“Five of diamonds,” Teddy said.
“I’m sorry?” Hunching ever forward.
“Is that your next parlor trick?” Teddy said. “You tell me what card I’m holding. Or, no, wait—you cut a nurse in half, pull a rabbit from Dr. Cawley’s head.”
“These are not parlor tricks.”
“How about this,” Teddy said, wanting to pluck that cherry head right off those lumpy shoulders. “You teach a woman how to walk through walls, levitate over a building full of orderlies and penal staff, and float across the sea.”
Chuck said, “That’s a good one.”
Naehring allowed himself another slow blink that reminded Teddy of a house cat after it’s been fed.
“Again, your defense mechanisms are—”
“Oh, here we go.”
“—impressive. But the issue at hand—”
“The issue at hand,” Teddy said, “is that this facility suffered about nine flagrant security breaches last night. You’ve got a missing woman and no one’s looking for—”
“We’re looking.”
“Hard?”
Naehring sat back, glanced over at Cawley in such a way that Teddy wondered which of them was really in charge.
Cawley caught Teddy’s look and the underside of his jaw turned slightly pink. “Dr. Naehring, among other capacities, serves as chief liaison to our board of overseers. I asked him here in that capacity tonight to address your earlier requests.”
“Which requests were those?”
Naehring stoked his pipe back to life with a cupped match. “We will not release personnel files of our clinical staff.”
“Sheehan,” Teddy said.
“Anyone.”
“You’re cock-blocking us, essentially.”
“I’m not familiar with that term.”
“Consider traveling more.”
“Marshal, continue your investigation and we’ll help where we can, but—”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” Cawley leaning forward now, all four of them with hunched shoulders and extended heads.
“No,” Teddy repeated. “This investigation is over. We’ll return to the city on the first ferry. We’ll file our reports and the matter will be turned over, I can only assume, to Hoover’s boys. But we’re out of this.”
Naehring’s pipe stayed hovering in his hand. Cawley took a pull on his drink. Mahler tinkled. Somewhere in the room a clock ticked. Outside, the rain had grown heavy.
Cawley placed his empty glass on the small table beside his chair.
“As you wish, Marshal.”
IT WAS POURING when they left Cawley’s house, the rain clattering against the slate roof and the brick patio, the black roof of the waiting car. Teddy could see it slicing through the blackness in slanted sheets of silver. It was only a few steps from Cawley’s porch to the car, but they got drenched just the same, and then McPherson came around the front and hopped behind the wheel and moisture splattered the dashboard as he shook it free of his head and put the Packard in gear.
“Nice night.” His voice rose over the slapping wiper blades and the drumming rain.
Teddy looked back through the rear window, could see the blurry forms of Cawley and Naehring on the porch watching them go.
“Not fit for man or beast,” McPherson said as a thin branch, torn from its mother trunk, floated past the windshield.
Chuck said, “How long you worked here, McPherson?”
“Four years.”
“Ever had a break before?”
“Hell no.”
“How about a breach? You know, someone gets missing for an hour or two?”
McPherson shook his head. “Not even that. You’d have to be, well, fucking crazy. Where can you go?”
“How about Dr. Sheehan?” Teddy said. “You know him?”
“Sure.”
“How long has he been here?”
“I think a year before me.”
“So five years.”
“Sounds right.”
“Did he work with Miss Solando much?”
“Not that I know of. Dr. Cawley was her primary psychotherapist.”
“Is that common for the chief of staff to be the primary on a patient’s case?”
McPherson said, “Well…”
They waited, and the wipers continued to slap, and the dark trees bent toward them.
“It depends,” McPherson said, waving at the guard as the Packard rolled through the main gate. “Dr. Cawley does a lot of primary work with the Ward C patients, of course. And then, yeah, there are a few in the other wards whose casework he assumes.”
“Who besides Miss Solando?”
McPherson pulled up outside the male dormitory. “You don’t mind if I don’t come around to open your doors, do you? You get some sleep. I’m sure Dr. Cawley will answer all your questions in the morning.”
“McPherson,” Teddy said as he opened his door.
McPherson looked back over the seat at him.
“You’re not very good at this,” Teddy said.
“Good at what?”
Teddy gave him a grim smile and stepped out into the rain.
THEY SHARED A room with Trey Washington and another orderly named Bibby Luce. The room was a good size, with two sets of bunk beds and a small sitting area where Trey and Bibby were playing cards when they came in. Teddy and Chuck dried their hair with white towels from a stack someone had left for them on the top bunk, and then they pulled up chairs and joined the game.
Trey and Bibby played penny-ante, and cigarettes were deemed an acceptable substitute if anyone ran short of coins. Teddy strung all three of them along on a hand of seven-card, came away with five bucks and eighteen cigarettes on a club flush, pocketed the cigarettes, and played conservative from that point on.
Chuck turned out to be the real player, though, jovial as ever, impossible to read, amassing a pile of coins and cigarettes and eventually bills, glancing down at the end of it all as if surprised at how such a fat pile got in front of him.
Trey said, “You got yourself some of them X-ray eyes, Marshal?”
“Lucky, I guess.”
“Booshit. Motherfucker that lucky? He got hisself some voodoo working.”
Chuck said, “Maybe some motherfucker shouldn’t tug his earlobe.”
“Huh?”
“You tug your earlobe, Mr. Washington. Every time you got less than a full house.” He pointed at Bibby. “And this motherfucker—”
All three of them burst out laughing.
“He…he—no, wait a minute, wait—he…he gets all squirrelly-eyed, starts looking at everybody’s chips just before he bluffs. When he’s got a hot hand, though? He’s all serene and inward-looking.”
Trey ripped the air with his loudest guffaw and slapped the table. “What about Marshal Daniels? How’s he give himself away?”
Chuck grinned. “I’m going to rat out my partner? No, no, no.”
“Ooooh!” Bibby pointed across the table at them both.
“Can’t do it.”
“I see, I see,” Trey said. “It’s a white man kinda thing.”
Chuck’s face darkened and he stared at Trey until the room was sucked dry of air.
Trey’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he started to raise a hand in apology, and Chuck said, “Absolutely. What else would it be?” and the grin that broke across his face was river-size.
“Mother-fucker!” Trey slapped his hand off Chuck’s fingers.
“Motherfucker!” Bibby said.
“Mutha-fucka,” Chuck said, and then all three of them giggled like little girls.
Teddy thought of trying it, decided he’d fail, a white man trying to sound hep. And yet Chuck? Chuck could pull it off somehow.
“SO WHAT GAVE me away?” Teddy asked Chuck as they lay in the dark. Across the room, Trey and Bibby were locked in a snoring competition and the rain had gone soft in the last half an hour, as if it were catching its breath, awaiting reinforcements.
>
“At cards?” Chuck said from the lower bunk. “Forget it.”
“No. I want to know.”
“You thought you were pretty good up till now, didn’t you? Admit it.”
“I didn’t think I was bad.”
“You’re not.”
“You cleaned my clock.”
“I won a few bucks.”
“Your daddy was a gambler, that it?”
“My daddy was a prick.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Not your fault. Yours?”
“My daddy?”
“No, your uncle. Of course, your daddy.”
Teddy tried to picture him in the dark, could only see his hands, welted with scars.
“He was a stranger,” Teddy said. “To everyone. Even my mother. Hell, I doubt he knew who he was. He was his boat. When he lost the boat, he just drifted away.”
Chuck didn’t say anything and after a while Teddy figured he’d fallen asleep. He could suddenly see his father, all of him, sitting in that chair on the days there’d been no work, the man swallowed by the walls, ceilings, rooms.
“Hey, boss.”
“You still up?”
“We really going to pack it in?”
“Yeah. You surprised?”
“I’m not blaming you. I just, I dunno…”
“What?”
“I never quit anything before.”
Teddy lay quiet for a bit. Finally, he said, “We haven’t heard the truth once. We got no way through to it and we got nothing to fall back on, nothing to make these people talk.”
“I know, I know,” Chuck said. “I agree with the logic.”
“But?”
“But I never quit anything before is all.”
“Rachel Solando didn’t slip barefoot out of a locked room without help. A lot of help. The whole institution’s help. My experience? You can’t break a whole society that doesn’t want to hear what you have to say. Not if there’s only two of us. Best-case scenario—the threat worked and Cawley’s sitting up in his mansion right now, rethinking his whole attitude. Maybe in the morning…”
“So you’re bluffing.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I just played cards with you, boss.”
They lay in silence, and Teddy listened to the ocean for a while.
“You purse your lips,” Chuck said, his voice beginning to garble with sleep.
“What?”
“When you’re holding a good hand. You only do it for a second, but you always do it.”
“Oh.”
“’Night, boss.”
“’Night.”
6
SHE COMES DOWN the hallway toward him.
Dolores, karats of anger in her eyes, Bing Crosby crooning “East Side of Heaven” from somewhere in the apartment, the kitchen, maybe. She says, “Jesus, Teddy. Jesus Christ.” She’s holding an empty bottle of JTS Brown in her hand. His empty bottle. And Teddy realizes she’s found one of his stashes.
“Are you ever sober? Are you ever fucking sober anymore? Answer me.”
But Teddy can’t. He can’t speak. He’s not even sure where his body is. He can see her and she keeps coming down that long hallway toward him, but he can’t see his physical self, can’t even feel it. There’s a mirror at the other end of the hall behind Dolores, and he’s not reflected in it.
She turns left into the living room and the back of her is charred, smoldering a bit. The bottle is no longer in her hand, and small ribbons of smoke unwind from her hair.
She stops at a window. “Oh, look. They’re so pretty like that. Floating.”
Teddy is beside her at the window, and she’s no longer burned, she’s soaking wet, and he can see himself, his hand as he places it on her shoulder, the fingers draping over her collarbone, and she turns her head and gives his fingers a quick kiss.
“What did you do?” he says, not even sure why he’s asking.
“Look at them out there.”
“Baby, why you all wet?” he says, but isn’t surprised when she doesn’t answer.
The view out the window is not what he expects. It’s not the view they had from the apartment on Buttonwood, but the view of another place they stayed once, a cabin. There’s a small pond out there with small logs floating in it, and Teddy notices how smooth they are, turning almost imperceptibly, the water shivering and gone white in places under the moon.
“That’s a nice gazebo,” she says. “So white. You can smell the fresh paint.”
“It is nice.”
“So,” Dolores says.
“Killed a lot of people in the war.”
“Why you drink.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s here.”
“Rachel?”
Dolores nods. “She never left. You almost saw it. You almost did.”
“The Law of Four.”
“It’s code.”
“Sure, but for what?”
“She’s here. You can’t leave.”
He wraps his arms around her from behind, buries his face in the side of her neck. “I’m not going to leave. I love you. I love you so much.”
Her belly springs a leak and the liquid flows through his hands.
“I’m bones in a box, Teddy.”
“No.”
“I am. You have to wake up.”
“You’re here.”
“I’m not. You have to face that. She’s here. You’re here. He’s here too. Count the beds. He’s here.”
“Who?”
“Laeddis.”
The name crawls through his flesh and climbs over his bones.
“No.”
“Yes.” She bends her head back, looks up at him. “You’ve known.”
“I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have. You can’t leave.”
“You’re tense all the time.” He kneads her shoulders, and she lets out a soft moan of surprise that gives him a hard-on.
“I’m not tense anymore,” she says. “I’m home.”
“This isn’t home,” he says.
“Sure it is. My home. She’s here. He’s here.”
“Laeddis.”
“Laeddis,” she says. Then: “I need to go.”
“No.” He’s crying. “No. Stay.”
“Oh, God.” She leans back into him. “Let me go. Let me go.”
“Please don’t go.” His tears spill down her body and mix with her pouring belly. “I need to hold you just a little longer. A little longer. Please.”
She lets loose a small bubble of a sound—half sigh, half howl, so torn and beautiful in its anguish—and she kisses his knuckles.
“Okay. Hold tight. Tight as you can.”
And he holds his wife. He holds her and holds her.
FIVE O’CLOCK IN the morning, the rain dropping on the world, and Teddy climbed off the top bunk and took his notebook from his coat. He sat at the table where they’d played poker and opened the notebook to the page where he’d transcribed Rachel Solando’s Law of 4.
Trey and Bibby continued to snore as loud as the rain. Chuck slept quietly, on his stomach, one fist tucked close to his ear, as if it were whispering secrets.
Teddy looked down at the page. It was simple once you knew how to read it. A child’s code, really. It was still code, though, and it took Teddy until six to break it.
He looked up, saw Chuck watching him from the lower bunk, Chuck’s chin propped up on his fist.
“We leaving, boss?”
Teddy shook his head.
“Ain’t nobody leaving in this shit,” Trey said, climbing out of his bunk, pulling up the window shade on a drowning landscape the color of pearl. “No how.”
The dream was harder to hold suddenly, the smell of her evaporating with the ascent of the shade, a dry cough from Bibby, Trey stretching with a loud, long yawn.
Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him. If he
could turn back the years to that morning of the fire and replace her body with his own, he would. That was a given. That had always been a given. But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.
I held her, he wanted to say to Chuck and Trey and Bibby. I held her as Bing Crosby crooned from the kitchen radio and I could smell her and the apartment on Buttonwood and the lake where we stayed that summer and her lips grazed my knuckles.
I held her. This world can’t give me that. This world can only give me reminders of what I don’t have, can never have, didn’t have for long enough.
We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.
Not this. Not this.
I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn’t raise the gun to my head fast enough.
Chuck was staring at him, waiting.
Teddy said, “I broke Rachel’s code.”
“Oh,” Chuck said, “is that all?”
DAY TWO
Laeddis
7
CAWLEY MET THEM in the foyer of Ward B. His clothes and face were drenched and he looked like a man who’d spent the night on a bus stop bench.
Chuck said, “The trick, Doctor, is to sleep when you lie down.”
Cawley wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Oh, is that the trick, Marshal? I knew I was forgetting something. Sleep, you say. Right.” They climbed the yellowed staircase, nodded at the orderly posted at the first landing.
“And how was Dr. Naehring this morning?” Teddy asked.
Cawley gave him a weary rise and fall of his eyebrows. “I apologize for that. Jeremiah is a genius, but he could use some social polishing. He has this idea for a book about the male warrior culture throughout history. He’s constantly bringing his obsession into conversations, trying to fit people into his preconceived models. Again, I’m sorry.”
“You guys do that a lot?”