Then he raised his hands a half an inch and shot Cawley in the face.
With water.
Cawley frowned. Then he blinked several times. He took a handkerchief from his pocket.
The door opened behind Teddy, and he spun in his chair and took aim as a man entered the room.
“Don’t shoot,” Chuck said. “I forgot to wear my raincoat.”
23
CAWLEY WIPED HIS face with the handkerchief and took his seat again and Chuck came around the table to Cawley’s side and Teddy turned the gun in his palm and stared down at it.
He looked across the table as Chuck took his seat, and Teddy noticed he was wearing a lab coat.
“I thought you were dead,” Teddy said.
“Nope,” Chuck said.
It was suddenly hard to get words out. He felt the inclination to stutter, just as the woman doctor had predicted. “I…I…was…I was willing to die to bring you out of here. I…” He dropped the gun to the table, and he felt all strength drain from his body. He fell into his chair, unable to go on.
“I’m genuinely sorry about that,” Chuck said. “Dr. Cawley and I agonized over that for weeks before we put this into play. I never wanted to leave you feeling betrayed or cause you undue anguish. You have to believe me. But we were certain we had no alternative.”
“There’s a bit of a clock ticking on this one,” Cawley said. “This was our last-ditch effort to bring you back, Andrew. A radical idea, even for this place, but I’d hoped it would work.”
Teddy wiped at the sweat in his eyes, ended up smearing it there. He looked through the blur at Chuck.
“Who are you?” he said.
Chuck stretched a hand across the table. “Dr. Lester Sheehan,” he said.
Teddy left the hand hanging in the air and Sheehan eventually withdrew it.
“So,” Teddy said and sucked wet air through his nostrils, “you let me go on about how we needed to find Sheehan when you…you were Sheehan.”
Sheehan nodded.
“Called me ‘boss.’ Told me jokes. Kept me entertained. Kept a watch on me at all times, is that right, Lester?”
He looked across the table at him, and Sheehan tried to hold his eyes, but he failed and dropped his gaze to his tie and flapped it against his chest. “I had to keep an eye on you, make sure you were safe.”
“Safe,” Teddy said. “So that made everything okay. Moral.”
Sheehan dropped his tie. “We’ve known each other for two years, Andrew.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Two years. I’ve been your primary psychiatrist. Two years. Look at me. Don’t you even recognize me?”
Teddy used the cuff of his suit jacket to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and this time they cleared, and he looked across the table at Chuck. Good ol’ Chuck with his awkwardness around firearms and those hands that didn’t fit his job description because they weren’t the hands of a cop. They were the hands of a doctor.
“You were my friend,” Teddy said. “I trusted you. I told you about my wife. I talked to you about my father. I climbed down a fucking cliff looking for you. Were you watching me then? Keeping me safe then? You were my friend, Chuck. Oh, I’m sorry. Lester.”
Lester lit a cigarette and Teddy was pleased to see that his hands shook too. Not much. Not nearly as bad as Teddy’s and the tremors stopped as soon as he got the cigarette lit and tossed the match in an ashtray. But still…
I hope you’ve got it too, Teddy thought. Whatever this is.
“Yeah,” Sheehan said (and Teddy had to remind himself not to think of him as Chuck), “I was keeping you safe. My disappearance was, yes, part of your fantasy. But you were supposed to see Laeddis’s intake form on the road, not down the cliff. I dropped it off the promontory by mistake. Just pulling it out of my back pocket, and it blew away. I went down after it, because I knew if I didn’t,
Cawley cleared his throat. “We almost called it off when we saw you were going to go down that cliff. Maybe we should have.”
“Called it off.” Teddy suppressed a giggle into his fist.
“Yes,” Cawley said. “Called it off. This was a pageant, Andrew. A—”
“My name’s Teddy.”
“—play. You wrote it. We helped you stage it. But the play wouldn’t work without an ending, and the ending was always your reaching this lighthouse.”
“Convenient,” Teddy said and looked around at the walls.
“You’ve been telling this story to us for almost two years now. How you came here to find a missing patient and stumbled onto our Third Reich-inspired surgical experiments, Soviet-inspired brainwashing. How the patient Rachel Solando had killed her children in much the same way your wife killed yours. How just when you got close, your partner—and don’t you love the name you gave him? Chuck Aule. I mean, Jesus, say it a couple of times fast. It’s just another of your jokes, Andrew—your partner was taken and you were left to fend for yourself, but we got to you. We drugged you. And you were committed before you could get the story back to your imaginary Senator Hurly. You want the names of the current senators from the state of New Hampshire, Andrew? I have them here.”
“You faked all this?” Teddy said.
“Yes.”
Teddy laughed. He laughed as hard as he’d laughed since before Dolores had died. He laughed and heard the boom of it, and the echoes of it curled back into themselves and joined the stream still coming from his mouth, and it roiled above him and soaped the walls and mushroomed out into the surf.
“How do you fake a hurricane?” he said and slapped the table. “Tell me that, Doctor.”
“You can’t fake a hurricane,” Cawley said.
“No,” Teddy said, “you can’t.” And he slapped the table again.
Cawley looked at his hand, then up into his eyes. “But you can predict one from time to time, Andrew. Particularly on an island.”
Teddy shook his head, felt a grin still plastered to his face, even as the warmth of it died, even as it probably appeared silly and weak. “You guys never give up.”
“A storm was essential to your fantasy,” Cawley said. “We waited for one.”
Teddy said, “Lies.”
“Lies? Explain the anagrams. Explain how the children in those pictures—children you’ve never seen if they belonged to Rachel Solando—are the same children in your dreams. Explain, Andrew, how I knew to say to you when you walked through this door, ‘Why you all wet, baby?’ Do you think I’m a mind reader?”
“No,” Teddy said. “I think I was wet.”
For a moment, Cawley looked like his head was going to shoot off his neck. He took a long breath, folded his hands together, and leaned into the table. “Your gun was filled with water. Your codes? They’re showing, Andrew. You’re playing jokes on yourself. Look at the one in your notebook. The last one. Look at it. Nine letters. Three lines. Should be a piece of cake to break. Look at it.”
Teddy looked down at the page:
13(M)-21(U)-25(Y)-18(R)-1(A)-5(E)-8(H)-15(O)-9(I)
“We’re running out of time,” Lester Sheehan said. “Please understand, it’s all changing. Psychiatry. It’s had its own war going on for some time, and we’re losing.”
M-U-Y-R-A-E-H-O-I
