Flashback (30 page)

"Anna?" A tiny voice pushed through the terrible darkness of a thousand miles of telephone wire and abyss of the microwave. Her hand stopped. She did not hang up. Neither did she put the phone back to her ear. Time and reality had been suspended and she was afraid to move, to believe.

"Anna, are you there?"

The voice sounded so lost and alone. Even if Paul had become one more symptom of impending disaster, she could not leave him unanswered. "I'm here," she whispered, realized the receiver was still halfway to the phone, brought it back to her ear and said again, "I'm here."

"I hate this phone. Did you say you'd marry me?"

"I did."

"You sound funny."

"I am funny."

"Anna, this phone makes me crazy. I'm going to be quiet now and listen. You tell me what's going on, okay?"

"Does the offer still stand?" Anna asked.

"What offer?"

"You asked me to marry you."

"It still stands. It will stand forever. Maybe lean a little after eight hundred years like the tower of Pisa, but it will still be standing."

"I want to do it. I want to marry you. Right away. As soon as I get back."

Another silence threatened Anna, but this one was blessedly shortlived.

"I would like that," Paul said carefully. "Right now I need to hear what is happening to you."

Anna told him everything. Words poured out haphazardly, the plots of her various tales interweaving, pronouns dropped, sentences with subjects and no predicates. Chronological order was abused and misused and her emotions colored fact and fiction alike. She was not a law-enforcement officer making a report, she was a tired, shaken woman talking to her lover.

The drugs with which she'd been washing down her peanut butter sandwiches had eaten away a wall she'd not known was still standing. Though only vaguely, she was aware that she had never talked this way to anyone-or not for so many years she'd lost count. Not even to her sister.

Retaining control, a degree of professionalism, appearing to be always master of herself, if not the situation, had been so much a part of her she'd not been aware of it till it was gone. Never-at least not since the death of her husband Zach and possibly not before-had she allowed herself to be so vulnerable.

This scrap of knowledge flittered through her mind as she babbled. She tucked it away for further investigation. Ecstacy, a designer drug that had hit the world running in the eighties, was said to have an opening effect on the heart and mind. Ecstacy had come long after Anna's days of seeking recreation and/or enlightenment with various toxic substances. She had no personal experience to draw upon.

At length she had, in her uncalculated and fragmented way, told Paul Davidson of the adventures both physical and metaphysical which had befallen her. He left a moment's silence and she resisted the temptation to blurt: "Are you still there?" while the last of her words surmounted whatever delaying obstacle lay between Fort Jefferson and the rest of the world.

"Have you told me everything?" Paul's voice returned after the expected seconds had ticked away.

From anyone else-anyone besides her sister, Molly-Anna would have fielded that question with care; responding to the accusation often cloaked in the words, the suggestion she was hiding something.

In Paul's kind tones, coming from a mind she was learning was subtly complex but never devious, she believed the question was only what it seemed. "Everything I can think of," she told him.

"Do you want me to come out there?"

Did she ever. She'd not thought of it, but when he asked, she knew how desperately she had been needing exactly that. Someone she could trust. Warm arms to hold her at night. A fine mind with which to share her great-great-aunt Raffia's letters. A hard-nosed southern sheriff to keep her from harm. A wise and loving priest to whom she could confess her sins. The thought of Paul Davidson stepping onto the dock in front of Fort Jefferson engendered a sensation behind her rib cage that lent credence to the bard's allusion to hearts taking wing.

"No. No thanks," she said. Supervisory Rangers did not call in their boyfriends to help out when things got sticky. There would be no faster way to feed her career to the sharks and her credibility to the endless gossip mill run by the boys.

"You're sure?"

Anna didn't trust herself to answer. As she'd hoped, he took her silence for an affirmative. "If you change your mind-"

"I won't." A lie. She'd already done so fifty times in the brief pause between the asking and the answering.

The call went on as calls between sweethearts do, with professions of love and mutual "I miss you's," but Anna kept it short lest she weaken and take the White Knight option. Being a damsel in distress had a dark fascination for her; the idea of being without responsibility, merely enduring and hoping and-if the scenario happened to be in a fairy tale-ultimately rescued not only from the situation but from the specter of loneliness. In real life she'd never had the guts to try it. Even had she found the courage to wait, to have faith, she knew she would never have the patience. When things went wrong she couldn't rest till she'd righted them, or tried to. And, too, self-respecting damsels were not allowed to kick, spit, shout or swear at their respective dragons. "Got any guesses as to who might be doctoring my water?" she asked to get the conversation back on safer ground.

"My money is on Ms. Timothy Leary, R.N.," Paul said. "Poisoning is a woman's crime traditionally, and the fact that this was not poisoning with intent to kill or even harm permanently strikes me as additionally female from a statistics point of view. A way she could safely remove you and what's-his-name-"

"Wilcox."

"Wilcox from her husband's way without feeling guilty about it. It fits in with the nursing, too. Unless she's got that Angel of Death thing going on, she probably views herself as a healer, a caretaker. Using a non-lethal drug might tie into that."

"Works for me," Anna said. Hearing his rationale given in deep, strong tones with roots deep in the Mississippi clay made her feel calmer, saner. The thoughts he expressed dovetailed with those she had had in her skittery drug-paranoid fashion. It was infinitely comforting to know her mind not only worked but had done so under duress.

"Do you dive? How about that engine on the coral moving?" Asking the question, it occurred to her that, though she'd known Paul for a year or so, there was a great deal about him she was not yet privy to. They'd met and courted under unusual circumstances, what with dead men and living wives underfoot. Even realizing this, she did not change her mind about matrimony. "Do you know anything about scuba diving?" she amended her question.

"Not as much as you do," he replied. "But I've had a whiff of high school physics and I've lifted more than my share of engines in and out of secondhand pickup trucks. If that motor was seated as solidly as you say it was then it didn't shift because you put your tiny little self underneath and wriggled about a bit."

"I braced the heel of my hand on it when I was copying down the serial number," Anna confessed.

Paul laughed. "Even given the strength of your good right arm, I don't think you could have shifted that thing. Either it was already unseated or somebody moved it."

Anna had known that. Of the various neuroses, the one she most lusted after was the one she could never quite attain: denial. Always, just when she thought she had a handle on it, a pesky fact or puzzling anomaly would punch a hole in the dike and reality would pour in.

Of course she'd checked the seating of the motor on its coral bed. Having no desire to be trapped-or crushed-beneath the engine, she had pushed and shoved and peeked at its edges to confirm it had reached its final resting place. Without that reassurance, she could never have tricked her claustrophobic self into slithering into the crevice beneath it.

Then it had shifted and caught her, nearly killed her.

Ergo someone or something or some event had caused it to move.

It was at this point that logic ceased to work and the practice of denial would have come in handy. Who or what could have moved the engine? The obvious choice was Mack. As the only other creature with opposable thumbs within a hundred-foot radius, he was at the top of the suspect list. With a pry bar and a working knowledge of levers and fulcrums, he could have managed it. Why he would want to was an open question, but Anna had always considered herself a pleasant enough person and relatively harmless. Still, Mack might have his reasons. It was possible he'd been behind the light in Lanny Wilcox's bedroom window, had known she'd followed and didn't want her poking her nose into whatever business he'd had there. Could be he loved her and felt rejected, hated her and felt seduced or didn't like the fact that she never parted her hair.

Why he may have tried to crush her could be any of a hundred things the human psyche finds irresistible or intolerable. Given that he had means, motive and opportunity, if he did it, why not finish the job? Mack had gone to great lengths to rescue her. There were no witnesses but the fishes. Had he wanted her dead, it could have been done with thumb and forefinger: no muss, no fuss and no evidence left behind. Instead he'd worked feverishly to get her out and, once she was safe and topside, showed a concern for her welfare that Anna did not believe was feigned.

Unless he'd suffered a brief psychotic and homicidal episode, then repented and saved her, Mack was not her man. There'd been no seismic disturbances, not tsunamis, no ground swells shifting the sands. According to Daniel, no torpedoes had been fired, and the only anchor dragged was his when he and Mack had engineered her release.

The tried and possibly true Sherlockian assertion that once everything possible has been ruled out, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, suggested an answer.

There was another diver.

Anna returned to her quarters. There was much to think about: the second diver, the whereabouts of Theresa Alvarez, Teddy Shaw's proclivity for drugs, two sunken vessels and one accepted proposal for marriage. The first four she would attend to in due time. The fifth she was oddly content with, pleased, excited even. Marrying Paul Davidson felt as warm and light and supportive as this southern sea when first tumbled into. If like dangers to life and limb lurked in the connubial depths, so be it.

Tired as she was, she sat down with her great-great-aunt Raffia's letters. In a way she hoped the affects of the hallucinogen had not completely worn off. The drug had given her a heightened connection to Raffia: reading the letters was as poignant as speaking to the dead.

18

Dear Peg-

I was in the downstairs parlor-it's quite a gracious room and used by all the officers and their wives on occasion-restuffing the pillows with moss some of the soldiers gather and sell to their fellows to make mattresses. The moss is not so comfortable as a feather bed, but it has the advantage of being cheap and easily available. In a place where one's bedding mildews and is subject to becoming a home for creatures that bite, being able to stuff pillows anew is almost a necessity. I was called from this mindless task by a shrieking as of fishwives.

I ran upstairs to see who was murdering whom and found Tilly and Luanne in a tug-of-war over a skirt. Luanne was in one of her stubborn moods. They come upon her when she is doing her duty as she declares, "In a right and God-fearing way," and one of us has the temerity to interfere with her. Tilly, who has been raised properly and ought to know better, had worked herself into a tear-streaked state of shouting and pulling. With some difficulty and a bit of fishwifery of my own, I managed to wrestle the garment from them before they tore it into pieces.

Because Luanne is older and has not had the advantages that Tilly has, I let her tell her side first. "I gathered up the laundry like I done every Tuesday since I started doing for you," she told me. Despite the odd use of language the slaves have adopted, her indignation gave her dignity. Tilly began to behave less like a wild animal and have the decency to look a little ashamed of herself. "I got this dirty old skirt out from under Miss Tilly's bed where it's got no business being. It got foods on it and now she got it crumbled and all over with dust. I was taking it with the rest to see to it, and out she comes screaming I was stealing. I never stole nothing in my life."

Stealing, in the life that Luanne was given, the life of a slave, was a serious accusation. Where she had come from she would have been beaten or worse for theft.

"Matilda, what have you got to say for yourself?" I demanded. I sounded so much like Molly at that moment you would have laughed or cried to hear me. Tilly had the grace (or the very sensible fear of my wrath) to apologize to Luanne.

"There's something in the pocket I need to have back," she said as if this explained her outrageous exhibition.

"Why didn't you simply ask Luanne to take it out of the pocket and give it to you?" I asked reasonably. I added the "reasonably" because I am inordinately proud that, given the embarrassment I was suffering because of our sister, reason did not come easily at that moment.

"It's mine," Tilly stated.

Well, that was no sort of an answer at all. I waited for the rest of the explanation but it was not forthcoming. Luanne, her blood still up from the unwarranted attack on her character, started in again with "I never took" etc. etc. Not wishing to be drawn back into it, I cut her off.