Duma Key

  "I drew this," I said faintly.

  "I know," Wireman said. "I've seen it. You called it Hello."

  I thumbed deeper, hurrying through big bunches of watercolors and colored pencil drawings, knowing what I would eventually find. And yes, near the bottom I came to Elizabeth's first picture of the Perse. Only she had drawn it new, a slim three-masted beauty with sails furled, standing in on the blue-green waters of the Gulf beneath a trademark Elizabeth Eastlake sun, the kind that shoots off long happy-rays of light. It was a wonderful piece of work, almost begging for a calypso soundtrack.

  But unlike her other paintings, it also felt false.

  "Keep going, muchacho."

  The ship . . . the ship . . . family, four of them, anyway, standing on the beach with their hands linked like paperdolls and those big Elizabeth happysmiles . . . the ship . . . the house, with what looked like a Negro lawn jockey standing on its head . . . the ship, that gorgeous white swallow . . . John Eastlake . . .

  John Eastlake screaming . . . blood running from his nose and one eye . . .

  I stared at it, mesmerized. It was a child's watercolor, but it had been executed with hellish skill. It depicted a man who looked insane with terror, grief, or both.

  "My God," I said.

  "One more, muchacho," Wireman said. "One more to go."

  I flicked back the picture of the screaming man. Old dried watercolors rattled like bones. Beneath the screaming father was the ship again, only this time it really was my ship, my Perse. Elizabeth had painted it at night, and not with a brush--I could still see the ancient dried prints of her child's fingers in the swirls of gray and black. This time it was as if she had finally seen through the Perse's disguise. The boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes. Around her, blue in the light of a moon that did not smile or send out happy-rays, hundreds of skeleton arms rose from the water in a dripping salute. And standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing, vaguely female, wearing a decayed something that might have been a cloak, a winding shroud . . . or a robe. It was the red-robe, my red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my Girl and Ship paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up. This is everything awful, it said. This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it.

  "Christ," I said, looking up at Wireman. "When, do you think? After her sisters--?"

  "Must have been. Must have been her way of coping with it, don't you think?"

  "I don't know," I said. Part of me was trying to think of my own girls, and part of me was trying not to. "I don't know how a kid--any kid--could come up with something like that."

  "Race memory," Wireman said. "That's what the Jungians would say."

  "And how did I end up painting this same fucking ship? Maybe this same fucking creature, only from the back? Do the Jungians have any theories about that?"

  "It doesn't say Perse on Elizabeth's," Jack pointed out.

  "She would have been four," I said. "I doubt if the name would have made much of an impression on her." I thought of her earlier pictures--the ones where this boat had been a beautiful white lie she had believed for a little while. "Especially once she saw what it really was."

  "You talk as if it were real," Wireman said.

  My mouth was very dry. I went to the bathroom, drew myself a glass of water, and drank it down. "I don't know what I believe about this," I said, "but I have a general rule of thumb in life, Wireman. If one person sees a thing, it could be a hallucination. If two people see it, chances of reality improve exponentially. Elizabeth and I both saw the Perse."

  "In your imaginations," Wireman said. "In your imaginations you saw it."

  I pointed to Wireman's face and said, "You've seen what my imagination can do."

  He didn't reply, but he nodded. He was very pale.

  "You said, 'Once she saw what it really was,' " Jack said. "If the boat in that picture is real, what is it, exactly?"

  "I think you know," Wireman said. "I think we all do; it's pretty damned hard to miss. We're just afraid to say it out loud. Go on, Jack. God hates a coward."

  "Okay, it's a ship of the dead," Jack said. His voice was flat in my clean, well-lighted studio. He put his hands to his head and raked his fingers slowly through his hair, making it wilder than ever. "But I'll tell you something, you guys:--if that's what's coming for me in the end, I sort of wish I'd never been born in the first place."

  x

  I set the thick stack of drawings and watercolors aside on the carpet, delighted to get the last two out of my sight. Then I looked at what had been under her pictures, weighing the picnic basket down.

  It was ammo for the spear-pistol. I lifted one of the stubby harpoons out. It was about fifteen inches long, and quite heavy. The shaft was steel, not aluminum--I wasn't sure aluminum had even been used in the nineteen-twenties. The business-end was triple-bladed, and although the blades were tarnished, they looked sharp. I touched the ball of my finger to one, and a tiny bead of blood appeared on the skin instantly.

  "You ought to disinfect that," Jack said.

  "Yes indeed," I said. I turned the thing over in the afternoon sun, sending reflections bounding around the walls. The short harpoon had its own ugly beauty, a paradox perhaps reserved exclusively for certain weapons of efficiency.

  "This wouldn't go very far in water," I said. "Not as heavy as it is."

  "You'd be surprised," Wireman said. "The gun fires off a spring and a CO2 cartridge. She bangs pretty good. And back in those days, short range was enough. The Gulf teemed with fish, even close in. If Eastlake wanted to shoot something, he could usually do it at point blank range."

  "I don't understand these tips," I said.

  Wireman said, "Nor do I. She had at least a dozen harpoons, including four mounted on the wall in the library, and none of them are like these."

  Jack had gone into the bathroom and come back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Now he took the harpoon I was holding and examined the triple-bladed tip. "What is it? Silver?"

  Wireman made his thumb and forefinger into a gun and pointed it at him. "Hold your cards, but Wireman thinks you have scored a Bingo."

  "And you don't get that?" Jack asked.

  Wireman and I looked at each other, then at Jack again.

  "You haven't been watching the right movies," he said. "Silver bullets are what you use to kill were-wolves. I don't know if silver works on vampires or not, but obviously somebody thought it did. Or that it might."

  "If you're suggesting Tessie and Laura Eastlake are vampires," Wireman said, "they must have built up a hell of a thirst since 1927." He looked at me, expecting corroboration.

  "I think Jack's onto something," I said. I took the bottle of peroxide, dipped the finger I'd pricked into it, and splashed the bottle up and down a couple of times.

  "Man-law," Jack said, grimacing.

  "Not unless you were planning to drink it," I said, and after a moment's consideration Jack and I both burst out laughing.

  "Huh?" Wireman asked. "I don't get it."

  "Never mind," Jack said, still grinning. Then he grew serious again. "But there are no such things as vampires, Edgar. There could be ghosts, I'll give you that much--I think almost everyone believes there could be ghosts--but there's no such thing as vampires." He brightened as an idea struck him. "Besides, it takes a vampire to make a vampire. The Eastlake twins drowned."

  I picked up the short harpoon again, turning it from side to side, making the reflection from the tarnished tip tumble along the wall. "Still, this is suggestive."

  "Really," Jack agreed.

  "So's the unlocked door you found when you brought the picnic basket," I said. "The tracks. The canvas that was lifted out of the rack and put onto the easel."


  "You saying it was the crazy librarian after all, amigo?"

  "No. Just that . . ." My voice cracked, broke. I had to take another sip of water before I could say what needed saying. "Just that maybe vampires aren't the only things that come back from the dead."

  "What are you talking about?" Jack asked. "Zombies?"

  I thought of the Perse with her rotting sails. "Let's say deserters."

  xi

  "Are you sure you want to be here alone tonight, Edgar?" Wireman asked. "Because I'm not sure it's such a great idea. Especially with that stack of old pictures for company." He sighed. "You have succeeded in giving Wireman a first-class case of the willies."

  We were sitting out in the Florida room, watching the sun start its long, slow decline toward the horizon. I had produced cheese and crackers.

  "I'm not sure this will work otherwise," I said. "Think of me as a gunslinger of the art world. I paint alone, podner."

  Jack looked at me over a fresh glass of iced tea. "You're planning to paint?"

  "Well--sketch. It's what I know how to do." And when I thought back to a certain pair of gardening gloves--HANDS printed on the back of one, OFF on the back of the other--I thought sketching would be enough, especially if I did it with little Elizabeth Eastlake's colored pencils.

  I swung around to Wireman. "You have the funeral parlor tonight, correct?"

  Wireman glanced at his watch and heaved a sigh. "Correct. From six until eight. There's another visitation tomorrow from noon until two. Relatives from afar will come to bare their teeth at the usurping interloper. That would be me. Then the final act, day after tomorrow. Funeral at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Osprey. That's at ten. Followed by cremation at Abbot-Wexler. Burny-burny, hot-hot-hot."

  Jack grimaced. "Gross me out."

  Wireman nodded. "Death is gross, son. Remember what we sang as children? 'The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, and the pus runs out like shaving cream.' "

  "Classy," I said.

  "Yep," Wireman agreed. He selected another cracker, looked at it, then threw it violently back onto the tray. It bounced onto the floor. "This is nuts. The whole thing."

  Jack picked up the cracker, seemed to consider eating it, then put it aside. Perhaps he had decided eating crackers off a Florida room floor violated another man-law. Probably it did. There are so many.

  I said to Wireman, "When you come back from the funeral parlor tonight, you check in on me, okay?"

  "Yes."

  "If I tell you I'm fine, to just go on home, you do it."

  "Don't interrupt you if you're communing with your muse. Or the spirits."

  I nodded, because he wasn't that far off. Then I turned to Jack. "And you're staying at El Palacio while Wireman's at the funeral parlor, right?"

  "Sure, if that's what you guys want." He looked a little uneasy about it, and I didn't blame him. It was a big house, Elizabeth had lived in it a long time, and it was where her memory was freshest. I would have been uneasy, too, if I hadn't been sure the spooks on Duma Key were elsewhere.

  "If I call you, come on the run."

  "I will. Call me on the house phone or my cell phone."

  "You sure your cell phone's working?"

  He looked slightly shamefaced. "Battery was a little flat, is all. I got it charged in my car."

  Wireman said, "I wish I understood better why you feel like you have to keep fooling with this, Edgar."

  "Because it's not over. For years it was. For years Elizabeth lived here very quietly, first with her father and then on her own. She had her charities, she had her friends, she played tennis, she played bridge--so Mary Ire told me--and most of all, she had the Suncoast art scene. It was the quiet, rewarding life of an elderly woman with lots of money and few bad habits other than her cigarettes. Then things started to change. La loteria. You said it yourself, Wireman."

  "You really think something's been making all this happen," he said. Not with disbelief; with awe.

  "It's what you believe," I said.

  "Sometimes I do. It isn't what I want to believe. That there's something with a reach so long . . . with eyesight keen enough to see you . . . me . . . God knows who or what else . . ."

  "I don't like it either," I said, but that was far from the truth. The truth was I hated it. "I don't like the idea that something may have actually reached out and killed Elizabeth--maybe scared her to death--just to shut her up."

  "And you think you can find out what's going on from those pictures."

  "Some, yes. How much I won't know until I try."

  "And then?"

  "It depends. Almost certainly a trip to the south end of the Key. There's unfinished business there."

  Jack put down his tea-glass. "What unfinished business?"

  I shook my head. "Don't know. Her pictures may tell me."

  "Just as long as you don't get in over your head and discover you can't get back to shore," Wireman said. "That's what happened to those two little girls."

  "I know it," I said.

  Jack pointed his finger at me. "Take care of yourself. Man-law."

  I nodded and pointed back. "Man-law."

  15--Intruder

  i

  Twenty minutes later I sat in Little Pink with my sketch-pad on my lap and the red picnic basket beside me. Directly ahead, filling the western-facing window with light, was the Gulf. Far below me was the murmur of the shells. I had set my easel aside and covered my paint-splattered work-table with a piece of toweling. I laid the remains of her freshly sharpened colored pencils on top of it. There wasn't much left of those pencils, which were fat and somehow antique, but I thought there'd be enough. I was ready.

  "Bullshit I am," I said. I was never going to be ready for this, and part of me was hoping nothing would happen. I thought something would, though. I thought that was why Elizabeth had wanted me to find her drawings. But how much of what was inside the red basket did she actually remember? My guess was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had happened to her when she was a child even before the Alzheimer's came along to complicate things. Because forgetting isn't always involuntary. Sometimes it's willed.

  Who would want to remember something so awful that it had made your father scream until he bled? Better to stop drawing completely. To just go cold turkey. Better to tell people you can hardly even draw stick figures, that when it comes to art you're like wealthy alums who support their college sports teams: if you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. Better to put it out of your mind completely, and in your old age, creeping senility will take care of the rest.

  Oh, some of that old ability may still remain--like scar-tissue on the dura of the brain from an old injury (caused by falling out of a pony-trap, let's say)--and you might have to find ways to let that out once in awhile, to express it like a build-up of pus from an infection that will never quite heal. So you get interested in other people's art. You become, in fact, a patron of the arts. And if that's still not enough? Why, maybe you begin to collect china figures and buildings. You begin to build yourself a China Town. No one will call creating such tableaux art, but it's certainly imaginative, and the regular exercise of the imagination--its visual aspect in particular--is enough to make it stop.

  Make what stop?

  The itch, of course.

  That damnable itch.

  I scratched at my right arm, passed through it, and for the ten thousandth time found only my ribs. I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first sheet.

  Start with a blank surface.

  It called to me, as I was sure such blank sheets had once called to her.

  Fill me up. Because white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember. Make. Show. Draw. And when you do, the itch will go away. For awhile the confusion will subside.

  Please stay on the Key, she had said. No matter what happens. We need you.

  I thought that might be true.

  I sketched quickly. Just a few strokes. Something that could
have been a cart. Or possibly a pony-trap, standing still and waiting for the pony.

  "They lived here happily enough," I told the empty studio. "Father and daughters. Then Elizabeth fell out of the pony-trap and started to draw, the off-season hurricane exposed the debris field, the little girls drowned. Then the rest of them pop off to Miami, and the trouble stops. And, when they came back nearly twenty-five years later . . ."

  Beneath the pony-trap I printed FINE. Paused. Added AGAIN. FINE AGAIN.

  Fine, the shells whispered far below. Fine again.

  Yes, they had been fine, John and Elizabeth had been fine. And after John died, Elizabeth had continued being fine. Fine with her art shows. Fine with her chinas. Then things had for some reason begun to change again. I didn't know if the deaths of Wireman's wife and daughter had been a part of that change, but I thought they might have been. And about his arrival and mine on Duma Key I thought there was no question. I had no rational reason for believing that, but I did.

  Things on Duma Key had been okay . . . then strange . . . then for a long time they'd been okay again. And now . . .

  She's awake.

  The table is leaking.

  If I wanted to know what was happening now, I had to know what had happened then. Dangerous or not, I had to.

  ii

  I picked up her first drawing, which wasn't a drawing at all but just an uncertain line running across the middle of the paper. I took it in my left hand, closed my eyes, and then pretended I was touching it with my right, just as I had with Pam's HANDS OFF gardening gloves. I tried to see my right fingers running over that hesitant line. I could--sort of--but I felt a kind of despair. Did I mean to do this with all of the pictures? There had to be twelve dozen, and that was a conservative estimate. Also, I wasn't exactly being overwhelmed with psychic information.

  Take it easy. Rome wasn't built in an hour.

  I decided a little Radio Free Bone couldn't hurt and might help. I got up, holding the ancient piece of paper in my right hand, and of course it went fluttering to the floor because there was no right hand. I bent to pick it up, thinking I had the saying wrong, the saying was Rome wasn't built in a day.