Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  "Did you see those two Cubans when Perry brought you in?"

  "I guess. I saw two men. One sitting."

  "I think those two guys, Mack and Theresa Alvarez masterminded this thing. They're bringing over three hundred plus Cuban refugees. They had to disable the fort to make sure we didn't get hold of the mainland in time to get the coast guard out here, stop the Cubans from landing and send them back to Castro. Besides, they had to give themselves and the boat captains bringing the people time to get away."

  "Mack and Theresa?"

  "I think so. Mack was born in Cuba."

  "Where did Theresa go then? Cuba, to plan things?" Teddy asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Who's this Perry? He's not Cuban."

  "There's two of them," Anna said. "Another guy, Butch, is a bigger meaner, uglier Perry. I think they're hired guns. Maybe they've developed plans of their own. They're not following Mack's game plan. They got something else going."

  A ruckus from the outer office silenced them. Neither moved. Anna listened with every ounce of her will. Like bunnies, she thought, trapped in their burrow, hoping to hear the danger has passed.

  A saying of her father's came to mind. He'd been dead for twenty years, but occasionally Anna heard his voice in her head as warm and clear as if he stood in the room next to her. "There's wolves and there's rabbits," he used to say. "And there's no percentage in being a rabbit."

  "God damn but I hate this," Anna whispered.

  The noise moved toward their end of the office. The foreshortened door was jerked open and a body pushed through. Again the door slammed, and a terrific pounding began.

  "They're nailing us in."

  "Daniel?"

  "Who'd you think it was, Tinkerbell?" The maintenance man turned his back on the door to face them. "This baboon shows up on my doorstep with an Uzi. He says Mack sabotaged the generators. He smashes my radio and prods me in the ribs with a gun barrel. What the hell is going on here?"

  Daniel made the office almost unbearably claustrophobic for Anna. His bulk crowded the cramped space. His energy vibrated back from the walls. Though he spoke in the hushed tones of the confused, the hunted, as far as the impact on Anna's brain was concerned he might as well have been bellowing.

  "I've got to get out of here," she said. Then, realizing how self-centered she sounded, amended her statement: "We've got to get out of here."

  From without there came the sounds of another banging door and again the murmuring of voices. None held the sharpness or edge of before. Anna feared the seeds of distrust and dissention she'd sewn had fallen on rocky ground.

  She and Teddy quickly told Daniel what had brought them to this sorry state of affairs. Anna went on to share suspicions and speculations, then Daniel, his thick self hulking into the space Anna'd been using to breathe, joined them in their rabbit-eared listening. Nothing could be discerned. The door had been nailed shut and probably the filing cabinets shoved against it for good measure. Because he couldn't resist, Daniel hurled himself against it several times. There was no give.

  "What are they doing?" Teddy asked after a bit.

  No one had heard anything she hadn't. Anna knew she asked from frustration and the need to connect, to do something. She answered for the same reason. "Waiting, I expect. The refugees should be here soon. They've shut us down. Now all they've got to do is sit on us, make sure we don't get word out and that none of the boaters or campers get in contact with us. They couldn't have wished for better weather. The campground is deserted. The boaters are tucked in. We could scream ourselves hoarse and never raise anybody. Once they've unloaded their cargo, they'll leave. And we'll be found nailed in my office like three chickens in a coop by the first tourist who hears us hollering in the morning." That image was almost as terrifying as the other entertainments the body smugglers had been kind enough to arrange for her.

  "I'm getting out of here," Anna said.

  "Not through that door you're not," Daniel said, ever practical.

  "These aren't hollow-core doors. They're solid oak nailed into solid oak frames. And if we did have a wrecking ball and got out, what do you suggest we do? Charge five armed men with paper clips and Post-it notes?"

  "There's my letter opener," Anna said.

  "Jesus, woman."

  Daniel was right: there was no possibility of getting out the door and no wisdom in attempting it even if it were possible. Anna turned to the only other way out of the room. "Move," she said to her fellow prisoners. Any motion in such close quarters was a cooperative effort.

  She shoved her desk over beneath the firing slit and climbed up on all fours, the better to inspect the thing by feel, memory and intuition.

  "Anna, that window's no more than seven inches wide. I should know. I installed them," Daniel said.

  "Can you get it out? The glass and the frame?" Anna asked.

  "Maybe. Then it would be almost eight inches wide. Nobody can squeeze through that."

  Not so many years ago Anna would have believed him. Since then she'd been a reluctant party to a cave rescue in one of the world's greatest caves, Lechuguilla in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Claustrophobia and a clear and rational mind kept her from intentionally putting herself in squashy little places. She'd never forgotten for a moment what one of the Bureau of Land Management's premier cavers told her: "You get wedged, you die." A sentiment seldom shared with the public during cave search-and-rescue operations.

  But she had seen some remarkable passages. A man who'd become her friend on that hellish expedition, a big Minnesotan named Curt Schatz, had been able to squeeze through alarmingly narrow crevices. "Mouse bones," he'd told her. Mice had sliding skeletons that allowed them to collapse down even smaller than customary mouse size.

  "Mouse bones," Anna told Daniel. "Eight inches?"

  "Tops."

  Turning from the window, she opened the shallow drawer in the center of the desk and felt around for the ruler that everyone, even an acid-befogged, heartbroken Supervisory Ranger, kept there. "Measure my head," she commanded Teddy.

  "Width or circumference?"

  Anna was pleased to hear the controlled, efficient Teddy was back.

  "Width."

  Without light it took several minutes. Teddy had to read the ruler by the Braille method, clicking her long nails from groove to groove till she was sure her count was right.

  "Six and a half inches," she announced.

  "Anna, are you nuts? That's an old wives' tale that wherever your head'll fit you can get through. It's bull. Look at me. My head is nowhere near the biggest part of me. You're gonna get yourself hurt."

  "Get the frame out, Daniel." Anna slid off the desk and they shuffled in a tight circle till Daniel could take her place.

  The only tools he had access to were Anna's letter opener and Swiss army knife. They were all he needed. Anna and Teddy sat in the dark, listening to his scraping and muttering, and when he was ready, they pounded on the door and shouted to be let out while he completed the noisy business of wrenching the window frame out.

  "Seven inches," he said as he handed Anna the window.

  Anna said nothing. Maybe it was an old wives' tale.

  "Move," she said.

  "Keep your knickers on," Daniel replied. "Let me get what I can of the grouting out. This stuff's sharp as can be. It'd tear you up proper."

  Anna bowed to his greater wisdom in the area of grout and appreciated the skin he'd thought to save.

  The low-grade grumble of voices from the outer offices quieted, but they'd not heard the door open and close. Probably the smugglers left during the time Anna and Teddy were pounding on the door to cover Daniel's demolition duties.

  Anna looked at the slot, a rectangle a shade lighter than the surrounding brick. Eight inches. It looked so narrow. Maybe she'd get stuck part way and be found come morning half out half in, dangling like a breech calf. She didn't want to think about it. She wanted to get out. Stopping the Cuban refugees from landing wa
sn't important. America could absorb three hundred more souls. Stopping what she suspected could turn into a bloodbath was.

  30

  Charley Munson and I hid in the back of the bakery behind the wall housing the great ovens. The rich smell of bread was comforting. The knowledge that the fort's bakers must come on duty soon was not. From without, on the parade ground, we heard the sound of men coalesce, disperse, coalesce again then go silent, giving up the hunt. There was no way the sentry who'd seen me could know I was not just a rank-and-file soldier caught out on an illicit tryst with a laundress or engaged in petty theft or drunkenness. When they didn't find me, it was practical to assume I had made it back to the anonymity of my barracks.

  When all was quiet, Charley grabbed my arm again. "Bakers will be here soon," he said.

  "Let me go," I told him. Now that the terror of nearly being discovered had passed, the sickness I'd felt earlier for myself, for the entire race of humans, returned. It was as if a great fire had burned out my insides, leaving a black and stinking ruin. I wanted to get home, get into a clean nightdress and let sleep erase thought for however long it would.

  He hesitated a moment but whether from indecision or something else I couldn't tell. The hiding place he'd chosen was unnatural in its total lightlessness. The grip on my arm tightened, and he pulled me after him. I hadn't the strength to break free or the moral authority to scream for help. Once again I followed, stumbling after in the darkness. The night had been so rife with terrors, it seemed I had exhausted my ability to experience the sensation. I was numb, too low in spirit even to feel curiosity about our destination or what was to be done with me when we reached it. Me bumbling, Private Munson muttering, "Oh my Aunt Fanny" and "God's teeth"--curses that triggered what might have been hysteria, a need to laugh that I was fortunately too numb to give in to--led me up the spiraling stairs to the second tier, past the Virginia regiment's cells and finally to the powder magazine where I'd found Tilly.

  In the airless confines of that place he let loose of me. His grip had been so hard my hand tingled as blood began flowing back into my fingers. Again we were in a place without light. Since I had not barked my shins or tripped over anything, I assumed Sergeant Sinapp had finished clearing out the items cached there. The sweet sharp smell of new-cut wood suggested the walls had been completed as well. Massive walls and mazelike entrance kept out sound as well as light. There was a sense of being suspended in time and space.

  My legs would no longer support me, and I sank to the floor. My captor--or rescuer, his role in my life yet to be determined--sat near me. His breathing, heavy as though he had carried rather than led me, was the only sound I could hear.

  "Why did you have that key?" he asked. The question didn't surprise me but his tone did. He sounded afraid. As absurd as it sounds, his fear angered me. I was the one who had been chased, dragged out of a window, struck in the face, silenced and brought to a place where, should I cry out, no one would hear me. How dare he be the frightened one? That I had gone past fear and was not scared anymore was not the point. Fear was my inalienable right and it outraged me that he had usurped it.

  Even at the time I knew how ridiculous I was being but it failed to temper my emotions.

  "You carried messages from the conspirators to my sister, did you not?" I demanded. The position I was in suggested I should not demand anything, but I had grown heartily sick of not only those things I listed previously, but of men, all men and because Private Munson was nearest, of him particularly. "I know you did."

  He didn't say anything. The sound of his breathing was joined by the small furtive noises of a man fidgeting on a stone floor.

  "Dr. Mudd told me of your complicity, as did Mr. Arnold. Please tell me yourself." Hostility is expensive to maintain, and I hadn't the physical reserves to sustain it. This last came out as a plea.

  Private Munson, who had withstood my browbeating, was not proof against my beseeching.

  "I felt sorry for Joel," he said. "He was so bad hurt. I couldn't let that go. I mean, prisoners can't be mouthing off, sowing seeds of contention and the like. But I couldn't let that go."

  This "sowing seeds" was clearly a quote learned from his superiors. I'd heard Joseph use it many times.

  "What couldn't you let go?" I asked.

  "The sergeant had crippled the boy. His hands. You oughtn't cripple a person. Not like that."

  Joel, "the boy," was only a year or two younger than Charley Munson. The war changed our sons, if not into men, then into half men, half children; children without innocence, men without dreams.

  "So you carried messages for Joel?" I had to prod; in this lightless silence he would drift away between words if I did not. There was that out-of-world quality I mentioned earlier and I, too, was having trouble focusing.

  "At first," he replied. "Then I carried notes for the doctor. I liked them. Tilly was such a grand brave girl, and the doctor always polite like I was somebody and not just a foot soldier in an army that had thrown him in the brig."

  The last of his words scattered around me unheeded. The "was" and the sorrow with which he uttered it hit me like a blow. I had feared for Tilly for quite some time but in speaking of her, Joseph, myself, the other officers and men of the fort who'd been involved in the search for her and Private Lane always referred to her in the present tense, as if, though out of our sight, she still lived. Till I heard my abductor refer to her in the past tense I'd not truly let myself believe that our vibrant, foolish, courageous little Tilly was gone. Gone forever.

  "You said 'was,' Tilly was. Why did you say that?"

  I was crying. Tears flooded down my cheeks. One splashed onto my hand, startling me. I grabbed Private Munson in that same pinching grip he'd used to propel me to this place. As I grabbed blindly I do not know what part of him I held so tightly.

  "I didn't," he said.

  "You did."

  I felt his hands on me then, one on the wrist of the hand that gripped him, the other on my left breast. I thought he'd gone mad but he had not meant to assault me, only to catch hold of me in the dark. Both his hands found my shoulders and he squeezed so hard I knew his fingers would leave bruises.

  "You quit, Mrs. Coleman. You leave this alone. Leave. It. Be." He shook me hard with each word. Not able to see and so anticipate the movement, my head snapped painfully back and forth.

  "You're hurting me," I managed.

  He stopped but did not apologize. "Go home. Don't tell anybody where you been tonight. Don't. Don't talk about your sister no more." Another tear--or perhaps spittle from the vehemence of his words--struck my hand.

  He released me so suddenly I fell backward. I squeaked, not from the pain of striking my elbows on the floor but from the suddenness of it all. Quickly I reoriented myself and sat up. No sound of breathing, no slithery rubbing of fabric on the rough floor or walls. "Private Munson?"

  I'd meant to call firmly, but it came out the barest breath of air. A terrible sense of him in that blind place, just within reach of me but silent, listening, waiting, panicked me. I crawled in the direction I thought was the doorway to the rest of the tier. My head struck something and I cried out again. I don't know whether I'd gotten turned around in my panic or when we'd first come into the powder magazine.

  On my neck, my cheek, I could feel breathing, something close in the dark. I barely had sense enough to follow the wall but did so knowing in this small closed space I would reach the doorway.

  Below, beyond the unfinished enlisted men's quarters, walked a lone man. Private Munson. He'd not been a presence in the hell I'd crawled free of. I had been stalked only by fear.

  Knowing this did not cure me. I could not shake the sense that something horrible was right behind me. Every part of my body was shaking. When I reached the back window to our downstairs hall, it took me three tries to boost myself up that I might slip through on my stomach.

  There by the open window I stripped off my clothes--Joseph's clothes--and wearing nothing b
ut shoes, knickers and chemise, carried them to Luanne's laundry basket. At the basket I removed all but the shoes. I could not bear to have even these mute companions in folly near me. Naked, I climbed the stairs hoping Joseph and Luanne were sleeping and would not come into the hall and find me so.

  In Tilly's room, I put on the clean bed gown I'd craved and lay on the sheets, the night being too warm for covers. I had thought I would sleep immediately. Back in the powder magazine, before that, even, outside Dr. Mudd's place of imprisonment, it seemed I could sleep for a month I was so tired.

  When I finally had the chance, my mind refused to shut out the very things it had been exhausted by. That is why I am sitting up writing you at Tilly's desk, just as dawn is hinting at day beyond the lighthouse. Charley Munson spoke as if he knew Tilly was dead. Yet he seemed both saddened and frightened by the death, as if he had no part in it. He admitted to being the carrier of messages, and I was sure Tilly had been lured from her room that night by a message and Mr. Arnold believed one of the men who came to fetch Joel spoke with Private Munson's voice.

  Private Munson first caught me crawling in my own window, struck me thinking me a thief or worse, recognized me as the captain's wife which stopped the beating, but what decided him to hide me that I mightn't face discovery was the sight of the key to Mr. Arnold's cell.

  Joel worked on Charley Munson's sympathy, and he began carrying messages from Joel to Tilly. When Dr. Mudd became aware of, or became insane and deluded himself into believing he had discovered tangible proof of his innocence, he must have co-opted Munson as a carrier either by threatening to expose his already compromised position or won him over with charm.

  Dr. Mudd pulled Tilly into his plot by appealing to her sense of justice and drama. I don't know if Dr. Mudd in actuality had this photograph proving his innocence or didn't have it but believed he did or was simply pretending he did to get Tilly to risk some further danger in his pursuit of freedom. I don't think Dr. Mudd is above attempting to escape, nor do I think he'd flinch at using our sister should he devise a plan in which she might be of use. I came to believe that, regardless of the truth, Dr. Mudd genuinely believes he once held the key to his release.