Dolores, who’d enjoyed sunbathing, probably would have loved this place, but Teddy could feel only the constant sweep of the ocean breeze, a warning from the sea that it could pounce at will, suck you down to its floor.
The orderlies came back down the dock with the mail and the medical cases and loaded them onto handcarts, and McPherson signed for the items on a clipboard and handed the clipboard back to one of the ferry guards and the guard said, “We’ll be taking off, then.”
McPherson blinked in the sun.
“The storm,” the guard said. “No one seems to know what it’s going to do.”
McPherson nodded.
“We’ll contact the station when we need a pickup,” Teddy said.
The guard nodded. “The storm,” he said again.
“Sure, sure,” Chuck said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
McPherson led them up a path that rose gently through the stand of trees. When they’d cleared the trees, they reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin, and Teddy could see a house off to both his right and his left. The one to the left was the simpler of the two, a maroon mansarded Victorian with black trim, small windows that gave the appearance of sentinels. The one to the right was a Tudor that commanded its small rise like a castle.
They continued on, climbing a slope that was steep and wild with sea grass before the land greened and softened around them, leveling out up top as the grass grew shorter, gave way to a more traditional lawn that spread back for several hundred yards before coming to a stop at a wall of orange brick that seemed to curve away the length of the island. It was ten feet tall and topped with a single strip of wire, and something about the sight of the wire got to Teddy. He felt a sudden pity for all those people on the other side of the wall who recognized that thin wire for what it was, realized just how badly the world wanted to keep them in. Teddy saw several men in dark blue uniforms just outside the wall, heads down as they peered at the ground.
Chuck said, “Correctional guards at a mental institution. Weird sight, if you don’t mind me saying, Mr. McPherson.”
“This is a maximum security institution,” McPherson said. “We operate under dual charters—one from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, the other from the Federal Department of Prisons.”
“I understand that,” Chuck said. “I’ve always wondered, though—you guys have much to talk about around the dinner table?”
McPherson smiled and gave a tiny shake of his head.
Teddy saw a man with black hair who wore the same uniform as the rest of the guards, but his was accented by yellow epaulets and a standing collar, and his badge was gold. He was the only one who walked with his head held up, one hand pressed behind his back as he strode among the men, and the stride reminded Teddy of full colonels he’d met in the war, men for whom command was a necessary burden not simply of the military but of God. He carried a small black book pressed to his rib cage, and he nodded in their direction and then walked down the slope from which they’d come, his black hair stiff in the breeze.
“The warden,” McPherson said. “You’ll meet later.”
Teddy nodded, wondering why they didn’t meet now, and the warden disappeared on the other side of the rise.
One of the orderlies used a key to open the gate in the center of the wall, and the gate swung wide and the orderlies and their carts went in as two guards approached McPherson and came to a stop on either side of him.
McPherson straightened to his full height, all business now, and said, “I’ve got to give you guys the basic lay of the land.”
“Sure.”
“You gentlemen will be accorded all the courtesies we have to offer, all the help we can give. During your stay, however short that may be, you will obey protocol. Is that understood?”
Teddy nodded and Chuck said, “Absolutely.”
McPherson fixed his eyes on a point just above their heads. “Dr. Cawley will explain the finer points of protocol to you, I’m sure, but I have to stress the following: unmonitored contact with patients of this institution is forbidden. Is that understood?”
Teddy almost said, Yes, sir, as if he were back in basic, but he stopped short with a simple “Yes.”
“Ward A of this institution is the building behind me to my right, the male ward. Ward B, the female ward, is to my left. Ward C is beyond those bluffs directly behind this compound and the staff quarters, housed in what was once Fort Walton. Admittance to Ward C is forbidden without the written consent and physical presence of both the warden and Dr. Cawley. Understood?”
Another set of nods.
McPherson held out one massive palm, as if in supplication to the sun. “You are hereby requested to surrender your firearms.”
Chuck looked at Teddy. Teddy shook his head.
Teddy said, “Mr. McPherson, we are duly appointed federal marshals. We are required by government order to carry our firearms at all times.”
McPherson’s voice hit the air like steel cable. “Executive Order three-nine-one of the Federal Code of Penitentiaries and Institutions for the Criminally Insane states that the peace officer’s requirement to bear arms is superseded only by the direct order of his immediate superiors or that of persons entrusted with the care and protection of penal or mental health facilities. Gentlemen, you find yourself under the aegis of that exception. You will not be allowed to pass through this gate with your firearms.”
Teddy looked at Chuck. Chuck tilted his head at McPherson’s extended palm and shrugged.
Teddy said, “We’d like our exceptions noted for the record.”
McPherson said, “Guard, please note the exceptions of Marshals Daniels and Aule.”
“Noted, sir.”
“Gentlemen,” McPherson said.
The guard on McPherson’s right opened a small leather pouch.
Teddy pulled back his overcoat and removed the service revolver from his holster. He snapped the cylinder open with a flick of his wrist and then placed the gun in McPherson’s hand. McPherson handed it off to the guard, and the guard placed it in his leather pouch and McPherson held out his hand again.
Chuck was a little slower with his weapon, fumbling with the holster snap, but McPherson showed no impatience, just waited until Chuck placed the gun awkwardly in his hand.
McPherson handed the gun to the guard, and the guard added it to the pouch and stepped through the gate.
“Your weapons will be checked into the property room directly outside the warden’s office,” McPherson said softly, his words rustling like leaves, “which is in the main hospital building in the center of the compound. You will pick them back up on the day of your departure.” McPherson’s loose, cowboy grin suddenly returned. “Well, that about does it for the official stuff for now. I don’t know about y’all, but I am glad to be done with it. What do you say we go see Dr. Cawley?”
And he turned and led the way through the gate, and the gate was closed behind them.
Inside the wall, the lawn swept away from either side of a main path made from the same brick as the wall. Gardeners with manacled ankles tended to the grass and trees and flower beds and even an array of rosebushes that grew along the foundation of the hospital. The gardeners were flanked by orderlies, and Teddy saw other patients in manacles walking the grounds with odd, ducklike steps. Most were men, a few were women.
“When the first clinicians came here,” McPherson said, “this was all sea grass and scrub. You should see the pictures. But now…”
To the right and left of the hospital stood two identical redbrick colonials with the trim painted bright white, their windows barred, and the panes yellowed by salt and sea wash. The hospital itself was charcoal-colored, its brick rubbed smooth by the sea, and it rose six stories until the dormer windows up top stared down at them.
McPherson said, “Built as the battalion HQ just before the Civil War. They’d had some designs, apparently, to make this a training facility. Then when war seemed imminent, they
concentrated on the fort, and then later on transforming this into a POW camp.”
Teddy noticed the tower he’d seen from the ferry. The tip of it peeked just above the tree line on the far side of the island.
“What’s the tower?”
“An old lighthouse,” McPherson said. “Hasn’t been used as such since the early 1800s. The Union army posted lookout sentries there, or so I’ve heard, but now it’s a treatment facility.”
“For patients?”
He shook his head. “Sewage. You wouldn’t believe what ends up in these waters. Looks pretty from the ferry, but every piece of trash in just about every river in this state floats down into the inner harbor, out through the midharbor, and eventually reaches us.”
“Fascinating,” Chuck said and lit a cigarette, took it from his mouth to suppress a soft yawn as he blinked in the sun.
“Beyond the wall, that way”—he pointed past Ward B—“is the original commander’s quarters. You probably saw it on the walk up. Cost a fortune to build at the time, and the commander was relieved of his duties when Uncle Sam got the bill. You should see the place.”
“Who lives there now?” Teddy said.
“Dr. Cawley,” McPherson said. “None of this would exist if it weren’t for Dr. Cawley. And the warden. They created something really unique here.”
They’d looped around the back of the compound, met more manacled gardeners and orderlies, many hoeing a dark loam against the rear wall. One of the gardeners, a middle-aged woman with wispy wheat hair gone almost bald on top, stared at Teddy as he passed, and then raised a single finger to her lips. Teddy noticed a dark red scar, thick as licorice, that ran across her throat. She smiled, finger still held to her lips, and then shook her head very slowly at him.
“Cawley’s a legend in his field,” McPherson was saying as they passed back around toward the front of the hospital. “Top of his class at both Johns Hopkins and Harvard, published his first paper on delusional pathologies at the age of twenty. Has been consulted numerous times by Scotland Yard, MI5, and the OSS.”
“Why?” Teddy said.
“Why?”
Teddy nodded. It seemed a reasonable question.
“Well…” McPherson seemed at a loss.
“The OSS,” Teddy said. “Try them for starters. Why would they consult a psychiatrist?”
“War work,” McPherson said.
“Right,” Teddy said slowly. “What kind, though?”
“The classified kind,” McPherson said. “Or so I’d assume.”
“How classified can it be,” Chuck said, one bemused eye catching Teddy’s, “if we’re talking about it?”
McPherson paused in front of the hospital, one foot on the first step. He seemed baffled. He looked off for a moment at the curve of orange wall and then said, “Well, I guess you can ask him. He should be out of his meeting by now.”
They went up the stairs and in through a marble foyer, the ceiling arching into a coffered dome above them. A gate buzzed open as they approached it, and they passed on into a large anteroom where an orderly sat at a desk to their right and another across from him to their left and beyond lay a long corridor behind the confines of another gate. They produced their badges again to the orderly by the upper staircase and McPherson signed their three names to a clipboard as the orderly checked their badges and IDs and handed them back. Behind the orderly was a cage, and Teddy could see a man in there wearing a uniform similar to the warden’s, keys hanging from their rings on a wall behind him.
They climbed to the second floor and turned into a corridor that smelled of wood soap, the oak floor gleaming underfoot and bathed in a white light from the large window at the far end.
“Lot of security,” Teddy said.
McPherson said, “We take every precaution.”
Chuck said, “To the thanks of a grateful public, Mr. McPherson, I’m sure.”
“You have to understand,” McPherson said, turning back to Teddy as they walked past several offices, doors all closed and bearing the names of doctors on small silver plates. “There is no facility like this in the United States. We take only the most damaged patients. We take the ones no other facility can manage.”
“Gryce is here, right?” Teddy said.
McPherson nodded. “Vincent Gryce, yes. In Ward C.”
Chuck said to Teddy, “Gryce was the one…?”
Teddy nodded. “Killed all his relatives, scalped them, made himself hats.”
Chuck was nodding fast. “And wore them into town, right?”
“According to the papers.”
They had stopped outside a set of double doors. A brass plate affixed in the center of the right door read CHIEF OF STAFF, DR. J. CAWLEY.
McPherson turned to them, one hand on the knob, and looked at them with an unreadable intensity.
McPherson said, “In a less enlightened age, a patient like Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that caused him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behavior. If they can do that, maybe we can reach a day where that kind of disengagement can be rooted out of society entirely.”
He seemed to be waiting for a response, his hand stiff against the doorknob.
“It’s good to have dreams,” Chuck said. “Don’t you think?”
3
DR. CAWLEY WAS thin to the point of emaciation. Not quite the swimming bones and cartilage Teddy had seen at Dachau, but definitely in need of several good meals. His small dark eyes sat far back in their sockets, and the shadows that leaked from them bled across the rest of his face. His cheeks were so sunken they appeared collapsed, and the flesh around them was pitted with aged acne. His lips and nose were as thin as the rest of him, and his chin appeared squared off to the point of nonexistence. What remained of his hair was as dark as his eyes and the shadows underneath.
He had an explosive smile, however, bright and bulging with a confidence that lightened his irises, and he used it now as he came around the desk to greet them, his hand outstretched.
“Marshal Daniels and Marshal Aule,” he said, “glad you could come so quickly.”
His hand was dry and statue smooth in Teddy’s, and his grip was a shocker, squeezing the bones in Teddy’s hand until Teddy could feel the press of it straight up his forearm. Cawley’s eyes glittered for a moment, as if to say, Didn’t expect that, did you? and then he moved on to Chuck.
He shook Chuck’s hand with a “Pleased to meet you, sir,” and then the smile shot off his face and he said to McPherson, “That’ll be all for now, Deputy Warden. Thank you.”
McPherson said, “Yes, sir. A pleasure, gentlemen,” and backed out of the room.
Cawley’s smile returned, but it was a more viscous version, and it reminded Teddy of the film that formed over soup.
“He’s a good man, McPherson. Eager.”
“For?” Teddy said, taking a seat in front of the desk.
Cawley’s smile morphed again, curling up one side of his face and freezing there for a moment. “I’m sorry?”
“He’s eager,” Teddy said. “But for what?”
Cawley sat behind the teak desk, spread his arms. “For the work. A moral fusion between law and order and clinical care. Just half a century ago, even less in some cases, the thinking on the kind of patients we deal with here was that they should, at best, be shackled and left in their own filth and waste. They were systematically beaten, as if that could drive the psychosis out. We demonized them. We tortured them. Spread them on racks, yes. Drove screws into their brains. Even drowned them on occasion.”
“And now?” Chuck said.
“Now we treat them. Morally. We try to heal, to cure. And if that fails, we at least provide them with a measure of calm in their lives.”
“And their victims?” Teddy said.
Cawley raised his eyebrows, waiting.
“These are all violent offenders,” Teddy said. “Right?�
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Cawley nodded. “Quite violent, actually.”
“So they’ve hurt people,” Teddy said. “Murdered them in many cases.”
“Oh, in most.”
“So why does their sense of calm matter in relation to their victims’?”
Cawley said, “Because my job is to treat them, not their victims. I can’t help their victims. It’s the nature of any life’s work that it have limits. That’s mine. I can only concern myself with my patients.” He smiled. “Did the senator explain the situation?”
Teddy and Chuck shot each other glances as they sat.
Teddy said, “We don’t know anything about a senator, Doctor. We were assigned by the state field office.”
Cawley propped his elbows on a green desk blotter and clasped his hands together, placed his chin on top of them, and stared at them over the rim of his glasses.
“My mistake, then. So what have you been told?”
“We know a female prisoner is missing.” Teddy placed his notebook on his knee, flipped the pages. “A Rachel Solando.”
“Patient.” Cawley gave them a dead smile.
“Patient,” Teddy said. “I apologize. We understand she escaped within the last twenty-four hours.”
Cawley’s nod was a small tilt of his chin and hands. “Last night. Sometime between ten and midnight.”
“And she still hasn’t been found,” Chuck said.
“Correct, Marshal…” He held up an apologetic hand.
“Aule,” Chuck said.
Cawley’s face narrowed over his hands and Teddy noticed drops of water spit against the window behind him. He couldn’t tell whether they were from the sky or the sea.
“And your first name is Charles?” Cawley said.
“Yeah,” Chuck said.
“I’d take you for a Charles,” Cawley said, “but not necessarily an Aule.”
“That’s fortunate, I guess.”
“How so?”
“We don’t choose our names,” Chuck said. “So it’s nice when someone thinks that one of them, at least, fits.”
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