by Nevada Barr
"Doesn't sound like Theresa Alvarez," Donna said when she'd done, hearkening back to the non sequitur that she believed had launched this ghost story. "Theresa was dark and, as Patrice has so observantly pointed out, not much given to clothes that covered her from neck to ankles."
"No. Sorry," Anna said. "I never thought it was Lanny's girlfriend. Talking about Theresa just put me in mind of it because she disappeared. Ghostlike. Poof?"
The segue was spotty at best but the lighthouse keepers chose to accept it without question. Anna didn't know what gender the two had been born, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were girls now. It was good to be one of them.
"Do you think she was 'disappeared' against her will?" A funny edge came into Patrice's voice that bothered Anna till she remembered the woman was a retired law-enforcement officer.
"You think old fire horses are bad," Donna said as if reading her mind. "They've got nothing on retired cops."
Patrice was not to be deterred. "Do you suspect felonious play? We heard she'd run off, presumably with a man younger, prettier and richer than Lanny."
Hearing her vague suppositions laid out in words, Anna backed away from the idea. It sounded melodramatic, like a bored ranger making something out of nothing. Or a woman of a certain age having mid-life delusions.
"Just poking around," she said. "Nothing really. What I came over here for--besides to waste your time and drink up your tea--was to see if either of you recognized this boat. Here's what's left of it." She took a printout of an underwater photo of the bottle-green go-fast boat. It was taken before the second explosion, when the bow was still recognizable as such.
"Looks like a Scarab, maybe," Donna said. Anna took note of the fact that the woman knew her boats.
"It is."
"What's that color? Looks almost black in the picture."
"Metallic sparkly dark green."
"Where's the boat out of?" Patrice asked.
"I don't know yet. We're working on it."
"We see a lot of boats come through," Donna said.
"We'll keep an eye out," Patrice said. "What am I talking about? The boat's on the bottom. It's history. I'll see what I got."
"The Dick Tracy File," Donna explained when Anna looked confused. "Patrice videos anything the least bit odd. In case . . ." She laughed.
Patrice didn't.
"Not just odd," she defended herself. "Though of course odd is particularly interesting. Just a photographic record of comings and goings." For an instant she looked sheepish.
Donna patted her with a big callused hand, grease from working on the generator ingrained under her round, clipped fingernails. "It's good you keep it, Patrice. It's come in handy. Because of Patrice the Key West cops--"
"Key Stone cops," Patrice interjected.
"Your opinion. The Key West police and the coast guard were able to track down a twenty-nine-year-old felon who'd run off with his boss's fishing yacht."
"And his boss's fourteen-year-old daughter."
"She went willingly."
"It was her idea, but that doesn't change anything," Patrice said.
"Nope. He should have been keelhauled."
If the current theory about the lighthouse keepers was correct, neither of them had ever been little girls. Perhaps the undertone of anger Anna heard had nothing to do with chromosomes and everything to do with humanity.
Because she had time to kill and because she was enjoying herself and because her position as Supervisory Ranger in the Dry Tortugas was temporary, Anna decided to indulge in a little gossip--real gossip, not police work disguised--good old-fashioned dishing the dirt with the rest of the girls.
"What do you guys know about Mack?" she asked. "He strikes me as a man with a past."
Donna straddled the bench on the far side of the picnic table and rubbed her jaw. The way she pushed upward on her cheek made Anna wonder if it was a habit left over from years of checking for five o'clock shadow.
"He's an odd duck, that's for sure. He loves to talk, but only about himself."
"He's quite manly in that," Patrice said, and the three of them enjoyed an uncensored laugh.
"I noticed his back and legs are scarred. He ever mention how that came about?"
"I noticed those too, right off," Patrice said.
"She asked him about it right off, too," Donna said.
"I asked nice," Patrice said.
Donna mimicked her partner, batting her eyes like a femme fatale, which clearly tickled Patrice: "Hello, Mack, isn't it a nice day? By the by, how the hell did you get all cut up like that?"
"I did not," Patrice laughed.
"Did he tell you?" Anna asked.
"He told us a story," Patrice said. "Something about falling off an all-terrain vehicle and being dragged across gravel by a pant leg. A load of hooey."
"Child abuse, you think?"
"That's my guess," Patrice said. "If we're right, it's a wonder he didn't grow up to be another Jeffrey Dahmer. It had to've been brutal. I don't blame him for making up a better story."
Anna didn't either. "What does he talk about, then, if the past is out of the picture?"
"Oh it's not out," Donna said. "It's the picture that's a wee bit different than you'd expect after seeing the scars."
"Mack's got a lot of stories about how his folks were these rich aristocratic types. According to him he had his own horse, nannies and the trimmings," Patrice said.
"And he's a lowly government employee now because some evil relative squandered it all away," Anna finished. The fantasy was fairly common among dissatisfied men who thought they deserved better.
"Something like that," Patrice said. "He gets vague about it. Maybe that part of the story's not written yet."
For a while the three of them sat in comforting silence, Anna sipping her tea, Donna fiddling with the chunk of machinery, Patrice seemingly content doing nothing at all.
They made a bit more desultory talk. Anna asked politely about the eviscerated motor on the table and was treated to a list of internal combustion symptoms that meant nothing to her. Finally Patrice took pity on her and summed it up.
"Generator went ker-put."
"Terminally ker-put?" Anna asked.
"Over Donna's dead body."
"I'll have it up and running by dark," Donna promised. "I think we got a mouse problem. They get to building nests in the moving parts of your machinery and it's a nightmare."
It was on the tip of Anna's tongue to offer Piedmont's services as a mouser. He could rid an island of the size of Loggerhead Key of rodents in under a week. What stopped her was selfishness. She liked Piedmont at home.
Unless Donna pulled off her usual miracle, Loggerhead Key would have to swelter in the dark. Anna was keeping her cat.
She looked at her watch. Two forty-seven. Time to meet some men about a wreck. She made her goodbyes and walked away from the snug cottage and into the glare of white sand and a hard-looking sea. It occurred to her that she felt good for having had tea with Patrice and Donna. It also occurred to her that she had come with questions, and had given out a great deal of information and gotten little.
Patrice must've been one hell of a cop.
11
My Dearest Peg,
Five days have passed since I last sat down to write. To turn back the clock: the four of us waited in the casemate next to that shared by Dr. Mudd and a second of the conspirators.
The cell was dim, as they all are once the opening arch onto the parade ground has been boarded up, and this one darker than most, having but a small opening on the sea side. My eyes had adjusted, however, and I could see with that misty clarity one experiences at twilight. Though the cell was stiflingly hot, the sweat prickling my skin had the quality of winter perspiration brought on by exercising in extreme cold.
Joel was still and silent, the effort to be brave and charming during transport having taken what little strength he had. The soldier who was to remain with us as guard and chape
rone stood to one side of the door leading to Dr. Mudd's cell, looking agitated and thunderous. Eyes big and mouth pinched, Tilly knelt beside Joel, watching the door where the soldier had rapped, summoning the devil upon whom we had pinned our slim hopes.
The door opened. An urbane-looking man, hairline receding, a lush mustache covering his upper lip above a well-trimmed goatee, said: "May I help you?" for all the world as if he answered the door of his own home and under better circumstances.
I don't know if it was the relief that he did not look like a slavering beast or the surprisingly kind eyes under thin, low brows, or the offer of precisely that which we had come seeking--help--but Tilly started to cry.
"Are you Dr. Mudd?" she asked through tears that flowed prettily--when I cry, my face goes red and blotchy and my nose runs. Perhaps that's why my tears lost their efficacy with Joseph too many years ago to count.
The most hard-hearted of men would have responded with chivalry to the picture of feminine distress Tilly presented.
"I am," he told her and bowed slightly. He was elegant, even--or perhaps I should say especially--given the surroundings, and spoke with a whisper of a southern drawl that served to enhance the image. "How can I be of service?" All this was directed to Tilly, I suppose because it was she who first addressed him.
Whatever the reason, I could see her becoming as grave and mature as befitted a woman addressed on matters of importance. This "honor," if indeed attentions from the likes of him constituted such, coupled with his offer of medical help for Joel Lane, completely won Tilly over. Our little sister and one of the men condemned for the most heinous and cowardly of murders were staunch allies before they'd exchanged a baker's dozen of words.
I did not like it. I very much did not like it. Unfortunately my discomfort came only later. Joel's needs being foremost in my mind at the time, though not so swayed as Tilly, I was glad enough of the doctor's help.
As she had established a rapport with the notorious doctor, Tilly became mistress of the situation. I was content to stand by the soldier against the back wall and act as an observer.
She showed the doctor Joel and told him how he had come to be injured. Dr. Mudd's expression didn't appear to change, but when mouth and chin are completely obscured by hair, the face was unreadable. I wouldn't doubt if a few of the union's famed stoics owe the compliment not to moral fortitude but a plentitude of facial hair. The doctor did not give in to the temptation to comment on the brutality of the union soldiers. He merely nodded, said: "Please?" and, when Tilly made room, knelt to determine the extent of Joel's injuries.
I had been so caught up in Dr. Mudd's examination of Joel, the quick surety of his long fingers, the small helpful movements of Miss Tilly as though she'd spent years in a sickroom, that I forgot there was another soul incarcerated in these rooms until the soldier at my elbow moved suddenly.
Samuel Bland Arnold. You of course remember the name from the trial and the accounts in the newspapers. Words cannot convey the impact that laying eyes on this man has.
Mr. Arnold had taken Dr. Mudd's place in the door leading into their cell. He'd apparently started to enter the casemate where we were. That's what stirred the soldier assigned to Tilly and me. Arnold held both hands up, palms outward, to assure the soldier he would not try to cross the threshold again. This gesture is universal for surrender, acquiescence, yet in a manner I cannot put into words, when done by Mr. Arnold, it was mocking as well.
He leaned against the lintel, ankles crossed, and lit a cheroot. Dark haired, mustache worn clipped above the lip and long at the corners of his mouth, brows level and thick over deep-set eyes, the man is just the sort with whom silly girls ruin their reputations.
Mr. Arnold said nothing, nor did he interfere in any way, yet, to me at least, his presence was as disruptive as a soprano singing off-key. I turned my back on him yet remained so aware of his presence I believe I could have told you the instant it happened had he left that doorway.
My peculiar suffering wasn't to last long. Dr. Mudd was in need of many things for the care of the patient he had taken on with such automatic grace. The guard could not leave either Tilly or me alone with the prisoners, and Tilly would have had to be dragged from Joel's side by a team of wild horses. It fell to me to fetch and carry. I found it a great relief to be freed of that close room with its absence of air and presence of prison smells and the disturbing emanations from Mr. Arnold.
Dr. Caulley is a lean man, but his moon face, glistening summer and winter as if basted for roasting, gives the illusion he was meant to be corpulent but was too stingy to allow his body to attain its predestined shape. The fort's surgeon is unfailingly polite to me but manages by intricate manipulations of eyebrows and narrow mustache to semaphore the message that he doesn't like me and has a low opinion of my intellectual abilities.
When Dr. Caulley found me acting as errand girl for the infamous Dr. Samuel Mudd, his eyebrows surpassed themselves in communicating that which his pursed and niggardly little mouth was too pious to say. With those two scanty lines of reddish hair, he managed to disparage Dr. Mudd's medical abilities, lineage and politics while his mouth murmured only, "Mister Mudd. I see."
Joseph must have taken time to speak with him, because he granted my requests. It took several trips, but I brought Dr. Mudd everything he'd requested with the exception of morphine. Using hints and eyebrows, Dr. Caulley conveyed that the confederate doctor and conspirator in murder could not be trusted not to sell the morphine or use it himself. I was afraid Joel would be left to suffer. That he was in great pain was evident even to the untrained eye.
When I'd brought what I'd been given and relayed the information about the morphine--sans the eyebrow signals--Dr. Mudd was silent for a moment, rocking back on his heels where he'd been kneeling by his patient.
He finally stood and pulled what had once been a crease in his trousers straight. "Pain can kill a man," he said simply. "I saw it on the battlefield. The pain takes the strength that could otherwise be used for healing." Then he brushed his hands together, one against the other.
Tilly read the gesture as clearly as I did. "No," she said, but not with the girlish tears she'd shown earlier. In the little time we had been in this dark and sweltering room, Tilly had grown up. "Stay with him, Raffia," she said. "I won't be long."
I was so stunned by the change in her that she'd swept by me and was gone before I had time to protest or even to ask what she intended.
She wasn't gone more than twenty minutes, but it seemed a good deal longer. Tilly was the binding presence, I discovered, not Private Lane. When she left, none of us remaining could find anything to say to one another.
By the time Tilly returned with Joseph, though I'd not spoken a single word to either Dr. Mudd or Mr. Arnold, I felt I had spent a short lifetime in their midst.
From the moment Tilly stepped off the ship that brought her over from Key West she has had Joseph eating out of her hand. It delights me to see it and, I must confess, often makes me wonder if being barren is quite the blessing I believe it to be. He responds to her with gentleness I've seen him use only with horses and dogs. It reassures me the boy I fell in love with still dwells in the man I am married to.
Dr. Mudd reemerged from his cell when he heard the ring of Joseph's boots on the brick. Joseph stayed in one doorway and Mudd, having displaced Arnold--who seemed not so much to leave but to vanish as a shadow will when exposed to light--stayed in the other. Between them Joel's "hospital" room was neutral ground. Across it I could feel the animosity from my husband and the rebound of it from the doctor.
"Mudd," Joseph said curtly. "Morphine for the boy."
Dr. Mudd started to cross the open space to retrieve it. Pointedly, Joseph handed it to me.
"My wife will have the keeping of it. She will give you what you need for the boy and stay to watch until you have administered it."
"Thank you--" Mudd began, but Joseph cut him off.
"This is not a privilege and w
ill get you no special treatment. Never test me."
An arrogance I'd not seen--or not noticed--before came over Dr. Mudd, stiffening his back and hardening the muscles of his face. It made him a different man from the kindly doctor who tended to Joel. I could easily see how, if he wore this guise in court, he was condemned. This Mudd could possibly lie and kill and continue to feel righteous for having done so.
"Sir," Dr. Mudd said icily. "Considering you are willing to imprison an innocent man, your rudeness does not surprise me."
There was an awful moment after the doctor spoke. Joseph said nothing but let Dr. Mudd's words hang in the air. I don't think the doctor is aware of what a slender thread his continued well-being at Fort Jefferson depends on.
"Please . . ." Tilly said to no one and everyone.
"Do not test me," Joseph repeated in a tone I have come to respect. He turned to our soldier-escort. "Private Mason, as soon as the morphine is administered, see Mrs. Coleman and her sister back to the officers' quarters. On his way out he stopped beside Tilly and me. In less frightening but no less serious tones, he said: "Don't you two test me either."
Tilly scarcely heard him, nor, I noted, did she thank him for getting the morphine. I could only hope she had the sense--and the grace--to do it before they had returned to the casemate. She was halfway across the cell, the morphine in her outstretched hand. "Dr. Mudd, I cannot thank you enough. Without you we would be so alone."
Joseph looked back over his shoulder at Tilly clinging to Dr. Mudd's arm as they knelt by Joel. The expression on his face was alien to me; I could not read it, yet it made me afraid. For whom, I don't know. Maybe for myself.
13
Motoring into the harbor, things seemed peaceful enough. It was too early in the day for the shrimpers, and many other boats were out of the park fishing. Passing a sportfishing ban in Dry Tortugas National Park had caused an outcry heard all the way to Mississippi. Not killing animals in a national park was one thing, but fish? Surely it's every American boy's birthright to kill fish anywhere they are to be found.
