Flashback (48 page)

"Dr. Mudd used Tilly and now he's using you. I cannot condemn the man. I think he has gone mad," he said calmly, still lounging on one elbow with lower limbs exposed. He set the candle down on the bricks that served as his nightstand and pulled himself into a sitting position. "Dr. Mudd did steal from me. My sister sent me a photograph of a friend and myself in better days to cheer me. Mudd got it in his head that this photograph was somehow meaningful. He took it from my things and gave it to your sister. I have no idea what she did with it."

"Dr. Mudd said the picture was of you and a man who looks very like Dr. Mudd. He told me there was a date on the picture proving it was taken when he was elsewhere. That the man with you was the true conspirator." When I said these things Mr. Arnold's face underwent a change. By the light of the single candle it seemed as if the bones beneath his skin shifted and reconfigured into a harder form. Whether this was because he recognized the truth of my words or was confirmed in his belief of the doctor's madness I couldn't say.

"Mudd would say anything to free himself," he said.

"Would you say anything to keep him imprisoned?" I asked.

"Why would I do that?" He smiled as if he mocked his own words.

There was little else I could do. I had asked and had my questions answered. Mr. Arnold was quite comfortable with his story. Even if it were untrue, I was not going to shake him loose from it.

"You were here the night Tilly and Joel disappeared," I said.

"I was. I've been told they ran away together. An elopement."

"Did you hear or see anything?" I asked.

He didn't answer me right away but sat thinking so long I began to be afraid he wouldn't. When he finally spoke he seemed to be speaking honestly, as if, during the long silence, he had weighed the consequences and decided the truth would serve as well as a lie.

"Yes," he said. "But I don't know if it will help. I heard voices in the middle of the night. When you are a prisoner, voices in the dark engender strong emotions. Part of you knows the enemy has come to shove a knife between your ribs. Part of you hopes friends have come to set you free. I opened the door between the casemates a crack, but no light had been struck. Men, probably more than one but it was too dark to see anything, had come in. I heard grunts and Joel saying, 'What is it?' and scuffling and another man's voice saying, 'Come on.' That was it. The door closed and the lock turned. I'm sorry I can't tell you more."

He did seem genuinely sorry, and his story had the simplicity of truth. It was not what I wanted to hear. If a man had come for Joel, there was hope it was Charley, Dr. Mudd's messenger boy, either acting on Mudd's behalf or, perhaps persuaded by sympathy or bribes, acting as a go-between for Joel and Tilly. As it had been men plural who'd come and taken Joel away, I couldn't but believe it was a conspiracy of another sort, one too large and well-planned to have been put together by a prisoner or a mere girl. And Mr. Arnold said he heard Joel say, "What is it?" Had Joel sent the note or been planning to elope or escape with our sister, he would have been awake and waiting, he would have known what "it" was.

The removal of Tilly would be of no use to Dr. Mudd unless she had been sent to sea carrying his ticket to freedom. When I'd spoken to him, Dr. Mudd did not strike me as a man full of hope. Rather the opposite; a man whose hope has been dashed.

If Tilly had, or was at least believed to have had, proof of the doctor's innocence, there were only two people I could think of who might want her silenced. The first was Sergeant Sinapp. He was a man full of hatred. He would not want Mudd freed. And he lusted after Tilly and hated Joel not only for surviving but for capturing Tilly's heart-at least for a while. The other was sitting across from me. If he were protecting this doppelganger, the true guilty party in the murder of President Lincoln, he would probably not flinch at a second conspiracy aimed at much less dangerous and important individuals.

"I like Tilly very much," Mr. Arnold said, and I realized I was staring at him. "We all do. She is a spark of all that is bright in the grim place we've been sent to die."

"I have to go." I left immediately. Mr. Arnold did not follow. I relocked the cell's door behind me. I believed Mr. Arnold was innocent at least of Tilly's disappearance. His kind words about our sister, though seemingly genuine, were not what convinced me. It was his powerlessness. A prisoner as hated as himself could not turn enough of our soldiers to carry out the abduction of two people.

That left Sergeant Sinapp. Something had made him powerful, snapped the short leash Joseph had kept him on, freeing him to indulge his appetites and act out his cruelty in the guise of discipline and patriotism. It was well within his abilities to put Tilly and Joel on a ship out of here, maybe even sell Tilly to the sailors or pay them to maroon her and Joel on some out-of-the-way island.

Halfway down the stairs, groping in the dark like a blind woman, tapping in search of the next step, the despicable nature of the human race overcame me, rising like a tide of the worst sort of filth. I cannot describe how unclean I felt, how loathsome to be a member of this species. Despite the original goodness (or so I hope) of my intentions in starting out on this adventure, I despised myself for the absurdity and grotesquerie of dressing in a man's britches and shirt, of creeping about in the dark, cornering men in cell and dungeon, men who conspired to kill one of the greatest men of our time and, one of whom might have had a hand in harming a beautiful and precious child. I recoiled from my own flesh, from the stone around me, from the very smell of this place where men were incarcerated, some tortured, beaten, here to die of fevers and accidents and, the least fortunate, of old age.

Once in the relative light and space of the night parade ground I began to run. I couldn't bear to walk past Sinapp's godforsaken trees and the godforsaken men who dangled there crying out for water, water I hadn't the courage to stop and give them. Had I been thinking clearly I wouldn't have done something so rash. At that moment it was beyond me to stay still and quiet within my insane costume and crawling skin.

"You there!" someone shouted, and I realized my ill-chosen movement had caught the eye of the sentry on the north wall. For an instant I faltered, thinking I would call back. I am, after all, the captain's wife. There are few good reasons I might be out at that hour, but surely I could have come up with something a soldier would choose to believe rather than face the consequences of humiliating himself should he confront Joseph and find out I had not lied. Then I remembered the clothing I wore and ran faster. The clothing could not be explained away.

The distance from the stairwell to the side door in the officers' quarters is not great, but my heart was pounding so I could hear little else, and my lungs were burning when I reached the deep shade of the building's end.

In the fifteen or so seconds it had taken me to cross the parade ground, the sentry had continued to shout: "Halt!" And, "You on the parade ground!" And "Halt," again. Now that I'd stopped, over the thudding in my ears, I could hear crunching on gravel and more shouting as the sally port guards, alerted by the cries from ramparts, had begun to run after me or perhaps merely in the direction the guard above had pointed. There was a chance I'd not been seen by them.

"East end of the quarters," the sentry shouted from what sounded like directly above my head. "There or in the barracks construction. You there. In the shadows. Identify yourself or be shot."

The terrors of the night had come home to roost. I felt I'd been stripped naked and now must show myself to the men of the garrison to be hooted and jeered and used. I looked at the unfinished third tier where the voice was coming from. The sentry had moved with me and was poised three stories up, his rifle squeezed to his shoulder.

The gun wasn't pointing at me but at the deeper shadows across from me in a pile of lumber and brick. He could not see me but only guessed my whereabouts. As quietly as I could, hugging my protective shadow, I crept along the end of the building. The fort's surgeon and his family share the apartments on this end of the quarters. The next rooms house the engineer and his serving man. Then Joseph's and mine. There is no egress from the back of the building to our quarters, but the downstairs windows have not been closed since late April but for the one night we got that blowing rain.

Noise would call the guards down upon me, but time was short. The sentries would soon come from all points to join the search, and I must be in my bed by then, in my matronly nightgown with my matronly virtue wrapped around me.

I reached the window that let into the downstairs hall adjacent to Luanne's room and began pulling myself over the sill. Giddy with relief, had I not needed to keep quiet and to rid myself of Joseph's clothes before the shouting and running brought him out of his bed, I would have laughed.

Then a hand closed in the loose fabric at the seat of Joseph's trousers and I was jerked roughly backwards. Not daring to cry out for help, I caught at the frame and the sill but couldn't win my way free. Kicking, I connected with some part of someone and was rewarded by a grunt and a loosening of the grip. Before I regained even half the inches I'd won, my legs were grabbed and I was hauled outward so quickly my chin banged the sill. It was all I could do to throw my arms down before my face crashed into the ground. My shoulder was clutched so hard it hurt. I was rolled to my back and a fist struck me above the temple.

The shock of the fall and the blow disoriented me. My brain felt as if it had been jarred loose and slipped within my skull. The thick bone of my head must have hurt the sentry's hand because he cursed and didn't strike me again immediately. Into the brief respite I said: "No. It's me. Mrs. Coleman. Don't hit. Don't hit." To my own ears I sounded like a grammar school teacher talking to a small and very bad boy, but as he didn't hit me again, and as I could not feel more foolish, frightened or horrified than I did already, I didn't judge myself too harshly.

"Mrs. Coleman?" the voice said stupidly, and I felt myself being hauled unceremoniously to my feet by the collar of Joseph's shirt. The key to Mr. Arnold's cell slipped from the pocket of the baggy trousers and fell with an odd sound. I believe it must have hit the sentry's boot. Had it been just a key it might have gone unnoticed, but to mark them and keep them from being inadvertently carried away, each key was attached to a small block of wood by a leather thong. On the wooden block the cell number for the key was printed in white paint. It had been my intention to get rid of the thing, drop it on the parade ground where it would be conceivable some soldier could have lost it the day before. In my mental distress I had forgotten to do so.

Quick as a cat he bent down, dragging me with him, to retrieve it. I lost my balance and fell against him. "None of that," he snapped and shook me till my poor brain slipped again.

While he studied the key, I studied him. Even in the shadows there was enough light to see his face. It was Charley Munson, the boy-faced sentry whom Dr. Mudd had suborned into carrying his messages to Tilly.

I heard his breath hiss in as he recognized the cell number on the wooden block. "Quick," he whispered. Before I knew what it was I was to do, he quickly clamped his hand over my mouth and dragged me away from the wall and into the deeper shadows of the casemate opposite.

Once there he hissed, "Shhh," into my ear. I nodded and he transferred his hand from my mouth to my upper arm in that crushing pinch Aunt Margaret used to propel us from one place to another when we were girls. He hustled me into the darker recesses of the casemate. By the smell, I knew we were making our way to the bakery.

Because all other avenues seemed closed, I followed him willingly.

29

Cloaked in Wind and rain and darkness, Perry slammed into the office with the violence of the hurricane that never happened. The Uzi was in one hand, in the other a fistful of long dark hair. A shove and Teddy Shaw was sent sprawling to the floor weeping.

Having closed the door so hard the panes in the window rattled, Perry threw himself laughing into the single chair by the coffee-maker. The Uzi swung between his splayed knees in a frightening parody of modern manhood.

"Whooee," he crowed. "Fought like a wildcat but the Shaws are secured." He was obviously high, and Anna doubted it was drugs. Perry just loved his job.

She knelt by Teddy, who remained crumpled on the floor in the position she'd landed in. None of the three men made any move to stop her. Down the right side of Teddy's face was a cut oozing blood and beginning to darken into a bruise at the edges. Other than that she seemed unharmed.

"Lock them in one of the back offices," Perry said. "They'll be safe enough there. This place is built like a fort." Anna waited for him to laugh at his own witticism but he wasn't being funny, just trite.

She helped Teddy to her feet, not wanting to give Perry an excuse for the violence he so clearly fed on. Paulo and Rick remained in the exact same positions as they'd been in before Perry made his dramatic entrance. Both looked dismayed. The rules of the game had changed and they weren't sure how. Or why.

Teddy was up, still weeping but more quietly now that Anna held her hand in both hers, cuffed together as they were. Anna started toward the back offices without further prompting. An Uzi-toting thug was not her idea of a dream escort. Perry levered himself out of the chair and sauntered behind them. Teddy left a fog of terror and grief in her wake, and Perry apparently loved swimming in it.