Flashback (16 page)

Vaguely, she'd been aware Duncan was bent on proving beyond a shadow of a doubt and once and for all and finally (as if reality could ever lay hope and speculation to rest) that Dr. Mudd was guilty of conspiring to murder President Lincoln.

Had Duncan grown impatient, slipped into her quarters and read the letters? Duncan knew his history and was part actor/producer as were all good interpreters and historical reenactors. Other than universal malice, she could see no reason he or his wife would have for such trickery.

Teddy Shaw and Bob? He'd been in the hospital in Key West when Anna'd suffered her visitation, but Teddy'd been at the fort, and Anna doubted Teddy did much without his knowledge and enthusiastic approval. Daniel. Mack. Duncan. His wife. Linda. Cliff. The list was short and absurd. Much as she might wish to stretch things, she couldn't imagine why any of them would have the need or desire to carry out a hoax of such magnitude.

Consciously she breathed out the thoughts. Her mind was running too fast. She imagined she could hear the strain-the same sound as a car engine forced too hard in a low gear-see the needle sliding into the red. Loosing the clamp her fists had on her skull and the busy weaving fetters that tied thought to thought, she leaned back against the office door and let the soft night air in through lungs, eyes, ears and the pores in her skin.

The moon was well on its way toward setting, and the shadows, slightly blacker than she remembered them, had crept out to swallow the two houses, joined like Siamese twins, a screened-in porch at either end. Teddy slept alone in one. In the other Lanny Wilcox's worldly goods awaited his return.

The houses stood where the officers' quarters had been in Raffia's day. Anna pictured what they must have looked like in the moonlight.

Three stories high, long covered veranda on the first and second floors onto which the doors opened, palm trees and a path bordered by whitewashed skulls. Cannonballs.

To her the fort, this fort, the National Park Service's fort, seemed small and empty. Though it covered nearly seven acres and walking around it was close to a mile under bricked arches, it didn't seem big enough to hide anyone intent on evil. Without people for crowds or miles and miles of country to hide away in, evildoers would be obvious.

The Fort Jefferson Raffia described in her letters, with its thousand men, carpenters, bricklayers, engineers, guards and prisoners; with its store and construction projects, hospital, bakery and coaling docks visited by great ships, seemed as if it must have been a much larger place. St. John's bread trees with their thick crowns and twisted limbs took the place of the grove of palms Raffia had described. Two Portia trees grew their blood-red flowers, a source of delight in the desiccated parade ground, where the men suffering punishment were hung.

"Shit." Anna jerked herself upright. Raffia's world had begun to manifest again, a mist forming into three dimensions in a time where it did not belong. For a second-just a second-Anna could have sworn she saw a body, arms tied behind, toes barely sweeping the ground, hanging from the boughs of the Portia.

"God damn," Anna cursed herself and scrubbed at her face with her palms in an attempt to reconnect with the corporal world. I fell asleep. I was dreaming. "I was dreaming," she whispered aloud to see if the words were more reassuring than the thought. The Truth she'd settled on before the mists or the dreams had come resurfaced. Anna grabbed onto it.

Whatever she saw was real until proven otherwise.

Feeling shaky and naked and little in her short dress with no underpinnings, she pushed up from the steps. Kicking off the flip-flops so their idiosyncratic noise wouldn't alert the fort that she was flapping about, she walked around the perimeter of the open area, staying close to the casemates that she might share their shadows.

The Portia trees were spaced fifteen to twenty feet apart. There were three altogether. No bodies hung from the limbs. Nothing even suggested that shape or mass. This was one of the few times in her years as a law-enforcement ranger that she wished there was a corpse left hanging in the trees.

"Can't even trust the dead anymore," she muttered, then wondered if talking to yourself was a sign of incipient madness. "I've always talked to myself," she said. See, her traitorous mind whispered.

"Fuck."

A light flitted, butterfly-like across the upstairs window of one of the houses between the Portia trees and her quarters on the second tier: Lanny Wilcox's house.

"Fuck," Anna said again for lack of anything more erudite. She didn't move. The thought that she would be pursuing yet another will-o'-the-wisp and would become hopelessly lost in craziness paralyzed her. The light didn't come a second time, though she waited without moving for several minutes.

Standing barefoot in the dark, helpless with indecision, she had a sudden galvanizing thought. What if this precise reaction was what the maker of ghosts and will-o'-the-wisps wanted? A ranger too unsure of herself to do her job? Even as the idea cheered her, it faded. Criminals-real ones-were seldom so crafty as to employ esoteric psychological tortures with uncertain ends. Except in fiction, it was pretty much a smash-and-grab, drive-by-shooting sort of world.

As if in ratification, the unmistakable click of an old-fashioned door closing snicked through the still air. Anna'd been related to a psychiatrist long enough to know that run-of-the-mill hallucinations seldom came with sound. A human being from the twenty-first century was skulking about the Wilcox place in the dead of night.

"Hallelujah!" Anna breathed and, silent as a cat on her bare feet, she ran lightly over the brick path that rounded toward the houses. She made so little noise she could hear a muffled plod that could be the fall of soft-soled shoes on brick.

The pathway was old, the bricks broken in places. Intent on speed, Anna stumbled, her toes catching on a ragged upthrust. Pain was immediate and intense. She didn't cry out but went down on one knee. If the skin was scraped from it, the screaming of the nerves in her toes drowned out its complaint. All she felt was the jar. Her fall made a sound, a small one but on a night so still it might have been enough. Holding her breath, she listened. The footsteps had stopped.

If they'd ever been there. The earlier expletive went unspoken if not unthought. Hallucinations she could live with. Self-doubt was crippling. She stayed where she was, not moving, not thinking, just listening. Mad or not, there was little in this dimension or the next that she could not outwait. The pain in her toes passed, allowing her to feel the burn where brick had abraded the skin from her knee. Compared to the burn of coral it wasn't worth her notice. It was almost a relief to have a scrape that didn't itch while it hurt.

She didn't twitch or scratch or fidget. Stillness grew around her, knit from the night itself. The faintest of skritching noises heralded a lizard, not more than two inches long, who came out from his crevice in the crumbling mortar and warmed his tiny belly on the brick an inch and a half from her little finger and never sensed he was not alone.

Occasionally a recurrence of the idea that there'd been no footsteps drifted into Anna's brain. In stillness she accepted it without fear. Should she be mad, there was no better place to be so than in the quiet darkness with a lizard for company.

After a time she had no interest in measuring, her patience was rewarded. Not a footfall but a splash came to her ears. She rose in one fluid motion and ran quickly around behind the Wilcox/Shaw homes and up the wooden stairs to where her quarters were. The casemates beneath, where she guessed the nightwalker had stopped when he heard her fall, were too dark to walk into alone, half-naked, at night merely because she believed the danger to have passed.

On the second tier she ran to the broken-out gun port forming a ragged-edged window opposite her picnic tables and leaned out to see beyond the thickness of the wall. The casemates on the first floor had like holes punched in their sides. At one time the ports had been enclosed with iron shutters-high-tech for their time-designed to fly open when the canons came forward and slam shut when they recoiled. According to the old military and engineering reports, they'd never worked properly.

In the ensuing century those that hadn't been forcibly removed had rusted out. Water had Mown into the exposed mortar, and bricks had fallen away leaving great toothy gaps where the ports had been.

Crawling out onto her three-foot windowsill, she studied the gun ports in the ground-floor casemates. Empty. She'd expected that. The moat, crystal clear and not more than two- or three-feet deep on the west side, was empty as well. She'd not expected that. The water was mildly agitated, but that could mean nothing. Big fish and little waves came in through the break in the wall to the sea.

On the gray concrete capping the wall separating the moat from the ocean she saw, not what she looked for, but proof it had been there. Against the pale concrete, silvered by the moon, were two dark handprints and a darkened slash. Whoever she'd heard leaving Wilcox's quarters had stepped into a lower casemate when she'd fallen. Too clever or cowardly to trust her silence, he-or she-had gone out through the portal into the moat and over into the ocean. The moat wall on the west and south sides of the fort was high, six to eight feet above water level in places. Once outside, it could be easy to keep out of sight of the fort.

Because the moat was unoccupied, at least by bipeds, Anna guessed she'd not heard the drop from the fort to the moat but the splash made as the person had clambered out on the far side. By the time she reached the place the handprints were, whoever it was would be gone, either back into the campground, out to his boat or in through another portal and back to his bed.

It occurred to Anna to run down, follow the trail through the darkened casemate and the warm water just to see if the handprints and the butt slide were really there, feel the dampness with her own fingers. Instead, she turned and went into her quarters.

She did not want to arrive on the moat wall to find the prints were gone, then have to spend the rest of the night wondering if they'd dried or were never there in the first place.

Too late to sleep, she picked up Raffia's letters and began to read.

8

My Dearest Peg, The footsteps we heard were indeed Joseph's. Having had more than ample opportunity over the years to witness his rages, I've come to classify them into red and white. When in a red rage Joseph yells and curses, slams doors and smashes his fists into things-not me, mind you, but walls, bolsters and other pieces of innocent household accoutrements. The white rages are more alarming. These are blessedly rare and marked by tight-lipped control and palpable emanations of violence leashed. I don't fear them as I once did and, in a strange way, have come almost to admire them. Joseph in a rage is a force of nature. I find myself watching him in fascination and awe, much as I would a tremendous hurricane wind.

The day he found Tilly and me outside the door of the dungeon, his rage was white hot. Entering as he did from the direction of the light, the first thing we saw was his silhouette framed in a confluence of dark arches. Joseph is not a big man, but he looked so to us Tilly stopped her whimpering over her damaged rebel and became absolutely still.

What she did from instinct, I had to learn by trial and error. When Joseph's rage is white, I know better than to so much as utter a single word.

Since he cannot speak when this mood is upon him-due no doubt to the fact that even the slenderest of syllables cannot force themselves through iron-clenched jaws and lips compressed to a bloodless seam-our entire drama was enacted in near silence. Only the ring of my husband's boots on the brick and the whisper of my skirts entangling with Tilly's told of our exodus.

Joseph grabbed each of us by the upper arm and marched us from the door of the dungeon. Struggling would only have drawn attention to our indignity, so we allowed ourselves to be escorted ignobly back to quarters. Joseph never looks so handsome as he does when in high dudgeon. His hazel eyes were sparkling, his dark mustache framing that sensuous mouth and setting off a nose that must have been introduced into his French ancestors when they fought the Saracens in Spain. Perhaps I am pitifully like that old dog we used to have. He never seemed to care if we were yelling at him or stroking him as long as we were paying attention to him.

That night and the next day I kept myself out of his way, doing housewifely things for his comfort, and left Tilly to bring him around. Though I know soft ways and womanly wiles are best, I cannot bring myself to do them. Even after two decades there is a devil in me that wants to meet the devil in him out in the open. And, too, I believe our sister could wrap Lucifer himself around her little finger if she set her mind to it.

Even with beauty, cunning and youthful zeal, such is my husband's inner strength, it took Tilly thirty-six hours before he would agree to let us tend Joel. The fort surgeon refused to treat a "traitor," and Joseph refused to order him to do so, but in the end, I think he does have a heart if not of gold then at least not entirely of stone and didn't want the boy to die alone and uncared for.

Having begged what necessaries we could from the small infirmary in the parade ground-bandages and a blanket were all they said they could spare-we set off to get the key and then go to the dungeon.

The passage of another day and the insistence of the Lord in pouring the rational balm of pure sunlight down from a stunningly blue sky had done much to calm the garrison and return the soldiers to routine. Just that quickly was Joel not forgiven but forgotten. None of the guards so much as raised an eyebrow when we appeared, bandages and buckets of fresh water in hand, to ask for the key.