“Me, what?”
“Have any theories?”
“None. I wouldn’t have gotten past the first line.”
“You said that, yeah. Tired and all.”
“Very tired, Marshal.” He said it with his gaze fixed on Teddy’s face, and then he crossed to the window, watched the rain sluice down it, the sheets so thick they walled off the land on the other side. “You said last night that you’d be leaving.”
“First ferry out,” Teddy said, riding the bluff.
“There won’t be one today. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“So tomorrow, then. Or the next day,” Teddy said. “You still think she’s out there? In this?”
“No,” Cawley said. “I don’t.”
“So where?”
He sighed. “I don’t know, Marshal. It’s not my specialty.”
Teddy lifted the sheet of paper off the bed. “This is a template. A guide for deciphering future codes. I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”
“And if it is?”
“Then she’s not trying to escape, Doctor. She brought us here. I think there’s more of these.”
“Not in this room,” Cawley said.
“No. But maybe in this building. Or maybe out on the island.”
Cawley sucked the air of the room into his nostrils, steadying one hand against the windowsill, the man all but dead on his feet, making Teddy wonder what really had kept him up last night.
“She
“You tell me.”
Cawley closed his eyes and stayed silent for so long that Teddy began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.
He opened his eyes again, looked at both of them. “I’ve got a full day. I’ve got staff meetings, budget meetings with the overseers, emergency maintenance meetings in case this storm really hits us. You’ll be happy to know I’ve arranged for you both to speak with all of the patients who were in group therapy with Miss Solando the night she disappeared. Those interviews are scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes. Gentlemen, I appreciate you being here. I do. I’m jumping through as many hoops as I can, whether it appears so or not.”
“Then give me Dr. Sheehan’s personnel file.”
“I can’t do that. I absolutely cannot.” He leaned his head back against the wall. “Marshal, I’ve got the switchboard operator trying his number on a steady basis. But we can’t reach anyone right now. For all we know, the whole eastern seaboard is underwater. Patience, gentlemen. That’s all I’m asking. We’ll find Rachel, or we’ll find out what happened to her.” He looked at his watch. “I’m late. Is there anything else, or can it wait?”
THEY STOOD UNDER an awning outside the hospital, the rain sweeping across their field of vision in sheets the size of train cars.
“You think he knows what sixty-seven means?” Chuck said.
“Yup.”
“You think he broke the code before you did?”
“I think he was OSS. I think he’s got a gift or two in that department.”
Chuck wiped his face, flicked his fingers toward the pavement. “How many patients they got here?”
“It’s small,” Teddy said.
“Yeah.”
“What, maybe twenty women, thirty guys?”
“Not many.”
“No.”
“Not quite sixty-seven anyway.”
Teddy turned, looked at him. “But…,” he said.
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “But.”
And they looked off at the tree line and beyond, at the top of the fort pressed back behind the squall, gone fuzzy and indistinct like a charcoal sketch in a smoky room.
Teddy remembered what Dolores had said in the dream—Count the beds.
“How many they got up there, you think?”
“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “We’ll have to ask the helpful doctor.”
“Oh, yeah, he just screams ‘helpful,’ don’t he?”
“Hey, boss.”
“Yeah.”
“In your life, have you ever come across this much wasted federal space?”
“How so?”
“Fifty patients in these two wards? What do you think these buildings could hold? A couple hundred more?”
“At least.”
“And the staff-to-patient ratio. It’s like two-to-one favoring staff. You ever seen anything like that?”
“I gotta say no to that one.”
They looked at the grounds sizzling underwater.
“What the fuck is this place?” Chuck said.
THEY HELD THE interviews in the cafeteria, Chuck and Teddy sitting at a table in the rear. Two orderlies sat within shouting distance, and Trey Washington was in charge of leading the patients to them and then taking them away when they were through.
The first guy was a stubbled wreck of tics and eye blinks. He sat hunched into himself like a horseshoe crab, scratching his arms, and refused to meet their eyes.
Teddy looked down at the top page in the file Cawley had provided—just thumbnail sketches from Cawley’s own memory, not the actual patient files. This guy was listed first and his name was Ken Gage and he was in here because he’d attacked a stranger in the aisle of a corner grocery store, beat the victim on the head with a can of peas, all the time saying, in a very subdued voice, “Stop reading my mail.”
“So, Ken,” Chuck said, “how you doing?”
“I got a cold. I got a cold in my feet.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It hurts to walk, yeah.” Ken scratched around the edges of a scab on his arm, delicately at first, as if tracing a moat for it.
“Were you in group therapy the night before last?”
“I got a cold in my feet and it hurts to walk.”
“You want some socks?” Teddy tried. He noticed the two orderlies looking over at them, snickering.
“Yeah, I want some socks, I want some socks, I want some socks.” Whispering it, head down and bobbing a bit.
“Well, we’ll get you some in a minute. We just need to know if you were—”
“It’s just so cold. In my feet? It’s cold and it hurts to walk.”
Teddy looked over at Chuck. Chuck smiled at the orderlies as the sound of their giggles floated to the table.
“Ken,” Chuck said. “Ken, can you look at me?”
Ken kept his head down, bobbing a bit more. His fingernail tore open the scab and a small line of blood seeped into the hairs of his arm.
“Ken?”
“I can’t walk. Not like this, not like this. It’s so cold, cold, cold.”
“Ken, come on, look at me.”
Ken brought his fists down on the table.
Both orderlies stood and Ken said, “It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t. But they want it to. They fill the air with
