by Nevada Barr
"Mornin', ladies," he drawled. I find it particularly offensive when men from the north affect a southern drawl. It always sounds cruel to my ears. Coming from Sinapp I suspected it was meant to be.
I chose not to reply. Tilly, absorbed in her own thoughts, scarcely seemed to notice him.
Not wishing for the indignity of trying to dodge around him, I hooked my arm through Tilly's to keep her from wandering into the moat in her preoccupation, stopped in front of the sergeant and waited. It was clear I was doomed to endure whatever he chose to consider witty repartee.
"Looking for the boyfriend?" he asked and gave Tilly an encore performance of his leer two nights before. Fortunately she didn't seem to notice.
"Sergeant," I said. "Please excuse us, we wish to pass." I was terribly polite. Molly would be pleased to know I do occasionally use the good manners she was at such pains to instill in us.
The foul man didn't budge. The peculiar fatigue that had descended upon me so abruptly kept me from saying more.
"You been to the hospital?"
I said nothing. My focus had slid from Joel, Tilly and even the odious and odiferous sergeant to a single and greatly desired goal: I wanted to sit down, preferably in the shade.
"You have. I seen you." That was a lie but I left it unchallenged.
Sweat rolled down both sides of his face and into his collar. I was pleased to note he was nursing a particularly nasty boil below his left ear where the wool chafed his neck.
"Your boyfriend ain't in the hospital," Sinapp had to say. "We put him where traitor's deserve to be. Teach him to talk more respectful. Too bad there won't be anybody to hear it where he is."
Too tired to think of a reply, I stood holding up Tilly for a while longer. Either Sinapp grew bored with baiting us or he had exhausted his vocabulary. Finally he stepped aside and let us walk in out of the sun.
The shade beneath the sally port is complete unto darkness--or so it seemed after the glare of the sun--and a breeze off the harbor blows through. I led Tilly to a wooden bench the officers of the guard keep there and collapsed and let the unnerving assault of Sergeant Sinapp and two nights without proper sleep wash over me. Tilly came out of her stupor, which should have been a comfort--I had begun to worry--but it was only to embark on an emotional storm of a different kind. Tears leaked from her eyes. "He's dead. They killed him," she said in a tiny voice. "'There's no one to talk to where he is.'" She repeated the sergeant's words.
What with one thing and another, Tilly was working herself into a state of hysterics. I know I should have slapped her, but I doubt Tilly has ever been struck in her life and I couldn't bring myself to be the first. I like to think it is because I am too good-hearted, but it may have been that I was simply too tired to raise my arm.
Instead, I held her and rocked her and murmured, "Shh, shh, he's not dead," over and over until I convinced myself.
Sinapp's words might have meant the boy had been murdered, but his tone was that of a man enjoying not the memory of an evil done but an ongoing cruelty. There was such relish in his voice when he spoke of there being no one to hear Joel's imagined repentance. In the unfinished confines of Fort Jefferson there was only one place I could think of where one would be truly alone, unheard.
"He's not dead," I told Tilly.
She rebounded from despair as only the young can: in the time it takes for a tear to be wiped away.
"I must go to him"
I must go to him. What on earth has Molly been letting that girl read? She was such the tragic heroine I was tempted to administer the slap my inherent saintliness had resisted just moments before. All that saved her from at the very least the acid of my tongue was the look of genuine anguish on her face.
The young man on sentry duty at the guardhouse moved, and we realized our teapot tempest had been observed. Eyes blinded by shade after glare and minds blinded by our own thoughts, neither of us had noticed him against the stone in his stone-dark uniform.
"Now then don't you go thinking on that, Mrs. Coleman. It won't do, you know."
He moved out from the wall to stand before us.
"You knew," I said. I wasn't so much accusing him as amazed that this callow youth was such a practiced dissembler.
"I apologize, ma'am. But we have orders, and not talking about the Lane boy is one of them."
"You are talking about him now," Tilly said with the inexorable logic of a sixteen-year-old. The guard couldn't have been much older and seemed struck by Tilly's words.
"I am," he said, appalled at his dereliction of duty. A moment was all he needed to justify things in his mind. "But it's different."
I began to suspect this sweet-faced liar was not one of the Lord's brighter creations.
"We'll see him now," Tilly announced and stood up, brushing her skirts straight in a no-nonsense sort of way. "Now."
The soldier shuffled his feet but otherwise stood his ground. "I can't let you do that, Miss. The captain would have my hide."
Tilly began to tremble the way she used to just before she threw one of her terrible tantrums. I decided to step in before she humiliated us both and frightened the guard half silly. "We do need to see Private Lane," I told him, trying to make it sound as if we had orders from on high.
He grew more uncomfortable. His feet stilled, but his eyes fixed on some place of courage on the wall between Tilly and me.
"Come on, Tilly," I said with what I hoped was the voice of age and authority.
"I can't let you do that," he said again and stepped in front of me. I admired him for his courage and attention to duty, but my patience was at an end.
"How will you stop us?" I asked. "Will you throw us to the ground? Lock us in the guardhouse? Both of us?"
Regardless of orders, he was unwilling to lay hands on a woman, particularly not his captain's wife.
"I'll inform the captain," he said finally.
"And abandon your post? If you do that you will end up keeping Private Lane company. Or worse." With that, I took Tilly's arm and we left him standing in his personal quandary. Of course he would hail the first soldier who came within range and send him to fetch Joseph, but I hoped Tilly and I had gained enough time.
Tilly and I scuttled hastily down the row of casemates to the left of the sally port, walking through the narrow arches. In the shadows to our left was a rubble of new brick and gleaming cannon, oiled and ready but so new they'd not been fired. On our right was the brilliant light of the parade ground. I had been to our destination only once before and had not had the cause nor desire to see it a second time. Tilly was not even aware of its existence, and I couldn't really think of any words that might soften what was bound to be a blow.
At last we came to the largest room yet, windowless as were the others with no firing slits or gun ports to let in the day. A wooden door set in the heavy planks that sealed off one of the arches.
"What's that?" Tilly asked, again five years old.
I told her: "It's called the dungeon. It's the only truly secure place in the fort. Joseph puts the most dangerous men here sometimes."
"Oh, look," Tilly whispered and pointed.
I had forgotten, but just above the door were the words, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Tilly is not the only person on this earth with a love of melodrama.
I crossed the brick floor to peer in the tiny barred window in the door.
Light, leeched of its living gold by passage through the single narrow slit in the outer wall, provided just enough illumination I could see a pile of clothing on the floor of the dungeon. All that marked it as a man was a hand flung out and up, turned as gray and devoid of warmth as the light caught in its palm.
A heavy shackle weighed down the wrist. From it ran a chain to a ring set in the wall. In this age of steam engines, universities and travel across the oceans, a sight so medieval didn't seem real. It was as if I peeked through a portal into a barbaric past.
One my husband had created.
Reali
ty came back to me on the terrible odor wafting through the bars. A bucket for waste stood beside the crumpled form, and next to it, much too close for decency, a bucket with the handle of a water dipper protruding over the rim.
Private Lane--and who else could this have been?--could not even move out of his own waste. I do apologize for talking of such a distasteful thing, but the truth of it underscored how like an animal it made the boy seem, and how like mindless beasts the men who had put him there.
"Is it Joel? Is he alive?"
Tilly had crept up in her slippered feet. Her voice so close and sudden nearly stopped my heart.
"I don't know," I said truthfully. "If he is he won't be for long."
She began tugging at the door, but its lock was forged to withstand the strength of even first love.
The ringing of boots on brick in a rhythm I've listened for over half my life stopped us both--her tugging at the lock, me tugging at her.
"Joseph," I said.
7
Anna put Raffia's letter down and sat for a moment staring sightlessly across the narrow sitting room toward the kitchen sink. A grilled cheese sandwich with a single bite out of it lay congealed to the plate beside her on the sofa. On the coffee table, near the box of letters, was yet another glass of flat, unsparkly sparkling water. Her throat had been dry for days, and the water only seemed to make it worse.
The window over the sink had gone dark. An idle part of Anna's brain pondered that for a moment before logic told her night must have long since replaced the subtropical dusk. Even with this scrap of knowledge to cling to she couldn't shake the creepy sensation that, should she look out of that window, she would see soldiers from the Civil War hanging from trees.
It was the battering she'd taken, she told herself: heat, lack of sleep, blunt trauma, contusions, severed fingers, dead Cubans and live heroes.
And that made her see a ghost.
She shook her head as if negating an invisible accuser. She'd endured worse and never once had emanations from the ether plagued her. Though she didn't want to admit it, because to do so was as frightening as the ghost, the woman in white she knew was Raffia had not been a beginning but merely a next step. For a while now, maybe a day, maybe longer--Anna couldn't be sure, memories of sanity being tricky things--the world had started shifting occasionally, reality slipping just a little, just enough that Anna's entire being was suffused with the wrongness of things. It was as if she'd been cursed with the ability to see into another dimension or another time, and she didn't like it.
"Evils sufficient unto the day." She repeated the aphorism to the cat. Piedmont meowed politely but, not being much of a philosopher, chose to lick his hindquarters rather than continue the discussion. He assumed the position that always reminded Anna of a turkey ready for roasting and commenced his bath. Rubbing her eyes hard enough to chase red and black stars across her vision, Anna knew she was desperately in need of something. Sleep maybe. Her mind, the one thing she could count on to consistently work properly, was on the fritz. Molly. She needed Molly, and not as a sister this time but as a mental health professional. She looked at the clock on the front of the stove. The hands indicated one o'clock. Knowing that couldn't be right, she forced her stiff and creaking frame from the couch and went into the bedroom. The clock on the night table suffered the same time warp: one A.M. The sofa, Aunt Raffia, the other dimension she'd been slipping into, had swallowed three hours, and Anna couldn't readily account for them. By the number of pages beneath Piedmont's furry butt she knew she could not have been reading the whole time. Dreaming? Sleeping with her eyes open?
The unholy frisson of fear that had stalked the edges of her consciousness sank its claws in, and she winced with the sudden onslaught of psychic pain. Molly would have to be rudely awakened. She slipped on her flip-flops.
"Don't wait up," she told the cat as she collected the office keys from under the papers he used as a bath mat.
The night was glorious, the air at least eighty degrees and, after the air-conditioning, soothing against Anna's tortured skin. Unimpeded by light pollution or clouds, the moon cast enough light to throw silver pathways through the open casemates. Anna didn't slow down to glory in it but walked across the middle of the parade ground, dry grasses crackling beneath her feet. She looked neither right nor left, not wanting to see what might be beckoning from the seductive black and silver rooms.
The humdrum bureaucratic box that encapsulated the administrative offices, usually a bane to eyes conditioned to historic grandeur, was a comfort. It exuded normalcy. No ghost worth her ectoplasm would deign to haunt such tedious architecture.
Sitting at Teddy's desk, Anna punched in the long list of numbers required to make a credit card call and was further reassured by her besieged brain's ability to recall them.
"Dr. Pigeon," Molly answered on the second ring, sounding alert and geared for whatever emergency the dead-of-night phone call presaged.
"Hello," Anna said. "It's me."
"Hello?"
"Hello."
"Hello?"
The creepy feeling flexed its claws again, and Anna wondered if she'd really dialed, if she'd spoken aloud, if this was all a dream.
"Anna?"
The delay. The phone on this out-of-the-way scrap of sand was subject to one- to two-second delays in transmission. Anna sighed out breath she'd not known she was holding. This phenomenon was merely mechanical. She could deal with that.
"I'm in trouble," Anna said and waited through another "Anna?" while the words made their journey to her sister's apartment on the Upper West Side.
"Start at the beginning," Molly told her when communication had been established.
Though Molly already knew some of it, Anna did as she was told, listing in chronological order the events that could possibly in some way, shape or form be responsible for the all-too-visible heebie-jeebies she'd been suffering. She included the not-totally-unpleasant pressure of Paul Davidson's love letters, the heat, the dryness of her mouth, the boat explosion, feeling the wreck was sentient and malicious, believing the corpse of the Cuban boatman to have moved a finger, each and every wince or advent of the willies she could recall, ending with the startling appearance of Raffia Coleman, the woman in white.
"Wilkie Collins," Molly said.
"Just like that but no veil," Anna replied. Silence came down, a palpable thing, like an iron plug in Anna's ear. She wondered if Molly was thinking of Collins's book, one of the first mysteries ever written. She hoped Molly was forming a perfectly logical diagnosis that would be the psychiatric equivalent of "take two aspirin and call me in the morning." As the silence continued, Anna began to lose hope.
"Okay," Molly said after what Anna felt was a cruel and unusual amount of time. "You say this figure was our great-great-aunt Raffia, the woman whose letters I sent you?"
"Yes."
"Do you just, quote, know, unquote, it was Aunt Raffia, or do you genuinely believe it was Aunt Raffia?"
Anna let the difference between the two percolate through her brain. "I just know," she said. "I don't believe it. It's nuts. I don't believe in ghosts. Either this was a figment or a fake, though I don't know who but you knows anything about Aunt Raffia."
"Do you lock your door?"
Anna said nothing. It was a rhetorical question. Living in National Parks, Anna'd seldom felt the need. Living in New York, the concept appalled Molly.
"Okay," Anna agreed. "Where does that leave me? Headed for Bedlam or Bellevue or what?"
Again Molly was quiet too long, and Anna felt a fist of panic knuckling behind her sternum.
"Given you don't literally believe the woman was real--or a real ghost--unless it's some kind of bizarre joke by people too long on a desert island, I think there is hope for you."
Anna laughed, wanting that to be all, something a trained psychiatrist would laugh off as normal, but Molly wasn't through.
"However," her sister went on. "Given the clarity and duration of the h
allucination, as well as the intense feelings of fear and disorientation you've been having over the last few days, I would like you to see someone."
"Like a shrink?" Anna asked, appalled just as if she'd not been talking to one for half her life.
"A neurologist would be the place to start," Molly said. "You've had blunt trauma, possibly affecting the head or the inner ear--I don't really know how an underwater explosion works. That could be a factor. But considering you had these feelings earlier--"
"Maybe not," Anna cut her off, trampling her sister's words as they came two seconds late. "I mean, time's relative, and I wasn't seeing things before the explosion. I mean, of course I was seeing things, but I wasn't seeing things." Abruptly she stopped. Not only was she babbling, but with her inner ear she could hear Sister Mary Corinne saying: "Thou dost protest too much."
Molly let the silence settle. Anna hoped she was just making sure there were no words left on the time delay and not dialing her cell phone to call the men with the butterfly nets to catch her mad sibling.
"It never hurts to get things checked out," Molly said reasonably. "A CAT scan, a physical, that sort of thing. Once those are ruled out we can take a next step."
Suddenly Anna was sorry she'd called, sorry she'd told anyone. She didn't want to take a first step, let alone a next step.
"Or it could just be one of those things and go away," she said.
"Could be," Molly returned with such studied neutrality Anna grew more alarmed.
To reassure her sister--and herself--she laughed. "Hey, maybe it's in the air out here. The guy before me went nuts and had to be relieved of duty." The instant the words were out of her mouth, Anna was shocked to hear the truth in them.
"My God, Molly. No kidding. The guy's name was Lanny Wilcox. Daniel, the maintenance man here, said Lanny got stranger and stranger and finally started seeing things nobody else saw. I've got to go. I've got to think about this."
