Flashback (20 page)

"Captain's orders, ma'am," I was told when I asked. "The captain won't have Mudd given free run of the fort. If he's to look after this man he's got to be quartered next to the conspirators."

Since Joseph had given me my way in all else, I did not fuss, though the cells over the guardroom are among the worst at Fort Jefferson, having no windows but only three high gun slits that let in little light or air and one must lift oneself up just to see outside. I expect this is why the conspirators were housed there.

Joel was carried into the casemate adjoining that of our most famous inmates and lifted from the stretcher to the bare floor with less gentleness than when he'd been picked up. Being in close proximity to two of the men guilty of conspiring to kill Mr. Lincoln reawakened the outrage and hatred in the soldiers.

As it did in me. I'd not thought I hated the conspirators, but hated only their acts. Knowing I was close to them, even with a wooden partition between us, a wave of fury swept over me so hot I was surprised my hair didn't catch afire. If it had not been for the innocence of Tilly and the pathos of Private Lane, I believe I would have turned my back on the whole thing.

All but one of the soldiers left us. He walked to the door leading to the adjoining cell and banged it hard. "Mudd. Got a job for you. Try not to kill this one," he shouted, then retreated to the egress from what was now Joel Lane's cell. Like me, I think he feared not Mudd but his own hatred of the man.

Tilly had knelt by Private Lane. Both stared at the door, as did I, preparing to meet the monster who was to serve us.

11

Anna awoke at quarter till eleven feeling rested if not refreshed. She'd not had a drink of anything alcoholic in a long time and deeply resented suffering a hangover when she'd not had the pleasure of earning it.

The greatest delight-when she had burned away enough mental fog in the shower she could take note of it-was that her mind was clear. Or at least relatively so. The crawling sense of urgency that had driven her the previous night had slowed to a creep at the edges of her adrenal system. Sunshine drove the skittering shadows from the outer limits of her vision.

Due on duty at noon, she breakfasted on a Coke and peanut-butter-and-saltine sandwiches. Customarily she drank only coffee or sparkling water in the mornings. This morning she couldn't face carbonated water gone flat and didn't have the time for coffee but needed the caffeine.

As she dressed, she mentally apologized to Bob Shaw for mocking him-if only in her heart-for wearing full battle regalia out to count the fishies. Coral-enraged patches of skin cried out against fabric and leather gear, and Anna's vestigial fashion sense was outraged by the combination of shorts and duty belt. On a woman barely five feet four inches tall, knobby knees below and bristling armament above made her look more like a walking antipersonnel mine than a woman of sense. She wasn't unduly affected. Some days it paid a girl to look like she might go off at any minute and blow a hole in anybody standing too close.

Out of habit, she called in service. Bob was in the hospital in Key West. By now Teddy would be at his bedside to admire how bravely he handled the pain of his broken bone.

"Ten-four. I'll be listening," came back over the airwaves. Daniel. Anna was glad that in Bob and Teddy's absence he would stay by the radio in the event she needed him.

"Mrs. Meyers," Anna said aloud and laughed, startling Piedmont. "Never mind," she told the cat. "Homo sapien humor. Guard the house."

Celebrating a return to normalcy, as proved by a sun-drenched parade ground sparsely populated with tourists reading plaques and wandering through shaded arches, by white sails on graceful boats and by the fact that Anna had no doubt these things she witnessed could be ratified and corroborated, she took the scenic route to her office.

The "Chapel" was near her quarters on the fort's second level, above the rooms that had housed the garrison's bakery. Park historians had more or less intuited The Chapel. No proof existed that this vaulted room in the northwestern bastion had ever contained an altar, pews or baptismal font. Nothing in the architecture was suggestive of narthex, nave or sanctuary. But this one room of the ten outermost rooms on both levels of the five bastions had no gun port in its end wall. Unbroken brick flowed from the beautifully vaulted ceiling to the floor. To sacrifice such a prime gun placement, the builders must have had in mind a room of equal or higher importance in turning the tide of battle as armaments. It was speculated that this room had been dedicated to getting God on one's side.

Anna liked The Chapel. In addition to grace of architecture and masonry, she sensed the spiritual there as well. Not so much a deity as a place where people have poured enough of their belief in a deity that the power of faith soaked into stone and wood, brick and mortar.

At the eastern arch of The Chapel, just outside where the many-arched walkway and casemates chased away in a straight line of forced perspective, was where she had nearly met up with her great-great-aunt Raffia the night before.

By the light of day Anna hoped something more corporeal than faith had been left behind, a sign that might lead her to whoever the prankster-or person intent on gaslighting her-was.

Either the ghost had truly been of ectoplasm-the slime-free variety that leaves no gooey residue-or the ghost-maker was neat as well as effective. She found smudged tracks in the mortar dust, left by someone running with no shoes on. Recognizing her own footprints and no others was mildly disconcerting, but any number of reasons could account for it. On this side of the fort the flooring on the upper tiers had never been completed. Gun casemates were floored in slabs of granite-stone hard enough to take the shock from the guns. Near The Chapel, where Anna looked, the floor was rubble and didn't take tracks well.

Shelving the spectral side of life, she finished her morning commute. The next two hours were spent on the phone.

Before she'd had to deal with it, complaints about the one- to two-second delay before words said on one end trickled into an ear on the other had struck Anna as frivolous. Not so. She was amazed at how seemingly small a thing could cripple conversation. It was nearly impossible for those not accustomed to it-or those accustomed but impatient-not to talk over one another. Half of her calls consisted of the words "what?" and "I'm sorry."

The Florida State Police hadn't been able to trace the John Doe Bob had towed to East Key. The Dry Tortugas were in the Gulf of Mexico sixty miles from Florida's land mass but, as they were part of the state of Florida, the waters fell under the state's jurisdiction. Anna described the military-looking tattoo on the John Doe's calf. Lieutenant Henriquez, the officer with whom she spoke, said they'd made a note of that and were following up. He didn't sound hopeful or even particularly interested.

The police couldn't begin tracing the boat till Anna got a name or registration number off the wreck. Henriquez told her he wasn't going to hold his breath while she looked. If the vessel belonged to a smuggler there would be no number and the name would be meaningless.

Theresa Alvarez posed less of a problem. She'd joined Lanny Wilcox as a VIP-Volunteer in Parks-a designation often given spouses and significant others for reasons of record keeping and insurance should they perform work while on the premises. Andy, the woman in Human Resources at Dry Tortugas and Everglades headquarters in Homestead, pulled up Ms. Alvarez's personnel file.

"Let's see what we've got." She had a trace of a Maine accent that cooled Anna just hearing it. "Ms. Alvarez... here we go. Twenty-three years old, five-foot-three, one hundred and three pounds-must be a size two, I hate her already-Cuban born, naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of six, fluent in Spanish and English. Do you want her last known home address and number?"

Andy read off a Miami address.

Anna wrote it down. "Has anybody else called you guys asking after her?"

"You mean other than poor Lanny?"

"Lanny Wilcox called?"

"Constantly. Since he'd been acting... well... peculiar, we were advised not to give out any information on her. Stalking, you know-you can't be too careful."

"What did he want to know?"

"The usual: home address, phone number, parents' names, that sort of thing."

"He lived with this woman and didn't know her home address?"

"Apparently not. I guess Lanny had better things to talk about with Ms. Alvarez than her vital statistics-if you don't count thirty-four, twenty, thirty-four in that category. She was pretty enough to model."

"You knew her." Anna was hoping for more to go on than an outdated address and phone number.

"Only to look at the way a cat can look at the queen," Andy said.

Anna dialed the number from Theresa Alvarez's personnel file. No one answered and no phone machine picked up. She would try again come evening.

Time had come to return to the sea.

Years before, in Lake Superior, when Anna worked as a boat patrol ranger at Isle Royale National Park, she'd learned firsthand the dangers of diving wrecks alone. Daniel didn't dive but was an experienced dive tender. If they had time to donate to law enforcement, she'd see if Daniel could stay topside and Mack dive with her.

She found Mack in the shop between her quarters and the generator rooms. This was where her amphibious intruder had fled into the dark, then, when she wouldn't go away, out the shattered gun port into the moat. The shop was a favorite place of hers when she wanted to hang out and gossip with Daniel. Woodworking shops, with the smell of sawdust and signs of productivity laid out in a pattern of tools, were always warm and welcoming in her mind. As a girl she'd spent hours in her father's shop, listening to his stories and building things, things that always turned out well because at night, after she'd gone to bed, he would go back and make what she'd done beautiful. No wonder she'd believed "The Shoemaker and the Elves" was a documentary till she was in her teens.

Mack was at the lathe, his back to her, safety goggles' strap pushing his brown hair into a rooster's tail. For a peaceful minute, she watched the wood turning under his corded fingers, a sensuous shape being drawn out. Mack was as scrawny and sere as a mountain man. Too long in the sun had melted off the fat and tanned his hide till it wrinkled and cracked.

He wore the green NPS shorts and gray shirt. The shirt was three shades darker at the armpits, wet with sweat. Anna was too well bred to look, but hers would be the same. The air was close to ninety-five degrees, and down on the lower level, the ocean breezes weren't strong. Watching him work, her mind floating free on the noise of the lathe and the hypnotic spin of the wood, she noticed the back of Mack's arms and legs were striped. Thin white lines cut through the browned skin at an angle. Scars. They were barely visible, his downy leg and arm hair grown up around them, but in the hard light of the sun they were unmistakable. Anna would have been surprised if his back was not similarly marked.

Mack had been viciously whipped, maybe with a material harsher even than leather-barbed wire, maybe. From the healing and fading of the scars Anna guessed it had been done a long time ago, probably when Mack was a little boy.

She looked away, staring vacantly at the parched grass of the parade ground, wondering why knowledge of childhood abuse should make her both ache and feel ashamed for him. She must ask Molly about it when next she got to a telephone that didn't drive her half-mad with frustration. Education explained why the abused child felt shame over the abuse, but not why that shame was echoed by the observer. Maybe Anna was ashamed because she belonged to the same species as the perpetrators, and maybe a kernel of that craven evil lay dormant in her own heart.

A shudder took her, violent and sudden the way muscles sometimes spasm just before sleep.

"Don't tell me you're shivering. I've got news for you; it ain't cold."

Anna turned back and smiled at Mack even more warmly than she had intended. It didn't go unnoticed. His blue eyes took on a glitter that makes a woman want to flirt or flee depending on the glitterer.

"To what do I owe this honor?" he asked and moved so he stood a little too close for comfort.

Quashing an urge to reclaim her invaded space, she cloaked herself in business. "With Bob out of commission and Linda and Cliff back in Key West I'm going to need help finishing up the investigation on the wrecks. I was hoping you'd dive and Daniel would tend. Do you guys have any free time?"

Mack wiped the sawdust from the length of wood he'd turned on the lathe, a table leg by the look of it. While his eyes were thus busy, Anna took the opportunity to step back a pace.

The maintenance man looked up, his gaze wandering into the sky above the far rampart. He narrowed his eyes and scratched at his grizzled beard, dislodging a minute blizzard of sawdust. "Lemme think."

It wasn't that hard a question. Anna wondered if he had a problem with the dive per se or if he was playing hard to get.

"Daniel and me got to work on generator five. Been sounding funny. How 'bout maybe four o'clock?"

Sunset wasn't till nine.

"Suits me," Anna said and, belatedly, "Thanks."

Impatience urged her to dive the wrecks without them, but good sense prevailed. Ignoring reports to be written and schedules still to be clone, she decided to return to Lanny Wilcox's house and see if anything new presented itself. The decision to revisit the scene of last night's adventure was made more from homage to rationality than because she expected to find anything. After six hours of good sleep the events of the previous night-the ghost, the light in Lanny's window, the wet prints on the moat wall, even Mrs. Meyers-had taken on the ephemeral quality of a dream imperfectly remembered.