by Nevada Barr
Anna wondered where Theresa had painted. She couldn't imagine works of such detail and clarity being created in the three-dimensional cacophony that was Lanny Wilcox's home.
On reflection, two things surprised Anna regarding Lanny's Theresa: that she'd not left him sooner than she did and, again, that she'd left her artwork behind.
Anna was not an artist. Her creations tended to be big and functional: benches, tables, outhouses. And they were usually painted with a wide brush and any color that was cheap and handy. Even so, when she had put time and effort into making something, she didn't like leaving it with people or in places where it would be abused. If she was disturbed when wicked campers sprayed graffiti on privy walls she'd nailed together, how much more painful it must have been for Theresa to abandon her works to a home where they would eventually be vying for wall space with snowshoes and frying pans?
No answer came. What came was nothing, followed by a short sharp jab of fear. For a moment Anna had absolutely no idea in hell why she'd come to Wilcox's, why she was upstairs in his bedroom with a flashlight.
Flashlight.
Memory rushed back and she laughed out loud with relief. She'd seen a light in the upstairs window. Or thought she had. "Stop that," she said. She'd seen a light. There was no reason anyone whose purposes were legitimate would enter in the night without turning the lights on. The fact that she had done just that wiggled momentarily, but she dismissed it and shone her light around the room. With the plethora of goods crammed into it, she doubted anyone would have been able to find anything and, at a glance, it seemed there would be little to tempt a thief.
The beam raked across the headboard and onto the nightstand. Its surface was the only clear spot in the house. Everything had been wiped from the top of the low table, including reading lamp and alarm clock. In their place a digital camera had been left lying on its side.
Unless Lanny, in a fit of pique, had done it himself at the cost of his lamp, it must have happened after he'd gone, by someone in a hurry, someone who had little respect and no patience for Lanny's stockpile of junk. Maybe somebody who'd been in the house that night, the camera one of the intruder's objectives. Since he or she hadn't taken it with them, they must have been after the pictures stored inside.
Having propped the flashlight on one of the pillows, Anna picked the camera up and turned it on. She hit the eject button. The disk had been left in place. She turned the knob to "retrieve" and began going through the images. They looked as if a child had taken them--or a man testing a new camera under various light and movement conditions. Lanny had no children that she knew of, and the camera was several years old and had the look of a piece of equipment much used, so neither explanation fit. Photo after photo of the corners and walls of the rooms Lanny lived in, flash photos, taken by night, of uninteresting twists and turns within the casemates. Close-ups of what could be anything: cannon barrels, dock pilings, the flagpole.
Anna clicked through, wondering what it was her phantom intruder had sought, which picture incriminated, embarrassed, compromised or exonerated.
After several dozen views of Lanny's kitchen closet, she realized what she was looking at. Not pictures of walls, floors and shelves of canned goods. These were pictures of what Lanny saw, visions he'd tried to validate digitally. Pictures of things that weren't there.
She set the camera back where she'd found it. She needed to get out of that claustrophobic house, away from unseen things that drove men mad.
Such was her need to breathe untainted air that she fled, not home to her bed, but out into the middle of the parade ground where she could stand beneath open sky. There she stared at the stars, sucked in lungfuls of warm, damp air and yearned for the sweet purifying oxygen of her western mountains. Something was terribly wrong: with Fort Jefferson, with Lanny Wilcox, with her. Tears of self-pity stung her eyes, and she wondered if she should take Molly's advice and go to the mainland, to a hospital, get a CAT scan, see a head shrinker. At the moment being in a clean modern room in the solicitous care of professionals didn't seem such a wretched alternative.
Temptation was shouted down by duty. Bob was out of the running; Lanny was gone. Without her the fort would have no law enforcement. Anna pulled herself together, stopped gulping air and breathed slowly, deeply. When her heart ceased to race and her mind to gabble, she turned to go back to her quarters.
A light from the southern casemates stopped her. This was not the ephemeral will-o'-the-wisp she'd spent the shank of the night chasing but the solid reassuring yellow glow of electric lights shining from the archway into the maintenance shop and the long row of generators that provided the fort with the stuff of the good life: light, heat, air conditioning, radio to the mainland and water pressure.
Instead of being alarmed by yet another nocturnal manifestation, Anna looked forward to a confrontation with a live, flesh-and-blood human being, evil or not.
The bringer of light was Daniel Barrons. Anna watched him for several minutes before he knew she was there. Clad in khaki shorts, bedroom slippers and an uncharacteristic tank top that unveiled his tattoos; not only the classic tattoo of the naked girl under the palm tree but a number of others which, screened from view by a prodigious nest of chest and back hair, she couldn't make any artistic sense of. Daniel moved down the line of roaring generators, opening panels and fiddling about inside. It wasn't until he'd visited all but the one beside which Anna stood that he noticed her. When he did he squeaked loudly and threw up both palms shoulder high, reminding her of an illustration in a turn-of-the-century acting book her husband had found at The Strand in New York. The photograph was a graphic lesson on how the thespian should indicate surprise. She and Zach had laughed at it then. Those were the days when The Method was the rage. Seeing "surprise" produced so spontaneously, Anna wished Zach had lived to share the joke.
Anna hadn't thought of her dead husband in days. Since giving up carrying the torch a few years back, occasionally as much as a week would pass during which she wouldn't say his name to herself. Remembering him after the night she'd just had was oddly comforting. Perhaps being insane in the company of actors wasn't as stigmatizing as it would be in law-enforcement circles.
"Jesus H. Christ," Daniel bellowed over the din of the six generators. "You scared the shit out of me."
"You screamed like a girl," Anna said, uncertain whether she wished to provoke or was merely being accurate.
"Swear to God I thought you were a ghost. We got 'em, you know. And I did not. If anything I squealed like a stuck pig."
Again Anna was unsure if the statement that Daniel would rather be likened to a pig than a girl was meant to provoke or was merely accurate. Either way it amused her. Still she couldn't relax enough to smile. His mention of ghosts put her back on her guard. Had the mention been intentional? Pushing the power of suggestion? Mocking? Or was it just coincidence?
"What are you doing up?" she shouted over the noise. Half a dozen generators, each eight feet high at a guess and half again that long, created noise that poured into ears and corners and arches and nostrils like wet concrete filling spaces, then hardening till it was an effort to move or think.
Daniel made a gentlemanly gesture indicating they step out of his office and away from the racket. For half a breath he paused to let her go first. When she didn't, he moved ahead. On the whole Anna approved of good manners and believed "ladies first" was a pleasant perk. It wasn't misplaced feminism that kept her feet rooted to the floor; it was a desire not to have anyone behind her till she figured out what was throwing her world out of balance.
Daniel walked to the underground cistern built where once the foundation of a chapel had been laid. He sat on the edge of the raised flat "roof" used to collect rainwater.
Though the water was filtered and purified, Anna winced inwardly to see what was undoubtedly a hairy butt planted so firmly on the surface from which her drinking water was collected. She followed him, glad to be away from the generators, but did
not sit down. Mind and body were tuned to the dark side, and she preferred to remain on her feet. Had he ushered her out first because he was polite or because he was dangerous? Had he left the generators for ease of conversation or because he needed time to think of a lie in answer to her questions? Did he sit because his legs were tired or to put her off guard?
"What did you ask me?" Daniel dug in the pocket of his shorts and fished out a pack of Marlboros so crumpled it looked as if he slept with the things.
Anna's suspicious mind started to question every detail of his language and body language. With an effort she shut the internal inquisition down. Over-vigilance was as blinding as being oblivious and wasted a whole lot more time. She repeated her original question. "What are you doing up?"
Daniel lit his disreputable-looking smoke with an old-style lighter made of silver with a top to click open and shut. The wings of the Harley Davidson insignia were on one side in raised brass. "Thought I heard something. I figured I'd better check the generators."
"What did you hear?"
Daniel looked up at her, surprised maybe by her tone. "I don't really know. A door slamming, tool dropped. I was asleep."
Anna thought about that. "I was in the office. It could have been me," she said. She had been careful to open and close doors with stealth born of paranoia. She just wanted to give him an easy out and see if he took it.
"When?"
"Fifteen or twenty minutes ago."
"Wasn't that, then. Besides, it was closer. Or sounded like it was."
"If it woke you up and you rushed out to check, why aren't you in your bathrobe?" The question sounded like what it was: an accusation.
Daniel took a drag on his cigarette that burned a third of it away. "I can go put it on if you'd like," he said. "What's eating you?"
"Weirdness," Anna admitted. "General weirdness. I was up chasing the noise as well." It crossed her mind that the sound that had awakened the maintenance man might have been the sound of her intruder, her moat wader, coming back to roost either in through one of the many gun ports or through the sally port, then shutting his own door behind him.
Daniel looked at a watch nestled in the dark curling hair that covered his wrists. "The sun will be up in a bit. No sense in going back to bed now. I've put coffee on. Want a cup?"
Anna realized she did want coffee. More than that she wanted the normalcy of a kitchen and conversation.
Daniel's rooms were the antithesis of Lanny's, neat and well appointed. Either he'd come to terms with the single life and reveled in it or, beneath all the body hair and tattoos, he was actually or spiritually gay. Having seniority and fulfilling an indispensable job had won him the finest quarters. Two casemates had been taken over to create space for a comfortable kitchen opening onto a graceful living room. Two doors opened off one side. Probably bedrooms. Created before DRTO changed to the prefab boxes inserted into the upper casemates, his apartment retained the natural brick and vaulted ceilings of the fort. Daniel had filled it with tasteful furniture and good rugs. The rooms were tidy, the kitchen counter devoid of clutter.
He poured them each a cup of coffee from a pot in a coffeemaker with numerous buttons and digital readouts. The cups were good quality china, thin enough to be elegant but not so thin one felt in danger of crushing them. The rims were gold and royal blue, the side decorated with four small pink rosebuds. They were of a piece with the rooms and the Japanese kimono and at odds with the burly biker physique of their owner.
Sitting across from one another at a blond wood table with matching chairs, probably Swedish, possibly expensive, they chatted about the noise, the wrecked go-fast boat, the heroics of Bob Shaw.
"The heavy fuel load--smugglers?" Anna said.
"Could be. A lot of it goes on in this part of the world."
Anna had known that: drugs, guns, people, exotic plants and animals, even the tried-and-true classics, Cuban rum and cigars. Neither she nor Daniel had answers, and for a while they sipped excellent coffee from their understatedly elegant cups. Talk soothed Anna. Silence was even better. The fogs of weird were lifting. She could feel the slipped gears of her brain snicking back into their proper grooves and wondered if it indicated a second wind or was engendered by the knowledge that sunrise was near; the dark that frightens children in their beds and is home to hobgoblins was soon to be banished. Sitting, sipping, muscles unclenching, mind clearing, Anna felt the sleepiness that had evaded her for the past twenty-four hours fold around her.
"Two bedrooms?" she asked, just to make conversation.
"I'm one of the lucky few," Daniel acknowledged.
"It must be nice to have a place to put guests besides on the sofa."
"Second bedroom belongs to Mrs. Meyers."
Not knowing Mrs. Meyers, Anna said nothing.
Daniel tilted his head much as a quizzical dog might. "Haven't you ever met Mrs. Meyers?"
His voice changed subtly, triggering Anna's internal alarms. She was being set up for something, she just couldn't figure out what. Moving her coffee away slightly, she gathered her feet under her in case a quick exit was called for. "Can't say as I have," she said neutrally.
"That's right," Daniel said as if remembering something of importance. "Mrs. Meyers hasn't been out since you came onboard. You want to meet her now?"
Grisly images of mummified grandmothers in rocking chairs, corpses in freezers and blood-splashed walls flashed through her mind. The weird was back. She sighed. "Sure. Why not?"
With the excitement of a twelve-year-old showing off his favorite toy, Daniel abandoned his coffee and veritably bounced to the nearer of the two doors. Anna followed, too tired for caution and grown unnaturally accepting of the bizarre.
Daniel moved with a light-footed buoyancy that was unsettling in a man of his heft. Reaching the door, he paused, shot Anna an elfin look at odds with his troll body and beard, and said: "Shh. She may be sleeping."
He opened the door, then stood back that Anna might enter. "Mrs. Meyers," he said with obvious pride and affection.
In the middle of the otherwise empty room was a vintage 1952 Harley Davidson motorcycle. No dirt marred her perfect surfaces, no grease besmudged the gleaming exhaust pipes or dulled the black shine of her engine.
"Wow," Anna said, genuinely impressed. "And all this time I thought you lived alone."
"Tank full of gas, key in the ignition," he said delightedly.
For the next fifteen minutes he extolled Mrs. Meyers's finer points, and Anna fought the sandman to a draw in order to stay on her feet. Finally he wound down. She mumbled her thanks for the coffee and compliments to Mrs. Meyers and all but staggered back to her quarters.
As everything had been this longest of nights, the fatigue was sudden and unnatural. It wasn't the simple tiredness after too long without sleep but the bottomless exhaustion left when amphetamines wear off and the user crashes.
Piedmont was curled into an orange ball on her pillow. The bedside clock read four twenty-seven. Anna nudged cat and pillow to one side and crawled in beside them. Because it was a lifetime's habit to read herself to sleep, she'd brought a piece of Aunt Raffia's correspondence with her. The last thing she remembered was the slither of paper as the letters slid from her hands to scatter on the tile.
10
Tilly's doctor was a recent addition to our jolly crew. Dr. Mudd is one of the Lincoln conspirators and very possibly the most hated man at fort. Perhaps because he protests his innocence so loudly when there are those of us who can only find solace in the sincere confession and repentance of those responsible. He is not even well thought of by his own. Many of our confederate soldiers view assassination as a base and cowardly act not befitting what they view as their noble cause.
I promised Tilly I would do my best. To this end I set out to find Joseph.
He was out on the coaling dock organizing a group of men to go to the neighboring keys to dig for eggs and catch turtles for meat. (Did you know that Tortuga was Spanish for torto
ise? These lonely sand scraps were named for the creatures.) I am awestruck by their ponderous beauty, yet because I am also awestruck by their delicious taste, I am as eager for the hunting of them as any soldier. Turtles have the added benefit of staying fresh--a distinct problem with meats of all kinds in this heat. The hunters simply roll the turtles onto their backs, rendering them immobile till it's time to slaughter them.
As the men moved out to the dinghies, Joseph noticed me waiting. For a moment he seemed glad to see me, but only for a moment. Then it was as if he remembered who I was and some old anger fell between his heart and his eyes.
I have often wondered what I have done that he works so hard at hating me. Sometimes I think it was that day he struck me and I swore if it happened again he would never be safe, not waking, not sleeping. I believe I frightened him. For a man like Joseph to be afraid, even once and for so brief a span of time, is unacceptable. That I caused it or, worse, saw it, must make me unacceptable as well.
Or perhaps it's not hate I see in his face but the countenance of a man eternally disappointed that the endearing kitten he brought home had the bad judgment to grow into an ungainly cat.
As the welcome faded from his eyes he came to where I stood. "What is it now? Has Tilly's pet rebel died?"
"Not yet," I told him and, though he'd deny it, I saw relief in his look.
I took it for kindness till he said: "Good. Sinapp doesn't need many more 'accidents' on his record. He's a good soldier."
"Private Lane needs to be looked after by a doctor," I said. "His hands are badly injured. I'm afraid without more care than Tilly and I can give him he will lose the use of them."
"What a pity. He'll no longer be able to pull the trigger of a gun aimed at our boys," Joseph said.
