of delusions."
"Schizophrenics?"
"I guess, yeah. You won't find your everyday mongoloids in here in any case. Or some guy who's afraid of sidewalk cracks, sleeps too much. Far as I could tell from the file, everyone here is, you know, really crazy." Chuck said, "How many you think are faking it, though? I've always wondered that. You remember all the Section Eights you met in the war? How many, really, did you think were nuts?"
"I served with a guy in the Ardennes - "
"You were there?"
Teddy nodded. "This guy, he woke up one day speaking backward."
"The words or the sentences?"
"Sentences," Teddy said. "He'd say, 'Sarge, today here blood much too is there.' By late afternoon, we found him in a foxhole, hitting his own head with a rock. Just hitting it. Over and over. We were s6rattled that it took us a minute to realize he'd scratched out his own eyes."
"You are shitting me."
Teddy shook his head. "I heard from a guy a few years later who ran across the blind guy in a vet hospital in San Diego. Still talking backward, and he had some sort of paralysis that none of the doctors could diagnose the cause of, sat in a wheelchair by the window all day, kept talking about his crops, he had to get to his crops. Thing was, the guy grew up in Brooklyn."
"Well, guy from Brooklyn thinks he's a farmer, I guess he is Section Eight."
"That's one tip-off, sure."
Chapter 2
DEPUTY WARDEN MCPH'ERSON met them at the dock. He was young for a man of his rank, and his blond hair was cut a bit longer than the norm, and he had the kind of lanky grace in his movements that Teddy associated with Texans or men who'd grown up around horses.
He was flanked by orderlies, mostly Negroes, a few white guys with deadened faces, as if they hadn't been fed enough as babies, had remained stunted and annoyed ever since.
The orderlies wore white shirts and white trousers and moved in a pack. They barely glanced at Teddy and Chuck. They barely glanced at anything, just moved down the dock to the ferry and waited for it to unload its cargo.
Teddy and Chuck produced their badges upon request and McPherson took his time studying them, looking up from the ID cards to their faces, squinting.
"I'm not sure I've ever seen a U.S. marshal's badge before," he said.
"And now you've seen two," Chuck said. "A big day."
He gave Chuck a lazy grin and flipped the badge back at him. The beach looked to have been lashed by the sea in recent nights; it was strewn with shells and driftwood, mollusk skeletons and dead fish half eaten by whatever scavengers lived here. Teddy noticed trash that must have blown in from the inner harbor - cans and sodden wads of paper, a single license plate tossed up by the tree line and washed beige and numberless by the sun. The trees were mostly pine and maple, thin and haggard, and Teddy could see some buildings through the gaps, sitting at the top of the rise.
Dolores, who'd enjoyed sunbathing, probably would have loved this place, but Teddy could feel only the constant sweep of the ocean breeze, a warning from the sea that it could pounce at will, suck'you down to its/:]oor.
The orderlies came back down the dock with the mail and fhe medical cases and loaded them onto handcarts, and McPherson signed for the items on a clipboard and handed the clipboard back to one of the ferry guards and the guard said, "We'll be taking off, then." McPherson blinked in the sun.
"The storm," the guard said. "No one seems to know what it's going to do."
McPherson nodded.
"We'll contact the station when we need a pickup," Teddy said.
The guard nodded. "The storm," he said again.
"Sure., sure," Chuck said. "We'll keep that in mind."
McPherson led them up a path that rose gently throUgh the stand of trees. When they'd cleared the trees, they reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin, and Teddy could see a house off to both 25 his right and his left. The one to the left was the simpler of the two, a maroon mansarded Victorian with black trim, small windows that gave the appearance of sentinels. The one to the right was a Tudor that commanded its small rise like a castle.
They continued on, climbing a slope that was steep and wild with sea grass before the land greened and