Duma Key

i

The following afternoon found me once more sitting at the little table at the end of the El Palacio de Asesinos boardwalk. The striped umbrella, although ripped, was still serviceable. A breeze chilly enough to warrant sweatshirts was blowing in off the water. Little scars of light danced across the table-top as I talked. And I talked, all right — for almost an hour, refreshing myself with sips of green tea from a glass Wireman kept filled. At last I stopped and for a little while there was no sound but the mild whisper of the incoming waves, breaking and running up the strand.

Wireman must have heard enough wrong in my voice the night before to concern him, because he’d offered to come in the Palacio golf cart immediately. He said he could stay in touch with Miss Eastlake via walkie-talkie. I told him it could wait a little. It was important, I said, but not urgent. Not in the 911 sense, at least. And it was true. If Tom were to commit suicide on his cruise, there was little I could do to prevent it. But I didn’t think he’d do it as long as his mother and brother were with him.

I had no intention of telling Wireman about my furtive hunt through my daughter’s purse; that was something of which I’d grown more rather than less ashamed. But once I started, beginning with LINK-BELT, I couldn’t stop. I told him almost everything, finishing with Tom Riley standing at the head of the stairs leading up to Little Pink, pale and dead and minus an eye. I think part of what kept me going was the simple realization that Wireman couldn’t commit me to the nearest lunatic asylum — he had no legal authority. Part of it was that, attracted as I was by his kindness and cynical good cheer, he was still a stranger. Sometimes — often, I think — telling stories that are embarrassing or even downright crazy is easier when you’re telling them to a stranger. Mostly, though, I pushed on out of pure relief: I felt like a man expressing snake-venom from a bite.

Wireman poured himself a fresh glass of tea with a hand that was not quite steady. I found that interesting and disquieting. Then he glanced at his watch, which he wore nurse-style, with the face on the inside of his wrist. “In half an hour or so I really have to go up and check her,” he said. “I’m sure she’s fine, but—”

“What if she wasn’t?” I asked. “If she fell, or something?”

He pulled a walkie-talkie from the pocket of his chinos. It was as slim as a cell phone. “I make sure she always carries hers. There are also Rapid Response call-buttons all over the house, but—” He tapped a thumb on his chest. “I’m the real alarm system, okay? The only one I trust.”

He looked out at the water and sighed.

“She’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s not too bad yet, but Dr. Hadlock says it’ll probably move fast now that it’s settled in. A year from now…” He shrugged almost sullenly, then brightened. “We have tea every day at four. Tea and Oprah. Why not come up and meet the lady of the house? I’ll even throw in a slice of key lime pie.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal. Do you think she’s the one who left that message on my answering machine about Duma Key not being a lucky place for daughters?”

“Sure. Although if you expect an explanation — if you expect her to even remember — good luck. But I can help you a little, maybe. You said something about brothers and sisters yesterday, and I didn’t get a chance to correct you. Fact is, all Elizabeth’s sibs were girls. All daughters. The oldest was born in 1908 or thereabouts. Elizabeth came onstage in 1923. Mrs. Eastlake died about two months after having her. Some kind of infection. Or maybe she threw a clot… who’s to know at this late date? That was here, on Duma Key.”

“Did the father remarry?” I still couldn’t remember his name.

Wireman helped me out. “John? No.”

“You’re not going to tell me he raised six girls out here. That’s just too gothic.”

“He tried, with the help of a nanny. But his eldest ran off with a boy. Miss Eastlake had an accident that almost killed her. And the twins…” He shook his head. “They were two years older than Elizabeth. In 1927 they disappeared. The presumption is they tried to go swimming, got swept away by an undertow, and drowned out there in the caldo grande.”

We looked at the water for a little while — those deceptively mild waves running up the beach like puppies — and said nothing. Then I asked if Elizabeth had told him all of this.

“Some. Not all. And she’s mixed up about what she does remember. I found a passing mention of an incident that had to be the right one on a Web site dedicated to Gulf coast history. Had a little e-mail correspondence with a guy who’s a librarian in Tampa.” Wireman raised his hands and waggled his fingers in a typing mime. “Tessie and Laura Eastlake. The librarian sent me a copy of the Tampa paper from April 19th, 1927. The headline on the front page is very stark, very bleak, very chilling. Three words. THEY ARE GONE.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Six years old. Elizabeth would have been four, old enough to understand what had happened. Maybe old enough to read a newspaper headline as simple as THEY ARE GONE. The twins dead and Adriana, the oldest, eloped off to Atlanta with one of his plant managers… no wonder John had had enough of Duma for awhile. He and the remaining three moved to Miami. Many years later, he moved back here to die, and Miss Eastlake cared for him.” Wireman shrugged. “Pretty much as I’m caring for her. So… do you see why an old lady with onset-Alzheimer’s might consider Duma a bad place for daughters?”

“I guess so, but how does an old lady with onset-Alzheimer’s find the phone number of her new tenant?”

Wireman gave me a sly look. “New tenant, old number, autodial function on all the phones back there.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Any other questions?”

I gaped at him. “She has me on autodial?”

“Don’t blame me; I came in late on this movie-show. My guess is that the Realtor who handles things for her programmed the rental properties into the phones. Or maybe Miss Eastlake’s business manager. He pops down from St. Petersburg every six weeks or so to make sure she’s not dead and I’m not stealing the Spode. I’ll ask him the next time he shows up.”

“So she can call any house on the north end of the Key at the touch of a button.”

“Well… yeah. I mean, they are all hers.” He patted my hand. “But you know what, muchacho? I think your button is going to have a little nervous breakdown this evening.”

“No,” I said, not even thinking about it. “Don’t do that.”

“Ah,” Wireman said, exactly as if he understood. And who knows, maybe he did. “Anyway, that explains your mystery caller — although I have to tell you, explanations have a way of thinning out on Duma Key. As your story demonstrates.”

“What do you mean? Have you had… experiences?”

He looked at me squarely, his large tanned face inscrutable. The chilly late January wind gusted, blowing sand around our ankles. It also lifted his hair, once again revealing the coin-shaped scar above his right temple. I wondered if someone had poked him with the neck of a bottle, maybe in a bar fight, and tried to imagine someone getting mad at this man. It was hard to do.

“Yes, I’ve had… experiences,” he said, and hooked the first two fingers of each hand into little quotation marks. “It’s what makes children into… adults. Also what gives English teachers something to bullshit about in first year… lit courses.” Each time with the air-quotes.

Okay, he didn’t want to talk about it, at least not then. So I asked him how much of my story he believed.

He rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. “Don’t try my patience, vato. You might be mistaken about a few things, but you ain’t nuts. I got a lady up there… sweetest lady in the world and I love her, but sometimes she thinks I’m her Dad and it’s Miami circa nineteen thirty-four. Sometimes she pops one of her china people into a Sweet Owen cookie-tin and tosses it into the koi pond behind the tennis court. I have to get em out when she naps, otherwise she pitches a bitch. No idea why. I think by this summer she may be wearing an adult didey full-time.”

“Point?”

“The point is I know loco, I know Duma, and I’m getting to know you. I’m perfectly willing to believe you had a vision of your friend dead.”

“No bullshit?”

“No bullshit. Verdad. The question is what you’re going to do about it, assuming you’re not eager to see him into the ground for — may I be vulgar? — buttering what used to be your loaf.”

“I’m not. I did have this momentary thing… I don’t know how to describe it…”

“Was it a momentary thing where you felt like chopping off his dick, then putting out his eyes with a hot toasting-fork? Was it that momentary thing, muchacho?” Wireman made the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a gun and pointed it at me. “I was married to a Mexican lassie, and I know jealousy. It’s normal. Like a startle-reflex.”

“Did your wife ever…” I stopped, suddenly aware all over again that I’d only met this man the day before. That was easy to forget. Wireman was intense.

“No, amigo, not to my knowledge. What she did was die on me.” His face was perfectly expressionless. “Let’s not go there, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thing to remember about jealousy is it comes, it goes. Like the afternoon showers down here during the mean season. You’re over it, you say. You should be, because you ain’t her campesino no more. The question is what you’re going to do about this other thing. How you going to keep this guy from killing himself? Because you know what happens when the happy-family cruise is over, right?”

For a moment I said nothing. I was translating that last bit of Spanish, or trying to. You ain’t her farmer no more, was that right? If so, it had a bitter ring of truth.

“Muchacho? Your next move?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s got e-mail, but what do I write to him? ‘Dear Tom, I’m worried you’re contemplating suicide, please reply soonest’? I bet he’s not checking his e-mail while he’s on vacation, anyway. He’s got two ex-wives, and still pays alimony to one of them, but he’s not close to either. There was one kid, but he died in infancy — spina bifida, I think — and… what? What?”

Wireman had turned away and sat slouched in his chair, looking out at the water, where pelicans were diving for their own high tea. His body English suggested disgust.

He turned back. “Quit squirming. You know damn well who knows him. Or you think you do.”

“Pam? You mean Pam?”

He only looked at me.

“Are you going to talk, Wireman, or only sit there?”

“I have to check on my lady. She’ll be up by now and she’s going to want her four o’clockies.”

“Pam would think I’m crazy! Hell, she still thinks I’m crazy!”

“Convince her.” Then he relented a little. “Look, Edgar. If she’s been as close to him as you think, she’ll have seen the signs. And all you can do is try. Entiendes?”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“It means call your wife.”

“She’s my ex.”

“Nope. Until your mind changes, the divorce is just a legal fiction. That’s why you give a shit what she thinks about your state of mind. But if you also care about this guy, you’ll call her and tell her you have reason to think he’s planning to highside it.”

He heaved himself out of his chair, then held out his hand. “Enough palaver. Come on and meet the boss. You won’t be sorry. As bosses go, she’s a pretty nice one.”

I took his hand and let him pull me out of what I presumed was a replacement beach chair. He had a strong grip. That was something else I’ll never forget about Jerome Wireman; the man had a strong grip. The boardwalk up to the gate in the back wall was only wide enough for one, so I followed, limping gamely along. When he reached the gate — which was a smaller version of the one in front and looked as Spanish as Wireman’s offhand patois — he turned toward me, smiling a little.

“Josie comes in to clean Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she’s willing to keep an ear out for Miss Eastlake during her afternoon nap — which means I could come down and look at your pictures tomorrow afternoon around two, if that suits.”

“How did you know I wanted you to? I was still working up the nerve to ask.”

He shrugged. “It’s pretty obvious you want someone to look before you show them to the guy at that gallery. Besides your daughter and the kid who runs your errands, that is.”

“The appointment’s on Friday. I’m dreading it.”

Wireman waggled his hand in the air and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. He paused. “If I think your stuff is crap, I’m going to tell you so.”

“That works.”

He nodded. “Just wanted to be clear.” Then he opened the gate and led me into the courtyard of Heron’s Roost, also known as Palacio de Asesinos.

ii

I’d already seen the courtyard, on the day I’d used the front entrance to turn around, but on that day I’d gotten little more than a glance. I’d mostly been concentrating on getting myself and my ashen-faced, perspiring daughter back to Big Pink. I’d noticed the tennis court and the cool blue tiles, but had missed the koi pool entirely. The tennis court was swept and ready for action, its paved surface two shades darker than the courtyard tile. One turn of the chrome crank would bring the net taut and ready. A full basket of balls stood on wire stilts, and made me think briefly of the sketch Ilse had taken back to Providence with her: The End of the Game.

“One of these days, muchacho,” Wireman said, pointing at the court as we walked by. He had slowed down so I could catch up. “You and me. I’ll take it easy on you — just volley-and-serve — but I hunger to swing a racket.”

“Is volley-and-serve what you charge for evaluating pictures?”

He smiled. “I have a price, but that ain’t it. Tell you later. Come on in.”

iii

Wireman led me through the back door, across a dim kitchen with large white service islands and an enormous Westinghouse stove, then into the whispering interior of the house, which shone with dark woods — oak, walnut, teak, redwood, cypress. This was a Palacio, all right, old Florida style. We passed one book-lined room with an actual suit of armor brooding in the corner. The library connected with a study where paintings — not stodgy oil portraits but bright abstract things, even a couple of op-art eye-poppers — hung on the walls.

Light showered down on us like white rain as we walked the main hall (Wireman walked; I limped), and I realized that, for all of the mansion’s grandeur, this part of it was no more than a glorified dogtrot — the kind that separates sections of older and much humbler Florida dwellings. That style, almost always constructed of wood (sometimes scrapwood) rather than stone, even has a name: Florida Cracker.

This dogtrot, filled with light courtesy of its long glass ceiling, was lined with planters. At its far end, Wireman hung a right. I followed him into an enormous cool parlor. A row of windows gave on a side courtyard filled with flowers — my daughters could have named half of them, Pam all of them, but I could only name the asters, dayflowers, elderberry, and foxglove. Oh, and the rhododendron. There was plenty of that. Beyond the tangle, on a blue-tiled walk that presumably connected with the main courtyard, stalked a sharp-eyed heron. It looked both thoughtful and grim, but I never saw a one on the ground that didn’t look like a Puritan elder considering which witch to burn next.

In the center of the room was the woman Ilse and I had seen on the day we tried exploring Duma Key Road. Then she’d been in a wheelchair, her feet clad in blue Hi-Tops. Today she was standing with her hands planted on the grips of a walker, and her feet — large and very pale — were bare. She was dressed in a high-waisted pair of beige slacks and a dark brown silk blouse with amusingly wide shoulders and full sleeves. It was an outfit that made me think of Katharine Hepburn in those old movies they sometimes show on Turner Classic Movies: Adam’s Rib, or Woman of the Year. Only I couldn’t remember Katharine Hepburn looking this old, even when she was old.

The room was dominated by a long, low table of the sort my father had had in the cellar for his electric trains, only this one was covered in some light wood — it looked like bamboo — rather than fake grass. It was crowded with model buildings and china figurines: men, women, children, barnyard animals, zoo animals, creatures of mythical renown. Speaking of mythical creatures, I saw a couple of fellows in blackface that wouldn’t have passed muster with the N-double-A-C-P.

Elizabeth Eastlake looked at Wireman with an expression of sweet delight I would have enjoyed drawing… although I’m not sure anyone would have taken it seriously. I’m not sure we ever believe the simplest emotions in our art, although we see them all around us, every day.

“Wireman!” she said. “I woke up early and I’ve been having such a wonderful time with my chinas!” She had a deep southern-girl accent that turned chinas into CHA-nahs. “Look, the family’s at home!”

At one end of the table was a model mansion. The kind with pillars. Think Tara in Gone With the Wind and you’ll be fine. Or fahn, if you talk like Elizabeth. Around it were ranged almost a dozen figures, standing in a circle. The pose was strangely ceremonial.

“So they are,” Wireman agreed.

“And the schoolhouse! See how I’ve put the children outside the schoolhouse! Do come see!”

“I will, but you know I don’t like you to get up without me,” he said.

“I didn’t feel like calling on that old talkie-walkie. I’m really feeling very well. Come and see. Your new friend as well. Oh, I know who you are.” She smiled and crooked a finger at me to come closer. “Wireman tells me all about you. You’re the new fellow at Salmon Point.”

“He calls it Big Pink,” Wireman said.

She laughed. It was the cigarettey kind that dissolves into coughing. Wireman had to hurry forward and steady her. Miss Eastlake didn’t seem to mind either the coughing or the steadying. “I like that!” she said when she was able. “Oh hon, I like that! Come and see my new schoolhouse arrangement, Mr…? I’m sure I’ve been told your name but it escapes me, so much does now, you are Mr…?”

“Freemantle,” I said. “Edgar Freemantle.”

I joined them at her play-table; she offered her hand. It wasn’t muscular, but was, like her feet, of a good size. She hadn’t forgotten the fine art of greeting, and gripped as well as she could. Also, she looked at me with cheerful interest as we shook. I liked her for her frank admission of memory troubles. And, Alzheimer’s or not, I did far more mental and verbal stuttering than I’d seen so far from her.

“It’s good to know you, Edgar. I have seen you before, but I don’t recall when. It will come to me. Big Pink! That’s sassy!”

“I like the house, ma’am.”

“Good. I’m very glad if it gives satisfaction. It’s an artist’s house, you know. Are you an artist, Edgar?”

She was looking at me with her guileless blue eyes. “Yes,” I said. It was the easiest, the quickest, and maybe it was the truth. “I guess I am.”

“Of course you are, hon, I knew right away. I’ll need one of your pictures. Wireman will strike a price with you. He’s a lawyer as well as an excellent cook, did he tell you that?”

“Yes… no… I mean—” I was lost. Her conversation seemed to have developed too many threads, and all at once. Wireman, that dog, looked as if he were struggling not to laugh. Which made me feel like laughing, of course.

“I try to get pictures from all the artists who’ve stayed in your Big Pink. I have a Haring that was painted there. Also a Dalí sketch.”

That stopped any impulse to laugh. “Really?”

“Yes! I’ll show you in a bit, one really can’t avoid it, it’s in the television room and we always watch Oprah. Don’t we, Wireman?”

“Yes,” he said, and glanced at the face of his watch on the inside of his wrist.

“But we don’t have to watch it on the dot, because we have a wonderful gadget called…” She paused, frowned, and put a finger to the dimple in one side of her plump chin. “Vito? Is it Vito, Wireman?”

He smiled. “TiVo, Miss Eastlake.”

She laughed. “TiVo, isn’t that a funny word? And isn’t it funny how formal we are? He’s Wireman to me, I’m Miss Eastlake to him — unless I’m upset, as I sometimes am when things slip my mind. We’re like characters in a play! A happy one, where one knows that soon the band will strike up and everyone in the company will sing!” She laughed to show what a charming idea it was, but there was something a little frantic in it. For the first time her accent made me think of Tennessee Williams instead of Margaret Mitchell.

Gently — very gently — Wireman said: “Maybe we ought to go into the other room for Oprah now. I think you ought to sit down. You can have a cigarette when you watch Oprah, and you know you like that.”

“In a minute, Wireman. In just a minute. We have so little company here.” Then back to me. “What kind of artist are you, Edgar? Do you believe in art for art’s sake?”

“Definitely art for art’s sake, ma’am.”

“I’m glad. That’s the kind Salmon Point likes best. What do you call it?”

“My art?”

“No, hon — Salmon Point.”

“Big Pink, ma’am.”

“Big Pink it shall be. And I shall be Elizabeth to you.”

I smiled. I had to, because she was earnest rather than flirty. “Elizabeth it is.”

“Lovely. In a moment or two we shall go to the television room, but first…” She turned her attention back to the play-table. “Well, Wireman? Well, Edgar? Do you see how I’ve arranged the children?”

There were about a dozen, all facing the left side of the schoolhouse. Low student enrollment.

“What does it say to you?” she asked. “Wireman? Edward? Either?”

That was a very minor slip, but of course I was attuned to slips. And that time my own name was the banana peel.

“Recess?” Wireman asked, and shrugged.

“Of course not,” she said. “If it were recess, they’d be playing, not all bunched together and gawking.”

“It’s either a fire or a fire drill,” I said.

She leaned over her walker (Wireman, vigilant, grabbed her shoulder to keep her from overbalancing), and planted a kiss on my cheek. It surprised hell out of me, but not in a bad way. “Very good, Edward!” she cried. “Now which do you say it is?”

I thought it over. It was easy if you took the question seriously. “A drill.”

“Yes!” Her blue eyes blazed with delight. “Tell Wiring why.”

“If it was a fire, they’d be scattering in all directions. Instead, they’re—”

“Waiting to go back in, yes.” But when she turned to Wireman, I saw a different woman, one who was frightened. “I called you by the wrong name again.”

“It’s all right, Miss Eastlake,” he said, and kissed the hollow of her temple with a tenderness that made me like him very much.

She smiled at me. It was like watching the sun sail out from behind a cloud. “As long as he is still addressing one by one’s surname, one knows…” But now she seemed lost, and her smile began to falter. “One knows that…”

“That it’s time to watch Oprah,” Wireman said, and took her arm. Together they turned her walker away from the play-table, and she began to clump with surprising speed toward a door in the far end of the room. He walked watchfully beside her.

Her “television room” was dominated by a big flat-screen Samsung. At the other end of the room was a stack of expensive sound components. I hardly noticed either one. I was looking at the framed sketch on the wall above the shelves of CDs, and for a few seconds I forgot to breathe.

The sketch was just pencil, augmented by two scarlet threads, probably added with nothing more than a plain red ballpoint pen — the kind teachers use to grade papers. These not-quite-offhand scribbles had been laid along the horizon-line of the Gulf to indicate sunset. They were just right. They were genius writ small. It was my horizon, the one I saw from Little Pink. I knew that just as I knew the artist had been listening to the shells grind steadily beneath him as he turned blank white paper into what his eye saw and his mind translated. On the horizon was a ship, probably a tanker. It could have been the very one I’d drawn my first evening at Number 13 Duma Key Road. The style was nothing at all like mine, but the choice of subject-matter was damn near identical.

Scribbled almost carelessly at the bottom: Salv Dalí.

iv

Miss Eastlake — Elizabeth — had her cigarette while Oprah questioned Kirstie Alley on the always fascinating subject of weight-loss. Wireman produced egg salad sandwiches, which were delicious. My eyes kept straying to the framed Dalí sketch, and I kept thinking — of course — Hello, Dalí. When Dr. Phil came on and began berating a couple of fat ladies in the audience who had apparently volunteered to be berated, I told Wireman and Elizabeth that I really ought to be getting back.

Elizabeth used the remote to silence Dr. Phil, then held out the book the remote had been sitting on. Her eyes looked both humble and hopeful. “Wireman says you’ll come and read to me on some afternoons, Edmund, is that true?”

We’re forced to make some decisions in a split second, and I made one then. I decided not to look at Wireman, who was sitting to Elizabeth’s left. The acuity she’d exhibited at her play-table was fading, even I could see that, but I thought there was still quite a lot left. A glance in Wireman’s direction would be enough to tell her that this was news to me, and she’d be embarrassed. I didn’t want her to be embarrassed, partly because I liked her and partly because I suspected life would hold a great many embarrassments for her in the year or two ahead. It would soon be more than forgetting names.

“We’ve discussed it,” I said.

“Perhaps you’d read me a poem this afternoon,” she said. “Your choice. I miss them so. I could do without Oprah, but a life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…” She laughed. It was a bewildered sound that hurt my heart. “It’s like a life without pictures, don’t you think? Or don’t you?”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere else a clock was ticking, but that was all. I thought Wireman would say something, but he didn’t; she had rendered him temporarily speechless, no mean trick when it came to that hijo de madre.

“It can be your choice,” she said again. “Or, if you’ve stayed too long, Edward—”

“No,” I said. “No, that’s all right, I’m fine.”

The book was simply titled: Good Poems. The editor was Garrison Keillor, a man who could probably run for governor and be elected in the part of the world I came from. I opened at random and found a poem by someone named Frank O’Hara. It was short. That made it a good poem in my book, and I waded in.

Something happened to me there. My voice wavered and the words doubled, as if the word water from my mouth had summoned some in my eyes. I looked up and said, “Pardon me.” My voice was husky. Wireman looked concerned, but Elizabeth Eastlake was smiling at me with an expression of perfect understanding.

“That’s all right, Edgar,” she said. “Poetry sometimes does that to me, as well. Honest feeling is nothing to be ashamed of. Men do not sham convulsion.”

“Nor simulate a throe,” I added. My voice seemed to be coming from someone else.

She smiled brilliantly. “The man knows his Dickinson, Wireman!”

“Seems to,” Wireman agreed. He was watching me closely.

“Will you finish, Edward?”

“Yes, ma’am.

I closed the book. “That’s the end.”

She nodded. “What were the best of all your days, Edgar?”

“Maybe these,” I said. “I’m hoping.”

She nodded. “Then I’ll hope, too. One is always allowed to hope. And Edgar?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Let me be Elizabeth to you. I can’t stand being a ma’am at this end of my life. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded. “I think we do, Elizabeth.”

She smiled, and the tears that had been in her own eyes fell. The cheeks they landed on were old and ruined with wrinkles, but the eyes were young. Young.

v

Ten minutes later, Wireman and I were standing at the end of the Palacio boardwalk again. He had left the lady of the house with a slice of key lime pie, a glass of tea, and the remote control. I had two of Wireman’s egg salad sandwiches in a bag. He said they’d just go stale if I didn’t take them home, and he didn’t have to press me too hard. I also hit him up for a couple of aspirin.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about that. I was going to ask first, believe me.”

“Relax, Wireman.”

He nodded but didn’t look directly at me. He was looking out at the Gulf. “I just want you to know I didn’t promise her anything. But she’s… childish now. So she makes assumptions the way kids do, based on what she wants rather than on the facts.”

“And what she wants is to be read to.”

“Yes.”

“Poems on tapes and compact discs don’t cut it?”

“Nope. She says the difference between recorded and live is like the difference between canned mushrooms and fresh ones.” He smiled, but still wouldn’t look at me.

“Why don’t you read to her, Wireman?”

Still looking out at the water, he said: “Because I no longer can.”

“No longer… why not?”

He considered this, then shook his head. “Not today. Wireman’s tired, muchacho, and she’ll be up in the night. Up and argumentative, full of rue and confusion, liable to think she’s in London or St. Tropez. I see the signs.”

“Will you tell me another day?”

“Yeah.” He sighed through his nose. “If you can show yours, I suppose I can show mine, although I don’t relish it. Are you sure you’re okay to get back on your own?”

“Absolutely,” I said, although my hip was throbbing like a big motor.

“I’d run you in the golf cart, I really would, but when she’s this way — Dr. Wireman’s clinical term for it is Bright Going On Stupid — she’s apt to take it into her mind to wash the windows… or dust some shelves… or go for a walk without her walker.” At that he actually shuddered. It looked like the kind that starts out as burlesque and ends up being real.

“Everybody keeps trying to get me into a golf cart,” I said.

“You’ll call your wife?”

“I don’t see any other option,” I said.

He nodded. “Good boy. You can tell me all about it when I come to look at your pictures. Any time’ll work. There’s a visiting nurse I can call — Annmarie Whistler — if the morning works better.”

“Okay. Thanks. And thanks for listening to me, Wireman.”

“Thanks for reading to the boss. Buena suerte, amigo.”

I set off down the beach and had gotten about fifty yards before something occurred to me. I turned back, thinking Wireman would be gone, but he was still standing there with his hands in his pockets and the wind off the Gulf — increasingly chilly — combing back his long graying hair. “Wireman!”

“What?”

“Was Elizabeth ever an artist herself?”

He said nothing for a long time. There was only the sound of the waves, louder tonight with the wind to push them. Then he said, “That’s an interesting question, Edgar. If you were to ask her — and I’d advise against it — she’d say no. But I don’t think that’s the truth.”

“Why not?”

But he only said, “You’d better get walking, muchacho. Before that hip of yours stiffens up.” He gave me a quick seeya wave, turned, and was gone back up the boardwalk, chasing his lengthening shadow, almost before I was aware he was leaving.

I stood where I was a moment or two longer, then turned north, set my sights on Big Pink, and headed for home. It was a long trip, and before I got there my own absurdly elongated shadow was lost in the sea oats, but in the end I made it. The waves were still building, and under the house the murmur of the shells had again become an argument.