Teddy and the other orderly kept walking, the orderly holding out a brown hand. “I’m Al.”
Teddy shook the hand. “Teddy, Al. Nice to meet you.”
“Why you all got up for the outside, Teddy?”
Teddy looked at his slicker. “Roof detail. Saw a patient on the stairs, though, chased him in here. Figured you guys could use an extra hand.”
A wad of feces hit the floor by Teddy’s foot and someone cackled from the dark of a cell and Teddy kept his eyes straight ahead and didn’t break stride.
Al said, “You want to stay as close to the middle as possible. Even so, you get hit with just about everything ’least once a week. You see your man?”
Teddy shook his head. “No, I—”
“Aww, shit,” Al said.
“What?”
“I see mine.”
He was coming right at them, soaking wet, and Teddy saw the guards dropping the hose and giving chase. A small guy with red hair, a face like a swarm of bees, covered in blackheads, red eyes that matched his hair. He broke right at the last second, hitting a hole only he saw as Al’s arms swept over his head and the little guy slid on his knees, rolled, and then scrambled up.
Al broke into a run after him and then the guards rushed past Teddy, batons held over their heads, as wet as the man they chased.
Teddy had started to step into the chase, if from nothing else but instinct, when he heard the whisper:
“Laeddis.”
He stood in the center of the room, waiting to hear it again. Nothing. The collective moaning, momentarily stopped by the pursuit of the little redhead, began to well up again, starting as a buzz amid the stray rattlings of bedpans.
Teddy thought about those yellow pills again. If Cawley suspected, really suspected, that he and Chuck were—
“Laed. Dis.”
He turned and faced the three cells to his right. All dark. Teddy waited, knowing the speaker could see him, wondering if it could be Laeddis himself.
“You were supposed to save me.”
It came from either the one in the center or the one to the left of it. Not Laeddis’s voice. Definitely not. But one that seemed familiar just the same.
Teddy approached the bars in the center. He fished in his pockets. He found a box of matches, pulled it out. He struck the match against the flint strip and it flared and he saw a small sink and a man with sunken ribs kneeling on the bed, writing on the wall. He looked back over his shoulder at Teddy. Not Laeddis. Not anyone he knew.
“Do you mind? I prefer to work in the dark. Thank you oh so much.”
Teddy backed away from the bars, turning to his left and noticing that the entire left wall of the man’s cell was covered in script, not an inch to spare, thousands of cramped, precise lines of it, the words so small they were unreadable unless you pressed your eyes to the wall.
He crossed to the next cell and the match went out and the voice, close now, said, “You failed me.”
Teddy’s hand shook as he struck the next match and the wood snapped and broke away against the flint strip.
“You told me I’d be free of this place. You promised.”
Teddy struck another match and it flew off into the cell, unlit.
“You lied.”
The third match left the flint with a sizzle and the flame flared high over his finger and he held it to the bars and stared in. The man sitting on the bed in the left corner had his head down, his face pressed between his knees, his arms wrapped around his calves. He was bald up the middle, salt-and-pepper on the sides. He was naked except for a pair of white boxer shorts. His bones shook against his flesh.
Teddy licked his lips and the roof of his mouth. He stared over the match and said, “Hello?”
“They took me back. They say I’m theirs.”
“I can’t see your face.”
“They say I’m home now.”
“Could you raise your head?”
“They say this is home. I’ll never leave.”
“Let me see your face.”
“Why?”
“Let me see your face.”
“You don’t recognize my voice? All the conversations we had?”
“Lift your head.”
“I used to like to think it became more than strictly professional. That we became friends of a sort. That match is going to go out soon, by the way.”
Teddy stared at the swath of bald skin, the trembling limbs.
“I’m telling you, buddy—”
“Telling me what? Telling me what? What can you tell me? More lies, that’s what.”
“I don’t—”
“You are a liar.”
“No, I’m not. Raise your—”
The flame burned the tip of his index finger and the side of his thumb and he dropped the match.
The cell vanished. He could hear the bedsprings wheeze, a coarse whisper of fabric against stone, a creaking of bones.
Teddy heard the name again:
“Laeddis.”
It came from the right side of the cell this time.
“This was never about the truth.”
He pulled two matches free, pressed them together.
“Never.”
He struck the match. The bed was empty. He moved his hand to the right and saw the man standing in the corner, his back to him.
“Was it?”
“What?” Teddy said.
“About the truth.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“This is about the truth. Exposing the—”
“This is about you. And Laeddis. This is all it’s ever been about. I was incidental. I was a way in.”
The man spun. Walked toward him. His face was pulverized. A swollen mess of purple and black and cherry red. The nose broken and covered in an X of white tape.
“Jesus,” Teddy said.
“You like it?”
“Who did this?”
“You did this.”
“How the hell could I have—”
George Noyce stepped up to the bars, his lips as thick as bicycle tires and black with sutures. “All your talk. All your fucking talk and I’m back in here. Because of you.”
Teddy remembered the last time he’d seen him in the visiting room at the prison. Even with the jail-house tan, he’d looked healthy, vibrant, most of his dark clouds lifted. He’d told a joke, something about an Italian and a German walking into a bar in El Paso.
“You look at me,” George Noyce said. “Don’t look away. You never wanted to expose this place.”
“George,” Teddy said, keeping his voice low, calm, “that’s not true.”
“It is.”
“No. What do you think I’ve spent the last year of my life planning for? This. Now. Right here.”
“Fuck you!”
Teddy could feel the scream hit his face.
“Fuck you!” George yelled again. “You spent the last year of your life planning? Planning to kill. That’s all. Kill Laeddis. That’s your fucking game. And look where it got me. Here. Back here. I can’t take here. I can’t take this fucking horror house. Do you hear me? Not again, not again, not again.”
“George, listen. How did they get to you? There have to be transfer orders. There have to be psychiatric consultations. Files, George. Paperwork.”
George laughed. He pressed his face between the bars and jerked his eyebrows up and down. “You want to hear a secret?”
Teddy took a step closer.
George said, “This is good…”
“Tell me,” Teddy said.
And George spit in his face.
Teddy stepped back and dropped the matches and wiped the phlegm off his forehead with his sleeve.
In the dark, George said, “You know what dear Dr. Cawley’s specialty is?”
Teddy ran a palm over his forehead and the bridge of his nose, found it dry. “Survivor guilt, grief trauma.”
“Noooo.” The word left George’s mouth in a dry chuckle
. “Violence. In the male of the species, specifically. He’s doing a study.”
“No. That’s Naehring.”
“Cawley,” George said. “All Cawley. He gets the most violent patients and felons shipped in from all over the country. Why do you think the patient base here is so small? And do you think, do you honestly think that anyone is going to look closely at the transfer paperwork of someone with a history of violence and a history of psychological issues? Do you honestly fucking think that?”
Teddy fired up another two matches.
“I’m never getting out now,” Noyce said. “I got away once. Not twice. Never twice.”
Teddy said, “Calm down, calm down. How did they get to you?”
“They knew. Don’t you get it? Everything you were up to. Your whole plan. This is a game. A handsomely mounted stage play. All this”—his arm swept the air above him—“is for you.”
Teddy smiled. “They threw in a hurricane just for me, huh? Neat trick.”
Noyce was silent.
“Explain that,” Teddy said.
“I can’t.”
“Didn’t think so. Let’s relax with the paranoia. Okay?”
“Been alone much?” Noyce said, staring through the bars at him.
“What?”
“Alone. Have you ever been alone since this whole thing started?”
Teddy said, “All the time.”
George cocked one eyebrow. “Completely alone?”
“Well, with my partner.”
“And who’s your partner?”
Teddy jerked a thumb back up the cell block. “His name’s Chuck. He’s—”
“Let me guess,” Noyce said. “You’ve never worked with him before, have you?”
Teddy felt the cell block around him. The bones in his upper arms were cold. For a moment he was unable to speak, as if his brain had forgotten how to connect with his tongue.
Then he said, “He’s a U.S. marshal from the Seattle—”
“You’ve never worked with him before, have you?”
Teddy said, “That’s irrelevant. I know men. I know this guy. I trust him.”
“Based on what?”
There was no simple answer for that. How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was. Teddy had known men in war whom he’d trust with his life on a battlefield and yet never with his wallet once they were off it. He’d known men he’d trust with his wallet and his wife but never to watch his back in a fight or go through a door with him.
Chuck could have refused to accompany him, could have chosen to stay back in the men’s dormitory, sleeping off the storm cleanup, waiting for word of the ferry. Their job was done—Rachel Solando had been found. Chuck had no cause, no vested interest, in following Teddy on his search for Laeddis, his quest to prove Ashecliffe was a mockery of the Hippocratic oath. And yet he was here.
“I trust him,” Teddy repeated. “That’s the only way I know how to put it.”
Noyce looked at him sadly through the steel tubing. “Then they’ve already won.”
Teddy shook the matches out and dropped them. He pushed open the cardboard box and found the last match. He heard Noyce, still at the bars, sniffing the air.
“Please,” he whispered, and Teddy knew he was weeping. “Please.”
“What?”
“Please don’t let me die here.”
“You won’t die here.”
“They’re going to take me to the lighthouse. You know that.”
“The lighthouse?”
“They’re going to cut out my brain.”
Teddy lit the match, saw in the sudden flare that Noyce gripped the bars and shook, the tears falling from his swollen eyes and down his swollen face.
“They’re not going to—”
“You go there. You see that place. And if you come back alive, you tell me what they do there. See it for yourself.”
“I’ll go, George. I’ll do it. I’m going to get you out of here.”
Noyce lowered his head and pressed his bare scalp to the bars and wept silently, and Teddy remembered that last time they’d met in the visitors’ room and George had said, “If I ever had to go back to that place, I’d kill myself,” and Teddy had said, “That’s not going to happen.”
A lie apparently.
Because here Noyce was. Beaten, broken, shaking with fear.
“George, look at me.”
Noyce raised his head.
“I’m going to get you out of here. You hold on. Don’t do anything you can’t come back from. You hear me? You hold on. I will come back for you.”
George Noyce smiled through the stream of tears and shook his head very slowly. “You can’t kill Laeddis and expose the truth at the same time. You have to make a choice. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Where is he?”
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand. Where is he?”
“You have to choose.”
“I won’t kill anyone. George? I won’t.”
And looking through the bars at Noyce, he felt this to be true. If that’s what it took to get this poor wreck, this terrible victim, home, then Teddy would bury his vendetta. Not extinguish it. Save it for another time. And hope Dolores understood.
“I won’t kill anyone,” he repeated.
“Liar.”
“No.”
“She’s dead. Let her go.”
He pressed his smiling, weeping face between the bars and held Teddy with his soft swollen eyes.
Teddy felt her in him, pressed at the base of his throat. He could see her sitting in the early July haze, in that dark orange light a city gets on summer nights just after sundown, looking up as he pulled to the curb and the kids returned to their stickball game in the middle of the street, and the laundry flapped overhead, and she watched him approach with her chin propped on the heel of her hand and the cigarette held up by her ear, and he’d brought flowers for once, and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Let her go, Noyce had said.
“I can’t,” Teddy said, and the words came out cracked and too high and he could feel screams welling in the center of his chest.
Noyce leaned back as far as he could and still maintain his grip on the bars and he cocked his head so that the ear rested on his shoulder.
“Then you’ll never leave this island.”
Teddy said nothing.
And Noyce sighed as if what he was about to say bored him to the point of falling asleep on his feet. “He was transferred out of Ward C. If he’s not in Ward A, there’s only one place he can be.”
He waited until Teddy got it.
“The lighthouse,” Teddy said.
Noyce nodded, and the final match went out.
For a full minute Teddy stood there, staring into the dark, and then he heard the bedsprings again as Noyce lay down.
He turned to go.
“Hey.”
He stopped, his back to the bars, and waited.
“God help you.”
16
TURNING TO WALK back through the cell block, he found Al waiting for him. He stood in the center of the granite corridor and fixed Teddy in a lazy gaze and Teddy said, “You get your guy?”
Al fell into step beside him. “Sure did. Slippery bastard, but in here there’s only so far you can go before you run out of room.”
They walked up the cell block, keeping to the center, and Teddy could hear Noyce asking if he’d ever been alone here. How long, he wondered, had Al been watching him? He thought back through his three days here, tried to find a single instance in which he’d been entirely alone. Even using the bat
hroom, he was using staff facilities, a man at the next stall or waiting just outside the door.
But, no, he and Chuck had gone out on the island alone several times…
He and Chuck.
What exactly did he know about Chuck? He pictured his face for a moment, could see him on the ferry, looking off at the ocean…
Great guy, instantly likeable, had a natural ease with people, the kind of guy you wanted to be around. From Seattle. Recently transferred. Hell of a poker player. Hated his father—the one thing that didn’t seem to jibe with the rest of him. There was something else off too, something buried in the back of Teddy’s brain, something…What was it?
Awkward. That was the word. But, no, there was nothing awkward about Chuck. He was smooth incarnate. Slick as shit through a goose, to use an expression Teddy’s father had been fond of. No, there was nothing remotely awkward about the man. But wasn’t there? Hadn’t there been one blip in time when Chuck had been clumsy in his movements? Yes. Teddy was sure the moment had happened. But he couldn’t remember the specifics. Not right now. Not here.
And, anyway, the whole idea was ridiculous. He trusted Chuck. Chuck had broken into Cawley’s desk, after all.
Did you see him do it?
Chuck, right now, was risking his career to get to Laeddis’s file.
How do you know?
They’d reached the door and Al said, “Just go back to the stairwell and follow those steps up. You’ll find the roof easy enough.”
“Thanks.”
Teddy waited, not opening the door just yet, wanting to see how long Al would hang around.
But Al just nodded and walked back into the cell block and Teddy felt vindicated. Of course they weren’t watching him. As far as Al knew, Teddy was just another orderly. Noyce was paranoid. Understandably so—who wouldn’t be in Noyce’s shoes?—but paranoid, just the same.
Al kept walking and Teddy turned the knob of the door and opened it, and there were no orderlies or guards waiting on the landing. He was alone. Completely alone. Unwatched. And he let the door close behind him and turned to go down the stairs and saw Chuck standing at the curve where they’d run into Baker and Vingis. He pinched his cigarette and took hard, quick hits off it and looked up at Teddy as he came down the steps, and turned and started moving fast.
“I thought we were meeting in the hall.”