Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

“They do,” Cawley said with just a hint of annoyance. “But by ten o’clock, the doctors have signed out for the night.”

“And turned in their keys?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s a record of that?” Teddy said.

“I don’t follow.”

Chuck said, “They have to sign in and out for the keys, Doctor—that’s what we’re wondering.”

“Of course.”

“And we could check last night’s sign-in log,” Teddy said.

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

“And that would be kept in the cage we saw on the first floor,” Chuck said. “The one with the guard inside of it and the wall of keys behind him?”

Cawley gave him a quick nod.

“And the personnel files,” Teddy said, “of the medical staff and the orderlies and the guards. We’ll need access to those.”

Cawley peered at him as if Teddy’s face were sprouting blackflies. “Why?”

“A woman disappears from a locked room, Doctor? She escapes onto a tiny island and no one can find her? I have to at least consider that she had help.”

“We’ll see,” Cawley said.

“We’ll see ?”

“Yes, Marshal. I’ll have to speak with the warden and some of the other staff. We’ll make a determination of your request based on—”

“Doctor,” Teddy said, “it wasn’t a request. We’re here by order of the government. This is a federal facility from which a dangerous prisoner—”

“Patient.”

“A dangerous patient,” Teddy said, keeping his voice as even as possible, “has escaped. If you refuse to aid two U.S. marshals, Doctor, in the apprehension of that patient you are, unfortunately—Chuck?”

Chuck said, “Obstructing justice, Doctor.”

Cawley looked at Chuck as if he’d been expecting grief from Teddy, but Chuck hadn’t been on his radar.

“Yes, well,” he said, his voice stripped of life, “all I can say is that I will do all that I can to accommodate your request.”

Teddy and Chuck exchanged a small glance, went back to looking at the bare room. Cawley probably wasn’t used to questions that continued after he’d shown displeasure with them, so they gave him a minute to catch his breath.

Teddy looked in the tiny closet, saw three white smocks, two pairs of white shoes. “How many shoes are the patients given?”

“Two.”

“She left this room barefoot?”

“Yes.” He fixed the tie under his lab coat and then pointed at a large sheet of paper lying on the bed. “We found that behind the dresser. We don’t know what it means. We were hoping someone could tell us.”

Teddy lifted the sheet of paper, turned it over to see that the other side was a hospital eye chart, the letters shrinking and descending in a pyramid. He turned it back over and held it up for Chuck:

THE LAW OF 4

I AM 47

THEY WERE 80

+YOU ARE 3

WE ARE 4

BUT

WHO IS 67?

Teddy didn’t even like holding it. The edges of the paper tingled against his fingers.

Chuck said, “Fuck if I know.”

Cawley stepped up beside them. “Quite similar to our clinical conclusion.”

“We are three,” Teddy said.

Chuck peered at the paper. “Huh?”

“We could be the three,” Teddy said. “The three of us right now, standing in this room.”

Chuck shook his head. “How’s she going to predict that?”

Teddy shrugged. “It’s a reach.”

“Yeah.”

Cawley said, “It is, and yet Rachel is quite brilliant in her games. Her delusions—particularly the one that allows her to believe her three children are still alive—are conceived on a very delicate but intricate architecture. To sustain the structure, she employs an elaborate narrative thread to her life that is completely fictitious.”

Chuck turned his head slowly, looked at Cawley. “I’d need a degree to understand that, Doctor.”

Cawley chuckled. “Think of the lies you tell your parents as a child. How elaborate they are. Instead of keeping them simple to explain why you missed school or forgot your chores, you embellish, you make them fantastical. Yes?”

Chuck thought about it and nodded.

Teddy said, “Sure. Criminals do the same thing.”

“Exactly. The idea is to obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth. Now consider those lies being told to yourself. That’s what Rachel does. In four years, she never so much as acknowledged that she was in an institution. As far as she was concerned, she was back home in the Berkshires in her house, and we were deliverymen, milkmen, postal workers, just passing by. Whatever the reality, she used sheer force of will to make her illusions stronger.”

“But how does the truth never get through?” Teddy said. “I mean, she’s in a mental institution. How does she not notice that from time to time?”

“Ah,” Cawley said, “now we’re getting into the true horrible beauty of the full-blown schizophrenic’s paranoid structure. If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying…”

“Then any truth they say,” Chuck said, “must be a lie.”

Cawley cocked his thumb and pointed his finger at him like a gun. “You’re getting it.”

Teddy said, “And that somehow plays into these numbers?”

“It must. They have to represent something. With Rachel, no thought was idle or ancillary. She had to keep the structure in her head from collapsing, and to do that, she had to be thinking always. This"—he tapped the eye chart—"is the structure on paper. This, I sincerely believe, will tell us where she’s gone.”

For just a moment, Teddy thought it was speaking to him, becoming clearer. It was the first two numbers, he was certain—the “47” and the “80"—he could feel something about them scratching at his brain like the melody of a song he was trying to remember while the radio played a completely different tune. The “47” was the easiest clue. It was right in front of him. It was so simple. It was…

And then any possible bridges of logic collapsed, and Teddy felt his mind go white, and he knew it was in flight again—the clue, the connection, the bridge—and he placed the page down on the bed again.

“Insane,” Chuck said.

“What’s that?” Cawley said.

“Where she’s gone,” Chuck said. “In my opinion.”

“Well, certainly,” Cawley said. “I think we can take that as a given.”

THEY STOOD OUTSIDE the room. The corridor broke off from a staircase in the center. Rachel’s door was to the left of the stairs, halfway down on the right-hand side.

“This is the only way off this floor?” Teddy said.

Cawley nodded.

“No roof access?” Chuck said.

Cawley shook his head. “The only way up is from the fire escape. You’ll see it on the south side of the building. It has a gate, and the gate is always locked. Staff has keys, of course, but no patients. To get to the roof, she’d have had to go downstairs, outside, use a key, and climb back up top.”

“But the roof was checked?”

Another nod. “As were all the rooms in the ward. Immediately. As soon as she was discovered missing.”

Teddy pointed at the orderly who sat by a small card table in front of the stairs. “Someone’s there twenty-four hours?”

“Yes.”

“So, someone was there last night.”

“Orderly Ganton, actually.”

They walked to the staircase and Chuck said, “So…,” and raised his eyebrows at Teddy.

“So,” Teddy agreed.

“So,” Chuck said, “Miss Solando gets out of her locked room into this corridor, goes down these steps.” They went down the steps themselves and Chuck jerked a thumb at the orderly waiting for them by the second-floor landing. “She gets past another orderly here, we don’t know how, makes herself invisible or something, goes down this next flight, and comes out into…”