Flashback (34 page)

As Anna turned right to walk around the moat wall, Teddy couldn't take it any longer. "You ran background checks," she said.

"I did."

They reached the southeast corner of the fort, and Anna turned right again, following the wide walkway that topped the moat's wall. Between them and the fort lay the water, shallow at this end, maybe three feet deep and twice that from the top of the wall to the surface of the water. To their left was the ocean, sparkling where the wind roughed its surface.

"I've been clean since I married Bob," Teddy said. "All that was another lifetime. I was another person."

"Does Bob know?" Anna asked.

"He knows."

That was a lie. Anna'd read the truth in Teddy's face back in her kitchen. She let it alone. Beneath the crystal waters of the moat a nurse shark, not yet two feet long, hung motionless, strands of brown seaweed trailing over its tail.

"I never told him," Teddy confessed at last. "Bob is so... good. It was too late for me. I already loved him. I was afraid he wouldn't see me the same way anymore."

"What was it?" Anna asked.

Teddy understood the question. Like any lover or addict, the name of the necessary object stays close in mind. "Percodan," Teddy said. "Prescription painkillers."

"You stole them from the hospitals where you worked."

"For a while. Then I knew I was taking too many so I started stealing prescription pads and signing the doctors' names to them."

Again a right turn. They walked now along the western wall where Anna believed she had seen the wet prints of whoever had run from her the night she'd seen the light in Lanny Wilcox's quarters. She stopped midway down the wall and looked out toward Loggerhead Key. Three miles away, it looked ghostly in the mist the wind teased from the ocean. Out of the corner of her eye Anna studied Teddy Shaw. Black snakes of hair whipped her cheeks, stuck to her lips. Color had returned and she no longer looked as if she might pass out.

If she had indeed splashed across the moat that night and slithered over the wall, she didn't seem to be thinking about it now. Her attention was directed inward.

"Will you tell him?"

"Yeah," Anna said. "You can have a few days to tell him yourself if you like. Then we'll go on in to Key West and you can turn yourself in. I doubt you'll get more than a couple months' jail time. Maybe not even that, maybe just more probation."

"Can't you just pretend you don't know?"

Teddy knew she couldn't, so Anna didn't bother to answer.

"Two months, probation or whatever and it'll be over. You can come home," Anna said. "Over forever unless you screw up again. I'd think that'd be a relief."

"If I have a home to come to."

"You will." Anna didn't doubt for a minute the truth of her words. Bob and Teddy had such a rich dream life they'd be able to romanticize even jail time into their story. "Tell you what I can do," Anna said as the story they might write unfolded in her brain. "You don't have to tell Bob I found out. I won't. Then you just tell him you have to come clean, square yourself with the law."

Teddy thought about that. If it were possible to see someone mentally embroider a tale, Anna would have sworn that was what she witnessed in Teddy's eyes.

"That would be good," she said at last.

They walked on, circumnavigating the fort. Anna felt no need to talk, and Teddy was busy with her own thoughts, perhaps scripting her confession scene with her husband. The sun baked sweat from their bodies, the wind sucked it away. Anna's throat grew dry. Across the narrow isthmus on Bush Key the sooty terns wheeled in a gray cloud crying their endless cries. Tourists dotted the old coaling docks and sat on beaches enjoying their day in the sun. They reached the sally port and went into the fort. The grass on the parade ground was so dry it crackled underfoot, putting Anna in mind of crispy Chinese noodles.

When they reached Teddy's back door and the wooden stairs to Anna's second-tier apartment, Anna spoke again. "Would you mind coming up for a minute? There's something I'd like your opinion on."

The pull to escape into her house, to be with Bob, was so great Teddy's body actually leaned in that direction. For a second Anna thought she'd refuse. Evidently she decided keeping on Anna's good side was worth extending her stay away from her wifely duties.

"For a minute," Teddy said.

"Sit down," Anna said when they'd gone inside. Teddy perched on the edge of the couch. At the far end Piedmont opened his eyes the merest of slits. Apparently the idea of sharing his bed with a stranger appalled him. He jumped to the chair, curled up, and resumed his nap.

"I'm thirsty," Anna said. She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of sparkling water.

"Can I pour you a glass of water?"

"That'd be great," Teddy said. No hesitation. No flicker of alarm.

Anna put the bottle back and took out two Cokes. "The water's gone flat," she said. "I'd forgotten."

Teddy pulled the tab. Anna sat by Piedmont.

"What did you want my opinion on?"

"Drugs. If somebody wanted to induce mild psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia, what would be the best way to do it? You know, tasteless, easy to get a hold of, easy to administer in liquid."

Teddy liked story problems. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, can of pop in both hands. "Legal or illegal?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Lysergic acid diethylamide."

LSD. The old classics were always best.

"Any way to control the dosage?"

"In a lab, sure, but with street stuff who knows?"

That fit with Anna's experience. One of the tainted bottles had agitated her only a little. The other had taken the top of her head off.

"Thanks."

"Why? You planning on taking a trip?"

"Just curious," Anna said.

Another time Teddy might have stayed and tried to wheedle the truth out of Anna. Today the need to be with her crippled husband took precedence.

Anna walked her home.

She stood for a minute in the sun. Air-conditioning could be counted on to provide two wonderful moments: the first blast of cool air when coming in from a sweltering summer and the relief of being enveloped in heat when one stepped out again. While standing in the Shaws' tiny courtyard feeling her skin expand and grow supple after the dry arctic winds of General Electric's winter, Anna's radio crackled to life. The noise startled her. With Bob gone the radio waves had been uncharacteristically empty.

It was Donna the lighthouse keeper on Loggerhead. "Dick Tracy hit pay dirt," she said.

"I'll be there shortly," Anna replied. Glad to have direction, she set out for the docks.

With no discernable change in the weather, the sea had entered another season and rose gray and choppy, the low short swells guaranteed to unsettle the stomachs of the uninitiated. To her shame, Anna was not a particularly good sailor and had been known to run for the rail with the best of them. When she was piloting the boat, this was changed; she had a stomach of iron. In these warm seas where the spray was a blessing and not a curse, she enjoyed the ride.

Patrice was at the house. Donna, Anna was told, was at the top of the seventy-five-foot-tall lighthouse inspecting the railings. The lighthouse had been built in 1886. The railings around the walkway at the top were rusting away. It wouldn't be good for the park service's image to have a visitor plunge to her death while on holiday.

As Patrice ushered Anna into the tiny and wonderful old house, pots and pans, tiny stove, sink, and two-person dining table lining the stone walls, Donna joined them. Come for no other reason, Anna guessed, than to bask in the cleverness of her beloved. In a serendipitous aping of Daniel, Donna was wiping her blunt square hands on a red grease rag. With the two broad-shouldered rough-voiced women in it, the ground floor room with its pint-sized appliances was further reduced until Anna felt she'd entered a dollhouse.

"Upstairs," Patrice said and led the way. The open staircase was made to scale with the house. For Anna it was just narrow enough to feel cozy. With a big woman in front of her and another behind, she was suddenly aware of the structure's great age. Treads creaked in protest, and Anna could feel challenged wood thrumming through the soles of her deck shoes. She took comfort in the fact that, should the stairs collapse, Donna's substantial self would break her fall. Then it occurred to her Patrice would fall on top of them both.

The bedroom was reached without incident. Anna and Donna sat on the bed that took up most of the space. Patrice loaded one of an impressive stack of videotapes into the VCR set beside a television with a thirteen-inch screen.

"I knew it was here somewhere," Patrice said. "My clerical skills being on a par with Donna's cooking, it took me a while to find it."

Donna snorted but seemed unoffended.

"That boat you found-or one like you described to us, might not be the same banana-has been out here a bunch of times in the last couple of months. We get a lot of regulars and I don't videotape them, but these guys were acting fishy."

"No pun intended," Donna interjected.

"I never paid much attention to them till they beached on the west shore under the lighthouse." The tape was in. Patrice joined Anna and Donna on the bed and the three of them stared intently at the small screen as a video of white sand and blue water began to play.

"There's no beaching here-"

"As you know," Donna interrupted.

"But that doesn't mean boats don't laud. Donna or I just politely shoo 'em away or, if there's a problem, call you guys. So, this guy beaches." Patrice let the tape lay for fifteen seconds or so in silence. A sleek green missile of a boat thrust into frame and she paused the tape. The picture held but twitched and jerked as if the power of the boat would pull it back into play.

"This guy," Patrice continued, pointing at the captured image, "beaches that thing. He and another guy jump out. Both Hispanic: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Panamanian-something. So Donna here goes down to shoo them away."

"It was my turn," Donna explained, apparently needing Anna to know nobody wore the pants in this particular family. "I'd just done my hale-fellow-well-met wave and smile preparatory to chucking them nicely back into the sea. They saw me and got themselves launched, back in the boat and were leaving a wake wide as a three-lane highway before I had time to get my arm down."

"Donna told me about it and I kept an eye out. Next time they showed, I taped them."

"You can take the woman out of the policeman..." Donna said.

"But you can't take the policeman out of the woman," Patrice finished. This was an old joke, the best kind, and the two of them enjoyed themselves.

"They never beached again. Never even came close. That's why this shot's not all that great. But it's the same boat."

For a long minute the three of them stared at the tape. Patrice had zoomed in on it but it still was a good ways away and, on the thirteen-inch screen, no more than three inches long. It was a Scarab. Anna had looked up go-fast boats on the Internet and familiarized herself with the various silhouettes. The differences were small, but each designer left his or her mark on the product. The boat Patrice had caught on film was the same metallic green as the one wrecked off East Key. There was no way to prove to a jury the two were the same boat, but Anna didn't need to. At present she needed only to satisfy herself.

"It's the same boat," she said.

Patrice leaned forward and clicked off the television, ejected the tape and gave it to Anna without being asked. "I'd like it back when you're done."

"No problem." The three of them continued to sit, each alone with her thoughts, blissfully unaware they painted a picture of the "see no evil" monkeys as middle-aged white ladies.

"Why do you figure they beached here, then took off?" Anna asked at last. She had her own theory but respected Patrice's police skills enough to entertain others.

"My guess is they thought the Key was unoccupied," Patrice said. "You'd think a great phallic black-and-white tower with a light on top would have tipped them off, but there's a few Keys out here with buildings that are abandoned."

"You said you'd seen the boat before."

"Right. It's been out here-or we've seen it-maybe five or six times. Five or six, Donna?"

"About that but not before it beached and ran. That was the first time."

Patrice thought about that. "Right," she said. "I had my brain calendar screwed up. Because it beached I got interested, not the other way around."

"You said it the other way," Donna pushed.

"I'm old and I'm fat and I lie, but you adore me." Patrice said and smiled at her partner.

Donna threw up her big grease-stained hands. "What can I say? I like to walk on the wild side."

The three of them gnawed over the question of the green boat till it was frayed and sodden, stretching the possible from the probable to the fantastical to see if anything shook loose. In the end they returned to earth not that much wiser. The go-fast was not fishing or camping, yet it frequented the park. The go-fast boat was owned or captained by males of a Hispanic cast, two of whom were now dead. The boat had probably beached on Loggerhead mistakenly, either believing it to be uninhabited or believing it to be a different landfall entirely. These paltry facts, put together with the fuel containers that had obliterated the sunken hull and the operator's strong desire to remain unnoticed by anyone in authority, seemed to point to drug smuggling. Smugglers drove powerboats to outrun the coast guard cutters, carried extra fuel, and used isolated and uninhabited places for caches of illegal goods. The drawback to this theory was that if the men killed on the Scarab were drug smugglers, they had to be among the stupidest criminals ever to cross the law. This was a grave insult, given criminals are not known for their cleverness, education, long-term planning or impulse control.