Flashback (33 page)

Tribute given and accepted, Daniel said: "What's up?"

Anna did not choose to share her theory about a second diver and the engine being shifted intentionally, so she just asked if he had noticed any other boats near the dive site. He hadn't, but couldn't swear there hadn't been any. "My attention was focused down pretty much," he said. "Anything short of a Spanish galleon under full sail could have gone unnoticed."

Mack, the only other witness, was her last recourse. She'd not yet spoken with him on the assumption that, had he seen anyone-and how could he not if a second diver had been in evidence-and had any intention of volunteering the information, he would have done so already. Mack may have saved her life for reasons of his own, but the mere fact he had been there when the "accident" occurred made him suspect of collusion or criminal negligence at least.

This line of inquiry was to be aborted. Mack, Daniel told her, was on his lieu days and had hitched a ride to Key West on the early seaplane. He'd be out of pocket for five days. The "good" news was the Shaws had returned on the first ferry of the day. Anna'd slept through the hero's welcome Bob had been given on the docks. All the fort's personnel had been there, partly out of respect for Bob, mostly because everyone but a skeleton crew were leaving the island for a three-day session regarding health and benefits at headquarters in Homestead.

Bob and his wife were tucked away in their house.

Not anxious to interview them with an eye to the poisoning, Anna took a leisurely route back to the west side of the fort. Tourists off the huge catamaran, one of two that ferried visitors from the mainland each day, wandered the parade ground and drifted from casemate to casemate. Anna could see them through the brick arches, small and dressed in bright colors like dolls in a dollhouse viewed from the back. People made places mundane, robbed them of mystery and romance. Crazy, delusional, absurd as the human animal could be, it carried homely reality around its neck like the mariner's albatross. Religion, the fantasy of the occult, the paranormal, close encounters of the third kind, served to indicate how burdensome life without magic had become to some.

Moving slowly, taking the steps one at a time in deference to her hard-won aches and scrapes and her desire to put off meeting with the Shaws a little longer, Anna climbed the spiral stairs beside the Visitors Center, the room that had housed the guards when Raffia Coleman was in residence.

On the second level she turned right, instead of left toward the Shaws and home. When she'd first come to the fort, Duncan had taken her on a tour. One of the stops was in Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mr. Sam Arnold's cell, they being the two most famous-or infamous-of the inmates when Fort Jefferson had been a prison.

Duncan adhered to the theory that the doctor was guilty as charged. Despite the fact that a couple of presidents had written letters amounting to an apology to the doctor's descendants, the court's ruling had never been overturned and the doctor's name was still Mudd. The information available from the highly public legal proceeding gave rise to reams of paper on the subject, and Duncan preached his gospel of Mudd's guilt in learned terms and soon, he hoped, from the New York Times bestseller list.

As Anna understood it, Samuel Mudd's contention was that he had not known John Wilkes Booth when, hours after Lincoln's assassination, he set the man's leg, broken in the jump from the balcony to the stage of Ford's Theatre. This was why he had given treatment and, upon learning of the assassination, had not turned Booth in. Mudd's poor-country-doctor-living-up-to-the-Hippocratic-oath defense was, according to Duncan, undone by the fact that several witnesses had seen Mudd in the company of John Wilkes Booth on two occasions prior to the shooting of the president, making it extremely unlikely that Booth, who remained overnight in the doctor's house, was unrecognized by Mudd.

Till reading Raffia Coleman's letters, Anna had little interest in the guilt or innocence of a man so long dead. Drugs and family ties having dragged history through time and dumped it in her living room, she looked on the cell with new eyes. The channels so painstakingly chipped in the floor to carry away standing water were as Raffia had described them. In running her fingers over the fissures Anna could feel the anger and desperation it had taken to carve them. Imagining the casemate, now open to the sunlight with a pleasant view of the parade ground, hoarded over, the three high, narrow slits on the east wall must have crushed the life from what little light they allowed through.

Regardless of the deeds of the men condemned to serve time in the cell, Anna felt pity for them. She sided with those opposed to the death penalty because it did not deter crime, was not cost effective and those on death row seemed anxious to live. She was not against it because it was deemed cruel or unusual. Had she been sentenced to such a room as this without light, without hope of release, the death penalty would have been a great kindness.

Still, keeping company with her aunts Raffia and Tilly, Anna took her time walking the northern bastion and casemates. Partway down she veered from the dramatic drench of sun and shadow in the great arched spaces and slipped into the brick passage Raffia had described outside the black powder storage room.

Built within the walls, closer to the parade ground than the sea, these small rooms were designed for security, a place safe from the guns of an attacking force yet convenient to the gun ports they served. The tight doglegged passage to gain entrance reminded Anna of the way into Injun Joe's Cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Time warped briefly-a sensation she was beginning to get used to-and she suffered the same pinch of panic going in as she had at nineteen in southern California.

Inside, the room was lined-floor, walls and ceiling-with wood. She'd have to ask Duncan why. Maybe, in this humid climate, it helped to keep the powder dry. The timber-lined, many-angled internal ceiling going up to a point, it felt like the inside of the grain silos she'd played in as a girl. Three weeks before her eleventh birthday a kid had suffocated, drowned in grain, and her father never let her or Molly play in one again. Looking around this confined space, protected from the elements, graffiti from the eighteen hundreds still legible on the boards, she felt again that unsettling mix of excitement and dread silos had engendered in her since the neighbor boy had died.

For several minutes she let the centuries shift and listened for the weeping of Tilly, the calls of her older sister, the clatter of men and hammers. Before she could conjure up the past, two teenaged boys wearing shorts so large the crotches hobbled their knees burst in with sweating exuberance and Anna was driven back into the new millennia where boys Joel Lane's age were still children and had the tee shirts and the manners to prove it.

Hounded from her hiding place, she gave up procrastinating and finished the journey to the Shaws'. Their home was just below her apartment and mirrored Lanny Wilcox's quarters. On the southernmost end of the house was a screened-in porch. Anna always paid attention to this on her way past because the Shaws kept two fine fat cats who often lounged on the porch.

Thinking life would be grand if she dealt exclusively with felines, she knocked on the door. Teddy let her in with what appeared to be genuine pleasure. Wondering if this woman regularly poisoned people to further her husband's career, Anna experienced no reciprocal emotions but believed she'd faked them adequately enough to pass muster.

The two houses, the Shaws' and Wilcox's, were structurally alike, but there ended the similarity. Where Lanny's was made smaller by the encroachment of his collected interests, mementos, incarnations and necessary junk, the Shaws' home was made larger by white paint, mirrors, clean, polished wood-and-canvas furniture and an absence of any trappings of the past. Though she traveled light, Anna had not been this unencumbered since college, when a bookcase of bricks and boards and a couple of thumbtacks were all she needed in the way of interior decor.

Not that the Shaws' tastes ran to plastic milk crates and beanbag chairs; what there was was classy and probably expensive. It was just that there was so little. What there was appeared planned, cautious, devoid of knickknacks, personal photos, souvenirs, toys, dog-eared books or anything else to play with. The room could have been designed for a magazine cover.

Given what Anna had learned of Teddy's past, it wasn't surprising she had no wish to be reminded of it on a daily basis. Why Bob would have so little of his history on the walls Anna had no idea. Regardless of pathologies, she much preferred the Shaws' living space to that of Lanny Wilcox. In the Shaws' quarters she could breathe.

Having ushered Anna over the stairway landing and down into the living room, Teddy left her to find her own seat. Anna chose the one with the white cat named Joey, as Teddy fluttered around her husband. Bob was ensconced on the sofa, a cream canvas sling supported by blond wood that had to be more attractive than comfortable. Had Anna been the one with her leg in a cast, she would have been forced to crawl to the closet, get a gun and shoot Teddy. The amount of fussing and plumping and cooing would have driven her around the bend.

Bob thrived on it. A warrior carried from the field of battle, he accepted the attention with gracious humility that only just dimmed the glow of pure contentment on his face. Probably this idyll would be shortlived. Having tasted what he'd thirsted after for so long, odds were good he'd be craving another adventure before the scars of this one had time to fade.

Following an offer of drinks, which Anna almost forgot to decline, the domestic Teddy, exhibiting none of the Borgia characteristics Anna'd envisioned once she'd seen her as a suspect, left Anna and Bob alone and went into the kitchen.

The life of the party gone, there didn't seem much to say. Anna would have busied herself playing with Joey, but the cat was having none of it and jumped down at the first tentative pat.

"You're looking good," Anna said to keep the silence from getting embarrassing.

"I'm a fast healer," Bob said.

He probably was. So far his other inflated opinions about his worth had been proved out. Still, Anna had to make a point not to smile. Bob must even outdo other men in the superior functioning of his cells.

"Bring me up to speed. What's been happening on the boat thing?" Bob plucked two brightly colored pillows from where Teddy tucked them and tossed them to the floor. Basking in the glow of past deeds had lasted an even shorter time than Anna'd given it. The adrenaline junkie was back.

Teddy returned with drinks on a tray, a Coke for Bob and iced tea for her. Seeing the Coke can was unopened and meant for Bob Anna quickly changed her mind and asked if she could have that drink after all. Nosing around the haunts of Civil War dead was thirsty work. Teddy gave Anna Bob's soda without so much as blinking and fetched another. Had she been planning on drugging her guest she was unperturbed at being foiled.

"So," Teddy said, flopping down on the only empty chair. "Who was Bob's dead guy? Anything on that?" She was as anxious to return to the glory days as her husband.

The delay Anna had instigated with the coke business had given her time to think, something she should have done before making the call.

She told them everything, leaving out only that she and Lanny had been drugged and that she knew there was a warrant out for Teddy's arrest.

Both Shaws listened with the rapt attention of children being told a favorite bedtime story. As carefully as she watched, Anna could detect no flickers of fear or guilt.

"Teddy," Anna said as the younger woman saw her to the door. "Do you think Bob could spare you for a little while? There's something I'd like to discuss."

"Can't we do it here? I have no secrets from-" Teddy jerked the way a small dog does when it runs headlong into the end of its leash. For the time it takes to breathe, she met Anna's eyes. Other than maybe Matt Damon, Anna had never seen an actor who could match the sudden and overwhelming vulnerability of Teddy's face. Emotion was clearly written there. Anna watched it come and go. Dismay, that almost laughable look a toddler gets when its first balloon pops in his hand, the sudden shock before the shrieking, robbed Teddy of her years. An adult's realization of consequences brought them back with another ten she'd not yet earned. The baby face hardened then sagged, lips thinning.

"Let me tell him I'm going out," Teddy said softly.

As she crossed the kitchen and climbed the three stairs over the hump into the living room, Anna wondered if Teddy would face her monsters with the courage she'd so lauded in her husband. Hard to tell. Fessing up to sleaze and paying the sordid price took a different kind of courage than taking a bullet for the president or rescuing a child from a burning building. No adrenaline helped one through the terror; no promise of reward in status or simply goodwill pulled one through the hard marches. It wasn't even as good as the biblical sort of bravery, the willingness to suffer degradation and abuse for the good of another.

It was pure payback. Scraping it up for the bookie when the bet was lost.

A murmured conversation later Teddy came again into the kitchen. Anna'd seen people go pale beneath a suntan before. Teddy's skin had the unpleasant grayish cast skim milk lends to coffee.

"Let's walk," Anna said. The day was impossibly hot and windy, but being in public would be safer. Besides, Anna wanted to conduct an experiment.

They walked in silence across the parade ground and out the sally port beneath the sweep and cry of the frigate birds. Teddy had guessed what the conversation was to be about, and silence would do more to soften her up than questions.