Shutter Island

1

TEDDY DANIELS’S FATHER had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the bank in ’31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight along the docks when they didn’t, going long stretches when he was back at the house by ten in the morning, sitting in an armchair, staring at his hands, whispering to himself occasionally, his eyes gone wide and dark.

He’d taken Teddy out to the islands when Teddy was still a small boy, too young to be much help on the boat. All he’d been able to do was untangle the lines and tie off the hooks. He’d cut himself a few times, and the blood dotted his fingertips and smeared his palms.

They’d left in the dark, and when the sun appeared, it was a cold ivory that pushed up from the edge of the sea, and the islands appeared out of the fading dusk, huddled together, as if they’d been caught at something.

Teddy saw small, pastel-colored shacks lining the beach of one, a crumbling limestone estate on another. His father pointed out the prison on Deer Island and the stately fort on Georges. On Thompson, the high trees were filled with birds, and their chatter sounded like squalls of hail and glass.

Out past them all, the one they called Shutter lay like something tossed from a Spanish galleon. Back then, in the spring of ’28, it had been left to itself in a riot of its own vegetation, and the fort that stretched along its highest point was strangled in vines and topped with great clouds of moss.

“Why Shutter?” Teddy asked.

His father shrugged. “You with the questions. Always the questions.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Some places just get a name and it sticks. Pirates probably.”

“Pirates?” Teddy liked the sound of that. He could see them—big men with eye patches and tall boots, gleaming swords.

His father said, “This is where they hid in the old days.” His arm swept the horizon. “These islands. Hid themselves. Hid their gold.”

Teddy imagined chests of it, the coins spilling down the sides.

Later he got sick, repeatedly and violently, pitching black ropes of it over the side of his father’s boat and into the sea.

His father was surprised because Teddy hadn’t begun to vomit until hours into the trip when the ocean was flat and glistening with its own quiet. His father said, “It’s okay. It’s your first time. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

Teddy nodded, wiped his mouth with a cloth his father gave him.

His father said, “Sometimes there’s motion, and you can’t even feel it until it climbs up inside of you.”

Another nod, Teddy unable to tell his father that it wasn’t motion that had turned his stomach.

It was all that water. Stretched out around them until it was all that was left of the world. How Teddy believed that it could swallow the sky. Until that moment, he’d never known they were this alone.

He looked up at his father, his eyes leaking and red, and his father said, “You’ll be okay,” and Teddy tried to smile.

His father went out on a Boston whaler in the summer of ’38 and never came back. The next spring, pieces of the boat washed up on Nantasket Beach in the town of Hull, where Teddy grew up. A strip of keel, a hot plate with the captain’s name etched in the base, cans of tomato and potato soup, a couple of lobster traps, gap-holed and misshapen.

They held the funeral for the four fishermen in St. Theresa’s Church, its back pressed hard against the same sea that had claimed so many of its parishioners, and Teddy stood with his mother and heard testimonials to the captain, his first mate, and the third fisherman, an old salt named Gil Restak, who’d terrorized the bars of Hull since returning from the Great War with a shattered heel and too many ugly pictures in his head. In death, though, one of the bartenders he’d terrorized had said, all was forgiven.

The boat’s owner, Nikos Costa, admitted that he’d barely known Teddy’s father, that he’d hired on at the last minute when a crew member broke his leg in a fall from a truck. Still, the captain had spoken highly of him, said everyone in town knew that he could do a day’s work. And wasn’t that the highest praise one could give a man?

Standing in that church, Teddy remembered that day on his father’s boat because they’d never gone out again. His father kept saying they would, but Teddy understood that he said this only so his son could hold on to some pride. His father never acknowledged what had happened that day, but a look had passed between them as they headed home, back through the string of islands, Shutter behind them, Thompson still ahead, the city skyline so clear and close you’d think you could lift a building by its spire.

“It’s the sea,” his father said, a hand lightly rubbing Teddy’s back as they leaned against the stern. “Some men take to it. Some men it takes.”

And he’d looked at Teddy in such a way that Teddy knew which of those men he’d probably grow up to be.

TO GET THERE in ’54, they took the ferry from the city and passed through a collection of other small, forgotten islands—Thompson and Spectacle, Grape and Bumpkin, Rainford and Long—that gripped the scalp of the sea in hard tufts of sand, wiry trees, and rock formations as white as bone. Except for supply runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the ferry ran on an irregular schedule and the galley was stripped of everything but the sheet metal that covered the floor and two steel benches that ran under the windows. The benches were bolted to the floor and bolted to thick black posts at both ends, and manacles and their chains hung in spaghetti piles from the posts.

The ferry wasn’t transporting patients to the asylum today, however, just Teddy and his new partner, Chuck Aule, a few canvas bags of mail, a few cases of medical supplies.

Teddy started the trip down on his knees in front of the toilet, heaving into the bowl as the ferry’s engine chugged and clacked and Teddy’s nasal passages filled with the oily smells of gasoline and the late-summer sea. Nothing came out of him but small streams of water, yet his throat kept constricting and his stomach banged up against the base of his esophagus and the air in front of his face spun with motes that blinked like eyes.

The final heave was followed by a globe of trapped oxygen that seemed to carry a piece of his chest with it as it exploded from his mouth, and Teddy sat back on the metal floor and wiped his face with his handkerchief and thought how this wasn’t the way you wanted to start a new partnership.

He could just imagine Chuck telling his wife back home—if he had a wife; Teddy didn’t even know that much about him yet—about his first encounter with the legendary Teddy Daniels. “Guy liked me so much, honey, he threw up.”

Since that trip as a boy, Teddy had never enjoyed being out on the water, took no pleasure from such a lack of land, of visions of land, things you could reach out and touch without your hands dissolving into them. You told yourself it was okay—because that’s what you had to do to cross a body of water—but it wasn’t. Even in the war, it wasn’t the storming of the beaches he feared so much as those last few yards from the boats to the shore, legs slogging through the depths, strange creatures slithering over your boots.

Still, he’d prefer to be out on deck, facing it in the fresh air, rather than back here, sickly warm, lurching.

When he was sure it had passed, his stomach no longer bubbling, his head no longer swimming, he washed his hands and face, checked his appearance in a small mirror mounted over the sink, most of the glass eroded by sea salt, a small cloud in the center where Teddy could just make out his reflection, still a relatively young man with a government-issue crew cut. But his face was lined with evidence of the war and the years since, his penchant for the dual fascinations of pursuit and violence living in eyes Dolores had once called “dog-sad.”

I’m too young, Teddy thought, to look this hard.

He adjusted his belt around his waist so the gun and holster rested on his hip. He took his hat from the top of the toilet and put it back on, adjusted the brim until it tilted just slightly to the right. He tightened the knot in his tie. It was one of those loud floral ties that had been going out of style for about a year, but he wore it because she had given it to him, slipped it over his eyes one birthday as he sat in the living room. Pressed her lips to his Adam’s apple. A warm hand on the side of his cheek. The smell of an orange on her tongue. Sliding into his lap, removing the tie, Teddy keeping his eyes closed. Just to smell her. To imagine her. To create her in his mind and hold her there.

He could still do it—close his eyes and see her. But lately, white smudges would blur parts of her—an earlobe, her eyelashes, the contours of her hair. It didn’t happen enough to fully obscure her yet, but Teddy feared time was taking her from him, grinding away at the picture frames in his head, crushing them.

“I miss you,” he said, and went out through the galley to the foredeck.

It was warm and clear out there, but the water was threaded with dark glints of rust and an overall pallor of gray, a suggestion of something growing dark in the depths, massing.

Chuck took a sip from his flask and tilted the neck in Teddy’s direction, one eyebrow cocked. Teddy shook his head, and Chuck slipped it back into his suit pocket, pulled the flaps of his overcoat around his hips, and looked out at the sea.

“You okay?” Chuck asked. “You look pale.”

Teddy shrugged it off. “I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

Teddy nodded. “Just finding my sea legs.”

They stood in silence for a bit, the sea undulating all around them, pockets of it as dark and silken as velvet.

“You know it used to be a POW camp?” Teddy said.

Chuck said, “The island?”

Teddy nodded. “Back in the Civil War. They built a fort there, barracks.”

“What do they use the fort for now?”

Teddy shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. There’s quite a few of them out here on the different islands. Most of them were target practice for artillery shells during the war. Not too many left standing.”

“But the institution?”

“From what I could tell, they use the old troop quarters.”

Chuck said, “Be like going back to basic, huh?”

“Don’t wish that on us.” Teddy turned on the rail. “So what’s your story there, Chuck?”

Chuck smiled. He was a bit stockier and a bit shorter than Teddy, maybe five ten or so, and he had a head of tight, curly black hair and olive skin and slim, delicate hands that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, as if he’d borrowed them until his real ones came back from the shop. His left cheek bore a small scythe of a scar, and he tapped it with his index finger.

“I always start with the scar,” he said. “People usually ask sooner or later.”

“Okay.”

“Wasn’t from the war,” Chuck said. “My girlfriend says I should just say it was, be done with it, but…” He shrugged. “It was from playing war, though. When I was a kid. Me and this other kid shooting slingshots at each other in the woods. My friend’s rock just misses me, so I’m okay, right?” He shook his head. “His rock hit a tree, sent a piece of bark into my cheek. Hence the scar.”

“From playing war.”

“From playing it, yeah.”

“You transferred from Oregon?”

“Seattle. Came in last week.”

Teddy waited, but Chuck didn’t offer any further explanation.

Teddy said, “How long you been with the marshals?”

“Four years.”

“So you know how small it is.”

“Sure. You want to know how come I transferred.” Chuck nodded, as if deciding something for himself. “If I said I was tired of rain?”

Teddy turned his palms up above the rail. “If you said so…”

“But it’s small, like you said. Everyone knows everyone in the service. So eventually, there’ll be—what do they call it?—scuttlebutt.”

“That’s word for it.”

“You caught Breck, right?”

Teddy nodded.

“How’d you know where he’d go? Fifty guys chasing him, they all went to Cleveland. You went to Maine.”

“He’d summered there once with his family when he was a kid. That thing he did with his victims? It’s what you do to horses. I talked to an aunt. She told me the only time he was ever happy was at a horse farm near this rental cottage in Maine. So I went up there.”

“Shot him five times,” Chuck said and looked down the bow at the foam.

“Would have shot him five more,” Teddy said. “Five’s what it took.”

Chuck nodded and spit over the rail. “My girlfriend’s Japanese. Well, born here, but you know…Grew up in a camp. There’s still a lot of tension out there—Portland, Seattle, Tacoma. No one likes me being with her.”

“So they transferred you.”

Chuck nodded, spit again, watched it fall into the churning foam.

“They say it’s going to be big,” he said.

Teddy lifted his elbows off the rail and straightened. His face was damp, his lips salty. Somewhat surprising that the sea had managed to find him when he couldn’t recall the spray hitting his face.

He patted the pockets of his overcoat, looking for his Chesterfields. “Who’s ‘they’? What’s ‘it’?”

“They. The papers,” Chuck said. “The storm. Big one, they say. Huge.” He waved his arm at the pale sky, as pale as the foam churning against the bow. But there, along its southern edge, a thin line of purple cotton swabs grew like ink blots.

Teddy sniffed the air. “You remember the war, don’t you, Chuck?”

Chuck smiled in such a way that Teddy suspected they were already tuning in to each other’s rhythms, learning how to fuck with each other.

“A bit,” Chuck said. “I seem to remember rubble. Lots of rubble. People denigrate rubble, but I say it has its place. I say it has its own aesthetic beauty. I say it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

“You talk like a dime novel. Has anyone else told you that?”

“It’s come up.” Chuck giving the sea another of his small smiles, leaning over the bow, stretching his back.

Teddy patted his trouser pockets, searched the inside pockets of his suit jacket. “You remember how often the deployments were dependent on weather reports.”

Chuck rubbed the stubble on his chin with the heel of his hand. “Oh, I do, yes.”

“Do you remember how often those weather reports proved correct?”

Chuck furrowed his brow, wanting Teddy to know he was giving this due and proper consideration. Then he smacked his lips and said, “About thirty percent of the time, I’d venture.”

“At best.”

Chuck nodded. “At best.”

“And so now, back in the world as we are…”

“Oh, back we are,” Chuck said. “Ensconced, one could even say.”

Teddy suppressed a laugh, liking this guy a lot now. Ensconced. Jesus.

“Ensconced,” Teddy agreed. “Why would you put any more credence in the weather reports now than you did then?”

“Well,” Chuck said as the sagging tip of a small triangle peeked above the horizon line, “I’m not sure my credence can be measured in terms of less or more. Do you want a cigarette?”

Teddy stopped in the middle of a second round of pocket pats, found Chuck watching him, his wry grin etched into his cheeks just below the scar.

“I had them when I boarded,” Teddy said.

Chuck looked back over his shoulder. “Government employees. Rob you blind.” Chuck shook a cigarette free of his pack of Luckies, handed one to Teddy, and lit it for him with his brass Zippo, the stench of the kerosene climbing over the salt air and finding the back of Teddy’s throat. Chuck snapped the lighter closed, then flicked it back open with a snap of his wrist and lit his own.

Teddy exhaled, and the triangle tip of the island disappeared for a moment in the plume of smoke.

“Overseas,” Chuck said, “When a weather report dictated if you went to the drop zone with your parachute pack or set off for the beachhead, well, there was much more at stake, wasn’t there?”

“True.”

“But back home, where’s the harm in a little arbitrary faith? That’s all I’m saying, boss.”

It began to reveal itself to them as more than a triangle tip, the lower sections gradually filling in until the sea stretched out flat again on the other side of it and they could see colors filling in as if by brush stroke—a muted green where the vegetation grew unchecked, a tan strip of shoreline, the dull ochre of cliff face on the northern edge. And at the top, as they churned closer, they began to make out the flat rectangular edges of buildings themselves.

“It’s a pity,” Chuck said.

“What’s that?”

“The price of progress.” He placed one foot on the towline and leaned against the rail beside Teddy, and they watched the island attempt to define itself. “With the leaps—and there are leaps going on, don’t kid yourself, leaps every day—happening in the field of mental health, a place like this will cease to exist. Barbaric they’ll call it twenty years from now. An unfortunate by-product of the bygone Victorian influence. And go it should, they’ll say. Incorporation, they’ll say. Incorporation will be the order of the day. You are all welcomed into the fold. We will soothe you. Rebuild you. We are all General Marshalls. We are a new society, and there is no place for exclusion. No Elbas.”

The buildings had disappeared again behind the trees, but Teddy could make out the fuzzy shape of a conical tower and then hard, jutting angles he took to be the old fort.

“But do we lose our past to assure our future?” Chuck flicked his cigarette out into the foam. “That’s the question. What do you lose when you sweep a floor, Teddy? Dust. Crumbs that would otherwise draw ants. But what of the earring she misplaced? Is that in the trash now too?”

Teddy said, “Who’s ‘she’? Where did ‘she’ come from, Chuck?”

“There’s always a she. Isn’t there?”

Teddy heard the whine of the engine change pitch behind them, felt the ferry give a small lurch underfoot, and he could see the fort clearer now atop the southern cliff face as they came around toward the western side of the island. The cannons were gone, but Teddy could make out the turrets easily enough. The land went back into hills behind the fort, and Teddy figured the walls were back there, blurring into the landscape from his current angle, and then Ashecliffe Hospital sat somewhere beyond the bluffs, overlooking the western shore.

“You got a girl, Teddy? Married?” Chuck said.

“Was,” Teddy said, picturing Dolores, a look she gave him once on their honeymoon, turning her head, her chin almost touching her bare shoulder, muscles moving under the flesh near her spine. “She died.”

Chuck came off the rail, his neck turning pink. “Oh, Jesus.”

“It’s okay,” Teddy said.

“No, no.” Chuck held his palm up by Teddy’s chest. “It’s…I’d heard that. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten. A couple of years ago, wasn’t it?”

Teddy nodded.

“Christ, Teddy. I feel like an idiot. Really. I’m so sorry.”

Teddy saw her again, her back to him as she walked down the apartment hallway, wearing one of his old uniform shirts, humming as she turned into the kitchen, and a familiar weariness invaded his bones. He would prefer to do just about anything—swim in that water even—rather than speak of Dolores, of the facts of her being on this earth for thirty-one years and then ceasing to be. Just like that. There when he left for work that morning. Gone by the afternoon.

But it was like Chuck’s scar, he supposed—the story that had to be dispensed with before they could move on, or otherwise it would always be between them. The hows. The wheres. The whys.

Dolores had been dead for two years, but she came to life at night in his dreams, and he sometimes went full minutes into a new morning thinking she was out in the kitchen or taking her coffee on the front stoop of their apartment on Buttonwood. This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it—waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

What was far crueler were the ways in which a seemingly illogical list of objects could trigger memories of his wife that lodged in his brain like a lit match. He could never predict what one of the objects would be—a shaker of salt, the gait of a strange woman on a crowded street, a bottle of Coca-Cola, a smudge of lipstick on a glass, a throw pillow.

But of all the triggers, nothing was less logical in terms of connective tissue, or more pungent in terms of effect, than water—drizzling from the tap, clattering from the sky, puddled against the sidewalk, or, as now, spread around him for miles in every direction.

He said to Chuck: “There was a fire in our apartment building. I was working. Four people died. She was one of them. The smoke got her, Chuck, not the fire. So she didn’t die in pain. Fear? Maybe. But not pain. That’s important.”

Chuck took another sip from his flask, offered it to Teddy again.

Teddy shook his head. “I quit. After the fire. She used to worry about it, you know? Said all of us soldiers and cops drank too much. So…” He could feel Chuck beside him, sinking in embarrassment, and he said, “You learn how to carry something like that, Chuck. You got no choice. Like all the shit you saw in the war. Remember?”

Chuck nodded, his eyes going small with memory for a moment, distant.

“It’s what you do,” Teddy said softly.

“Sure,” Chuck said eventually, his face still flushed.

The dock appeared as if by trick of light, stretching out from the sand, a stick of chewing gum from this distance, insubstantial and gray.

Teddy felt dehydrated from his time at the toilet and maybe a bit exhausted from the last couple of minutes; no matter how much he’d learned to carry it, carry her, the weight could wear him down every now and then. A dull ache settled into the left side of his head, just behind his eye, as if the flat side of an old spoon were pressed there. It was too early to tell if it were merely a minor side effect of the dehydration, the beginnings of a common headache, or the first hint of something worse—the migraines that had plagued him since adolescence and that at various times could come so strongly they could temporarily rob him of vision in one eye, turn light into a hailstorm of hot nails, and had once—only once, thank God—left him partially paralyzed for a day and a half. Migraines, his anyway, never visited during times of pressure or work, only afterward, when all had quieted down, after the shells stopped dropping, after the pursuit was ended. Then, at base camp or barracks or, since the war, in motel rooms or driving home along country highways—they came to do their worst. The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn’t catch you if you didn’t stop running.

He said to Chuck, “Heard much about this place?”

“A mental hospital, that’s about all I know.”

“For the criminally insane,” Teddy said.

“Well, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t,” Chuck said.

Teddy caught him smiling that dry grin again. “You never know, Chuck. You don’t look a hundred percent stable to me.”

“Maybe I’ll put a deposit down on a bed while we’re here, for the future, make sure they hold a place for me.”

“Not a bad idea,” Teddy said as the engines cut out for a moment, and the bow swung starboard as they turned with the current and the engines kicked in again and Teddy and Chuck were soon facing the open sea as the ferry backed toward the dock.

“Far as I know,” Teddy said, “they specialize in radical approaches.”

“Red?” Chuck said.

“Not Red,” Teddy said. “Just radical. There’s a difference.”

“You wouldn’t know it lately.”

“Sometimes, you wouldn’t,” Teddy agreed.

“And this woman who escaped?”

Teddy said, “Don’t know much about that. She slipped out last night. I got her name in my notebook. I figure they’ll tell us everything else.”

Chuck looked around at the water. “Where’s she going to go? She’s going to swim home?”

Teddy shrugged. “The patients here, apparently, suffer a variety of delusions.”

“Schizophrenics?”

“I guess, yeah. You won’t find your everyday mongoloids in here in any case. Or some guy who’s afraid of sidewalk cracks, sleeps too much. Far as I could tell from the file, everyone here is, you know, really crazy.”

Chuck said, “How many you think are faking it, though? I’ve always wondered that. You remember all the Section Eights you met in the war? How many, really, did you think were nuts?”

“I served with a guy in the Ardennes—”

“You were there?”

Teddy nodded. “This guy, he woke up one day speaking backward.”

“The words or the sentences?”

“Sentences,” Teddy said. “He’d say, ‘Sarge, today here blood much too is there.’ By late afternoon, we found him in a foxhole, hitting his own head with a rock. Just hitting it. Over and over. We were so rattled that it took us a minute to realize he’d scratched out his own eyes.”

“You are shitting me.”

Teddy shook his head. “I heard from a guy a few years later who ran across the blind guy in a vet hospital in San Diego. Still talking backward, and he had some sort of paralysis that none of the doctors could diagnose the cause of, sat in a wheelchair by the window all day, kept talking about his crops, he had to get to his crops. Thing was, the guy grew up in Brooklyn.”

“Well, guy from Brooklyn thinks he’s a farmer, I guess he is Section Eight.”

“That’s one tip-off, sure.”

2

DEPUTY WARDEN MCPHERSON met them at the dock. He was young for a man of his rank, and his blond hair was cut a bit longer than the norm, and he had the kind of lanky grace in his movements that Teddy associated with Texans or men who’d grown up around horses.

He was flanked by orderlies, mostly Negroes, a few white guys with deadened faces, as if they hadn’t been fed enough as babies, had remained stunted and annoyed ever since.

The orderlies wore white shirts and white trousers and moved in a pack. They barely glanced at Teddy and Chuck. They barely glanced at anything, just moved down the dock to the ferry and waited for it to unload its cargo.

Teddy and Chuck produced their badges upon request and McPherson took his time studying them, looking up from the ID cards to their faces, squinting.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a U.S. marshal’s badge before,” he said.

“And now you’ve seen two,” Chuck said. “A big day.”

He gave Chuck a lazy grin and flipped the badge back at him.

The beach looked to have been lashed by the sea in recent nights; it was strewn with shells and driftwood, mollusk skeletons and dead fish half eaten by whatever scavengers lived here. Teddy noticed trash that must have blown in from the inner harbor—cans and sodden wads of paper, a single license plate tossed up by the tree line and washed beige and numberless by the sun. The trees were mostly pine and maple, thin and haggard, and Teddy could see some buildings through the gaps, sitting at the top of the rise.

Dolores, who’d enjoyed sunbathing, probably would have loved this place, but Teddy could feel only the constant sweep of the ocean breeze, a warning from the sea that it could pounce at will, suck you down to its floor.

The orderlies came back down the dock with the mail and the medical cases and loaded them onto handcarts, and McPherson signed for the items on a clipboard and handed the clipboard back to one of the ferry guards and the guard said, “We’ll be taking off, then.”

McPherson blinked in the sun.

“The storm,” the guard said. “No one seems to know what it’s going to do.”

McPherson nodded.

“We’ll contact the station when we need a pickup,” Teddy said.

The guard nodded. “The storm,” he said again.

“Sure, sure,” Chuck said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

McPherson led them up a path that rose gently through the stand of trees. When they’d cleared the trees, they reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin, and Teddy could see a house off to both his right and his left. The one to the left was the simpler of the two, a maroon mansarded Victorian with black trim, small windows that gave the appearance of sentinels. The one to the right was a Tudor that commanded its small rise like a castle.

They continued on, climbing a slope that was steep and wild with sea grass before the land greened and softened around them, leveling out up top as the grass grew shorter, gave way to a more traditional lawn that spread back for several hundred yards before coming to a stop at a wall of orange brick that seemed to curve away the length of the island. It was ten feet tall and topped with a single strip of wire, and something about the sight of the wire got to Teddy. He felt a sudden pity for all those people on the other side of the wall who recognized that thin wire for what it was, realized just how badly the world wanted to keep them in. Teddy saw several men in dark blue uniforms just outside the wall, heads down as they peered at the ground.

Chuck said, “Correctional guards at a mental institution. Weird sight, if you don’t mind me saying, Mr. McPherson.”

“This is a maximum security institution,” McPherson said. “We operate under dual charters—one from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, the other from the Federal Department of Prisons.”

“I understand that,” Chuck said. “I’ve always wondered, though—you guys have much to talk about around the dinner table?”

McPherson smiled and gave a tiny shake of his head.

Teddy saw a man with black hair who wore the same uniform as the rest of the guards, but his was accented by yellow epaulets and a standing collar, and his badge was gold. He was the only one who walked with his head held up, one hand pressed behind his back as he strode among the men, and the stride reminded Teddy of full colonels he’d met in the war, men for whom command was a necessary burden not simply of the military but of God. He carried a small black book pressed to his rib cage, and he nodded in their direction and then walked down the slope from which they’d come, his black hair stiff in the breeze.

“The warden,” McPherson said. “You’ll meet later.”

Teddy nodded, wondering why they didn’t meet now, and the warden disappeared on the other side of the rise.

One of the orderlies used a key to open the gate in the center of the wall, and the gate swung wide and the orderlies and their carts went in as two guards approached McPherson and came to a stop on either side of him.

McPherson straightened to his full height, all business now, and said, “I’ve got to give you guys the basic lay of the land.”

“Sure.”

“You gentlemen will be accorded all the courtesies we have to offer, all the help we can give. During your stay, however short that may be, you will obey protocol. Is that understood?”

Teddy nodded and Chuck said, “Absolutely.”

McPherson fixed his eyes on a point just above their heads. “Dr. Cawley will explain the finer points of protocol to you, I’m sure, but I have to stress the following: unmonitored contact with patients of this institution is forbidden. Is that understood?”

Teddy almost said, Yes, sir, as if he were back in basic, but he stopped short with a simple “Yes.”

“Ward A of this institution is the building behind me to my right, the male ward. Ward B, the female ward, is to my left. Ward C is beyond those bluffs directly behind this compound and the staff quarters, housed in what was once Fort Walton. Admittance to Ward C is forbidden without the written consent and physical presence of both the warden and Dr. Cawley. Understood?”

Another set of nods.

McPherson held out one massive palm, as if in supplication to the sun. “You are hereby requested to surrender your firearms.”

Chuck looked at Teddy. Teddy shook his head.

Teddy said, “Mr. McPherson, we are duly appointed federal marshals. We are required by government order to carry our firearms at all times.”

McPherson’s voice hit the air like steel cable. “Executive Order three-nine-one of the Federal Code of Penitentiaries and Institutions for the Criminally Insane states that the peace officer’s requirement to bear arms is superseded only by the direct order of his immediate superiors or that of persons entrusted with the care and protection of penal or mental health facilities. Gentlemen, you find yourself under the aegis of that exception. You will not be allowed to pass through this gate with your firearms.”

Teddy looked at Chuck. Chuck tilted his head at McPherson’s extended palm and shrugged.

Teddy said, “We’d like our exceptions noted for the record.”

McPherson said, “Guard, please note the exceptions of Marshals Daniels and Aule.”

“Noted, sir.”

“Gentlemen,” McPherson said.

The guard on McPherson’s right opened a small leather pouch.

Teddy pulled back his overcoat and removed the service revolver from his holster. He snapped the cylinder open with a flick of his wrist and then placed the gun in McPherson’s hand. McPherson handed it off to the guard, and the guard placed it in his leather pouch and McPherson held out his hand again.

Chuck was a little slower with his weapon, fumbling with the holster snap, but McPherson showed no impatience, just waited until Chuck placed the gun awkwardly in his hand.

McPherson handed the gun to the guard, and the guard added it to the pouch and stepped through the gate.

“Your weapons will be checked into the property room directly outside the warden’s office,” McPherson said softly, his words rustling like leaves, “which is in the main hospital building in the center of the compound. You will pick them back up on the day of your departure.” McPherson’s loose, cowboy grin suddenly returned. “Well, that about does it for the official stuff for now. I don’t know about y’all, but I am glad to be done with it. What do you say we go see Dr. Cawley?”

And he turned and led the way through the gate, and the gate was closed behind them.

Inside the wall, the lawn swept away from either side of a main path made from the same brick as the wall. Gardeners with manacled ankles tended to the grass and trees and flower beds and even an array of rosebushes that grew along the foundation of the hospital. The gardeners were flanked by orderlies, and Teddy saw other patients in manacles walking the grounds with odd, ducklike steps. Most were men, a few were women.

“When the first clinicians came here,” McPherson said, “this was all sea grass and scrub. You should see the pictures. But now…”

To the right and left of the hospital stood two identical redbrick colonials with the trim painted bright white, their windows barred, and the panes yellowed by salt and sea wash. The hospital itself was charcoal-colored, its brick rubbed smooth by the sea, and it rose six stories until the dormer windows up top stared down at them.

McPherson said, “Built as the battalion HQ just before the Civil War. They’d had some designs, apparently, to make this a training facility. Then when war seemed imminent, they concentrated on the fort, and then later on transforming this into a POW camp.”

Teddy noticed the tower he’d seen from the ferry. The tip of it peeked just above the tree line on the far side of the island.

“What’s the tower?”

“An old lighthouse,” McPherson said. “Hasn’t been used as such since the early 1800s. The Union army posted lookout sentries there, or so I’ve heard, but now it’s a treatment facility.”

“For patients?”

He shook his head. “Sewage. You wouldn’t believe what ends up in these waters. Looks pretty from the ferry, but every piece of trash in just about every river in this state floats down into the inner harbor, out through the midharbor, and eventually reaches us.”

“Fascinating,” Chuck said and lit a cigarette, took it from his mouth to suppress a soft yawn as he blinked in the sun.

“Beyond the wall, that way"—he pointed past Ward B—"is the original commander’s quarters. You probably saw it on the walk up. Cost a fortune to build at the time, and the commander was relieved of his duties when Uncle Sam got the bill. You should see the place.”

“Who lives there now?” Teddy said.

“Dr. Cawley,” McPherson said. “None of this would exist if it weren’t for Dr. Cawley. And the warden. They created something really unique here.”

They’d looped around the back of the compound, met more manacled gardeners and orderlies, many hoeing a dark loam against the rear wall. One of the gardeners, a middle-aged woman with wispy wheat hair gone almost bald on top, stared at Teddy as he passed, and then raised a single finger to her lips. Teddy noticed a dark red scar, thick as licorice, that ran across her throat. She smiled, finger still held to her lips, and then shook her head very slowly at him.

“Cawley’s a legend in his field,” McPherson was saying as they passed back around toward the front of the hospital. “Top of his class at both Johns Hopkins and Harvard, published his first paper on delusional pathologies at the age of twenty. Has been consulted numerous times by Scotland Yard, MI5, and the OSS.”

“Why?” Teddy said.

“Why?”

Teddy nodded. It seemed a reasonable question.

“Well…” McPherson seemed at a loss.

“The OSS,” Teddy said. “Try them for starters. Why would they consult a psychiatrist?”

“War work,” McPherson said.

“Right,” Teddy said slowly. “What kind, though?”

“The classified kind,” McPherson said. “Or so I’d assume.”

“How classified can it be,” Chuck said, one bemused eye catching Teddy’s, “if we’re talking about it?”

McPherson paused in front of the hospital, one foot on the first step. He seemed baffled. He looked off for a moment at the curve of orange wall and then said, “Well, I guess you can ask him. He should be out of his meeting by now.”

They went up the stairs and in through a marble foyer, the ceiling arching into a coffered dome above them. A gate buzzed open as they approached it, and they passed on into a large anteroom where an orderly sat at a desk to their right and another across from him to their left and beyond lay a long corridor behind the confines of another gate. They produced their badges again to the orderly by the upper staircase and McPherson signed their three names to a clipboard as the orderly checked their badges and IDs and handed them back. Behind the orderly was a cage, and Teddy could see a man in there wearing a uniform similar to the warden’s, keys hanging from their rings on a wall behind him.

They climbed to the second floor and turned into a corridor that smelled of wood soap, the oak floor gleaming underfoot and bathed in a white light from the large window at the far end.

“Lot of security,” Teddy said.

McPherson said, “We take every precaution.”

Chuck said, “To the thanks of a grateful public, Mr. McPherson, I’m sure.”

“You have to understand,” McPherson said, turning back to Teddy as they walked past several offices, doors all closed and bearing the names of doctors on small silver plates. “There is no facility like this in the United States. We take only the most damaged patients. We take the ones no other facility can manage.”

“Gryce is here, right?” Teddy said.

McPherson nodded. “Vincent Gryce, yes. In Ward C.”

Chuck said to Teddy, “Gryce was the one…?”

Teddy nodded. “Killed all his relatives, scalped them, made himself hats.”

Chuck was nodding fast. “And wore them into town, right?”

“According to the papers.”

They had stopped outside a set of double doors. A brass plate affixed in the center of the right door read CHIEF OF STAFF, DR. J. CAWLEY.

McPherson turned to them, one hand on the knob, and looked at them with an unreadable intensity.

McPherson said, “In a less enlightened age, a patient like Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that caused him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behavior. If they can do that, maybe we can reach a day where that kind of disengagement can be rooted out of society entirely.”

He seemed to be waiting for a response, his hand stiff against the doorknob.

“It’s good to have dreams,” Chuck said. “Don’t you think?”

3

DR. CAWLEY WAS thin to the point of emaciation. Not quite the swimming bones and cartilage Teddy had seen at Dachau, but definitely in need of several good meals. His small dark eyes sat far back in their sockets, and the shadows that leaked from them bled across the rest of his face. His cheeks were so sunken they appeared collapsed, and the flesh around them was pitted with aged acne. His lips and nose were as thin as the rest of him, and his chin appeared squared off to the point of nonexistence. What remained of his hair was as dark as his eyes and the shadows underneath.

He had an explosive smile, however, bright and bulging with a confidence that lightened his irises, and he used it now as he came around the desk to greet them, his hand outstretched.

“Marshal Daniels and Marshal Aule,” he said, “glad you could come so quickly.”

His hand was dry and statue smooth in Teddy’s, and his grip was a shocker, squeezing the bones in Teddy’s hand until Teddy could feel the press of it straight up his forearm. Cawley’s eyes glittered for a moment, as if to say, Didn’t expect that, did you? and then he moved on to Chuck.

He shook Chuck’s hand with a “Pleased to meet you, sir,” and then the smile shot off his face and he said to McPherson, “That’ll be all for now, Deputy Warden. Thank you.”

McPherson said, “Yes, sir. A pleasure, gentlemen,” and backed out of the room.

Cawley’s smile returned, but it was a more viscous version, and it reminded Teddy of the film that formed over soup.

“He’s a good man, McPherson. Eager.”

“For?” Teddy said, taking a seat in front of the desk.

Cawley’s smile morphed again, curling up one side of his face and freezing there for a moment. “I’m sorry?”

“He’s eager,” Teddy said. “But for what?”

Cawley sat behind the teak desk, spread his arms. “For the work. A moral fusion between law and order and clinical care. Just half a century ago, even less in some cases, the thinking on the kind of patients we deal with here was that they should, at best, be shackled and left in their own filth and waste. They were systematically beaten, as if that could drive the psychosis out. We demonized them. We tortured them. Spread them on racks, yes. Drove screws into their brains. Even drowned them on occasion.”

“And now?” Chuck said.

“Now we treat them. Morally. We try to heal, to cure. And if that fails, we at least provide them with a measure of calm in their lives.”

“And their victims?” Teddy said.

Cawley raised his eyebrows, waiting.

“These are all violent offenders,” Teddy said. “Right?”

Cawley nodded. “Quite violent, actually.”

“So they’ve hurt people,” Teddy said. “Murdered them in many cases.”

“Oh, in most.”

“So why does their sense of calm matter in relation to their victims’?”

Cawley said, “Because my job is to treat them, not their victims. I can’t help their victims. It’s the nature of any life’s work that it have limits. That’s mine. I can only concern myself with my patients.” He smiled. “Did the senator explain the situation?”

Teddy and Chuck shot each other glances as they sat.

Teddy said, “We don’t know anything about a senator, Doctor. We were assigned by the state field office.”

Cawley propped his elbows on a green desk blotter and clasped his hands together, placed his chin on top of them, and stared at them over the rim of his glasses.

“My mistake, then. So what have you been told?”

“We know a female prisoner is missing.” Teddy placed his notebook on his knee, flipped the pages. “A Rachel Solando.”

“Patient.” Cawley gave them a dead smile.

“Patient,” Teddy said. “I apologize. We understand she escaped within the last twenty-four hours.”

Cawley’s nod was a small tilt of his chin and hands. “Last night. Sometime between ten and midnight.”

“And she still hasn’t been found,” Chuck said.

“Correct, Marshal…” He held up an apologetic hand.

“Aule,” Chuck said.

Cawley’s face narrowed over his hands and Teddy noticed drops of water spit against the window behind him. He couldn’t tell whether they were from the sky or the sea.

“And your first name is Charles?” Cawley said.

“Yeah,” Chuck said.

“I’d take you for a Charles,” Cawley said, “but not necessarily an Aule.”

“That’s fortunate, I guess.”

“How so?”

“We don’t choose our names,” Chuck said. “So it’s nice when someone thinks that one of them, at least, fits.”

“Who chose yours?” Cawley said.

“My parents.”

“Your surname.”

Chuck shrugged. “Who’s to tell? We’d have to go back twenty generations.”

“Or one.”

Chuck leaned forward in his chair. “Excuse me?”

“You’re Greek,” Cawley said. “Or Armenian. Which?”

“Armenian.”

“So Aule was…”

“Anasmajian.”

Cawley turned his slim gaze on Teddy. “And yourself?”

“Daniels?” Teddy said. “Tenth-generation Irish.” He gave Cawley a small grin. “And, yeah, I can trace it back, Doctor.”

“But your given first name? Theodore?”

“Edward.”

Cawley leaned his chair back, his hands falling free of his chin. He tapped a letter opener against the desk edge, the sound as soft and persistent as snow falling on a roof.

“My wife,” he said, “is named Margaret. Yet no one ever calls her that except me. Some of her oldest friends call her Margo, which makes a certain amount of sense, but everyone else calls her Peggy. I’ve never understood that.”

“What?”

“How you get Peggy from Margaret. And yet it’s quite common. Or how you get Teddy from Edward. There’s no p in Margaret and no t in Edward.”

Teddy shrugged. “Your first name?”

“John.”

“Anyone ever call you Jack?”

He shook his head. “Most people just call me Doctor.”

The water spit lightly against the window, and Cawley seemed to review their conversation in his head, his eyes gone shiny and distant, and then Chuck said, “Is Miss Solando considered dangerous?”

“All our patients have shown a proclivity for violence,” Cawley said. “It’s why they’re here. Men and women. Rachel Solando was a war widow. She drowned her three children in the lake behind her house. Took them out there one by one and held their heads under until they died. Then she brought them back into the house and arranged them around the kitchen table and ate a meal there before a neighbor dropped by.”

“She kill the neighbor?” Chuck asked.

Cawley’s eyebrows rose, and he gave a small sigh. “No. Invited him to sit and have breakfast with them. He declined, naturally, and called the police. Rachel still believes the children are alive, waiting for her. It might explain why she’s tried to escape.”

“To return home,” Teddy said.

Cawley nodded.

“And where’s that?” Chuck asked.

“A small town in the Berkshires. Roughly a hundred fifty miles from here.” With a tilt of his head, Cawley indicated the window behind him. “To swim that way, you don’t reach land for eleven miles. To swim north, you don’t reach land until Newfoundland.”

Teddy said, “And you’ve searched the grounds.”

“Yes.”

“Pretty thoroughly?”

Cawley took a few seconds to answer, played with a silver bust of a horse on the corner of his desk. “The warden and his men and a detail of orderlies spent the night and a good part of the morning scouring the island and every building in the institution. Not a trace. What’s even more disturbing is that we can’t tell how she got out of her room. It was locked from the outside and its sole window was barred. We’ve found no indication that the locks were tampered with.” He took his eyes off the horse and glanced at Teddy and Chuck. “It’s as if she evaporated straight through the walls.”

Teddy jotted “evaporated” in his notebook. “And you are sure that she was in that room at lights-out.”

“Positive.”

“How so?”

Cawley moved his hand back from the horse and pressed the call button on his intercom. “Nurse Marino?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Please tell Mr. Ganton to come in.”

“Right away, Doctor.”

There was a small table near the window with a pitcher of water and four glasses on top. Cawley went to it and filled three of the glasses. He placed one in front of Teddy and one in front of Chuck, took his own back behind the desk with him.

Teddy said, “You wouldn’t have some aspirin around here, would you?”

Cawley gave him a small smile. “I think we could scare some up.” He rummaged in his desk drawer, came out with a bottle of Bayer. “Two or three?”

“Three would be nice.” Teddy could feel the ache behind his eye begin to pulse.

Cawley handed them across the desk and Teddy tossed them in his mouth, chased them with the water.

“Prone to headaches, Marshal?”

Teddy said, “Prone to seasickness, unfortunately.”

Cawley nodded. “Ah. Dehydrated.”

Teddy nodded and Cawley opened a walnut cigarette box, held it open to Teddy and Chuck. Teddy took one. Chuck shook his head and produced his own pack, and all three of them lit up as Cawley lifted the window open behind him.

He sat back down and handed a photograph across the desk—a young woman, beautiful, her face blemished by dark rings under the eyes, rings as dark as her black hair. The eyes themselves were too wide, as if something hot were prodding them from inside her head. Whatever she saw beyond that camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably—wasn’t fit to be seen.

There was something uncomfortably familiar about her, and then Teddy made the connection—a young boy he’d seen in the camps who wouldn’t eat the food they gave him. He sat against a wall in the April sun with that same look in his eyes until his eyelids closed and eventually they added him to the pile at the train station.

Chuck unleashed a low whistle. “My God.”

Cawley took a drag on his cigarette. “Are you reacting to her apparent beauty or her apparent madness?”

“Both,” Chuck said.

Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, “No, no, no. It’s okay. Sssh.” You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.

The office door opened and a tall Negro with thick flecks of gray in his hair entered wearing the white-on-white uniform of an orderly.

“Mr. Ganton,” Cawley said, “these are the gentlemen I told you about—Marshals Aule and Daniels.”

Teddy and Chuck stood and shook Ganton’s hand, Teddy getting a strong whiff of fear from the man, as if he wasn’t quite comfortable shaking hands with the law, maybe had a pending warrant or two against him back in the world.

“Mr. Ganton has been with us for seventeen years. He’s the head orderly here. It was Mr. Ganton who escorted Rachel to her room last night. Mr. Ganton?”

Ganton crossed his ankles, placed his hands on his knees, and hunched forward a bit, his eyes on his shoes. “There was group at nine o’clock. Then—”

Cawley said, “That’s a group therapy session led by Dr. Sheehan and Nurse Marino.”

Ganton waited until he was sure Cawley had finished before he began again. “So, yeah. They was in group, and it ended round ten. I escorted Miss Rachel up to her room. She went inside. I locked up from the outside. We do checks every two hours during lights-out. I go back at midnight. I look in, and her bed’s empty. I figure maybe she’s on the floor. They do that a lot, the patients, sleep on the floor. I open up—”

Cawley again: “Using your keys, correct, Mr. Ganton?”

Ganton nodded at Cawley, looked back at his knees. “I use my keys, yeah, ’cause the door’s locked. I go in. Miss Rachel ain’t nowhere to be found. I shut the door and check the window and the bars. They locked tight too.” He shrugged. “I call the warden.” He looked up at Cawley, and Cawley gave him a soft, paternal nod.

“Any questions, gentlemen?”

Chuck shook his head.

Teddy looked up from his notebook. “Mr. Ganton, you said you entered the room and ascertained that the patient wasn’t there. What did this entail?”

“Sir?”

Teddy said, “Is there a closet? Space beneath the bed where she could hide?”

“Both.”

“And you checked those places.”

“Yes, sir.”

“With the door still open.”

“Sir?”

“You said that you entered the room and looked around and couldn’t find the patient. Then you shut the door behind you.”

“No, I…Well…”

Teddy waited, took another hit off the cigarette Cawley had given him. It was smooth, richer than his Chesterfields, and the smell of the smoke was different too, almost sweet.

“It took all of five seconds, sir,” Ganton said. “No door on the closet. I look there, I look under the bed, and I shut the door. No place she could have been hiding. Room’s small.”

“Against the wall, though?” Teddy said. “To the right or the left of the door?”

“Nah.” Ganton shook his head, and for the first time Teddy thought he glimpsed anger, a sense of primal resentment behind the downcast eyes and the “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs.”

“It’s unlikely,” Cawley said to Teddy. “I see your point, Marshal, but once you see the room, you’ll understand that Mr. Ganton would have been hard-pressed to miss the patient if she were standing anywhere within its four walls.”

“That’s right,” Ganton said, staring openly at Teddy now, and Teddy could see the man carried a furious pride in his work ethic that Teddy, by questioning, had managed to insult.

“Thank you, Mr. Ganton,” Cawley said. “That’ll be all for now.”

Ganton rose, his eyes lingering on Teddy for another few seconds, and then he said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and left the room.

They were quiet for a minute, finishing their cigarettes and then stubbing them out in the ashtrays before Chuck said, “I think we should see the room now, Doctor.”

“Of course,” Cawley said and came out from behind his desk, a ring of keys in his hand the size of a hubcap. “Follow me.”

IT WAS A tiny room with the door opening inward and to the right, the door cut from steel and the hinges well greased so that it swung hard against the wall on the right. To their left was a short length of wall and then a small wooden closet with a few smocks and drawstring pants hanging on plastic hangers.

“There goes that theory,” Teddy admitted.

Cawley nodded. “There would have been no place for her to hide from anyone standing in this doorway.”

“Well, the ceiling,” Chuck said, and all three of them looked up and even Cawley managed a smile.

Cawley closed the door behind them and Teddy felt the immediate sense of imprisonment in his spine. They might call it a room, but it was a cell. The window hovering behind the slim bed was barred. A small dresser sat against the right wall, and the floor and walls were a white institutional cement. With three of them in the room, there was barely space to move without bumping limbs.

Teddy said, “Who else would have access to the room?”

“At that time of night? Very few would have any reason to be in the ward.”

“Sure,” Teddy said. “But who would have access?”

“The orderlies, of course.”

“Doctors?” Chuck said.

“Well, nurses,” Cawley said.

“Doctors don’t have keys for this room?” Teddy asked.

“They do,” Cawley said with just a hint of annoyance. “But by ten o’clock, the doctors have signed out for the night.”

“And turned in their keys?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s a record of that?” Teddy said.

“I don’t follow.”

Chuck said, “They have to sign in and out for the keys, Doctor—that’s what we’re wondering.”

“Of course.”

“And we could check last night’s sign-in log,” Teddy said.

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

“And that would be kept in the cage we saw on the first floor,” Chuck said. “The one with the guard inside of it and the wall of keys behind him?”

Cawley gave him a quick nod.

“And the personnel files,” Teddy said, “of the medical staff and the orderlies and the guards. We’ll need access to those.”

Cawley peered at him as if Teddy’s face were sprouting blackflies. “Why?”

“A woman disappears from a locked room, Doctor? She escapes onto a tiny island and no one can find her? I have to at least consider that she had help.”

“We’ll see,” Cawley said.

“We’ll see?”

“Yes, Marshal. I’ll have to speak with the warden and some of the other staff. We’ll make a determination of your request based on—”

“Doctor,” Teddy said, “it wasn’t a request. We’re here by order of the government. This is a federal facility from which a dangerous prisoner—”

“Patient.”

“A dangerous patient,” Teddy said, keeping his voice as even as possible, “has escaped. If you refuse to aid two U.S. marshals, Doctor, in the apprehension of that patient you are, unfortunately—Chuck?”

Chuck said, “Obstructing justice, Doctor.”

Cawley looked at Chuck as if he’d been expecting grief from Teddy, but Chuck hadn’t been on his radar.

“Yes, well,” he said, his voice stripped of life, “all I can say is that I will do all that I can to accommodate your request.”

Teddy and Chuck exchanged a small glance, went back to looking at the bare room. Cawley probably wasn’t used to questions that continued after he’d shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.

Teddy looked in the tiny closet, saw three white smocks, two pairs of white shoes. “How many shoes are the patients given?”

“Two.”

“She left this room barefoot?”

“Yes.” He fixed the tie under his lab coat and then pointed at a large sheet of paper lying on the bed. “We found that behind the dresser. We don’t know what it means. We were hoping someone could tell us.”

Teddy lifted the sheet of paper, turned it over to see that the other side was a hospital eye chart, the letters shrinking and descending in a pyramid. He turned it back over and held it up for Chuck:

Teddy didn’t even like holding it. The edges of the paper tingled against his fingers.

Chuck said, “Fuck if I know.”

Cawley stepped up beside them. “Quite similar to our clinical conclusion.”

“We are three,” Teddy said.

Chuck peered at the paper. “Huh?”

“We could be the three,” Teddy said. “The three of us right now, standing in this room.”

Chuck shook his head. “How’s she going to predict that?”

Teddy shrugged. “It’s a reach.”

“Yeah.”

Cawley said, “It is, and yet Rachel is quite brilliant in her games. Her delusions—particularly the one that allows her to believe her three children are still alive—are conceived on a very delicate but intricate architecture. To sustain the structure, she employs an elaborate narrative thread to her life that is completely fictitious.”

Chuck turned his head slowly, looked at Cawley. “I’d need a degree to understand that, Doctor.”

Cawley chuckled. “Think of the lies you tell your parents as a child. How elaborate they are. Instead of keeping them simple to explain why you missed school or forgot your chores, you embellish, you make them fantastical. Yes?”

Chuck thought about it and nodded.

Teddy said, “Sure. Criminals do the same thing.”

“Exactly. The idea is to obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth. Now consider those lies being told to yourself. That’s what Rachel does. In four years, she never so much as acknowledged that she was in an institution. As far as she was concerned, she was back home in the Berkshires in her house, and we were deliverymen, milkmen, postal workers, just passing by. Whatever the reality, she used sheer force of will to make her illusions stronger.”

“But how does the truth never get through?” Teddy said. “I mean, she’s in a mental institution. How does she not notice that from time to time?”

“Ah,” Cawley said, “now we’re getting into the true horrible beauty of the full-blown schizophrenic’s paranoid structure. If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying…”

“Then any truth they say,” Chuck said, “must be a lie.”

Cawley cocked his thumb and pointed his finger at him like a gun. “You’re getting it.”

Teddy said, “And that somehow plays into these numbers?”

“It must. They have to represent something. With Rachel, no thought was idle or ancillary. She had to keep the structure in her head from collapsing, and to do that, she had to be thinking always. This"—he tapped the eye chart—"is the structure on paper. This, I sincerely believe, will tell us where she’s gone.”

For just a moment, Teddy thought it was speaking to him, becoming clearer. It was the first two numbers, he was certain—the “47” and the “80"—he could feel something about them scratching at his brain like the melody of a song he was trying to remember while the radio played a completely different tune. The “47” was the easiest clue. It was right in front of him. It was so simple. It was…

And then any possible bridges of logic collapsed, and Teddy felt his mind go white, and he knew it was in flight again—the clue, the connection, the bridge—and he placed the page down on the bed again.

“Insane,” Chuck said.

“What’s that?” Cawley said.

“Where she’s gone,” Chuck said. “In my opinion.”

“Well, certainly,” Cawley said. “I think we can take that as a given.”

4

THEY STOOD OUTSIDE the room. The corridor broke off from a staircase in the center. Rachel’s door was to the left of the stairs, halfway down on the right-hand side.

“This is the only way off this floor?” Teddy said.

Cawley nodded.

“No roof access?” Chuck said.

Cawley shook his head. “The only way up is from the fire escape. You’ll see it on the south side of the building. It has a gate, and the gate is always locked. Staff has keys, of course, but no patients. To get to the roof, she’d have had to go downstairs, outside, use a key, and climb back up top.”

“But the roof was checked?”

Another nod. “As were all the rooms in the ward. Immediately. As soon as she was discovered missing.”

Teddy pointed at the orderly who sat by a small card table in front of the stairs. “Someone’s there twenty-four hours?”

“Yes.”

“So, someone was there last night.”

“Orderly Ganton, actually.”

They walked to the staircase and Chuck said, “So…,” and raised his eyebrows at Teddy.

“So,” Teddy agreed.

“So,” Chuck said, “Miss Solando gets out of her locked room into this corridor, goes down these steps.” They went down the steps themselves and Chuck jerked a thumb at the orderly waiting for them by the second-floor landing. “She gets past another orderly here, we don’t know how, makes herself invisible or something, goes down this next flight, and comes out into…”

They turned down the last flight and were facing a large open room with several couches pressed against the wall, a large folding table in the center with folding chairs, bay windows saturating the space with white light.

“The main living area,” Cawley said. “Where most of the patients spend their evenings. Group therapy was held here last night. You’ll see the nurses’ station is just through that portico there. After lights-out, the orderlies congregate here. They’re supposed to be mopping up, cleaning windows and such, but more often than not, we catch them here, playing cards.”

“And last night?”

“According to those who were on duty, the card game was in full swing. Seven men, sitting right at the base of the stairs, playing stud poker.”

Chuck put his hands on his hips, let out a long breath through his mouth. “She does the invisible thing again, apparently, moves either right or left.”

“Right would bring her through the dining area, then into the kitchen, and beyond that is a door that is caged and set with an alarm at nine o’clock at night, once the kitchen staff has left. To the left is the nurses’ station and the staff lounge. No door to the outside. The only ways out are that door on the other side of the living area, or back down the corridor behind the staircase. Both had men at their stations last night.” Cawley glanced at his watch. “Gentlemen, I have a meeting. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask any of the staff or visit McPherson. He’s handled the search thus far. He should have all the information you need. Staff eats at six sharp in the mess hall in the basement of the orderlies’ dormitory. After that, we’ll assemble here in the staff lounge and you can speak to anyone who was working during last night’s incident.”

He hurried out the front door, and they watched him until he turned left and disappeared.

Teddy said, “Is there anything about this that doesn’t feel like an inside job?”

“I’m kind of fond of my invisible theory. She could have the formula in a bottle. You following me? She could be watching us right now, Teddy.” Chuck looked over his shoulder quick, then back at Teddy. “Something to think about.”

IN THE AFTERNOON they joined the search party and moved inland as the breeze grew swollen, warmer. So much of the island was overgrown, clogged with weeds and thick fields of tall grass threaded with grasping tendrils of ancient oak and green vines covered in thorns. In most places, human passage was impossible even with the machetes some of the guards carried. Rachel Solando wouldn’t have had a machete, and even if she had, it seemed the nature of the island to push all comers back to the coast.

The search struck Teddy as desultory, as if no one but he and Chuck truly had his heart in it. The men wound their way along the inner ring above the shoreline with downcast eyes and sullen steps. At one point they rounded a bend on a shelf of black rocks and faced a cliff that towered out past them into the sea. To their left, beyond a stand of moss and thorns and red berries curled into an overgrown mass, lay a small glade that dropped away at the base of some low hills. The hills rose steadily, each one higher than the last, until they gave way to the jagged cliff, and Teddy could see cuts in the hills and oblong holes in the side of the cliff.

“Caves?” he said to McPherson.

He nodded. “A few of them.”

“You check ’em?”

McPherson sighed and cupped a match against the wind to light a thin cigar. “She had two pairs of shoes, Marshal. Both found back in her room. How’s she going to get through what we just came through, cross over these rocks, and scale that cliff?”

Teddy pointed off past the glade to the lowest of the hills. “She takes the long way, works her way up from the west?”

McPherson placed his own finger beside Teddy’s. “See where the glade drops off? That’s marshland right there at the tip of your finger. The base of those hills is covered in poison ivy, live oak, sumac, about a thousand different plants, and all of ’em with thorns the size of my dick.”

“That mean they’re big or little?” This from Chuck, a few steps ahead of them, looking back over his shoulder.

McPherson smiled. “Might be somewhere in between.”

Chuck nodded.

“All I’m saying, gentlemen? She would’ve had no choice but to stick hard to the shoreline, and halfway around in either direction, she would’ve run out of beach.” He pointed at the cliff. “Met one of those.”

AN HOUR LATER, on the other side of the island, they met the fence line. Beyond it lay the old fort and the lighthouse, and Teddy could see that the lighthouse had its own fence, penning it in, two guards at the gate, rifles held to their chests.

“Septic processing?” he said.

McPherson nodded.

Teddy looked at Chuck. Chuck raised his eyebrows.

“Septic processing?” Teddy said again.

NO ONE CAME to their table at dinner. They sat alone, damp from the careless spits of rain, that warm breeze that had begun to carry the ocean with it. Outside, the island had begun to rattle in the dark, the breeze turning into a wind.

“A locked room,” Chuck said.

“Barefoot,” Teddy said.

“Past three interior checkpoints.”

“A roomful of orderlies.”

“Barefoot,” Chuck agreed.

Teddy stirred his food, some kind of shepherd’s pie, the meat stringy. “Over a wall with electric security wire.”

“Or through a manned gate.”

“Out into that.” The wind shaking the building, shaking the dark.

“Barefoot.”

“No one sees her.”

Chuck chewed his food, took a sip of coffee. “Someone dies on this island—it’s got to happen, right?—where do they go?”

“Buried.”

Chuck nodded. “You see a cemetery today?”

Teddy shook his head. “Probably fenced in somewhere.”

“Like the septic plant. Sure.” Chuck pushed his tray away, sat back. “Who we speaking to after this?”

“The staff.”

“You think they’ll be helpful?”

“Don’t you?”

Chuck grinned. He lit a cigarette, his eyes on Teddy, his grin turning into a soft laugh, the smoke chugging out in rhythm with it.

TEDDY STOOD IN the center of the room, the staff in a circle around him. He rested his hands on the top of a metal chair, Chuck slouched against a beam beside him, hands in his pockets.

“I assume everyone knows why we’re all here,” Teddy said. “You had an escape last night. Far as we can tell, the patient vanished. We have no evidence that would allow us to believe the patient left this institution without help. Deputy Warden McPherson, would you agree?”

“Yup. I’d say that’s a reasonable assessment at this time.”

Teddy was about to speak again when Cawley, sitting in a chair beside the nurse, said, “Could you gentleman introduce yourselves? Some of my staff have not made your acquaintance.”

Teddy straightened to his full height. “U.S. Marshal Edward Daniels. This is my partner, U.S. Marshal Charles Aule.”

Chuck gave a small wave to the group, put his hand back in his pocket.

Teddy said, “Deputy Warden, you and your men searched the grounds.”

“Sure did.”

“And you found?”

McPherson stretched in his chair. “We found no evidence to suggest a woman in flight. No shreds of torn clothing, no footprints, no bent vegetation. The current was strong last night, the tide pushing in. A swim would have been out of the question.”

“But she could have tried.” This from the nurse, Kerry Marino, a slim woman with a bundle of red hair that she’d loosed from the pile atop her head and unclenched from another clip just above her vertebrae as soon as she’d walked into the room. Her cap sat in her lap, and she finger-combed her hair in a lazy way that suggested weariness but had every guy in the room sneaking glances at her, the way that weary finger-combing suggested the need for a bed.

McPherson said, “What was that?”

Marino’s fingers stopped moving through her hair and she dropped them to her lap.

“How do we know she didn’t try to swim, end up drowning instead?”

“She would have washed ashore by now.” Cawley yawned into his fist. “That tide?”

Marino held up a hand as if to say, Oh, excuse me, boys, and said, “Just thought I’d bring it up.”

“And we appreciate it,” Cawley said. “Marshal, ask your questions, please. It’s been a long day.”

Teddy glanced at Chuck and Chuck gave him a small tilt of the eyes back. A missing woman with a history of violence at large on a small island and everyone seemed to just want to get to bed.

Teddy said, “Mr. Ganton has already told us he checked on Miss Solando at midnight and discovered her missing. The locks to the window grate in her room and the door were not tampered with. Between ten and twelve last night, Mr. Ganton, was there ever a point where you didn’t have an eye’s view of the third-floor corridor?”

Several heads turned to look at Ganton, and Teddy was confused to see a kind of amused light in some of the faces, as if Teddy were the third-grade teacher who’d asked a question of the heppest kid in class.

Ganton spoke to his own feet. “Only time my eyes weren’t on that corridor was when I entered her room, found her gone.”

“That would have taken thirty seconds.”

“More like fifteen.” He turned his eyes to Teddy. “It’s a small room.”

“But otherwise?”

“Otherwise, everyone was locked down by ten. She was the last one in her room. I take up my seat on the landing, I don’t see no one for two hours.”

“And you never left your post?”

“No, sir.”

“Get a cup of coffee, nothing?”

Ganton shook his head.

“All right, people,” Chuck said, coming off the pole. “I have to make a huge leap here. I have to say, for the sake of argument only and meaning no disrespect to Mr. Ganton here, let’s play with the idea that somehow Miss Solando crawled across the ceiling or something.”

Several members of the group chuckled.

“And she gets to the staircase leading down to the second floor. Who’s she gotta pass?”

A milk-white orderly with orange hair raised his hand.

“And your name?” Teddy said.

“Glen. Glen Miga.”

“Okay, Glen. Were you at your post all night?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Teddy said, “Glen.”

“Yeah?” He looked up from the hangnail he’d been picking.

“The truth.”

Glen looked over at Cawley, then back at Teddy. “Yeah, I was.”

“Glen,” Teddy said, “come on.”

Glen held Teddy’s gaze, his eyes beginning to widen, and then he said, “I went to the bathroom.”

Cawley leaned forward on his knees. “Who stepped in as your relief?”

“It was a quick piss,” Glen said. “A pee, sir. Sorry.”

“How long?” Teddy said.

Glen shrugged. “A minute. Tops.”

“A minute. You’re sure?”

“I’m not a camel.”

“No.”

“I was in and out.”

“You breached protocol,” Cawley said. “Christ.”

“Sir, I know. I—”

“What time was this?” Teddy said.

“Eleven-thirty. Thereabouts.” Glen’s fear of Cawley was turning into hate for Teddy. A few more questions, he’d get hostile.

“Thanks, Glen,” Teddy said and turned it back to Chuck with a tilt of his head.

“At eleven-thirty,” Chuck said, “or thereabouts, was the poker game still in full swing?”

Several heads turned toward one another and then back to Chuck and then one Negro nodded, followed by the rest of the orderlies.

“Who was still sitting in at that point?”

Four Negroes and one white raised their hands.

Chuck zeroed in on the ringleader, the first guy to nod, first one to raise his hand. A round, fleshy guy, his head shaved and shiny under the light.

“Name?”

“Trey, sir. Trey Washington.”

“Trey, you were all sitting where?”

Trey pointed at the floor. “Right about here. Center of the room. Looking right at that staircase. Had an eye on the front door, had one on the back.”

Chuck walked over by him, craned his head to clock the front and back doors, the staircase. “Good position.”

Trey lowered his voice. “Ain’t just about the patients, sir. ’Bout the doctors, some of the nurses who don’t like us. Ain’t supposed to be playing cards. Gotta be able to see who’s coming, grab us a mop right quick.”

Chuck smiled. “Bet you move fast too.”

“You ever seen lightning in August?”

“Yeah.”

“Slow compared to me getting on that mop.”

That broke the group up, Nurse Marino unable to suppress a smile, and Teddy noticing a few of the Negroes sliding their fingers off each other. He knew then that for the duration of their stay, Chuck would play Good Cop. He had the knack with people, as if he’d be comfortable in any cross section of the population, regardless of color or even language. Teddy wondered how the fuck the Seattle office could have let him go, Jap girlfriend or not.

Teddy, on the other hand, was instinctively alpha male. Once men accepted it, as they’d had to pretty quickly in the war, they got along great with him. Until then, though, there’d be tension.

“Okay, okay.” Chuck held up a hand to quiet the laughter, still grinning himself. “So, Trey, you were all at the base of these stairs, playing cards. When did you know something was wrong?”

“When Ike—ah, Mr. Ganton, I mean—he start shouting down, ‘Call the warden. We got us a break.’”

“And what time was that?”

“Twelve-oh-two and thirty-nine seconds.”

Chuck raised his eyebrows. “You a clock?”

“No, sir, but I trained to look at one the first sign of trouble. Anything might be what you call an ‘incident,’ we all going to have to fill out an IR, an ‘incident report.’ First thing you get asked on an IR is the time the incident began. You do enough IRs? Gets to be second nature to look at a clock the first hint of trouble.”

Several of the orderlies were nodding as he spoke, a few “Uh-huh’s” and “That’s right’s” tumbling out of their mouths as if they were at a church revival.

Chuck gave Teddy a look: Well, how about that?

“So twelve-oh-two,” Chuck said.

“And thirty-nine seconds.”

Teddy said to Ganton, “Those extra two minutes past midnight, that would be because you checked a few rooms before you got to Miss Solando’s, right?”

Ganton nodded. “She’s the fifth down that hallway.”

“Warden arrives on scene when?” Teddy said.

Trey said, “Hicksville—he one o’ the guards—he’s first through the front door. Was working the gate, I think. He come through at twelve-oh-six and twenty-two seconds. The warden, he come four minutes after that with six men.”

Teddy turned to Nurse Marino. “You hear all the commotion and you…”

“I lock the nurses’ station. I come out into the rec hall at about the same time Hicksville was coming through the front door.” She shrugged and lit a cigarette, and several other members of the group took it as a cue, lit up their own.

“And nobody could have gotten by you in the nurses’ station.”

She propped her chin on the heel of her palm, stared through a sickle-stream of smoke at him. “Gotten by me to where? The door to Hydrotherapy? You go in there, you’re locked in a cement box with a lot of tubs, a few small pools.”

“That room was checked?”

“It was, Marshal,” McPherson said, sounding tired now.

“Nurse Marino,” Teddy said, “you were part of the group therapy session last night.”

“Yes.”

“Anything unusual occur?”

“Define ‘unusual.’”

“Excuse me?”

“This is a mental institution, Marshal. For the criminally insane. ‘Usual’ isn’t a big part of our day.”

Teddy gave her a nod and a sheepish smile. “Let me rephrase. Anything occur in group last night that was more memorable than, um…?”

“Normal?” she said.

That drew a smile from Cawley, a few stray laughs.

Teddy nodded.

She thought about it for a minute, her cigarette ash growing white and hooked. She noticed it, flicked it off into the ashtray, raised her head. “No. Sorry.”

“And did Miss Solando speak last night?”

“A couple of times, I think, yes.”

“About?”

Marino looked over at Cawley.

He said, “We’re waiving patient confidentiality with the marshals for now.”

She nodded, though Teddy could tell she wasn’t too fond of the concept.

“We were discussing anger management. We’ve had a few instances of inappropriate volatility recently.”

“What kind?”

“Patients screaming at other patients, fighting, that sort of thing. Nothing out of the norm, just a small upsurge in recent weeks that probably had to do with the heat wave more than anything. So last night we discussed appropriate and inappropriate ways to display anxiety or displeasure.”

“Has Miss Solando had any anger issues of late?”

“Rachel? No. Rachel only became agitated when it rained. That was her contribution to group last night. ‘I hear rain. I hear rain. It’s not here, but it’s coming. What can we do about the food?’”

“The food?”

Marino stubbed out her cigarette and nodded. “Rachel hated the food here. She complained constantly.”

“For good reason?” Teddy said.

Marino caught herself before a half smile went full. She dropped her eyes. “One could argue the reason was understandable possibly. We don’t color reasons or motives in terms of good or bad moral suppositions.”

Teddy nodded. “And there was a Dr. Sheehan here last night. He ran group. Is he here?”

No one spoke. Several men stubbed out their cigarettes in the standing ashtrays between chairs.

Eventually, Cawley said, “Dr. Sheehan left on the morning ferry. The one you took on the return trip.”

“Why?”

“He’d been scheduled for a vacation for some time.”

“But we need to talk to him.”

Cawley said, “I have his summation documents in regard to the group session. I have all his notes. He departed the main facility at ten last night, retired to his quarters. In the morning, he left. His vacation had been long overdue and long planned as well. We saw no reason to keep him here.”

Teddy looked to McPherson.

“You approved this?”

McPherson nodded.

“It’s a state of lockdown,” Teddy said. “A patient has escaped. How do you allow anyone to leave during lockdown?”

McPherson said, “We ascertained his whereabouts during the night. We thought it through, couldn’t think of any reason to keep him.”

“He’s a doctor,” Cawley said.

“Jesus,” Teddy said softly. Biggest breach in standard operating procedure he’d ever encountered at any penal institution and everyone was acting like it was no big deal.

“Where’d he go?”

“Excuse me?”

“On vacation,” Teddy said. “Where did he go?”

Cawley looked up at the ceiling, trying to recall. “New York, I believe. The city. It’s where his family is from. Park Avenue.”

“I’ll need a phone number,” Teddy said.

“I don’t see why—”

“Doctor,” Teddy said. “I’ll need a phone number.”

“We’ll get that to you, Marshal.” Cawley kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Anything else?”

“You bet,” Teddy said.

Cawley’s chin came down and he looked across at Teddy.

“I need a phone,” Teddy said.

THE PHONE IN the nurses’ station gave off nothing but a white hiss of air. There were four more in the ward, locked behind glass, and once the glass was opened, the phones produced the same result.

Teddy and Dr. Cawley walked over to the central switchboard on the first floor of the main hospital building. The operator looked up as they came through the door, a set of black headphones looped around his neck.

“Sir,” he said, “we’re down. Even radio communication.”

Cawley said, “It’s not all that bad out.”

The operator shrugged. “I’ll keep trying. It’s not so much what it’s doing here, though. It’s what kinda weather they’re having back on the other side.”

“Keep trying,” Cawley said. “You get it up and running, you get word to me. This man needs to make a pretty important call.”

The operator nodded and turned his back to them, put the headphones back on.

Outside, the air felt like trapped breath.

“What do they do if you don’t check in?” Cawley asked.

“The field office?” Teddy said. “They mark it in their nightly reports. Usually twenty-four hours before they start to worry.”

Cawley nodded. “Maybe this’ll blow over by then.”

“Over?” Teddy said. “It hasn’t even started yet.”

Cawley shrugged and began walking toward the gate. “I’ll be having drinks and maybe a cigar or two at my house. Nine o’clock, if you and your partner feel like dropping by.”

“Oh,” Teddy said. “Can we talk then?”

Cawley stopped, looked back at him. The dark trees on the other side of the wall had begun to sway and whisper.

“We’ve been talking, Marshal.”

CHUCK AND TEDDY walked the dark grounds, feeling the storm in the air swelling hot around them, as if the world were pregnant, distended.

“This is bullshit,” Teddy said.

“Yup.”

“Rotten to the fucking core.”

“I was Baptist, I’d give you an ‘Amen, brother.’”

“Brother?”

“How they talk down there. I did a year in Mississippi.”

“Yeah?”

“Amen, brother.”

Teddy bummed another cigarette off Chuck and lit it.

Chuck said, “You call the field office?”

Teddy shook his head. “Cawley said the switchboard’s down.” He raised his hand. “The storm, you know.”

Chuck spit tobacco off his tongue. “Storm? Where?”

Teddy said, “But you can feel it coming.” He looked at the dark sky. “Though, not to where it’s taking out their central com’.”

“Central com’,” Chuck said. “You leave the army yet or you still waiting for your D papers?”

“Switchboard,” Teddy said, waving his cigarette at it. “Whatever we’re calling it. And their radio too.”

“Their fucking radio?” Chuck’s eyes bloomed wide. “The radio, boss?”

Teddy nodded. “Pretty bleak, yeah. They got us locked down on an island looking for a woman who escaped from a locked room…”

“Past four manned checkpoints.”

“And a room full of attendants playing poker.”

“Scaled a ten-foot brick wall.”

“With electric wire up top.”

“Swam eleven miles—”

“—against an irate current—”

“—to shore. Irate. I like that. Cold too. What’s it, maybe fifty-five degrees in that water?”

“Sixty, tops. Night, though?”

“Back to fifty-five.” Chuck nodded. “Teddy, this whole thing, you know?”

Teddy said, “And the missing Dr. Sheehan.”

Chuck said, “Struck you as odd too, huh? I wasn’t sure. Didn’t seem you tore Cawley’s asshole quite wide enough, boss.”

Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and…

“…if we’re the cover story?” Chuck was saying.

“What?”

“What if we’re the cover story?” Chuck said. “What if we were brought here to help them cross ts and dot is?”

“Clarity, Watson.”

Another smile. “All right, boss, try and keep up.”

“I will, I will.”

“Let’s say a certain doctor has an infatuation with a certain patient.”

“Miss Solando.”

“You saw the picture.”

“She is attractive.”

“Attractive. Teddy, she’s a pinup in a GI’s locker. So she works our boy, Sheehan…You seeing it now?”

Teddy flicked his cigarette into the wind, watching the coals splatter and ignite in the breeze, then streak back past him and Chuck. “And Sheehan gets hooked, decides he can’t live without her.”

“The operating word being live. As a free couple in the real world.”

“So they amscray. Off the island.”

“Could be at a Fats Domino show as we speak.”

Teddy stopped at the far end of the staff dormitories, faced the orange wall. “But why not call in the dogs?”

“Well, they did,” Chuck said. “Protocol. They had to bring in someone, and in the case of an escape from a place like this, they call in us. But if they’re covering up staff involvement, then we’re just here to substantiate their story—that they did everything by the book.”

“Okay,” Teddy said. “But why cover for Sheehan?”

Chuck propped the sole of his shoe against the wall, flexing his knee as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Haven’t thought that through yet.”

“If Sheehan did take her out of here, he greased some palms.”

“Had to.”

“A lot of them.”

“A few attendants, anyway. A guard or two.”

“Someone on the ferry. Maybe more than one.”

“Unless he didn’t leave on the ferry. Could have had his own boat.”

Teddy gave it some thought. “Comes from money. Park Avenue, according to Cawley.”

“So, there you go—his own boat.”

Teddy looked up the wall to the thin wire at the top, the air around them protruding like a bubble pressed against glass.

“Brings up as many questions as it answers,” Teddy said after a bit.

“How so?”

“Why those codes in Rachel Solando’s room?”

“Well, she is crazy.”

“Why show it to us, though? I mean, if this is a cover-up, why not make it easier for us to sign off on the reports and go home? ‘The attendant fell asleep.’ Or ‘The lock on the window rusted out and we didn’t notice.’”

Chuck pressed his hand to the wall. “Maybe they were lonely. All of them. Needed some company from the outside world.”

“Sure. Made up a story so they could bring us here? Have something new to chat about? I’ll buy that.”

Chuck turned and looked back at Ashecliffe. “Joking aside…”

Teddy turned too, and they stood facing it. “Sure…”

“Starting to get nervous here, Teddy.”

5

“THEY CALLED IT a Great Room,” Cawley said as he led them through his parquet foyer to two oak doors with brass knobs the size of pineapples. “I’m serious. My wife found some unsent letters in the attic from the original owner, Colonel Spivey. Going on and on about the Great Room he was building.”

Cawley yanked back on one of the pineapples and wrenched the door open.

Chuck let loose a low whistle. Teddy and Dolores had had an apartment on Buttonwood that was the envy of friends because of its size, a central hallway that seemed to go on the length of a football field, and yet that apartment could have folded into this room twice.

The floor was marble, covered here and there by dark Oriental rugs. The fireplace was taller than most men. The drapes alone—three yards of dark purple velvet per window and there were nine windows—had to cost more than Teddy made in a year. Maybe two. A billiards table took up one corner under oil paintings of a man in Union army formal blue, another of a woman in a frilly white dress, a third painting of the man and woman together, a dog at their feet, that same gargantuan fireplace behind them.

“The colonel?” Teddy said.

Cawley followed his gaze, nodded. “Relieved of his command shortly after those paintings were finished. We found them in the basement along with a billiards table, the rugs, most of the chairs. You should see the basement, Marshal. We could fit the Polo Grounds down there.”

Teddy smelled pipe tobacco, and he and Chuck turned at the same time, realized there was another man in the room. He sat with his back to them in a high-back wing chair facing the fireplace, one foot extending off the opposite knee, the corner of an open book propped there.

Cawley led them toward the fireplace, gestured at the ring of chairs facing the hearth as he crossed to a liquor cabinet. “Your poison, gentlemen?”

Chuck said, “Rye, if you got it.”

“I think I can scare some up. Marshal Daniels?”

“Soda water and some ice.”

The stranger looked up at them. “You don’t indulge in alcohol?”

Teddy looked down at the guy. A small red head perched like a cherry on top of a chunky body. There was something pervasively delicate about him, a sense Teddy got that he spent far too much time in the bathroom every morning pampering himself with talcs and scented oils.

“And you are?” Teddy said.

“My colleague,” Cawley said. “Dr. Jeremiah Naehring.”

The man blinked in acknowledgment but didn’t offer his hand, so neither did Teddy or Chuck.

“I’m curious,” Naehring said as Teddy and Chuck took the two seats that curved away from Naehring’s left side.

“That’s swell,” Teddy said.

“Why you don’t drink alcohol. Isn’t it common for men in your profession to imbibe?”

Cawley handed him his drink and Teddy stood and crossed to the bookshelves to the right of the hearth. “Common enough,” he said. “And yours?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your profession,” Teddy said. “I’ve always heard it’s overrun with boozers.”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Haven’t looked too hard, then, huh?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“That’s, what, cold tea in your glass?”

Teddy turned from the books, watched Naehring glance at his glass, a silkworm of a smile twitching his soft mouth. “Excellent, Marshal. You possess outstanding defense mechanisms. I assume you’re quite adept at interrogation.”

Teddy shook his head, noticing that Cawley kept little in the way of medical texts, at least in this room. There were a few, but it was mostly novels, a few slim volumes Teddy assumed were poetry, several shelves of histories and biographies.

“No?” Naehring said.

“I’m a federal marshal. We bring them in. That’s it. Most times, others handle the interviewing.”

“I called it ‘interrogation,’ you called it ‘interviewing.’ Yes, Marshal, you do have astonishing defense capabilities.” He clicked the bottom of his scotch glass off the table several times as if in applause. “Men of violence fascinate me.”

“Men of what?” Teddy strolled over to Naehring’s chair, looked down at the little man, and rattled the ice in his glass.

Naehring tilted his head back, took a sip of scotch. “Violence.”

“Hell of an assumption to make, Doc.” This from Chuck, looking as openly annoyed as Teddy’d ever seen him.

“There’s no assumption, no assumption.”

Teddy gave his glass one more rattle before he drained it, saw something twitch near Naehring’s left eye. “I’d have to agree with my partner,” he said and took his seat.

“No.” Naehring turned the one syllable into three. “I said you were men of violence. That’s not the same as accusing you of being violent men.”

Teddy gave him a big smile. “Edify us.”

Cawley, behind them, placed a record on the phonograph and the scratch of the needle was followed by stray pops and hisses that reminded Teddy of the phones he’d tried to use. Then a balm of strings and piano replaced the hisses. Something classical, Teddy knew that much. Prussian. Reminding him of cafes overseas and a record of collection he’d seen in the office of a subcommandant at Dachau, the man listening to it when he’d shot himself in the mouth. He was still alive when Teddy and four GIs entered the room. Gurgling. Unable to reach the gun for a second shot because it had fallen to the floor. That soft music crawling around the room like spiders. Took him another twenty minutes to die, two of the GIs asking der Kommandant if it hurt as they ransacked the room. Teddy had taken a framed photograph off the guy’s lap, a picture of his wife and two kids, the guy’s eyes going wide and reaching for it as Teddy took it away from him. Teddy stood back and looked from the photo to the guy, back and forth, back and forth, until the guy died. And all the time, that music. Tinkling.

“Brahms?” Chuck asked.

“Mahler.” Cawley took the seat beside Naehring.

“You asked for edification,” Naehring said.

Teddy rested his elbows on his knees, spread his hands.

“Since the schoolyard,” Naehring said, “I would bet neither of you has ever walked away from physical conflict. That’s not to suggest you enjoyed it, only that retreat wasn’t something you considered an option. Yes?”

Teddy looked over at Chuck. Chuck gave him a small smile, slightly abashed.

Chuck said, “Wasn’t raised to run, Doc.”

“Ah, yes—raised. And who did raise you?”

“Bears,” Teddy said.

Cawley’s eyes brightened and he gave Teddy a small nod.

Naehring didn’t seem appreciative of humor, though. He adjusted his pants at the knee. “Believe in God?”

Teddy laughed.

Naehring leaned forward.

“Oh, you’re serious?” Teddy said.

Naehring waited.

“Ever seen a death camp, Doctor?”

Naehring shook his head.

“No?” Teddy hunched forward himself. “Your English is very good, almost flawless. You still hit the consonants a tad hard, though.”

“Is legal immigration a crime, Marshal?”

Teddy smiled, shook his head.

“Back to God, then.”

“You see a death camp someday, Doctor, then get back to me with your feelings about God.”

Naehring’s nod was a slow closing and reopening of his eyelids and then he turned his gaze on Chuck.

“And you?”

“Never saw the camps, myself.”

“Believe in God?”

Chuck shrugged. “Haven’t given him a lot of thought, one way or the other, in a long time.”

“Since your father died, yes?”

Chuck leaned forward now too, stared at the fat little man with his glass-cleaner eyes.

“Your father is dead, yes? And yours as well, Marshal Daniels? In fact, I’ll wager that both of you lost the dominant male figure in your lives before your fifteenth birthdays.”

“Five of diamonds,” Teddy said.

“I’m sorry?” Hunching ever forward.

“Is that your next parlor trick?” Teddy said. “You tell me what card I’m holding. Or, no, wait—you cut a nurse in half, pull a rabbit from Dr. Cawley’s head.”

“These are not parlor tricks.”

“How about this,” Teddy said, wanting to pluck that cherry head right off those lumpy shoulders. “You teach a woman how to walk through walls, levitate over a building full of orderlies and penal staff, and float across the sea.”

Chuck said, “That’s a good one.”

Naehring allowed himself another slow blink that reminded Teddy of a house cat after it’s been fed.

“Again, your defense mechanisms are—”

“Oh, here we go.”

“—impressive. But the issue at hand—”

“The issue at hand,” Teddy said, “is that this facility suffered about nine flagrant security breaches last night. You’ve got a missing woman and no one’s looking for—”

“We’re looking.”

“Hard?”

Naehring sat back, glanced over at Cawley in such a way that Teddy wondered which of them was really in charge.

Cawley caught Teddy’s look and the underside of his jaw turned slightly pink. “Dr. Naehring, among other capacities, serves as chief liaison to our board of overseers. I asked him here in that capacity tonight to address your earlier requests.”

“Which requests were those?”

Naehring stoked his pipe back to life with a cupped match. “We will not release personnel files of our clinical staff.”

“Sheehan,” Teddy said.

“Anyone.”

“You’re cock-blocking us, essentially.”

“I’m not familiar with that term.”

“Consider traveling more.”

“Marshal, continue your investigation and we’ll help where we can, but—”

“No.”

“Excuse me?” Cawley leaning forward now, all four of them with hunched shoulders and extended heads.

“No,” Teddy repeated. “This investigation is over. We’ll return to the city on the first ferry. We’ll file our reports and the matter will be turned over, I can only assume, to Hoover’s boys. But we’re out of this.”

Naehring’s pipe stayed hovering in his hand. Cawley took a pull on his drink. Mahler tinkled. Somewhere in the room a clock ticked. Outside, the rain had grown heavy.

Cawley placed his empty glass on the small table beside his chair.

“As you wish, Marshal.”

IT WAS POURING when they left Cawley’s house, the rain clattering against the slate roof and the brick patio, the black roof of the waiting car. Teddy could see it slicing through the blackness in slanted sheets of silver. It was only a few steps from Cawley’s porch to the car, but they got drenched just the same, and then McPherson came around the front and hopped behind the wheel and moisture splattered the dashboard as he shook it free of his head and put the Packard in gear.

“Nice night.” His voice rose over the slapping wiper blades and the drumming rain.

Teddy looked back through the rear window, could see the blurry forms of Cawley and Naehring on the porch watching them go.

“Not fit for man or beast,” McPherson said as a thin branch, torn from its mother trunk, floated past the windshield.

Chuck said, “How long you worked here, McPherson?”

“Four years.”

“Ever had a break before?”

“Hell no.”

“How about a breach? You know, someone gets missing for an hour or two?”

McPherson shook his head. “Not even that. You’d have to be, well, fucking crazy. Where can you go?”

“How about Dr. Sheehan?” Teddy said. “You know him?”

“Sure.”

“How long has he been here?”

“I think a year before me.”

“So five years.”

“Sounds right.”

“Did he work with Miss Solando much?”

“Not that I know of. Dr. Cawley was her primary psychotherapist.”

“Is that common for the chief of staff to be the primary on a patient’s case?”

McPherson said, “Well…”

They waited, and the wipers continued to slap, and the dark trees bent toward them.

“It depends,” McPherson said, waving at the guard as the Packard rolled through the main gate. “Dr. Cawley does a lot of primary work with the Ward C patients, of course. And then, yeah, there are a few in the other wards whose casework he assumes.”

“Who besides Miss Solando?”

McPherson pulled up outside the male dormitory. “You don’t mind if I don’t come around to open your doors, do you? You get some sleep. I’m sure Dr. Cawley will answer all your questions in the morning.”

“McPherson,” Teddy said as he opened his door.

McPherson looked back over the seat at him.

“You’re not very good at this,” Teddy said.

“Good at what?”

Teddy gave him a grim smile and stepped out into the rain.

THEY SHARED A room with Trey Washington and another orderly named Bibby Luce. The room was a good size, with two sets of bunk beds and a small sitting area where Trey and Bibby were playing cards when they came in. Teddy and Chuck dried their hair with white towels from a stack someone had left for them on the top bunk, and then they pulled up chairs and joined the game.

Trey and Bibby played penny-ante, and cigarettes were deemed an acceptable substitute if anyone ran short of coins. Teddy strung all three of them along on a hand of seven-card, came away with five bucks and eighteen cigarettes on a club flush, pocketed the cigarettes, and played conservative from that point on.

Chuck turned out to be the real player, though, jovial as ever, impossible to read, amassing a pile of coins and cigarettes and eventually bills, glancing down at the end of it all as if surprised at how such a fat pile got in front of him.

Trey said, “You got yourself some of them X-ray eyes, Marshal?”

“Lucky, I guess.”

“Booshit. Motherfucker that lucky? He got hisself some voodoo working.”

Chuck said, “Maybe some motherfucker shouldn’t tug his earlobe.”

“Huh?”

“You tug your earlobe, Mr. Washington. Every time you got less than a full house.” He pointed at Bibby. “And this motherfucker—”

All three of them burst out laughing.

“He…he—no, wait a minute, wait—he…he gets all squirrelly-eyed, starts looking at everybody’s chips just before he bluffs. When he’s got a hot hand, though? He’s all serene and inward-looking.”

Trey ripped the air with his loudest guffaw and slapped the table. “What about Marshal Daniels? How’s he give himself away?”

Chuck grinned. “I’m going to rat out my partner? No, no, no.”

“Ooooh!” Bibby pointed across the table at them both.

“Can’t do it.”

“I see, I see,” Trey said. “It’s a white man kinda thing.”

Chuck’s face darkened and he stared at Trey until the room was sucked dry of air.

Trey’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he started to raise a hand in apology, and Chuck said, “Absolutely. What else would it be?” and the grin that broke across his face was river-size.

“Mother-fucker!” Trey slapped his hand off Chuck’s fingers.

“Motherfucker!” Bibby said.

“Mutha-fucka,” Chuck said, and then all three of them giggled like little girls.

Teddy thought of trying it, decided he’d fail, a white man trying to sound hep. And yet Chuck? Chuck could pull it off somehow.

“SO WHAT GAVE me away?” Teddy asked Chuck as they lay in the dark. Across the room, Trey and Bibby were locked in a snoring competition and the rain had gone soft in the last half an hour, as if it were catching its breath, awaiting reinforcements.

“At cards?” Chuck said from the lower bunk. “Forget it.”

“No. I want to know.”

“You thought you were pretty good up till now, didn’t you? Admit it.”

“I didn’t think I was bad.”

“You’re not.”

“You cleaned my clock.”

“I won a few bucks.”

“Your daddy was a gambler, that it?”

“My daddy was a prick.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Not your fault. Yours?”

“My daddy?”

“No, your uncle. Of course, your daddy.”

Teddy tried to picture him in the dark, could only see his hands, welted with scars.

“He was a stranger,” Teddy said. “To everyone. Even my mother. Hell, I doubt he knew who he was. He was his boat. When he lost the boat, he just drifted away.”

Chuck didn’t say anything and after a while Teddy figured he’d fallen asleep. He could suddenly see his father, all of him, sitting in that chair on the days there’d been no work, the man swallowed by the walls, ceilings, rooms.

“Hey, boss.”

“You still up?”

“We really going to pack it in?”

“Yeah. You surprised?”

“I’m not blaming you. I just, I dunno…”

“What?”

“I never quit anything before.”

Teddy lay quiet for a bit. Finally, he said, “We haven’t heard the truth once. We got no way through to it and we got nothing to fall back on, nothing to make these people talk.”

“I know, I know,” Chuck said. “I agree with the logic.”

“But?”

“But I never quit anything before is all.”

“Rachel Solando didn’t slip barefoot out of a locked room without help. A lot of help. The whole institution’s help. My experience? You can’t break a whole society that doesn’t want to hear what you have to say. Not if there’s only two of us. Best-case scenario—the threat worked and Cawley’s sitting up in his mansion right now, rethinking his whole attitude. Maybe in the morning…”

“So you’re bluffing.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I just played cards with you, boss.”

They lay in silence, and Teddy listened to the ocean for a while.

“You purse your lips,” Chuck said, his voice beginning to garble with sleep.

“What?”

“When you’re holding a good hand. You only do it for a second, but you always do it.”

“Oh.”

“’Night, boss.”

“’Night.”

6

SHE COMES DOWN the hallway toward him.

Dolores, karats of anger in her eyes, Bing Crosby crooning “East Side of Heaven” from somewhere in the apartment, the kitchen, maybe. She says, “Jesus, Teddy. Jesus Christ.” She’s holding an empty bottle of JTS Brown in her hand. His empty bottle. And Teddy realizes she’s found one of his stashes.

“Are you ever sober? Are you ever fucking sober anymore? Answer me.”

But Teddy can’t. He can’t speak. He’s not even sure where his body is. He can see her and she keeps coming down that long hallway toward him, but he can’t see his physical self, can’t even feel it. There’s a mirror at the other end of the hall behind Dolores, and he’s not reflected in it.

She turns left into the living room and the back of her is charred, smoldering a bit. The bottle is no longer in her hand, and small ribbons of smoke unwind from her hair.

She stops at a window. “Oh, look. They’re so pretty like that. Floating.”

Teddy is beside her at the window, and she’s no longer burned, she’s soaking wet, and he can see himself, his hand as he places it on her shoulder, the fingers draping over her collarbone, and she turns her head and gives his fingers a quick kiss.

“What did you do?” he says, not even sure why he’s asking.

“Look at them out there.”

“Baby, why you all wet?” he says, but isn’t surprised when she doesn’t answer.

The view out the window is not what he expects. It’s not the view they had from the apartment on Buttonwood, but the view of another place they stayed once, a cabin. There’s a small pond out there with small logs floating in it, and Teddy notices how smooth they are, turning almost imperceptibly, the water shivering and gone white in places under the moon.

“That’s a nice gazebo,” she says. “So white. You can smell the fresh paint.”

“It is nice.”

“So,” Dolores says.

“Killed a lot of people in the war.”

“Why you drink.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s here.”

“Rachel?”

Dolores nods. “She never left. You almost saw it. You almost did.”

“The Law of Four.”

“It’s code.”

“Sure, but for what?”

“She’s here. You can’t leave.”

He wraps his arms around her from behind, buries his face in the side of her neck. “I’m not going to leave. I love you. I love you so much.”

Her belly springs a leak and the liquid flows through his hands.

“I’m bones in a box, Teddy.”

“No.”

“I am. You have to wake up.”

“You’re here.”

“I’m not. You have to face that. She’s here. You’re here. He’s here too. Count the beds. He’s here.”

“Who?”

“Laeddis.”

The name crawls through his flesh and climbs over his bones.

“No.”

“Yes.” She bends her head back, looks up at him. “You’ve known.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. You can’t leave.”

“You’re tense all the time.” He kneads her shoulders, and she lets out a soft moan of surprise that gives him a hard-on.

“I’m not tense anymore,” she says. “I’m home.”

“This isn’t home,” he says.

“Sure it is. My home. She’s here. He’s here.”

“Laeddis.”

“Laeddis,” she says. Then: “I need to go.”

“No.” He’s crying. “No. Stay.”

“Oh, God.” She leans back into him. “Let me go. Let me go.”

“Please don’t go.” His tears spill down her body and mix with her pouring belly. “I need to hold you just a little longer. A little longer. Please.”

She lets loose a small bubble of a sound—half sigh, half howl, so torn and beautiful in its anguish—and she kisses his knuckles.

“Okay. Hold tight. Tight as you can.”

And he holds his wife. He holds her and holds her.

FIVE O’CLOCK IN the morning, the rain dropping on the world, and Teddy climbed off the top bunk and took his notebook from his coat. He sat at the table where they’d played poker and opened the notebook to the page where he’d transcribed Rachel Solando’s Law of 4.

Trey and Bibby continued to snore as loud as the rain. Chuck slept quietly, on his stomach, one fist tucked close to his ear, as if it were whispering secrets.

Teddy looked down at the page. It was simple once you knew how to read it. A child’s code, really. It was still code, though, and it took Teddy until six to break it.

He looked up, saw Chuck watching him from the lower bunk, Chuck’s chin propped up on his fist.

“We leaving, boss?”

Teddy shook his head.

“Ain’t nobody leaving in this shit,” Trey said, climbing out of his bunk, pulling up the window shade on a drowning landscape the color of pearl. “No how.”

The dream was harder to hold suddenly, the smell of her evaporating with the ascent of the shade, a dry cough from Bibby, Trey stretching with a loud, long yawn.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him. If he could turn back the years to that morning of the fire and replace her body with his own, he would. That was a given. That had always been a given. But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

I held her, he wanted to say to Chuck and Trey and Bibby. I held her as Bing Crosby crooned from the kitchen radio and I could smell her and the apartment on Buttonwood and the lake where we stayed that summer and her lips grazed my knuckles.

I held her. This world can’t give me that. This world can only give me reminders of what I don’t have, can never have, didn’t have for long enough.

We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

Not this. Not this.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn’t raise the gun to my head fast enough.

Chuck was staring at him, waiting.

Teddy said, “I broke Rachel’s code.”

“Oh,” Chuck said, “is that all?”