Flashback (46 page)

"Rick, listen to me," she said.

"Shut the-" Butch began.

Anna stopped him, both hands up, palms out, "No. Let me."

For some reason he did.

"Look at me Rick."

He did.

"You're not going to die. You're not bleeding internally. You've got a little bitty piece of lead in your leg about the size of the tip of my little finger. I said all that stuff so these bozos would let me call the mainland. You're not going to die. Are you hearing me?"

"You lied about me bleeding to death?" The look of shocked disbelief made her want to laugh. Knowing it would verge on the hysterical, she didn't give in to it. "Yes. I lied. A bald-faced lie. There's a nurse here, she'll tell you the same."

"No nurse," Butch said.

"Okay. No problem. We'll get you some hot tea, get that leg up, and you'll be right as rain." Anna's decent impulse earned her the reward of seeing a hint of color return to the boy's lips.

"You can do that, okay?" she asked Butch. "Let me get him some tea, bandage the leg?"

"Maybe."

Paulo got a bit of his spine back. He stood up straight, balled his fists. He was a big guy, almost as big as Butch. The older man took in his situation and did some rapid mental calculations. "Sure," he said. "Why not?" He even managed to force a semblance of affability into his voice, if not his eyes.

Mack, driving the electric cart, materialized out of the rain. The absolute silence of the machine continued to amaze Anna. On occasion she pictured cities running in blissful quiet, the streets and avenues of New York whispering through rush hour.

"Is everything quiet?" Butch asked.

"It'll take a few minutes to kick in," Mack replied.

An image of poisoned corpses strewn about sprang to Anna's mind. For a panicked moment she fought the urge to slip off her cuffs and take her chances in the sea.

26

I Stayed with Dr. Mudd another quarter of an hour. I tried all the tricks-bluster, threat, innuendo, pleading-I have learned over a lifetime of watching Molly and Joseph get the truth from wayward girls and soldiers. Mudd never changed his story: he had not summoned Tilly the night she disappeared, he had asked neither her nor Joel to carry his proof to the mainland in any but a safe and usual channel, he knew nothing of the children's whereabouts or destination.

Dr. Mudd theorized-and it sounded as if he believed what he was saying, but I am a woman easily fooled by liars-the plan to remove both Tilly and Joel was hatched by Samuel Arnold. According to Mudd, Mr. Arnold knew the doctor was innocent of conspiracy but would do all he could to keep that information from getting out and, thus, starting a hunt for the real conspirator, this doppelganger in the purloined photograph. Knowing Mudd to have had a falling-out with his cellmate, I found his theory self-serving. It too neatly fitted facts only Dr. Mudd was privy to and told the story he was desperate for others to believe. I did not take it on faith. Still, it was sufficiently sensical, I knew I must speak with Mr. Arnold despite the strictures laid upon me.

After much cajoling on my part, Mudd told me the name of the soldier he had suborned into carrying messages to Tilly: Charley Munson. At first I couldn't place the name in the roster of near a thousand boys and men at Fort Jefferson. Once Mudd described him it came back. Charley Munson was the boy-faced soldier Tilly and I briefly glimpsed the night of the theatrical, when we'd been drawn into this prolonged insanity by Joel's screams. Private Munson had been on duty at the sally port when Sergeant Sinapp hung Joel by the thumbs. I remember how white-faced and stricken he looked. Sympathy for a fellow recruit, even if an enemy in name, must have made him vulnerable to Dr. Mudd's winning ways.

Shortly thereafter I left Dr. Mudd to his dungeon, feeling my way out like one of the blind mice and sharing the same terror that a carving knife was poised above my tail. The watch was calling three A.M. when I slipped out of the stifling darkness of our man-made cavern and into the shadows at the edge of the parade ground. Less than an hour had passed. I'd thought I'd been so long whispering through the bars of the dungeon I would emerge to a full dawn and have to run a gauntlet of curious and mocking eyes as I scurried home in my husband's trousers.

Knowing I had at least two more hours of darkness decided me. Trying to keep to the shadows, call no attention to myself, yet not appear furtive should a sentry catch sight of me, I made my way through casemates housing cannon and shot till I reached the small opening into the south side of the sally port. This is a mere slot in the brick, narrow and shaped in an el for easy defense. There in the black of the shadows I watched the guardroom across the entryway.

It was too much to hope that Charley Munson would be on duty. Neither of the sentries were men I knew. They were passing the time in the forbidden but common practice of one keeping watch while the other napped.

From my many visits to Joel I knew where the key to the casemates was kept. All the keys were stored in a heavy wooden box bolted into the brick to the left of the guardroom door. The box was padlocked but the key to the lock was stashed in a niche carved out of the mortar a couple of feet above and to the right of the box.

There was a good deal of coming and going in the cells: food, water, men going to and returning from work, laundresses, mail when the ship brought it, so I suppose this weakness in the system was considered less problematic than having sentries lose the key periodically or have half a dozen keys in as many pockets.

The guard whose turn it was to sleep was doing so most profoundly. From where I stood in my niche in the shadows I could not see him, but I could hear the snoring. The sentry on watch paced back and forth. Four times he walked through the sally port, stopping for a moment to gaze out over the harbor, then back to stop again to do the same with the parade ground. Each time, he passed within six feet of where I stood and never sensed or saw me. I was frightened and anxious about my ability to carry out my plan-if you will allow me the conceit of calling anything so crude a plan-but being thus secret and watching gave me a heady sense of power, as though I could go where I wished, do what I wished and there would be no consequences. Perhaps I am cut out for a life of stealth and deceit. If not for the accompanying feeling that I should vomit at any moment, I would be tempted.

Under his breath the sentry was whistling a lively tune brought to the fort by the confederate soldiers. We have won the battle but it is their battle hymns our children will sing.

Whether this pacing out and in and out was what was required of the night sentry or whether this whistler merely stretched his legs to stay awake I couldn't know. Nor could I foresee how much longer the pattern might continue. Before the utter stupidity of my so-called plan could dissuade me, I acted. As the sentry reached his farthest-most point from the guardroom door in his pendulum swing, I slipped out of my crevice, across the sally port and into the guardroom. There I flattened myself against the wall as he turned and paced back.

Hearing sharpened by fear, I was aware of every scuff of his boots, every fragment of gravel set in motion by his passage. He slowed as if he stopped or turned to come back to his roost. My stomach grew tighter till I had to swallow back the bile in my throat. Across from where I stood was the sleeping guard. I watched with terror each time an explosive spasm of snorts and gurgles threatened such violence that I thought he must surely wake himself.

Hearing the outside soldier's boots stop, this time for real, at the parade ground end of his short patrol, I slipped the key from its niche and unlocked the cabinet. A person perennially terrified would miss nothing of life. Each movement, each second that passed, I was acutely aware of: small snicks of the key in the lock, the faint creak of the hinges as I opened the cabinet. These were magnified till it seemed I passed half a lifetime in the doing. The clatter the key I took from the third peg made as it bumped the one below rang so loudly in my ears I thought the whole garrison must wake.

Lest the guards have cause to look in the cabinet anytime soon, I took a key from another peg and used it to replace the one I'd stolen, in hopes immediate suspicion would take them some other place than where I intended to go. This done, I relocked the cabinet and slipped the key to the padlock back between the bricks. The key to the casemate I put in my trouser-or, rather, Joseph's trouser-pocket.

Footsteps began again. The eternity I'd spent fumbling with locks and keys, with snorts and snores and the sound of my own heart beating in my ears, had passed in that brief moment while the sentry surveyed the parade ground.

Once again, back against the wall, face to face with the man dreaming in his chair, I prayed to each and every saint Molly ever made us light candles to but especially to St. Dismas, the patron saint of thieves. It was he whom I thought might be most sympathetic with my spiritual needs at that moment.

Either my prayers were heard or heaven was closed to me, leaving me free to do the devil's work. The sentry passed. I slipped out of the guardroom and around the corner. In moments I was in the inky darkness within the spiral stairwell. Courage and strength deserted me and I sat till the shaking in my legs and the staggering faintness of my heart passed and I could walk again. Sitting in the dark hugging my knees, gasping for breath and trying to keep my insides from vibrating so hard they rattled my teeth, I thought of the soldiers asleep around me. How did they go into battle? How could they make their legs work as cannon banged and their fellows bled and died or fell screaming? Once I fancied myself a courageous woman and had fantasies of stanching wounds with my petticoats or daring enemy lines to carry messages to turn the tide of war.

No more. Hiding in that twisting round of slate and stone I was acutely aware that life is the only gift God gives us that we cannot earn, find, build or bake for ourselves.

When I had recovered-a matter of minutes really, though they passed a thousand times faster than in the guardroom-I felt my way to the second tier. Whereas the utter dark of the passage to the dungeon had unnerved me, this darkness was my friend, indicating I was alone. I was sorry to leave it when I reached the top of the stairs and had to walk in the open for half a dozen yards before I could again hide myself, this time in the passageway behind the enclosed casemates.

I had stolen the key, I had reached my destination, yet I stood before the door and did nothing. It wasn't fear of Sam Arnold that held me there. Foolish as it looks in retrospect, I had no fear that Mr. Arnold would do me harm. My fear was for whom I would become in the eyes of my neighbor, of my husband, when it was known I had gone alone in the middle of the night to call on a man. As I stood feeling terrible shame, as if every woman in the fort already gossiped about me and every man made bawdy jokes when my name came up, I couldn't but think of the times Tilly had come without me. Young and foolish and wrong as she was, Tilly had not hesitated to do what she believed was just. She was taught, as are all girls, what involving herself in scandal could do to her reputation and her future, yet she did it anyway.

Could I do less?

I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The darkness here was different. Little air came into the casemate. Without the cooling ocean breeze to clear away the heat and the inevitable stink of occupation, it was a darkness that not only lay heavy on my eyelids but thick and choking in my throat.

Mr. Arnold had shared the back casemate with Dr. Mudd, Joel using the first one inside the door. I hoped, though Joel and the doctor were gone, Mr. Arnold would have kept to the same bed out of habit. If Mr. Arnold was still in residence. It had not occurred to me until that moment that Sam Arnold might have been moved as well; that new tenants might be sleeping around my feet at that very moment. The quaking fear that had beset me in the stairwell threatened to return. Before it could cripple me or send me crashing blindly for the door, I began speaking.

"Mr. Arnold? Mr. Arnold. It's Mrs. Coleman. I'm sorry to call so late." Calling indeed. It has been years since I have used calling cards, and this was not a place with a silver salver in the entrance hall to receive them.

At last a light was struck in the far room and I fairly rushed toward it. Mr. Arnold, candle in hand, was propped up on his bed of bricks and boards wearing nothing but the corner of a thin blanket. Stopping in the doorway to the room he now had to himself, I wanted to explain myself but no words came.

For the longest time he stared at me and I felt myself growing smaller by the moment. Finally he spoke: "What do you want, boy?"

The success of my disguise reassured me for some reason, and my vocabulary returned. "It's Mrs. Coleman. I need to speak with you."

"Does anybody know you are here?"

Before I could think better of it, I told him no.

27

The Storm brought darkness early. As the electric cart slipped noiselessly through the sally port, Anna could see welcoming gold light in the windows of the Shaws' house across the parade ground and the window of Daniel's casemate apartment to the left. Mack stopped the cart in front of the administrative offices. With the switching off of the electric motor there came a metallic crunching sound as if a giant spoon had fallen into a monster garbage disposal. As one, every light in the compound went dark.

"That's it then," Mack said.