Shutter Island

7

CAWLEY MET THEM in the foyer of Ward B. His clothes and face were drenched and he looked like a man who’d spent the night on a bus stop bench.

Chuck said, “The trick, Doctor, is to sleep when you lie down.”

Cawley wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Oh, is that the trick, Marshal? I knew I was forgetting something. Sleep, you say. Right.” They climbed the yellowed staircase, nodded at the orderly posted at the first landing.

“And how was Dr. Naehring this morning?” Teddy asked.

Cawley gave him a weary rise and fall of his eyebrows. “I apologize for that. Jeremiah is a genius, but he could use some social polishing. He has this idea for a book about the male warrior culture throughout history. He’s constantly bringing his obsession into conversations, trying to fit people into his preconceived models. Again, I’m sorry.”

“You guys do that a lot?”

“What’s that, Marshal?”

“Sit around over drinks and, um, probe people?”

“Occupational hazard, I guess. How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know. How many?”

“Eight.”

“Why?”

“Oh, stop overanalyzing it.”

Teddy caught Chuck’s eyes and they both laughed.

“Shrink humor,” Chuck said. “Who would’ve guessed?”

“You know what the state of the mental health field is these days, gentlemen?”

“Not a clue,” Teddy said.

“Warfare,” Cawley said and yawned into his damp handkerchief. “Ideological, philosophical, and yes, even psychological warfare.”

“You’re doctors,” Chuck said. “You’re supposed to play nice, share your toys.”

Cawley smiled and they passed the orderly on the second-floor landing. From somewhere below, a patient screamed, and the echo fled up the stairs toward them. It was a plaintive howl, and yet Teddy could hear the hopelessness in it, the certainty it carried that whatever it longed for was not going to be granted.

“The old school,” Cawley said, “believes in shock therapy, partial lobotomies, spa treatments for the most docile patients. Psychosurgery is what we call it. The new school is enamored of psychopharmacology. It’s the future, they say. Maybe it is. I don’t know.”

He paused, a hand on the banister, midway between the second floor and the third, and Teddy could feel his exhaustion as a living, broken thing, a fourth body in the stairwell with them.

“How does psychopharmacology apply?” Chuck asked.

Cawley said, “A drug has just been approved—lithium is its name—that relaxes psychotic patients, tames them, some would say. Manacles will become a thing of the past. Chains, handcuffs. Bars even, or so the optimists say. The old school, of course, argues that nothing will replace psychosurgery, but the new school is stronger, I think, and it will have money behind it.”

“Money from where?”

“Pharmaceutical companies, of course. Buy stock now, gentlemen, and you’ll be able to retire to your own island. New schools, old schools. My god, I do rant sometimes.”

“Which school are you?” Teddy asked gently.

“Believe it or not, Marshal, I believe in talk therapy, basic interpersonal skills. I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect and listen to what he’s trying to tell you, you just might reach him.”

Another howl. Same woman, Teddy was pretty sure. It slid between them on the stairs and seemed to spike Cawley’s attention.

“But these patients?” Teddy said.

Cawley smiled. “Well, yes, many of these patients need to be medicated and some need to be manacled. No argument. But it’s a slippery slope. Once you introduce the poison into the well, how do you ever get it out of the water?”

“You don’t,” Teddy said.

He nodded. “That’s right. What should be the last resort gradually becomes standard response. And, I know, I’m mixing my metaphors. Sleep,” he said to Chuck. “Right. I’ll try that next time.”

“I’ve heard it works wonders,” Chuck said, and they headed up the final flight.

In Rachel’s room, Cawley sat heavily on the edge of her bed and Chuck leaned against the door. Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?”

“Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.

“You’ll grow up someday, Marshal,” Cawley said. “Won’t you?”

“I’ve got my doubts.”

Teddy held the sheet of paper in front of his chest and tapped it to get their attention. “Take another look.”

After a minute, Cawley said, “I’m too tired, Marshal. It’s all gibberish to me right now. Sorry.”

Teddy looked at Chuck. Chuck shook his head.

Teddy said, “It was the plus sign that got me going, made me look at it again. Look at the line under ‘They were eighty.’ We’re supposed to add the two lines. What do you get?”

“A hundred and twenty-seven.”

“One, two, and seven,” Teddy said. “Right. Now you add three. But it’s separated. She wants us to keep the integers apart. So you have one plus two plus seven plus three. What’s that give you?”

“Thirteen.” Cawley sat up on the bed a bit.

Teddy nodded. “Does thirteen have any particular relevance to Rachel Solando? Was she born on the thirteenth? Married on it? Killed her kids on the thirteenth?”

“I’d have to check,” Cawley said. “But thirteen is often a significant number to schizophrenics.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “The same way it is to many people. It’s a harbinger of bad luck. Most schizophrenics live in a state of fear. It’s the common bonding element in the disease. So most schizophrenics are also deeply superstitious. Thirteen plays into that.”

“That makes sense, then,” Teddy said. “Look at the next number. Four. Add one plus three you get four. But one and three on their own?”

“Thirteen.” Chuck came off the wall and cocked his head at the sheet of paper.

“And the last number,” Cawley said. “Sixty-seven. Six and seven equals thirteen.”

Teddy nodded. “It’s not the ‘law of four.’ It’s the law of thirteen. There are thirteen letters in the name Rachel Solando.”

Teddy watched both Cawley and Chuck count it up in their heads. Cawley said, “Go on.”

“Once we’ve accepted that, Rachel leaves a whole lot of bread crumbs. The code follows the most rudimentary principle of number-to-letter assignation. One equals A. Two equals B. You with me?”

Cawley nodded, followed by Chuck a few seconds later.

“The first letter of her name is R. Numerical assignation of R is eighteen. A is one. C is three. H is eight. E is five. L is twelve. Eighteen, one, three, eight, five, and twelve. Add ’em up, guys, and what do you get?”

“Jesus,” Cawley said softly.

“Forty-seven,” Chuck said, his eyes gone wide, staring at the sheet of paper over Teddy’s chest.

“That’s the ‘I,’” Cawley said. “Her first name. I get that now. But what about ‘they’?”

“Her last name,” Teddy said. “It’s theirs.”

“Whose?”

“Her husband’s family and their ancestors. It’s not hers, not by birth. Or it refers to her children. In either case, it doesn’t really matter, the whys. It’s her last name. Solando. Take the letters and add up their numerical assignations and, yeah, trust me, you come up with eighty.”

Cawley came off the bed, and both he and Chuck stood in front of Teddy to look at the code draped over his chest.

Chuck looked up after a while, into Teddy’s eyes. “What’re you—fucking Einstein?”

“Have you broken code before, Marshal?” Cawley said, eyes still on the sheet of paper. “In the war?”

“No.”

“So how did you…?” Chuck said.

Teddy’s arms were tired from holding up the sheet. He placed it on the bed.

“I don’t know. I do a lot of crosswords. I like puzzles.” He shrugged.

Cawley said, “But you were Army Intelligence overseas, right?”

Teddy shook his head. “Regular army. You, though, Doctor, you were OSS.”

Cawley said, “No. I did some consulting.”

“What kind of consulting?”

Cawley gave him that sliding smile of his, gone almost as soon as it appeared. “The never-talk-about-it kind.”

“But this code,” Teddy said, “it’s pretty simple.”

“Simple?” Chuck said. “You’ve explained it, and my head still hurts.”

“But for you, Doctor?”

Cawley shrugged. “What can I tell you, Marshal? I wasn’t a code breaker.”

Cawley bent his head and stroked his chin as he turned his attention back to the code. Chuck caught Teddy’s eyes, his own filled with question marks.

Cawley said, “So we’ve figured out—well, you have, Marshal—the forty-seven and the eighty. We’ve ascertained that all clues are permutations of the number thirteen. What about the ‘three’?”

“Again,” Teddy said, “it either refers to us, in which case she’s clairvoyant…”

“Not likely.”

“Or it refers to her children.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Add Rachel to the three…”

“And you get the next line,” Cawley said. “’We are four.’”

“So who’s sixty-seven?”

Cawley looked at him. “You’re not being rhetorical?”

Teddy shook his head.

Cawley ran his finger down the right side of the paper. “None of the numbers add up to sixty-seven?”

“Nope.”

Cawley ran a palm over the top of his head and straightened. “And you have no theories?”

Teddy said, “It’s the one I can’t break. Whatever it refers to isn’t anything I’m familiar with, which makes me think it’s something on this island. You, Doctor?”

“Me, what?”

“Have any theories?”

“None. I wouldn’t have gotten past the first line.”

“You said that, yeah. Tired and all.”

“Very tired, Marshal.” He said it with his gaze fixed on Teddy’s face, and then he crossed to the window, watched the rain sluice down it, the sheets so thick they walled off the land on the other side. “You said last night that you’d be leaving.”

“First ferry out,” Teddy said, riding the bluff.

“There won’t be one today. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“So tomorrow, then. Or the next day,” Teddy said. “You still think she’s out there? In this?”

“No,” Cawley said. “I don’t.”

“So where?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Marshal. It’s not my specialty.”

Teddy lifted the sheet of paper off the bed. “This is a template. A guide for deciphering future codes. I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”

“And if it is?”

“Then she’s not trying to escape, Doctor. She brought us here. I think there’s more of these.”

“Not in this room,” Cawley said.

“No. But maybe in this building. Or maybe out on the island.”

Cawley sucked the air of the room into his nostrils, steadying one hand against the windowsill, the man all but dead on his feet, making Teddy wonder what really had kept him up last night.

“She brought you here?” Cawley said. “To what end?”

“You tell me.”

Cawley closed his eyes and stayed silent for so long that Teddy began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.

He opened his eyes again, looked at both of them. “I’ve got a full day. I’ve got staff meetings, budget meetings with the overseers, emergency maintenance meetings in case this storm really hits us. You’ll be happy to know I’ve arranged for you both to speak with all of the patients who were in group therapy with Miss Solando the night she disappeared. Those interviews are scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes. Gentlemen, I appreciate you being here. I do. I’m jumping through as many hoops as I can, whether it appears so or not.”

“Then give me Dr. Sheehan’s personnel file.”

“I can’t do that. I absolutely cannot.” He leaned his head back against the wall. “Marshal, I’ve got the switchboard operator trying his number on a steady basis. But we can’t reach anyone right now. For all we know, the whole eastern seaboard is underwater. Patience, gentlemen. That’s all I’m asking. We’ll find Rachel, or we’ll find out what happened to her.” He looked at his watch. “I’m late. Is there anything else, or can it wait?”

THEY STOOD UNDER an awning outside the hospital, the rain sweeping across their field of vision in sheets the size of train cars.

“You think he knows what sixty-seven means?” Chuck said.

“Yup.”

“You think he broke the code before you did?”

“I think he was OSS. I think he’s got a gift or two in that department.”

Chuck wiped his face, flicked his fingers toward the pavement. “How many patients they got here?”

“It’s small,” Teddy said.

“Yeah.”

“What, maybe twenty women, thirty guys?”

“Not many.”

“No.”

“Not quite sixty-seven anyway.”

Teddy turned, looked at him. “But…,” he said.

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “But.”

And they looked off at the tree line and beyond, at the top of the fort pressed back behind the squall, gone fuzzy and indistinct like a charcoal sketch in a smoky room.

Teddy remembered what Dolores had said in the dream—Count the beds.

“How many they got up there, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “We’ll have to ask the helpful doctor.”

“Oh, yeah, he just screams ‘helpful,’ don’t he?”

“Hey, boss.”

“Yeah.”

“In your life, have you ever come across this much wasted federal space?”

“How so?”

“Fifty patients in these two wards? What do you think these buildings could hold? A couple hundred more?”

“At least.”

“And the staff-to-patient ratio. It’s like two-to-one favoring staff. You ever seen anything like that?”

“I gotta say no to that one.”

They looked at the grounds sizzling underwater.

“What the fuck is this place?” Chuck said.

THEY HELD THE interviews in the cafeteria, Chuck and Teddy sitting at a table in the rear. Two orderlies sat within shouting distance, and Trey Washington was in charge of leading the patients to them and then taking them away when they were through.

The first guy was a stubbled wreck of tics and eye blinks. He sat hunched into himself like a horseshoe crab, scratching his arms, and refused to meet their eyes.

Teddy looked down at the top page in the file Cawley had provided—just thumbnail sketches from Cawley’s own memory, not the actual patient files. This guy was listed first and his name was Ken Gage and he was in here because he’d attacked a stranger in the aisle of a corner grocery store, beat the victim on the head with a can of peas, all the time saying, in a very subdued voice, “Stop reading my mail.”

“So, Ken,” Chuck said, “how you doing?”

“I got a cold. I got a cold in my feet.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It hurts to walk, yeah.” Ken scratched around the edges of a scab on his arm, delicately at first, as if tracing a moat for it.

“Were you in group therapy the night before last?”

“I got a cold in my feet and it hurts to walk.”

“You want some socks?” Teddy tried. He noticed the two orderlies looking over at them, snickering.

“Yeah, I want some socks, I want some socks, I want some socks.” Whispering it, head down and bobbing a bit.

“Well, we’ll get you some in a minute. We just need to know if you were—”

“It’s just so cold. In my feet? It’s cold and it hurts to walk.”

Teddy looked over at Chuck. Chuck smiled at the orderlies as the sound of their giggles floated to the table.

“Ken,” Chuck said. “Ken, can you look at me?”

Ken kept his head down, bobbing a bit more. His fingernail tore open the scab and a small line of blood seeped into the hairs of his arm.

“Ken?”

“I can’t walk. Not like this, not like this. It’s so cold, cold, cold.”

“Ken, come on, look at me.”

Ken brought his fists down on the table.

Both orderlies stood and Ken said, “It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t. But they want it to. They fill the air with cold. They fill my kneecaps.”

The orderlies crossed to their table, looked over Ken at Chuck. The white one said, “You guys about done, or you want to hear more about his feet?”

“My feet are cold.”

The black orderly raised an eyebrow. “It’s okay, Kenny. We’ll take you to Hydro, warm you right up.”

The white one said, “I been here five years. Topic don’t change.”

“Ever?” Teddy said.

“It hurts to walk.”

“Ever,” the orderly said.

“Hurts to walk ’cause they put cold in my feet…”

THE NEXT ONE, Peter Breene, was twenty-six, blond, and pudgy. A knuckle-cracker and a nail-biter.

“What are you here for, Peter?”

Peter looked across the table at Teddy and Chuck with eyes that seemed permanently damp. “I’m scared all the time.”

“Of what?”

“Things.”

“Okay.”

Peter propped his left ankle up on his right knee, gripped the ankle, and leaned forward. “It sounds stupid, but I’m afraid of watches. The ticking. It gets in your head. Rats terrify me.”

“Me too,” Chuck said.

“Yeah?” Peter brightened.

“Hell, yeah. Squeaky bastards. I get the piss-shivers just looking at one.”

“Don’t go out past the wall at night, then,” Peter said. “They’re everywhere.”

“Good to know. Thanks.”

“Pencils,” Peter said. “The lead, you know? The scratch-scratch on the paper. I’m afraid of you.”

“Me?”

“No,” Peter said, pointing his chin at Teddy. “Him.”

“Why?” Teddy asked.

He shrugged. “You’re big. Mean-looking crew cut. You can handle yourself. Your knuckles are scarred. My father was like that. He didn’t have the scars. His hands were smooth. But he was mean-looking. My brothers too. They used to beat me up.”

“I’m not going to beat you up,” Teddy said.

“But you could. Don’t you see? You have that power. And I don’t. And that makes me vulnerable. Being vulnerable makes me scared.”

“And when you get scared?”

Peter gripped his ankle and rocked back and forth, his bangs falling down his forehead. “She was nice. I didn’t mean anything. But she scared me with her big breasts, the way her can moved in that white dress, coming to our house every day. She’d look at me like…You know the smile you give a child? She’d give me that smile. And she was my age. Oh, okay, maybe a few years older, but still, in her twenties. And she had so much sexual knowledge. It was apparent in her eyes. She liked to be naked. She’d sucked cock. And then she asks me, as if she can have a glass of water. She’s alone in the kitchen with me, as if that’s no big deal?”

Teddy tilted the file so Chuck could see Cawley’s notes:

Patient assaulted his father’s nurse with a broken glass. Victim critically injured, permanently scarred. Patient in denial over his responsibility for the act.

“It’s only because she scared me,” Peter said. “She wanted me to pull out my thing so she could laugh at it. Tell me how I’d never be with a woman, never have children of my own, never be a man? Because, otherwise, I mean you know this, you can see it in my face—I wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not in me. But when I’m scared? Oh, the mind.”

“What about it?” Chuck’s voice was soothing.

“You ever think about it?”

“Your mind?”

“The mind,” he said. “Mine, yours, anyone’s. It’s an engine essentially. That’s what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it’s got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don’t even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one…Have you thought about that?”

“Not recently.”

“You should. It’s just like a car. No different. One gear slips, one bolt cracks, and the whole system goes haywire. Can you live knowing that?” He tapped his temple. “That it’s all trapped in here and you can’t get to it and you don’t really control it. But it controls you, doesn’t it? And if it decides one day that it doesn’t feel like coming to work?” He leaned forward, and they could see tendons straining in his neck. “Well, then you’re pretty much good and fucked, aren’t you?”

“Interesting perspective,” Chuck said.

Peter leaned back in his chair, suddenly listless. “That’s what scares me most.”

Teddy, whose migraines gave him a bit of insight into the lack of control one had over one’s mind, would cede a point to Peter on the general concept, but mostly he just wanted to pick the little shit up by his throat, slam him against one of the ovens in the back of the cafeteria, and ask him about that poor nurse he’d carved up.

Do you even remember her name, Pete? What do you think she feared? Huh? You. That’s what. Trying to do an honest day’s work, make a living. Maybe she had kids, a husband. Maybe they were trying to save enough to put one of those kids through college someday, give him a better life. A small dream.

But, no, some rich prick’s fucked-up mama’s boy of a son decides she can’t have that dream. Sorry, but no. No normal life for you, miss. Not ever again.

Teddy looked across the table at Peter Breene, and he wanted to punch him in the face so hard that doctors would never find all the bones in his nose. Hit him so hard the sound would never leave his head.

Instead, he closed the file and said, “You were in group therapy the night before last with Rachel Solando. Correct?”

“Yes, I sure was, sir.”

“You see her go up to her room?”

“No. The men left first. She was still sitting there with Bridget Kearns and Leonora Grant and that nurse.”

“That nurse?”

Peter nodded. “The redhead. Sometimes I like her. She seems genuine. But other times, you know?”

“No,” Teddy said, keeping his voice as smooth as Chuck’s had been, “I don’t.”

“Well, you’ve seen her, right?”

“Sure. What’s her name again?”

“She doesn’t need a name,” Peter said. “Woman like that? No name for her. Dirty Girl. That’s her name.”

“But, Peter,” Chuck said, “I thought you said you liked her.”

“When did I say that?”

“Just a minute ago.”

“Uh-uh. She’s trash. She’s squishy-squishy.”

“Let me ask you something else.”

“Dirty, dirty, dirty.”

“Peter?”

Peter looked up at Teddy.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Did anything unusual happen in group that night? Did Rachel Solando say anything or do anything out of the ordinary?”

“She didn’t say a word. She’s a mouse. She just sat there. She killed her kids, you know. Three of them. You believe that? What kind of person does that sort of thing? Sick fucking people in this world, sirs, if you don’t mind me mentioning.”

“People have problems,” Chuck said. “Some are deeper than others. Sick, like you said. They need help.”

“They need gas,” Peter said.

“Excuse me?”

“Gas,” Peter said to Teddy. “Gas the retards. Gas the killers. Killed her own kids? Gas the bitch.”

They sat silent, Peter glowing as if he’d illuminated the world for them. After a while, he patted the table and stood.

“Good to meet you, gents. I’ll be getting back.”

Teddy used a pencil to doodle on the file cover, and Peter stopped, looked back at him.

“Peter,” Teddy said.

“Yeah?”

“I—”

“Could you stop that?”

Teddy scratched his initials into the cardboard in long, slow strokes. “I was wondering if—”

“Could you please, please…?”

Teddy looked up, still pulling the pencil down the file cover. “Which?”

“—stop that?”

“What?” Teddy looked at him, looked down at the file. He lifted the pencil, cocked an eyebrow.

“Yes. Please. That.”

Teddy dropped the pencil on the cover. “Better?”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know a patient, Peter, by the name of Andrew Laeddis?”

“No.”

“No? No one here by that name?”

Peter shrugged. “Not in Ward A. He could be in C. We don’t mingle with them. They’re fucking nuts.”

“Well, thank you, Peter,” Teddy said, and picked up the pencil and went back to doodling.

AFTER PETER BREENE, they interviewed Leonora Grant. Leonora was convinced that she was Mary Pickford and Chuck was Douglas Fairbanks and Teddy was Charlie Chaplin. She thought that the cafeteria was an office on Sunset Boulevard and they were here to discuss a public stock offering in United Artists. She kept caressing the back of Chuck’s hand and asking who was going to record the minutes.

In the end, the orderlies had to pull her hand from Chuck’s wrist while Leonora cried, “Adieu, mon cheri. Adieu.”

Halfway across the cafeteria, she broke free of the orderlies, came charging back across the floor toward them, and grabbed Chuck’s hand.

She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”

Chuck looked in her eyes and said, “Noted.”

After that, they met Arthur Toomey, who kept insisting they call him Joe. Joe had slept through group therapy that night. Joe, it turned out, was a narcoleptic. He fell asleep twice on them, the second time for the day, more or less.

Teddy was feeling the place in the back of his skull by that point. It was making his hair itch, and while he felt sympathy for all the patients except for Breene, he couldn’t help wonder how anyone could stand working here.

Trey came ambling back in with a small woman with blond hair and a face shaped like a pendant. Her eyes pulsed with clarity. And not the clarity of the insane, but the everyday clarity of an intelligent woman in a less-than-intelligent world. She smiled and gave them each a small, shy wave as she sat.

Teddy checked Cawley’s notes—Bridget Kearns.

“I’ll never get out of here,” she said after they’d been sitting there for a few minutes. She smoked her cigarettes only halfway before stubbing them out, and she had a soft, confident voice, and a little over a decade ago she’d killed her husband with an ax.

“I’m not sure I should,” she said.

“Why’s that?” Chuck said. “I mean, excuse me for saying it, Miss Kearns—”

“Mrs.”

“Mrs. Kearns. Excuse me, but you seem, well, normal to me.”

She leaned back in her chair, as at ease as anyone they’d met in this place, and gave a soft chuckle. “I suppose. I wasn’t when I first came here. Oh my god. I’m glad they didn’t take pictures. I’ve been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, and I have no reason to doubt that. I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don’t kill their husbands with an ax. I’ve been told I have deep, unresolved conflicts with my father, and I’ll agree to that too. I doubt I’d go out and kill someone again, but you can never tell.” She pointed the tip of her cigarette in their direction. “I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.”

She met Teddy’s eyes and something in her pupils—a schoolgirl’s shy giddiness, perhaps—made him laugh.

“What?” she said, laughing with him.

“Maybe you shouldn’t get out,” he said.

“You say that because you’re a man.”

“You’re damn right.”

“Well then, I don’t blame you.”

It was a relief to laugh after Peter Breene, and Teddy wondered if he was actually flirting a bit too. With a mental patient. An ax murderer. This is what it’s come to, Dolores. But he didn’t feel altogether bad about it, as if after these two long dark years of mourning he was maybe entitled to a little harmless repartee.

“What would I do if I did get out?” Bridget said. “I don’t know what’s out in that world anymore. Bombs, I hear. Bombs that can turn whole cities to ash. And televisions. That’s what they call them, isn’t it? There’s a rumor each ward will get one, and we’ll be able to see plays on this box. I don’t know that I’d like that. Voices coming from a box. Faces from a box. I hear enough voices and see enough faces every day. I don’t need more noise.”

“Can you tell us about Rachel Solando?” Chuck asked.

She paused. It was more like a hitch, actually, and Teddy watched her eyes turn up slightly, as if she were searching her brain for the right file, and Teddy scribbled “lies” in his notepad, curling his wrist over the word as soon as he was done.

Her words came more carefully and smelled of rote.

“Rachel is nice enough. She keeps to herself. She talks about rain a lot, but mostly she doesn’t talk at all. She believed her kids were alive. She believed she was still living in the Berkshires and that we were all neighbors and postmen, deliverymen, milkmen. She was hard to get to know.”

She spoke with her head down, and when she finished, she couldn’t meet Teddy’s eyes. Her glance bounced off his face, and she studied the tabletop and lit another cigarette.

Teddy thought about what she’d just said, realized the description of Rachel’s delusions was almost word for word what Cawley had said to them yesterday.

“How long was she here?”

“Huh?”

“Rachel. How long was she in Ward B with you?”

“Three years? About that, I think. I lose track of time. It’s easy to do that in this place.”

“And where was she before that?” Teddy asked.

“Ward C, I heard. She transferred over, I believe.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No. I…Again, you lose track.”

“Sure. Anything unusual happen the last time you saw her?”

“No.”

“That was in group.”

“What?”

“The last time you saw her,” Teddy said. “It was in group therapy the night before last.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She nodded several times and shaved some ash off against the rim of the ashtray. “In group.”

“And you all went up to your rooms together?”

“With Mr. Ganton, yes.”

“What was Dr. Sheehan like that night?”

She looked up, and Teddy saw confusion and maybe some terror in her face. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Was Dr. Sheehan there that night?”

She looked at Chuck, then over at Teddy, sucked her upper lip against her teeth. “Yeah. He was there.”

“What’s he like?”

“Dr. Sheehan?”

Teddy nodded.

“He’s okay. He’s nice. Handsome.”

“Handsome?”

“Yeah. He’s…not hard on the eyes, as my mother used to say.”

“Did he ever flirt with you?”

“No.”

“Come on to you?”

“No, no, no. Dr. Sheehan’s a good doctor.”

“And that night?”

“That night?” She gave it some thought. “Nothing unusual happened that night. We spoke about, um, anger management? And Rachel complained about the rain. And Dr. Sheehan left just before the group broke up, and Mr. Ganton led us up to our rooms, and we went to bed, and that was it.”

In his notebook, Teddy wrote “coached” underneath “lies” and closed the cover.

“That was it?”

“Yes. And the next morning Rachel was gone.”

“The next morning?”

“Yeah. I woke up and heard that she’d escaped.”

“But that night? Around midnight—you heard it, right?”

“Heard what?” Stubbing out her cigarette, waving at the smoke that wafted up in its wake.

“The commotion. When she was discovered missing.”

“No. I—”

“There was shouting, yelling, guards running in from everywhere, alarms sounding.”

“I thought it was a dream.”

“A dream?”

She nodded fast. “Sure. A nightmare.” She looked at Chuck. “Could I get a glass of water?”

“You bet.” Chuck stood and looked around, saw a stack of glasses in the rear of the cafeteria beside a steel dispenser.

One of the orderlies half rose from his seat. “Marshal?”

“Just getting some water. It’s okay.”

Chuck crossed to the machine, selected a glass, and took a few seconds to decide which nozzle produced milk and which produced water.

As he lifted the nozzle, a thick knob that looked like a metal hoof, Bridget Kearns grabbed Teddy’s notebook and pen. She looked at him, holding him with her eyes, and flipped to a clean page, scribbled something on it, then flipped the cover closed and slid the notebook and pen back to him.

Teddy gave her a quizzical look, but she dropped her eyes and idly caressed her cigarette pack.

Chuck brought the water back and sat down. They watched Bridget drain half the glass and then say, “Thank you. Do you have any more questions? I’m kind of tired.”

“You ever meet a patient named Andrew Laeddis?” Teddy asked.

Her face showed no expression. None whatsoever. It was as if it had turned to alabaster. Her hands stayed flat on the tabletop, as if removing them would cause the table to float to the ceiling.

Teddy had no clue as to why, but he’d swear she was on the verge of weeping.

“No,” she said. “Never heard of him.”

“YOU THINK SHE was coached?” Chuck said.

“Don’t you?”

“Okay, it sounded a little forced.”

They were in the breezeway that connected Ashecliffe to Ward B, impervious to the rain now, the drip of it on their skin.

“A little? She used the exact same words Cawley used in some cases. When we asked what the topic was about in group, she paused and then she said ‘anger management?’ Like she wasn’t sure. Like she was taking a quiz and she’d spent last night cramming.”

“So what’s that mean?”

“Fuck if I know,” Teddy said. “All I got are questions. Every half an hour, it’s like there’re thirty more.”

“Agreed,” Chuck said. “Hey, here’s a question for you—who’s Andrew Laeddis?”

“You caught that, huh?” Teddy lit one of the cigarettes he’d won in poker.

“You asked every patient we talked to.”

“Didn’t ask Ken or Leonora Grant.”

“Teddy, they didn’t know what planet they were on.”

“True.”

“I’m your partner, boss.”

Teddy leaned back against the stone wall and Chuck joined him. He turned his head, looked at Chuck.

“We just met,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t trust me.”

“I trust you, Chuck. I do. But I’m breaking the rules here. I asked for this case specifically. The moment it came over the wire in the field office.”

“So?”

“So my motives aren’t exactly impartial.”

Chuck nodded and lit his own cigarette, took some time to think about it. “My girl, Julie—Julie Taketomi, that’s her name—she’s as American as I am. Doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. Hell, her parents go back two generations in this country. But they put her in a camp and then…” He shook his head and then flicked his cigarette into the rain and pulled up his shirt, exposed the skin over his right hip. “Take a look, Teddy. See my other scar.”

Teddy looked. It was long and dark as jelly, thick as his thumb.

“I didn’t get this one in the war, either. Got it working for the marshals. Went through a door in Tacoma. The guy we were after sliced me with a sword. You believe that? A fucking sword. I spent three weeks in the hospital while they sewed my intestines back together. For the U.S. Marshals Service, Teddy. For my country. And then they run me out of my home district because I’m in love with an American woman with Oriental skin and eyes?” He tucked his shirt back in. “Fuck them.”

“If I didn’t know you better,” Teddy said after a bit, “I’d swear you really love that woman.”

“Die for her,” Chuck said. “No regrets about it, either.”

Teddy nodded. No purer feeling in the world that he knew of.

“Don’t let that go, kid.”

“I won’t, Teddy. That’s the point. But you gotta tell me why we’re here. Who the hell is Andrew Laeddis?”

Teddy dropped the butt of his cigarette to the stone walk and ground it out with his heel.

Dolores, he thought, I’ve got to tell him. I can’t do this alone.

If after all my sins—all my drinking, all the times I left you alone for too long, let you down, broke your heart—if I can ever make up for any of that, this might be the time, the last opportunity I’ll ever have.

I want to do right, honey. I want to atone. You, of all people, would understand that.

“Andrew Laeddis,” he said to Chuck, and the words clogged in his dry throat. He swallowed, got some moisture into his mouth, tried again…

“Andrew Laeddis,” he said, “was the maintenance man in the apartment building where my wife and I lived.”

“Okay.”

“He was also a firebug.”

Chuck took that in, studied Teddy’s face.

“So…”

“Andrew Laeddis,” Teddy said, “lit the match that caused the fire—”

“Holy fuck.”

“—that killed my wife.”

8

TEDDY WALKED OVER to the edge of the breezeway and stuck his head out from under the roof to douse his face and hair. He could see her in the drops. Dissolving on impact.

She hadn’t wanted him to go to work that morning. In that final year of her life, she’d grown inexplicably skittish, prone to insomnia that left her tremor-filled and addled. She’d tickled him after the alarm had gone off, then suggested they close the shutters and block out the day, never leave the bed. When she hugged him, she held on too tightly and for too long, and Teddy could feel the bones in her arms crush into his neck.

As he took his shower, she came to him, but he was too rushed, already late, and as had so often been the case in those days, hungover. His head simultaneously soggy and filled with spikes. Her body like sandpaper when she pressed it against his. The water from the shower as hard as BBs.

“Just stay,” she said. “One day. What difference will one day make?”

He tried to smile as he lifted her gently out of the way and reached for the soap. “Honey, I can’t.”

“Why not?” She ran her hand between his legs. “Here. Give me the soap. I’ll wash it for you.” Her palm sliding under his testicles, her teeth nipping his chest.

He tried not to push her. He gripped her shoulders as gently as he could and lifted her back a step or two. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve really got to go.”

She laughed some more, tried to nuzzle him again, but he could see her eyes growing hard with desperation. To be happy. To not be left alone. To have the old days back—before he worked too much, drank too much, before she woke up one morning and the world seemed too bright, too loud, too cold.

“Okay, okay.” She leaned back so he could see her face as the water bounced off his shoulders and misted her body. “I’ll make a deal with you. Not the whole day, baby. Not the whole day. Just an hour. Just be an hour late.”

“I’m already—”

“One hour,” she said, stroking him again, her hand soapy now. “One hour and then you can go. I want to feel you inside of me.” She raised herself up on her toes to kiss him.

He gave her a quick peck on the lips and said, “Honey, I can’t,” and turned his face to the shower spray.

“Will they call you back up?” she said.

“Huh?”

“To fight.”

“That piss-ant country? Honey, that war will be over before I could lace my boots.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know why we’re there. I mean—”

“Because the NKPA doesn’t get weaponry like that from nowhere, honey. They got it from Stalin. We have to prove that we learned from Munich, that we should have stopped Hitler then, so we’ll stop Stalin and Mao. Now. In Korea.”

“You’d go.”

“If they called me up? I’d have to. But they won’t, honey.”

“How do you know?”

He shampooed his hair.

“You ever wonder why they hate us so much? The Communists?” she said. “Why can’t they leave us alone? The world’s going to blow up and I don’t even know why.”

“It’s not going to blow up.”

“It is. You read the papers and—”

“Stop reading the papers, then.”

Teddy rinsed the shampoo from his hair and she pressed her face to his back and her hands snaked around his abdomen. “I remember the first time I saw you at the Grove. In your uniform.”

Teddy hated when she did this. Memory Lane. She couldn’t adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.

“You were so handsome. And Linda Cox said, ‘I saw him first.’ But you know what I said?”

“I’m late, honey.”

“Why would I say that? No. I said, ‘You might have seen him first, Linda, but I’ll see him last.’ She thought you looked mean up close, but I said, ‘Honey, have you looked in his eyes? There’s nothing mean there.’”

Teddy shut off the shower and turned, noticed that his wife had managed to get some of his soap on her. Smudges of lather splattered her flesh.

“You want me to turn it back on?”

She shook her head.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and shaved at the sink, and Dolores leaned against the wall as the soap dried white on her body and watched him.

“Why don’t you dry off?” Teddy said. “Put a robe on?”

“It’s gone now,” she said.

“It’s not gone. Looks like white leeches stuck all over you.”

“Not the soap,” she said.

“What, then?”

“The Cocoanut Grove. Burned to the ground while you were over there.”

“Yeah, honey, I heard that.”

“Over there,” she sang lightly, trying to lighten the mood. “Over there…”

She’d always had the prettiest voice. The night he’d returned from the war, they’d splurged on a room at the Parker House, and after they’d made love, he heard her sing for the first time from the bathroom as he lay in bed—"Buffalo Girls” with the steam creeping out from under the door.

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?” He caught the reflection of the left side of her body in the mirror. Most of the soap had dried on her skin and something about it annoyed him. It suggested violation in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

“Do you have somebody else?”

“What?”

“Do you?”

“The fuck are you talking about? I work, Dolores.”

“I’m touching your dick in the—”

“Don’t say that word. Jesus Christ.”

“—shower and you don’t even get hard?”

“Dolores.” He turned from the mirror. “You were talking about bombs. The end of the world.”

She shrugged, as if that had no relevance to this current conversation. She propped her foot back against the wall and used a finger to wipe the water off her inner thigh. “You don’t fuck me anymore.”

“Dolores, I’m serious—you don’t talk like that in this house.”

“So I’ve gotta assume you’re fucking her.”

“I’m not fucking anyone, and could you stop saying that word?”

“Which word?” She placed a hand over her dark public hair. “Fucking?”

“Yes.” He raised one hand. He went back to shaving with the other.

“So that’s a bad word?”

“You know it is.” He pulled the razor up his throat, heard the scratch of hairs through the foam.

“So what’s a good word?”

“Huh?” He dipped the razor, shook it.

“What word about my body won’t cause you to make a fist?”

“I didn’t make a fist.”

“You did.”

He finished his throat, wiped the razor on a facecloth. He laid the flat of it below his left sideburn. “No, honey. I didn’t.” He caught her left eye in the mirror.

“What should I say?” She ran one hand through her upper hair and one through her lower. “I mean, you can lick it and you can kiss it and you can fuck it. You can watch a baby come out of it. But you can’t say it?”

“Dolores.”

“Cunt,” she said.

The razor slid so far through Teddy’s skin he suspected it hit jaw bone. It widened his eyes and lit up the entire left side of his face, and then some shaving cream dripped into the wound and eels exploded through his head and the blood poured into the white clouds and water in the sink.

She came to him with a towel, but he pushed her away and sucked air through his teeth and felt the pain burrowing into his eyes, scorching his brain, and he bled into the sink and he felt like crying. Not from the pain. Not from the hangover. But because he didn’t know what was happening to his wife, to the girl he’d first danced with at the Cocoanut Grove. He didn’t know what she was becoming or what the world was becoming with its lesions of tiny, dirty wars and furious hatreds and spies in Washington, in Hollywood, gas masks in schoolhouses, cement bomb shelters in basements. And it was, somehow, all connected—his wife, this world, his drinking, the war he’d fought because he honestly believed it would end all this…

He bled into the sink and Dolores said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he took the towel the second time she offered it but couldn’t touch her, couldn’t look at her. He could hear the tears in her voice and he knew there were tears in her eyes and on her face, and he hated how fucked up and obscene the world and everything in it had become.

IN THE PAPER, he’d been quoted as saying the last thing he told his wife was that he loved her.

A lie.

The last thing he really said?

Reaching for the doorknob, a third towel pressed to his jaw, her eyes searching his face:

“Jesus, Dolores, you’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes—okay?—and get your fucking head right.”

Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He’d closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.

Softer. That would have been nice.

THE WOMAN WITH the licorice scar across her throat came waddling down the breezeway toward them, her ankles and wrists enchained, an orderly on each elbow. She looked happy and made duck sounds and tried to flap her elbows.

“What did she do?” Chuck said.

“This one?” the orderly said. “This here Old Maggie. Maggie Moonpie, we call her. She just going to Hydro. Can’t take no chances with her, though.”

Maggie stopped in front of them, and the orderlies made a halfhearted attempt to keep her moving, but she shoved back with her elbows and dug her heels against the stone, and one of the orderlies rolled his eyes and sighed.

“She gone proselytize now, hear?”

Maggie stared up into their faces, her head cocked to the right and moving like a turtle sniffing its way out of its shell.

“I am the way,” she said. “I am the light. And I will not bake your fucking pies. I will not. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Chuck said.

“You bet,” Teddy said. “No pies.”

“You’ve been here. You’ll stay here.” Maggie sniffed the air. “It’s your future and your past and it cycles like the moon cycles around the earth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She leaned in close and sniffed them. First Teddy, then Chuck.

“They keep secrets. That’s what feeds this hell.”

“Well, that and pies,” Chuck said.

She smiled at him, and for a moment it seemed as if someone lucid entered her body and passed behind her pupils.

“Laugh,” she said to Chuck. “It’s good for the soul. Laugh.”

“Okay,” Chuck said. “I will, ma’am.”

She touched his nose with a hooked finger. “I want to remember you that way—laughing.”

And then she turned away and started walking. The orderlies fell into step and they walked down the breezeway and through a side door into the hospital.

Chuck said, “Fun girl.”

“Kind you’d bring home to Mom.”

“And then she’d kill Mom and bury her in an out-house, but still…” Chuck lit a cigarette. “Laeddis.”

“Killed my wife.”

“You said that. How?”

“He was a firebug.”

“Said that too.”

“He was also the maintenance man in our building. Got in a fight with the owner. The owner fired him. At the time, all we knew was that the fire was arson. Someone had set it. Laeddis was on a list of suspects, but it took them a while to find him, and once they did, he’d shored up an alibi. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was him.”

“What changed your mind?”

“A year ago, I open the paper and there he is. Burned down a schoolhouse where he’d been working. Same story—they fired him and he came back, lit it in the basement, primed the boiler so it would explode. Exact same M.O. Identical. No kids in the schoolhouse, but the principal was there, working late. She died. Laeddis went to trial, claimed he heard voices, what have you, and they committed him to Shattuck. Something happened there—I don’t know what—but he was transferred here six months ago.”

“But no one’s seen him.”

“No one in Ward A or B.”

“Which suggests he’s in C.”

“Yup.”

“Or dead.”

“Possibly. One more reason to find the cemetery.”

“Let’s say he isn’t dead, though.”

“Okay…”

“If you find him, Teddy, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t bullshit me, boss.”

A pair of nurses came toward them, heels clicking, bodies pressed close to the wall to avoid the rain.

“You guys are wet,” one of them said.

“All wet?” Chuck said, and the one closest to the wall, a tiny girl with short black hair, laughed.

Once they’d passed, the black-haired nurse looked back over her shoulder at them. “You marshals always so flirty?”

“Depends,” Chuck said.

“On?”

“Quality of personnel.”

That stopped both of them for a moment, and then they got it, and the black-haired nurse buried her face in the other one’s shoulder, and they burst out laughing and walked to the hospital door.

Christ, how Teddy envied Chuck. His ability to believe in the words he spoke. In silly flirtations. In his easy-GI’s penchant for quick, meaningless wordplay. But most of all for the weightlessness of his charm.

Charm had never come easily to Teddy. After the war, it had come harder still. After Dolores, not at all.

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

“You know,” he said to Chuck, “the last morning I was with my wife, she spoke about the Cocoanut Grove fire.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s where we met. The Grove. She had this rich roommate and I was let in because they gave a serviceman’s discount. It was just before I shipped out. Danced with her all night. Even the foxtrot.”

Chuck craned his neck out from the wall, looked into Teddy’s face. “You doing the foxtrot? I’m trying to picture it, but…”

“Hey, boss,” Teddy said, “if you’d seen my wife that night? You would have hopped around the floor like a bunny if she asked.”

“So you met her at the Cocoanut Grove.”

Teddy nodded. “And then it burned down while I was in—Italy? Yeah, I was in Italy then—and she found that fact, I dunno, meaningful, I guess. She was terrified of fire.”

“But she died in a fire,” Chuck said softly.

“Beats all, don’t it?” Teddy bit back against an image of her from that last morning, lifting her leg against the bathroom wall, naked, her body splattered with dead white foam.

“Teddy?”

Teddy looked at him.

Chuck spread his hands. “I’ll back you on this. No matter what. You want to find Laeddis and kill him? That’s jake with me.”

“Jake.” Teddy smiled. “I haven’t heard that since—”

“But, boss? I need to know what to expect. I’m serious. We got to get our shit straight or we’ll end up in some new Kefauver Hearing or something. Everyone’s looking these days, you know? Looking in at all of us. Watching. World gets smaller every minute.” Chuck pushed back at the stand of bushy hair over his forehead. “I think you know about this place. I think you know shit you haven’t told me. I think you came here to do damage.”

Teddy fluttered a hand over his heart.

“I’m serious, boss.”

Teddy said, “We’re wet.”

“So?”

“My point. Care if we get wetter?”

THEY LEFT THROUGH the gate and walked the shore. The rain blanketed everything. Waves the size of houses hit the rocks. They flared high and then shattered to make way for new ones.

“I don’t want to kill him,” Teddy shouted over the roar.

“No?”

“No.”

“Not sure I believe you.”

Teddy shrugged.

“It was my wife?” Chuck said. “I’d kill him twice.”

“I’m tired of killing,” Teddy said. “In the war? I lost track. How’s that possible, Chuck? But I did.”

“Still. Your wife, Teddy.”

They found an outcropping of sharp, black stones that rose off the beach toward the trees, and they climbed inland.

“Look,” Teddy said once they’d reached a small plateau and a circle of high trees that blocked some of the rain, “I still put the job first. We find what happened to Rachel Solando. And if I meet up with Laeddis while I’m doing it? Great. I’ll tell him I know he killed my wife. I’ll tell him I’ll be waiting on the mainland when he gets released. I’ll tell him free air isn’t something he breathes as long as I’m alive.”

“And that’s all?” Chuck said.

“That’s all.”

Chuck wiped his eyes with his sleeve, pushed his hair off his forehead. “I don’t believe you. I just don’t.”

Teddy looked off to the south of the ring of trees, saw the top of Ashecliffe, its watchful dormers.

“And don’t you think Cawley knows why you’re really here?”

“I’m really here for Rachel Solando.”

“But fuck, Teddy, if the guy who killed your wife was committed here, then—”

“He wasn’t convicted for it. There’s nothing to tie me and him to each other. Nothing.”

Chuck sat down on a stone jutting out of the field, lowered his head to the rain. “The graveyard, then. Why don’t we see if we can find that, now that we’re out here? We see a ‘Laeddis’ headstone, we know half the battle’s over.”

Teddy looked off at the ring of trees, the black depth of them. “Fine.”

Chuck stood. “What did she say to you, by the way?”

“Who?”

“The patient.” Chuck snapped his fingers. “Bridget. She sent me for water. She said something to you, I know it.”

“She didn’t.”

“She didn’t? You’re lying. I know she—”

“She wrote it,” Teddy said and patted the pockets of his trench coat for his notebook.

He found it eventually in his inside pocket and started to flip through it.

Chuck began to whistle and clop his feet into the soft earth in a goose step.

When he reached the page, Teddy said, “Adolf, enough.”

Chuck came over. “You find it?”

Teddy nodded, turned the notebook so that Chuck could see the page, the single word written there, tightly scrawled and already beginning to bleed in the rain:

9

THEY FOUND THE stones about a half mile inland as the sky rushed toward darkness under slate-bottomed clouds. They came over soggy bluffs where the sea grass was lank and slick in the rain, and they were both covered in mud from clawing and stumbling their way up.

A field lay below them, as flat as the undersides of the clouds, bald except for a stray bush or two, some heavy leaves tossed in by the storm, and a multitude of small stones that Teddy initially assumed had come with the leaves, riding the wind. He paused halfway down the far side of the bluff, though, gave them another look.

They were spread across the field in small, tight piles, each pile separated from the one closest to it by about six inches, and Teddy put his hand on Chuck’s shoulder and pointed at them.

“How many piles do you count?”

Chuck said, “What?”

Teddy said, “Those rocks. You see ’em?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re piled separately. How many do you count?”

Chuck gave him a look like the storm had found his head. “They’re rocks.”

“I’m serious.”

Chuck gave him a bit more of that look and then turned his attention to the field. After a minute, he said, “I count ten.”

“Me too.”

The mud gave way under Chuck’s foot and he slipped, flailed back with an arm that Teddy caught and held until Chuck righted himself.

“Can we go down?” Chuck said and gave Teddy a mild grimace of annoyance.

They worked their way down and Teddy went to the stone piles and saw that they formed two lines, one above the other. Some piles were much smaller than others. A few contained only three or four stones while others had more than ten, maybe even twenty.

Teddy walked between the two lines and then stopped and looked over at Chuck and said, “We miscounted.”

“How?”

“Between these two piles here?” Teddy waited for him to join him and then they were looking down at it. “That’s one stone right there. Its own single pile.”

“In this wind? No. It fell from one of the other stacks.”

“It’s equidistant to the other piles. Half a foot to the left of that one, half a foot to the right of that one. And in the next row, the same thing occurs again twice. Single stones.”

“So?”

“So, there’re thirteen piles of rock, Chuck.”

“You think she left this. You really do.”

“I think someone did.”

“Another code.”

Teddy squatted by the rocks. He pulled his trench coat over his head and extended the flaps of it in front of his body to protect his notebook from the rain. He moved sideways like a crab and paused at each pile to count the number of stones and write it down. When he was finished, he had thirteen numbers: 18-1-4-9-5-4-23-1-12-4-19-14-5.

“Maybe it’s a combination,” Chuck said, “for the world’s biggest padlock.”

Teddy closed the notebook and placed it in his pocket. “Good one.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Chuck said. “I’ll be appearing twice nightly in the Catskills. Please come out, won’t you?”

Teddy pulled the trench coat back off his head and stood, and the rain pounded him again and the wind had found its voice.

They walked north with the cliffs off to the right and Ashecliffe shrouded to their left somewhere in the smash of wind and rain. It grew measurably worse in the next half hour, and they pressed their shoulders together in order to hear each other talk and listed like drunks.

“Cawley asked you if you were Army Intelligence. Did you lie to him?”

“I did and I didn’t,” Teddy said. “I received my discharge from regular army.”

“How’d you enter, though?”

“Out of basic, I was sent to radio school.”

“And from there?”

“A crash course at War College and then, yeah, Intel’.”

“So how’d you end up in regulation brown?”

“I fucked up.” Teddy had to shout it against the wind. “I blew a decoding. Enemy position coordinates.”

“How bad?”

Teddy could still hear the noise that had come over the radio. Screams, static, crying, static, machine gun fire followed by more screams and more crying and more static. And a boy’s voice, in the near background of all that noise, saying, “You see where the rest of me went?”

“About half a battalion,” Teddy shouted into the wind. “Served ’em up like meat loaf.”

There was nothing but the gale in his ears for a minute, and then Chuck yelled, “I’m sorry. That’s horrible.”

They crested a knoll and the wind up top nearly blew them back off it, but Teddy gripped Chuck’s elbow and they surged forward, heads down, and they walked that way for some time, bowing their heads and bodies into the wind, and they didn’t even notice the headstones at first. They kept trudging along with the rain filling their eyes and then Teddy bumped into a slate stone that tipped backward and was wrenched from its hole by the wind and lay flat on its back looking up at him.

A tree broke to their left, and the crack of it sounded like an ax through a tin roof, and Chuck yelled, “Jesus Christ,” and parts of the tree were picked up by the wind and shot past their eyes.

They moved into the graveyard with their arms up around their faces and the dirt and leaves and pieces of trees gone alive and electric, and they fell several times, almost blinded by it, and Teddy saw a fat charcoal shape ahead and started pointing, his shouts lost to the wind. A chunk of something passed so close to his head he could feel it kiss his hair and they ran with the wind battering their legs and the earth rising up and chunking against their knees.

A mausoleum. The door was steel but broken at the hinges, and weeds sprouted from the foundation. Teddy pulled the door back and the wind tore into him, banged him to his left with the door, and he fell to the ground and the door rose off its broken lower hinge and yowled and then slammed back against the wall. Teddy slipped in the mud and rose to his feet and the wind battered his shoulders and he dropped to one knee and saw the black doorway facing him and he plunged forward through the muck and crawled inside.

“You ever see anything like this?” Chuck said as they stood in the doorway and watched the island whirl itself into a rage. The wind was thick with dirt and leaves, tree branches and rocks and always the rain, and it squealed like a pack of boar and shredded the earth.

“Never,” Teddy said, and they stepped back from the doorway.

Chuck found a pack of matches that was still dry in the inside pocket of his coat and he lit three at once and tried to block the wind with his body and they saw that the cement slab in the center of the room was empty of a coffin or a body, either moved or stolen in the years since it had been interred. There was a stone bench built into the wall on the other side of the slab, and they walked to it as the matches went out. They sat down and the wind continued to sweep past the doorway and hammer the door against the wall.

“Kinda pretty, though, huh?” Chuck said. “Nature gone crazy, the color of that sky…You see the way that headstone did a backflip?”

“I gave it a nudge, but, yeah, that was impressive.”

“Wow.” Chuck squeezed his pants cuffs until there were puddles under his feet, fluttered his soaked shirt against his chest. “Guess we should have stayed closer to home base. We might have to ride this out. Here.”

Teddy nodded. “I don’t know enough about hurricanes, but I get the feeling it’s just warming up.”

“That wind changes direction? That graveyard’s going to be coming in here.”

“I’d still rather be in here than out there.”

“Sure, but seeking high ground in a hurricane? How fucking smart are we?”

“Not very.”

“It was so fast. One second it was just heavy rain, the next second we’re Dorothy heading to Oz.”

“That was a tornado.”

“Which?”

“In Kansas.”

“Oh.”

The squealing rose in pitch and Teddy could hear the wind find the thick stone wall behind him, pounding on it like fists until he could feel tiny shudders of impact in his back.

“Just warming up,” he repeated.

“What do you suppose all the crazies are doing about now?”

“Screaming back at it,” he said.

They sat silent for a while and each had a cigarette. Teddy was reminded of that day on his father’s boat, of his first realization that nature was indifferent to him and far more powerful, and he pictured the wind as something with a hawk’s face and hooked beak as it swooped over the mausoleum and cawed. An angry thing that turned waves into towers and chewed houses into matchsticks and could lift him in its grasp and throw him to China.

“I was in North Africa in ’forty-two,” Chuck said. “Went through a couple of sandstorms. Nothing like this, though. Then again, you forget. Maybe it was as bad.”

“I can take this,” Teddy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t walk out into what’s going on now, start strolling around, but it beats the cold. The Ardennes, Jesus, your breath froze coming out of your mouth. To this day, I can feel it. So cold my fingers felt like they were on fire. How do you figure that?”

“North Africa, we had the heat. Guys dropping from it. Just standing there one minute, on the deck the next. Guys had coronaries from it. I shot this guy and his skin was so soft from the heat, he actually turned and watched the bullet fly out the other side of his body.” Chuck tapped the bench with his finger. “Watched it fly,” he said softly. “I swear to God.”

“Only guy you ever killed?”

“Up close. You?”

“I was the opposite. Killed a lot, saw most of them.” Teddy leaned his head back against the wall, looked up at the ceiling. “If I ever had a son, I don’t know if I’d let him go to war. Even a war like that where we had no choice. I’m not sure that should be asked of anyone.”

“What?”

“Killing.”

Chuck raised a knee to his chest. “My parents, my girlfriend, some of my friends who couldn’t pass the physical, they all ask, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it like? That’s what they want to know. And you want to say, ‘I don’t know what it was like. It happened to someone else. I was just watching it from above or something.’” He held out his hands. “I can’t explain it any better. Did that make a bit of sense?”

Teddy said, “At Dachau, the SS guards surrendered to us. Five hundred of them. Now there were reporters there, but they’d seen all the bodies piled up at the train station too. They could smell exactly what we were smelling. They looked at us and they wanted us to do what we did. And we sure as hell wanted to do it. So we executed every one of those fucking Krauts. Disarmed them, leaned them against walls, executed them. Machine-gunned over three hundred men at one time. Walked down the line putting bullets into the head of anyone still breathing. A war crime if ever there was one. Right? But, Chuck, that was the least we could have done. Fucking reporters were clapping. The camp prisoners were so happy they were weeping. So we handed a few of the storm troopers over to them. And they tore them to shreds. By the end of that day, we’d removed five hundred souls from the face of the earth. Murdered ’em all. No self-defense, no warfare came into it. It was homicide. And yet, there was no gray area. They deserved so much worse. So, fine—but how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you’ve done this thing? You’ve executed unarmed people? You’ve killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is—You can’t tell ’em. They’ll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you’ll never wash it off.”

After a while, Chuck said, “At least it was for the right reason. You ever look at some of these poor bastards come back from Korea? They still don’t know why they were there. We stopped Adolf. We saved millions of lives. Right? We did something, Teddy.”

“Yeah, we did,” Teddy admitted. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

“It’s gotta be. Right?”

An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns.

“You see that?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ‘Wait a second. This isn’t right.’

“‘I’m supposed to be over there.’

“‘Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.’”

They laughed softly in the dark and watched the island race by like a fever dream.

“So how much do you really know about this place, boss?”

Teddy shrugged. “I know some. Not nearly enough. Enough to scare me.”

“Oh, great. You’re scared. What’s normal mortal supposed to feel, then?”

Teddy smiled. “Abject terror?”

“Okay. Consider me terrified.”

“It’s known as an experimental facility. I told you—radical therapy. Its funding comes partially from the Commonwealth, partially from the Bureau of Federal Penitentiaries, but mostly from a fund set up in ’fifty-one by HUAC.”

“Oh,” Chuck said. “Terrific. Fighting the Commies from an island in Boston Harbor. How does one go about doing that?”

“They experiment on the mind. That’s my guess. Write down what they know, turn it over to Cawley’s old OSS buddies in the CIA maybe. I dunno. You ever heard of phencyclidine?”

Chuck shook his head.

“LSD? Mescaline?”

“Nope and nope.”

“They’re hallucinogens,” Teddy said. “Drugs that cause you to hallucinate.”

“All right.”

“In even minimal doses, strictly sane people—you or I—would start seeing things.”

“Upside-down trees flying past our door?”

“Ah, there’s the rub. If we’re both seeing it, it’s not a hallucination. Everyone sees different things. Say you looked down right now and your arms had turned to cobras and the cobras were rising up, opening their jaws to eat your head?”

“I’d say that would be a hell of a bad day.”

“Or those raindrops turned into flames? A bush became a charging tiger?”

“An even worse day. I should’ve never left the bed. But, hey, you’re saying a drug could make you think shit like that was really happening?”

“Not just ‘could.’ Will. Given the right dosage, you will start to hallucinate.”

“Those are some drugs.”

“Yeah, they are. A lot of these drugs? Their effect is supposedly identical to what it’s like to be a severe schizophrenic. What’s his name, Ken, that guy. The cold in his feet. He believes that. Leonora Grant, she wasn’t seeing you. She was seeing Douglas Fairbanks.”

“Don’t forget—Charlie Chaplin too, my friend.”

“I’d do an imitation, but I don’t know what he sounds like.”

“Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.”

“There have been documented cases of schizophrenics tearing their own faces off because they believed their hands were something else, animals or whatever. They see things that aren’t there, hear voices no one else hears, jump from perfectly sound roofs because they think the building’s on fire, and on and on. Hallucinogens cause similar delusions.”

Chuck pointed a finger at Teddy. “You’re suddenly speaking with a lot more erudition than usual.”

Teddy said, “What can I tell you? I did some homework. Chuck, what do you think would happen if you gave hallucinogens to people with extreme schizophrenia?”

“No one would do that.”

“They do it, and it’s legal. Only humans get schizophrenia. It doesn’t happen to rats or rabbits or cows. So how are you going to test cures for it?”

“On humans.”

“Give that man a cigar.”

“A cigar that’s just a cigar, though, right?”

Teddy said, “If you like.”

Chuck stood and placed his hands on the stone slab, looked out at the storm. “So they’re giving schizophrenics drugs that make them even more schizophrenic?”

“That’s one test group.”

“What’s another?”

“People who don’t have schizophrenia are given hallucinogens to see how their brains react.”

“Bullshit.”

“This is a matter of public record, buddy. Attend a psychiatrists’ convention someday. I have.”

“But you said it’s legal.”

“It’s legal,” Teddy said. “So was eugenics research.”

“But if it’s legal, we can’t do anything about it.”

Teddy leaned into the slab. “No argument. I’m not here to arrest anyone just yet. I was sent to gather information. That’s all.”

“Wait a minute—sent? Christ, Teddy, how fucking deep are we here?”

Teddy sighed, looked over at him. “Deep.”

“Back up.” Chuck held up a hand. “From the top. How’d you get involved in all this?”

“It started with Laeddis. A year ago,” Teddy said. “I went to Shattuck under the pretense of wanting to interview him. I made up a bullshit story about how a known associate of his was wanted on a federal warrant and I thought Laeddis could shed some light on his whereabouts. Thing was, Laeddis wasn’t there. He’d been transferred to Ashecliffe. I call over here, but they claim to have no record of him.”

“And?”

“And that gets me curious. I make some phone calls to some of the psych hospitals in town and everyone is aware of Ashecliffe but no one wants to talk about it. I talk to the warden at Renton Hospital for the Criminally Insane. I’d met him a couple times before and I say, ‘Bobby, what’s the big deal? It’s a hospital and it’s a prison, no different from your place,’ and he shakes his head. He says, ‘Teddy, that place is something else entirely. Something classified. Black bag. Don’t go out there.’”

“But you do,” Chuck said. “And I get assigned to go with you.”

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Teddy said. “Agent in charge tells me I have to take a partner, I take a partner.”

“So you’ve just been waiting for an excuse to come out here?”

“Pretty much,” Teddy said. “And, hell, I couldn’t bet it would ever happen. I mean, even if there was a patient break, I didn’t know if I’d be in town when it happened. Or if someone else would be assigned to it. Or, hell, a million ‘ifs.’ I got lucky.”

“Lucky? Fuck.”

“What?”

“It’s not luck, boss. Luck doesn’t work that way. The world doesn’t work that way. You think you just happened to get assigned to this detail?”

“Sure. Sounds a little crazy, but—”

“When you first called Ashecliffe about Laeddis, did you ID yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Well then—”

“Chuck, it was a full year ago.”

“So? You don’t think they keep tabs? Particularly in the case of a patient they claim to have no record of?”

“Again—twelve months ago.”

“Teddy, Jesus.” Chuck lowered his voice, placed the flats of his palms on the slab, took a long breath. “Let’s say they are doing some bad shit here. What if they’ve been onto you since before you ever stepped foot on this island? What if they brought you here?”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Bullshit? Where’s Rachel Solando? Where’s one shred of evidence that she ever existed? We’ve been shown a picture of a woman and a file anyone could have fabricated.”

“But, Chuck—even if they made her up, even if they staged this whole thing, there’s still no way they could have predicted that I would be assigned to the case.”

“You’ve made inquiries, Teddy. You’ve looked into this place, asked around. They got an electrified fence around a septic processing facility. They got a ward inside a fort. They got under a hundred patients in a facility that could hold three hundred. This place is fucking scary, Teddy. No other hospital wants to talk about it, and that doesn’t tell you something? You got a chief of staff with OSS ties, funding from a slush fund created by HUAC. Everything about this place screams ‘government ops.’ And you’re surprised by the possibility that instead of you looking at them for the past year, they’ve been looking at you?”

“How many times do I have to say it, Chuck: how could they know I’d be assigned to Rachel Solando’s case?”

“Are you fucking thick?”

Teddy straightened, looked down at Chuck.

Chuck held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry. I’m nervous, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All I’m saying, boss, is that they knew you’d jump at any excuse to come here. Your wife’s killer is here. All they had to do was pretend someone escaped. And then they knew you’d pole-vault your way across that harbor if you had to.”

The door ripped free of its sole hinge and smashed back into the doorway, and they watched it hammer the stone and then lift into the air and shoot out above the graveyard and disappear in the sky.

Both of them stared at the doorway, and then Chuck said, “We both saw that, right?”

“They’re using human beings as guinea pigs,” Teddy said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“It terrifies me, Teddy. But how do you know this? You say you were sent to gather information. Who sent you?”

“In our first meeting with Cawley, you heard him ask about the senator?”

“Yeah.”

“Senator Hurly, Democrat, New Hampshire. Heads up a subcommittee on public funding for mental health affairs. He saw what kind of money was being funneled to this place, and he didn’t like it. Now, I’d come across a guy named George Noyce. Noyce spent time here. In Ward C. He was off the island two weeks when he walked into a bar in Attleboro and began stabbing people. Strangers. In jail, he starts talking about dragons in Ward C. His lawyer wants to claim insanity. If ever there was a case for it, it’s this guy. He’s bonkers. But Noyce fires his lawyer, goes in front of the judge, and pleads guilty, pretty much begs to be sent to a prison, any prison, just not a hospital. Takes him about a year in prison, but his mind starts coming back, and eventually, he starts telling stories about Ashecliffe. Stories that sound crazy, but the senator thinks they’re maybe not as crazy as everyone else assumes.”

Chuck sat up on the slab and lit a cigarette, smoked it for a bit as he considered Teddy.

“But how’d the senator know to find you and how’d you both manage to find Noyce?”

For a moment, Teddy thought he saw lights arcing through the eruptions outside.

“It actually worked the other way around. Noyce found me and I found the senator. It was Bobby Farris, the warden at Renton. He called me one morning and asked if I was still interested in Ashecliffe. I said sure, and he told me about this convict down in Dedham who was making all this noise about Ashecliffe. So I go to Dedham a few times, talk to Noyce. Noyce says when he was in college, he got a bit tense one year around exams time. Shouted at a teacher, put his fist through a window in his dorm. He ends up talking to somebody in the psych department. Next thing you know, he agrees to be part of a test so he can make a little pocket change. A year later, he’s out of college, a full-fledged schizophrenic, raving on street corners, seeing things, the whole nine yards.”

“Now this is a kid who started out normal…”

Teddy saw lights again flaring through the storm and he walked nearer to the door, stared out. Lightning? It would make sense, he supposed, but he hadn’t seen any before this.

“Normal as pecan pie. Maybe had some—what do they call it here?—’anger management issues,’ but all in all, perfectly sane. A year later, he’s out of his mind. So he sees this guy in Park Square one day, thinks it’s the professor who first recommended he see someone in the psych department. Long story short—it ain’t, but Noyce fucks him up pretty bad. Gets sent to Ashecliffe. Ward A. But he’s not there long. He’s a pretty violent guy by this time, and they send him to Ward C. They fill him up with hallucinogens and they step back and watch as the dragons come to eat him and he goes crazy. A little crazier than they hoped, I guess, because in the end, just to calm him down, they performed surgery.”

“Surgery,” Chuck said.

Teddy nodded. “A transorbital lobotomy. Those are fun, Chuck. They zap you with electroshock and then they go in through your eye with, get this, an ice pick. I’m not kidding. No anesthesia. They poke around here and there and take a few nerve fibers out of your brain, and then that’s it, it’s over. Piece of cake.”

Chuck said, “The Nuremberg Code prohibits—”

“—experimenting on humans purely in the interest of science, yes. I thought we had a case based on Nuremberg too. So did the senator. No go. Experimentation is allowable if it’s used to directly attack a patient’s malady. So as long as a doctor can say, ‘Hey, we’re just trying to help the poor bastard, see if these drugs can induce schizophrenia and these drugs over here can stop it’—then they’re legally in the clear.”

“Wait a second, wait a second,” Chuck said. “You said this Noyce had a trans, um—”

“A transorbital lobotomy, yeah.”

“But if the point of that, however medieval, is to calm someone down, how’s he manage to go fuck some guy up in Park Square?”

“Obviously, it didn’t take.”

“Is that common?”

Teddy saw the arcing lights again, and this time he was pretty sure he could hear the whine of an engine behind all that squealing.

“Marshals!” The voice was weak on the wind, but they both heard it.

Chuck swung his legs over the end of the slab and jumped off and joined Teddy at the doorway and they could see headlights at the far end of the cemetery and they heard the squawk of a megaphone and a screech of feedback and then:

“Marshals! If you are out here, please signal us. This is Deputy Warden McPherson. Marshals!”

Teddy said, “How about that? They found us.”

“It’s an island, boss. They’ll always find us.”

Teddy met Chuck’s eyes and nodded. For the first time since they’d met, he could see fear in Chuck’s eyes, his jaw trying to tighten against it.

“It’s going to be okay, partner.”

“Marshals! Are you out here?”

Chuck said, “I don’t know.”

“I do,” Teddy said, though he didn’t. “Stick with me. We’re walking out of this fucking place, Chuck. Make no mistake about it.”

And they stepped out of the doorway and into the cemetery. The wind hit their bodies like a team of linemen but they stayed on their feet, locking arms and gripping the other’s shoulder as they stumbled toward the light.

10

“ARE YOU FUCKING crazy?”

This from McPherson, shouting into the wind, as the jeep hurtled down a makeshift trail along the western edge of the cemetery.

He was in the passenger seat, looking back at them with red eyes, all vestiges of Texas country boy charm washed away in the storm. The driver hadn’t been introduced to them. Young kid, lean face, and pointed chin were about all Teddy could make out under the hood of his rain slicker. Drove that jeep like a professional, though, tearing through scrub brush and the storm’s debris like it wasn’t even there.

“This has just been upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane. Winds are coming in at around a hundred miles an hour right now. By midnight, they’re expected to hit a hundred fifty. And you guys go strolling off in it?”

“How do you know it was upgraded?” Teddy said.

“Ham radio, Marshal. We expect to lose that within a couple of hours too.”

“Of course,” Teddy said.

“We could have been shoring up the compound right now, but instead we were looking for you.” He slapped the back of his seat, then turned forward, done with them.

The jeep bounced over a rise and for a moment Teddy saw only sky, felt nothing underneath the wheels, and then the tires hit dirt and they spun through a sharp curve that dipped steeply with the trail and Teddy could see the ocean off their left, the water churning with explosions that bloomed white and wide like mushroom clouds.

The jeep tore down through a rise of small hills and then burst into a stand of trees, Teddy and Chuck holding on to the seats as they banged off each other in the back, and then the trees were behind them and they were facing the back of Cawley’s mansion, crossing a quarter acre of wood chips and pine needles before they hit the access road and the driver pushed out of low gear and roared toward the main gate.

“We’re taking you to see Dr. Cawley,” McPherson said, looking back at them. “He just can’t wait to talk to you guys.”

“And here I thought my mother was back in Seattle,” Chuck said.

THEY SHOWERED IN the basement of the staff dormitory and were given clothes from the orderlies’ stockpile. Their own clothes were sent to the hospital laundry, and Chuck combed his hair back in the bathroom and looked at his white shirt and white pants and said, “Would you like to see a wine list? Our special tonight is beef Wellington. It’s quite good.”

Trey Washington stuck his head in the bathroom. He seemed to be biting back on a smile as he appraised their new clothes and then he said, “I’m to bring you to Dr. Cawley.”

“How much trouble we in?”

“Oh, a bit, I’d expect.”

“GENTLEMEN,” CAWLEY SAID as they entered the room, “good to see you.”

He seemed in a magnanimous mood, his eyes bright, and Teddy and Chuck left Trey at the door as they entered a boardroom on the top floor of the hospital.

The room was filled with doctors, some in white lab coats, some in suits, all sitting around a long teak table with green-shaded banker’s lamps in front of their chairs and dark ashtrays that smoldered with cigarettes or cigars, the sole pipe belonging to Naehring, who sat at the head of the table.

“Doctors, these are the federal marshals we discussed. Marshals Daniels and Aule.”

“Where are your clothes?” one man asked.

“Good question,” Cawley said, enjoying the hell out of this, in Teddy’s opinion.

“We were out in the storm,” Teddy said.

“Out in that?” The doctor pointed at the tall windows. They’d been crisscrossed with heavy tape and they seemed to breathe slightly, exhaling into the room. The panes drummed with fingertips of rain, and the entire building creaked under the press of wind.

“Afraid so,” Chuck said.

“If you could take a seat, gentlemen,” Naehring said. “We’re just finishing up.”

They found two seats at the end of the table.

“John,” Naehring said to Cawley, “we need a consensus on this.”

“You know where I stand.”

“And I think we all respect that, but if neuroleptics can provide the necessary decrease in five-HT imbalances of serotonin, then I don’t feel we have much choice. We have to continue the research. This first test patient, this, uh, Doris Walsh, fits all the criteria. I don’t see a problem there.”

“I’m just worried about the cost.”

“Far less than surgery and you know that.”

“I’m talking about the damage risks to the basal ganglia and the cerebral cortex. I’m talking about early studies in Europe that have shown risks of neurological disruption similar to those caused by encephalitis and strokes.”

Naehring dismissed the objection with a raised hand. “All those in favor of Dr. Brotigan’s request, please raise your hands.”

Teddy watched every hand at the table except Cawley’s and one other man’s hit the air.

“I’d say that’s a consensus,” Naehring said. “We’ll petition the board, then, for funding on Dr. Brotigan’s research.”

A young guy, must have been Brotigan, gave a nod of thanks to each end of the table. Lantern-jawed, all-American, smooth-cheeked. He struck Teddy as the kind of guy who needed watching, too secure in his own fulfillment of his parents’ wildest dreams.

“Well, then,” Naehring said and closed the binder in front of him as he looked down the table at Teddy and Chuck, “how are things, Marshals?”

Cawley rose from his seat and fixed a cup of coffee for himself at the sideboard. “Rumor has it you were both found in a mausoleum.”

There were several soft chuckles from the table, doctors raising fists to mouths.

“You know a better place to sit out a hurricane?” Chuck said.

Cawley said, “Here. Preferably in the basement.”

“We hear it may hit land at a hundred fifty miles an hour.”

Cawley nodded, his back to the room. “This morning, Newport, Rhode Island, lost thirty percent of its homes.”

Chuck said, “Not the Vanderbilts, I pray.”

Cawley took his seat. “Provincetown and Truro got hit this afternoon. No one knows how bad because the roads are out and so is radio communication. But it looks to be heading right at us.”

“Worst storm to hit the eastern seaboard in thirty years,” one of the doctors said.

“Turns the air to pure static electricity,” Cawley said. “That’s why the switchboard went to hell last night. That’s why the radios have been so-so at best. If it gives us a direct hit, I don’t know what’s going to be left standing.”

“Which is why,” Naehring said, “I repeat my insistence that all Blue Zone patients be placed in manual restraints.”

“Blue Zone?” Teddy said.

“Ward C,” Cawley said. “Patients who have been deemed a danger to themselves, this institution, and the general public at large.” He turned to Naehring. “We can’t do that. If that facility floods, they’ll drown. You know that.”

“It would take a lot of flooding.”

“We’re in the ocean. About to get hit with hurricane winds of a hundred and fifty miles per hour. A ‘lot of flooding’ seems distinctly possible. We double up the guards. We account for every Blue Zone patient at all times. No exceptions. But we cannot lock them to their beds. They’re already locked down in cells, for Christ’s sake. It’s overkill.”

“It’s a gamble, John.” This was said quietly by a brown-haired man in the middle of the table. Along with Cawley, he’d been the only abstaining vote on whatever they’d been discussing when Teddy and Chuck first entered. He clicked a ballpoint pen repeatedly and his gaze was given to the tabletop, but Teddy could tell from his tone that he was friends with Cawley. “It’s a real gamble. Let’s say the power fails.”

“There’s a backup generator.”

“And if that goes? Those cells will open.”

“It’s an island,” Cawley said. “Where’s anyone going to go? It’s not like they can catch a ferry, scoot over to Boston, and wreak havoc. If they’re in manual restraints and that facility floods, gentlemen, they’ll all die. That’s twenty-four human beings. If, god forbid, anything happens in the compound? To the other forty-two? I mean, good Christ. Can you live with that? I can’t.”

Cawley looked up and down the table, and Teddy suddenly felt a capacity for compassion coming from him that he’d barely sensed before. He had no idea why Cawley had allowed them into this meeting, but he was starting to think the man didn’t have many friends in the room.

“Doctor,” Teddy said, “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Not at all, Marshal. We brought you here.”

Teddy almost said: no kidding?

“When we spoke this morning about Rachel Solando’s code—”

“Everyone’s familiar with what the marshal’s talking about?”

“The Law of Four,” Brotigan said with a smile Teddy wanted to take a pair of pliers to. “I just love that.”

Teddy said, “When we talked this morning you said you had no theories about the final clue.”

“’Who is sixty-seven?’” Naehring said. “Yes?”

Teddy nodded and then leaned back in his chair, waiting.

He found everyone looking back down the table at him, baffled.

“You honestly don’t see it,” Teddy said.

“See what, Marshal?” This from Cawley’s friend, and Teddy took a look at his lab coat, saw that his name was Miller.

“You have sixty-six patients here.”

They stared back at him like birthday-party children waiting for the clown’s next bouquet.

“Forty-two patients, combined, in Wards A and B. Twenty-four in Ward C. That’s sixty-six.”

Teddy could see the realization dawn on a few faces, but the majority still looked dumbfounded.

“Sixty-six patients,” Teddy said. “That suggests that the answer to ‘Who is sixty-seven?’ is that there’s a sixty-seventh patient here.”

Silence. Several of the doctors looked across the table at one another.

“I don’t follow,” Naehring said eventually.

“What’s not to follow? Rachel Solando was suggesting that there’s a sixty-seventh patient.”

“But there isn’t,” Cawley said, his hands held out in front of him on the table. “It’s a great idea, Marshal, and it would certainly crack the code if it were true. But two plus two never equals five even if you want it to. If there are only sixty-six patients on the island, then the question referring to a sixty-seventh is moot. You see what I mean?”

“No,” Teddy said, keeping his voice calm. “I’m not quite with you on this one.”

Cawley seemed to choose his words carefully before he spoke, as if picking the simplest ones. “If, say, this hurricane weren’t going on, we would have received two new patients this morning. That would put our total at sixty-eight. If a patient, God forbid, died in his sleep last night, that would put our total at sixty-five. The total can change day by day, week by week, depending on a number of variables.”

“But,” Teddy said, “as of the night Miss Solando wrote her code…”

“There were sixty-six, including her. I’ll grant you that, Marshal. But that’s still one short of sixty-seven, isn’t it? You’re trying to put a round peg into a square hole.”

“But that was her point.”

“I realize that, yes. But her point was fallacious. There is no sixty-seventh patient here.”

“Would you permit my partner and me to go through the patient files?”

That brought a round of frowns and offended looks from the table.

“Absolutely not,” Naehring said.

“We can’t do that, Marshal. I’m sorry.”

Teddy lowered his head for a minute, looked at his silly white shirt and matching pants. He looked like a soda jerk. Probably appeared as authoritative. Maybe he should serve scoops of ice cream to the room, see if he could get to them that way.

“We can’t access your staff files. We can’t access your patient files. How are we supposed to find your missing patient, gentlemen?”

Naehring leaned back in his chair, cocked his head.

Cawley’s arm froze, a cigarette half lifted to his lips.

Several of the doctors whispered to one another.

Teddy looked at Chuck.

Chuck whispered, “Don’t look at me. I’m baffled.”

Cawley said, “The warden didn’t tell you?”

“We’ve never spoken to the warden. We were picked up by McPherson.”

“Oh,” Cawley said, “my goodness.”

“What?”

Cawley looked around at the other doctors, his eyes wide.

“What?” Teddy repeated.

Cawley let a rush of air out of his mouth and looked back down the table at them.

“We found her.”

“You what?”

Cawley nodded and took a drag off his cigarette. “Rachel Solando. We found her this afternoon. She’s here, gentlemen. Right out that door and down the hall.”

Teddy and Chuck both looked over their shoulders at the door.

“You can rest now, Marshals. Your quest is over.”

11

CAWLEY AND NAEHRING led them down a black-and-white-tiled corridor and through a set of double doors into the main hospital ward. They passed a nurses’ station on their left and turned right into a large room with long fluorescent bulbs and U-shaped curtain rods hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and there she was, sitting up on a bed in a pale green smock that ended just above her knees, her dark hair freshly washed and combed back off her forehead.

“Rachel,” Cawley said, “we’ve dropped by with some friends. I hope you don’t mind.”

She smoothed the hem of the smock under her thighs and looked at Teddy and Chuck with a child’s air of expectation.

There wasn’t mark on her.

Her skin was the color of sandstone. Her face and arms and legs were unblemished. Her feet were bare, and the skin was free of scratches, untouched by branches or thorns or rocks.

“How can I help you?” she asked Teddy.

“Miss Solando, we came here to—”

“Sell something?”

“Ma’am?”

“You’re not here to sell something, I hope. I don’t want to be rude, but my husband makes all those decisions.”

“No, ma’am. We’re not here to sell anything.”

“Well, that’s fine, then. What can I do for you?”

“Could you tell me where you were yesterday?”

“I was here. I was home.” She looked at Cawley. “Who are these men?”

Cawley said, “They’re police officers, Rachel.”

“Did something happen to Jim?”

“No,” Cawley said. “No, no. Jim’s fine.”

“Not the children.” She looked around. “They’re right out in the yard. They didn’t get into any mischief, did they?”

Teddy said, “Miss Solando, no. Your children aren’t in any trouble. Your husband’s fine.” He caught Cawley’s eye and Cawley nodded in approval. “We just, um, we heard there was a known subversive in the area yesterday. He was seen on your street passing out Communist literature.”

“Oh, dear Lord, no. To children?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“But in this neighborhood? On this street?”

Teddy said, “I’m afraid so, ma’am. I was hoping you could account for your whereabouts yesterday so we’d know if you ever crossed paths with the gentleman in question.”

“Are you accusing me of being a Communist?” Her back came off the pillows and she bunched the sheet in her fists.

Cawley gave Teddy a look that said: You dug the hole. You dig your way out.

“A Communist, ma’am? You? What man in his right mind would think that? You’re as American as Betty Grable. Only a blind man could miss that.”

She unclenched one hand from the sheet, rubbed her kneecap with it. “But I don’t look like Betty Grable.”

“Only in your obvious patriotism. No, I’d say you look more like Teresa Wright, ma’am. What was that one she did with Joseph Cotton, ten—twelve years ago?”

“Shadow of a Doubt. I’ve heard that,” she said, and her smile managed to be gracious and sensual at the same time. “Jim fought in that war. He came home and said the world was free now because Americans fought for it and the whole world saw that the American way was the only way.”

“Amen,” Teddy said. “I fought in that war too.”

“Did you know my Jim?”

“’Fraid not, ma’am. I’m sure he’s a fine man. Army?”

She crinkled her nose at that. “Marines.”

“Semper fi,” Teddy said. “Miss Solando, it’s important we know every move this subversive made yesterday. Now you might not have even seen him. He’s a sneaky one. So we need to know what you did so that we can match that against what we know about where he was, so we can see if you two may have ever passed each other.”

“Like ships in the night?”

“Exactly. So you understand?”

“Oh, I do.” She sat up on the bed and tucked her legs underneath her, and Teddy felt her movements in his stomach and groin.

“So if you could walk me through your day,” he said.

“Well, let’s see. I made Jim and the children their breakfast and then I packed Jim’s lunch and Jim left, and then I sent the children off to school and then I decided to take a long swim in the lake.”

“You do that often?”

“No,” she said, leaning forward and laughing, as if he’d made a pass at her. “I just, I don’t know, I felt a little kooky. You know how you do sometimes? You just feel a little kooky?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s how I felt. So I took off all my clothes and swam in the lake until my arms and legs were like logs, they were so heavy, and then I came out and dried off and put my clothes right back on and took a long walk along the shore. And I skipped some stones and built several small sand castles. Little ones.”

“You remember how many?” Teddy asked and felt Cawley staring at him.

She thought about it, eyes tilted toward the ceiling. “I do.”

“How many?”

“Thirteen.”

“That’s quite a few.”

“Some were very small,” she said. “Teacup-size.”

“And then what did you do?”

“I thought about you,” she said.

Teddy saw Naehring glance over at Cawley from the other side of the bed. Teddy caught Naehring’s eye, and Naehring held up his hands, as surprised as anyone.

“Why me?” Teddy said.

Her smile exposed white teeth that were nearly clamped together except for a tiny red tip of tongue pressed in between. “Because you’re my Jim, silly. You’re my soldier.” She rose on her knees and reached out and took Teddy’s hand in hers, caressed it. “So rough. I love your calluses. I love the bump of them on my skin. I miss you, Jim. You’re never home.”

“I work a lot,” Teddy said.

“Sit.” She tugged his arm.

Cawley nudged him forward with a glance, so Teddy allowed himself to be led to the bed. He sat beside her. Whatever had caused that howl in her eyes in the photograph had fled from her, at least temporarily, and it was impossible, sitting this close, not to be fully aware of how beautiful she was. The overall impression she gave was liquid—dark eyes that shone with a gaze as clear as water, languid uncoilings of her body that made her limbs appear to swim through air, a face that was softly overripe in the lips and chin.

“You work too much,” she said and ran her fingers over the space just below his throat, as if she were smoothing a kink in the knot of his tie.

“Gotta bring home the bacon,” Teddy said.

“Oh, we’re fine,” she said, and he could feel her breath on his neck. “We’ve got enough to get by.”

“For now,” Teddy said. “I’m thinking about the future.”

“Never seen it,” Rachel said. “’Member what my poppa used to say?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

She combed the hair along his temple with her fingers. “’Future’s something you put on layaway,’ he’d say. ‘I pay cash.’” She gave him a soft giggle and leaned in so close that he could feel her breasts against the back of his shoulder. “No, baby, we’ve got to live for today. The here and now.”

It was something Dolores used to say. And the lips and hair were both similar, enough so that if Rachel’s face got much closer, he could be forgiven for thinking he was talking to Dolores. They even had the same tremulous sensuality, Teddy never sure—even after all their years together—if his wife was even aware of its effect.

He tried to remember what he was supposed to ask her. He knew he was supposed to get her back on track. Have her tell him about her day yesterday, that was it, what happened after she walked the shore and built the castles.

“What did you do after you walked the lake?” he said.

“You know what I did.”

“No.”

“Oh, you want to hear me say it? Is that it?”

She leaned in so that her face was slightly below his, those dark eyes staring up, and the air that escaped her mouth climbed into his.

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t.”

“Liar.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re not. If you forgot that, James Solando, you are in for some trouble.”

“So, tell me,” Teddy whispered.

“You just want to hear it.”

“I just want to hear it.”

She ran her palm down his cheekbone and along his chin, and her voice was thicker when she spoke:

“I came back still wet from the lake and you licked me dry.”

Teddy placed his hands on her face before she could close the distance between them. His fingers slid back along her temples, and he could feel the dampness from her hair against his thumbs and he looked into her eyes.

“Tell me what else you did yesterday,” he whispered, and he saw something fighting against the water-clarity in her eyes. Fear, he was pretty sure. And then it sprouted onto her upper lip and the skin between her eyebrows. He could feel tremors in her flesh.

She searched his face and her eyes widened and widened and flicked from side to side in their sockets.

“I buried you,” she said.

“No, I’m right here.”

“I buried you. In an empty casket because your body was blown all over the North Atlantic. I buried your dog tags because that’s all they could find. Your body, your beautiful body, that was burned up and eaten by sharks.”

“Rachel,” Cawley said.

“Like meat,” she said.

“No,” Teddy said.

“Like black meat, burned beyond tenderness.”

“No, that wasn’t me.”

“They killed Jim. My Jim’s dead. So who the fuck are you?”

She wrenched from his grip and crawled up the bed to the wall and then turned to look back at him.

“Who the fuck is that?” She pointed at Teddy and spit at him.

Teddy couldn’t move. He stared at her, at the rage filling her eyes like a wave.

“You were going to fuck me, sailor? Is that it? Put your dick inside me while my children played in the yard? Was that your plan? You get the hell out of here! You hear me? You get the hell out of—”

She lunged for him, one hand raised over her head, and Teddy jumped from the bed and two orderlies swooped past him with thick leather belts draped over their shoulders and caught Rachel under the arms and flipped her back onto the bed.

Teddy could feel the shakes in his body, the sweat springing from his pores, and Rachel’s voice blew up through the ward:

“You rapist! You cruel fucking rapist! My husband will come and cut your throat open! You hear me? He will cut your fucking head off and we’ll drink the blood! We’ll bathe ourselves in it, you sick fucking bastard!”

One orderly lay across her chest and the other one grasped her ankles in a massive hand and they slid the belts through metal slots in the bedrails and crossed them over Rachel’s chest and ankles and pulled them through slots on the other side, pulled them taut and then slid the flaps through buckles, and the buckles made a snap as they locked, and the orderlies stepped back.

“Rachel,” Cawley said, his voice gentle, paternal.

“You’re all fucking rapists. Where are my babies? Where are my babies? You give me back my babies, you sick sons-a-bitches! You give me my babies!”

She let loose a scream that rode up Teddy’s spine like a bullet, and she surged against her restraints so hard the gurney rails clattered, and Cawley said, “We’ll come check on you later, Rachel.”

She spit at him and Teddy heard it hit the floor and then she screamed again and there was blood on her lip from where she must have bitten it, and Cawley nodded at them and started walking and they fell into step behind him, Teddy looking back over his shoulder to see Rachel watching him, looking him right in the eye as she arched her shoulders off the mattress and the cords in her neck bulged and her lips were slick with blood and spittle as she shrieked at him, shrieked like she’d seen all the century’s dead climb through her window and walk toward her bed.

CAWLEY HAD A bar in his office, and he went to it as soon as they entered, crossing to the right, and that’s where Teddy lost him for a moment. He vanished behind a film of white gauze, and Teddy thought:

No, not now. Not now, for Christ’s sake.

“Where’d you find her?” Teddy said.

“On the beach near the lighthouse. Skipping stones into the ocean.”

Cawley reappeared, but only because Teddy shifted his head to the left as Cawley continued on to the right. As Teddy turned his head, the gauze covered a built-in bookcase and then the window. He rubbed his right eye, hoping against all evidence, but it did no good, and then he felt it along the left side of his head—a canyon filled with lava cut through the skull just below the part in his hair. He’d thought it was Rachel’s screams in there, the furious noise, but it was more than that, and the pain erupted like a dozen dagger points pushed slowly into his cranium, and he winced and raised his fingers to his temple.

“Marshal?” He looked up to see Cawley on the other side of his desk, a ghostly blur to his left.

“Yeah?” Teddy managed.

“You’re deathly pale.”

“You okay, boss?” Chuck was beside him suddenly.

“Fine,” Teddy managed, and Cawley placed his scotch glass down on the desk, and the sound of it was like a shotgun report.

“Sit down,” Cawley said.

“I’m okay,” Teddy said, but the words made their way down from his brain to his tongue on a spiked ladder.

Cawley’s bones cracked like burning wood as he leaned against the desk in front of Teddy. “Migraine?”

Teddy looked up at the blur of him. He would have nodded, but past experience had taught him never to nod during one of these. “Yeah,” he managed.

“I could tell by the way you’re rubbing your temple.”

“Oh.”

“You get them often?”

“Half-dozen…” Teddy’s mouth dried up and he took a few seconds to work some moisture back into his tongue. “…times a year.”

“You’re lucky,” Cawley said. “In one respect anyway.”

“How’s that?”

“A lot of migraine sufferers get cluster migraines once a week or so.” His body made that burning-wood sound again as he came off the desk and Teddy heard him unlock a cabinet.

“What do you get?” he asked Teddy. “Partial vision loss, dry mouth, fire in the head?”

“Bingo.”

“All the centuries we’ve studied the brain, and no one has a clue where they come from. Can you believe that? We know they attack the parietal lobe usually. We know they cause a clotting of the blood. It’s infinitesimal as these things go, but have it occur in something as delicate and small as the brain, and you will get explosions. All this time, though, all this study, and we know no more about the cause or much of the long-term effects than we do about how to stop the common cold.”

Cawley handed him a glass of water and put two yellow pills in his hand. “These should do the trick. Knock you out for an hour or two, but when you come to, you should be fine. Clear as a bell.”

Teddy looked down at the yellow pills, the glass of water that hung in a precarious grip.

He looked up at Cawley, tried to concentrate with his good eye because the man was bathed in a light so white and harsh that it flew off his shoulders and arms in shafts.

Whatever you do, a voice started to say in Teddy’s head…

Fingernails pried open the left side of his skull and poured a shaker of thumbtacks in there, and Teddy hissed as he sucked his breath in.

“Jesus, boss.”

“He’ll be fine, Marshal.”

The voice tried again: Whatever you do, Teddy…

Someone hammered a steel rod through the field of thumbtacks, and Teddy pressed the back of his hand to his good eye as tears shot from it and his stomach lurched.

…don’t take those pills.

His stomach went fully south, sliding across into his right hip as flames licked the sides of the fissure in his head, and if it got any worse, he was pretty sure he’d bite straight through his tongue.

Don’t take those fucking pills, the voice screamed, running back and forth down the burning canyon, waving a flag, rallying the troops.

Teddy lowered his head and vomited onto the floor.

“Boss, boss. You okay?”

“My, my,” Cawley said. “You do get it bad.”

Teddy raised his head.

Don’t…

His cheeks were wet with his own tears.

…take…

Someone had inserted a blade lengthwise into the canyon now.

…those…

The blade had begun to saw back and forth.

…pills.

Teddy gritted his teeth, felt his stomach surge again. He tried to concentrate on the glass in his hand, noticed something odd on his thumb, and decided it was the migraine playing tricks with his perception.

don’ttakethosepills.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel’s screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head—

don’ttakethosefuckingpills

—and he slapped his palm up to his mouth and felt the pills fly back in there and he chased them with water and swallowed, felt them slide down his esophagus and he gulped from the glass until it was empty.

“You’re going to thank me,” Cawley said.

Chuck was beside him again and he handed Teddy a handkerchief and Teddy wiped his forehead with it and then his mouth and then he dropped it to the floor.

Cawley said, “Help me get him up, Marshal.”

They lifted Teddy out of the chair and turned him and he could see a black door in front of him.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Cawley said, “but there’s a room through there where I steal my naps sometimes. Oh, okay, once a day. We’re going to put you in there, Marshal, and you’ll sleep this off. Two hours from now, you’ll be fit as a fiddle.”

Teddy saw his hands draping off their shoulders. They looked funny—his hands hanging like that just over his sternum. And the thumbs, they both had that optical illusion on them. What the fuck was it? He wished he could scratch the skin, but Cawley was opening the door now, and Teddy took one last look at the smudges on both thumbs.

Black smudges.

Shoe polish, he thought as they led him into the dark room.

How the hell did I get shoe polish on my thumbs?

12

THEY WERE THE worst dreams he’d ever had.

They began with Teddy walking through the streets of Hull, streets he had walked countless times from childhood to manhood. He passed his old schoolhouse. He passed the small variety store where he’d bought gum and cream sodas. He passed the Dickerson house and the Pakaski house, the Murrays, the Boyds, the Vernons, the Constantines. But no one was home. No one was anywhere. It was empty, the entire town. And dead quiet. He couldn’t even hear the ocean, and you could always hear the ocean in Hull.

It was terrible—his town, and everyone gone. He sat down on the seawall along Ocean Avenue and searched the empty beach and he sat and waited but no one came. They were all dead, he realized, long dead and long gone. He was a ghost, come back through the centuries to his ghost town. It wasn’t here any longer. He wasn’t here any longer. There was no here.

He found himself in a great marble hall next, and it was filled with people and gurneys and red IV bags and he immediately felt better. No matter where this was, he wasn’t alone. Three children—two boys and a girl—crossed in front of him. All three wore hospital smocks, and the girl was afraid. She clutched her brothers’ hands. She said, “She’s here. She’ll find us.”

Andrew Laeddis leaned in and lit Teddy’s cigarette. “Hey, no hard feelings, right, buddy?”

Laeddis was a grim specimen of humanity—a gnarled cord of a body, a gangly head with a jutting chin that was twice as long as it should have been, misshapen teeth, sprouts of blond hair on a scabby, pink skull—but Teddy was glad to see him. He was the only one he knew in the room.

“Got me a bottle,” Laeddis said, “if you want to have a toot later.” He winked at Teddy and clapped his back and turned into Chuck and that seemed perfectly normal.

“We’ve gotta go,” Chuck said. “Clock’s ticking away here, my friend.”

Teddy said, “My town’s empty. Not a soul.”

And he broke into a run because there she was, Rachel Solando, shrieking as she ran through the ballroom with a cleaver. Before Teddy could reach her, she’d tackled the three children, and the cleaver went up and down and up and down, and Teddy froze, oddly fascinated, knowing there was nothing he could do at this point, those kids were dead.

Rachel looked up at him. Her face and neck were speckled with blood. She said, “Give me a hand.”

Teddy said, “What? I could get in trouble.”

She said, “Give me a hand and I’ll be Dolores. I’ll be your wife. She’ll come back to you.”

So he said, “Sure, you bet,” and helped her. They lifted all three children at once somehow and carried them out through the back door and down to the lake and they carried them into the water. They didn’t throw them. They were gentle. They lay them on the water and the children sank. One of the boys rose back up, a hand flailing, and Rachel said, “It’s okay. He can’t swim.”

They stood on the shore and watched the boy sink, and she put her arm around Teddy’s waist and said, “You’ll be my Jim. I’ll be your Dolores. We’ll make new babies.”

That seemed a perfectly just solution, and Teddy wondered why he’d never thought of it before.

He followed her back into Ashecliffe and they met up with Chuck and the three of them walked down a long corridor that stretched for a mile. Teddy told Chuck: “She’s taking me to Dolores. I’m going home, buddy.”

“That’s great!” Chuck said. “I’m glad. I’m never getting off this island.”

“No?”

“No, but it’s okay, boss. It really is. I belong here. This is my home.”

Teddy said, “My home is Rachel.”

“Dolores, you mean.”

“Right, right. What did I say?”

“You said Rachel.”

“Oh. Sorry about that. You really think you belong here?”

Chuck nodded. “I’ve never left. I’m never going to leave. I mean, look at my hands, boss.”

Teddy looked at them. They looked perfectly fine to him. He said as much.

Chuck shook his head. “They don’t fit. Sometimes the fingers turn into mice.”

“Well, then I’m glad you’re home.”

“Thanks, boss.” He slapped his back and turned into Cawley and Rachel had somehow gotten far ahead of them and Teddy started walking double-time.

Cawley said, “You can’t love a woman who killed her children.”

“I can,” Teddy said, walking faster. “You just don’t understand.”

“What?” Cawley wasn’t moving his legs, but he was keeping pace with Teddy just the same, gliding. “What don’t I understand?”

“I can’t be alone. I can’t face that. Not in this fucking world. I need her. She’s my Dolores.”

“She’s Rachel.”

“I know that. But we’ve got a deal. She’ll be my Dolores. I’ll be her Jim. It’s a good deal.”

“Uh-oh,” Cawley said.

The three children came running back down the corridor toward them. They were soaking wet and they were screaming their little heads off.

“What kind of mother does that?” Cawley said.

Teddy watched the children run in place. They’d gotten past him and Cawley, and then the air changed or something because they ran and ran but never moved forward.

“Kills her kids?” Cawley said.

“She didn’t mean to,” Teddy said. “She’s just scared.”

“Like me?” Cawley said, but he wasn’t Cawley anymore. He was Peter Breene. “She’s scared, so she kills her kids and that makes it okay?”

“No. I mean, yes. I don’t like you, Peter.”

“What’re you going to do about it?”

Teddy placed his service revolver to Peter’s temple.

“You know how many people I’ve executed?” Teddy said, and there were tears streaming down his face.

“Well, don’t,” Peter said. “Please.”

Teddy pulled the trigger, saw the bullet come out the other side of Breene’s head, and the three kids had watched the whole thing and they were screaming like crazy now and Peter Breene said, “Dammit,” and leaned against the wall, holding his hand over the entrance wound. “In front of the children?”

And they heard her. A shriek that came out of the darkness ahead of them. Her shriek. She was coming. She was up there somewhere in the dark and she was running toward them full tilt and the little girl said, “Help us.”

“I’m not your daddy. It’s not my place.”

“I’m going to call you Daddy.”

“Fine,” Teddy said with a sigh and took her hand.

They walked the cliffs overlooking the Shutter Island shore and then they wandered into the cemetery and Teddy found a loaf of bread and some peanut butter and jelly and made them sandwiches in the mausoleum and the little girl was so happy, sitting on his lap, eating her sandwich, and Teddy took her out with him into the graveyard and pointed out his father’s headstone and his mother’s headstone and his own:

“Why are you a bad sailor?” the girl asked.

“I don’t like water.”

“I don’t like water, either. That makes us friends.”

“I guess it does.”

“You’re already dead. You got a whatchamacallit.”

“A headstone.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess I am, then. There was no one in my town.”

“I’m dead too.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“You didn’t stop her.”

“What could I do? By the time I reached her, she’d already, you know…”

“Oh, boy.”

“What?”

“Here she comes again.”

And there was Rachel walking into the graveyard by the headstone Teddy had knocked over in the storm. She took her time. She was so beautiful, her hair wet and dripping from the rain, and she’d traded in the cleaver for an ax with a long handle and she dragged it beside her and said, “Teddy, come on. They’re mine.”

“I know. I can’t give them to you, though.”

“It’ll be different this time.”

“How?”

“I’m okay now. I know my responsibilities. I got my head right.”

Teddy wept. “I love you so much.”

“And I love you, baby. I do.” She came up and kissed him, really kissed him, her hands on his face and her tongue sliding over his and a low moan traveling up her throat and into his mouth as she kissed him harder and harder and he loved her so much.

“Now give me the girl,” she said.

He handed the girl to her and she held the girl in one arm and picked up the ax in the other and said, “I’ll be right back. Okay?”

“Sure,” Teddy said.

He waved to the girl, knowing she didn’t understand. But it was for her own good. He knew that. You had to make tough decisions when you were an adult, decisions children couldn’t possibly understand. But you made them for the children. And Teddy kept waving, even though the girl wouldn’t wave back as her mother carried her toward the mausoleum and the little girl stared at Teddy, her eyes beyond hope for rescue, resigned to this world, this sacrifice, her mouth still smeared with peanut butter and jelly.

“OH, JESUS!” TEDDY sat up. He was crying. He felt he’d wrenched himself awake, tore his brain into consciousness just to get out of that dream. He could feel it back there in his brain, waiting, its doors wide open. All he had to do was close his eyes and tip his head back toward the pillow and he’d topple right back into it.

“How are you, Marshal?”

He blinked several times into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

Cawley turned on a small lamp. It stood beside his chair in the corner of the room. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

Teddy sat up on the bed. “How long have I been here?”

Cawley gave him a smile of apology. “The pills were a little stronger than I thought. You’ve been out for four hours.”

“Shit.” Teddy rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“You were having nightmares, Marshal. Serious nightmares.”

“I’m in a mental institution on an island in a hurricane,” Teddy said.

“Touche,” Cawley said. “I was here a month before I had a decent night’s sleep. Who’s Dolores?”

Teddy said, “What?” and swung his legs off the side of the bed.

“You kept saying her name.”

“My mouth is dry.”

Cawley nodded and turned his body in the chair, lifted a glass of water off the table beside him. He handed it across to Teddy. “A side effect, I’m afraid. Here.”

Teddy took the glass and drained it in a few gulps.

“How’s the head?”

Teddy remembered why he was in this room in the first place and took a few moments to take stock. Vision clear. No more thumbtacks in his head. Stomach a little queasy, but not too bad. A mild ache in the right side of his head, like a three-day-old bruise, really.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Those were some pills.”

“We aim to please. So who’s Dolores?”

“My wife,” Teddy said. “She’s dead. And, yes, Doctor, I’m still coming to terms with it. Is that okay?”

“It’s perfectly fine, Marshal. And I’m sorry for your loss. She died suddenly?”

Teddy looked at him and laughed.

“What?”

“I’m not really in the mood to be psychoanalyzed, Doc.”

Cawley crossed his legs at the ankles and lit a cigarette. “And I’m not trying to fuck with your head, Marshal. Believe it or not. But something happened in that room tonight with Rachel. It wasn’t just her. I’d be negligent in my duties as her therapist if I didn’t wonder what kind of demons you’re carrying around.”

“What happened in that room?” Teddy said. “I was playing the part she wanted me to.”

Cawley chuckled. “Know thyself, Marshal. Please. If we’d left you two alone, you’re telling me we would have come back to find you both fully clothed?”

Teddy said, “I’m an officer of the law, Doctor. Whatever you think you saw in there, you didn’t.”

Cawley held up a hand. “Fine. As you say.”

“As I say,” Teddy said.

He sat back and smoked and considered Teddy and smoked some more and Teddy could hear the storm outside, could feel the press of it against the walls, feel it pushing through gaps under the roof, and Cawley remained silent and watchful, and Teddy finally said:

“She died in a fire. I miss her like you…If I was underwater, I wouldn’t miss oxygen that much.” He raised his eyebrows at Cawley. “Satisfied?”

Cawley leaned forward and handed Teddy a cigarette and lit it for him. “I loved a woman once in France,” he said. “Don’t tell my wife, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I loved this woman the way you love…well, nothing,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice. “You can’t compare that kind of love to anything, can you?”

Teddy shook his head.

“It’s its own unique gift.” Cawley’s eyes followed the smoke from his cigarette, his gaze gone out of the room, over the ocean.

“What were you doing in France?”

He smiled, shook a playful finger at Teddy.

“Ah,” Teddy said.

“Anyway, this woman was coming to meet me one night. She’s hurrying, I guess. It’s a rainy night in Paris. She trips. That’s it.”

“She what?”

“She tripped.”

“And?” Teddy stared at him.

“And nothing. She tripped. She fell forward. She hit her head. She died. You believe that? In a war. All the ways you’d think a person could die. She tripped.”

Teddy could see the pain in his face, even after all these years, the stunned disbelief at being the butt of a cosmic joke.

“Sometimes,” Cawley said quietly, “I make it a whole three hours without thinking of her. Sometimes I go whole weeks without remembering her smell, that look she’d give me when she knew we’d find time to be alone on a given night, her hair—the way she played with it when she was reading. Sometimes…” Cawley stubbed out his cigarette. “Wherever her soul went—if there was a portal, say, under her body and it opened up as she died and that’s where she went? I’d go back to Paris tomorrow if I knew that portal would open, and I’d climb in after her.”

Teddy said, “What was her name?”

“Marie,” Cawley said, and the saying of it took something from him.

Teddy took a draw on the cigarette, let the smoke drift lazily back out of his mouth.

“Dolores,” he said, “she tossed in her sleep a lot, and her hand, seven times out of ten, I’m not kidding, would flop right into my face. Over my mouth and nose. Just whack and there it was. I’d remove it, you know? Sometimes pretty roughly. I’m having a nice sleep and, bang, now I’m awake. Thanks, honey. Sometimes, though, I’d leave it there. Kiss it, smell it, what have you. Breathe her in. If I could have that hand back over my face, Doc? I’d sell the world.”

The walls rumbled, the night shook with wind.

Cawley watched Teddy the way you’d watch children on a busy street corner. “I’m pretty good at what I do, Marshal. I’m an egotist, I admit. My IQ is off the charts, and ever since I was a boy, I could read people. Better than anyone. I say what I’m about to say meaning no offense, but have you considered that you’re suicidal?”

“Well,” Teddy said, “I’m glad you didn’t mean to offend me.”

“But have you considered it?”

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “It’s why I don’t drink anymore, Doctor.”

“Because you know that—”

“—I’d have eaten my gun a long time ago, if I did.”

Cawley nodded. “At least you’re not deluding yourself.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, “at least I got that going for me.”

“When you leave here,” Cawley said, “I can give you some names. Damn good doctors. They could help you.”

Teddy shook his head. “U.S. marshals don’t go to head doctors. Sorry. But if it ever leaked, I’d be pensioned out.”

“Okay, okay. Fair enough. But, Marshal?”

Teddy looked up at him.

“If you keep steering your current course, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. I specialize in grief trauma and survivor’s guilt. I suffer from the same, so I specialize in the same. I saw you look into Rachel Solando’s eyes a few hours ago and I saw a man who wants to die. Your boss, the agent in charge at the field office? He told me you’re the most decorated man he has. Said you came back from the war with enough medals to fill a chest. True?”

Teddy shrugged.

“Said you were in the Ardennes and part of the liberating force at Dachau.”

Another shrug.

“And then your wife is killed? How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”

Teddy said, “Don’t know, Doc. Kind of wondering, myself.”

Cawley leaned across the space between them and clapped Teddy on the knee. “Take those names from me before you leave. Okay? I’d like to be sitting here five years from now, Marshal, and know you’re still in the world.”

Teddy looked down at the hand on his knee. Looked up at Cawley.

“I would too,” he said softly.

13

HE MET BACK up with Chuck in the basement of the men’s dormitory, where they’d assembled cots for everyone while they rode out the storm. To get here, Teddy had come through a series of underground corridors that connected all the buildings in the compound. He’d been led by an orderly named Ben, a hulking mountain of jiggling white flesh, through four locked gates and three manned checkpoints, and from down here you couldn’t even tell the world stormed above. The corridors were long and gray and dimly lit, and Teddy wasn’t all that fond of how similar they were to the corridor in his dream. Not nearly as long, not filled with sudden banks of darkness, but ball-bearing gray and cold just the same.

He felt embarrassed to see Chuck. He’d never had a migraine attack that severe in public before, and it filled him with shame to remember vomiting on the floor. How helpless he’d been, like a baby, needing to be lifted from the chair.

But as Chuck called, “Hey, boss!” from the other side of the room, it surprised him to realize what a relief it was to be reunited with him. He’d asked to go on this investigation alone and been declined. At the time, it had pissed him off, but now, after two days in this place, after the mausoleum and Rachel’s breath in his mouth and those fucking dreams, he had to admit he was glad not to be alone on this.

They shook hands and he remembered what Chuck had said to him in the dream—"I’m never getting off this island"—and Teddy felt a sparrow’s ghost pass through the center of his chest and flap its wings.

“How you doing, boss?” Chuck clapped his shoulder.

Teddy gave him a sheepish grin. “I’m better. A little shaky, but all in all, okay.”

“Fuck,” Chuck said, lowering his voice and stepping away from two orderlies smoking cigarettes against a support column. “You had me scared, boss. I thought you were having a heart attack or a stroke or something.”

“Just a migraine.”

“Just,” Chuck said. He lowered his voice even further and they walked to the beige cement wall on the south side of the room, away from the other men. “I thought you were faking it at first, you know, like you had some plan to get to the files or something.”

“I wish I was that smart.”

He looked in Teddy’s eyes, his own glimmering, pushing forward. “It got me thinking, though.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“What’d you do?”

“I told Cawley I’d sit with you. And I did. And after a while, he got a call and he left the office.”

“You went after his files?”

Chuck nodded.

“What did you find?”

Chuck’s face dropped. “Well, not much actually. I couldn’t get into the file cabinets. He had some locks I’ve never seen before. And I’ve picked a lot of locks. I could’ve picked these, but I would have left marks. You know?”

Teddy nodded. “You did the right thing.”

“Yeah, well…” Chuck nodded at a passing orderly and Teddy had the surreal sensation that they’d been transported into an old Cagney movie, cons on the yard plotting their escape. “I did get into his desk.”

“You what?”

Chuck said, “Crazy, huh? You can slap my wrist later.”

“Slap your wrist? Give you a medal.”

“No medal. I didn’t find much, boss. Just his calendar. Here’s the thing, though—yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the next day were all blocked off, you know? He bordered them in black.”

“The hurricane,” Teddy said. “He’d heard it was coming.”

Chuck shook his head. “He wrote across the four boxes. You know what I mean? Like you’d write ‘Vacation on Cape Cod.’ Following me?”

Teddy said, “Sure.”

Trey Washington ambled on over to them, a ratty stogie in his mouth, his head and clothes drenched with rain. “Ya’ll getting clandestine over here, Marshals?”

“You bet,” Chuck said.

“You been out there?” Teddy said.

“Oh, yeah. Brutal now, Marshals. We were sandbagging the whole compound, boarding up all the windows. Shit. Motherfuckers falling all over themselves out there.” Trey relit his cigar with a Zippo and turned to Teddy. “You okay, Marshal? Word around the campfire was you had some sort of attack.”

“What sort of attack?”

“Oh, now, you’d be here all night, you tried to get every version of the story.”

Teddy smiled. “I get migraines. Bad ones.”

“Had an aunt used to get ’em something awful. Lock herself up in a bedroom, shut off the light, pull the shades, you wouldn’t see her for twenty-four hours.”

“She’s got my sympathy.”

Trey puffed his cigar. “Well, she long dead and all now, but I’ll pass it upstairs in my prayers tonight. She was a mean woman anyway, headache or not. Used to beat me and my brother with a hickory stick. Sometimes for nothing. I’d say, ‘Auntie, what I do?’ She say, ‘I don’t know, but you thinking about doing something terrible.’ What you do with a woman like that?”

He truly seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Chuck said, “Run faster.”

Trey let out a low “Heh, heh, heh” around his cigar. “Ain’t that the truth. Yes, sir.” He sighed. “I’m gone go dry off. We’ll see you later.”

“See you.”

The room was filling up with men coming in from the storm, shaking the moisture off black slickers and black forest ranger hats, coughing, smoking, passing around the not-so-secret flasks.

Teddy and Chuck leaned against the beige wall and spoke in flat tones while facing the room.

“So the words on the calendar…”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t say ‘Vacation on Cape Cod.’”

“Nope.”

“What’d they say?”

“’Patient sixty-seven.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s enough, though, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d say so.”

HE COULDN’T SLEEP. He listened to the men snore and huff and inhale and exhale, some with faint whistles, and he heard some talk in their sleep, heard one say, “You shoulda told me. That’s all. Just said the words…” Heard another say, “I got popcorn in my throat.” Some kicked the sheets and some rolled over and back again and some rose long enough to slap their pillows before dropping back to the mattresses. After a while, the noise achieved a kind of comfortable rhythm that reminded Teddy of a muffled hymn.

The outside was muffled too, but Teddy could hear the storm scrabble along the ground and thump against the foundation, and he wished there were windows down here, if only so he could see the flash of it, the weird light it must be painting on the sky.

He thought of what Cawley had said to him.

It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

Was he suicidal?

He supposed he was. He couldn’t remember a day since Dolores’s death when he hadn’t thought of joining her, and it sometimes went further than that. Sometimes he felt as if continuing to live was an act of cowardice. What was the point of buying groceries, of filling the Chrysler tank, of shaving, putting on socks, standing in yet another line, picking a tie, ironing a shirt, washing his face, combing his hair, cashing a check, renewing his license, reading the paper, taking a piss, eating—alone, always alone—going to a movie, buying a record, paying bills, shaving again, washing again, sleeping again, waking up again…

…if none of it brought him closer to her?

He knew he was supposed to move on. Recover. Put it behind him. His few stray friends and few stray relatives had said as much, and he knew that if he were on the outside looking in, he would tell that other Teddy to buck up and suck in your gut and get on with the rest of your life.

But to do that, he’d have to find a way to put Dolores on a shelf, to allow her to gather dust in the hope that enough dust would accumulate to soften his memory of her. Mute her image. Until one day she’d be less a person who had lived and more the dream of one.

They say, Get over her, you have to get over her, but get over to what? To this fucking life? How am I going to get you out of my mind? It hasn’t worked so far, so how am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to let you go, that’s all I’m asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade…

He wished he’d never taken those pills. He was wide awake at three in the morning. Wide awake and hearing her voice, the dusk in it, the faint Boston accent that didn’t reveal itself on the a and r, so much as the e and r so that Dolores loved him in a whispered foreva and eva. He smiled in the dark, hearing her, seeing her teeth, her eyelashes, the lazy carnal appetite in her Sunday-morning glances.

That night he’d met her at the Cocoanut Grove. The band playing a big, brassy set and the air gone silver with smoke and everyone dressed to the nines—sailors and soldiers in their best dress whites, dress blues, dress grays, civilian men in explosive floral ties and double-breasted suits with handkerchief triangles pressed smartly into the pockets, sharp-brimmed fedoras propped on the tables, and the women, the women were everywhere. They danced even as they walked to the powder room. They danced moving from table to table and they spun on their toes as they lit cigarettes and snapped open their compacts, glided to the bar and threw back their heads to laugh, and their hair was satin-shiny and caught the light when they moved.

Teddy was there with Frankie Gordon, another sergeant from Intel, and a few other guys, all of them shipping out in a week, but he dumped Frankie the moment he saw her, left him in midsentence and walked down to the dance floor, lost her for a minute in the throng between them, everyone pushing to the sides to make space for a sailor and a blonde in a white dress as the sailor spun her across his back and then shot her above his head in a twirl and caught her coming back down, dipped her toward the floor as the throng broke out in applause and then Teddy caught the flash of her violet dress again.

It was a beautiful dress and the color had been the first thing to catch his eye. But there were a lot of beautiful dresses there that night, too many to count, so it wasn’t the dress that held his attention but the way she wore it. Nervously. Self-consciously. Touching it with a hint of apprehension. Adjusting and readjusting it. Palms pressing down on the shoulder pads.

It was borrowed. Or rented. She’d never worn a dress like that before. It terrified her. So much so that she couldn’t be sure if men and women looked at her out of lust, envy, or pity.

She’d caught Teddy watching as she fidgeted and pulled her thumb back out from the bra strap. She dropped her eyes, the color rushing up from her throat, and then looked back up and Teddy held her eyes and smiled and thought, I feel stupid in this getup too. Willing that thought across the floor. And maybe it worked, because she smiled back, less a flirtatious smile than a grateful one, and Teddy left Frankie Gordon right there and then, Frankie talking about feed stores in Iowa or something, and by the time he passed through the sweaty siege of dancers, he realized he had nothing to say to her. What was he going to say? Nice dress? Can I buy you a drink? You have beautiful eyes?

She said, “Lost?”

His turn to spin. He found himself looking down at her. She was a small woman, no more than five four in heels. Outrageously pretty. Not in a tidy way, like so many of the other women in there with perfect noses and hair and lips. There was something unkempt about her face, eyes maybe a bit too far apart, lips that were so wide they seemed messy on her small face, a chin that was uncertain.

“A bit,” he said.

“Well, what are you looking for?”

He said it before he could think to stop himself: “You.”

Her eyes widened and he noticed a flaw, a speckle of bronze, in the left iris, and he felt horror sweep through his body as he realized he’d blown it, come off as a Romeo, too smooth, too full of himself.

You.

Where the fuck did he come up with that one? What the fuck was he—?

“Well,” she said…

He wanted to run. He couldn’t bear to look at her another second.

“…at least you didn’t have to walk far.”

He felt a goofy grin break across his face, felt himself reflected in her eyes. A goof. An oaf. Too happy to breathe.

“No, miss, I guess I didn’t.”

“My God,” she said, leaning back to look at him, her martini glass pressed to her upper chest.

“What?”

“You’re as out of place here as I am, aren’t you, soldier?”

LEANING IN THE cab window as she sat in the back with her friend Linda Cox, Linda hunching forward to give the driver an address, and Teddy said, “Dolores.”

“Edward.”

He laughed.

“What?”

He held up a hand. “Nothing.”

“No. What?”

“No one calls me Edward but my mother.”

“Teddy, then.”

He loved hearing her say the word.

“Yes.”

“Teddy,” she said again, trying it out.

“Hey. What’s your last name?” he said.

“Chanal.”

Teddy cocked an eyebrow at that.

She said, “I know. It doesn’t go with the rest of me at all. Sounds so highfalutin.”

“Can I call you?”

“You got a head for numbers?”

Teddy smiled. “Actually…”

“Winter Hill six-four-three-four-six,” she said.

He’d stood on the sidewalk as the cab pulled away, and the memory of her face just an inch from his—through the cab window, on the dance floor—nearly short-circuited his brain, almost drove her name and number right out of there.

He thought: so this is what it feels like to love. No logic to it—he barely knew her. But there it was just the same. He’d just met the woman he’d known, somehow, since before he was born. The measure of every dream he’d never dared indulge.

Dolores. She was thinking of him now in the dark backseat, feeling him as he was feeling her.

Dolores.

Everything he’d ever needed, and now it had a name.

TEDDY TURNED OVER on his cot and reached down to the floor, searched around until he found his notebook and a box of matches. He lit the first match off his thumb, held it above the page he’d scribbled on in the storm. He went through four matches before he’d ascribed the appropriate letters to the numbers:

Once that was done, though, it didn’t take long to unscramble the code. Another two matches, and Teddy was staring at the name as the flame winnowed its way down the wood toward his fingers:

As the match grew hotter, he looked over at Chuck, sleeping two cots over, and he hoped his career wouldn’t suffer. It shouldn’t. Teddy would take all the blame. Chuck should be fine. He had that aura about him in general—no matter what happened, Chuck would emerge unscathed.

He looked back at the page, got one last glimpse before the match blew itself out.

Going to find you today, Andrew. If I don’t owe Dolores my life, I owe her that much, at least.

Going to find you.

Going to kill you dead.