Duma Key (57 page)

“Nothing else?” I asked, handing the invitation back.

“She said my name a couple of times. She knew me. And she said yours, Edgar.”

“Have a look at this,” I said, and slid the manila envelope across the table.

He asked where I'd gotten it and I told him. He said it all seemed a little convenient, and I shrugged. I was remembering something Elizabeth had said to me—
The water runs faster now. Soon come the rapids.
Well, the rapids were here. I had a feeling this was only the start of the white water.

My hip was starting to feel a little better, its late-night sobbing down to mere sniffles. According to popular wisdom, a dog is a man's best friend, but I would vote for aspirin. I pulled my chair around the table and sat next to Wireman, where I could read the headline:
DUMA KEY TOT BLOSSOMS FOLLOWING SPILL—IS SHE A CHILD PRODIGY?
Beneath was a photograph. In it was a man I knew well in a bathing suit I knew well: John Eastlake in his slimmer, trimmer incarnation. He was smiling, and holding up a smiling little girl. It was Elizabeth, looking the same age as in the family portrait of Daddy and His Girls, only now she was holding out a drawing to the camera in both hands and wearing a gauze bandage wrapped around her head. There was another, much older girl in the picture—big sister Adriana, and yes, she could have been a carrot-top—but to begin with, Wireman and I paid little attention to her. Or to John Eastlake. Or even to the toddler with the bandage around her head.

“Holy wow,” Wireman said.

The picture was of a horse looking over a fence rail. It wore an unlikely (and un-equine) smile. In the foreground, back-to, was a little girl with lots of golden ringlets, holding out a carrot the size of a shotgun for the smiling horse to eat. To either side, bracketing the picture almost like theater curtains, were palm trees. Above were puffy white clouds and a great big sun, shooting off happy-rays of light.

It was a child's picture, but the talent that had created it was beyond doubt. The horse had a
joie de vivre
that made the smile the punchline of a cheerful joke. You could put a dozen art students in a room,
tell them to execute a happy horse, and I was willing to bet not one of them would be able to match the success of that picture. Even the oversized carrot felt not like a mistake but part of the giggle, an intensifier, an artistic steroid.

“It's
not
a joke,” I muttered, bending closer . . . only bending closer did no good. I was seeing this picture through four aggravating levels of obfuscation: the photograph, the newspaper reproduction of the photograph, the Xerox of the newspaper reproduction of the photograph . . . and time itself. Over eighty years of it, if I had the math right.

“What's not a joke?” Wireman asked.

“The way the size of the horse is exaggerated. And the carrot. Even the sunrays. It's a child's cry of glee, Wireman!”

“A hoax is what it is. Got to be. She would have been
two
! A child of two can't even make stick figures and call em mommy and daddy, can she?”

“Was what happened to Candy Brown a hoax? Or what about the bullet that used to be in your brain? The one that's now gone?”

He was silent.

I tapped
CHILD PRODIGY
. “Look, they even had the right fancy term for it. Do you suppose if she'd been poor and black, they would have called her
PICKANINNY FREAK
and stuck her in a sideshow somewhere? Because I sort of do.”

“If she'd been poor and black, she never would have made the paper at all. Or fallen out of a pony-trap to begin with.”

“Is that what hap—” I stopped, my eye caught by the blurry photograph again. Now it was big sis I was looking at. Adriana.

“What?” Wireman asked, and his tone was
What now?

“Her bathing suit. Look familiar to you?”

“I can't see very much, just the top. Elizabeth's holding her picture out in front of the rest.”

“What about the part you can see?”

He looked for a long time. “Wish I had a magnifying glass.”

“That would probably make it worse instead of better.”

“All right,
muchacho,
it
does
look vaguely familiar . . . but maybe that's just an idea you put in my head.”

“In all the
Girl and Ship
paintings, there was only one Rowboat Girl I was never sure of: the one in
No. 6
. The one with the orangey hair, the one in the blue singlet with the yellow stripe around the neck.” I tapped Adriana's blurred image in the photocopy Mary Ire had given me. “This is the girl. This is the swimming suit. I'm sure of it. So was Elizabeth.”

“What are we saying here?” Wireman asked. He was skimming the print, rubbing at his temples as he did so. I asked if his eye was bothering him.

“No. This is just so . . . so fucking . . .” He looked up at me, eyes big, still rubbing his temples. “She fell out of the goddam pony-trap and hit her head on a rock, or so it says here. Woke up in the doctor's infirmary just as they were getting ready to transport her to the hospital in St. Pete. Seizures thereafter. It says, ‘The seizures continue for Baby Elizabeth, although they are moderating and seem to do her no lasting harm.' And she started painting pictures!”

I said, “The accident must have happened right after the big group portrait was taken, because she looks exactly the same, and they change fast at that age.”

Wireman seemed not to notice. “We're all in the same rowboat,” he said.

I started to ask him what he meant, then realized I didn't have to. “
Sí, señor,
” I said.

“She fell on her head. I shot myself in the head.
You
got your head crushed by a payloader.”

“Crane.”

He waved his hand as if to indicate this made no difference. Then he used the hand to grip my surviving wrist. His fingers were cold. “I have questions,
muchacho.
How come she stopped painting? And how come I never started?”

“I can't say for certain why she stopped. Maybe she forgot—blocked it out—or maybe she deliberately lied and denied. As for you, your talent's empathy. And on Duma Key, empathy got raised to telepathy.”

“That's bullshi . . .” He trailed off.

I waited.

“No,” he said. “No. It's not. But it's also completely gone. Want to know something,
amigo
?”

“Sure.”

He cocked a thumb at the tense family group across the room from us. They had gone back to their discussion. Pop was now shaking his finger at Mom. Or maybe it was Sis. “A couple of months ago, I could have told you what that hoopdedoo was about. Now all I could do is make an educated guess.”

“And probably come out in much the same place,” I said. “Would you trade one for the other in any case? Your eyesight for the occasional thoughtwave?”

“God, no!” he said, then looked around the caff with an ironic, despairing, head-cocked smile. “I can't believe we're having this discussion, you know. I
keep thinking I'll wake up and it'll all be as you were, Private Wireman, assume the position.”

I looked him in the eye. “Ain't gonna happen.”

x

According to the
Weekly Echo,
Baby Elizabeth (as she was referred to almost throughout) began her artistic endeavors on the very first day of her at-home convalescence. She quickly went on, “gaining skill and prowess with each passing hour, it seemed to her amazed father.” She started with colored pencils (“Sound familiar?” Wireman asked), before progressing to a box of watercolors the bemused John Eastlake brought home from Venice.

In the three months following her accident, much of it spent in bed, she had done literally hundreds of watercolors, turning them out at a rate John Eastlake and the other girls found a little frightening. (If “Nan Melda” had an opinion, it wasn't offered in print.) Eastlake tried to slow her down—on doctor's orders—but this was counterproductive. It caused fretfulness, crying fits, insomnia, bouts of fever. Baby Elizabeth said when she couldn't draw or paint, “her head hurted.” Her father said that when she did paint, “She ate like one of the horses she liked to draw.” The article's author, one M. Rickert, seemed to find this endearing. Recalling my own eating binges, I found it all too familiar.

I was going over the muddy print for the third time, with Wireman where my right arm would have been, if I'd had a right arm, when the door opened and Gene Hadlock came in. He was still wearing the
black tie and bright pink shirt he'd had on at the show, although the tie had been pulled down and the collar was loosened. He was still wearing green scrub pants and green bootees over his shoes. His head was down. When he looked up I saw a face that was as long and sad as an old bloodhound's.

“Eleven-nineteen,” he said. “There was never really a chance.”

Wireman put his face in his hands.

xi

I got to the Ritz at quarter to one in the morning, limping with fatigue and not wanting to be there. I wanted to be in my bedroom at Big Pink. I wanted to lie in the middle of my bed, push the strange new doll to the floor as I had the ornamental pillows, and hug Reba to me. I wanted to lie there and look at the turning fan. Most of all, I wanted to listen to the whispered conversation of the shells under the house as I drifted off to sleep.

Instead I had this lobby to deal with: too ornate, too full of people and music (cocktail piano even at this hour), most of all, too bright. Still, my family was here. I had missed the celebratory dinner. I would not miss the celebratory breakfast.

I asked the clerk for my key. He gave it to me, along with a stack of messages. I opened them one after another. Most were congratulations. The one from Ilse was different. It read:
Are you okay? If I
don't see you by 8 AM, I'm coming to find you. Fair warning.

At the very bottom was one from Pam. The note itself was only four words long:
I know she died
.
Everything else that needed saying was expressed by the enclosure. It was her room key.

xii

I stood outside 847 five minutes later with the key in my hand. I'd move it toward the slot, then move my finger toward the doorbell, then look back toward the elevators. I must have stood that way for five minutes or more, too exhausted to make up my mind, and might have stood there even longer if I hadn't heard the elevator doors open, followed by the sound of tipsy convivial laughter. I was afraid it would turn out to be someone I knew—Tom and Bozie, or Big Ainge and his wife. Maybe even Lin and Ric. In the end I hadn't booked the entire floor, but I'd taken most of it.

I pushed the key into the lock. It was the electronic kind you didn't even have to turn. A green light came on, and as the laughter from down the hall came closer, I slipped inside.

I had ordered her a suite, and the living room was big. There had apparently been a before-show party, because there were two room-service tables and lots of plates with the remains of canapés on them. I spotted two—no, three champagne buckets. Two of the bottles were sticking bottoms-up, dead soldiers. The third appeared to still be alive, although on life support.

That made me think of Elizabeth again. I saw her sitting beside her China Village, looking like Katharine Hepburn in
Woman of the Year,
saying
See
how I've put the children outside the schoolhouse! Do come see!

Pain is the biggest power of love. That's what Wireman says.

I threaded my way around chairs where my nearest and dearest had sat, talking and laughing and—I was sure of it—toasting my hard work and good fortune. I took the last champagne bottle from the pool in which it sat, held it up to the wall-length picture-window showcasing Sarasota Bay, and said: “Here's to you, Elizabeth.
Hasta la vista, mi amada
.”

“What does
amada
mean?”

I turned. Pam was standing in the bedroom doorway. She was wearing a blue nightgown I didn't remember. Her hair was down. It hadn't been so long since Ilse was in junior high school. It touched her shoulders.

“It means darling,” I said. “I learned it from Wireman. He was married to a Mexican woman.”

“Was?”

“She died. Who told you about Elizabeth?”

“The young man who works for you. I asked him to call if there was news. I'm so sorry.”

I smiled. I tried to put the champagne bottle back and missed the bucket. Hell, I missed the table. The bottle hit the carpet and rolled. Once the Daughter of the Godfather had been a child, holding out her picture of a smiling horse for a photographer's camera, the photographer probably some jazzy guy wearing a straw hat and arm garters. Then she had been an old woman jittering away the last of her life in a wheelchair while her snood came loose and flailed from one final hairpin under the fluorescent lights of an art gallery office. And the time between? It probably
seemed like no more than a nod or the wave of a hand to the clear blue sky. In the end we all go smash to the floor.

Pam held out her arms. There was a full moon shining in through the big window, and by its light I could see the rose tattoo on the swell of her breast. Something else new and different . . . but the breast was familiar. I knew it well. “Come here,” she said.

I came. I struck one of the room-service tables with my bad hip, gave a muttering cry, and stumbled the last two steps into her arms, thinking this was a nice reunion, we were both going to land on the carpet, me on top of her. Maybe I could even break a couple of her ribs. It was certainly possible; I'd put on twenty pounds since coming to Duma Key.

But she was strong. I forgot that. She held my weight, at first bracing against the side of the bedroom door, then standing up straight with me in her arms. I put my own arm around her and laid my cheek on her shoulder, just breathing in the scent of her.