Duma Key

  "What's happening?" Wireman called.

  "Getting there!" I called back. Blood dribbled into my left eye, stinging, and I blinked it away. I tried to think of Illy, my If-So-Girl, and was horrified to realize I couldn't remember her face. "Little slag, little horrock, we're working it out."

  "What?"

  "Snag! Little snag, little hold-up! You fucking deaf, Wearman?"

  Was the flashlight sleeve tilting? I feared it was. Water could be running over my hand and I might now be too numb to feel it. But if the sleeve wasn't tilting and I tried to correct, I'd make matters worse.

  If water's running out, her head will be above the surface again in a matter of seconds. And then it'll be all over. You know that, right?

  I knew. I sat in the dark with my arm up, afraid to do anything. Bleeding and waiting. Time had been canceled and memory was a ghost.

  "Here it is," Jack said at last. "It's caught in someone's ribs. Wait . . . got it."

  "Thank God," I said. "Thank Christ." I could see him in front of me, a dim shape with one knee between my awkwardly bent legs, planted in the litter of disarranged bones that had once been part of John Eastlake's eldest daughter. I held the flashlight sleeve out. "Screw it on. Gently does it, because I can't hold it straight much longer."

  "Luckily," he said, "I have two hands." And he put one of his over mine, steadying the water-filled flashlight as he began screwing the cap back on. He paused only once, to ask me why I was crying.

  "Relief," I said. "Go on. Finish. Hurry."

  When it was done, I took the capped flashlight from him. It wasn't as heavy as when it had been filled with D-cells, but I didn't care about that. What I cared about was making sure that the lid was screwed down tight. It seemed to be. I told Jack to have Wireman check it again when he got back up.

  "Will do," he said.

  "And try not to break any more rungs. I'm going to need them all."

  "You get past the broken one, Edgar, and we'll haul you the rest of the way."

  "Okay, and I won't tell anyone you tore out the seat of your pants."

  At that he actually laughed. I watched the dark shape of him go up the ladder, taking a big stride to get past the broken rung. I had a moment of doubt accompanied by a terrible vision of tiny china hands unscrewing the flashlight cap from the inside--yes, even though I was sure the fresh water had immobilized her--but Jack didn't cry out or come tumbling back down, and the bad moment passed. There was a circle of brighter darkness above my head, and eventually he reached it.

  When he was up and out, Wireman called down: "Now you, muchacho."

  "In a minute," I said. "Are your girlfriends gone?"

  "Ran away. Shore leave over, I guess."

  "And Emery?"

  "That you need to see for yourself, I think. Come on up."

  I repeated, "In a minute."

  I leaned my head back against the moss-slimy coral, closed my eyes, and reached out. I kept reaching until I touched something smooth and round. Then my first two fingers slipped into an indentation that was almost certainly an eyesocket. And since I was sure it had been Adriana's skull Jack had crushed--

  All's ending as well as can be at this end of the island, I told Nan Melda. And this isn't much of a grave, but you may not be in it much longer, my dear.

  "May I keep your bracelets? There might be more to do."

  Yes. I was afraid I had another thing coming.

  "Edgar?" Wireman sounded worried. "Who you talking to?"

  "The one who really stopped her," I said.

  And because the one who really stopped her did not tell me she would have her bracelets back, I kept them on and began the slow and painful work of getting to my feet. Dislodged bone-fragments and bits of moss-encrusted ceramic showered down around my feet. My left knee--my good one--felt swollen and tight against the torn cloth of my pants. My head was throbbing and my chest was on fire. The ladder looked at least a mile high, but I could see the dark shapes of Jack and Wireman hanging over the rim of the cistern, waiting to grab me when--if--I managed to haul myself into grabbing-range.

  I thought: There's a three-quarter moon tonight, and I can't see it until I get out of this hole in the ground.

  So I got started.

  xiii

  The moon had risen fat and yellow above the eastern horizon, casting its glow on the lush jungle growth that overbore the south end of the Key and gilding the east side of John Eastlake's ruined mansion, where he had once lived with his housekeeper and his six girls--happily enough, I suppose, before Libbit's tumble from the pony-trap changed things.

  It also gilded the ancient, coral-encrusted skeleton that lay on the mattress of trampled vines Jack and Wireman had uprooted to free the cistern cap. Looking at Emery Paulson's remains, a snatch of Shakespeare from my high school days recurred, and I spoke it aloud: "Full fathom five thy father lies . . . those are pearls that were his eyes."

  Jack shivered violently, as if stroked by a keen wet wind. He actually clutched himself. This time he got it.

  Wireman bent and picked up one thin, trailing arm. It snapped in three without a sound. Emery Paulson had been in the caldo a long, long time. There was a harpoon sticking through the shelly harp of his ribs. Wireman retrieved it now, having to work the tip free of the ground in order to take it back.

  "How'd you keep the Twins from Hell off you with the spear-pistol unloaded?" I asked.

  Wireman jabbed the harpoon in his hand like a dagger.

  Jack nodded. "Yeah. I grabbed one out of his belt and did the same. I don't know how long it would have worked over the long haul, though--they were like mad dogs."

  Wireman replaced the silver-tipped harpoon he'd used on Emery in his belt. "Speaking of the long haul, we might consider another storage container for your new doll. What do you think, Edgar?"

  He was right. Somehow I couldn't imagine Perse spending the next eighty years in the barrel of a Garrity flashlight. I was already wondering how thin the shield between the battery case and the lens housing might be. And the rock that had fallen out of the cistern wall and cracked the Table Whiskey keg: had that been an accident . . . or a final victory of mind over matter after years of patient work? Perse's version of digging through the wall of her cell with a sharpened spoonhandle?

  Still, the flashlight had served its purpose. God bless Jack Cantori's practical mind. No--that was too chintzy. God bless Jack.

  "There's a custom silversmith in Sarasota," Wireman said. "Mexicano muy talentoso. Miss Eastlake has--had--a few pieces of his stuff. I bet I could commission him to make a watertight tube big enough to hold the flashlight. That'd give us what insurance companies and football coaches call double coverage. It'd be pricey, but so what? Barring probate snags, I'm going to be an extremely wealthy man. Caught a break there, muchacho."

  "La loteria," I said, without thinking.

  "Si," he said. "La goddam loteria. Come on, Jack. Help me tip Emery into the cistern."

  Jack grimaced. "Okay, but I . . . I really don't want to touch it."

  "I'll help with Emery," I said. "You hold onto the flashlight. Wireman? Let's do this."

  The two of us rolled Emery into the hole, then threw in the pieces of him that broke off--or as many as we could find. I still remember his stony coral grin as he tumbled into the dark to join his bride. And sometimes, of course, I dream about it. In these dreams I hear Adie and Em calling up to me from the dark, asking me if I wouldn't like to come down and join them. And sometimes in those dreams I do. Sometimes I throw myself into that dark and stinking throat just to make an end to my memories.

  These are the dreams from which I wake up screaming, thrashing at the dark with a hand that is no longer there.

  xiv

  Wireman and Jack slid the cap into position again, and then we went back to Elizabeth's Mercedes. That was a slow, painful walk, and by the end of it I really wasn't walking at all; I was lurching. It was as if the clock had been rolled back to the previous October. I was a
lready thinking of the few Oxycontin tablets I had waiting for me back at Big Pink. I would have three, I decided. Three would do more than kill the pain; with luck they would also pound me into at least a few hours of sleep.

  Both of my friends asked if I didn't want to sling an arm around them. I refused. This wasn't going to be my last walk tonight; I had made up my mind about that. I still didn't have the last piece of the puzzle, but I had an idea. What had Elizabeth told Wireman? You will want to but you mustn't.

  Too late, too late, too late.

  The idea wasn't clear. What was clear was the sound of the shells. You could hear that sound from anywhere inside Big Pink, but to get the full effect, you really had to come up on the place from outside. That was when they sounded the most like voices. So many nights I had wasted painting when I could have been listening.

  Tonight I would listen.

  Outside the pillars, Wireman paused. "Abyssus abyssum invocat," he said.

  "Hell invokes Hell," Jack said, and sighed.

  Wireman looked at me. "Think we'll have any trouble negotiating the road home?"

  "Now? No."

  "And are we done here?"

  "We are."

  "Will we ever come again?"

  "No," I said. I looked at the ruined house, dreaming in the moonlight. Its secrets were out. I realized we'd left little Libbit's heart-shaped box behind, but maybe that was for the best. Let it stay here. "No one will come here anymore."

  Jack looked at me, curious and a little afraid. "How can you know that?"

  "I know," I said.

  21--The Shells by Moonlight

  i

  We had no trouble negotiating the road home. The smell was still there, but it was better now--partly because a good wind was getting up, blowing in off the Gulf, and partly because it was just . . . better now.

  The courtyard lights of El Palacio were on a timer, and they looked wonderful, twinkling out of the dark. Inside the house, Wireman went methodically from room to room, turning on more lights. Turning on all the lights, until the house where Elizabeth had spent most of her life glowed like an ocean-liner coming into port at midnight.

  When El Palacio was lit to the max, we took turns in the shower, passing the water-filled flashlight from hand to hand like a baton as we did so. Someone was always holding it. Wireman went first, then Jack, then me. After showering, each of us was inspected by the other two, then scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide where any skin was broken. I was the worst, and when I finally put my clothes back on, I stung all over.

  I was finishing with my boots, laboriously tying them one-handed, when Wireman came into the guest bedroom looking grave. "There's a message you need to hear on the machine downstairs. From the Tampa Police. Here, let me help you."

  He went down on one knee before me and began tightening my laces. I saw without surprise that the gray in his hair had advanced . . . and suddenly a bolt of alarm went through me. I reached out and grabbed his meaty shoulder. "The flashlight! Does Jack--"

  "Relax. He's sitting in Miss Eastlake's old China Parlor, and he's got it on his lap."

  I hurried, nevertheless. I don't know what I expected to find--the room empty, the unscrewed flashlight lying on the rug in a puddle of dampness, maybe, or Jack sex-changed into the three-eyed, claw-handed bitch that had come falling out of the old cracked keg--but he was only sitting there with the flashlight, looking troubled. I asked if he was all right. And I took a good look at his eyes. If he was going . . . wrong . . . I thought I'd see it in his eyes.

  "I'm fine. But that message from the cop . . ." He shook his head.

  "Well, let's hear it."

  A man identifying himself as Detective Samson said that he was trying to reach both Edgar Freemantle and Jerome Wireman, to ask some questions about Mary Ire. He particularly wanted to speak to Mr. Freemantle, if he had not left for Rhode Island or Minnesota--where, Samson understood, the body of his daughter was being transported for burial.

  "I'm sure Mr. Freemantle is in a state of bereavement," Samson said, "and I'm sure these are really Providence P.D.'s questions, but we know Mr. Freemantle did a newspaper interview with the Ire woman recently, and I volunteered to talk with him and yourself, Mr. Wireman, if possible. I can tell you over the phone what Providence is most curious about, if this message tape doesn't run out . . ." It didn't. And the last piece fell into place.

  ii

  "Edgar, this is crazy," Jack said. It was the third time he'd said it, and he was beginning to sound desperate. "Totally nuts." He turned to Wireman. "You tell him!"

  "Un poco loco," Wireman agreed, but I knew the difference between poco and muy even if Jack didn't.

  We were standing in the courtyard, between Jack's sedan and Elizabeth's old Mercedes. The moon had risen higher; so had the wind. The surf was pounding the shore, and a mile away, the shells under Big Pink would be discussing all sorts of strange things: muy asustador. "But I think I could talk all night and still not change his mind."

  "Because you know I'm right," I said.

  "Tu perdon, amigo, you might be right," he said. "I'll tell you one thing: Wireman intends to get down on his fat and aging knees and pray you are."

  Jack looked at the flashlight in my hand. "At least don't take that," he said. "Excuse my French, boss, but you're fucking crazy to take that!"

  "I know what I'm doing," I said, hoping to God it was true. "And stay here, both of you. Don't try to follow me." I raised the flashlight and pointed it at Wireman. "You're on your honor."

  "All right, Edgar. My honor's a tattered thing, but I swear on it. One practical question: are you sure two Tylenol will be enough to get you down the beach to your house on your feet, or are you going to wind up doing the Crawly-Gator?"

  "I'll get there upright."

  "And you'll call when you do."

  "I'll call."

  He opened his arms then, and I stepped into them. He kissed me on both cheeks. "I love you, Edgar," he said. "You're a hell of a man. Sano como una manzana."

  "What does that one mean?"

  He shrugged. "Stay healthy. I think."

  Jack offered his hand--the left one, the boy was a learner--and then decided a hug was in order, after all. In my ear he whispered, "Give me the flashlight, boss."

  In his I whispered back: "Can't. Sorry."

  I started along the path to the back of the house, the one that would take me to the boardwalk. At the end of that boardwalk, a thousand or so years ago, I'd met the big man I was now leaving behind. He had been sitting under a striped umbrella. He had offered me iced green tea, very cooling. And he had said, So--the limping stranger arriveth at last.

  And now he goeth, I thought.

  I turned back. They were watching me.

  "Muchacho!" Wireman called.

  I thought he was going to ask me to come back so we could think about this a little more, talk it over a little more. But I had underestimated him.

  "Vaya con Dios, mi hombre."

  I gave him a final wave and walked around the corner of the house.

  iii

  So then I took my last Great Beach Walk, as limping and painful as my first ones along that shell-littered shore. Only those had been by the rosy light of early morning, when the world was at its most still, the only things moving the mild lap of the waves and the brown clouds of peeps that fled before me. This was different. Tonight the wind roared and the waves raged, not alighting on the shore but committing suicide on it. The rollers farther out were painted chrome, and several times I thought I saw the Perse from the corner of my eye, but each time I turned to look, there was nothing. Tonight there was nothing on my part of the Gulf but moonlight.

  I lurched along, flashlight gripped in my hand, thinking of the day I had walked here with Ilse. She had asked me if this was the most beautiful place on earth and I had assured her that no, there were at least three others that were more beautiful . . . but I couldn't remember what I'd told her those others were, only that they were
hard to spell. What I remembered most clearly was her saying I deserved a beautiful place, and time to rest. Time to heal.

  Tears started to come then, and I let them. I had the flashlight in the hand I could have used to wipe them away, so I just let them come.

  iv

  I heard Big Pink before I actually saw it. The shells under the house had never been so loud. I walked a little farther, then stopped. It was just ahead of me now, a black shape where the stars were blotted out. Another forty or fifty slow, limping paces, and moonlight began to fill in the details. All the lights were out, even the ones I almost always left on in the kitchen and Florida room. That could have been a power outage caused by the wind, but I didn't think that was it.

  I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations.

  And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

  I walked on, leaving tracks behind me that featured one dragging foot. The blacked-out hulk of Big Pink grew closer. It wasn't ruined like Heron's Roost, but tonight it was haunted. Tonight there was a ghost waiting. Or maybe something a little more solid.

  The wind gusted and I looked left, into its pushing force. The ship was out there now, all right, lightless and silent, its sails so many flapping rags in the wind, waiting.

  Might as well go, the shells said as I stood in the moonlight, now less than twenty yards from my house. Wipe the blackboard clean--it can be done, no one knows it better than you--and just sail away. Leave this sadness behind. If you want to play you gotta pay. And the best part?

  "The best part is I don't have to go alone," I said.

  The wind gusted. The shells murmured. And from the blackness under the house, where that bony bed lay six feet deep, a darker shadow slipped free and stepped into the moonlight. It stood bent over for a moment, as if considering, and then began to come toward me.

  She began to come toward me. But not Perse; Perse had been drowned to sleep.