Flashback (10 page)

The men in the audience grew restive, and a handful of the officers stood up and left. My stage business being finished but for the curtain call, I slipped out the back of the mess hall behind the stage and hid myself in the shadows of the new construction to see what the noise was about. Soldiers being so outnumbered by prisoners, we live with the fear of an uprising, though the unfortunate wretches condemned to serve their time here have shown no such inclination. At first I thought this long-held fear had come to pass. The parade ground, so ghostly and quiet when Tilly and I went out earlier, was teeming with men in various states of dress. Some carried lanterns, a few with torches or candles, all were grumbling or shouting, creating a noise that was truly frightening.

I was standing behind a pile of bricks the engineers were to use for the barracks's foundation and thought myself alone. When I felt someone grab my shoulder, I screamed. In the general hubbub, all was confusion, noise, fire and darkness, and no one heard me. When I found Tilly had followed me out, I was so angry and relieved I nearly slapped her. I think only knowing how it feels to be on the receiving end of that sort of hurt stopped my hand.

Guns began to fire, at what or who was unclear, but the reports were loud, echoing as they do in the enclosed space of Fort Jefferson. Those who'd been invited to the entertainment in the mess hall poured out across the gravel. Many had snatched lanterns from the footlights and the walls.

The lights crossed and moved, making each man into four and casting wild shadows. Suddenly Tilly and I were illuminated, and I heard Joseph's familiar bellow.

"Christ on the cross, you stupid woman!"

That, of course, would be me. He came at us at a run, and his face was twisted with anger.

Tilly must have thought he was going to attack us. She shrank down and clung to my skirts like she used to when she was a little girl.

Joseph did lay hands on me but only to give me a shake and vent his anger. "The whole God damn fort is up in arms. You get yourself and your sister back in quarters and bolt the door or I'll beat you till you can't sit down for a month of Sundays."

There are times I do believe he loves me. Oddly enough that was one of them. Tilly, though, was frightened out of her wits and began to sob. Long ago I learned that there is nothing Joseph so hates as a weeping woman. He left the lantern he'd carried on the ground, grabbed a handful of Tilly's pinafore in one hand and my arm with the other and all but carried us back into the officers' mess. I was reminded of my husband's strength of back and of purpose. I suppose it's why his men love him. As I did once and do again from time to time.

He hurled us at his petty officer with dire threats and not a few expletives, and we were marched up to my quarters like naughty children and a soldier stationed outside our door at my husband's order to see that we stayed there.

Though angry at having been bundled away and locked in, I felt safer, partly for myself and a great deal for Tilly. Once the door was slammed behind us we went to the window. The noise, the running, had grown worse.

"An uprising? A lynching?" I said, forgetting I was not alone and very probably infecting Tilly with my fears.

"Lynching?" she repeated "Private Lane? For what they say he said about the president?"

I said nothing, but that had been my first thought as well.

5

From a place above and just outside Fort Jefferson's walls, Anna watched soldiers, small and silent as black ants, scurrying across the parade ground in the moonlight. In clots and trails they moved toward a confused flashing of lanterns near the sally port. Though logic told her she could not, she saw, too, Raffia and Tilly behind a locked door in the officers' quarters, an armed guard to keep them in. The vivid colors of their bows and pinafores came to startling life when they neared a lamp, only to return to gray as they passed from its circle of influence. The vision was very real; she was there and she was not.

Then a force she could not see clamped over her face, something hard and foreign was forced into her mouth. Air rushed into her lungs, a sudden hammer blow banging out her ribs. The fort, the soldiers, the women, receded to a pinpoint then burned out in a tiny noiseless explosion, and Anna was alone.

Darkness coiled around her body and mind. She flailed but touched nothing. Down and up ceased to have meaning. For a moment of blinding panic she believed she was dead and this suffocating nothingness was eternal afterlife.

Another monstrous struggle with unseen forces determined to invade her very being for all of time, and again air thundered into her lungs. She could hear it passing through her trachea; marbles pouring down the narrow neck of a glass jar.

Without conscious thought, air changed from invader to the single most important thing in life. Anna gulped and floundered. Darkness began to recede, edges first, turning green then sifting in toward the center.

Underwater. She was underwater. A hand was on her waist, a regulator held in her mouth. This knowledge didn't speak to the rational part of her brain, it was merely an observation. A watery world made as little sense as the silent scream of the black vortex had moments earlier.

Rising. Breaking the surface. Sunlight. More of the marvelous air. Anna remembered now: Fort Jefferson, the hunt for Bob Shaw, cutting away her trapped fin. After that there was only the darkness and Great-Great-Aunt Raffia.

She spit out the regulator and fought the arm across her chest feebly. A strong swimmer towed her toward the NPS boats: hers, Mack's and Daniel's. She knew names. A good sign.

"Stop wiggling," came a command and Anna obeyed, lying in the water, face to the sky, being reeled in like the day's catch.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Later. On board. Be quiet."

For reasons she was unsure of-and uninterested in-Anna was content to be a package with no thoughts and no responsibilities other than to shut up and lie still.

The idyll was short-lived. As her rescuer floated her inert body close to the nearest boat, shouting and clattering dinned in her waterlogged ears. "Is she alive?" was hollered more than once so Anna knew her lost minutes had been of the dangerous sort. When the answer was in the affirmative, somebody said, "Hallelujah!" so she knew she was among friends.

Her birth from the warm amniotic sea and the odd drift of mind was sufficiently violent with hauling and pushing and dragging her corpus over the gunwale and flopping it onto the deck that she was reborn, not only into the world of the living but into her old life with its dues and responsibilities.

"What happened?" she demanded.

"You're welcome," she heard a voice murmur. Teddy Shaw, dressed in a dripping blouse, underpants and fins, a snorkel and mask the sum total of her dive gear, sat beside her on the box covering the engine of the Boston Whaler. Teddy had saved Anna's life. Since Danny didn't dive, she must have shucked off her trousers at the first sign of a problem and free dived unknown territory to bring Anna out.

"Oh. Right," Anna said. "What happened?" Then, more sharply: "Where's Linda? I was diving with Linda." She stood quickly with the half-baked idea of going back down. Dizziness smacked into her. Teddy caught her before she toppled over the side.

Teddy gently pushed her head down. Blackness receded. "I know what you did for me," Anna said. It came out in a creaky little whisper. "I am grateful. But I'm in a hurry. Where is Linda?" She pushed herself upright, but this time had the good sense to remain seated. Fainting was embarrassing, and as the shock of being alive wore off, her entire body had begun to hurt.

"She's okay." Danny knelt in front of her, the gesture of an adult soothing a child.

"Where?"

"On the Atlantic Ranger. There." Daniel pointed. "Right after the explosion I radioed Mack to get another diver over here. Rather than wait, Teddy went over the side in a snorkel.

"Mack got here a few minutes ago, just as Teddy broke surface with you. Linda'd come up a minute or so before. She's on board with Cliff now."

"She's okay?" Anna asked.

"Shook up. Bruised. She was closer than you but didn't seem as hard hit. The hull must have aimed the explosion up and out where you were.

She got cut up pretty bad on the coral but managed to keep her regulator in her month and never lost consciousness. The blast stirred up the bottom and knocked you clean out of her sight. She'd come up to see if she could see your bubbles, but Teddy'd already gone down."

Explosion. Blast. Anna remembered none of that. For a second she just sat, watching the water on the deck around her feet turn pink.

"Guess I'm bleeding," she said. "What blew up? The boat?"

"The boat," Daniel confirmed.

"How could the damn thing blow up?" Anna asked nobody in particular. "It'd already blown up. There were pieces scattered all over hell and back." For some reason the image of the damaged fingers beckoning from the misshapen cabin door flashed behind Anna's eyes. Terror seized her: fear the finger belonged to the grim reaper himself, that he stalked her and, having missed this time, would try again, and soon. The horror was so intense and unexpected Anna sucked her breath in.

"What's the matter? Are you okay?" chorused in her ears, and she was pulled out of her paranoia.

"Must have broken a rib," she lied. Raw fear born of a mental-picture-become-real was as frightening as the false hell of the image.

It was insane.

Anna rubbed her face hard with both hands, scrubbing away the disease.

"Extra fuel tanks in the bow, is my guess," Daniel said, returning to her question of how a boat could explode twice. "That or explosives of some kind."

"Fire," Anna said. "Just before nothing, I saw a bubble full of smoke leaking from the hull."

"An explosive detonated by fire," Daniel amended his earlier supposition.

While she'd been sitting, gathering what wits were left to her, ignoring Teddy, her savior, and making demands for information, the Atlantic motored over to raft off the Curious, and Teddy and Daniel had divested her of tank, weight belt, fins and snorkel.

Anna reached down to retrieve the heavy buoyancy compensator-BC-that held tank and regulator. "I'd better go back down," she said. "Figure out what the hell happened."

"That might not be the best idea."

Cliff, with his kindly professional face and quiet voice, leaned on the gunwales where the two boats touched. "Might want to rethink that one. Linda's not going back down. Not today."

Anna's vision, narrow and inward for the few minutes she'd been out of the water, opened to include sky, ocean and this handful of people floating in between. Linda, free of dive gear as she was, sat in the Atlantic's bow. Mack was cutting her tattered dive skin off of her. The exposed flesh oozed with cuts and scrapes, one or two quite deep, bleeding freely, though not life threateningly.

"Are you okay, Linda?" Anna asked.

"Better than you. And I've got sense enough to call it a day. I hurt too bad not to be stupid down there."

Anna hadn't taken time to assess herself, but she did so now. Like Linda, her dive skin was torn in dozens of places. Blood mixed with water was staining the deck around her feet. When she breathed, her ribs hurt-probably not broken but badly bruised. There might be other injuries not so readily apparent.

"Good point," she finally agreed. "Teddy might not take kindly to having to save my life more than once a day."

"I'll go down in half an hour or so," Cliff promised. "Let the dust settle a bit."

Anna thought for a second and was pleased to note that her ability to reason seemed to have returned. "Okay," she said. "You stay here, Mack. Dive with Cliff. Stay clear of the wreck if anything looks like it could turn on you. I'll leave my gear and the camera." It occurred to her then that the camera had been with Linda. She looked at the other diver, naked now but for the bottom of her two-piece bathing suit. The top lay in pieces on the deck. Ugly scrapes raked across her left breast.

Linda pawed through the refuse of her gear and held it up. "Can't promise it'll still work."

"Bob-" Teddy began.

Anna overrode her. "Daniel, take the Curious and continue the search. Teddy, me and Linda will go back to the fort, get patched up, then join you."

With a minimum of fuss, they divided themselves among the boats and, Teddy driving. the women motored back to Garden Key.

The more time that passed, the more Anna's body made its complaints heard. By the time they docked, she had stiffened up and was hard pressed to find any part of her that did not ache.

Linda looked just as miserable. "Why don't you lay low for a while," Anna suggested. "Teddy'll do the driving. I'll sit still and look." That would be about all she could do, but Anna chose not to put it into words.

Ever practical, Linda accepted.

Anna showered quickly. Naked, she could see the toll coral and trauma had taken. She'd sustained no deep cuts as Linda had, but contusions, burning and itching from the coral's defensive toxins, marked her so that she looked as if she suffered from some vile and highly contagious disease.

Choosing comfort, she set aside the National Park Service's uniform code and donned another short loose dress. She wanted as little touching her skin as park rules and regulations would allow.