“Who chose yours?” Cawley said.
“My parents.”
“Your surname.”
Chuck shrugged. “Who’s to tell? We’d have to go back twenty generations.”
“Or one.”
Chuck leaned forward in his chair. “Excuse me?”
“You’re Greek,” Cawley said. “Or Armenian. Which?”
“Armenian.”
“So Aule was…”
“Anasmajian.”
Cawley turned his slim gaze on Teddy. “And yourself?”
“Daniels?” Teddy said. “Tenth-generation Irish.” He gave Cawley a small grin. “And, yeah, I can trace it back, Doctor.”
“But your given first name? Theodore?”
“Edward.”
Cawley leaned his chair back, his hands falling free of his chin. He tapped a letter opener against the desk edge, the sound as soft and persistent as snow falling on a roof.
“My wife,” he said, “is named Margaret. Yet no one ever calls her that except me. Some of her oldest friends call her Margo, which makes a certain amount of sense, but everyone else calls her Peggy. I’ve never understood that.”
“What?”
“How you get Peggy from Margaret. And yet it’s quite common. Or how you get Teddy from Edward. There’s no p in Margaret and no t in Edward.”
Teddy shrugged. “Your first name?”
“John.”
“Anyone ever call you Jack?”
He shook his head. “Most people just call me Doctor.”
The water spit lightly against the window, and Cawley seemed to review their conversation in his head, his eyes gone shiny and distant, and then Chuck said, “Is Miss Solando considered dangerous?”
“All our patients have shown a proclivity for violence,” Cawley said. “It’s why they’re here. Men and women. Rachel Solando was a war widow. She drowned her three children in the lake behind her house. Took them out there one by one and held their heads under until they died. Then she brought them back into the house and arranged them around the kitchen table and ate a meal there before a neighbor dropped by.”
“She kill the neighbor?” Chuck asked.
Cawley’s eyebrows rose, and he gave a small sigh. “No. Invited him to sit and have breakfast with them. He declined, naturally, and called the police. Rachel still believes the children are alive, waiting for her. It might explain why she’s tried to escape.”
“To return home,” Teddy said.
Cawley nodded.
“And where’s that?” Chuck asked.
“A small town in the Berkshires. Roughly a hundred fifty miles from here.” With a tilt of his head, Cawley indicated the window behind him. “To swim that way, you don’t reach land for eleven miles. To swim north, you don’t reach land until Newfoundland.”
Teddy said, “And you’ve searched the grounds.”
“Yes.”
“Pretty thoroughly?”
Cawley took a few seconds to answer, played with a silver bust of a horse on the corner of his desk. “The warden and his men and a detail of orderlies spent the night and a good part of the morning scouring the island and every building in the institution. Not a trace. What’s even more disturbing is that we can’t tell how she got out of her room. It was locked from the outside and its sole window was barred. We’ve found no indication that the locks were tampered with.” He took his eyes off the horse and glanced at Teddy and Chuck. “It’s as if she evaporated straight through the walls.”
Teddy jotted “evaporated” in his notebook. “And you are sure that she was in that room at lights-out.”
“Positive.”
“How so?”
Cawley moved his hand back from the horse and pressed the call button on his intercom. “Nurse Marino?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Please tell Mr. Ganton to come in.”
“Right away, Doctor.”
There was a small table near the window with a pitcher of water and four glasses on top. Cawley went to it and filled three of the glasses. He placed one in front of Teddy and one in front of Chuck, took his own back behind the desk with him.
Teddy said, “You wouldn’t have some aspirin around here, would you?”
Cawley gave him a small smile. “I think we could scare some up.” He rummaged in his desk drawer, came out with a bottle of Bayer. “Two or three?”
“Three would be nice.” Teddy could feel the ache behind his eye begin to pulse.
Cawley handed them across the desk and Teddy tossed them in his mouth, chased them with the water.
“Prone to headaches, Marshal?”
Teddy said, “Prone to seasickness, unfortunately.”
Cawley nodded. “Ah. Dehydrated.”
Teddy nodded and Cawley opened a walnut cigarette box, held it open to Teddy and Chuck. Teddy took one. Chuck shook his head and produced his own pack, and all three of them lit up as Cawley lifted the window open behind him.
He sat back down and handed a photograph across the desk—a young woman, beautiful, her face blemished by dark rings under the eyes, rings as dark as her black hair. The eyes themselves were too wide, as if something hot were prodding them from inside her head. Whatever she saw beyond that camera lens, beyond the photographer, beyond anything in the known world probably—wasn’t fit to be seen.
There was something uncomfortably familiar about her, and then Teddy made the connection—a young boy he’d seen in the camps who wouldn’t eat the food they gave him. He sat against a wall in the April sun with that same look in his eyes until his eyelids closed and eventually they added him to the pile at the train station.
Chuck unleashed a low whistle. “My God.”
Cawley took a drag on his cigarette. “Are you reacting to her apparent beauty or her apparent madness?”
“Both,” Chuck said.
Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, “No, no, no. It’s okay. Sssh.” You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.
The office door opened and a tall Negro with thick flecks of gray in his hair entered wearing the white-on-white uniform of an orderly.
“Mr. Ganton,” Cawley said, “these are the gentlemen I told you about—Marshals Aule and Daniels.”
Teddy and Chuck stood and shook Ganton’s hand, Teddy getting a strong whiff of fear from the man, as if he wasn’t quite comfortable shaking hands with the law, maybe had a pending warrant or two against him back in the world.
“Mr. Ganton has been with us for seventeen years. He’s the head orderly here. It was Mr. Ganton who escorted Rachel to her room last night. Mr. Ganton?”
Ganton crossed his ankles, placed his hands on his knees, and hunched forward a bit, his eyes on his shoes. “There was group at nine o’clock. Then—”
Cawley said, “That’s a group therapy session led by Dr. Sheehan and Nurse Marino.”
Ganton waited until he was sure Cawley had finished before he began again. “So, yeah. They was in group, and it ended round ten. I escorted Miss Rachel up to her room. She went inside. I locked up from the outside. We do checks every two hours during lights-out. I go back at midnight. I look in, and her bed’s empty. I figure maybe she’s on the floor. They do that a lot, the patients, sleep on the floor. I open up—”
Cawley again: “Using your keys, correct, Mr. Ganton?”
Ganton nodded at Cawley, looked back at his knees. “I use my keys, yeah, ’cause the door’s locked. I go in. Miss Rachel ain’t nowhere to be found. I shut the door and check the window and the bars. They locked tight too.” He shrugged. “I call the warden.” He looked up at Cawley, and Cawley gave him a soft, paternal nod.
“Any questions, gentlemen?”
Chuck shook his head.
Teddy looked up from his notebook. “Mr. Ganton, you said you entered the room and ascertained that the patient wasn’t there. What did this entail?”
; “Sir?”
Teddy said, “Is there a closet? Space beneath the bed where she could hide?”
“Both.”
“And you checked those places.”
“Yes, sir.”
“With the door still open.”
“Sir?”
“You said that you entered the room and looked around and couldn’t find the patient. Then you shut the door behind you.”
“No, I…Well…”
Teddy waited, took another hit off the cigarette Cawley had given him. It was smooth, richer than his Chesterfields, and the smell of the smoke was different too, almost sweet.
“It took all of five seconds, sir,” Ganton said. “No door on the closet. I look there, I look under the bed, and I shut the door. No place she could have been hiding. Room’s small.”
“Against the wall, though?” Teddy said. “To the right or the left of the door?”
“Nah.” Ganton shook his head, and for the first time Teddy thought he glimpsed anger, a sense of primal resentment behind the downcast eyes and the “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs.”
“It’s unlikely,” Cawley said to Teddy. “I see your point, Marshal, but once you see the room, you’ll understand that Mr. Ganton would have been hard-pressed to miss the patient if she were standing anywhere within its four walls.”
“That’s right,” Ganton said, staring openly at Teddy now, and Teddy could see the man carried a furious pride in his work ethic that Teddy, by questioning, had managed to insult.
“Thank you, Mr. Ganton,” Cawley said. “That’ll be all for now.”
Ganton rose, his eyes lingering on Teddy for another few seconds, and then he said, “Thank you, Doctor,” and left the room.
They were quiet for a minute, finishing their cigarettes and then stubbing them out in the ashtrays before Chuck said, “I think we should see the room now, Doctor.”
“Of course,” Cawley said and came out from behind his desk, a ring of keys in his hand the size of a hubcap. “Follow me.”
IT WAS A tiny room with the door opening inward and to the right, the door cut from steel and the hinges well greased so that it swung hard against the wall on the right. To their left was a short length of wall and then a small wooden closet with a few smocks and drawstring pants hanging on plastic hangers.
“There goes that theory,” Teddy admitted.
Cawley nodded. “There would have been no place for her to hide from anyone standing in this doorway.”
“Well, the ceiling,” Chuck said, and all three of them looked up and even Cawley managed a smile.
Cawley closed the door behind them and Teddy felt the immediate sense of imprisonment in his spine. They might call it a room, but it was a cell. The window hovering behind the slim bed was barred. A small dresser sat against the right wall, and the floor and walls were a white institutional cement. With three of them in the room, there was barely space to move without bumping limbs.
Teddy said, “Who else would have access to the room?”
“At that time of night? Very few would have any reason to be in the ward.”
“Sure,” Teddy said. “But who would have access?”
“The orderlies, of course.”
“Doctors?” Chuck said.
“Well, nurses,” Cawley said.
“Doctors don’t have keys for this room?” Teddy asked.
“They do,” Cawley said with just a hint of annoyance. “But by ten o’clock, the doctors have signed out for the night.”
“And turned in their keys?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s a record of that?” Teddy said.
“I don’t follow.”
Chuck said, “They have to sign in and out for the keys, Doctor—that’s what we’re wondering.”
“Of course.”
“And we could check last night’s sign-in log,” Teddy said.
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
“And that would be kept in the cage we saw on the first floor,” Chuck said. “The one with the guard inside of it and the wall of keys behind him?”
Cawley gave him a quick nod.
“And the personnel files,” Teddy said, “of the medical staff and the orderlies and the guards. We’ll need access to those.”
Cawley peered at him as if Teddy’s face were sprouting blackflies. “Why?”
“A woman disappears from a locked room, Doctor? She escapes onto a tiny island and no one can find her? I have to at least consider that she had help.”
“We’ll see,” Cawley said.
“We’ll see?”
“Yes, Marshal. I’ll have to speak with the warden and some of the other staff. We’ll make a determination of your request based on—”
“Doctor,” Teddy said, “it wasn’t a request. We’re here by order of the government. This is a federal facility from which a dangerous prisoner—”
“Patient.”
“A dangerous patient,” Teddy said, keeping his voice as even as possible, “has escaped. If you refuse to aid two U.S. marshals, Doctor, in the apprehension of that patient you are, unfortunately—Chuck?”
Chuck said, “Obstructing justice, Doctor.”
Cawley looked at Chuck as if he’d been expecting grief from Teddy, but Chuck hadn’t been on his radar.
“Yes, well,” he said, his voice stripped of life, “all I can say is that I will do all that I can to accommodate your request.”
Teddy and Chuck exchanged a small glance, went back to looking at the bare room. Cawley probably wasn’t used to questions that continued after he’d shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.
Teddy looked in the tiny closet, saw three white smocks, two pairs of white shoes. “How many shoes are the patients given?”
“Two.”
“She left this room barefoot?”
“Yes.” He fixed the tie under his lab coat and then pointed at a large sheet of paper lying on the bed. “We found that behind the dresser. We don’t know what it means. We were hoping someone could tell us.”
Teddy lifted the sheet of paper, turned it over to see that the other side was a hospital eye chart, the letters shrinking and descending in a pyramid. He turned it back over and held it up for Chuck:
THE LAW OF 4
I AM 47
THEY WERE 80
+YOU ARE 3
WE ARE 4
BUT
WHO IS 67?
Teddy didn’t even like holding it. The edges of the paper tingled against his fingers.
Chuck said, “Fuck if I know.”
Cawley stepped up beside them. “Quite similar to our clinical conclusion.”
“We are three,” Teddy said.
Chuck peered at the paper. “Huh?”
“We could be the three,” Teddy said. “The three of us right now, standing in this room.”
Chuck shook his head. “How’s she going to predict that?”
Teddy shrugged. “It’s a reach.”
“Yeah.”
Cawley said, “It is, and yet Rachel is quite brilliant in her games. Her delusions—particularly the one that allows her to believe her three children are still alive—are conceived on a very delicate but intricate architecture. To sustain the structure, she employs an elaborate narrative thread to her life that is completely fictitious.”
Chuck turned his head slowly, looked at Cawley. “I’d need a degree to understand that, Doctor.”
Cawley chuckled. “Think of the lies you tell your parents as a child. How elaborate they are. Instead of keeping them simple to explain why you missed school or forgot your chores, you embellish, you make them fantastical. Yes?”
Chuck thought about it and nodded.
Teddy said, “Sure. Criminals do the same thing.”
“Exactly. The idea is to obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth. Now consider those lies being told to yourself. That’s what Rachel does. In four years, s
he never so much as acknowledged that she was in an institution. As far as she was concerned, she was back home in the Berkshires in her house, and we were deliverymen, milkmen, postal workers, just passing by. Whatever the reality, she used sheer force of will to make her illusions stronger.”
“But how does the truth never get through?” Teddy said. “I mean, she’s in a mental institution. How does she not notice that from time to time?”
“Ah,” Cawley said, “now we’re getting into the true horrible beauty of the full-blown schizophrenic’s paranoid structure. If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying…”
“Then any truth they say,” Chuck said, “must be a lie.”
Cawley cocked his thumb and pointed his finger at him like a gun. “You’re getting it.”
Teddy said, “And that somehow plays into these numbers?”
“It must. They have to represent something. With Rachel, no thought was idle or ancillary. She had to keep the structure in her head from collapsing, and to do that, she had to be thinking always. This”—he tapped the eye chart—“is the structure on paper. This, I sincerely believe, will tell us where she’s gone.”
For just a moment, Teddy thought it was speaking to him, becoming clearer. It was the first two numbers, he was certain—the “47” and the “80”—he could feel something about them scratching at his brain like the melody of a song he was trying to remember while the radio played a completely different tune. The “47” was the easiest clue. It was right in front of him. It was so simple. It was…
And then any possible bridges of logic collapsed, and Teddy felt his mind go white, and he knew it was in flight again—the clue, the connection, the bridge—and he placed the page down on the bed again.
“Insane,” Chuck said.
“What’s that?” Cawley said.
“Where she’s gone,” Chuck said. “In my opinion.”
“Well, certainly,” Cawley said. “I think we can take that as a given.”
4
THEY STOOD OUTSIDE the room. The corridor broke off from a staircase in the center. Rachel’s door was to the left of the stairs, halfway down on the right-hand side.
“This is the only way off this floor?” Teddy said.