Shutter Island(10)

“My mistake, then. So what have you been told?”

“We know a female prisoner is missing.” Teddy placed his notebook on his knee, flipped the pages. “A Rachel Solando.”

“Patient.” Cawley gave them a dead smile.

“Patient,” Teddy said. “I apologize. We understand she escaped within the last twenty-four hours.”

Cawley’s nod was a small tilt of his chin and hands. “Last night. Sometime between ten and midnight.”

“And she still hasn’t been found,” Chuck said.

“Correct, Marshal…” He held up an apologetic hand.

“Aule,” Chuck said.

Cawley’s face narrowed over his hands and Teddy noticed drops of water spit against the window behind him. He couldn’t tell whether they were from the sky or the sea.

“And your first name is Charles?” Cawley said.

“Yeah,” Chuck said.

“I’d take you for a Charles,” Cawley said, “but not necessarily an Aule.”

“That’s fortunate, I guess.”

“How so?”

“We don’t choose our names,” Chuck said. “So it’s nice when someone thinks that one of them, at least, fits.”

“Who chose yours?” Cawley said.

“My parents.”

“Your surname.”

Chuck shrugged. “Who’s to tell? We’d have to go back twenty generations.”

“Or one.”

Chuck leaned forward in his chair. “Excuse me?”

“You’re Greek,” Cawley said. “Or Armenian. Which?”

“Armenian.”

“So Aule was…”

“Anasmajian.”

Cawley turned his slim gaze on Teddy. “And yourself?”

“Daniels?” Teddy said. “Tenth-generation Irish.” He gave Cawley a small grin. “And, yeah, I can trace it back, Doctor.”

“But your given first name? Theodore?”

“Edward.”

Cawley leaned his chair back, his hands falling free of his chin. He tapped a letter opener against the desk edge, the sound as soft and persistent as snow falling on a roof.

“My wife,” he said, “is named Margaret. Yet no one ever calls her that except me. Some of her oldest friends call her Margo, which makes a certain amount of sense, but everyone else calls her Peggy. I’ve never understood that.”

“What?”

“How you get Peggy from Margaret. And yet it’s quite common. Or how you get Teddy from Edward. There’s no p in Margaret and no t in Edward.”

Teddy shrugged. “Your first name?”

“John.”

“Anyone ever call you Jack?”

He shook his head. “Most people just call me Doctor.”

The water spit lightly against the window, and Cawley seemed to review their conversation in his head, his eyes gone shiny and distant, and then Chuck said, “Is Miss Solando considered dangerous?”

“All our patients have shown a proclivity for violence,” Cawley said. “It’s why they’re here. Men and women. Rachel Solando was a war widow. She drowned her three children in the lake behind her house. Took them out there one by one and held their heads under until they died. Then she brought them back into the house and arranged them around the kitchen table and ate a meal there before a neighbor dropped by.”

“She kill the neighbor?” Chuck asked.

Cawley’s eyebrows rose, and he gave a small sigh. “No. Invited him to sit and have breakfast with them. He declined, naturally, and called the police. Rachel still believes the children are alive, waiting for her. It might explain why she’s tried to escape.”

“To return home,” Teddy said.

Cawley nodded.

“And where’s that?” Chuck asked.

“A small town in the Berkshires. Roughly a hundred fifty miles from here.” With a tilt of his head, Cawley indicated the window behind him. “To swim that way, you don’t reach land for eleven miles. To swim north, you don’t reach land until Newfoundland.”

Teddy said, “And you’ve searched the grounds.”

“Yes.”

“Pretty thoroughly?”

Cawley took a few seconds to answer, played with a silver bust of a horse on the corner of his desk. “The warden and his men and a detail of orderlies spent the night and a good part of the morning scouring the island and every building in the institution. Not a trace. What’s even more disturbing is that we can’t tell how she got out of her room. It was locked from the outside and its sole window was barred. We’ve found no indication that the locks were tampered with.” He took his eyes off the horse and glanced at Teddy and Chuck. “It’s as if she evaporated straight through the walls.”

Teddy jotted “evaporated” in his notebook. “And you are sure that she was in that room at lights-out.”

“Positive.”

“How so?”

Cawley moved his hand back from the horse and pressed the call button on his intercom. “Nurse Marino?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Please tell Mr. Ganton to come in.”

“Right away, Doctor.”