Duma Key (69 page)

I pulled on my jeans and left everything else lying on the floor, including the harpoon with the silver tip. I didn't think Emery Paulson would be back to visit me, not by daylight. I checked on Wireman, but that was only a formality; I could hear him snoring and whistling away. He was once more on his back, arms thrown wide.

I went downstairs to the kitchen and shook my head over the broken faucet and the juice glass with the dried Half-n-Half scum on its sides. I found a bigger glass in a cupboard and filled it with oj. I took it out on the back porch. The wind blowing in from the Gulf was strong but warm, lifting my sweaty hair back from my brow and temples. It felt good. Soothing. I decided to walk to the beach and drink my juice there.

I stopped three-quarters of the way down the boardwalk, about to take a sip of my juice. The glass was tipped, and some of it splattered on one bare foot. I barely noticed.

Out there on the Gulf, riding in toward shore on one of the large, wind-driven waves, was a bright green tennis ball.

It means nothing,
I told myself, but that wouldn't hold water. It meant everything, and I knew it from the moment I saw it. I tossed the glass into the sea oats and broke into a lunging lurch—the Edgar Freemantle version of running that year.

It took me fifteen seconds to reach the end of the boardwalk, maybe even less, but in that time I saw three more tennis balls floating in on the tide. Then six, then eight. Most were off to my right—to the north.

I wasn't watching where I was going and plunged off the end of the boardwalk into thin air, arm whirling. I hit the sand still running and might have stayed up if I'd landed on my good leg, but I didn't. A zigzag of pain corkscrewed up my bad one, shin to knee to hip, and I went sprawling in the sand. Six inches in front of my nose was one of those damned tennis balls, its fuzz soaked flat.

DUNLOP
was printed on the side, the letters as black as damnation.

I struggled to my feet, looking wildly out at the Gulf. There were only a few incoming balls in front of
El Palacio,
but farther north, near Big Pink, I saw a green flotilla—a hundred at least, probably many more.

It means nothing. She's safe. She burned the picture and she's asleep in her apartment a thousand miles from here, safe and sound.

“It means
nothing,
” I said, but now the wind blowing my hair back felt cold instead of warm. I began to limp toward Big Pink, down where the sand was wet and packed and shining. The peeps flew up in front of me in clouds. Every now and then an incoming wave would drop a tennis ball at my feet. There were lots
of them now, scattered on the wet hardpack. Then I came to a burst-open crate reading
Dunlop Tennis Balls
and
FACTORY REJECTS NO CANS
. It was surrounded by floating, bobbing tennis balls.

I broke into a run.

xi

I unlocked the door and left my keys hanging in the lock. Lurched to the phone and saw the message light blinking. I pushed the PLAY button. The robot's expressionless male voice told me that this message had been received at 6:48 AM, which meant I had missed it by less than half an hour. Then Pam's voice burst out of the speaker. I bent my head, the way you'd bend your head to try and keep a burst of jagged glass fragments from flying directly into your face.

“Edgar, the police called and they say Illy's dead! They say a woman named Mary Ire came to her apartment and killed her! One of your
friends
! One of your
art friends
from
Florida
has killed our
daughter
!” She burst into a storm of harsh and ugly weeping . . . then laughed. It was horrible, that laugh. I felt as if one of those flying shards of glass had cut into my face. “Call me, you bastard. Call and explain yourself.
You said she'd be SAFE!
”

Then more crying. It was cut off by a click. Next came the hum of an open line.

I reached out and pushed the OFF button, silencing it.

I walked into the Florida room and looked at the tennis balls, still bobbing in on the waves. I felt doubled, like a man watching a man.

The dead twins had left a message in my studio—
Where our sister?
Had Illy been the sister they meant?

I could almost hear the hag laughing and see her nodding.

“Are you here, Perse?” I asked.

The wind rushed in through the screens. The waves crashed on the shore with metronome-like regularity. Birds flew over the water, crying. On the beach I could see another burst-open tennis ball crate, already half-buried in the sand. Treasure from the sea; fair salvage from the
caldo
. She was watching, all right. Waiting for me to break down. I was quite sure of it. Her—what? her guardians?—might sleep in the daytime, but not her.

“I win, you win,” I said. “But you think you got your lasties, don't you? Clever Perse.”

Of course she was clever. She'd been playing the game for a long time. I had an idea she'd been old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt. Sometimes she slept, but now she was awake.

And her reach was long.

My phone began to ring. I went back in, still feeling like two Edgars, one earthbound, the other floating above the earthbound Edgar's head, and picked it up. It was Dario. He sounded upset.

“Edgar? What's this shit about not releasing the paintings to—”

“Not now, Dario,” I said. “Hush.” I broke the connection and called Pam. Now that I wasn't thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

Pam was calmer. I don't know what she'd taken,
but it was already working. We talked for twenty minutes. She wept through most of the conversation, and was intermittently accusatory, but when I made no effort to defend myself, her anger collapsed into grief and bewilderment. I got the salient points, or so I thought then. There was one very salient point that we both were missing, but as a wise man once said, “You can't hit em if you can't see em,” and the police representative who called Pam didn't think to tell her what Mary Ire had brought to our daughter's Providence apartment.

Besides the gun, that was. The Beretta.

“The police say she must have driven, and almost nonstop,” Pam said dully. “She never could have gotten a gun like that on an airplane. Why did she do it? Was it another fucking
painting
?”

“Of course it was,” I said. “She bought one. I never thought of that. I never thought of
her
. Not once. It was Illy's fucking
boyfriend
I was worried about.”

Speaking very calmly, my ex-wife—that's what she surely was now—said: “
You
did this.”

Yes. I had. I should have realized Mary Ire would buy at least one painting, and that she'd probably want a canvas from the
Girl and Ship
series—the most toxic of all. Nor would she have wanted the Scoto to store it, not when she lived right up the road in Tampa. For all I knew, she might have had it in the trunk of her beat-up Mercedes when she dropped me at the hospital. From there she could have gone right to her place on Davis Islands to get her home protection automatic. Hell, it would have been on her way north.

That part I should have at least guessed. I had met her, after all, and I knew what she thought of my work.

“Pam, something very bad is happening on this island. I—”

“Do you think I care about that, Edgar? Or about why that woman did it? You got our daughter killed. I don't ever want to talk to you again, I don't want to
see
you again, and I'd rather poke out my eyes than ever have to look at another picture of yours. You should have died when that crane hit you.” There was an awful thoughtfulness in her voice. “That would have been a happy ending.”

There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my nineteen-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

Then, slowly, I walked back out through the door. I left it open. There seemed no reason to lock it now. There was a broom meant for sweeping sand off the walk leaning against the side of the house. I looked at it and my right arm began to itch. I lifted my right hand and held it in front of my eyes. It wasn't there, but when I opened it and closed it, I could feel it flex. I could also feel a couple of long nails biting into my palm. The others felt short and ragged. They must have broken off. Somewhere—perhaps on the carpet upstairs in Little Pink—were a couple of ghost fingernails.

“Go away,” I told it. “I don't want you anymore, go away and be dead.”

It didn't. It wouldn't. Like the arm to which it had once been attached, the hand itched and throbbed and ached and refused to leave me.

“Then go find my daughter,” I said, and the tears began to flow. “Bring her back, why don't you? Bring her to me. I'll paint anything you want, just bring her to me.”

Nothing. I was just a one-armed man with a phantom itch. The only ghost was his own, drifting around just over his head, observing all this.

The creeping in my flesh grew worse. I picked the broom up, weeping now not just from grief but also from the horrible discomfort of that unreachable itch, then realized I couldn't do what I needed to do—a one-armed man can't snap a broomhandle over his knee. I leaned it against the house again and stomped it with my good leg. There was a snap, and the bristle end went flying. I held the jagged end up in front of my streaming eyes and nodded. It would do.

I went around the corner of the house toward the beach, a distant part of my mind registering the loud conversation of the shells beneath Big Pink as the waves dashed into the darkness there and then withdrew.

I had one fleeting thought as I reached the wet and shining hardpack, dotted here and there with tennis balls: The third thing Elizabeth had said to Wireman was
You will want to, but you
mustn't
.

“Too late,” I said, and then the string tethering the Edgar over my head broke. He floated away, and for a little while I knew no more.

i

I next remember Wireman coming along and picking me up. I remember walking a few steps, then recalling that Ilse was dead and collapsing to my knees. And the most shameful thing was that, even though I was heartbroken, I was also hungry. Starving.

I remember Wireman helping me in through the open door and telling me it was all a bad dream, that I'd been having the horrors, and when I told him no, it was true, Mary Ire had done it, Mary Ire had drowned Ilse in Ilse's own bathtub, he had laughed and said that now he knew it. For one horrible moment I believed him.

I pointed to the answering machine. “Play the message,” I said, and went into the kitchen. Staggered into the kitchen. When Pam started in again—
Edgar, the police called and they say Illy's dead!
—I was eating fistfuls of Frosted Mini-Wheats straight from the box. I had a queer sense of being part of a prepared slide. Soon I would be placed under a microscope and studied. In the other room, the message ended. Wireman cursed and played it again. I kept eating cereal. The time I'd spent on the beach before Wireman came along was missing. That part of my memory was as blank as my early hospital stay after my accident.

I took a final handful of cereal, crammed it into my
mouth, and swallowed. It stuck in my throat, and that was good. That was fine. I hoped it would choke me. I
deserved
to choke. Then it slid down. I went shuffle-limping back into the living room. Wireman was standing beside the answering machine, wide-eyed.

“Edgar . . . 
muchacho
 . . . what in God's name—?”

“One of the paintings,” I said, and kept on shuffling. Now that I had something in my stomach, I wanted some more oblivion. If only for a little while. Only it was more than wanting, actually; it was needing. I had broken the broomhandle . . . then Wireman came along. What was in the ellipsis? I didn't know.

I decided I didn't
want
to know.

“The paintings . . . ?”

“Mary Ire bought one. I'm sure it was one from the
Girl and Ship
series. And she took it with her. We should have known.
I
should have known. Wireman, I need to lie down. I need to sleep. Two hours, okay? Then wake me and we'll go to the south end.”

“Edgar, you can't . . . I don't expect you to after . . .”

I stopped to look at him. It felt as though my head weighed a hundred pounds, but I managed. “
She
doesn't expect me to, either, but this ends today. Two hours.”

Big Pink's open door faced east, and the morning sun struck brightly across Wireman's face, lighting a compassion so strong I could barely look at it. “Okay,
muchacho
. Two hours.”

“In the meantime, try to keep everyone clear.” I don't know if he heard that last part or not. I was facing into my bedroom by then, and the words were trailing away. I fell onto my bed, and there was Reba. For a moment I considered throwing her across
the room, as I had considered throwing the phone. Instead I gathered her to me and pressed my face against her boneless body and began to cry. I was still crying when I fell asleep.

ii

“Wake up.” Someone was shaking me. “Wake up, Edgar. If we're going to do this, we have to get rolling.”