Teddy tilted the file so Chuck could see Cawley’s notes:
Patient assaulted his father’s nurse with a broken glass. Victim critically injured, permanently scarred. Patient in denial over his responsibility for the act.
“It’s only because she scared me,” Peter said. “She wanted me to pull out my thing so she could laugh at it. Tell me how I’d never be with a woman, never have children of my own, never be a man? Because, otherwise, I mean you know this, you can see it in my face—I wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not in me. But when I’m scared? Oh, the mind.”
“What about it?” Chuck’s voice was soothing.
“You ever think about it?”
“Your mind?”
“The mind,” he said. “Mine, yours, anyone’s. It’s an engine essentially. That’s what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it’s got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don’t even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one…Have you thought about that?”
“Not recently.”
“You should. It’s just like a car. No different. One gear slips, one bolt cracks, and the whole system goes haywire. Can you live knowing that?” He tapped his temple. “That it’s all trapped in here and you can’t get to it and you don’t really control it. But it controls you, doesn’t it? And if it decides one day that it doesn’t feel like coming to work?” He leaned forward, and they could see tendons straining in his neck. “Well, then you’re pretty much good and fucked, aren’t you?”
“Interesting perspective,” Chuck said.
Peter leaned back in his chair, suddenly listless. “That’s what scares me most.”
Teddy, whose migraines gave him a bit of insight into the lack of control one had over one’s mind, would cede a point to Peter on the general concept, but mostly he just wanted to pick the little shit up by his throat, slam him against one of the ovens in the back of the cafeteria, and ask him about that poor nurse he’d carved up.
Do you even remember her name, Pete? What do you think she feared? Huh? You. That’s what. Trying to do an honest day’s work, make a living. Maybe she had kids, a husband. Maybe they were trying to save enough to put one of those kids through college someday, give him a better life. A small dream.
But, no, some rich prick’s fucked-up mama’s boy of a son decides she can’t have that dream. Sorry, but no. No normal life for you, miss. Not ever again.
Teddy looked across the table at Peter Breene, and he wanted to punch him in the face so hard that doctors would never find all the bones in his nose. Hit him so hard the sound would never leave his head.
Instead, he closed the file and said, “You were in group therapy the night before last with Rachel Solando. Correct?”
“Yes, I sure was, sir.”
“You see her go up to her room?”
“No. The men left first. She was still sitting there with Bridget Kearns and Leonora Grant and that nurse.”
“That nurse?”
Peter nodded. “The redhead. Sometimes I like her. She seems genuine. But other times, you know?”
“No,” Teddy said, keeping his voice as smooth as Chuck’s had been, “I don’t.”
“Well, you’ve seen her, right?”
“Sure. What’s her name again?”
“She doesn’t need a name,” Peter said. “Woman like that? No name for her. Dirty Girl. That’s her name.”
“But, Peter,” Chuck said, “I thought you said you liked her.”
“When did I say that?”
“Just a minute ago.”
“Uh-uh. She’s trash. She’s squishy-squishy.”
“Let me ask you something else.”
“Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
“Peter?”
Peter looked up at Teddy.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Did anything unusual happen in group that night? Did Rachel Solando say anything or do anything out of the ordinary?”
“She didn’t say a word. She’s a mouse. She just sat there. She killed her kids, you know. Three of them. You believe that? What kind of person does that sort of thing? Sick fucking people in this world, sirs, if you don’t mind me mentioning.”
“People have problems,” Chuck said. “Some are deeper than others. Sick, like you said. They need help.”
“They need gas,” Peter said.
“Excuse me?”
“Gas,” Peter said to Teddy. “Gas the retards. Gas the killers. Killed her own kids? Gas the bitch.”
They sat silent, Peter glowing as if he’d illuminated the world for them. After a while, he patted the table and stood.
“Good to meet you, gents. I’ll be getting back.”
Teddy used a pencil to doodle on the file cover, and Peter stopped, looked back at him.
“Peter,” Teddy said.
“Yeah?”
“I—”
“Could you stop that?”
Teddy scratched his initials into the cardboard in long, slow strokes. “I was wondering if—”
“Could you please, please…?”
Teddy looked up, still pulling the pencil down the file cover. “Which?”
“—stop that?”
“What?” Teddy looked at him, looked down at the file. He lifted the pencil, cocked an eyebrow.
“Yes. Please. That.”
Teddy dropped the pencil on the cover. “Better?”
“Thank you.”
“Do you know a patient, Peter, by the name of Andrew Laeddis?”
“No.”
“No? No one here by that name?”
Peter shrugged. “Not in Ward A. He could be in C. We don’t mingle with them. They’re fucking nuts.”
“Well, thank you, Peter,” Teddy said, and picked up the pencil and went back to doodling.
AFTER PETER BREENE, they interviewed Leonora Grant. Leonora was convinced that she was Mary Pickford and Chuck was Douglas Fairbanks and Teddy was Charlie Chaplin. She thought that the cafeteria was an office on Sunset Boulevard and they were here to discuss a public stock offering in United Artists. She kept caressing the back of Chuck’s hand and asking who was going to record the minutes.
In the end, the orderlies had to pull her hand from Chuck’s wrist while Leonora cried, “Adieu, mon chéri. Adieu.”
Halfway across the cafeteria, she broke free of the orderlies, came charging back across the floor toward them, and grabbed Chuck’s hand.
She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”
Chuck looked in her eyes and said, “Noted.”
After that, they met Arthur Toomey, who kept insisting they call him Joe. Joe had slept through group therapy that night. Joe, it turned out, was a narcoleptic. He fell asleep twice on them, the second time for the day, more or less.
Teddy was feeling the place in the back of his skull by that point. It was making his hair itch, and while he felt sympathy for all the patients except for Breene, he couldn’t help wonder how anyone could stand working here.
Trey came ambling back in with a small woman with blond hair and a face shaped like a pendant. Her eyes pulsed with clarity. And not the clarity of the insane, but the everyday clarity of an intelligent woman in a less-than-intelligent world. She smiled and gave them each a small, shy wave as she sat.
Teddy checked Cawley’s notes—Bridget Kearns.
“I’ll never get out of here,” she said after they’d been sitting there for a few minutes. She smoked her cigarettes only halfway before stubbing them out, and she had a soft, confident voice, and a little over a decade ago she’d killed her husband with an ax.
“I’m not sure I should,” she said.
“Why’s that?” Chuck said. “I mean, excuse me for saying it, Miss Kearns—”
“Mrs.”
“Mrs. Kearns. Excuse me, but you seem, well, normal to me.”
She leaned back in her chair, as at ease as anyone they’d met in this place, and gave a soft
chuckle. “I suppose. I wasn’t when I first came here. Oh my god. I’m glad they didn’t take pictures. I’ve been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, and I have no reason to doubt that. I do have my dark days. I suppose everyone does. The difference is that most people don’t kill their husbands with an ax. I’ve been told I have deep, unresolved conflicts with my father, and I’ll agree to that too. I doubt I’d go out and kill someone again, but you can never tell.” She pointed the tip of her cigarette in their direction. “I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn’t the least understandable thing you can do.”
She met Teddy’s eyes and something in her pupils—a schoolgirl’s shy giddiness, perhaps—made him laugh.
“What?” she said, laughing with him.
“Maybe you shouldn’t get out,” he said.
“You say that because you’re a man.”
“You’re damn right.”
“Well then, I don’t blame you.”
It was a relief to laugh after Peter Breene, and Teddy wondered if he was actually flirting a bit too. With a mental patient. An ax murderer. This is what it’s come to, Dolores. But he didn’t feel altogether bad about it, as if after these two long dark years of mourning he was maybe entitled to a little harmless repartee.
“What would I do if I did get out?” Bridget said. “I don’t know what’s out in that world anymore. Bombs, I hear. Bombs that can turn whole cities to ash. And televisions. That’s what they call them, isn’t it? There’s a rumor each ward will get one, and we’ll be able to see plays on this box. I don’t know that I’d like that. Voices coming from a box. Faces from a box. I hear enough voices and see enough faces every day. I don’t need more noise.”
“Can you tell us about Rachel Solando?” Chuck asked.
She paused. It was more like a hitch, actually, and Teddy watched her eyes turn up slightly, as if she were searching her brain for the right file, and Teddy scribbled “lies” in his notepad, curling his wrist over the word as soon as he was done.
Her words came more carefully and smelled of rote.
“Rachel is nice enough. She keeps to herself. She talks about rain a lot, but mostly she doesn’t talk at all. She believed her kids were alive. She believed she was still living in the Berkshires and that we were all neighbors and postmen, deliverymen, milkmen. She was hard to get to know.”
She spoke with her head down, and when she finished, she couldn’t meet Teddy’s eyes. Her glance bounced off his face, and she studied the tabletop and lit another cigarette.
Teddy thought about what she’d just said, realized the description of Rachel’s delusions was almost word for word what Cawley had said to them yesterday.
“How long was she here?”
“Huh?”
“Rachel. How long was she in Ward B with you?”
“Three years? About that, I think. I lose track of time. It’s easy to do that in this place.”
“And where was she before that?” Teddy asked.
“Ward C, I heard. She transferred over, I believe.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“No. I…Again, you lose track.”
“Sure. Anything unusual happen the last time you saw her?”
“No.”
“That was in group.”
“What?”
“The last time you saw her,” Teddy said. “It was in group therapy the night before last.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She nodded several times and shaved some ash off against the rim of the ashtray. “In group.”
“And you all went up to your rooms together?”
“With Mr. Ganton, yes.”
“What was Dr. Sheehan like that night?”
She looked up, and Teddy saw confusion and maybe some terror in her face. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Was Dr. Sheehan there that night?”
She looked at Chuck, then over at Teddy, sucked her upper lip against her teeth. “Yeah. He was there.”
“What’s he like?”
“Dr. Sheehan?”
Teddy nodded.
“He’s okay. He’s nice. Handsome.”
“Handsome?”
“Yeah. He’s…not hard on the eyes, as my mother used to say.”
“Did he ever flirt with you?”
“No.”
“Come on to you?”
“No, no, no. Dr. Sheehan’s a good doctor.”
“And that night?”
“That night?” She gave it some thought. “Nothing unusual happened that night. We spoke about, um, anger management? And Rachel complained about the rain. And Dr. Sheehan left just before the group broke up, and Mr. Ganton led us up to our rooms, and we went to bed, and that was it.”
In his notebook, Teddy wrote “coached” underneath “lies” and closed the cover.
“That was it?”
“Yes. And the next morning Rachel was gone.”
“The next morning?”
“Yeah. I woke up and heard that she’d escaped.”
“But that night? Around midnight—you heard it, right?”
“Heard what?” Stubbing out her cigarette, waving at the smoke that wafted up in its wake.
“The commotion. When she was discovered missing.”
“No. I—”
“There was shouting, yelling, guards running in from everywhere, alarms sounding.”
“I thought it was a dream.”
“A dream?”
She nodded fast. “Sure. A nightmare.” She looked at Chuck. “Could I get a glass of water?”
“You bet.” Chuck stood and looked around, saw a stack of glasses in the rear of the cafeteria beside a steel dispenser.
One of the orderlies half rose from his seat. “Marshal?”
“Just getting some water. It’s okay.”
Chuck crossed to the machine, selected a glass, and took a few seconds to decide which nozzle produced milk and which produced water.
As he lifted the nozzle, a thick knob that looked like a metal hoof, Bridget Kearns grabbed Teddy’s notebook and pen. She looked at him, holding him with her eyes, and flipped to a clean page, scribbled something on it, then flipped the cover closed and slid the notebook and pen back to him.
Teddy gave her a quizzical look, but she dropped her eyes and idly caressed her cigarette pack.
Chuck brought the water back and sat down. They watched Bridget drain half the glass and then say, “Thank you. Do you have any more questions? I’m kind of tired.”
“You ever meet a patient named Andrew Laeddis?” Teddy asked.
Her face showed no expression. None whatsoever. It was as if it had turned to alabaster. Her hands stayed flat on the tabletop, as if removing them would cause the table to float to the ceiling.
Teddy had no clue as to why, but he’d swear she was on the verge of weeping.
“No,” she said. “Never heard of him.”
“YOU THINK SHE was coached?” Chuck said.
“Don’t you?”
“Okay, it sounded a little forced.”
They were in the breezeway that connected Ashecliffe to Ward B, impervious to the rain now, the drip of it on their skin.
“A little? She used the exact same words Cawley used in some cases. When we asked what the topic was about in group, she paused and then she said ’anger management?’ Like she wasn’t sure. Like she was taking a quiz and she’d spent last night cramming.”
“So what’s that mean?”
“Fuck if I know,” Teddy said. “All I got are questions. Every half an hour, it’s like there’re thirty more.”
“Agreed,” Chuck said. “Hey, here’s a question for you—who’s Andrew Laeddis?”
“You caught that, huh?” Teddy lit one of the cigarettes he’d won in poker.
“You asked every patient we talked to.”
“Didn’t ask Ken or Leonora Grant.”
“Teddy, they didn’t know what planet they were on.”
&
nbsp; “True.”
“I’m your partner, boss.”
Teddy leaned back against the stone wall and Chuck joined him. He turned his head, looked at Chuck.
“We just met,” he said.
“Oh, you don’t trust me.”
“I trust you, Chuck. I do. But I’m breaking the rules here. I asked for this case specifically. The moment it came over the wire in the field office.”
“So?”
“So my motives aren’t exactly impartial.”
Chuck nodded and lit his own cigarette, took some time to think about it. “My girl, Julie—Julie Taketomi, that’s her name—she’s as American as I am. Doesn’t speak a word of Japanese. Hell, her parents go back two generations in this country. But they put her in a camp and then…” He shook his head and then flicked his cigarette into the rain and pulled up his shirt, exposed the skin over his right hip. “Take a look, Teddy. See my other scar.”
Teddy looked. It was long and dark as jelly, thick as his thumb.
“I didn’t get this one in the war, either. Got it working for the marshals. Went through a door in Tacoma. The guy we were after sliced me with a sword. You believe that? A fucking sword. I spent three weeks in the hospital while they sewed my intestines back together. For the U.S. Marshals Service, Teddy. For my country. And then they run me out of my home district because I’m in love with an American woman with Oriental skin and eyes?” He tucked his shirt back in. “Fuck them.”
“If I didn’t know you better,” Teddy said after a bit, “I’d swear you really love that woman.”
“Die for her,” Chuck said. “No regrets about it, either.”
Teddy nodded. No purer feeling in the world that he knew of.
“Don’t let that go, kid.”
“I won’t, Teddy. That’s the point. But you gotta tell me why we’re here. Who the hell is Andrew Laeddis?”