Flashback (22 page)

Patrice nodded. "A liberal."

"Fire-breathing, heart-on-your-sleeve liberal. Major snooze."

"Except for the thong," Patrice said dreamily, hoping to get a rise out of Donna. Donna obliged with a boiler-room snort.

"Anything else?" Anna asked.

Patrice shook her head.

"We didn't see that much of her-" She shot Patrice a look that stopped the obvious rejoinder. "Theresa left not long after we got here."

"That did kind of surprise me," Patrice said. "Teddy'd told us she'd figured Theresa for using Lanny, but I got the feeling she loved the man."

"Using Lanny how?" Anna asked. Lanny Wilcox wasn't going to attract gold diggers on a GS-II's salary, and though there was no accounting for taste, Anna couldn't see a balding man in his fifties with the housekeeping instincts of a frat boy as anybody's idea of a sex toy. "Was she broke enough forty thousand a year would seem like money?"

"Not money, I don't think." Patrice looked to Donna for corroboration.

"No. Teddy didn't make it sound like a money thing. Besides, Theresa had the looks to use a man for a whole lot more than forty thousand a year less taxes. Teddy kind of thought Theresa might be running from something, using Lanny and Fort Jefferson as a place to hide out."

"A lot of people who wash up on islands are running from something," Anna said.

Donna and Patrice exchanged a look that made Anna think she'd hit a nerve.

"Or running to something," Patrice said softly.

"Or running to something," Anna agreed.

"Ask Teddy," Donna suggested. "Teddy is from whence all information worth having around here flows."

Anna would do that as soon as the Shaws returned from the mainland.

"Why the sudden interest in Lanny's love life?" Donna asked.

"I've been seeing ghosts," Anna said and watched them carefully. Donna's face was impassive to the point of frozen, but Anna couldn't tell if she'd solidified her facial muscles to hide a guilty secret or to hide the fact that she thought Anna was an idiot.

Patrice seemed delighted. "Oh, man, I would kill to see a ghost. Even part of one: a spectral hand, a rattling chain. I wouldn't even mind being slimed. Tell us everything," she demanded, and propped her chin in her hands expectantly.

The juxtaposition of the girlish pose and the hairy forearms shook Anna's insides, but she didn't laugh; she liked these women too well.

She obliged them with the story of Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's fleeting visit to the casemate near the chapel. She'd meant to keep it bare bones and focus on their reactions, but Patrice was such a good audience and Anna so in need of women confidants with whom there was no one-to two-second delay from mouth to ear, she found herself relating every detail: the turn of the head, the upswept hair, the delicate long fingers pushing in otherworldly hairpins.

"Doesn't sound like Theresa Alvarez," Donna said when she'd done, hearkening back to the non sequitur that she believed had launched this ghost story. "Theresa was dark and, as Patrice has so observantly pointed out, not much given to clothes that covered her from neck to ankles."

"No. Sorry," Anna said. "I never thought it was Lanny's girlfriend. Talking about Theresa just put me in mind of it because she disappeared. Ghostlike. Poof?"

The segue was spotty at best but the lighthouse keepers chose to accept it without question. Anna didn't know what gender the two had been born, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were girls now. It was good to be one of them.

"Do you think she was 'disappeared' against her will?" A funny edge came into Patrice's voice that bothered Anna till she remembered the woman was a retired law-enforcement officer.

"You think old fire horses are bad," Donna said as if reading her mind. "They've got nothing on retired cops."

Patrice was not to be deterred. "Do you suspect felonious play? We heard she'd run off, presumably with a man younger, prettier and richer than Lanny."

Hearing her vague suppositions laid out in words, Anna backed away from the idea. It sounded melodramatic, like a bored ranger making something out of nothing. Or a woman of a certain age having mid-life delusions.

"Just poking around," she said. "Nothing really. What I came over here for-besides to waste your time and drink up your tea-was to see if either of you recognized this boat. Here's what's left of it." She took a printout of an underwater photo of the bottle-green go-fast boat. It was taken before the second explosion, when the bow was still recognizable as such.

"Looks like a Scarab, maybe," Donna said. Anna took note of the fact that the woman knew her boats.

"It is."

"What's that color? Looks almost black in the picture."

"Metallic sparkly dark green."

"Where's the boat out of?" Patrice asked.

"I don't know yet. We're working on it."

"We see a lot of boats come through," Donna said.

"We'll keep an eye out," Patrice said. "What am I talking about? The boat's on the bottom. It's history. I'll see what I got."

"The Dick Tracy File," Donna explained when Anna looked confused. "Patrice videos anything the least bit odd. In case..." She laughed.

Patrice didn't.

"Not just odd," she defended herself. "Though of course odd is particularly interesting. Just a photographic record of comings and goings." For an instant she looked sheepish.

Donna patted her with a big callused hand, grease from working on the generator ingrained under her round, clipped fingernails. "It's good you keep it, Patrice. It's come in handy. Because of Patrice the Key West cops-"

"Key Stone Cops," Patrice interjected.

"Your opinion. The Key West police and the coast guard were able to track down a twenty-nine-year-old felon who'd run off with his boss's fishing yacht."

"And his boss's fourteen-year-old daughter."

"She went willingly."

"It was her idea, but that doesn't change anything," Patrice said.

"Nope. He should have been keelhauled."

If the current theory about the lighthouse keepers was correct, neither of them had ever been little girls. Perhaps the undertone of anger Anna heard had nothing to do with chromosomes and everything to do with humanity.

Because she had time to kill and because she was enjoying herself and because her position as Supervisory Ranger in the Dry Tortugas was temporary, Anna decided to indulge in a little gossip-real gossip, not police work disguised-good old-fashioned dishing the dirt with the rest of the girls.

"What do you guys know about Mack?" she asked. "He strikes me as a man with a past."

Donna straddled the bench on the far side of the picnic table and rubbed her jaw. The way she pushed upward on her cheek made Anna wonder if it was a habit left over from years of checking for five o'clock shadow.

"He's an odd duck, that's for sure. He loves to talk, but only about himself."

"He's quite manly in that," Patrice said, and the three of them enjoyed an uncensored laugh.

"I noticed his back and legs are scarred. He ever mention how that came about?"

"I noticed those too, right off," Patrice said.

"She asked him about it right off, too," Donna said.

"I asked nice," Patrice said.

Donna mimicked her partner, batting her eyes like a femme fatale, which clearly tickled Patrice: "Hello, Mack, isn't it a nice day? By the by, how the hell did you get all cut up like that?"

"I did not," Patrice laughed.

"Did he tell you?" Anna asked.

"He told us a story," Patrice said. "Something about falling off an all-terrain vehicle and being dragged across gravel by a pant leg. A load of hooey."

"Child abuse, you think?"

"That's my guess," Patrice said. "If we're right, it's a wonder he didn't grow up to be another Jeffrey Dahmer. It had to've been brutal. I don't blame him for making up a better story."

Anna didn't either. "What does he talk about, then, if the past is out of the picture?"

"Oh it's not out," Donna said. "It's the picture that's a wee bit different than you'd expect after seeing the scars."

"Mack's got a lot of stories about how his folks were these rich aristocratic types. According to him he had his own horse, nannies and the trimmings," Patrice said.

"And he's a lowly government employee now because some evil relative squandered it all away," Anna finished. The fantasy was fairly common among dissatisfied men who thought they deserved better.

"Something like that," Patrice said. "He gets vague about it. Maybe that part of the story's not written yet."

For a while the three of them sat in comforting silence, Anna sipping her tea, Donna fiddling with the chunk of machinery, Patrice seemingly content doing nothing at all.

They made a bit more desultory talk. Anna asked politely about the eviscerated motor on the table and was treated to a list of internal combustion symptoms that meant nothing to her. Finally Patrice took pity on her and summed it up.

"Generator went ker-put."

"Terminally ker-put?" Anna asked.

"Over Donna's dead body."

"I'll have it up and running by dark," Donna promised. "I think we got a mouse problem. They get to building nests in the moving parts of your machinery and it's a nightmare."

It was on the tip of Anna's tongue to offer Piedmont's services as a mouser. He could rid an island of the size of Loggerhead Key of rodents in under a week. What stopped her was selfishness. She liked Piedmont at home.

Unless Donna pulled off her usual miracle, Loggerhead Key would have to swelter in the dark. Anna was keeping her cat.

She looked at her watch. Two forty-seven. Time to meet some men about a wreck. She made her goodbyes and walked away from the snug cottage and into the glare of white sand and a hard-looking sea. It occurred to her that she felt good for having had tea with Patrice and Donna. It also occurred to her that she had come with questions, and had given out a great deal of information and gotten little.

Patrice must've been one hell of a cop.

12

My Dearest Peg, Five days have passed since I last sat down to write. To turn back the clock: the four of us waited in the casemate next to that shared by Dr. Mudd and a second of the conspirators.

The cell was dim, as they all are once the opening arch onto the parade ground has been boarded up, and this one darker than most, having but a small opening on the sea side. My eyes had adjusted, however, and I could see with that misty clarity one experiences at twilight. Though the cell was stiflingly hot, the sweat prickling my skin had the quality of winter perspiration brought on by exercising in extreme cold.

Joel was still and silent, the effort to be brave and charming during transport having taken what little strength he had. The soldier who was to remain with us as guard and chaperone stood to one side of the door leading to Dr. Mudd's cell, looking agitated and thunderous. Eyes big and mouth pinched, Tilly knelt beside Joel, watching the door where the soldier had rapped, summoning the devil upon whom we had pinned our slim hopes.

The door opened. An urbane-looking man, hairline receding, a lush mustache covering his upper lip above a well-trimmed goatee, said: "May I help you?" for all the world as if he answered the door of his own home and under better circumstances.

I don't know if it was the relief that he did not look like a slavering beast or the surprisingly kind eyes under thin, low brows, or the offer of precisely that which we had come seeking-help-but Tilly started to cry.

"Are you Dr. Mudd?" she asked through tears that flowed prettily-when I cry, my face goes red and blotchy and my nose runs. Perhaps that's why my tears lost their efficacy with Joseph too many years ago to count.

The most hard-hearted of men would have responded with chivalry to the picture of feminine distress Tilly presented.

"I am," he told her and bowed slightly. He was elegant, even-or perhaps I should say especially-given the surroundings, and spoke with a whisper of a southern drawl that served to enhance the image. "How can I be of service?" All this was directed to Tilly, I suppose because it was she who first addressed him.

Whatever the reason, I could see her becoming as grave and mature as befitted a woman addressed on matters of importance. This "honor," if indeed attentions from the likes of him constituted such, coupled with his offer of medical help for Joel Lane, completely won Tilly over. Our little sister and one of the men condemned for the most heinous and cowardly of murders were staunch allies before they'd exchanged a baker's dozen of words.

I did not like it. I very much did not like it. Unfortunately my discomfort came only later. Joel's needs being foremost in my mind at the time, though not so swayed as Tilly, I was glad enough of the doctor's help.

As she had established a rapport with the notorious doctor, Tilly became mistress of the situation. I was content to stand by the soldier against the back wall and act as an observer.

She showed the doctor Joel and told him how he had conic to be injured. Dr. Mudd's expression didn't appear to change, but when mouth and chin are completely obscured by hair, the face was unreadable. I wouldn't doubt if a few of the union's famed stoics owe the compliment not to moral fortitude but a plenitude of facial hair. The doctor did not give in to the temptation to comment on the brutality of the union soldiers. He merely nodded, said: "Please?" and, when Tilly made room, knelt to determine the extent of Joel's injuries.