Flashback (3 page)

Anna stepped from beneath the sally port to the edge of the parade ground. The sun hit her eyes with such force she winced. Within the embrace of the casemates was a third and different world: no ocean, no mind-bending arches, just a manageable patch of sky, horizons close, and the comfort of the man-made on all sides. Brick arches at ground and second floor, one after the other in an unbroken line, surrounded an expanse of grass so dry it crackled underfoot. Twin houses, officer quarters during the Civil War, now served as quarters for the absent Lanny Wilcox and Bob and Teddy Shaw. Around the edges of the parade ground, inside the heavy walls, were scattered ruins from when Jefferson was home to troops, prisoners, slaves, cooks, washerwomen, officers, wives and daughters: the skeletal remains of a Civil War barracks, razed by the NPS when safety had broil a higher priority than preservation; two half-finished armories, their under-roofs rounded like their later relative, the Quonset hut; a half disassembled shot oven; the foundation for what started out to be a church to a soldier's god but ended life as a below-ground cistern for the federal government. All testified to the hubbub of disparate humanity who had once been packed within the walls like powder in a cannon's barrel.

Two boys rampaged out from the shadows behind Anna and ran left past the office to disappear into the first casemate. Anna turned left as well. The arch of the casemate had been boarded up to enclose the park's offices. The same treatment had been used to make employee quarters, some at ground level and some in the second tier, where cannons and convicts had been stored during the Civil War.

Anna pushed past the Employees Only sign and pulled the door shut behind her. Air conditioning; cool was wonderful. Dry was even better. Without humidity the air felt pounds lighter, slid into the lungs effortlessly. The physical ease was a relief, but as ever in the gullet of bureaucracy, the magic was gone. The place looked like a hundred other park offices: vaguely dingy, crowded, metal desks and chin-high partitions cutting up what little space there was.

Teddy Shaw sat behind the first desk, staring at the now ubiquitous computer screen. Teddy was younger than her husband by a dozen years or so, thirty to thirty-five at a guess, and a couple of inches taller, an advantage her posture seemed bent on rejecting. She probably had at least twenty pounds on him as well but was nowhere near fat. The euphemism "pleasantly plump" was apt in Teddy's case. Except for the stooped shoulders, she was pretty in a girl-next-door way, with brown hair brushing her shoulders and brown eyes that reminded Anna of her inherited golden retriever, Taco, in color if not softness. Because of her relative youth and uncompromising support of her husband's John Wayne/Napoleon neurosis, one might have expected her to assume the role of helpless maiden in need of rescue. More than once Anna had thought Teddy would have liked to be that for him, but a core of inner steel got in her way. Teddy was as peculiar in her way as Bob was in his. She steadfastly believed in her husband's heroic potential and seemed mildly embittered that others did not see him in the same light. Anna thought Teddy would almost welcome disaster-even at the cost of a few lives-if her husband would finally be given a chance to shine.

"Thanks for putting up my groceries," Anna said by way of greeting. "Bagels, if I got 'em, for key lime pie?"

"Yup. Six."

"Four."

"Five"

"Deal." Anna didn't much care for either bagels or key lime pie, but she enjoyed the dickering. "Any messages?"

"Two. On your desk."

Anna dumped her bag and threaded her way to the back of the office. To facilitate climate control and keep out the endless weeping of moisture and dust from the tiers above, the office was completely enclosed, walls and ceiling painted white, making it into a box that could have as easily been in a trailer house in Nevada as a two-hundred-year-old fortress in the Gulf of Mexico. Off the back of the box were two closet-sized rooms. One Bob had laid claim to, the other was the Supervisory Ranger's office. Though Anna's claustrophobia wouldn't allow her to linger there-and certainly never with the door shut-she got a kick out of her new office. Behind a door narrower and shorter than standard issue, the essence of Fort Jefferson again manifested itself. The outer wall was exposed brick. The one window, overlooking the moat, was a firing slot cutting through seven feet of defensive stonework. The only modern touch was a skinny three-paned window cemented into the slit.

Anna would check e-mail in the morning when she came on duty. It would be something to look forward to, this far out in the middle of watery nowhere, though even e-mail was not instantaneous-it took a day or more, as it was routed through headquarters in Homestead.

The two promised messages were where Teddy said they'd be. The first was from Alistair Kirk, the Assistant Chief Ranger of Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks. "Tomorrow, 10:00 A.M., you and Daniel call me re: new water treatment plans." Fresh water had been a problem since the fort had been built. The original designers had created an ingenious plan where the top of the fort would collect rainwater, which would then be drawn down through sand filters built inside the fort's frame and stored in one hundred nine vaulted cisterns built below ground level beneath the casemates. The total capacity was a million and a half gallons.

What hadn't been foreseen was that the fort would be too heavy for the land. When tens of tons of brick began to settle, the cisterns cracked, letting seawater in and rendering them useless for fresh-water storage. They'd been sealed off after the Civil War. Since that time, in addition to what rainwater could be caught, drinking water had been barged to the island in wooden casks and rationed as strictly as rum. In 1935 the NPS had taken over Garden Key. Eventually the cisterns beneath the aborted chapel had been rehabilitated for use. Much of the fresh water was collected during the torrential rains that fell in hurricane season. In dry years a reverse osmosis plant that desalinated seawater augmented this.

The entire system was outmoded and needed to be rethought and rebuilt. It would be a time of great upheaval, and Anna rather hoped she'd be home in Mississippi before the digging and cursing and spending commenced.

The second note was from Paul Davidson. Knowing it was almost impossible to get hold of her, Paul left her messages several times a week and wrote her every day. In her quarters, along with groceries and the mysterious box from Molly rumored to contain New York bagels, would be a packet of letters from him.

In Teddy's crabbed hand, Paul said: "Taco and I arrested your favorite drunk today. All three of us missed you. Taco and I probably more than Barstow. Paul." Clay Barstow was a scrawny, amiable old alcoholic Anna arrested every time she found his battered '57 pickup truck crawling along the Trace at fifteen miles an hour, two wheels off the pavement for guidance. They'd become, if not friends, at least comfortable with their relationship as jailer and jailed. As Sheriff of Claiborne County, Paul must have had to arrest him. Taco, left in Paul's care, rode in the front seat of the Sheriff's car each day. The three-legged dog would be gleefully spoiled by the time Anna returned. She laughed even as she felt the muscles around her heart tighten with an inexplicable pain.

This subtle form of heart attack had been with Anna since the Friday night Paul had taken her to the Episcopal church in Port Gibson, where he occasionally fulfilled the office of priest when Father Sam was out of town and when Paul's duties of apprehending criminals didn't take precedence over his job of forgiving them. It had been late spring. The foliage around the two-century-old, barn-red church had already matured into a fecund green that whispered of summer. The leaves were so thick that no sun dappled through.

St. James Church was stuffy and, as churches seem to be between choir practice and Sunday services, preternaturally still; more than simply an absence of sound, a deepening of silence until one could almost believe it had become active through the alchemy of some unseen listening ear. Those who'd been washed in the blood of the Lamb would probably say it was the presence of God.

To Anna it had more the feel of the yawning silence of a well inviting a dark fall that was as seductive as it was terrifying.

Leading her by the hand, Paul took her down the side aisle. The sun was close to setting. From its place near the horizon beyond the far bank of the Mississippi River, the rays cut horizontally beneath the protective canopy of antebellum oaks. Light so saturated with color it collected on the polished wooden bench in puddles of ruby, emerald, topaz and cobalt poured through the stained-glass depiction of St. Francis holding a lamb.

Paul ushered her into this rainbow-drenched pew, then seated himself in the pew in front of her. He twisted around and put his forearms on the seatback, his eyes level with hers. His blond hair, not so much going gray as fading at the temples, was died a rich auburn by a fold of St. Francis's robe, and he looked closer to thirty than fifty. His eyes, customarily a blue that Anna found varied in hue as much as the sky, depending on his internal weather, showed violet in the strange light.

Maybe because she'd been alone for so many years, maybe because she'd chosen to be blind to the signs, Anna hadn't known he'd brought her to St. James to propose. His divorce, not a particularly pleasant exercise in emotional law, was scarcely two weeks old. Anna thought she had time.

From his shirt pocket he removed the clich‚d black velvet box. Anna blinked in the manner of an iguana on speed. She was a trained law-enforcement officer. How could she have missed a clue the size of a two-carat diamond ring box in a man's breast pocket?

It was two carats Anna asked. She couldn't help herself. It was the biggest diamond she'd ever seen outside a jewelry-store window. Light, green from the grass under the saint's feet, caught in the facets till it glowed like kryptonite. Anna felt her strength being drained away.

Paul held it out to her, but she could not raise her hands from where they rested, palms up on her thighs like fainting white spiders.

"You with me sweetheart?"

Sweetheart. She'd grown to love the endearments he was so comfortable with. Darling. Honey. She'd not yet been able to say them back, but she planned to give it a shot real soon. Zach had never called her sweet names. He'd called her "Pigeon," and she had thought she loved it.

Anna had not wanted Zach there in the light with her and Paul and fear and hope, and she'd shaken her head to rid her mind of her first husband's face.

"You're not with me?" Paul asked.

"No. It's just that... I'm with you." She tried to smile and found it was a whole lot easier than she thought it would be. There was happiness nearby. Anna could feel it rising in place of the listening silence.

Paul looked at her closely, answering her smile with the slow southern warmth that had first warmed her loins and then come to warm her heart. "Good. I brought you to this church, my church, the house of my God, because I know you're not exactly on a first-name basis with the Almighty. Maybe you don't always think he-"

"She."

"-she exists." He reached out, stroked her cheek with such gentleness she felt tears prick at her eyes and confuse her mind. "I brought you here to ask you to marry me because I want you to know my belief is enough. God comes or doesn't, is or isn't, manifests or vanishes according to forces I cannot begin to understand. I have chosen this," and though he didn't gesture at the church, Anna felt as if he had. "What you choose is for you. I will never push or pry or expect. Freedom of religion. An American marriage." Again he smiled. Again the kryptonite flashed. Anna felt a new sort of joy bubbling up around her. From somewhere in the dark of her mind she heard Zach whisper. "Pigeon, you're my person..." and she found an inner voice responding to the old litany: "No, you're my..." Again she shook her head to rattle out the vision, and she wondered when Zach had changed from an angel to a ghost.

"No. No. Don't say no," Paul was murmuring and reaching out to take her face between his hands. Dislodged, the diamond in its box fell into Anna's open palm. A sign.

"A good catch," she argued aloud.

"I am," Paul promised. "I will be."

"I'm sure you would be," Anna said pulling herself out of the jewel-lit church and back into the stony gloom of her office with its firing slit for a window. Born of the flashback-not the first she had of Paul's offer of marriage-a juxtaposition of joy and haunting filled her lungs as it had in St. James Church. She blew it out on a gust of air.

"I'm about to lock up," Teddy called back. "Are you going to be awhile?"

"No. I'm done," Anna replied, glad to have the impetus to move. The message about the water-system meeting she left on the desk. The note from Paul she carried with her. When she got back to her quarters she would tuck it in a painted box Molly had brought her from her trip to Russia when Anna was still in college and her sister was already a rising star in the field of psychiatry. The box was too full to close, but though she felt mildly absurd because of it, Anna couldn't bring herself to throw the notes away.

"Got everything?" Teddy asked, sounding like a kindergarten teacher asking a five-year-old if she went to the bathroom before letting her on the bus for a field trip.

Anna held up her net bag as proof she was allowed to go, and slipped out into the stark sun and shade of the parade ground. A brick walk, not original to the fort but added by the National Park Service, circumnavigated the inner court next to the casemates.