Duma Key

i

“All right, Edgar, I think we’re almost finished.”

Maybe she saw something on my face, because Mary laughed. “Has it been that awful?”

“No,” I said, and it hadn’t been, really, although her questions about my technique had made me feel uncomfortable. What it came down to was I looked at things, then slopped on the paint. That was my technique. And influences? What could I say? The light. It always came down to the light, both in the pictures I liked to look at and the ones I liked to paint. What it did to the surface of things, and what it seemed to suggest about what was inside, hunting a way out. But that didn’t sound scholarly; to my ears it sounded goofy.

“Okay,” she said, “last subject: how many more paintings are there?”

We were sitting in Mary Ire’s penthouse apartment on Davis Islands, a tony Tampa enclave which looked to me like the art deco capital of the world. The living room was a vast, nearly empty space with a couch at one end and two slingback chairs at the other. There were no books, but then, there was no TV, either. On the east wall, where it would catch the early light, was a large David Hockney. Mary and I were at opposite ends of the couch. She had her shorthand pad in her lap. There was an ashtray perched beside her on the arm of the sofa. Between us was a big silver Wollensak tape-recorder. It had to be fifty years old, but the reels turned soundlessly. German engineering, baby.

Mary wore no make-up, but her lips were coated with clear goo that made them shine. Her hair was tied up in a careless, coming-apart twist that looked simultaneously elegant and slatternly. She smoked English Ovals and sipped what looked like straight Scotch from a Waterford tumbler (she offered me a drink and seemed disappointed when I opted for bottled water). She wore tailored cotton slacks. Her face looked old, used, and sexy. Its best days might have been around the time Bonnie and Clyde was playing in theaters, but her eyes were still breathtaking, even with lines at the corners, cracks in the eyelids, and no make-up to enhance them. They were Sophia Loren eyes.

“You showed twenty-two slides at the Selby. Nine were of pencil-sketches. Very interesting, but small. And eleven paintings, because there were actually three slides of Wireman Looks West, two close-ups and the wide-angle. So how many other paintings are there? How many will you be showing at the Scoto next month?”

“Well,” I said, “I can’t say for sure, because I’m painting all the time, but I think right now there are about… twenty more.”

“Twenty,” she said, softly and tonelessly. “Twenty more.”

Something about the way she was looking at me made me uncomfortable and I shifted around. The sofa creaked. “I think the actual number might be twenty-one.” Of course there were a few pictures I wasn’t counting. Friends with Benefits, for instance. The one I sometimes thought of as Candy Brown Loses His Breath. And the red-robe sketch.

“So. Over thirty in all.”

I did the addition in my head and shifted around some more. “I guess so.”

“And you have no idea how amazing that is. I can see by your face that you don’t.” She got up, dumped her ashtray in a wastebasket behind the couch, then stood looking at the Hockney with her hands in the pockets of her expensive slacks. The painting showed a cube of a house and a blue swimming pool. Beside the pool was a ripe teenager in a black tank suit. She was all breasts and long tanned legs and dark hair. She wore dark glasses, and a tiny sun blazed in each lens.

“Is that an original?” I asked.

“Yes indeed,” she said, without turning. “The girl in the swimsuit is an original, too. Mary Ire, circa 1962. Gidget in Tampa.” She turned to me, her face fierce. “Turn that tape recorder off. The interview is over.”

I turned it off.

“I want you to listen to me. Will you?”

“Of course.”

“There are artists who labor for months over a single painting of half the quality your work shows. Of course many spend their mornings getting over the excesses of the night before. But you… you’re producing these things like a man working on an assembly line. Like a magazine illustrator or a… I don’t know… a comic-book artist!”

“I grew up believing folks were supposed to work hard at what they do — I think that’s all it is. When I had my own company, I worked much longer hours, because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.”

She nodded. “Not true for everyone, but when it is true, it’s really true. I know.”

“I just carried that… you know, that ethic… over to what I do now. And it’s all right. Hell, it’s better than all right. I turn on the radio… it’s like I go into a daze… and I paint…” I was blushing. “I’m not trying to set the world’s land-speed record, or anything—”

“I know that,” she said. “Tell me, do you block?”

“Block?” I knew what the word meant in a football context; otherwise, I was drawing a blank. “What’s that?”

“Never mind. In Wireman Looks West — which is staggering, by the way, that brain — how did you set the features?”

“I took some pictures,” I said.

“I’m sure you did, darling, but when you got ready to paint the portrait, how did you set the features?”

“I… well, I—”

“Did you use the third-eye rule?”

“Third-eye rule? I never heard of any third-eye rule.”

She smiled at me kindly. “In order to get the right spacing between a subject’s eyes, painters will often imagine or even block a third eye between the two actual ones. What about the mouth? Did you center it using the ears?”

“No… that is, I didn’t know you were supposed to do that.” Now it felt as if I were blushing all over my body.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m not suggesting y’all start following a bunch of bullshit art school rules after breaking them so spectacularly. It’s just…” She shook her head. “Thirty paintings since last November? No, it’s even less time than that, because you didn’t start painting right away.”

“Of course not, I had to get some art supplies first,” I said, and Mary laughed herself into a coughing fit that she washed away with a sip of Scotch.

“If thirty paintings in three months is what almost getting crushed to death does,” she said when she could talk again, “maybe I ought to find me a crane.”

“You wouldn’t want to,” I said. “Believe me.” I got up, went to the window, and looked down on Adalia Street. “This is some place you’ve got here.”

She joined me, and we looked out together. The sidewalk café directly across and seven stories below might have been airlifted in from New Orleans. Or Paris. A woman strolled up the sidewalk eating what looked like a baguette, the hem of her red skirt swirling. Somewhere someone was playing a twelve-bar guitar blues, every note ringing clear. “Tell me something, Edgar — when you look out there, does what you see interest you as an artist or as the builder you used to be?”

“Both,” I said.

She laughed. “Fair enough. Davis Islands is entirely artificial — the brainchild of a man named Dave Davis. He was Jay Gatsby, Florida-style. Have you heard of him?”

I shook my head.

“That just proves that fame’s a fleeting thing. During the Roaring Twenties, Davis was a god down here on the Suncoast.”

She waved an arm at the tangled streets below; the bangles on her scrawny wrist jangled; somewhere not too distant, a church-bell marked the hour of two.

“He dredged the whole thing from swampland at the mouth of the Hillsborough River. Talked the Tampa city fathers into moving both the hospital and the radio station here, back when radio was a bigger deal than health care. He built strange and beautiful apartment complexes in a time when the concept of an apartment complex was unknown. He put up hotels and swank nightclubs. He threw the dough around, married a beauty contest winner, divorced her, married her again. He was worth millions when a million dollars was worth what twelve million is today. And one of his best friends lived just down the coast on Duma Key. John Eastlake. Familiar with that name?”

“Of course. I’ve met his daughter. My friend Wireman takes care of her.”

Mary lit a fresh cigarette. “Well, both Dave and John were as rich as Croesus — Dave with his land and building speculations, John with his mills — but Davis was a peacock and Eastlake was more of a plain brown wren. Just as well for him, because you know what happens to peacocks, don’t you?”

“They get their tailfeathers chopped off?”

She took a drag on her latest cigarette, then pointed the fingers holding it at me as she jetted smoke from her nostrils. “That would be correct, sir. In 1925, the Florida Land Bust hit this state like a brick on a soap bubble. Dave Davis had invested pretty much everything he had in what you see out there.” She waved at the zig-zaggy streets and pink buildings. “In 1926, Davis was owed four million bucks on various successful ventures and collected something like thirty thousand.”

It had been awhile since I’d ridden on the tiger’s neck — which was what my father called over-extending your resources to the point where you had to start juggling your creditors and getting creative with your paperwork — and I’d never ridden that far up, even in The Freemantle Company’s early, desperate days. I felt for Dave Davis, long dead though he must be.

“How much of his own debts could he cover? Any?”

“He managed at first. Those were boom years in other parts of the country.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“Suncoast art is my passion, Edgar. Suncoast history is my hobby.”

“I see. So Davis survived the Land Bust.”

“For a short while. I imagine he sold his stocks on the bull market to cover his first round of losses. And friends helped him.”

“Eastlake?”

“John Eastlake was a major angel, and that’s aside from any of Dave’s bootleg hooch he may have stored out on the Key from time to time.”

“Did he do that?” I asked.

“Maybe, I said. That was another time and another Florida. You hear all sorts of colorful Prohibition-era booze-running stories if you live down here awhile. Booze or no booze, Davis would have been flat broke by Easter of ’26 without John Eastlake. John was no playboy, didn’t go nightclubbing and cathousing like Davis and some of Davis’s other friends, but he’d been a widower since 1923, and I’m guessing that old Dave might have helped a pal with a gal from time to time when his pal was feeling lonely. But by the summer of ’26, Dave’s debts were just too high. Not even his old pals could save him.”

“So he disappeared one dark night.”

“He disappeared, but not by the dark of the moon. That was not the Davis style. In October of 1926, less than a month after Hurricane Esther knocked the living hell out of his life’s work, he sailed for Europe with a bodyguard and his new gal-pal, who happened to be a Mack Sennett bathing beauty. The gal-pal and the bodyguard got to Gay Paree, but Dave Davis never did. He disappeared at sea, without a trace.”

“This is a true story you’re telling me?”

She raised her right hand in the Boy Scout salute — the image slightly marred by the cigarette smoldering between her first two fingers. “True blue. In November of ’26, there was a memorial service right over there.” She pointed toward where the Gulf twinkled between two bright pink art deco buildings. “At least four hundred people attended, many of them, I understand, the sort of women who were partial to ostrich feathers. One of the speakers was John Eastlake. He tossed a wreath of tropical flowers into the water.”

She sighed, and I caught a waft of her breath. I had no doubt that the lady could hold her liquor; I also had no doubt that she was well on her way to squiffy if not outright drunk this afternoon.

“Eastlake was undoubtedly sad about the passing of his friend,” she said, “but I bet he was congratulating himself on surviving Esther. I bet they all were. Little did he know he’d be throwing more wreaths into the water less than six months later. Not just one daughter gone but two. Three, I suppose, if you count the eldest. She eloped to Atlanta. With a foreman from one of Daddy’s mills, if memory serves. Although that’s hardly the same as losing two in the Gulf. God, that must have been hard.”

“THEY ARE GONE,” I said, remembering the headline Wireman had quoted.

She glanced at me sharply. “So you’ve done some research of your own.”

“Not me, Wireman. He was curious about the woman he was working for. I don’t think he knows about the connection to this Dave Davis.”

She looked thoughtful. “I wonder how much Elizabeth herself remembers?”

“These days she doesn’t even remember her own name,” I said.

Mary gave me another look, then turned from the window, got her ashtray, and put out her cigarette. “Alzheimer’s? I’d heard rumors.”

“Yes.”

“I’m goddam sorry to hear it. I got the more lurid details of the Dave Davis story from her, you know. In better days. I used to see her all the time, on the circuit. And I interviewed most of the artists who stayed at Salmon Point. Only you call it something else, don’t you?”

“Big Pink.”

She smiled. “I knew it was something cute.”

“How many artists stayed there?”

“Lots. They came to lecture in Sarasota or Venice, and perhaps to paint for awhile — although those who stayed at Salmon Point did precious little of that. For most of Elizabeth’s guests, their time on Duma Key amounted to little more than a free vacation.”

“She provided the place gratis?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling rather ironically. “The Sarasota Arts Council paid the honoraria for their lectures, and Elizabeth usually provided the lodging — Big Pink, née Salmon Point. But you didn’t get that deal, did you? Perhaps next time. Especially since you actually work there. I could name half a dozen artists who stayed in your house and never so much as wet a brush.” She marched to the sofa, lifted her glass, and had a sip. No — a swallow.

“Elizabeth has a Dalí sketch that was done at Big Pink,” I said. “That I saw with my own eyes.”

Mary’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yes, well. Dalí. Dalí loved it there, but not even he stayed long… although before he left, the son of a bitch goosed me. Do you know what Elizabeth told me after he left?”

I shook my head. Of course I didn’t, but I wanted to hear.

“He said it was ‘too rich.’ Does that strike a chord with you, Edgar?”

I smiled. “Why do you suppose Elizabeth turned Big Pink into an artist’s retreat? Was she always a patron of the arts?”

She looked surprised. “Your friend didn’t tell you? Perhaps he doesn’t know. According to local legend, Elizabeth was once an artist of some note herself.”

“What do you mean, according to local legend?”

“There’s a story — for all I know it’s pure myth — that she was a child prodigy. That she painted beautifully, while very young, and then just stopped.”

“Did you ever ask her?”

“Of course, silly man. Asking people things is what I do.” She was swaying a bit on her feet now, the Sophia Loren eyes noticeably bloodshot.

“What did she say?”

“That there was nothing to it. She said, ‘Those who can, do. And those who can’t support those who can. Like us, Mary.’”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Yes, it did to me, too,” Mary said, taking another sip from her Waterford tumbler. “The only problem I had with it was I didn’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, I just didn’t. I had an old friend named Aggie Winterborn who used to do the advice-to-the-lovelorn column in the Tampa Trib, and I happened to mention the story once to her. This was around the time Dalí was favoring the Suncoast with his presence, maybe 1980. We were in a bar somewhere — in those days we were always in a bar somewhere — and the conversation had turned to how legends are built. I mentioned the story of how Elizabeth had supposedly been a baby Rembrandt as an example of that, and Aggie — long dead, God rest her — said she didn’t think that was a legend, she thought it was the truth, or a version of it. She said she’d seen a newspaper story about it.”

“Did you ever check?” I asked.

“Of course I did. I don’t write everything I know” — she tipped me a wink — “but I like to know everything.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. Not in the Tribune, not in the Sarasota or Venice papers, either. So maybe it was just a story. Hell, maybe all that stuff about her father storing Dave Davis’s whiskey on Duma Key was just a story, too. But… I’d’ve bet money on Aggie Winterborn’s memory. And Elizabeth had a look on her face when I asked her about it.”

“What kind of look?”

“An I’m-not-telling-you look. But all that’s a long time ago, much booze under the bridge since, and you can’t ask her about it now, can you? Not if she’s as bad as you say.”

“No, but maybe she’ll come back. Wireman says she has before.”

“We’ll hope,” Mary said. “She’s a rarity, you know. Florida’s full of old people — they don’t call it God’s waiting room for nothing — but precious few of em grew up here. The Suncoast Elizabeth remembers — remembered — really was another Florida. Not the hurry-scurry sprawl we have now, with the domed stadiums and the turnpikes going everywhere, and not the one I grew up in, either. Mine was the John D. MacDonald Florida, back when people in Sarasota still knew their neighbors and the Tamiami Trail was a honky-tonk. Back then people sometimes still came home from church to find alligators in their swimming pools and bobcats rooting in their trash.”

She was actually very drunk, I realized… but that didn’t make her uninteresting.

“The Florida Elizabeth and her sisters grew up in was the one that existed after the Indians were gone but before old Mr. White Man had fully conshol… consolidated his hold. Your little island would have looked very different to you. I’ve seen the pictures. It was cabbage palms covered in strangler fig and gumbo limbo and slash pine inland; it was liveoak and mangrove in the few places the ground was wet. There was Cherokee bean and inkberry low on the ground, but none of that jungle shit that’s growing out there now. The beaches are the only thing that’s the same, and the sea oats, of course… like the hem of a skirt. The drawbridge was there at the north end, but there was just one house.”

“What caused all that growth?” I asked. “Do you have any idea? I mean three quarters of the island is buried in it.”

She might not have heard. “Just the one house,” she repeated. “Sitting up there on the little rise of ground toward the south end and looking like something you’d see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile. Pillars and a crushed gravel drive. You had your grand view of the Gulf to the west; your grand view of the Florida coast looking east. Not that there was much to see; just Venice. Village of Venice. Sleepy li’l village.” She heard how she sounded and pulled herself together. “Excuse me, Edgar. Please. I don’t do this every day. Really, you should take my… my excitement… as a compliment.”

“I do.”

“Twenty years ago I would have tried to get you into bed instead of drinking myself stupid. Maybe even ten. As it is, I can only hope I haven’t scared you away for good.”

“No such luck.”

She laughed, a caw both barren and cheery. “Then I hope you’ll come back soon. I make a mean red gumbo. But right now…” She put an arm around me and led me to the door. Her body was thin and hot and rock-hard beneath her clothes. Her gait was just south of steady. “Right now I think it’s time for you to go and for me to take my afternoon siesta. I regret to say I need it.”

I stepped out into the hall, then turned back. “Mary, did you ever hear Elizabeth speak of the deaths of her twin sisters? She would have been four or five. Old enough to remember something so traumatic.”

“Never,” Mary said. “Never once.”

ii

There were a dozen or so chairs lined up outside the lobby doors, in what was a thin but comfortable band of shade at quarter past two in the afternoon. Half a dozen oldsters were sitting there, watching the traffic on Adalia Street. Jack was also there, but he was neither watching the traffic nor admiring the passing ladies. He was tipped back against the pink stucco and reading Mortuary Science for Dummies. He marked his place and got up as soon as he saw me.

“Great choice for this state,” I said, nodding at the book with the trademark google-eyed nerd on the cover.

“I’ve got to pick a career sometime,” he said, “and the way you’re moving lately, I don’t think this job is going to last much longer.”

“Don’t hurry me,” I said, feeling in my pocket to make sure I had my little bottle of aspirin. I did.

“Actually,” Jack said, “that’s just what I’m going to do.”

“Have you got someplace you have to be?” I asked, limping down the cement walk beside him and into the sunshine. It was hot. There’s spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

“No, but you’ve got a four o’clock appointment with Dr. Hadlock in Sarasota. I think we can just make it, if the traffic’s kind.”

I stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Elizabeth’s doctor? What are you talking about?”

“For a physical. Word on the street is you’ve been putting it off, boss.”

“Wireman did this,” I muttered, and ran my hand through my hair. “Wireman the doctor-hater. I’ll never let him hear the end of it. You’re my witness, Jack, I will never—”

“Nope, he said you’d say that,” Jack said. He tugged me back into motion. “Come on, come on, we’ll never beat the rush hour traffic if we don’t get rolling.”

“Who? If Wireman didn’t make the appointment, then who?”

“Your other friend. The big black dude. Man, I liked him, he was totally chilly.”

We’d reached the Malibu and Jack opened the passenger door for me, but for a moment I just stood there looking at him, thunderstruck. “Kamen?”

“Yep. Him and Dr. Hadlock got talking at your reception after the lecture, and Dr. Kamen just happened to mention that he was concerned because you still hadn’t had the checkup you’d been promising to get. Dr. Hadlock volunteered to give you one.”

“Volunteered,” I said.

Jack nodded, smiling in the bright Florida sunshine. Impossibly young, with a canary-yellow copy of Mortuary Science for Dummies tucked under his arm. “Hadlock told Dr. Kamen they couldn’t let anything happen to such an important newly-discovered talent. And just for the record, I agree.”

“Thanks a pantload, Jack.”

He laughed. “You’re a trip, Edgar.”

“May I assume I’m also chilly?”

“Yup, you’re a bad refrigerator. Get in, and let’s get back over the bridge while we still can.”

iii

As it happened, we got to Dr. Hadlock’s Beneva Road office on the dot. Freemantle’s Theorem of Office Waiting states that one must add thirty minutes to the time of one’s appointment to arrive at the time one is actually seen, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised. The receptionist called my name at only ten past the hour and ushered me into a cheerful examination room where a poster to my left depicted a heart drowning in fat and one to my right showed a lung that looked charbroiled. The eye-chart directly ahead was a relief, even though I wasn’t much good after the sixth line.

A nurse came in, put a thermometer under my tongue, took my pulse, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm, inflated it, studied the readout. When I asked her how I was doing, she smiled noncommittally and said, “You pass.” Then she drew blood. After that I retired to the bathroom with a plastic cup, sending Kamen bitter vibes as I unzipped my fly. A one-armed man can provide a urine sample, but the potential for accidents is greatly magnified.

When I returned to the exam room, the nurse was gone. She had left a folder with my name on it. Beside the folder was a red pen. My stump gave a twinge. Without thinking about what I was doing, I took the pen and put it in my pants pocket. There was a blue Bic clipped to my shirt pocket. I took it out and put it where the red pen had been lying.

And what are you going to say when she comes back? I asked myself. That the Pen Fairy came in and decided to make a swap?

Before I could answer that question — or consider why I had stolen the red pen to begin with — Gene Hadlock came in and offered his hand. His left hand… which in my case was the right one. I found I liked him quite a lot better when he was divorced from Principe, the goateed neurologist. He was about sixty, a little on the pudgy side, with a white mustache of the toothbrush variety and a pleasant examining-table manner. He had me strip down to my shorts and examined my right leg and side at some length. He prodded me in several places, enquiring about the level of pain. He asked me what I was taking for painkillers and seemed surprised when I told him I was getting by on aspirin.

“I’m going to examine your stump,” he said. “That all right?”

“Yes. Just take it easy.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I sat with my left hand resting on my bare left thigh, looking at the eye-chart as he grasped my shoulder with one hand and cupped my stump in the other. The seventh line on the chart looked like AGODSED. A god said what? I wondered.

From somewhere, very distant, I felt faint pressure. “Hurt?”

“No.”

“Okay. No, don’t look down, just keep looking straight ahead. Do you feel my hand?”

“Uh-huh. Way off. Pressure.” But no twinge. Why would there be? The arm that was no longer there had wanted the pen, and the pen was in my pocket, so now the arm was asleep again.

“And how about this, Edgar? May I call you Edgar?”

“Anything but late to dinner. The same. Pressure. Faint.”

“Now you can look.”

I looked. One hand was still on my shoulder, but the other was at his side. Nowhere near the stump. “Oops.”

“Not at all, phantom sensations in the stump of a limb are normal. I’m just surprised at the rate of healing. And the lack of pain. I squeezed pretty darn hard to begin with. This is all good.” He cupped the stump again and pushed upward. “Does that give pain?”

It did — a dull, low sparkle, vaguely hot. “A little,” I said.

“If it didn’t I’d be worried.” He let go. “Look at the eye-chart again, all right?”

I did as he asked, and decided that all-important seventh line was AGOCSEO. Which made more sense because it made no sense.

“How many fingers am I touching you with, Edgar?”

“Don’t know.” It didn’t feel like he was touching me at all.

“Now?”

“Don’t know.”

“And now.”

“Three.” He was almost up to my collarbone. And I had an idea — crazy but very strong — that I would have been able to feel his fingers everywhere on the stump if I’d been in one of my painting frenzies. In fact, I would have been able to feel his fingers in the air below the stump. And I think he would have been able to feel me… which would no doubt have caused the good doctor to run screaming from the room.

He went on — first to my leg, then my head. He listened to my heart, looked into my eyes, and did a bunch of other doctorly things. When he’d exhausted most of the possibilities, he told me to get dressed and meet him at the end of the hall.

This turned out to be a pleasantly littered little office. Hadlock sat behind the desk and leaned back in his chair. There were pictures on one wall. Some, I assumed, were of the doctor’s family, but there were also shots of him shaking hands with George Bush the First and Maury Povich (intellectual equals, in my book), and one of him with an amazingly vigorous and pretty Elizabeth Eastlake. They were holding tennis rackets, and I recognized the court. It was the one at El Palacio.

“I imagine you’d like to get back to Duma and get off that hip, wouldn’t you?” Hadlock asked. “Must hurt by this time of the day, and I bet it’s all three witches from Macbeth when the weather’s damp. If you want a prescription for Percocet or Vicodin—”

“No, I’m fine with the aspirin,” I said. I’d labored to get off the hard stuff and wasn’t going back on it at this point, pain or no pain.

“Your recovery is remarkable,” Hadlock said. “I don’t think you need me to tell you how lucky you are not to be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, very likely steering yourself around by blowing into a straw.”

“I’m lucky to be alive at all,” I said. “Can I can assume you didn’t find anything dire?”

“Pending blood and urine, I’d say you’re good to go. I’m happy to order X-rays on your rightside injuries and your head, if you’ve got symptoms that concern you, but—”

“I don’t.” I had symptoms, and they concerned me, but I didn’t think X-rays would pinpoint the cause. Or causes.

He nodded. “The reason I went over your stump so carefully was because you don’t wear a prosthesis. I thought you might be experiencing tenderness. Or there might be signs of infection. But all seems well.”

“I guess I’m just not ready.”

“That’s fine. More than fine. Considering the work you’re doing, I’d have to say ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies here. Your paintings… remarkable. I can’t wait to see them on display at the Scoto. I’m bringing my wife. She’s very excited.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Thank you.” This sounded limp, at least to my own ears, but I still hadn’t figured out how to respond to such compliments.

“Having you turn up as an actual paying tenant at Salmon Point is sad and ironic,” Hadlock said. “For years — you might know this — Elizabeth reserved that house as an artist’s retreat. Then she became ill and allowed it to be listed as just another rental property, although she did insist that whoever took it would have to lease it for three months or longer. She didn’t want any Spring Breakers partying in there. Not where Salvador Dalí and James Bama once laid down their storied heads.”

“I can’t say that I blame her. It’s a special place.”

“Yes, but few of the famous artists who stayed there did anything special. Then the second ‘regular’ tenant comes along — a building contractor from Minneapolis recovering from an accident, and… well. Elizabeth must be very gratified.”

“In the building biz, we called that laying it on with a trowel, Dr. Hadlock.”

“Gene,” he said. “And the people who were at your lecture didn’t think so. You were marvelous. I only wish Elizabeth could have been there. How she would have preened.”

“Maybe she’ll make the opening.”

Very slowly, Gene Hadlock shook his head. “I doubt that. She’s fought the Alzheimer’s tooth and nail, but there comes a time when the disease simply wins. Not because the patient is weak but because it’s a physical condition, like MS. Or cancer. Once the symptoms begin to manifest, usually as a loss of short-term memory, a clock begins to run. I think Elizabeth’s time may be up, and I’m very sorry. It’s clear to me, I think it was clear to everyone at the lecture, that all this fuss makes you uncomfortable—”

“You can say that again.”

“ — but if she’d been there, she would have enjoyed it for you. I’ve known her most of my life, and I can tell you she would have supervised everything, including the hanging of each and every picture in the gallery.”

“I wish I’d known her then,” I said.

“She was amazing. When she was forty-five and I was twenty, we won the mixed doubles amateur tennis tournament at The Colony on Longboat Key. I was home from college on semester break. I’ve still got the cup. I imagine she’s still got hers, somewhere.”

That made me think of something — You’ll find it, I’m sure — but before I could chase that memory to its source, something else occurred to me. Something much more recent.

“Dr. Hadlock — Gene — did Elizabeth herself ever paint? Or draw?”

“Elizabeth? Never.” And he smiled.

“You’re sure of that.”

“You bet. I asked her once, and I remember the occasion very well. It was when Norman Rockwell was in town to lecture. He didn’t stay at your place, either; he stayed at the Ritz. Norman Rockwell, pipe and all!” Gene Hadlock shook his head, smiling more widely now. “Ye gods, what a controversy that was, the howling when the Arts Council announced Mr. Saturday Evening Post was coming. It was Elizabeth’s idea and she loved the hubbub it caused, said they could have filled Ben Hill Griffin Stadium—” He saw my blank look. “The University of Florida. ‘The swamp where only Gators come out alive’?”

“If you’re talking football, my interest begins with the Vikings and ends with the Packers.”

“The point is, I asked her about her own artistic abilities during the Rockwell uproar — and he did indeed sell out; not the Geldbart, either, but City Center. Elizabeth laughed and said she could hardly draw stick figures. In fact, she used a sports metaphor, which is probably why I thought of the Gators. She said she was like one of those wealthy college alumni, except she was interested in art instead of football. She said, ‘If you can’t be an athlete, hon, be an athletic supporter. And if you can’t be an artist, feed em, care for em, and make sure they have a place to come in out of the rain.’ But artistic talent herself? Absolutely none.”

I thought of telling him about Mary Ire’s friend Aggie Winterborn. Then I touched the red pen in my pocket and decided not to. I decided what I wanted to do was to get back to Duma Key and paint. Girl and Ship No. 8 was the most ambitious of the series, also the largest and the most complex, and it was almost done.

I stood up and offered my hand. “Thank you for everything.”

“Not at all. And if you change your mind and want something a little stronger for the pain—”

iv

The drawbridge to the Key was up to allow some rich guy’s toy to wallow through the pass to the Gulf side. Jack sat behind the wheel of the Malibu, admiring the girl in the green bikini who was sunning on the foredeck. The Bone was on the radio. An ad for some motorcycle dealership ended (The Bone was big on motorcycle sales and various mortgage services), and The Who came on: “Magic Bus.” My stump began to tingle, then to itch. And that itch spread slowly downward, sleepy but deep. Very deep. I inched the volume up a tick, then reached into my pocket and pulled out the stolen pen. Not blue; not black; it was red. I admired it for a moment in the late sun. Then I thumbed open the glove compartment and pawed around.

“Help you find something, boss?”

“Nope. Keep your eye on yonder honey. I’m doin fine.”

I pulled out a coupon for a free Checkers NASCAR Burger — Ya Gotta Eat! the coupon proclaimed. I turned it over. The flip side was blank. I drew quickly and without thinking. It was done before the song was. Underneath my small picture I printed five letters. The picture was similar to the doodles I’d done in my other life while dickering (usually with some dickhead) on the phone. The letters spelled PERSE, the name of my mystery ship. Only I didn’t think that was how you said it. I could have added an accent over the E, but that would turn it into something that sounded like Persay, and I didn’t think that was right, either.

“What’s that?” Jack asked, looking over, then answered his own question. “Little red picnic basket. Cute. But what’s a Purse?”

“You say it persie.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” The barrier at our end of the drawbridge went up and Jack rolled across onto Duma Key.

I looked at the little red picnic basket I’d drawn — only I thought you called this kind, the kind with wicker sides, a hamper — and wondered why it looked so familiar. Then I realized it didn’t, not exactly. It was the phrase that was familiar. Look for Nan Somebody’s picnic basket, Elizabeth had said on the night I brought Wireman back from Sarasota Memorial. The last night I had seen her compos mentis, I realized now. It’s in the attic. It’s red. And: You’ll find it, I’m sure. And: They’re inside. Only when I had asked her what she was talking about, she hadn’t been able to tell me. She had slipped away.

It’s in the attic. It’s red.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Everything is.”

“What, Edgar?”

“Nothing,” I said, looking at the stolen pen. “Just thinking out loud.”

v

Girl and Ship No. 8 — the last in the series, I felt almost sure — really was done, but I stood considering it in the lengthening light with my shirt off and The Bone blasting “Copperhead Road.” I had worked on it longer than any of the others — had come to realize that in many ways it summed up the others — and it was disturbing. That was why I covered it with a piece of sheet at the end of my sessions. Now, looking at it with what I hoped was a dispassionate eye, I realized disturbing was probably the wrong word; that baby was fucking terrifying. Looking at it was like looking at a mind turned sideways.

And maybe it would never be completely done. Certainly there was still room for a red picnic basket. I could hang it over the Perse’s bowsprit. What the hell, why not? The damned thing was crammed with figures and details as it was. Always room for one more.

I was reaching out a brush loaded with what could have been blood to do just that when the phone rang. I almost let it go — surely would have done, if I’d been in one of my painting trances — but I wasn’t. The picnic basket was only meant to be a grace note, and I had already added others. I put the brush back and picked up the phone. It was Wireman, and he sounded excited.

“She had a clear patch late this afternoon, Edgar! It might not mean anything — I’m trying to keep my hopes low — but I’ve seen this before. First one clear interval, then another, then another, then they start to merge together and she’s herself again, at least for awhile.”

“She knows who she is? Where she is?”

“Not now, but for half an hour or so, starting around five-thirty, she knew that stuff and who I was, too. Listen, muchacho — she lit her own damn cigarette!”

“I’ll be sure to tell the Surgeon General,” I said, but I was thinking. Five-thirty. Right around the time Jack and I had been waiting for the drawbridge. Around the time I’d felt that urge to draw.

“Did she want anything besides a cigarette?”

“She asked for food. But before that, she asked to go to the China Village. She wanted her chinas, Edgar! Do you know how long it’s been?”

I did, actually. And it was good to hear him excited on her behalf.

“She started to fade after I got her there, though. She looked around and asked me where Percy was. She said she wanted Percy, that Percy needed to go in the cookie-tin.”

I looked at my painting. At my ship. It was mine now, all right. My Perse. I licked my lips, which suddenly felt leathery. The way they always had when I first woke up after the accident. When some of the time I couldn’t remember who I was. Do you know what’s queer? Remembering forgetting. It’s like looking into a hall of mirrors. “Which one is Percy?”

“Damned if I know. When she wants me to throw the cookie-tin in the goldfish pond, she always insists on putting a girl china in it. Usually the shepherdess with her face chipped off.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She wanted food, I told you. Tomato soup. And peaches. By then she’d stopped looking at the chinas, and she was getting confused again.”

Had she gotten confused because Percy wasn’t there? Or the Perse? Maybe… but if she’d ever had a china boat, I’d never seen it. I thought — not for the first time — that Perse was a funny word. You couldn’t trust it. It kept changing.

Wireman said, “At one point she told me the table was leaking.”

“And was it?”

There was a brief pause. Then he said, not very humorously: “Are we having a little joke at Wireman’s expense, mi amigo?”

“No, I’m curious. What did she say? Exactly?”

“Just that. ‘The table is leaking.’ But her chinas are on a table-table, as you well know, not a water-table.”

“Calm down. Don’t lose your good thoughts.”

“I’m trying not to, but I have to say you seem a little off your conversational game, Edster.”

“Don’t call me Edster, it sounds like a vintage Ford. You brought her soup, and she was… what? Gone again?”

“Pretty much, yeah. She’d broken a couple of her china figures on the floor — a horse and a rodeo girl.” He sighed.

“Did she say ‘It’s leaking’ before or after you brought her the food?”

“After, before, what does it matter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Which was it?”

“Before. I think. Yes, before. Afterward, she’d pretty much lost interest in everything, including chucking the Sweet Owen tin into the pond for the umpteenth time. I brought the soup in her favorite mug, but she pushed it away so hard she slopped some on her poor old arm. She didn’t even seem to feel it. Edgar, why are you asking these questions? What do you know?” He was pacing around with the cell phone to his ear. I could see him doing it.

“Nothing. I’m feeling around in the dark, for Chrissake.”

“Yeah? Which arm you doing it with?”

That stopped me for a moment, but we had come too far and shared too much for lies, even when the truth was nuts. “My right one.”

“All right,” he said. “All right, Edgar. I wish I knew what was going on, that’s all. Because something is.”

“Maybe something is. How is she now?”

“Sleeping. And I’m interrupting you. You’re working.”

“No,” I said, and tossed the brush aside. “I think this is done, and I think I’m also done for awhile. Just walking and shelling for me between now and the show.”

“Noble aspirations, but I don’t think you can do it. Not a workaholic like you.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“Okay, I’m wrong. Won’t be the first time. Are you going to come down and visit with us tomorrow? I want you to see it if she lights up again.”

“Count on it. And maybe we could hit a few tennis balls.”

“Fine by me.”

“Wireman, there’s one other thing. Did Elizabeth ever paint?”

He laughed. “Who knows? I asked her once and she said she could hardly draw stick figures. She said her interest in the arts wasn’t much different from the interest some wealthy alumni have in football and basketball. She joked about it, said—”

“If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.”

“Exactly. How’d you know?”

“It’s an old one,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I hung up and stood where I was, watching the long light of evening fire up a Gulf sunset I had no urge to paint. They were the same words she’d used with Gene Hadlock. And I had no doubt that if I asked others, I’d hear the same anecdote once or twice or a dozen times: She said I can’t even draw stick figures, she said if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. And why? Because an honest woman may occasionally goof the truth, but a good liar never varies her story.

I hadn’t asked him about the red picnic basket, but I told myself that was all right; if it was in the attic of El Palacio, it would still be there the next day, and the day after that. I told myself there was time. Of course, that’s what we always tell ourselves, isn’t it? We can’t imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

I looked at Girl and Ship No. 8 with something approaching distaste and threw the cover-sheet over it. I never added the red picnic hamper to the bowsprit; I never put a brush to that particular painting again — the final mad descendent of my first sketch in Big Pink, the one I’d named Hello. No. 8 may have been the best thing I ever did, but in a strange way, I almost forgot it. Until the show, that was. After that I could never forget it.

vi

The picnic basket.

That damned red picnic basket full of her drawings.

How that haunts me.

Even now, four years later, I find myself playing the what-if game, wondering how much would have changed if I’d pushed everything else aside and gone hunting for it. It was found — by Jack Cantori — but by then it was too late.

And maybe — I can’t say for sure — it wouldn’t have changed anything, because some force was at work, both on Duma Key and inside Edgar Freemantle. Can I say that force brought me there? No. Can I say it didn’t? No, I can’t say that, either. But by the time March became April, it had begun to gain strength and ever so stealthily extend its reach.

That basket.

Elizabeth’s damned picnic basket.

It was red.

vii

Wireman’s hope that Elizabeth was coming around began to seem unjustified. She remained a muttering lump in her wheelchair, every now and then stirring enough to cry out for a cigarette in the cracked voice of an aging parrot. He hired Annmarie Whistler away from Bay Area Private Nursing to come in and help him four days a week. The extra help might have eased Wireman’s workload, but it did little to comfort him; he was heartsore.

But that was something I only glimpsed from the corner of my eye as April rolled in, sunny and hot. Because, speaking of hot… there I was.

Once Mary Ire’s interview was published, I became a local celebrity. Why not? Artist was good, especially in the Sarasota area. Artist Who Used to Build Banks and Then Turned His Back on Mammon was better. One-Armed Artist of Blazing Talent was the absolute Golden Motherfucker. Dario and Jimmy scheduled a number of follow-up interviews, including one with Channel 6. I emerged from their Sarasota studio with a blinding headache and a complimentary CHANNEL 6 SUNCOAST WEATHER-WATCHER bumper sticker, which I ended up plastering on one of the MEAN DOGS sawhorses. Don’t ask me why.

I also took over the Florida end of the travel-and-hospitality arrangements. Wireman was by then too busy trying to get Elizabeth to ingest anything but cigarette smoke. I found myself consulting with Pam every two or three days about the guest-list from Minnesota and travel arrangements from other parts of the country. Ilse called twice. I thought she was making an effort to sound cheerful, but I could have been wrong. My attempts to find out how her love-life was progressing were kindly but firmly blocked. Melinda called — to ask for my hat-size, of all things. When I asked why, she wouldn’t tell. Fifteen minutes after she hung up, I realized: she and her French ami really were buying me a fucking beret. I burst out laughing.

An AP reporter from Tampa came to Sarasota — he wanted to come to Duma, but I didn’t like the idea of a reporter tramping around in Big Pink, listening to what I now thought of as my shells. He interviewed me at the Scoto instead, while a photographer took pictures of three carefully selected paintings: Roses Grow from Shells, Sunset with Sophora, and Duma Road. I was wearing a Casey Key Fish House tee-shirt, and a photo of me — baseball cap on backwards and one short sleeve empty except for a nub of stump — ran nationwide. After that, my telephone rang off the hook. Angel Slobotnik called and talked for twenty minutes. At one point, he said he always knew I had it in me. “What?” I asked. His reply was “Bullshit, boss,” and we laughed like maniacs. Kathi Green called; I heard all about her new boyfriend (not so good) and her new self-help program (wonderful). I told her about how Kamen had shown up at the lecture and saved my ass. By the end of that call she was crying and saying she’d never had such a gutty, come-from-behind patient. Then she said when she saw me she was going to tell me to drop and give her fifty sit-ups. That sounded like the old Kathi. To top it all off, Todd Jamieson, the doctor who had probably saved me from a decade or two as a human rutabaga, sent me a bottle of champagne with a card reading, Cannot wait to see your work.

If Wireman had bet me on whether or not I’d get bored and pick up a brush again before the show, he would have lost. When I wasn’t getting ready for my big moment, I was walking, reading, or sleeping. I mentioned this to him on one of the rare afternoons when we were together at the end of El Palacio’s boardwalk, drinking green tea under the striped umbrella. This was less than a week before the show.

“I’m glad,” he said simply. “You needed to rest.”

“What about you, Wireman? How are you doing?”

“Not great, but I will survive — Gloria Gaynor, 1978. It’s sadness, mostly.” He sighed. “I’m going to lose her. I kidded myself that maybe she was coming back, but… I’m going to lose her. It’s not like Julia and Esmeralda, thank God, but it still weighs on me.”

“I’m sorry.” I laid my hand over his. “For her and for you.”

“Thanks.” He looked out at the waves. “Sometimes I think she won’t die at all.”

“No?”

“No. I think the Walrus and the Carpenter will come for her, instead. That they’ll just lead her away like they did those trusting Oysters. Lead her away down the beach. Do you remember what the Walrus says?”

I shook my head.

“‘It seems a shame to play them such a trick, After we’ve brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick.’” He swiped an arm across his face. “Look at me, muchacho, crying just like the Walrus. Ain’t I stupid.”

“No,” I said.

“I hate to face the idea that this time she’s gone for good, that the best part of her went off down the beach with the Walrus and the Carpenter and there’s nothing left but a fat old piece of suet that hasn’t quite forgotten how to breathe yet.”

I said nothing. He wiped his eyes again with his forearm and drew in a long, watery breath. Then he said, “I looked into the story of John Eastlake, and how his daughters were drowned, and what happened after — do you remember asking me to do that?”

I did, but it seemed long ago, and unimportant. What I think now is that something wanted it to seem that way to me.

“I went surfing around on the Internet and came up with a good deal from the local newspapers and a couple of memoirs that are available for download. One of them — I shit you not, muchacho — is called Boat Trips and Beeswax, A Girlhood in Nokomis, by Stephanie Weider Gravel-Miller.”

“Sounds like quite a trip down memory lane.”

“It was. She talks about ‘the happy darkies, picking oranges and singing simple songs of praise in their mellifluous voices.’”

“I guess that was before Jay-Z.”

“Got that right. Even better, I talked to Chris Shannington, over on Casey Key — you’ve almost certainly seen him. Colorful old geezer who walks everyplace with this gnarled briarwood cane, almost as tall as he is, and a big straw hat on his head. His father, Ellis Shannington, was John Eastlake’s gardener. According to Chris, it was Ellis who took Maria and Hannah, Elizabeth’s two older sisters, back to the Braden School ten days or so after the drowning. He said, ‘Those chirrun were heartbroken for the babby-uns.’”

Wireman’s imitation of the old man’s southern accent was eerily good, and I found myself for some reason thinking of the Walrus and the Carpenter again, walking up the beach with the little Oysters. The only part of the poem I could remember clearly was the Carpenter telling them they’d had a pleasant run, but of course the Oysters couldn’t answer, for they’d been eaten — every one.

“Do you want to hear this now?” Wireman asked.

“Have you got time to tell me now?”

“Sure. Annmarie’s got the duty until seven, although as a matter of practical fact, we share it most days. Why don’t we walk up to the house? I’ve got a file. There isn’t much in it, but there’s at least one picture that’s worth looking at. Chris Shannington had it in a box of his father’s things. I walked up to the Casey Key Public Library with him and copied it.” He paused. “It’s a picture of Heron’s Roost.”

“As it was back then, you mean?”

We had started to stroll back up the boardwalk, but Wireman stopped. “No, amigo, you misunderstand. I’m talking about the original Heron’s Roost. El Palacio is the second Roost, built almost twenty-five years after the little girls drowned. By then, John Eastlake’s ten or twenty million had grown to a hundred and fifty million or so. War Is Good Business, Invest Your Son.”

“Vietnam protest movement, 1969,” I said. “Often seen in tandem with A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.”

“Good, amigo,” Wireman said. He waved a hand toward the riotous greenery that began just south of us. “The first Heron’s Roost was out there, back when the world was young and flappers said poop-oopie-doop.”

I thought of Mary Ire, not just tiddly or squiffy but downright drunk, saying Just the one house, sitting up there and looking like something you’d see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“So far as I know, nothing but time and decay,” he said. “When John Eastlake gave up on recovering the bodies of his twins, he gave up on Duma Key, too. He paid off most of the help, packed his traps, took the three daughters who remained to him, got in his Rolls-Royce — he really had one — and drove away. A novel F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote, that’s what Chris Shannington said. Told me Eastlake was never at peace until Elizabeth brought him back here.”

“Do you think that’s something Shannington actually knows, or just a story he’s gotten used to hearing himself tell?”

“Quién sabe?” Wireman said. He stopped again and waved toward the southern end of Duma Key. “No overgrowth back then. You could see the original house from the mainland and vice-versa. And so far as I know, amigo, the house is still there. Whatever’s left of it. Sitting and rotting.” He reached the kitchen door and looked at me, unsmiling. “That would be something to paint, wouldn’t it? A ghost-ship on dry land.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it would.”

viii

He took me into the library with the suit of armor in the corner and the museum-quality weapons on the wall. There, on the table next to the telephone, was a folder marked JOHN EASTLAKE/HERON’S ROOSTI. He opened it and removed a photograph showing a house that bore an unmistakable similarity to the one we were in — the similarity, say, of first cousins. Yet there was one basic difference between the two, and the similarities — the same basic footprint for both houses, I thought, and the same roof of bright orange Spanish tile — only underlined it.

The current Palacio hid from the world behind a high wall broken by only a single gate — there wasn’t even a tradesman’s entrance. It had a beautiful interior courtyard which few people other than Wireman, Annmarie, the pool girl, and the twice-weekly gardener ever saw; it was like the body of a beautiful woman hidden under a shapeless piece of clothing.

The first Heron’s Roost was very different. Like Elizabeth’s mansion in China Town, it featured half a dozen pillars and a broad, welcoming veranda. It had a wide drive sweeping boldly up to it, splitting what looked like two acres of lawn. Not a gravel drive, either, as Mary Ire had told me, but rosy crushed shells. The original had invited the world in. Its successor — El Palacio — told the world to stay the hell out. Ilse had seen that at once, and so had I, but that day we had been looking from the road. Since then my view had changed, and with good reason: I had gotten used to seeing it from the beach. To coming upon it from its unarmored side.

The first Heron’s Roost had also been higher, three stories in front and four in back, so — if it really did stand on a rise, as Mary had said — people on the top floor would have had a breathtaking three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the Gulf, the mainland, Casey Key, and Don Pedro Island. Not bad. But the lawn looked strangely ragged — unkempt — and there were holes in the line of ornamental palms dancing like hula girls on either side of the house. I looked closer and saw that some of the upper windows had been boarded up. The roofline had a strangely unbalanced look, too. It took a second to realize why. There was a chimney at the east end. There should have been another at the west end, but there wasn’t.

“Was this taken after they left?” I asked.

He shook his head. “According to Shannington, it was snapped in March of 1927, before the little girls drowned, when everyone was still happy and well. That isn’t dilapidation you see, it’s storm-damage. From an Alice.”

“Which is what?”

“Hurricane season officially starts June fifteenth down here and lasts about five months. Out-of-season storms with torrential rains and high winds… as far as the old-timers are concerned, they’re all Alice. As in Hurricane Alice. It’s kind of a joke.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Nope. Esther — the big one in ’26 — missed Duma completely, but the Alice in March of ’27 hit it pretty much dead-on. Then it blew inland and drowned in the Glades. It did the damage you see in this picture — not much, really; blew down some palms, knocked out some glass, tore up the lawn. But in another way, its effects are still being felt. Because it seems pretty certain it was that Alice that led to the drowning deaths of Tessie and Laura, and that led to everything else. Including you and me standing here now.”

“Explain.”

“Remember this?”

He took another photo from his folder, and I certainly did remember it. The big one was on the second-floor landing of the main staircase. This was a smaller, sharper copy. It was the Eastlake family, with John Eastlake wearing a black bathing singlet and looking like a Hollywood B-list actor who might have specialized in detective movies and jungle epics. He was holding Elizabeth. One hand cupped her plump little bottom. The other held that harpoon pistol, and a face-mask with an attached snorkel.

“Judging just by Elizabeth, I’m going to guess this might have been taken around 1925,” Wireman said. “She looks two, going on three. And Adriana” — he tapped the eldest — “looks like she might be seventeen going on thirty-four, wouldn’t you say?”

Indeed. Seventeen and ripe, even in her it-covers-damn-near-everything bathing suit.

“She’s already got that sulky, pouty I-want-to-be-somewhere-else look, too,” Wireman said. “I wonder just how surprised her father was when she up and eloped with one of his plant managers. And I wonder if he wasn’t, in his heart of hearts, glad to see her go.” He put on his Chris Shannington drawl. “Run off to Atlanta with a boy in a tie and an eyeshade.” Then he quit it. I guessed the subject of little dead girls, even ones lost eighty years ago, was still a tender one with him. “She and her new hubby came back, but by then it was just a hunt for the bodies.”

I tapped the grim-faced black nanny. “Who was this?”

“Melda or Tilda or maybe even, God save us, Hecuba, according to Chris Shannington. His father knew, but Chris no longer remembers.”

“Nice bracelets.”

He glanced at them without much interest. “If you say so.”

“Maybe John Eastlake was sleeping with her,” I said. “Maybe the bracelets were a little present.”

“Quién sabe? Rich widower, young woman — it’s been known to happen.”

I tapped the picnic basket, which the young black woman was holding with both hands, her arms bunched as though it was heavy. Heavier than just a few sandwiches could account for, you’d think… but maybe there was a whole chicken in there. And maybe a few bottles of beer for ole massa, as well — a little reward after he’d finished his day’s dives. “What color would you say that hamper is? Dark brown? Or is it red?”

Wireman gave me a strange look. “In a black-and-white photograph, it’s hard to tell.”

“Tell me how the storm led to the deaths of the little girls.”

He opened the folder again and handed me an old news story with an accompanying photograph. “This is from the Venice Gondolier, March 28th, 1927. I got the original info on the net. Jack Cantori called the paper, got someone to make a copy and shoot me a fax. Jack’s terrific, by the way.”

“No argument there,” I said. I studied the photo. “Who are these girls? No — don’t tell me. The one on his left’s Maria. Hannah’s on his right.”

“A-plus. Hannah’s the one with breasts. She was fourteen in ’27.”

We studied the fax sheet in silence for a few moments. E-mail would have been better. The fax had annoying dark vertical lines running through it, blurring some of the print, but the headline was clear enough: STORM PROVES TREASURE-HUNTING BOON TO AMATEUR DIVER. And the picture was clear enough, too. Eastlake’s hairline had receded a little. As if to compensate, his narrow bandleader’s mustache was now closer to a walrus. And although he was still wearing the same black bathing singlet, it was now under severe stress… and actually popped under one arm, I thought, although the picture’s resolution wasn’t quite good enough to be certain. It appeared Dad Eastlake had packed on some pork between 1925 and 1927 — the B-movie actor would have trouble getting roles if he didn’t start skipping desserts and doing more work in the gym. The girls flanking him weren’t as sloe-eyed-sexy as their big sister — you looked at Adriana and thought about hot afternoons in a haymow, you looked at these two and wondered if they were getting their schoolwork done — but they were pretty in a not-quite-there-yet way, and their excitement shone out in the picture. Sure it did.

Because, spread before them on the sand, was treasure.

“I can’t make it all out, and the damn caption’s blurry,” I complained.

“There’s a magnifying glass in the desk, but let me save you a headache.” Wireman picked up a pen and pointed with the tip. “That’s a medicine bottle, and that there is a musket-ball — or so Eastlake claims in the story. Maria’s got her hand on what appears to be a boot… or the remains of one. Next to the boot—”

“Pair of spectacles,” I said. “And… a necklace-chain?”

“The story claims it’s a bracelet. I don’t know. All I could swear to is a metal loop of some kind, overgrown with crud. But the older girl’s definitely holding out an earring.”

I scanned the story. In addition to the stuff on view, Eastlake had found various eating utensils… four cups he claimed were “Italianate”… a trivet… a box of gears (whatever that might mean)… and nails without number. He had also found half a China Man. Not a Chinaman; a China Man. It wasn’t pictured, at least not that I could see. The story said Eastlake had been diving on the eroded reefs west of Duma Key for fifteen years, sometimes to fish, often just to relax. He said he had found all sorts of litter, but nothing of interest. He said that the Alice (he called it that) had generated some remarkably big waves, and they must have shifted the sand inside the reef just enough to reveal what he called “a dumping field.”

“He doesn’t call it a wreck,” I said.

“It wasn’t,” Wireman said. “There was no boat. He didn’t find one, and neither did the dozens of people who helped him try to recover the bodies of his little girls. Only detritus. They would have found a wreck if there was a wreck to find; the water on the southwest end of the Key is no more than twenty-five feet deep all the way out to what remains of Kitt Reef, and it’s pretty clear now. Back then it was like turquoise glass.”

“Any theories about how it came to be there?”

“Sure. The best is that some boat close to foundering came blowing in a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years before, shedding shit as it came. Or maybe the crew was tossing stuff overboard to stay afloat. They made repairs after the storm was over and went on their way. It would explain why there was a swath of detritus for Eastlake to find, and also why none of it was particularly valuable. Treasure would have stayed with the ship.”

“And the reef wouldn’t have ripped the keel out of a boat that got blown in here back in the 1700s? Or 1600s?”

Wireman shrugged. “Chris Shannington says no one knows what the geography of Kitt Reef might have been a hundred and fifty years ago.”

I looked at the spread-out loot. The smiling middle daughters. The smiling Daddy, who was soon going to have to buy himself a new bathing costume. And I suddenly decided he hadn’t been sleeping with the nanny. No. Even a mistress would have told him he couldn’t have a newspaper photo of himself taken in that old thing. She would have found a tactful reason, but the real one was right in front of me, after all these years; even with less-than-perfect vision in my right eye, I could see it. He was too fat. Only he didn’t see it, and his daughters didn’t see it, either. Loving eyes did not see.

Too fat. Something there, wasn’t there? Some A that practically demanded a B.

“I’m surprised he talked about what he found at all,” I said. “If you happened on stuff like this today and then blabbed to Channel 6, half of Florida would show up in their little putt-putts, hunting for doubloons and pieces of eight with metal detectors.”

“Ah, but this was another Florida,” Wireman said, and I remembered Mary Ire using the same phrase. “John Eastlake was a rich man, and Duma Key was his private preserve. Besides, there were no doubloons, no pieces of eight — just moderately interesting junk uncovered by a freak storm. For weeks he went down and dived where that debris was scattered on the floor of the Gulf — and it was close in, according to Shannington; at low tide, you could practically wade to it. And sure, he was probably keeping an eye out for valuables. He was a rich man, but I don’t think that vaccinates a man against the treasure-bug.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sure it doesn’t.”

“The nanny would have gone with him on his treasure-hunting expeditions. The three still-at-home girls, too: the twins and Elizabeth. Maria and Hannah were back at their boarding school in Bradenton, and big sis had run off to Atlanta. Eastlake and his little ones probably had picnics down there.”

“How often?” I began to see where this was going.

“Often. Maybe every day while the debris field was at its richest. They wore a path from the house to what was called Shade Beach. It was half a mile, if that.”

“A path two adventurous little girls could follow on their own.”

“And one day did. To everyone’s sorrow.” He swept the pictures back into the folder. “There’s a story here, muchacho, and I suppose it’s marginally more interesting than a little girl swallowing a marble, but a tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I’ll take A Midsummer Night’s Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.”

He brooded a moment.

“What probably happened is that one day in April of 1927, when Tessie and Laura were supposed to be napping, they decided to get up, sneak down the path, and go hunting for treasure at Shade Beach. Probably they meant to do no more than wade in as far as their knees, which is all they were permitted to do — one of the stories quotes John Eastlake as saying that, and Adriana backed him up.”

“The married daughter who came back.”

“Right. She and her new husband returned a day or two before the search for the bodies was officially called off. That’s according to Shannington. Anyway, one of the little girls maybe saw something gleaming a little further out and started to flounder. Then—”

“Then her sister tried to save her.” Yes, I could see it. Only I saw Lin and Ilse as they’d been when they were small. Not twins, but for three or four golden years nearly inseparable.

Wireman nodded. “And then the rip took em both. Had to’ve been that way, amigo; that’s why the bodies weren’t found. Off they went, heigh-ho for the caldo largo.”

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant by the rip, then remembered a painting by Winslow Homer, romantic but of undeniable power: Undertow.

The intercom on the wall beeped, startling us both. Wireman struck the folder with his arm as he turned around, knocking photocopies and faxes everywhere.

“Mr. Wireman!” It was Annmarie Whistler. “Mr. Wireman, are you there?”

“I’m here,” Wireman said.

“Mr. Wireman?” She sounded agitated. Then, as if to herself: “Jesus, where are you?”

“The fucking button,” he muttered, and went to the wall unit, not quite running. He pushed the button. “I’m here. What’s wrong? What’s happened? Did she fall?”

“No!” Annmarie cried. “She’s awake! Awake and aware! She’s asking for you! Can you come?”

“Right away,” he said, and turned to me, grinning. “Do you hear that, Edgar? Come on!” He paused. “What are you looking at?”

“These,” I said, and held out the two pictures of Eastlake in his bathing dress: the one where he was surrounded by all his daughters, and the one taken two years later, where he was flanked by just Maria and Hannah.

“Never mind em now — didn’t you hear her? Miss Eastlake is back!” He booked for the door. I dropped his folder on the library table and followed him. I had made the connection — but only because I’d spent the last few months cultivating the art of seeing. Cultivating it strenuously.

“Wireman!” I called. He’d gone the length of the dogtrot and was halfway up the staircase. I was limping as fast as I could and he was still pulling away. He waited for me, not very patiently. “Who told him the debris field was there?”

“Eastlake? I assume he stumbled on it while pursuing his diving hobby.”

“I don’t think so — he hadn’t been in that bathing suit for a long time. Diving and snorkeling may have been his hobby in the early twenties, but I think that around 1925, eating dinner became his chief diversion. So who told him?”

Annmarie came out of a door near the end of the hall. There was a goofy, unbelieving grin on her face that made her look half her forty years.

“Come on,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

“Is she—”

“She is,” came Elizabeth’s cracked but unmistakable voice. “Come in here, Wireman, and let me see your face while I still know it.”

ix

I lingered in the hall with Annmarie, not sure what to do, looking at the knickknacks and the big old Frederic Remington at the far end — Indians on ponies. Then Wireman called for me. His voice was impatient and rough with tears.

The room was dim. The shades had all been drawn. Air conditioning whispered through a vent somewhere above us. There was a table next to her bed with a lamp on it. The shade was green glass. The bed was the hospital kind, and cranked up so she could almost sit. The lamp put her in a soft spotlight, with her hair loose on the shoulders of a pink dressing gown. Wireman sat beside her, holding her hands. Above her bed was the only painting in the room, a fine print of Edward Hopper’s Eleven AM, an archetype of loneliness waiting patiently at the window for some change, any change.

Somewhere a clock was ticking.

She looked at me and smiled. I saw three things in her face. They hit me one after the other like stones, each one heavier than the last. The first was how much weight she’d lost. The second was that she looked horribly tired. The third was that she hadn’t long to live.

“Edward,” she said.

“No—” I began, but when she raised one hand (the flesh hanging down in a snow-white bag above her elbow), I stilled at once. Because here was a fourth thing to see, and it hit hardest of all — not a stone but a boulder. I was looking at myself. This was what people had seen in the aftermath of my accident, when I was trying to sweep together the poor scattered bits of my memory — all that treasure that looked like trash when it was spread out in such ugly, naked fashion. I thought of how I had forgotten my doll’s name, and I knew what was coming next.

“I can do this,” she said.

“I know you can,” I said.

“You brought Wireman back from the hospital,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I was so afraid they’d keep him. And I would be alone.”

I didn’t reply to this.

“Are you Edmund?” she asked timidly.

“Miss Eastlake, don’t tax yourself,” Wireman said gently. “This is—”

“Hush, Wireman,” I said. “She can do this.”

“You paint,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Have you painted the ship yet?”

A curious thing happened to my stomach. It didn’t sink so much as it seemed to disappear and leave a void between my heart and the rest of my guts. My knees tried to buckle. The steel in my hip went hot. The back of my neck went cold. And warm, prickling fire ran up the arm that wasn’t there.

“Yes,” I said. “Again and again and again.”

“You’re Edgar,” she said.

“Yes, Elizabeth. I’m Edgar. Good for you, honey.”

She smiled. I guessed no one had called her honey in a long time. “My mind is like a tablecloth with a great big hole burned into it.” She turned to Wireman. “Muy divertido, sí?”

“You need to rest,” he said. “In fact, you need to dormir como un tronco.”

She smiled faintly. “Like a log. Yes. And I think when I wake up, I’ll still be here. For a little while.” She lifted his hands to her face and kissed them. “I love you, Wireman.”

“I love you, too, Miss Eastlake,” he said. Good for him.

“Edgar?… Is it Edgar?”

“What do you think, Elizabeth?”

“Yes, of course it is. You’re to have a show? Is that how we left things before my last…” She drooped her eyelids, as if to mime sleep.

“Yes, at the Scoto Gallery. You really need to rest.”

“Is it soon? Your show?”

“In less than a week.”

“Your paintings… the ship paintings… are they on the mainland? At the gallery?”

Wireman and I exchanged a look. He shrugged.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good.” She smiled. “I’ll rest, then. Everything else can wait… until after you have your show. Your moment in the sun. Are you selling them? The ship pictures?”

Wireman and I exchanged another look, and the message in his eyes was very clear: Don’t upset her.

“They’re marked NFS, Elizabeth. That means—”

“I know what it means, Edgar, I didn’t fall out of an orange tree yesterday.” Inside their deep pockets of wrinkles, caught in a face that was receding toward death, her eyes flashed. “Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. And however hard it is for you. Break them up, send them to the four winds. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Will you do it?”

I didn’t know if I would or not, but I recognized her signs of growing agitation from my own not-so-distant past. “Yes.” At that point, I would have promised her to jump to the moon in seven-league boots, if it would have eased her mind.

“Even then they may not be safe,” she mused in an almost-horrified voice.

“Stop, now,” I said, and patted her hand. “Stop thinking about this.”

“All right. We’ll talk more after your show. The three of us. I’ll be stronger… clearer… and you, Edgar, will be able to pay attention. Do you have daughters? I seem to remember that you do.”

“Yes, and they’re staying on the mainland with their mother. At the Ritz. That’s already arranged.”

She smiled, but the corners drooped almost at once. It was as if her mouth were melting. “Crank me down, Wireman. I’ve been in the swamp… forty days and forty nights… so it feels… and I’m tired.”

He cranked her down, and Annmarie came in with something in a glass on a tray. No chance Elizabeth was going to drink any of it; she had already corked off. Over her head, the loneliest girl in the world sat in a chair and looked out the window forever, face hidden by the fall of her hair, naked but for a pair of shoes.

x

For me, sleep was long in coming that night. It was after midnight before I finally slipped away. The tide had withdrawn, and the whispered conversation under the house had ceased. That didn’t stop the whispered voices in my head, however.

Another Florida, Mary Ire whispered. That was another Florida.

Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. That was Elizabeth, of course.

The grown Elizabeth. I heard another version of her, however, and because I had to make this voice up, what I heard was Ilse’s voice as it had been as a child.

There’s treasure, Daddy, this voice said. You can get it if you put on your mask and snorkel. I can show you where to look.

I drew a picture.

xi

I was up with the dawn. I thought I could go to sleep again, but not until I took one of the few Oxycontin pills I still had put aside, and until I made a telephone call. I took the pill, then dialed the Scoto and got the answering machine — there wouldn’t be a living person in the gallery for hours yet. Artistic types aren’t morning people.

I pushed 11 for Dario Nannuzzi’s extension, and after the beep I said: “Dario, it’s Edgar. I’ve changed my mind about the Girl and Ship series. I want to sell them after all, okay? The only caveat is that they should all go to different people, if possible. Thanks.”

I hung up and went back to bed. Lay there for fifteen minutes watching the overhead fan turn lazily and listening to the shells whisper beneath me. The pill was working, but I wasn’t drifting off. And I knew why.

I knew exactly why.

I got up again, hit redial, listened to the recorded message, then punched in Dario’s extension one more time. His recorded voice invited me to leave a message at the beep. “Except for No. 8,” I said. “That one is still NFS.”

And why was it NFS?

Not because it was genius, although I think it was. Not even because when I looked at it, it was — for me — like listening to the darkest part of my heart telling its tale. It was because I felt that something had let me live just to paint it, and that to sell it would be to deny my own life, and all the pain I had undergone to reclaim it.

Yeah, that.

“That one’s mine, Dario,” I said.

Then I went back to bed, and that time I slept.