Flashback (27 page)

"A fish gaff," she said and was able to refrain from adding that she'd gotten it in a fight, a fight she'd won. "Where'd you get yours?" Tit for tat. I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.

His face, till now uncharacteristically open, his emotions as easy to read as those of a child, slammed shut. "Prison," he said. Then: "Are we about finished here? I've been off the clock for thirty minutes."

Anna wasn't going to get any more out of him, and she didn't want to try, not really. She'd felt enough of his shame not to want to stir it up again in either one of them. Floggings in prison had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, and the fine cut marks on his back and legs had faded as only scars received before one comes into their growth can. If it took a fantasy for Mack to hold his head up, Anna wasn't going to be the one to dismantle it. Ripping open old wounds was best left to sociopathic relatives and psychiatrists.

"I'm done here," she said. "Salvage can do the rest."

The men politely busied their eyes elsewhere as she wriggled back into her swimsuit lest she frighten the tourists or the fishes.

Back at the dock on Garden Key, equipment stowed in the room behind the ladies' lavatory, Mack offered to take care of Anna's dive skin and snorkel equipment. The concern was again in his face, but it had gone flat, like a smile held too long for the camera.

Anna declined and was surprised at the look of disappointment, disappointment so intense it bordered on annoyance.

"C'mon," he said, and it was dangerously near a whine. "You've got to be about wore out. Let me help you." If being hounded by Mack's good intentions was the price of having her life saved, Anna figured she'd gotten the good end of the deal, but maybe not by much. This new eagerness to be nursemaid was already wearing on her nerves.

Gratitude and kindness urged her to hand over her suit and gear if he needed to be of service for some unfathomable reason. She rose above them. "Nope. I'll do it. But thanks," she added. After all, she did owe him her life.

It was nearly six by the time she let herself into her quarters. Piedmont met her at the door, complaining of abandonment and starvation. Not for the first time she marveled at how one small cat can so fill a place with life. Despite the loneliness of this posting, the unexpected addition of a cat made it home; a single furry welcome let her know she belonged.

Along with her salt-soaked dive skin and snorkel gear, Anna dropped the stiff upper lip and macho facade. Scooping up Piedmont, she began to cry, not the crazed sobs that had shaken her after her narrow escape but warm tears, the kind that release tensions too long buried. Holding the old yellow tomcat in her arms as one might cradle a baby, Anna buried her face in the soft pale fur of his belly and wept.

Piedmont, to his credit, let her do so for most of a minute. After that he squirmed till she ceased and desisted. A cat has his pride.

Refreshed by the tears, Anna thanked him and apologized for dampening his fur. For half a can of Kitty Gourmet Seafood Delight, Piedmont was willing to overlook the transgression.

Dehydrated and so tired simply remaining upright was an unpleasant chore, Anna grabbed a fizzy water from the refrigerator and gulped it while leaning over the sink. Again the stuff was flat. This time she didn't mind too much. Quantity not quality was what she craved. She could get it down faster unencumbered by carbonation. Salt water seemed not only to leach moisture from the skin but to pull it from deeper tissues. She drank till her belly was full and still felt thirsty.

The water was amazingly rejuvenating. After she'd let it soak in for a few minutes, she felt energy returning. Thus strengthened, she believed she might shower without risk. In her previous depleted and deflated state it was possible she might have drowned like the apocryphal turkey in a rain shower.

As was her habit, she dragged her dive gear into the shower with her and rinsed it there. Mack was easier to thank from a distance, and as she rinsed mask and fins she thanked him heartily. These accoutrements weren't terribly expensive-certainly not by sporting goods standards-but she'd found stuff that fit, that worked, that she genuinely liked and so would have been hard to replace. Momentarily she entertained herself by starring in an imaginary commercial. "Not only does this mask not leak under water, it won't leak under an eight-cylinder engine."

She laughed, partly at her image and partly because she was alive and could create it.

The dive skin was wadded and knotted with a vengeance-Anna's as she'd fought free of life's unnecessary restrictions. The booties were halfway up the legs, which had been turned outside in. Both arms were partly inside out, the zipper half down and the torso stuffed into the seat of the suit.

For a short and silly while, in the confines of the tiny shower stall, wet and naked, she danced an odd pas de deux with a neon shadow of herself. At length she got it back into its proper shape and began rinsing the salt water out. The right sleeve had a lump in it. Wondering what on earth she could have shoved there during her frenzied striptease, she reached into the springy sleeve. Her underwater notebook and pen were lodged partway up. Like most underwater tools, they were worn attached to the body. Anna kept hers tethered to her wrist with a rubber loop.

"Hurray," she muttered as she pulled it free. Her ordeal by water and iron hadn't been for naught; she had the engine's serial number. She pulled the notebook free and looked at the pad. A fairly neat line of figures was written there. Light had grown dim, but there was still plenty to read by. She stared at the numbers. At least she remembered writing numbers. The scratchings on the pad made no sense. It was as if they were ancient hieroglyphs or musings of a Japanese calligraphist. As she stared, she could feel confusion rising in her mind, a cold graveyard fog that robbed meaning from her thoughts. The acid bite of fear followed it, and the confines of the shower began to shrink, the beat of the water on her skull to reverberate, deafening her.

With a cry she flung the sodden dive skin and note pad through the curtain, fumbled the water off and half fell, half stumbled out into the small bath, crowded with toilet, sink and shower stall. Drying off was out of the question. Dripping, she fled the closing in of the walls. The bedroom gave no respite. Walls, ceiling, floor pressed close, squeezing the breath from her lungs.

Dragging a long tee shirt over her wet body, she pushed on into the living area, stepped into the lemon-yellow flip-flops that lived by the door and fled.

Briefly she leaned against the picnic table, but a sudden terror she'd be found there, forced to interact with another human being, drove her through the wooden gate bearing the sign, Employees Only, and into the converging brick archways leading to The Chapel. No window created by brick tumbling from the edges of a gun port perforated the end of this bastion, but there was a large break in the southwestern wall. An alcove in the thick rampart formed a bench seat before a picture-window-sized break in the brick with a view of Loggerhead Key and miles of ocean and sky. On hands and knees Anna scrambled onto it, hung her head over the opening, moat below, sky above, and breathed in the open spaces.

Post-traumatic stress syndrome, she heard Molly say in her head and was comforted. From one class or another she remembered that flashbacks, sudden overwhelming reliving of the seminal event, were one of the symptoms. "Post-traumatic stress," she said aloud to see how it sounded. It sounded good, sane, reasonable. But she didn't feel much better. The nightmare was back, the sense of parallel universes, or this universe turned evil, she'd had the night before-surely it wasn't just the night before? Part of her felt as if it had been years ago-when reality and visions that sprang from dreams became difficult to separate, burglars and ghosts intruding upon her peace without differentiation. It was the same crawling sense of insanity that had left her naked and sobbing in front of the maintenance men.

Creepiness, not quite yet anxiety but headed in that direction, prickled up her back and over the top of her head. To normalize it, she scratched her scalp with all ten fingers, shaking water from her hair.

The scraping of a foot over mortar dust and brick injected an icy needleful of terror into her gut. Had she made the noise? Moved inadvertently? Anna's head was still in her hands and she was afraid to take it out, afraid to look up. She knew an apparition watched her from the shadows where the brick-on-brick vaults folded into total darkness before opening into the casemates along the northern side of the fort.

Surely if she didn't look, didn't see, whatever it was would not exist. Like a tree falling in the forest, if a ghost went unseen did it really exist?

"Nothing is there, for fuck's sake," Anna shouted into the bend of her elbows. "Okay. On three. One. Two. Three." Letting her hands slide down the sides of her face, still holding on lest her head begin to rotate and spit green bile or something equally alarming, she looked into the premature night beneath the knit of ceiling arches.

Nothing but darkness. Nice quiet friendly darkness. No boogeymen, no dead relatives.

"See?" she said. Having conversations with herself didn't make her question her sanity. She'd lived in New York City too many years for that. Many of the finest people in Manhattan talked to themselves.

At some point during this fit of weirdness, she had folded herself up as small as possible, knees under her chin, heels up against her butt, elbows tucked in. With a conscious effort, she unfolded and stood up. Insanity didn't run in her family. She needed to talk to Lanny Wilcox. Now.

Determination vanished as she stood in the growing shadows and realized she hadn't the faintest idea how to get out of this maze of black arches and blind passages. "Of course you do," she said to bolster her courage. "The fort just isn't that complex." Hearing it, Anna could not remember if "complex" was a word or if she'd simply uttered a jumble of sounds. The fear, momentarily at bay, rushed back.

In a science fiction book she'd read once, a man had recited "rented a tent, rented a tent" over and over in his head, creating white noise to keep the Thought Police from getting through to his deeper knowledge. Hoping it would serve as well to keep insane thoughts from clouding her mind with terror and confusion, Anna mentally chanted the words and began to walk.

The direction was irrelevant. Fort Jefferson was roughly circular. No matter which way she went, she would eventually reach an open casemate, a spiral stairway, and she would be back in the real world. Choosing not to think about what she might meet on her way, Anna walked straight-backed and resolute into the inky darkness of the northwestern bastion.

When she reached the darkest center, the place where many arches knit together overhead, a place she knew from memory, the ceiling lost now in darkness, Anna left-off trailing her fingers along the brick for guidance.

Back to the wall, she sat down and waited for them to come.

16

My Dearest Peg-

At long last I received your letter. The mail, slow always, reaches Fort Jefferson only when weather and the capriciousness of the Union Army permits. Had not Mrs. Teller taken it upon herself to (yet again) interfere in family affairs, I expect Molly would have kept her illness from all of us. This once I am grateful to the old biddy. I only wish I could come home. It is clear now why Tilly was sent to me; not "hoydenish ways" but Molly looking ahead as she always has. I'm glad she is being cared for by the Sisters of Mercy. The convent is where she is most at peace.

Peace is something I think of a great deal of late because there is so little of it to be had here. The constant clamor of construction, drill, the testing of the munitions, the coarse clatter and shout of a thousand men squeezed into a tiny space, the endless high-pitched fussing of the sooty terns on Bush Key next door: I have grown so accustomed to it it is as the roar of the sea on the Massachusetts shore, underlying my days and informing my dreams.

Tilly's clamorous passion rises above this cacophony. Despite much effort and the occasional cross word, I cannot ignore it and she cannot forbear speaking of it. Dr. Samuel Mudd and his "innocence" have become an obsession with her. An unhealthy hobby in this political climate. I finally convinced her to refrain from bringing up the subject in Joseph's hearing, but now and again she cannot resist slipping in a plea for her cause. Then I must live with my husband's icy looks and stony silence for half a day.

Joel is much better. He walks now and will recover complete use of his right hand, Dr. Mudd tells us, and possibly his left, though the thumb was more severely damaged. His nose was twice broken-or more-and, having been left so long untreated, heals crookedly. This and a scar beneath his right eye will commemorate this beating for the remainder of his life. With his spirits returning, he is still an attractive man, though no longer as handsome as he was.

Tilly's affection for him has settled from that of a lovesick girl to that of a friend, sister and nurse. Whether this is a maturing of genuine love or a cooling of ardor I cannot tell. I would rather she returned to making calf-eyes at her soldier. It was less alarming than her new quest.

Her fixation on Dr. Samuel Mudd does not appear to be romantic in nature, and the doctor seems devoted to and speaks warmly of his wife back home. Hero worship might be nearer the mark. The doctor has a forceful personality and an inner strength that is compelling. He spends much of our time together speaking quietly and convincingly of his innocence. Tilly, wide-eyed and innocent, drinks in his words as if they were the stuff of life and has become enamored with the idea of winning his freedom.