Second Sight Page 16

  “A day after they found him at the foot of Mount Tamathy they concluded he was brain-dead.” She glanced at Betsy. “They’ve got better words for that now, I’m sure, but it’s all the same. Anyhow”—she looked back at Sherry—“they just left after that. Betsy knows more about the rest than I do. I heard the army’s doctors spent some time with the asylum’s administrator and the administrator later announced to the staff that Thomas Monahan had no living relatives and he was moved to the old E Annex, where they kept terminal patients back then.”

  “Your husband was in charge of security at the hospital.”

  “It really was an asylum,” Carla smiled. “Still is. Asylum’s not such a bad word. Means shelter from danger, refuge.”

  After a pause, Carla opened the photo album she had brought. “That’s Jack,” she said, her little finger poking at a tall man sitting at a dining room table.

  “Handsome,” Sherry said softly.

  Carla nodded, never taking her eyes from the picture. Sherry watched her gaze drift ever so slightly, teeth catching her upper lip. She flipped pages. “He was the first one to find Monahan.” She sighed, stopping at a page and turning the album to face Sherry and Brigham. “That’s the only thing Jack ever said about the whole thing. That he found the boy. Oh, look here.” She pointed. “This is what the asylum looked like back then. They’ve fixed it up quite a bit now.” She scrunched her face. “Now that mental illness is respectable.”

  “Monahan was AWOL when your husband found him.”

  “Well, no one ever came out and said so, but he’d been running in the opposite direction from the base when he was seen that morning, so you can draw your own conclusions.” Carla looked around the table. “Still in uniform. Jack said he’d jumped from the Tamathy summit.”

  “That’s what he said? He used the word ‘jumped’?”

  She nodded. “That’s what he said to me. I guess no one could prove it one way or another, ’cause the boy never came to consciousness again.”

  “They documented this, of course? Took a report of some kind?”

  Carla nodded. “Jack kept a security log of all incidents on the property. He was very meticulous about things like that.”

  “But it wasn’t there in the seventies when I was at the asylum,” Betsy said. “Security looked for it, we all looked for it. Believe me when I tell you, it isn’t in that building.”

  “So the army got to it?”

  “All other records from the fifties and sixties are in archives in the basement.” Betsy shrugged. “Besides, I’ve never heard a better explanation.”

  “What about the administrators?”

  “You saw the portraits in the lobby,” Betsy said. “They changed administrators like you change tires over the years. Who could doubt the government had one or more of their own people in charge in the last fifty years?”

  “What else did your husband say about it?”

  “Really nothing.” Carla’s eyes locked on Sherry’s and she wagged a finger. “And that was unusual for Jack. I knew it had happened an hour or two after they got him to the emergency room. Jack came home tired. He’d been searching the mountain all day and now he had the boy’s blood all over him. He said he just wanted to shower and change.” She resumed slowly flipping through the album. “He was upset, I could tell. He’d just found this boy dying at the bottom of the rocks, and that’s not easy, I don’t think it matters how much bad stuff you’ve seen before. It can’t get all that much easier.”

  Her eyes turned slightly to the right, but she wasn’t so much looking at the rough wood wall as looking through it.

  “You know, he mentioned the boy’s eyes,” Carla said discordantly. “They were bleeding from inside his head.”

  The memory must have taken her by surprise, Sherry thought.

  “He said he’d never seen anything like that boy’s eyes before. That’s when he was walking out the door to go back to the asylum. It seemed to me then that there was something else he wanted to say, but I figured we’d talk it out later when he got home, that’s the way he was. But he didn’t talk it out later. Not ever. It was like it never happened after that day and the one time I prodded he had nothing at all to say.”

  “Which was strange?” Betsy nodded encouragingly at Carla.

  Carla shook her head. “Which wasn’t like him at all. We talked about everything that bothered him at work. Jack wasn’t a man of many words. Not out in public, but we had a different relationship. He confided in me about everything and I confided in him. We took on life as a team. I don’t know how these young working couples do it today. They go out to their own lives every day and meet for a few hectic hours in the middle, picking up or dropping off children, maybe even trading them for a night or a weekend, and they never talk. How anyone can take all the world has to throw at you alone is beyond me. I mean, you do what you’ve got to do, but it’s a whole lot easier to share your problems with another person. Life was a lot less stressful when I had Jack. Colter, my current husband”—her eyes moved to Sherry, then Brigham—“he has friends of his own. He owns a golf course on the Ashokan, so he gets his stress out on the green, or more likely, in the clubhouse.” She grinned. “We don’t talk like Jack and I did, but then everyone is different.”

  Carla touched the album with a finger. “Jack had opinions about what went on up there at that army base. I know he did. But he didn’t say a thing about it in front of me.” She took a drink of water and dabbed her lip with a paper napkin.

  “I talked to Emmet Fry at a company picnic years later. He was Jack’s deputy at the time and became the chief of security after Jack died. Anyhow, Emmet asked me if Jack had ever talked to me about the incident with the Monahan boy. I told him what Jack had said about the boy jumping from the rocks and he looked surprised, like he’d never considered the idea that the boy committed suicide before. He said, Carla, are you sure Jack said the boy jumped? And I told him yes, I was sure. That was exactly the word Jack used. Then Emmet told me he and Jack had seen freshly dug graves inside the fence of Area 17, way around on the far side of the base. That was the last time he or I ever spoke of it.”

  Carla shook her head and looked around the room. Her eyes were getting watery and she was rubbing a finger back and forth across the table. She leaned toward her friend. “Emmet’s been gone almost a dozen years now, wouldn’t you say, Betsy?”

  “About that, dear,” Betsy answered.

  “Jack wasn’t right after that day.” She began to draw figure eights on the tabletop with her finger. “I think he was afraid of something. I think he was afraid for both of us.”

  “Afraid of the army, you mean?” Sherry asked.

  The old woman shrugged. “Who else?”

  “Jack died right after the incident, Carla?” Sherry said.

  The woman nodded. “Five weeks later.”

  “Nothing else was happening in his life at that time?”

  She shook her head, still drawing figure eights. Her eyes had lost focus, as if she had left them all sitting there at the table and gone away for a time. Then she laughed all at once and sat back, folding her arms across her chest. “The time capsule.” She smiled.

  “Time capsule?”

  “They were all the rage back then, ever since the World’s Fair in 1939,” Carla said. “They buried a big one that year in Manhattan that was to be opened in five thousand years. The thing weighed something like eight hundred pounds. Westinghouse manufactured it, I remember, and it was filled with crop seeds and literature, threads and microscopes, newsreels, phone books, and on and on. After that a lot of schools started making their own time capsules and of course when students of one school heard about it they told others and pretty much every school ended up having to bury one of the darned things.

  “For us it was sixth-grade English class in 1950, the subject I taught for thirty years at Stockton Middle School. The kids were determined to bury midyear essays with a class picture near the construction site for
the new gym going in. The equipment was already there. It was no big deal to ask them to drill another hole in the ground.

  “Of course, the list grew of things they wanted to put into the jar: Raggedy Anns, Buck Rogers water pistols, Cootie, Silly Putty, things like that. We were going to use this humongous candy jar and seal the lid with wax, but the kids brought in so much stuff, we ended up needing two of them. Then we printed a declaration of intent and had it read into town council minutes requiring the governing body of Stockton to unearth the jars and share our history with the sixth-grade class of 2050.”

  Everyone nodded, wondering where the story was going.

  “Jack,” she said, “was sitting in his rocking chair the night I was sealing the jars. I had a pan on the stove to melt wax….” She stuck her tongue in the side of her mouth, remembering something from long ago. “And he did the strangest thing,” she said at last. “He got up and left the room, and when he came back was holding a green leather book, a writing book, like a journal. He asked me if he could put it in one of the jars.

  “I didn’t say anything at first. I knew he made sketches of things he saw in the forest, he was quite a good artist, but I never knew him to keep a journal. Jack was spare with words, you understand, and there wasn’t a frivolous bone in his body. He never did anything just for fun.”

  “So you put it in,” Betsy said, excited.

  Carla nodded. “And I sealed it in front of him. Jack knew me well. He knew I’d never pry. I respected him, and I respected his judgment, everyone did.”

  Sherry’s cell phone buzzed on her hip and she reached to silence it. “The jars won’t be opened for another forty-some years,” she said without missing a beat.

  Carla shrugged. “That was the plan. Might have worked, if the cable company hadn’t come to Stockton. They managed to run their trencher right into them. I was retired by then, but the principal knew the story. The seal had broken on one of them and most of the contents were soaked and rotting. The other one’s up in my attic. Glass is cracked. I kept meaning to ask someone to put it in a decent can and bury it again, but people just don’t do things like that anymore. It hardly seemed worth the effort now.”

  “Your husband’s journal?”

  She smiled. “It was in the jar that survived. And out of respect I have been determined not to open it.”

  No one spoke for a minute.

  “May I ask a personal question, Carla?” Sherry asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Was your husband ill or depressed?”

  Carla shook her head emphatically. “We had one doctor in town back in the day. Dick McKinley. He said Jack was the last person in the world he would expect to take his life.”

  “And he would have known if there was anything seriously wrong with him.”

  “They hunted together,” Carla said. “He would have known.”

  “You know what I’m going to ask you?” Sherry leaned across the table in the old woman’s direction.

  “You’d like to see the journal, I’m sure.” The eyes were alive again, piercing.

  “I would promise to be discreet.”

  “I’m sure you would, Miss Moore, and I’m inclined to say yes to you. Would you give me a little time, though? It’s not easy to explain, just a few days.”

  “I understand perfectly.” Sherry held up a hand to stop her. “Have Betsy call me when you’re ready.”

  Carla smiled and folded her hands in front of her.

  Betsy stood. “I asked Mike to let us be for a while. You folks want drinks or menus?”

  “Will you stay with us for lunch, Carla?” Brigham asked.

  The old woman shook her head. “Nah. If you’ll excuse me I’ll be getting home now.”

  “May I walk you?” Brigham got to his feet.

  She waved him off. “Oh, heck no, I’m just half a block from home.”

  Sherry got up as well. “It was very nice meeting you.”

  Everyone shook hands and Betsy excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sherry said.

  “The journal sounds interesting.”

  “Can you believe she wouldn’t open it after all that happened?”

  “That’s love.” Brigham looked at her.

  Sherry avoided his eyes. “And the old security records. Someone must have wanted to erase everything about Monahan’s life.”

  Brigham nodded. “I have a feeling if the army had found Monahan before this guy McCullough, you would never have had the opportunity to meet him in a Philadelphia hospital some fifty years later.”

  “You think they would have killed him?” Sherry looked shocked.

  “All I can say is, there was an emergency room full of witnesses that knew he survived. The only thing they could do by the time they found him was to make sure he never woke up or spoke again.”

  “According to Betsy, they most certainly accomplished that.”

  Betsy returned to the table and Sherry got up to check her phone and to give Betsy and Garland some time together. She saw that she had missed a call, and she sighed when she saw the number.

  “Troy Weir,” she whispered. “What in the hell am I supposed to do about you?”

  19

  “The transcripts aren’t all that interesting.” Weir handed an envelope to his stepfather, who glanced at it and then stuffed it into a leather sleeve at the side of his wheelchair.

  They were on the Lancaster farm, and two young women in khaki slacks and uniform shirts were leading Thoroughbreds around a track. The horses were sleek, one chestnut, one black, and they cantered with knees high and hooves dropping in flawless repetition.

  “It was interesting enough to give her sight again,” Case said with a rare smile. He looked up to see the young man’s reaction.

  “You don’t believe that, I take it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Weir shrugged. “That’s why she’s so hot on figuring out this guy Monahan. Dr. Salix writes that she’s convinced her contact with Monahan was responsible for restoring her sight.”

  “Which he thinks is ridiculous too, I’m sure.”

  “So is touching someone and seeing their last seconds of memory.”

  Case wheeled his chairthrough the stables, reaching up and rubbing the velvet noses of his Thoroughbreds along the way. “If that’s what she does,” he said with a sigh. “Ever been to Las Vegas and watched a magic show? Anyhow, she can’t just disappear.”

  “No”—Weir scratched the back of his neck—“that would definitely be noticed.”

  Case cast him a glance. “So what’s your plan?”

  “She was hospitalized two years ago for depression.”

  Case turned to face the younger man. “She tried to kill herself?”

  Weir shrugged. “Pills, I was told, although she denied it. She claimed the overdose was accidental.”

  “Well, that makes it a little easier.”

  “You want her to die?”

  “I don’t care what happens to her as long as I don’t hear the name Thomas Monahan again.”

  Weir nodded. “It may be too early to panic. I think she’ll drop the whole business once she gets used to her eyes. She’s vulnerable now. You can see it on her face. She’s overwhelmed by everything around her. She’s still getting used to the world.”

  “What’s she up to now?”

  “I don’t know. She wasn’t home last night, said she was visiting a friend. I couldn’t come right out and ask her where she was.”

  “Make her a priority until you’re satisfied this is over. Don’t let her out of your sight, and if you have to, push.”

  Case watched one of the horses do a lap.

  Then he turned toward his stepson. “You’re a smart man, Troy. I worried about you at first, I didn’t think you’d make it to the big league, but you figured out the kind of stuff that mattered in time. The stuff most men never get.”

  He was
talking about his favorite subject, Troy knew—Ed Case’s law of probability and response. Case believed that mankind was disadvantaged by an inherent—and unwarranted—concern for fellow human beings. He thought that society was its own greatest obstacle to progress. That it wasn’t possible to properly evaluate an endeavor’s true potential and respond to it appropriately unless consideration of its detrimental impact on the human race was eliminated. This was why so few people became giants in the world and why everyone else was piling up behind the great wall of mediocrity.

  If you wanted to know how deep the water was, you had to ride out into the middle of it. A young Colonel Custer once demonstrated that point to a humiliated General McClellan, who had been riding up and down the riverbank asking the question of everyone. Likewise, if you wanted to know how far you could go with stem cell transplants following high-dose chemotherapy, you needed to try it out on a human. Period. To have that ability was to have limitless potential. To retain it required keeping it veiled from a squeamish public.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “To show her something spectacular,” Troy said.

  Case started moving again. “And then what, she’ll melt into your arms and tell you all her secrets?”

  “Exactly,” the younger man said, wondering if his stepfather was really ignorant of his misuse of the MIRA technology.

  “Well, be quick about it. This should never have happened in the first place. Monahan should have been incinerated by now.”

  “It’s all being taken care of,” Weir assured him. “There is nothing more to learn in Stockton. There is nothing the government can tell them except what’s in his file, and that has been reduced to nothing.”

  “And I’ll accept that for now, but the moment you sense different, I want it handled. I never want to hear anything about Monahan, Area 17 or Alpha Company again.”

  “I’ll find out what this friend of hers is all about and where she stayed last night. I have a date with her tomorrow afternoon.”