Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  No one wanted to confess to killing an American before they'd even had a chance to become one themselves. Anna didn't care. She was grateful to the shooter.

  "Paulo!" she shouted. "How's Donna?"

  Two figures appeared shadowlike on the wall above the beaches. "Donna's fine" came the boiler engineer's gravelly voice. "But Mrs. Meyers is in critical condition."

  Patrice began to cry, great gulping sobs of relief punctuated by a single grunt as she again bashed Butch on the side of the head to remind him of his manners.

  Within half an hour Anna had things more or less organized. The refugees were in the casemates on the fort's north side where they were at least out of the rain. A Cuban man and Perry, bedfellows in death, lay side-by-side in the researchers' dorm. The wounded woman, suffering a bullet to her right shoulder, awaited Teddy in the fort's infirmary. Lack of personnel forced Anna to house the prisoners, Rick, Paulo, Butch and Mack, with the refugees, but they'd been bound securely with plastic handcuffs at wrist and ankle and weren't going anywhere soon--at least not anywhere fun. Donna was put to the task of freeing Teddy and Daniel, and Patrice, armed with two Uzis and a .44, stood watch over refugees and prisoners alike.

  A semblance of order restored, Anna set about finding Bob Shaw's body. When Teddy was released, Anna didn't want her to suffer under the added burden of not knowing, of picturing her beloved facedown in the moat, eyes being nibbled by crabs. Butch and Mack denied any knowledge of what Perry had done. Anna didn't waste time grilling them. From what Teddy told her, Perry had come to the Shaws' house alone.

  The sun had yet to thrust its face over the horizon, but the light had grown stronger with the shadowless clarity of a subtropical dawn. The rain had let up, and the clouds, though not gone, had lifted. It would be hot and sunny by noon.

  Returning to the Shaws', Anna set about following the blood trail that began near the sofa in the living room. She'd checked the bedroom before, and Anna took her search outside. Why Perry would bother to first drag the corpse upstairs, then change his mind, drag it back down and stash the body in one of the storage casemates was a mystery. It wouldn't keep the body from being found, only delay the inevitable a few minutes. When following the twisted trail of a sociopath there wasn't much point in spending a lot of thought on logic. Anna stuck to the trail of blood.

  Rain had obliterated most of the sporadic and sketchy trail. Anna found traces of what could be blood soaked into the wooden treads of the stairs leading to the second tier and her apartment. Once under the protective arches of the higher level, tracking became easy. An obvious trail where a heavy object had been dragged was left in the ubiquitous brick dust.

  Bob had been taken in the opposite direction from Anna's quarters. Two casemates down, she found him. The cast had been smashed off but for a jagged-edged ring of plaster at mid thigh The leg was rebroken, bone again breaking through the skin. Blood dyed the lower part of Bob's leg red. He lay half in the sill of the broken-out gunport facing Loggerhead Key. His service weapon was in his hand.

  "Oh my God," Anna whispered reverently. Shattered leg, bleeding, Bob had dragged himself up the stairs to his bedroom, retrieved his gun, then pulled himself up to the fort's second tier. It was he who had shot Perry and very probably saved Donna's life.

  He was breathing. He had a pulse, albeit a weak and thready one. "Hallelujah," Anna breathed her thanks to the ambient gods.

  The whump of helicopter blades announced the arrival of the cavalry, coast-guard style. The storm had lifted sufficiently that aircraft could be dispatched, and they had outpaced the ships headed to Garden Key.

  Uniformed men and women swarmed efficiently over the fort. Bob was packaged by EMTs and whisked away. Rick, Mack, Butch and Paulo were taken into custody. The refugees were being cared for. Anna was relieved of responsibility and felt the lift as a physical thing. Light and tired and surreal, she left the bustle and shouted commands and made her way to the dock where the prisoners awaited boarding under the stern eye of two young guardsmen looking fresh and clean and strong in their natty uniforms.

  Damp and crumpled, feeling old and small and frail, Anna sat down opposite but out of reach of William Macintyre. Despite his crimes--and she guessed they were even more numerous than she knew of--she felt a greater kinship with him than with any of the bright young soldiers who'd not had the night unravel and explode around them.

  "Hey, Mack," she said wearily.

  "Hey, Anna." If he was frightened or angry or resentful, he didn't show it. For a time they sat together without speaking, like comrades who've shared so much each knows all the other's stories and talk is redundant.

  "There was no other diver," Anna said at length. "It was you. You tried to kill me, squash me under that engine."

  "I'm sorry about that."

  "Sorry you tried or sorry you didn't kill me?"

  "As things turned out, I'm sorry I tried," Mack said.

  In spite of herself, Anna smiled. "After going to all the effort, why didn't you? It would have been easy enough."

  "Your feet started flipping and your little hand wiggling. I thought you were hurting. I can't stand to see anybody hurt."

  Anna understood the point he made. For his cause he would kill, sacrifice the few that the many might live free. When he said he couldn't hurt anyone, he meant it literally. He could take a life but he couldn't cause pain and suffering. Maybe because, as a boy, forced by vicious beatings to reveal the whereabouts of his parents and so cause their deaths, to die meant little to him. To live in pain was the true hell.

  "What happened to Theresa? Did you kill her?" Anna asked. "Or was that left to your hired thugs?"

  "Trecie grew up in my old neighborhood," Mack said. "I used to see her running around on a little banana bike with pink ribbons on the handlebars when I'd visit."

  It was on the tip of Anna's tongue to ask again if he'd killed her, but Mack wanted to tell it his own way. Before he could go on, Butch interrupted.

  "You're going to hang yourself, asshole." Till he spoke he'd been so still both Anna and Mack had nearly forgotten about him. At the sound of his voice, Mack was transformed. Blood suffused his face, spittle formed in the corners of his mouth and he appeared to grow larger, swell within his bonds.

  "You enjoy hurting people, you piece of shit. You piece of shit!"

  Mack half rose, bent on attacking the other man, but the two coast guard boys stepped in. The moment past, Mack shrank to normal size. When some time had gone by, he picked up his story. He needed to tell it. Anna needed to hear it.

  "Trecie--Theresa--was to seduce Lanny, get on the island and help from the inside. She was Cuban and wanted to work for her people. I guess she really did fall in love with old Lanny. She was going to tell him the whole thing; trade three hundred lives so she could be honest with her boyfriend. Rick and Paulo's brother--one of the guys killed when the fuel boat blew--came out and talked to her, but she wouldn't budge. I told 'em I'd take care of it. They don't know."

  Anna waited. When he didn't go on she asked again: "Did you kill her?"

  "I didn't hurt her."

  "What a fucking saint," Butch sneered.

  Mack didn't seem to hear him. In many ways Mack had withdrawn from the world Anna, the coast guard boys and Butch inhabited. Though he heard her questions, he answered as if speaking to himself in another place, a place not much better than where his corporal self would spend twenty-five to life.

  "Trecie was going to go tell Lanny. We were down by the old dungeon in the southeast corner where we wouldn't be overheard. Trecie'd got it into her head that Lanny'd throw in with us, help our people to get to America. It was bull. Lanny's an okay guy, but he doesn't take chances. He doesn't believe in anything but a pension.

  "I tried to quiet her. I needed to get her off Garden Key without her making noise. You know that sleeper hold the wrestlers used to do. I used that. It doesn't hurt."

  The silence grew. From within the fort came the comforting sounds of a
n orderly crowd. The two coast guard men stood as still and mute as Buckingham Palace guards till Butch asked for a cigarette. Neither of them smoked.

  "She never came to?" Anna said to be clear.

  "Never did. Poor little girl."

  "Dump the body at sea?"

  "I meant to, but things got dicey. Daniel was stomping down the stairs there at that end of the fort, hollering, 'Mack, Mack.' We'd been redoing the brickwork sealing up the old cisterns. The sledgehammer was there to bust out the stuff that was crumbling. I bashed a hole, stuffed her through and was laying brick when Daniel got there.

  "He stayed and gossiped for half an hour or more. There was nothing I could do but keep working. After I'd got it sealed up there didn't seem much point in changing things. I juiced Lanny with LSD to cloud his mind. He was gaga about Theresa. If he'd've been thinking clear, he'd've never let it go; screwed things up."

  "And me?"

  "Yeah. Why not? It worked once. And it doesn't--"

  "Right. It doesn't hurt," Anna finished for him.

  "Killing Trecie wasn't part of the plan, and I'm sorry it had to happen. Real sorry. Her aunt's going to feel pretty bad about the whole thing."

  "Somebody always ends up hurting," Anna said.

  "I guess."

  More silence. Anna wanted to leave, but that would have entailed standing and moving. She wasn't ready for that. Another question came to her. "You took the pictures of Theresa from Lanny's house the other night. Why?"

  Mack smiled. "You in your little dress running around at night. I thought you'd catch me for sure."

  Anna didn't answer his smile. Images of her own vulnerability didn't amuse her. "Why take them?"

  "Probably no reason. Lanny'd gone camera-happy after Theresa'd gone. Took a zillion pictures. I got to thinking some of them might be of me or Paulo or Rick or something. Figured better safe than sorry."

  "You missed one," Anna told him out of spite.

  He said nothing.

  She stood; her back and legs had stiffened and hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. It would take a degree of fortitude to walk away without wincing at every step. She looked down at the murdering, poisoning, smuggling, felonious reprobate and couldn't find any anger toward him.

  "Thanks for not killing me," she said, wondering why she should feel gratitude, but feeling it anyway. "I'm getting married," she added and realized she was too tired to filter her thoughts or words.

  "Congratulations," Mack said sincerely.

  The dungeon, the old cisterns, the brickwork happening so conveniently at a time of a young woman's disappearance: Anna remembered her great-great-aunt Raffia's letters, the mention of Sergeant Sinapp doing uncharacteristic physical labor himself, bricking up the ruined cistern when it had first been done nearly a century and a half before. She thought of Raffia feeling her way to Mudd's dungeon in the dark, how she'd known where she was by the smell of new mortar.

  Without stopping to think about what she intended to do, Anna borrowed a ten-pound sledgehammer and a flashlight from Daniel's shop and went to the dungeon.

  "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here."

  Permission to take down a wall, even one so newly and nefariously constructed, could drag on forever. Bureaucracies were good at making small problems last a long time, thus providing job security for middle management.

  The blows hurt her as much as they did the brick wall, but she was the more determined and it fell down before she did. The stink of decomposing flesh and the scurrying sound of interrupted diners gushed from the new-made hole, and Anna fell back. She gave the critters a few seconds' head start, then, having kicked the rubble away, stuck her head through, flashlight in hand.

  The earthly remains of Theresa Alvarez stopped her from going any farther. As Mack had said, she was shoved in a heap just inside the brick wall. Fighting her gag reflex--to once start vomiting was to have difficulty stopping till not only the smell but the sense memory of the smell were purged--Anna pulled and bashed away enough of the wall that she could see the corpse more clearly, not to study it for clues, but to avoid treading on or in any way touching the pathetic thing.

  She had no interest in the murder--Mack had confessed and she believed him--but should he think better of his admission and retract his confession before going to trial, Anna wanted to leave what evidence there might be undisturbed.

  Having created enough room to maneuver, she ducked through the hole and stood between Theresa's feet. The body was mashed into a rectangular opening about three by five feet and not high enough to stand upright. At the parade ground end was solid brick. Toward the sea narrow brick steps led steeply down into darkness. These Anna followed. There were but eight treads, each higher than a standard step, and then an opening to the left, low and small like the one above.

  It let into a room without a floor. The only place to stand was a shelf no more than eighteen inches wide. Beyond this was a great square hole the size of the casemate above and maybe that deep. Depth was hard to gauge without proper light. Seawater had seeped in until the old cistern was filled to half a dozen feet down from where Anna stood.

  The beam of her flashlight sank into the dark water. Beneath she could see the brick of the walls and sand. Hidden away from sun and storm, the water was clear, very nearly devoid of life and utterly devoid of movement. But for water and sand, the cistern was empty. Anna felt a crush of disappointment. It came down on her with a weight of fatigue and she found she must sit down on the ledge or pitch face foremost into the water. Till her strength returned sufficiently that she could climb eight stairs and brave the odiferous dead person, she idly played her light across the dark water. Over the century and half it had lain sealed. Brick dust, lime and other debris brought down by decay, rainwater seeping through from above and seawater from below, had formed a sort of a beach on the seaward side. Either that or the sand had fallen during a partial collapse of some kind and remained unchanged by wind or the action of the sea from that time to this.

  As she played the light back and forth over this subterranean atoll, she noticed a darkened triangle, like a small shark's fin, protruding above the surface. The first few times she'd taken it for a shadow--or perhaps been simply too tired and dispirited to notice. Once seen it would not melt into the background again.

  Finally curiosity got the better of lethargy and she scooted around the ledge on her bottom to where, with care, she could drop down onto the sand. As her fingers loosed the brick, she suffered a terrifying thought. What if the sand were viscous, near liquid and swallowed her like quicksand?

  The sand gave way beneath her just enough to snatch her breath away and douse her tired body with so much adrenaline she felt as if she could have leapt the six feet to safety flatfooted. Ankle-deep in sand and gasping for air, she waited till the panic passed. Since Mack's acid trips had scrambled her brains, the center for fear in her cerebral cortex had been working double time. Normal anxiety was revved up into crippling fear that came in bowel-loosening waves. Anna hoped it wasn't going to be a permanent condition; yet one more wound that left a scar.

  Recovered sufficiently that her hands quit shaking, she trained her light on the dark triangle that had lured her into the gullet of the abandoned cistern. It was a bit of weathered wood, nothing more. Because she was there and because, when the adrenaline burned out in liquid terror, she'd been left temporarily too weak to climb out of a bassinet let alone a brick tank, she knelt in the sand and began digging.

  Though softened by water and rot, she could tell the board's exposed end had not been sawed but broken. As she dug and pulled, she saw sledge or boot-heel-sized indentations where it had been repeatedly struck as if someone had gone to great lengths to smash it free of a structure.

  Five minutes of digging and worrying it and the sand gave up a board five or six inches wide and a bit over two feet long. Risking her fanny to the yielding sand, Anna sat and examined her find. At first her flashlight revealed nothing more exciting than an old, square-
headed, iron nail. As she looked, though, letters began to separate themselves from the shades of gray where white paint had once been emblazoned on the wood. Once looking for them, they became clear enough: rry Cay.

  "I knew it," Anna whispered. She leaned back and closed her eyes. "You were right, Aunt Raffia. Tilly never left the fort." For the briefest of instants, borne undoubtedly on the winds of an acid flashback, Anna felt the presence of her great-great-aunt so strongly she smiled. Until it was gone she didn't dare open her eyes. Seeing ghosts at night when she was high was one thing. Seeing them mid morning, straight, was too much to contemplate. rry Cay.

  The Merry Cay, the sailing skiff belonging to Sergeant Sinapp; the one he'd reported stolen the morning after Tilly and Private Lane disappeared, the boat that held together the thin fabric of lies about the supposed elopement.

  It was as Raffia had said. Sinapp killed them, dumped the bodies and the smashed skiff in the ruined cistern, then saw to the bricking up himself. Anna didn't doubt but that she sat on Tilly's impromptu grave. Without realizing she did so, she patted the sand with the tenderness of a mother gentling a frightened child.

  Whether bones would be found, she couldn't say. Not being a forensic expert she had no idea what a hundred and fifty years immersed in brackish water and wet sand would do to a human skeleton. For her, the finding of the boat was enough.

  Epilogue

  The refugees were taken to an INS holding facility by a flotilla of coast guard ships. According to the coast guard and INS, it was the largest single landing of illegal aliens since the British invaded in 1812. Anna had been a part of history.

  The six fishing boats were stopped and taken into custody at about the same time the helicopter reached Garden Key. They had no intention of returning to Cuba. No one doubted that they were headed to Enrico's Marine Supply in Miami, but as they denied it uniformly, there might be trouble proving it. The coast guard took possession of the fishing boats as well as the captured Scarab. Not a bad haul.