Flashback (50 page)

30

Charley Munson and I hid in the back of the bakery behind the wall housing the great ovens. The rich smell of bread was comforting. The knowledge that the fort's bakers must come on duty soon was not. From without, on the parade ground, we heard the sound of men coalesce, disperse, coalesce again then go silent, giving up the hunt. There was no way the sentry who'd seen me could know I was not just a rank-and-file soldier caught out on an illicit tryst with a laundress or engaged in petty theft or drunkenness. When they didn't find me, it was practical to assume I had made it back to the anonymity of my barracks.

When all was quiet, Charley grabbed my arm again. "Bakers will be here soon," he said.

"Let me go," I told him. Now that the terror of nearly being discovered had passed, the sickness I'd felt earlier for myself, for the entire race of humans, returned. It was as if a great fire had burned out my insides, leaving a black and stinking ruin. I wanted to get home, get into a clean nightdress and let sleep erase thought for however long it would.

He hesitated a moment but whether from indecision or something else I couldn't tell. The hiding place he'd chosen was unnatural in its total lightlessness. The grip on my arm tightened, and he pulled me after him. I hadn't the strength to break free or the moral authority to scream for help. Once again I followed, stumbling after in the darkness. The night had been so rife with terrors, it seemed I had exhausted my ability to experience the sensation. I was numb, too low in spirit even to feel curiosity about our destination or what was to be done with me when we reached it. Me bumbling, Private Munson muttering, "Oh my Aunt Fanny" and "God's teeth"-curses that triggered what might have been hysteria, a need to laugh that I was fortunately too numb to give in to-led me up the spiraling stairs to the second tier, past the Virginia regiment's cells and finally to the powder magazine where I'd found Tilly.

In the airless confines of that place he let loose of me. His grip had been so hard my hand tingled as blood began flowing back into my fingers. Again we were in a place without light. Since I had not barked my shins or tripped over anything, I assumed Sergeant Sinapp had finished clearing out the items cached there. The sweet sharp smell of new-cut wood suggested the walls had been completed as well. Massive walls and mazelike entrance kept out sound as well as light. There was a sense of being suspended in time and space.

My legs would no longer support me, and I sank to the floor. My captor-or rescuer, his role in my life yet to be determined-sat near me. His breathing, heavy as though he had carried rather than led me, was the only sound I could hear.

"Why did you have that key?" he asked. The question didn't surprise me but his tone did. He sounded afraid. As absurd as it sounds, his fear angered me. I was the one who had been chased, dragged out of a window, struck in the face, silenced and brought to a place where, should I cry out, no one would hear me. How dare he be the frightened one? That I had gone past fear and was not scared anymore was not the point. Fear was my inalienable right and it outraged me that he had usurped it.

Even at the time I knew how ridiculous I was being but it failed to temper my emotions.

"You carried messages from the conspirators to my sister, did you not?" I demanded. The position I was in suggested I should not demand anything, but I had grown heartily sick of not only those things I listed previously, but of men, all men and because Private Munson was nearest, of him particularly. "I know you did."

He didn't say anything. The sound of his breathing was joined by the small furtive noises of a man fidgeting on a stone floor.

"Dr. Mudd told me of your complicity, as did Mr. Arnold. Please tell me yourself." Hostility is expensive to maintain, and I hadn't the physical reserves to sustain it. This last came out as a plea.

Private Munson, who had withstood my browbeating, was not proof against my beseeching.

"I felt sorry for Joel," he said. "He was so bad hurt. I couldn't let that go. I mean, prisoners can't be mouthing off, sowing seeds of contention and the like. But I couldn't let that go."

This "sowing seeds" was clearly a quote learned from his superiors. I'd heard Joseph use it many times.

"What couldn't you let go?" I asked.

"The sergeant had crippled the boy. His hands. You oughtn't cripple a person. Not like that."

Joel, "the boy," was only a year or two younger than Charley Munson. The war changed our sons, if not into men, then into half men, half children; children without innocence, men without dreams.

"So you carried messages for Joel?" I had to prod; in this lightless silence he would drift away between words if I did not. There was that out-of-world quality I mentioned earlier and I, too, was having trouble focusing.

"At first," he replied. "Then I carried notes for the doctor. I liked them. Tilly was such a grand brave girl, and the doctor always polite like I was somebody and not just a foot soldier in an army that had thrown him in the brig."

The last of his words scattered around me unheeded. The "was" and the sorrow with which he uttered it hit me like a blow. I had feared for Tilly for quite sonic time but in speaking of her, Joseph, myself, the other officers and men of the fort who'd been involved in the search for her and Private Lane always referred to her in the present tense, as if, though out of our sight, she still lived. Till I heard my abductor refer to her in the past tense I'd not truly let myself believe that our vibrant, foolish, courageous little Tilly was gone. Gone forever.

"You said 'was,' Tilly was. Why did you say that?"

I was crying. Tears flooded down my cheeks. One splashed onto my hand, startling me. I grabbed Private Munson in that same pinching grip he'd used to propel me to this place. As I grabbed blindly I do not know what part of him I held so tightly.

"I didn't," he said.

"You did."

I felt his hands on me then, one on the wrist of the hand that gripped him, the other on my left breast. I thought he'd gone mad but he had not meant to assault me, only to catch hold of me in the dark. Both his hands found my shoulders and he squeezed so hard I knew his fingers would leave bruises.

"You quit, Mrs. Coleman. You leave this alone. Leave. It. Be." He shook me hard with each word. Not able to see and so anticipate the movement, my head snapped painfully back and forth.

"You're hurting me," I managed.

He stopped but did not apologize. "Go home. Don't tell anybody where you been tonight. Don't. Don't talk about your sister no more." Another tear-or perhaps spittle from the vehemence of his words-struck my hand.

He released me so suddenly I fell backward. I squeaked, not from the pain of striking my elbows on the floor but from the suddenness of it all. Quickly I reoriented myself and sat up. No sound of breathing, no slithery rubbing of fabric on the rough floor or walls. "Private Munson?"

I'd meant to call firmly, but it came out the barest breath of air. A terrible sense of him in that blind place, just within reach of me but silent, listening, waiting, panicked me. I crawled in the direction I thought was the doorway to the rest of the tier. My head struck something and I cried out again. I don't know whether I'd gotten turned around in my panic or when we'd first come into the powder magazine.

On my neck, my cheek, I could feel breathing, something close in the dark. I barely had sense enough to follow the wall but did so knowing in this small closed space I would reach the doorway.

Below, beyond the unfinished enlisted men's quarters, walked a lone man. Private Munson. He'd not been a presence in the hell I'd crawled free of. I had been stalked only by fear.

Knowing this did not cure me. I could not shake the sense that something horrible was right behind me. Every part of my body was shaking. When I reached the back window to our downstairs hall, it took me three tries to boost myself up that I might slip through on my stomach.

There by the open window I stripped off my clothes-Joseph's clothes-and wearing nothing but shoes, knickers and chemise, carried them to Luanne's laundry basket. At the basket I removed all but the shoes. I could not bear to have even these mute companions in folly near me. Naked, I climbed the stairs hoping Joseph and Luanne were sleeping and would not come into the hall and find me so.

In Tilly's room, I put on the clean bed gown I'd craved and lay on the sheets, the night being too warm for covers. I had thought I would sleep immediately. Back in the powder magazine, before that, even, outside Dr. Mudd's place of imprisonment, it seemed I could sleep for a month I was so tired.

When I finally had the chance, my mind refused to shut out the very things it had been exhausted by. That is why I am sitting up writing you at Tilly's desk, just as dawn is hinting at day beyond the lighthouse. Charley Munson spoke as if he knew Tilly was dead. Yet he seemed both saddened and frightened by the death, as if he had no part in it. He admitted to being the carrier of messages, and I was sure Tilly had been lured from her room that night by a message and Mr. Arnold believed one of the men who came to fetch Joel spoke with Private Munson's voice.

Private Munson first caught me crawling in my own window, struck me thinking me a thief or worse, recognized me as the captain's wife which stopped the beating, but what decided him to hide me that I mightn't face discovery was the sight of the key to Mr. Arnold's cell.

Joel worked on Charley Munson's sympathy, and he began carrying messages from Joel to Tilly When Dr. Mudd became aware of, or became insane and deluded himself into believing he had discovered tangible proof of his innocence, he must have co-opted Munson as a carrier either by threatening to expose his already compromised position or won him over with charm.

Dr. Mudd pulled Tilly into his plot by appealing to her sense of justice and drama. I don't know if Dr. Mudd in actuality had this photograph proving his innocence or didn't have it but believed he did or was simply pretending he did to get Tilly to risk some further danger in his pursuit of freedom. I don't think Dr. Mudd is above attempting to escape, nor do I think he'd flinch at using our sister should he devise a plan in which she might be of use. I came to believe that, regardless of the truth, Dr. Mudd genuinely believes he once held the key to his release.

Because he'd given that key into her keeping, Dr. Mudd would have done nothing to hurt Tilly or to endanger her. Therefore it would have been without his complicity or knowledge that Tilly either put out to sea with, or was taken away with, or was silenced along with Joel Lane.

Mr. Arnold-if Dr. Mudd is to be believed-might have had reason to silence Tilly, and, if Joel knew anything, to silence Joel as well. I do not believe, however, that Samuel Arnold has the power to do such a thing.

I spent longer than I should have working through the possible guilt of these two men, just as I allowed myself to believe much longer than reason would have dictated that Tilly, who had clearly fallen out of "love" with Joel, had suddenly decided to run away with him in a sailing skiff stolen from Sinapp.

Perhaps it was hope that made me cling to the latter, but it was cowardice that had me lingering so long with the conspirators. There remained only one person who had an interest in keeping any proofs of Mudd's innocence from reaching the light of day, who would not flinch at using and destroying a lovely girl and who did not know Tilly well enough to see that her ardor for Private Lane had cooled to the point a staged elopement would not silence questions as to what had become of her.

This man, of course, was Sergeant Sinapp. The sergeant craved evil for its own sake, became rabid and vicious on the subject of the assassination and the conspirators, lusted after, tormented and therefore must have hated Tilly for her clear preference for a Johnny Reb. The thick evil creature would not, could not, harbor the sensitivity to notice when a sixteen-year-old girl was over her crush on a boy.

I am sure Sergeant Sinapp killed our sister. What I mean to find out today is if he did it with my husband's knowledge or complicity.

31

That's as good as it's going to get with a letter opener and my fingernails," Daniel announced and climbed down from the desk. The movement was punctuated with grunting so like a pig's Anna suspected he'd affected it as a tribute to Mrs. Meyers during his days as a biker, and it had turned into habit and followed him into the legitimate world.

"Let me get on with it," she said. "The thugs are gone. Whatever's happening is happening now." She sprang onto the desk and put a hand to either side of the window/firing slit. God but it was small, built small back when people were small to keep small invading soldiers from invading.

"You'll never get through that."

At first Anna thought she'd spoken her fears aloud, but it was Daniel.

"Yes I will."

"They'll be landing on the west side behind the fort at that tiny beach," Daniel said. "Away from the boats moored in the bay."

Anna nodded. She'd figured that. Though with the darkness and the rain they probably could have landed the whole Cuban navy at the visitors' dock and no one would be any the wiser.

"First priority is to get to a radio," Daniel said.

"First priority is to get to Bob," Anna said.

"Put these over your ears." Teddy shared Anna's priorities. She looked not only to Anna's escape but to her condition should she pull it off.