39

Stumbling through an unlit alley. All the while, being punched and kicked by the world, the flesh, and the devil.

That was my feeling at that moment. Despite my onetime encounter with Marilyn and all my assumptions about her pregnancy resulting from that, I had been shown in black and white that Marilyn had been pregnant by another man. Heather was another man’s daughter.

But equally stunning, Ashley Linderman, who had access to the juvenile court records through her law enforcement work, had lied to me. She must have known. Yet she told me, after researching it for me, that Heather was my daughter. Ashley, who had become a close friend and confidante during that case in Wisconsin. Ashley, the woman with whom I had found myself falling in love, until our time together on the island when we both finally agreed to call it off. Why had she hidden the truth from me?

And then there was Marilyn. She was gone, of course. Cervical cancer. But when she had called me so many years ago as I sat in my college dorm room and told me that she was carrying my child, did she know she was lying? And if she did, why had she played such a twisted game of deception?

I needed to make a call to Ashley Linderman. I was crazy with grief and anger. I needed to hear it from her own mouth.

After that, I would have a second conversation. An even harder one. This one with Heather. But after everything we had been through, and all the years apart, then my stumbling attempts lately to earn her trust and make things right . . . what would I tell her now?

Once the interview with Dr. Schlosser was over, I was led into the dayroom with the other patients. A television was blaring on the wall, but no one was watching. I strained to keep a handle on things as I walked slowly around the perimeter of the room. Trying to focus. I had become, to the idle observer, just one more patient, as I stared at the floor sorting things out in my mind, trying to avoid all the ghosts that had been summoned to plague me. All the doubts.

I had a plan, didn’t I? Yes. I remembered it. I tried to tell myself that I might be down but I wasn’t out. I needed Heather’s help to execute the scheme. But how could I bring her into my plan without telling her what I now knew?

I forced myself to organize. Emergency triage. First things first. There would always be time later to get into the painful details with her about David Fleming, her real father.

I strolled up to Nurse Aldrich, the managing nurse who carried herself as stiff as the white starched uniform she was wearing. “I’d like to make a call out. Actually, two.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Black,” she said. “Calls out are not permitted for you right now.”

“I know my rights. This is a legal matter.”

“Are you calling a lawyer?”

“Not exactly. But my calls are connected to my legal defense.”

“I don’t think it’s possible.”

“Who’s the director here?”

“Dr. Manfred Touley.”

“I’d like to speak to him.”

“He’s not here today.”

“Who has the authority to give me telephone privileges?”

“Dr. Schlosser, whom you met. Unless he’s already left. He sees other patients at several other hospitals.”

“Can you check? This is urgent.”

Nurse Aldrich disappeared into her office.

I dropped into one of the chairs in front of the television set. It was a program about genealogy. Finding your genetic and familial roots. Given the recent turn of events, I would have preferred anything but that. I looked around, foolishly, for a remote control. Of course it wasn’t there. Probably controlled exclusively by Nurse Aldrich. Yes, I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I thought I knew how things went down.

An hour later, I noticed Nurse Aldrich stroll back into the dayroom, where she resumed her position at the far end. Before too long, Dr. Schlosser joined her and they talked together briefly before Schlosser disappeared.

Nurse Aldrich motioned for me.

“Mr. Black. You are being given an exceptional privilege. You may make one phone call. Five minutes in length. You can use the hall phone. I will put the code in and then hand the phone to you. If you abuse the privilege, there will be consequences.”

I called my own cell number, hoping that Heather would pick up. She did.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I tried to see you but they wouldn’t let me. I’m coming tonight during visiting hours.”

“When you do, bring some pens and a legal pad. Do you have a tape recorder?”

“Wow, that’s really old-school, Trevor. I have your smartphone —it has audio-recording capacity, remember?”

I asked her to do something else. To call Detective Ashley Linderman and have her call me at the hospital. “It’s important that you tell her,” I said as I practically choked on the words, “that I have been involuntarily committed for observation. I’m a patient here. So it may be tough for her to get through. But she’s pushy. I’m counting on that.”

There was a time when Ashley and I would have laughed at that last part. But not now.

Dinner for me that night was in the dining hall, where one unfortunate soul had an explosive episode and had to be restrained and taken away. I shared a table with a short, white-haired gentleman who described himself as “Saint Sebastian.” He warned me that if I crossed him he would pump me full of arrows, just like they used to kill him under Emperor Diocletian. Either he was a time traveler or he was suffering from psychosis. I was betting on the latter.

I told him that I wouldn’t think of crossing him, but I asked if I could pray for him. He shrugged and said, “You may, my son.”

After we bowed heads and I asked God to help him achieve clarity and peace of mind as well as peace in his heart, he looked up, said, “Well done, my son,” and then quickly consumed a mouthful of mashed potatoes. Returning to his previous conversation, he added, “You notice I refer to being shot with arrows. Of course, that was the technique —arrows from my crossbow —that I also used on that rotten neighbor of mine.”

When Heather arrived, visitation hours gave us a little less than an hour, so I had to talk fast.

But before I could speak, Heather leaned in and asked in a low voice, “How are you?”

I quickly passed it off, ready to dive in. But she wouldn’t let it go. “No, really,” she said, her voice trembling a little. I could see a glistening in her eyes. “How are you really doing in this place? It has to be so hard. . . .”

“Yes. Harder than I would have imagined.”

She nodded.

“What’s even harder is that if I don’t get released immediately, it could change everything. My credibility to law enforcement. My mission. What I said publicly at the ABA. And most important, I won’t be able to convince Deputy St. Martin, and perhaps even Sheriff Haywood, about a boat full of girls, taken captive by monsters, motoring right past them.”

I gave her a confident smile even though my heart was sinking under the weight of the family court document that Dr. Schlosser had shown me. Which in turn had raised a logistical question: Who had provided that court document about Heather’s adoption to Schlosser? For that matter, who was the motivating force behind this mental commitment proceeding against me? Sheriff Haywood seemed genuinely apologetic when he told me, “This is out of my hands.”

Heather interrupted my stream of consciousness when she asked, “What’s the plan?”

“It’s called habeas corpus,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“Latin for ‘bring forth the body.’ Forcing officials to produce an imprisoned person who is being kept illegally. An old English Common Law procedure. Today that right is protected by article 1, section 9, clause 2 of the US Constitution.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t go to law school. Break it down for me.”

“Better than that. I’ll dictate it.”

I grabbed my cell phone and started laying it all down. Heather would have to type it up. After I hand-drafted a declaration on the legal pad and signed and dated it, I told her, “Attach this to the end of the petition for habeas corpus.”

Then I quickly used the phone to do five minutes’ worth of legal research. I found what I was looking for, jotted it down on another piece of paper, and stuffed it in my pocket.

“Now the tough part,” I told her. “After you type this up, you need to get it to the clerk for the US district court in New Orleans and request an emergency hearing.”

She looked overwhelmed.

As I handed my cell phone back to her, I added, “And the court hearing has to be tomorrow.”

Before she left, I told her, “Heather, no matter what happens —no matter what comes of any of this, or even what might come between us —just know how proud I am of you. And what an extraordinary woman you are.”

Her chin trembled a bit. We heard the night nurse call out that the visiting period was over. “You have to go,” I said. “God bless you.”