by Nevada Barr
Bob and his wife were tucked away in their house.
Not anxious to interview them with an eye to the poisoning, Anna took a leisurely route back to the west side of the fort. Tourists off the huge catamaran, one of two that ferried visitors from the mainland each day, wandered the parade ground and drifted from casemate to casemate. Anna could see them through the brick arches, small and dressed in bright colors like dolls in a dollhouse viewed from the back. People made places mundane, robbed them of mystery and romance. Crazy, delusional, absurd as the human animal could be, it carried homely reality around its neck like the mariner's albatross. Religion, the fantasy of the occult, the paranormal, close encounters of the third kind, served to indicate how burdensome life without magic had become to some.
Moving slowly, taking the steps one at a time in deference to her hard-won aches and scrapes and her desire to put off meeting with the Shaws a little longer, Anna climbed the spiral stairs beside the Visitors Center, the room that had housed the guards when Raffia Coleman was in residence.
On the second level she turned right, instead of left toward the Shaws and home. When she'd first come to the fort, Duncan had taken her on a tour. One of the stops was in Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mr. Sam Arnold's cell, they being the two most famous--or infamous--of the inmates when Fort Jefferson had been a prison.
Duncan adhered to the theory that the doctor was guilty as charged. Despite the fact that a couple of presidents had written letters amounting to an apology to the doctor's descendants, the court's ruling had never been overturned and the doctor's name was still Mudd. The information available from the highly public legal proceeding gave rise to reams of paper on the subject, and Duncan preached his gospel of Mudd's guilt in learned terms and soon, he hoped, from the New York Times bestseller list.
As Anna understood it, Samuel Mudd's contention was that he had not known John Wilkes Booth when, hours after Lincoln's assassination, he set the man's leg, broken in the jump from the balcony to the stage of Ford's Theatre. This was why he had given treatment and, upon learning of the assassination, had not turned Booth in. Mudd's poor-country-doctor-living-up-to-the-Hippocratic-oath defense was, according to Duncan, undone by the fact that several witnesses had seen Mudd in the company of John Wilkes Booth on two occasions prior to the shooting of the president, making it extremely unlikely that Booth, who remained overnight in the doctor's house, was unrecognized by Mudd.
Till reading Raffia Coleman's letters, Anna had little interest in the guilt or innocence of a man so long dead. Drugs and family ties having dragged history through time and dumped it in her living room, she looked on the cell with new eyes. The channels so painstakingly chipped in the floor to carry away standing water were as Raffia had described them. In running her fingers over the fissures Anna could feel the anger and desperation it had taken to carve them. Imagining the casemate, now open to the sunlight with a pleasant view of the parade ground, boarded over, the three high, narrow slits on the east wall must have crushed the life from what little light they allowed through.
Regardless of the deeds of the men condemned to serve time in the cell, Anna felt pity for them. She sided with those opposed to the death penalty because it did not deter crime, was not cost effective and those on death row seemed anxious to live. She was not against it because it was deemed cruel or unusual. Had she been sentenced to such a room as this without light, without hope of release, the death penalty would have been a great kindness.
Still, keeping company with her aunts Raffia and Tilly, Anna took her time walking the northern bastion and casemates. Partway down she veered from the dramatic drench of sun and shadow in the great arched spaces and slipped into the brick passage Raffia had described outside the black powder storage room.
Built within the walls, closer to the parade ground than the sea, these small rooms were designed for security, a place safe from the guns of an attacking force yet convenient to the gun ports they served. The tight doglegged passage to gain entrance reminded Anna of the way into Injun Joe's Cave on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Time warped briefly--a sensation she was beginning to get used to--and she suffered the same pinch of panic going in as she had at nineteen in southern California.
Inside, the room was lined--floor, walls and ceiling--with wood. She'd have to ask Duncan why. Maybe, in this humid climate, it helped to keep the powder dry. The timber-lined, many-angled internal ceiling going up to a point, it felt like the inside of the grain silos she'd played in as a girl. Three weeks before her eleventh birthday a kid had suffocated, drowned in grain, and her father never let her or Molly play in one again. Looking around this confined space, protected from the elements, graffiti from the eighteen hundreds still legible on the boards, she felt again that unsettling mix of excitement and dread silos had engendered in her since the neighbor boy had died.
For several minutes she let the centuries shift and listened for the weeping of Tilly, the calls of her older sister, the clatter of men and hammers. Before she could conjure up the past, two teenaged boys wearing shorts so large the crotches hobbled their knees burst in with sweating exuberance and Anna was driven back into the new millennia where boys Joel Lane's age were still children and had the tee shirts and the manners to prove it.
Hounded from her hiding place, she gave up procrastinating and finished the journey to the Shaws'. Their home was just below her apartment and mirrored Lanny Wilcox's quarters. On the southernmost end of the house was a screened-in porch. Anna always paid attention to this on her way past because the Shaws kept two fine fat cats who often lounged on the porch.
Thinking life would be grand if she dealt exclusively with felines, she knocked on the door. Teddy let her in with what appeared to be genuine pleasure. Wondering if this woman regularly poisoned people to further her husband's career, Anna experienced no reciprocal emotions but believed she'd faked them adequately enough to pass muster.
The two houses, the Shaws' and Wilcox's, were structurally alike, but there ended the similarity. Where Lanny's was made smaller by the encroachment of his collected interests, mementos, incarnations and necessary junk, the Shaws' home was made larger by white paint, mirrors, clean, polished wood-and-canvas furniture and an absence of any trappings of the past. Though she traveled light, Anna had not been this unencumbered since college, when a bookcase of bricks and boards and a couple of thumbtacks were all she needed in the way of interior decor.
Not that the Shaws' tastes ran to plastic milk crates and beanbag chairs; what there was was classy and probably expensive. It was just that there was so little. What there was appeared planned, cautious, devoid of knickknacks, personal photos, souvenirs, toys, dog-eared books or anything else to play with. The room could have been designed for a magazine cover.
Given what Anna had learned of Teddy's past, it wasn't surprising she had no wish to be reminded of it on a daily basis. Why Bob would have so little of his history on the walls Anna had no idea. Regardless of pathologies, she much preferred the Shaws' living space to that of Lanny Wilcox. In the Shaws' quarters she could breathe.
Having ushered Anna over the stairway landing and down into the living room, Teddy left her to find her own seat. Anna chose the one with the white cat named Joey, as Teddy fluttered around her husband. Bob was ensconced on the sofa, a cream canvas sling supported by blond wood that had to be more attractive than comfortable. Had Anna been the one with her leg in a cast, she would have been forced to crawl to the closet, get a gun and shoot Teddy. The amount of fussing and plumping and cooing would have driven her around the bend.
Bob thrived on it. A warrior carried from the field of battle, he accepted the attention with gracious humility that only just dimmed the glow of pure contentment on his face. Probably this idyll would be short-lived. Having tasted what he'd thirsted after for so long, odds were good he'd be craving another adventure before the scars of this one had time to fade.
Following an offer of drinks, which Anna almost forgot to decline, the
domestic Teddy, exhibiting none of the Borgia characteristics Anna'd envisioned once she'd seen her as a suspect, left Anna and Bob alone and went into the kitchen.
The life of the party gone, there didn't seem much to say. Anna would have busied herself playing with Joey, but the cat was having none of it and jumped down at the first tentative pat.
"You're looking good," Anna said to keep the silence from getting embarrassing.
"I'm a fast healer," Bob said.
He probably was. So far his other inflated opinions about his worth had been proved out. Still, Anna had to make a point not to smile. Bob must even outdo other men in the superior functioning of his cells.
"Bring me up to speed. What's been happening on the boat thing?" Bob plucked two brightly colored pillows from where Teddy tucked them and tossed them to the floor. Basking in the glow of past deeds had lasted an even shorter time than Anna'd given it. The adrenaline junkie was back.
Teddy returned with drinks on a tray, a Coke for Bob and iced tea for her. Seeing the Coke can was unopened and meant for Bob Anna quickly changed her mind and asked if she could have that drink after all. Nosing around the haunts of Civil War dead was thirsty work. Teddy gave Anna Bob's soda without so much as blinking and fetched another. Had she been planning on drugging her guest she was unperturbed at being foiled.
"So," Teddy said, flopping down on the only empty chair. "Who was Bob's dead guy? Anything on that?" She was as anxious to return to the glory days as her husband.
The delay Anna had instigated with the coke business had given her time to think, something she should have done before making the call.
She told them everything, leaving out only that she and Lanny had been drugged and that she knew there was a warrant out for Teddy's arrest.
Both Shaws listened with the rapt attention of children being told a favorite bedtime story. As carefully as she watched, Anna could detect no flickers of fear or guilt.
"Teddy," Anna said as the younger woman saw her to the door. "Do you think Bob could spare you for a little while? There's something I'd like to discuss."
"Can't we do it here? I have no secrets from--" Teddy jerked the way a small dog does when it runs headlong into the end of its leash. For the time it takes to breathe, she met Anna's eyes. Other than maybe Matt Damon, Anna had never seen an actor who could match the sudden and overwhelming vulnerability of Teddy's face. Emotion was clearly written there. Anna watched it come and go. Dismay, that almost laughable look a toddler gets when its first balloon pops in his hand, the sudden shock before the shrieking, robbed Teddy of her years. An adult's realization of consequences brought them back with another ten she'd not yet earned. The baby face hardened then sagged, lips thinning.
"Let me tell him I'm going out," Teddy said softly.
As she crossed the kitchen and climbed the three stairs over the hump into the living room, Anna wondered if Teddy would face her monsters with the courage she'd so lauded in her husband. Hard to tell. Fessing up to sleaze and paying the sordid price took a different kind of courage than taking a bullet for the president or rescuing a child from a burning building. No adrenaline helped one through the terror; no promise of reward in status or simply goodwill pulled one through the hard marches. It wasn't even as good as the biblical sort of bravery, the willingness to suffer degradation and abuse for the good of another.
It was pure payback. Scraping it up for the bookie when the bet was lost.
A murmured conversation later Teddy came again into the kitchen. Anna'd seen people go pale beneath a suntan before. Teddy's skin had the unpleasant grayish cast skim milk lends to coffee.
"Let's walk," Anna said. The day was impossibly hot and windy, but being in public would be safer. Besides, Anna wanted to conduct an experiment.
They walked in silence across the parade ground and out the sally port beneath the sweep and cry of the frigate birds. Teddy had guessed what the conversation was to be about, and silence would do more to soften her up than questions.
As Anna turned right to walk around the moat wall, Teddy couldn't take it any longer. "You ran background checks," she said.
"I did."
They reached the southeast corner of the fort, and Anna turned right again, following the wide walkway that topped the moat's wall. Between them and the fort lay the water, shallow at this end, maybe three feet deep and twice that from the top of the wall to the surface of the water. To their left was the ocean, sparkling where the wind roughed its surface.
"I've been clean since I married Bob," Teddy said. "All that was another lifetime. I was another person."
"Does Bob know?" Anna asked.
"He knows."
That was a lie. Anna'd read the truth in Teddy's face back in her kitchen. She let it alone. Beneath the crystal waters of the moat a nurse shark, not yet two feet long, hung motionless, strands of brown seaweed trailing over its tail.
"I never told him," Teddy confessed at last. "Bob is so . . . good. It was too late for me. I already loved him. I was afraid he wouldn't see me the same way anymore."
"What was it?" Anna asked.
Teddy understood the question. Like any lover or addict, the name of the necessary object stays close in mind. "Percodan," Teddy said. "Prescription painkillers."
"You stole them from the hospitals where you worked."
"For a while. Then I knew I was taking too many so I started stealing prescription pads and signing the doctors' names to them."
Again a right turn. They walked now along the western wall where Anna believed she had seen the wet prints of whoever had run from her the night she'd seen the light in Lanny Wilcox's quarters. She stopped midway down the wall and looked out toward Loggerhead Key. Three miles away, it looked ghostly in the mist the wind teased from the ocean. Out of the corner of her eye Anna studied Teddy Shaw. Black snakes of hair whipped her cheeks, stuck to her lips. Color had returned and she no longer looked as if she might pass out.
If she had indeed splashed across the moat that night and slithered over the wall, she didn't seem to be thinking about it now. Her attention was directed inward.
"Will you tell him?"
"Yeah," Anna said. "You can have a few days to tell him yourself if you like. Then we'll go on in to Key West and you can turn yourself in. I doubt you'll get more than a couple months' jail time. Maybe not even that, maybe just more probation."
"Can't you just pretend you don't know?"
Teddy knew she couldn't, so Anna didn't bother to answer.
"Two months, probation or whatever and it'll be over. You can come home," Anna said. "Over forever unless you screw up again. I'd think that'd be a relief."
"If I have a home to come to."
"You will." Anna didn't doubt for a minute the truth of her words. Bob and Teddy had such a rich dream life they'd be able to romanticize even jail time into their story. "Tell you what I can do," Anna said as the story they might write unfolded in her brain. "You don't have to tell Bob I found out. I won't. Then you just tell him you have to come clean, square yourself with the law."
Teddy thought about that. If it were possible to see someone mentally embroider a tale, Anna would have sworn that was what she witnessed in Teddy's eyes.
"That would be good," she said at last.
They walked on, circumnavigating the fort. Anna felt no need to talk, and Teddy was busy with her own thoughts, perhaps scripting her confession scene with her husband. The sun baked sweat from their bodies, the wind sucked it away. Anna's throat grew dry. Across the narrow isthmus on Bush Key the sooty terns wheeled in a gray cloud crying their endless cries. Tourists dotted the old coaling docks and sat on beaches enjoying their day in the sun. They reached the sally port and went into the fort. The grass on the parade ground was so dry it crackled underfoot, putting Anna in mind of crispy Chinese noodles.
When they reached Teddy's back door and the wooden stairs to Anna's second-tier apartment, Anna spoke again. "Would you mind coming up for a minute? There's s
omething I'd like your opinion on."
The pull to escape into her house, to be with Bob, was so great Teddy's body actually leaned in that direction. For a second Anna thought she'd refuse. Evidently she decided keeping on Anna's good side was worth extending her stay away from her wifely duties.
"For a minute," Teddy said.
"Sit down," Anna said when they'd gone inside. Teddy perched on the edge of the couch. At the far end Piedmont opened his eyes the merest of slits. Apparently the idea of sharing his bed with a stranger appalled him. He jumped to the chair, curled up, and resumed his nap.
"I'm thirsty," Anna said. She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of sparkling water.
"Can I pour you a glass of water?"
"That'd be great," Teddy said. No hesitation. No flicker of alarm.
Anna put the bottle back and took out two Cokes. "The water's gone flat," she said. "I'd forgotten."
Teddy pulled the tab. Anna sat by Piedmont.
"What did you want my opinion on?"
"Drugs. If somebody wanted to induce mild psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia, what would be the best way to do it? You know, tasteless, easy to get a hold of, easy to administer in liquid."
Teddy liked story problems. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, can of pop in both hands. "Legal or illegal?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Lysergic acid diethylamide."
LSD. The old classics were always best.
"Any way to control the dosage?"
"In a lab, sure, but with street stuff who knows?"
That fit with Anna's experience. One of the tainted bottles had agitated her only a little. The other had taken the top of her head off.
"Thanks."
"Why? You planning on taking a trip?"
"Just curious," Anna said.
