Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

Teddy stood and the shakes rocked his arms from the shoulders on down. “My wife did not kill her kids. We never had kids.”

“You never had kids?” Cawley walked over to the wall.

“We never had kids, you stupid fuck.”

“Oh, okay.” Cawley pulled down another sheet.

On the wall behind it—a crime-scene diagram, photographs of a lake, photographs of three dead children. And then the names, written in the same tall block letters:

EDWARD LAEDDIS

DANIEL LAEDDIS

RACHEL LAEDDIS

Teddy dropped his eyes and stared at his hands; they jumped as if they were no longer attached to him. If he could step on them, he would.

“Your children, Andrew. Are you going to stand there and deny they ever lived? Are you?”

Teddy pointed across the room at him with his jerking hand. “Those are Rachel Solando’s children. That is the crime-scene diagram of Rachel Solando’s lake house.”

“That’s your house. You went there because the doctors suggested it for your wife. You remember? After she accidentally set your previous apartment on fire? Get her out of the city, they said, give her a more bucolic setting. Maybe she’d get better.”

“She wasn’t ill.”

“She was insane, Andrew.”

“Stop fucking calling me that. She was not insane.”

“Your wife was clinically depressed. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive. She was—”

“She was not,” Teddy said.

“She was suicidal. She hurt the children. You refused to see it. You thought she was weak. You told yourself sanity was a choice, and all she had to do was remember her responsibilities . To you. To the children. You drank, and your drinking got worse. You floated into your own shell. You stayed away from home. You ignored all the signs. You ignored what the teachers told you, the parish priest, her own family.”

“My wife was not insane!”

“And why? Because you were embarrassed .”

“My wife was not—”

“The only reason she ever saw a psychiatrist was because she tried to commit suicide and ended up in the hospital. Even you couldn’t control that. And they told you she was a danger to herself. They told you—”

“We never saw any psychiatrists!”

“—she was a danger to the children. You were warned time and time again.”

“We never had children. We talked about it, but she couldn’t get pregnant.”

Christ! His head felt like someone was beating glass into it with a rolling pin.

“Come over here,” Cawley said. “Really. Come up close and look at the names on these crime-scene photos. You’ll be interested to know—”

“You can fake those. You can make up your own.”

“You dream. You dream all the time. You can’t stop dreaming, Andrew. You’ve told me about them. Have you had any lately with the two boys and the little girl? Huh? Has the little girl taken you to your headstone? You’re ‘a bad sailor,’ Andrew. You know what that means? It means you’re a bad father. You didn’t navigate for them, Andrew. You didn’t save them. You want to talk about the logs? Huh? Come over here and look at them. Tell me they’re not the children from your dreams.”

“Bullshit.”

“Then look. Come here and look .”

“You drug me, you kill my partner, you say he never existed. You’re going to lock me up here because I know what you’re doing. I know about the experiments. I know what you’re giving schizophrenics, your liberal use of lobotomies, your utter disregard for the Nuremberg Code. I am fucking onto you , Doctor.”

“You are?” Cawley leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Please, educate me. You’ve had the run of the place the last four days. You’ve gained access to every corner of this facility. Where are the Nazi doctors? Where are the satanic ORs?”

He walked back over to the table and consulted his notes for a moment:

“Do you still believe we’re brainwashing patients, Andrew? Implementing some decades-long experiment to create—what did you call them once? Oh, here it is—ghost soldiers? Assassins?” He chuckled. “I mean, I have to give you credit, Andrew—even in these days of rampant paranoia, your fantasies take the cake.”

Teddy pointed a quaking finger at him. “You are an experimental hospital with radical approaches—”

“Yes, we are.”

“You take only the most violent patients.”

“Correct again. With a caveat—the most violent and the most delusional.”

“And you…”

“We what?”

“You experiment.”

“Yes!” Cawley clapped his hands and took a quick bow. “Guilty as charged.”

“Surgically.”

Cawley held up a finger. “Ah, no. Sorry. We do not experiment with surgery. It is used as a last resort, and that last resort is employed always over my most vocal protests. I’m one man, however, and even I can’t change decades of accepted practices overnight.”

“You’re lying.”

Cawley sighed. “Show me one piece of evidence that your theory can hold water. Just one.”

Teddy said nothing.

“And to all the evidence that I’ve presented, you have refused to respond.”

“That’s because it’s not evidence at all. It’s fabricated.”

Cawley pressed his hands together and raised them to his lips as if in prayer.

“Let me off this island,” Teddy said. “As a federally appointed officer of the law, I demand that you let me leave.”

Cawley closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were clearer and harder. “Okay, okay. You got me, Marshal. Here, I’ll make it easy on you.”

He pulled a soft leather briefcase off the floor and undid the buckles and opened it and tossed Teddy’s gun onto the table.

“That’s your gun, right?”

Teddy stared at it.

“Those are your initials engraved on the handle, correct?”

Teddy peered at it, sweat in his eyes.

“Yes or no, Marshal ? Is that your gun?”

He could see the dent in the barrel from the day when Phillip Stacks took a shot at him and hit the gun instead and Stacks ended up shot from the ricochet of his own bullet. He could see the initials E.D. engraved on the handle, a gift from the field office after he ended up shooting it out with Breck in Maine. And there, on the underside of the trigger guard, the metal was scraped and worn away a bit from when he’d dropped the gun during a foot chase in St. Louis in the winter of ’49.

“Is that your gun?”

“Yeah.”

“Pick it up, Marshal. Make sure it’s loaded.”

Teddy looked at the gun, looked back at Cawley.

“Go ahead, Marshal. Pick it up.”

Teddy lifted the gun off the table and it shook in his hand.

“Is it loaded?” Cawley asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can feel the weight.”

Cawley nodded. “Then blast away. Because that’s the only way you’re ever getting off this island.”

Teddy tried to steady his arm with his other hand, but that was shaking too. He took several breaths, exhaling them slowly, sighting down the barrel through the sweat in his eyes and the tremors in his body, and he could see Cawley at the other end of the gun sights, two feet away at most, but he was listing up and down and side to side as if they both stood on a boat in the high seas.

“You have five seconds, Marshal.”

Cawley lifted the phone out of the radio pack and cranked the handle, and Teddy watched him place the phone to his mouth.

“Three seconds now. Pull that trigger or you spend your dying days on this island.”

Teddy could feel the weight of the gun. Even with the shakes, he had a chance if he took it now. Killed Cawley, killed whoever was waiting outside.