Flashback (15 page)

The unholy frisson of fear that had stalked the edges of her consciousness sank its claws in, and she winced with the sudden onslaught of psychic pain. Molly would have to be rudely awakened. She slipped on her flip-flops.

"Don't wait up," she told the cat as she collected the office keys from under the papers he used as a bath mat.

The night was glorious, the air at least eighty degrees and, after the air-conditioning, soothing against Anna's tortured skin. Unimpeded by light pollution or clouds, the moon cast enough light to throw silver pathways through the open casemates. Anna didn't slow down to glory in it but walked across the middle of the parade ground, dry grasses crackling beneath her feet. She looked neither right nor left, not wanting to see what might be beckoning from the seductive black and silver rooms.

The humdrum bureaucratic box that encapsulated the administrative offices, usually a bane to eyes conditioned to historic grandeur, was a comfort. It exuded normalcy. No ghost worth her ectoplasm would deign to haunt such tedious architecture.

Sitting at Teddy's desk, Anna punched in the long list of numbers required to make a credit card call and was further reassured by her besieged brain's ability to recall them.

"Dr. Pigeon," Molly answered on the second ring, sounding alert and geared for whatever emergency the dead-of-night phone call presaged.

"Hello," Anna said. "It's me."

"Hello?"

"Hello."

"Hello?"

The creepy feeling flexed its claws again, and Anna wondered if she'd really dialed, if she'd spoken aloud, if this was all a dream.

"Anna?"

The delay. The phone on this out-of-the-way scrap of sand was subject to one- to two-second delays in transmission. Anna sighed out breath she'd not known she was holding. This phenomenon was merely mechanical. She could deal with that.

"I'm in trouble," Anna said and waited through another "Anna?" while the words made their journey to her sister's apartment on the Upper West Side.

"Start at the beginning," Molly told her when communication had been established.

Though Molly already knew some of it, Anna did as she was told, listing in chronological order the events that could possibly in some way, shape or form be responsible for the all-too-visible heebie-jeebies she'd been suffering. She included the not-totally-unpleasant pressure of Paul Davidson's love letters, the heat, the dryness of her mouth, the boat explosion, feeling the wreck was sentient and malicious, believing the corpse of the Cuban boatman to have moved a finger, each and every wince or advent of the willies she could recall, ending with the startling appearance of Raffia Coleman, the woman in white.

"Wilkie Collins," Molly said.

"Just like that but no veil," Anna replied. Silence came down, a palpable thing, like an iron plug in Anna's ear. She wondered if Molly was thinking of Collins's book, one of the first mysteries ever written. She hoped Molly was forming a perfectly logical diagnosis that would be the psychiatric equivalent of "take two aspirin and call me in the morning." As the silence continued, Anna began to lose hope.

"Okay," Molly said after what Anna felt was a cruel and unusual amount of time. "You say this figure was our great-great-aunt Raffia, the woman whose letters I sent you?"

"Yes."

"Do you just, quote, know, unquote, it was Aunt Raffia, or do you genuinely believe it was Aunt Raffia?"

Anna let the difference between the two percolate through her brain. "I just know," she said. "I don't believe it. It's nuts. I don't believe in ghosts. Either this was a figment or a fake, though I don't know who but you knows anything about Aunt Raffia."

"Do you lock your door?"

Anna said nothing. It was a rhetorical question. Living in National Parks, Anna'd seldom felt the need. Living in New York, the concept appalled Molly.

"Okay," Anna agreed. "Where does that leave me? Headed for Bedlam or Bellevue or what?"

Again Molly was quiet too long, and Anna felt a fist of panic knuckling behind her sternum.

"Given you don't literally believe the woman was real-or a real ghost-unless it's some kind of bizarre joke by people too long on a desert island, I think there is hope for you."

Anna laughed, wanting that to be all, something a trained psychiatrist would laugh off as normal, but Molly wasn't through.

"However," her sister went on. "Given the clarity and duration of the hallucination, as well as the intense feelings of fear and disorientation you've been having over the last few days, I would like you to see someone."

"Like a shrink?" Anna asked, appalled just as if she'd not been talking to one for half her life.

"A neurologist would be the place to start," Molly said. "You've had blunt trauma, possibly affecting the head or the inner ear-I don't really know how an underwater explosion works. That could be a factor. But considering you had these feelings earlier-"

"Maybe not," Anna cut her off, trampling her sister's words as they came two seconds late. "I mean, time's relative, and I wasn't seeing things before the explosion. I mean, of course I was seeing things, but I wasn't seeing things." Abruptly she stopped. Not only was she babbling, but with her inner ear she could hear Sister Mary Corinne saying: "Thou dost protest too much."

Molly let the silence settle. Anna hoped she was just making sure there were no words left on the time delay and not dialing her cell phone to call the men with the butterfly nets to catch her mad sibling.

"It never hurts to get things checked out," Molly said reasonably. "A CAT scan, a physical, that sort of thing. Once those are ruled out we can take a next step."

Suddenly Anna was sorry she'd called, sorry she'd told anyone. She didn't want to take a first step, let alone a next step.

"Or it could just be one of those things and go away," she said.

"Could be," Molly returned with such studied neutrality Anna grew more alarmed.

To reassure her sister-and herself-she laughed. "Hey, maybe it's in the air out here. The guy before me went nuts and had to be relieved of duty." The instant the words were out of her mouth, Anna was shocked to hear the truth in them.

"My God, Molly. No kidding. The guy's name was Lanny Wilcox. Daniel, the maintenance man here, said Lanny got stranger and stranger and finally started seeing things nobody else saw. I've got to go. I've got to think about this."

"Be careful," her sister warned. "Things we want to be true are incredibly convincing."

"Right."

"Call me," Molly said. Anna heard the words, little and far away, as she returned the receiver to its cradle and forgot them a second later. To escape the air-conditioning that chilled the sweat between the thin dress and her bare skin, she slipped out of the office and sat on the steps, elbows on her knees, temples between her palms, fingers in hair gone mostly gray.

I -army Wilcox had gone mad. His girlfriend had left him. He'd become distraught, obsessed with this Theresa woman, increasingly erratic. He'd started seeing things. Developed a paranoia probably-no, undoubtedly-accompanied by feelings of anxiety. Lanny had communicated his thoughts-his visions-to his fellow rangers and been bundled off to the mainland, out of sight and possibly out of his mind.

Now she was here, in his place. Her sweetheart had yet to abandon her, but there was a degree of stress in the relationship. Certainly there'd been other stressors: Shaw's disappearance, the sunken boats, reports explaining the loss of a United States Government boat.

Anna'd begun feeling strange, anxious. She was even a tad paranoid-afraid she was going off the deep end. Of course it wasn't paranoia if it was true.

"Stop that," she said sharply.

Then tonight, she'd begun seeing things.

"Not seeing things," she said aloud. "Seeing a thing. One thing."

But it had been a doozy; a flour-colored female in period costume who Anna "knew" was her and Molly's long-dead great-great-aunt.

The aunt part could be put off onto the power of suggestion; Anna's immersion in Raffia's letters. The ghost or hallucination or whatever could not.

The odds of both she and Lanny Wilcox, same job, same location, close to the same age going insane within weeks of each other were slim-at least she guessed they were. A check of medical leaves and absences of Fort Jefferson personnel over the past five years might be a good idea. Perhaps the nut cases one heard of drifting ashore and taking up residence on the islands of the Caribbean had been perfectly normal when they'd arrived. Sand and surf could have an as-yet-unresearched corrosive effect on the human mind. Maybe van Gogh would still have both cars if he'd stayed in France.

"Jesus," Anna whispered and squeezed the heels of her hands together to push her unraveling thoughts back into a thread she could follow.

So. Unless a great number of people on islands in the Caribbean went nuts, she and Lanny were moderately rare. Either a coincidence Thomas Hardy would be proud of had occurred or there were external forces at work. Like somebody... or something-

Somebody wanted the Supervisory Ranger to believe he or she was going mad so... So what? So they would go away? That was scarcely efficacious; the NPS would simply ship another out to fill the post.

A shudder took her from the inside out as though she ridded herself of a blanket of snow. Trying to fix on motive undermined the theory that Anna wanted-needed-to believe. "Two rangers going crazy in a row is crazy," she said. The echo of the word "crazy" scared her. Therefore, she pushed her mind on doggedly, if her theory was true-and until the walls started sprouting eyeballs and the lizards holding forth on Eastern philosophy, she had to believe it was-then she was not losing her mind; she was being gaslighted.

As Lanny had been gaslighted? "Yes," Anna hissed. "Move on." Squeezing her skull even more tightly, she continued to build the case for sanity.

Since Anna chose to believe that she was sane-or at least as sane as she'd ever been-the next obvious conclusion was that what she had seen earlier that evening had been real. Closing her fingers into fists, hair sticking out between the knuckles, she tugged gently at her scalp to assist in this rearrangement of theories.

Starting at the point where seeing was believing, it followed that the ghostly woman was real-not necessarily flesh and blood but conceived and executed by someone who was.

Lanny's beloved was an obvious choice to begin the deconstruction of his reality. If the same thing were happening to Anna, why would the perpetrator choose an image of her Aunt Raffia?

It was possible someone-anyone-in the fort could have read Raffia's letters. They needn't even have bothered to; Anna'd been sufficiently fascinated by the story she'd shared parts of it with several people: Duncan the historian, Teddy, Daniel. Pertaining to the fort as it did, the stories would have been repeated, discussed. Fort Jefferson's peak period as a working fort had been during its time as a prison for the Union Army. It was possible-probable, in fact-that anyone designing a haunt for the place would choose a specter from that period. A female in a long white dress not only fit with the history of the fort but was a classic in the ghost world, virtually a clich‚ like the rattling of chains and the trailing of rotting grave cloth.

The fact that Anna had "known" it was Raffia was neither here nor there. Reading the old letters would easily account for her identification. The brain seeks the familiar, needs to make sense of things.

Creating illusions was a good deal easier than most people suspected, Anna reminded herself. The human brain was excellent in filling in blanks, weaving whole cloth from a few threads. Magicians were masters at suggestion, distraction: a hint and an audience would believe.

If this was what happened to Lanny and was now happening to her, the field was narrowed down to the people living on Garden Key and the two lighthouse keepers on Loggerhead. It was too much of a stretch to believe a regular citizen would boat out the seventy or so miles from the mainland over a six- to eight-week period just to drive the ranger nuts.

The woman in white, seen from a distance and fleetingly, the light poor, the setting perfect, could have been quite simply a real woman dressed and in whiteface, a life-sized drawing, white on black cloth or paper, shown, then whisked from sight. Steeped in the history of the fort and her own family, Anna's mind would have filled in the rest.

She moved. Anna distinctly remembered the raise of the arm, the hand on the hair. She remembered, too, how detailed and specific everything she'd seen had been, but she pushed that memory into the mental file: "Tricks of eye and mind." Examining it too closely would lead her back to the place where madness was the answer.

Duncan's wife was the only woman living on Garden Key who physically resembled Anna's ghost: slender, well proportioned.

A scene of such little importance it had slipped her mind came back with stunning clarity: passing Duncan in the sally port, him smiling as always, his face creased with it till the old saw "wreathed with smiles" seemed sensual, his thinning blond hair as feathery as a baby duck's head, his square, strong body positively springy with vitality and clean living.

"Anna," he'd said, voice rich from years of playing to crowds. "I hear your sister sent you historical gold. Written around when Mudd was incarcerated here. Mind if I look at it sometime? Might be my Rosetta Stone."