Duma Key

  He is thinking this when the first cry comes, chiming in his head like a silver bell: Emery!

  And then comes another: Emery, help! The undertow! The rip!

  That is when he sees the girls, and his heart gives a springing leap. It seems to rise all the way to his throat before falling back into place, where it dashes double-time. The unlit cigar tumbles from his fingers.

  Two little girls, and they look just the same. They appear to be wearing identical jumpers, and although Emery should not be able to distinguish colors in this dying light, he can: one jumper is red, with an L on the front; the other is blue, with a T.

  The rip! the girl with the T on her jumper calls, holding out her arms in supplication.

  The undertow! calls the girl with the L.

  And although neither girl appears to be in the slightest danger of drowning, Emery doesn't hesitate. His joy won't let him hesitate, nor his bright certainty that this is a miracle opportunity: when he turns up with the twins, his previously distant father-in-law will change his tune in a hurry. And the silver chimes those voices ring in his head, they urge him forward, too. He rushes to rescue Adie's sisters, to gather the lost girls in and splash with them to shore.

  Emery! That's Tessie, her eyes dark in her china-pale face . . . but her lips are red.

  Emery, hurry! That's Laura, with her dripping white hands held out to him and her lank curls pasted against her white cheeks.

  He cries I'm coming, girls! Hold on!

  Splashing toward them, now up to his shins, now his knees.

  He cries Fight it! as though they are doing anything but standing there in water that is only thigh-deep on them, although he's now up to his own thighs and he's six feet and two inches tall.

  The water of the Gulf--still chilly in mid-April--is up to his chest when he reaches them, when he reaches out to them, and when they seize him with hands that are stronger than any little girls' hands should be; by the time he's close enough to see the silvery gleam in their glazed eyes and smell the salty, dead-fish aroma coming from their rotting hair, it's too late. He struggles, his cries of joy and his entreaties to fight the undertow turning first to yells of protest and then to screams of horror, but by then it is far too late. The screams do not last long, in any case. Their small hands have become cold claws digging deep into his flesh as they pull him deeper, and the water fills his mouth, drowning his screams. He sees the ship against the last cold ashes of the sunset, and--how did he not see it before? how did he not know?--realizes it is a hulk, a plague ship, a deathship. Something is waiting for him there, something in a shroud, and he would scream if he could, but now the water fills his eyes and there are other hands, ones that feel like nothing but stripped radiations of bone, closing around his ankles. A talon pulls off a shoe, then tweaks a toe . . . as if it means to play "This little piggy went to market" with him as he drowns.

  As Emery Paulson drowns.

  19--April of '27

  i

  Someone was yelling in the dark. It sounded like Make him stop screaming. Then there was a flat hard whacking sound and the dark lit up deep red, first on one side, then in the back. The red rolled toward the front of the darkness like a cloud of blood in water.

  "You hit him too hard," someone said. Was that Jack?

  "Boss? Hey, boss!" Somebody was shaking me, so I still had a body. Probably that was good. Jack was shaking me. Jack who? I could get it, but I had to think sideways. His name was like someone on The Weather Channel--

  More shaking. Rougher. "Muchacho! You there?"

  My head bonked something, and I opened my eyes. Jack Cantori was kneeling to my left, his face tight and scared. It was Wireman in front of me, on his feet but bending over, shaking me like a daiquiri. The doll was lying face-down on my lap. I batted her aside with a grunt of disgust--oh you nasty man, indeed. Noveen landed in the pile of dead wasps with a papery rustle.

  Suddenly the places she'd taken me began to come back: hell's own tour. The path to Shade Beach that Adriana Eastlake had called (much to her father's fury) Drunkard's Boulevard. The beach itself, and the horrible things that had happened there. The pool. The cistern.

  "His eyes are open," Jack said. "Thank God. Edgar, do you hear me?"

  "Yes," I said. My voice was hoarse from screaming. I wanted food, but first I wanted to pour something down my burning throat. "Thirsty--can you help a brother out?"

  Wireman handed me one of the big bottles of Evian water. I shook my head. "Pepsi."

  "You sure, muchacho? Water might be--"

  "Pepsi. Caffeine." That wasn't the only reason, but it would do.

  Wireman put the Evian back and gave me a Pepsi. It was warm, but I chugged half of it, burped, then drank again. I looked around and saw only my friends and a length of dirty hallway. That was not good. In fact, it was terrible. My hand--I was definitely back to one again--was stiff and throbbing, as if I had been using it steadily for at least two hours, so where were the drawings? I was terrified that without the drawings, everything would fade the way dreams do upon waking. And I had risked more than my life for that information. I had risked my sanity.

  I struggled, trying to get to my feet. A bolt of pain went through my head where I'd bumped it against the wall. "Where are the pictures? Please tell me there are pictures!"

  "Relax, muchacho, right here." Wireman stepped aside and showed me a semi-tidy stack of Artisan sheets. "You were drawing like a madman, tearing them off your pad as you went. I took em and stacked em up."

  "All right. Good. I need to eat. I'm starving." And this felt like the literal truth.

  Jack looked around uneasily. The front corridor, which had been filled with afternoon light when I took Noveen from Jack and went bye-bye down a black hole, was now dimmer. Not dark--not yet, and when I looked up I could see the sky overhead was still blue--but it was clear that the afternoon was either gone or almost gone.

  "What time is it?" I asked.

  "Quarter past five," Wireman said. He didn't have to glance at his watch, which told me he'd been keeping close track. "Sunset's still a couple of hours away. Give or take. So if they only come out at night--"

  "I think they do. That's enough time, and I still need to eat. We can get out of this ruin. We're done with the house. We may need a ladder, though."

  Wireman raised his eyebrows but didn't ask; he only said, "If there is one, it's probably in the barn. Which seems to have stood up to Father Time pretty well, actually."

  "What about the doll?" Jack asked. "Noveen?"

  "Put her back in Elizabeth's heart-box and bring her along," I said. "She deserves a place at El Palacio, with the rest of Elizabeth's things."

  "What's our next stop, Edgar?" Wireman asked.

  "I'll show you, but one thing first." I pointed to the gun in his belt. "That thing's still loaded, right?"

  "Absolutely. Fresh clip."

  "If the heron comes back, I still want you to shoot it. Make it a priority."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's her," I said. "Perse's been using it to watch us."

  ii

  We left the ruin the way we'd entered it and found a Florida early evening full of clear light. The sky above was cloudless. The sun cast a brilliant silver sheen across the Gulf. In another hour or so that track would begin to tarnish and turn to gold, but not yet.

  We trudged along the remains of Drunkard's Boulevard, Jack carrying the picnic basket, Wireman the bag containing the food and the Artisan pads. I had my drawings. Sea oats whispered at our pants legs. Our shadows trailed long behind us toward the wreck of the mansion. Far ahead, a pelican saw a fish, folded its wings, and dropped like a dive-bomber. We did not see the heron, nor were we visited by Charley the Lawn Jockey. But when we reached the crest of the ridge, where the path had once sloped down along dunes that were now eroded and steep, we saw something else.

  We saw the Perse.

  She lay at anchor three hundred yards out. Her spotless sails were furled. She rolled from
side to side on the swell, ticking like a clock. From here we could read the entire name painted on her starboard side: Persephone. She appeared deserted, and I was sure she was--in the daytime, the dead stayed dead. But Perse wasn't dead. Worse luck for us.

  "My God, it could have sailed right out of your paintings," Jack breathed. There was a stone bench to the right of the path, barely visible for the bushes growing around it and the vines snaking over its flat seat. He dropped onto it, gaping out at the boat.

  "No," I said. "I painted the truth. You're seeing the mask it wears in the daytime."

  Wireman stood beside Jack, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he turned to me. "Do they see it over on Don Pedro? They don't, do they?"

  "Maybe some do," I said. "The terminally ill, the schizos currently ditching their medicine . . ." That made me think of Tom. "But it's here for us, not them. We're meant to leave Duma Key on it tonight. The road will be closed to us once the sun goes down. The living dead may all be out there on Persephone, but there are things in the jungle. Some--like the lawn jockey--are things that Elizabeth created as a little girl. There are others that have come since Perse woke up again." I paused. I didn't like to say the rest, but I did. I had to. "I imagine I'm responsible for some of those. Every man has his nightmares."

  I thought of the skeleton arms reaching up in the moonlight.

  "So," Wireman said harshly. "The plan is for us to leave by boat, is it?"

  "Yes."

  "Press gang? Like in jolly old England?"

  "Pretty much."

  "I can't do that," Jack said. "I get seasick."

  I smiled and sat down beside him. "Sea voyages aren't in the plan, Jack."

  "Good."

  "Can you open that chicken for me, and tear me off a leg?"

  He did as I asked, and they watched, fascinated, as I devoured first one leg, then the other. I asked if anyone wanted the breast, and when they both said no, I ate that, too. Halfway through it I thought of my daughter, lying pale and dead in Rhode Island. I kept on eating, doing it methodically, wiping my greasy hands on my jeans between bites. Ilse would have understood. Not Pam and probably not Lin, but Illy? Yes. I was frightened of what lay ahead, but I knew Perse was frightened, too. If she hadn't been, she would not have tried so hard to keep us out. On the contrary, she would have welcomed us in.

  "Time's wasting, muchacho," Wireman said. "Daylight fleets."

  "I know," I said. "And my daughter's dead forever. I'm still starving, though. Is there anything sweet? Cake? Cookies? A motherfucking HoHo?"

  There wasn't. I settled for another Pepsi and a few cucumber strips dipped in ranch dressing, which to me has always looked and tasted like slightly sweetened snot. At least my headache was fading. The images that had come to me in the dark--the ones that had been waiting all those years inside Noveen's rag-stuffed head--were also fading, but I had my own pictures to refresh them. I wiped my hands a final time and put the stack of torn and wrinkled sheets on my lap: the family album from hell.

  "Keep an eye out for that heron," I told Wireman.

  He looked around, glanced at the deserted ship ticking back and forth out there on the mild swell, then looked back at me. "Wouldn't the spear-pistol be better for Big Bird? With one of the silver harpoons attached?"

  "No. The heron's something she just rides, the way a man rides a horse. She'd probably like it if we wasted one of the silvertips on it, but Perse is done getting what she likes." I smiled without humor. "That part of the lady's career is over."

  iii

  Wireman made Jack get up so he could strip the vines from the bench. Then we sat there, three unlikely warriors, two in their fifties and one barely out of his teens, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a ruined mansion on the other. The red basket and mostly depleted food-bag were at our feet. I thought I had twenty minutes to tell them what I knew, even half an hour, and that would still leave enough time.

  I hoped.

  "Elizabeth's connection with Perse was closer than mine," I said. "Much more intense than mine. I don't know how she stood it. Once she had the china figure, she saw everything, whether she was there or not. And she drew everything. But the worst pictures she burned before she left this place."

  "Like the picture of the hurricane?" Wireman asked.

  "Yes. I think she was afraid of their power, and she was right to be afraid. But she saw it all. And the doll stored it all up. Like a psychic camera. In most cases, I just saw what Elizabeth saw and drew what Elizabeth drew. Do you understand that?"

  They both nodded.

  "Start with this path, which was once a road. It went from Shade Beach to the barn." I pointed to the long, vine-coated outbuilding where I hoped we would find a ladder. "I don't think the bootlegger who wore it into the coral was Dave Davis, but I'm confident he was one of Davis's business associates, and that a fair amount of hooch came onto the Florida Suncoast by way of Duma Key. From Shade Beach to John Eastlake's barn, then across to the mainland. Mostly top-shelf stuff headed for a couple of jazz clubs in Sarasota and Venice, stored as a favor to Davis."

  Wireman glanced at the declining sun, then at his watch. "Does this have any bearing on our current situation, muchacho? I assume it does."

  "You bet." I produced a drawing of a keg with a fat screw-lid bung on top. The word TABLE had been sketched in a semicircle on the side, with SCOTLAND below it, in another semicircle. It was ragged work; I drew far better than I printed. "Whiskey, gents."

  Jack indicated a vague, humanoid scribble on the keg between TABLE and SCOTLAND. The figure had been executed in orange, and one foot was raised behind it. "Who's the chick in the dress?"

  "That's not a dress, it's a kilt. It's supposed to be a highlander."

  Wireman raised his shaggy brows. "Won't win any awards for that one, muchacho."

  "Elizabeth put Perse in some sort of midget whiskey barrel," Jack mused. "Or maybe it was Elizabeth and Nan Melda--"

  I shook my head. "Just Elizabeth."

  "How big was this thing?"

  I held my hands about two feet from each other, considered, then moved them a little farther apart.

  Jack nodded, but he was frowning, too. "She put the china figure in and screwed the cap back on. Or put the plug in the jug. And drowned Perse to sleep. Which seems fucked up to me, boss. She was underwater when she started calling to Elizabeth, for God's sake. On the bottom of the Gulf!"

  "Leave that for now." I put the sketch of the whiskey barrel on the bottom of the stack and showed them the next one. It was Nan Melda, using the telephone in the parlor. There was something furtive about the tilt of her head and the hunch of her shoulders, only a quick stroke or two, but it said all that needed to be said about how southern folk felt back in 1927 about black housekeepers using the parlor phone, even in an emergency.

  "We thought Adie and Emery read about it in the paper and came back, but the Atlanta papers probably didn't even cover the drowning of two little girls in Florida. When Nan Melda was sure the twins were missing, she called Eastlake--the Mister--on the mainland to give him the bad news. Then she called where Adie was staying with her new husband."

  Wireman pounded his fist on his leg. "Adie told her Nanny where she was staying! Of course she did!"

  I nodded. "The newlyweds had to've caught a train that very night, because they were home before dark the next day."

  "By then the two middle daughters must have been home, too," Jack said.

  "Yep, the whole family," I said. "And the water out there . . ." I gestured toward where the slim white ship rode at anchor, waiting for dark. "It was covered with small boats. The hunt for the bodies went on for at least three days, although they all knew those girls had to be dead. I imagine the last thing on John Eastlake's mind was trying to figure out how his eldest daughter and her husband got the news. All he could think during those days was his lost twins."

  "THEY ARE GONE," Wireman murmured. "Pobre hombre."

  I held up the next pic
ture. Here were three people standing on the veranda of Heron's Roost, waving, as a big old touring car motored down the crushed shell driveway toward the stone posts and the sane world beyond. I had sketched in a scattering of palms and some banana trees, but no hedge; the hedge did not exist in 1927.

  In the rear window of the touring car, two small white ovals were looking back. I touched each in turn. "Maria and Hannah," I said. "Going back to the Braden School."

  Jack said, "That's a little cold, don't you think?"

  I shook my head. "I don't, actually. Children don't mourn like adults."

  Jack nodded. "Yeah. I guess. But I'm surprised . . ." He fell silent.

  "What?" I asked. "What surprises you?"

  "That Perse let them go," Jack said.

  "She didn't, not really. They were only going to Bradenton."

  Wireman tapped the sketch. "Where's Elizabeth in this?"

  "Everywhere," I said. "We're looking through her eyes."

  iv

  "There's not much more, but the rest is pretty bad."

  I showed them the next sketch. It was as hurried as the other ones, and the male figure in it was depicted back-to, but I had no doubt it was the living version of the thing that had clamped a manacle on my wrist in the kitchen of Big Pink. We were looking down on him. Jack looked from the picture to Shade Beach, now eroded to a mere strip, then back to the picture. Finally he looked at me.

  "Here?" he asked in a low voice. "The point of view in this one is from right here?"

  "Yes."

  "That's Emery," Wireman said, touching the figure. His voice was even lower than Jack's. Sweat had sprung up on his brow.

  "Yes."

  "The thing that was in your house."

  "Yes."

  He moved his finger. "And those are Tessie and Laura?"

  "Tessie and Lo-Lo. Yes."

  "They . . . what? Lured him in? Like sirens in one of those old Greek fairy tales?"

  "Yes."

  "This really happened," Jack said. As if to get the sense of it.

  "It really did," I agreed. "Never doubt her strength."

  Wireman looked toward the sun, which was nearer the horizon than ever. Its track had begun to tarnish at last. "Then finish up, muchacho, quick as you can. So we can do our business and get the hell out of here."