sir."
"Gentlemen," McPherson said.
The guard on McPherson's right opened a small leather pouch. Teddy pulled back his overcoat and removed the service revolver from his holster. He snapped the cylinder open with a flick of his wrist and then placed the gun in McPherson's hand. McPherson handed it off to the guard, and the guard placed it in his leather pouch and McPherson held out his hand again.
Chuck was a little slower with his weapon, fumbling with the holster snap, but McPherson showed no impatience, just waited until Chuck placed the gun awkwardly in his hand.
McPherson handed the gun to the guard, and the guard added it to the pouch and stepped through the gate.
"Your weapons will be checked into the property room directly outside the warden's office," McPherson said softly, his words rustling like leaves, "which is in the main hospital building in the center of the compound. You will pick them back up on the day of your departure." McPherson's loose, cowboy grin suddenly returned. "Well, that about does it for the official stuff for now. I don't know about y'all, but I am glad to be done with it. What do you say we go see Dr. Cawley?"
And he turned and led the way through the gate, and the gate was closed behind them.
Inside the wall, the lawn swept away from either side of a main path made from the same brick as the wall. Gardeners with manacled ankles tended to the grass and trees and flower beds and even an array of rosebushes that grew along the foundation of the hospital. The gardeners were flanked by orderlies, and Teddy saw other patierits in manacles walking the grounds with odd, ducklike steps. Most were men, a few were women. "
"When the first clinicians came here," McPherson said, "this was all sea grass and scrub. You should see the pictures. But now..." To the right and left of the hospital stood two identical redbrick colonials with the trim painted bright white, their windows barred, and the panes yellowed by salt and sea wash. The hospital itself was charcoal-colored, its brick rubbed smooth by the sea, and it rose six stories until the dormer windows up top stared down at them. McPherson said, "Built as the battalion HQ just before the Civil War. They'd had some designs, apparently, to make this a training facility. Then when war seemed imminent, they concentrated on the fort, and then later on transforming this into a POW camp." Teddy noticed the tower he'd seen from the ferry. The tip of it peeked just above the tree line on the far side of the island. "What's the tower?"
"An old lighthouse," McPherson said. "Hasn't been used as such since the early 1800s. The Union army posted lookout sentries there, or so I've heard, but now it's a treatment facility."
"For patients?"
He shook his head. "Sewage. You wouldn't believe what ends up in these waters. Looks pretty from the ferry, but every piece of trash in just about every river in this state floats down into the inner harbor, out through the midharbor, and eventually reaches us." "Fascinating," Chuck said and lit a cigarette, took it from his mouth to suppress a soft yawn as he blinked in the sun. "Beyond the wall, that way" - he pointed past Ward B - "is the original commander's quarters. You probably saw it on the walk up. Cost a fortune to build at the time, and the commander was relieved of his duties when Uncle Sam got the bill. You should see the place." "Who lives there now?" Tdddy said.
"Dr. Cawley," McPherson said. "None of this would exist if it weren't for Dr. Cawley. And the warden. They created something really unique here."
They'd looped around the back of the compound, met more manacled gardeners and orderlies, many hoeing a dark loam against the rear wall. One of the gardeners, a middle-aged woman with wispy wheat hair gone almost bald on top, stared at Teddy as he passed, and then raised a single finger to her lips. Teddy noticed a dark red scar, thick as licorice, that ran across her throat. She smiled, finger still held to her lips, and then shook her head very slowly at him.
"Cawley's a legend in his field," McPherson was saying as they passed back around toward the front oi: the hospital. "Top of his class at both Johns Hopkins and Harvard, published his first paper on delusional pathologies at