“Based on what?”
There was no simple answer for that. How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was. Teddy had known men in war whom he’d trust with his life on a battlefield and yet never with his wallet once they were off it. He’d known men he’d trust with his wallet
Chuck could have refused to accompany him, could have chosen to stay back in the men’s dormitory, sleeping off the storm cleanup, waiting for word of the ferry. Their job was done—Rachel Solando had been found. Chuck had no cause, no vested interest, in following Teddy on his search for Laeddis, his quest to prove Ashecliffe was a mockery of the Hippocratic oath. And yet he was here.
“I trust him,” Teddy repeated. “That’s the only way I know how to put it.”
Noyce looked at him sadly through the steel tubing. “Then they’ve already won.”
Teddy shook the matches out and dropped them. He pushed open the cardboard box and found the last match. He heard Noyce, still at the bars, sniffing the air.
“Please,” he whispered, and Teddy knew he was weeping. “Please.”
“What?”
“Please don’t let me die here.”
“You won’t die here.”
“They’re going to take me to the lighthouse. You know that.”
“The lighthouse?”
“They’re going to cut out my brain.”
Teddy lit the match, saw in the sudden flare that Noyce gripped the bars and shook, the tears falling from his swollen eyes and down his swollen face.
“They’re not going to—”
“You go there. You see that place. And if you come back alive, you tell me what they do there. See it for yourself.”
“I’ll go, George. I’ll do it. I’m going to get you out of here.”
Noyce lowered his head and pressed his bare scalp to the bars and wept silently, and Teddy remembered that last time they’d met in the visitors’ room and George had said, “If I ever had to go back to that place, I’d kill myself,” and Teddy had said, “That’s not going to happen.”
A lie apparently.
Because here Noyce was. Beaten, broken, shaking with fear.
“George, look at me.”
Noyce raised his head.
“I’m going to get you out of here. You hold on. Don’t do anything you can’t come back from. You hear me? You hold on. I will come back for you.”
George Noyce smiled through the stream of tears and shook his head very slowly. “You can’t kill Laeddis and expose the truth at the same time. You have to make a choice. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Where is he?”
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand. Where is he?”
“You have to choose.”
“I won’t kill anyone. George? I won’t.”
And looking through the bars at Noyce, he felt this to be true. If that’s what it took to get this poor wreck, this terrible victim, home, then Teddy would bury his vendetta. Not extinguish it. Save it for another time. And hope Dolores understood.
“I won’t kill anyone,” he repeated.
“Liar.”
“No.”
“She’s dead. Let her go.”
He pressed his smiling, weeping face between the bars and held Teddy with his soft swollen eyes.
Teddy felt her in him, pressed at the base of his throat. He could see her sitting in the early July haze, in that dark orange light a city gets on summer nights just after sundown, looking up as he pulled to the curb and the kids returned to their stickball game in the middle of the street, and the laundry flapped overhead, and she watched him approach with her chin propped on the heel of her hand and the cigarette held up by her ear, and he’d brought flowers for once, and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Let her go, Noyce had said.
“I can’t,” Teddy said, and the words came out cracked and too high and he could feel screams welling in the center of his chest.
Noyce leaned back as far as he could and still maintain his grip on the bars and he cocked his head so that the ear rested on his shoulder.
“Then you’ll never leave this island.”
Teddy said nothing.
And Noyce sighed as if what he was about to say bored him to the point of falling asleep on his feet. “He was transferred out of Ward C. If he’s not in Ward A, there’s only one place he can be.”
He waited until Teddy got it.
“The lighthouse,” Teddy said.
Noyce nodded, and the final match went out.
For a full minute Teddy stood there, staring into the dark, and then he heard the bedsprings again as Noyce lay down.
He turned to go.
“Hey.”
He stopped, his back to the bars, and waited.
“God help you.”
16
TURNING TO WALK back through the cell block, he found Al waiting for him. He stood in the center of the granite corridor and fixed Teddy in a lazy gaze and Teddy said, “You get your guy?”
Al fell into step beside him. “Sure did. Slippery bastard, but in here there’s only so far you can go before you run out of room.”
They walked up the cell block, keeping to the center, and Teddy could hear Noyce asking if he’d ever been alone here. How long, he wondered, had Al been watching him? He thought back through his three days here, tried to find a single instance in which he’d been entirely alone. Even using the bathroom, he was using staff facilities, a man at the next stall or waiting just outside the door.
But, no, he and Chuck had gone out on the island alone several times…
He and Chuck.
What exactly did he know about Chuck? He pictured his face for a moment, could see him on the ferry, looking off at the ocean…
Great guy, instantly likeable, had a natural ease with people, the kind of guy you wanted to be around. From Seattle. Recently transferred. Hell of a poker player. Hated his father—the one thing that didn’t seem to jibe with the rest of him. There was something else off too, something buried in the back of Teddy’s brain, something…What was it?
Awkward. That was the word. But, no, there was nothing awkward about Chuck. He was smooth incarnate. Slick as shit through a goose, to use an expression Teddy’s father had been fond of. No, there was nothing remotely
