Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [85]
CHAPTER 45
New York City
DR. JOHN FELDER SLOWLY CLIMBED THE STAIRS of the Forty-Second Street branch of the New York Public Library. It was late afternoon, and the broad steps were busy with students and camera-wielding tourists. Felder ignored them, passing between the marble lions that guarded the Beaux-Arts façade and pushing his way into the echoing entrance hall.
For years, Felder had used this main branch of the library as a kind of retreat. He loved the way it mixed a sense of elegance and wealth with scholarly research. He’d grown up bookish and poor, the son of a dry-goods salesman and a public-school teacher, and this had always been his haven away from the commotion of Jewel Avenue. Even now, with all the research materials available to him at the Department of Health, he nevertheless found himself returning to the library again and again. Just entering its book-perfumed confines was a comforting act, leaving the squalid world behind for a better place.
Except for today. Today felt different, somehow.
He climbed the two flights of stairs to the Main Reading Room and made the long walk past dozens of long oaken tables to a far corner. Setting his case down on the scarred wooden surface, he pulled a nearby keyboard to him, then paused.
It had been half a year, roughly, since he’d first become involved with the case of Constance Greene. Originally it had been routine: another court-appointed interview with a criminal psychiatric patient. But it had quickly become more than that. She had been like no other patient he’d encountered. He’d found himself mystified, perplexed, intrigued—and aroused.
Aroused. Yes, that too. He’d finally come to admit it to himself. But it wasn’t just her beauty—it was also her strange otherworldliness. There was something unique about Constance Greene, something that went beyond her evident madness. And it was this something that drove Felder on, that pushed him to understand her. In a way he did not quite understand, Felder felt a deep-seated need to help her, to cure her. This need was only sharpened by her apparent lack of interest in receiving help.
And it was into this strange tinderbox of emotion that Dr. Ernest Poole had just intruded. Felder was aware his feelings about Poole were mixed. He felt a certain proprietary interest in Constance, and the idea that another psychiatrist had previously studied her was oddly annoying. Yet Poole’s own experience with Constance—quite unlike his own, apparently—promised perhaps the best chance yet of penetrating her mysteries. The fact that Poole’s clinical evaluations were so different was both perplexing and encouraging. It could offer a uniquely three-dimensional vantage onto what would be—he felt increasingly certain—the case study of his career.
He put his fingers on the keyboard and paused again. I was indeed born on Water Street in the ’70s—the 1870s. Funny: Constance’s intensity of belief, coupled with her photographic, as-yet-unexplained knowledge of the old neighborhood, almost had him believing she was, in fact, a hundred and forty years old. But Poole’s talk of her lacunar amnesia, her dissociative fugue, had brought him back to reality. Still, he felt he owed Constance enough benefit of doubt to undertake one final search.
Typing quickly, he brought up the library’s database of periodicals. He would make one last search, this time of the nineteen seventies and later—the time frame during which Constance could reasonably be expected to have been born.
He moved the cursor down to the “search parameters” field, then paused, consulting his notes. When my parents and sister died, I was orphaned and homeless. Mr. Pendergast’s house at Eight Ninety-one Riverside Drive was then owned by a man named Leng. Eventually it became vacant. I lived there.
He would search for three items: Greene, Water Street, and Leng. But he knew from past experience he’d better keep the terms of the search vague—scanned newspapers were notorious for typos. So he’d create a regular expression, using a logical AND query.
Typing once again, he entered