Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  I thought, You could do some real damage with a thing like that. Then I thought: My father was a skin diver.

  I pushed it out of my mind and called what used to be home.

  ix

  “Hi, Pam, it’s me again.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you any more, Edgar. We finished what we have to say.”

  “Not quite. But this will be short. I have an old lady to look after. She’s sleeping now, but I don’t like to leave her long.”

  Pam, curious in spite of herself: “What old lady?”

  “Her name’s Elizabeth Eastlake. She’s in her mid-eighties, and she’s got a good start on Alzheimer’s. Her principal caregiver is taking care of an electrical problem with someone’s sauna, and I’m helping out.”

  “Did you want a gold star to paste on the Helping Others page of your workbook?”

  “No, I called to convince you I’m not crazy.” I had brought in my drawing. Now I crooked the handset between my shoulder and my ear so I could pick it up.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because you’re convinced that all this started with Ilse, and it didn’t.”

  “My God, you’re unbelievable! If she called from Santa Fe and said she’d broken a shoelace, you’d fly out there to take her a new one!”

  “I also don’t like you thinking that I’m down here going insane when I’m not. So … are you listening?”

  Only silence from the other end, but silence was good enough. She was listening.

  “You’re ten or maybe fifteen minutes out of the shower. I think that because your hair is down on the back of your housecoat. I guess you still don’t like the hairdryer.”

  “How—”

  “I don’t know how. You were sitting in a rocking chair when I called. You must have gotten it since the divorce. Reading a book and eating a cookie. A Grandma’s oatmeal cookie. The sun’s out now, and it’s coming in the window. You have a new television, the kind with a flat screen.” I paused. “And a cat. You got a cat. It’s sleeping under the TV.”

  Dead silence from her end. On my end the wind blew and the rain slapped the windows. I was about to ask her if she was there when she spoke again, in a dull voice that didn’t sound like Pam at all. I had thought she was done hurting my heart, but I was wrong. “Stop spying on me. If you ever loved me—stop spying on me.”

  “Then stop blaming me,” I said in a hoarse, not-quite-breaking voice. Suddenly I remembered Ilse getting ready to go back to Brown, Ilse standing in the strong tropical sun outside the Delta terminal, looking up at me and saying, You deserve to get better. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that. “What’s happened to me isn’t my fault. The accident wasn’t my fault and neither is this. I didn’t ask for it.”

  She screamed, “Do you think I did?”

  I closed my eyes, begging something, anything, to keep me from giving back anger for anger. “No, of course not.”

  “Then leave me out of it! Stop calling me! Stop SCARING me!”

  She hung up. I stood holding the phone to my ear. There was silence, then a loud click. It was followed by that distinctive Duma Key warbling hum. Today it sounded rather subaqueous. Maybe because of the rain. I hung the phone up and stood looking at the suit of armor. “I think that went very well, Sir Lancelot,” I said.

  No reply, which was exactly what I deserved.

  x

  I crossed the plant-lined main hall to the doorway of the China Parlor, looked in at Elizabeth, and saw she was sleeping in the same head-cocked position. Her snores, which had earlier struck me as pathetic in their naked antiquity, were now actually comforting; otherwise, it would have been too easy to imagine her sitting there dead with her neck broken. I wondered if I should wake her, and decided to let her sleep. Then I glanced right, toward the wide main staircase, and thought of her saying Oh, you’ll find it on the second floor landing.

  Find what?

  Probably it had been just another bit of gibberish, but I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the hall that would have been a dogtrot in a humbler house—the rain tapping the glass ceiling—and then climbed the wide staircase. I stopped five risers from the top, staring, then slowly climbed the rest of the way. There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the nineteen-twenties could have been blown up to such a size—it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide—with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

  There were eight people in the photograph, standing on white sand with the Gulf of Mexico in the background. The man was tall and handsome and appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a black bathing singlet that consisted of a strap-style shirt and trunks that looked like the close-fitting underwear basketball players wear nowadays. Ranged on either side of him stood five girls, the oldest a ripe teenager, the youngest identical towheads that made me think of the Bobbsey Twins from my earliest adventures in reading. The twins were wearing identical bathing dresses with frilled skirts, and holding hands. In their free hands they clasped dangly-legged, apron-wearing Raggedy Ann dolls that made me think of Reba … and the dark yarn hair above the vacantly smiling faces of the twins’ dolls was surely RED. In the crook of one arm, the man—John Eastlake, I had no doubt—held girl number six, the toddler who would eventually become the snoring crone below me. Behind the white folks stood a young black woman of perhaps twenty-two, with her hair tied in a kerchief. She was holding a picnic basket, and judging from the way the not-inconsiderable muscles in her arms were bunched, it was heavy. Three bangled silver bracelets clung to one forearm.

  Elizabeth was smiling and holding out her chubby little hands to whoever had taken this family portrait. No one else was smiling, although there might have been the ghost of one lurking around the corners of the man’s mouth; he had a mustache, and that made it hard to tell. The young black nanny looked positively grim.

  In the hand not occupied with supporting the toddler, John Eastlake held two items. One was a skin diver’s facemask. The other was the harpoon pistol I had seen mounted on the wall of the library with the other weapons. The question, it seemed to me, was whether or not some rational Elizabeth had come out of the mental fog long enough to send me up here.

  Before I could consider this further, the front door opened below me. “I’m back!” Wireman called. “Mission accomplished! Now who wants a drink?”

  How to Draw a Picture (V)

  Don’t be afraid to experiment; find your muse and let her lead you. As her talent grew stronger, Elizabeth’s muse became Noveen, the marvelous talking doll. Or so she thought. And by the time she discovered her mistake—by the time Noveen’s voice changed—it was too late. But at first it must have been wonderful. Finding one’s muse always is.

  The cake, for instance.

  Make it go on the floor, Noveen says. Make it go on the floor, Libbit!

  And because she can, she does. She draws Nan Melda’s cake on the floor. Splattered on the floor! Ha! And Nan Melda standing over it, hands on hips, disgusted.

  And was Elizabeth ashamed when it actually happened? Ashamed and a little frightened? I think she was.

  I know she was. For children, meanness is usually funny only when it’s imagined.

  Still, there were other games. Other experiments. Until finally, in ’27 …

  In Florida, all out-of-season hurricanes are called Alice. It’s a kind of joke. But the one that came screaming in off the Gulf in March of that year should have been named Hurricane Elizabeth.

  The doll whispered to her in a voice that must have sounded like the wind in the palms at night. Or the retreating tide grating through the shells under Big Pink. Whispering as little Libbit lingered on the porch of sleep. Telling her how much fun it would be to paint a big storm. And more.

  Noveen says There are secret things. Buried treasures a big storm wil
l uncover. Things Daddy would like to find and look at.

  And that turned the trick. Elizabeth cared only a little about painting a storm, but pleasing her Daddy? That idea was irresistible.

  Because Daddy was angry that year. Mad at Adie, who wouldn’t go back to school even after her European Tour. Adie didn’t care about meeting the right people or going to the right deb balls. She was besotted with her Emery … who wasn’t the Right Sort at all, in Daddy’s view of things.

  Daddy says He’s not our kind, he’s a Celluloid Collar, and Adie says He’s my kind, no matter what collar, and Daddy’s furious.

  There were bitter arguments. Daddy mad at Adie and vicey-versey. Hannah and Maria mad at Adie for having a handsome boyfriend who was both Older and Below Her. The twins scared by all that mad. Libbit scared, too. Nan Melda declared over and over that if not for Tessie and Lo-Lo, she would have gone back to her people in Jacksonville long since.

  Elizabeth drew these things, so I saw them.

  The boil finally popped its top. Adie and her Unsuitable Young Man eloped off to Atlanta, where Emery had been promised work in the office of a competitor. Daddy was raging. The Big Meanies, home from the Braden School for the weekend, heard him on the telephone in his study, telling someone he’d have Emery Paulson brought back and horsewhipped within an inch of his life. He would have them both horsewhipped!

  Then he says No, by God. Let it be what it is. She’s made her bed; let her sleep in it.

  After that came the storm. The Alice.

  Libbit felt it coming. She felt the wind begin to rise and blow out of simple charcoal strokes as black as death. The size of the actual storm when it arrived—the pelting rain, the freight-train shriek of the gale—frightened her badly, as if she had whistled for a dog and gotten a wolf.

  But then the wind died and the sun came out and everyone was all right. Better than all right, because in the Alice’s aftermath, Adie and her Unsuitable Young Man were forgotten for a time. Elizabeth even heard Daddy humming as he and Mr. Shannington cleaned up the wreckage in the front yard, Daddy driving the little red tractor and Mr. Shannington throwing drowned palm-fronds and busted branches into the little trailer trundling along behind.

  The doll whispered, the muse told its tale.

  Elizabeth listened and painted the place off Hag’s Rock that very day, the one where Noveen whispered the buried treasure now lay exposed.

  Libbit begs her Daddy to go look, begs him begs him begs him. Daddy says NO, Daddy says he’s too tired, too stiff from all that yardwork.

  Nan Melda says Some time in the water might loosen you up, Mr. Eastlake.

  Nan Melda says I’ll bring down a picnic lunch and the l’il girls.

  And then Nan Melda says You know how she is now. If she say something’s out there, then maybe …

  So they went downbeach by Hag’s Rock—Daddy in the swimsuit that no longer fit him, and Elizabeth, and the twins, and Nan Melda. Hannah and Maria were back in school, and Adie … but best not talk about her. Adie’s IN DUTCH. Nan Melda was carrying the red picnic basket. Inside was the lunch, sunhats for the girls, Elizabeth’s drawing things, Daddy’s spear-pistol, and a few harpoons for it.

  Daddy puts on his flippers and wades into the caldo up to his knees and says This is cold! It better not take long, Libbit. Tell me where this fabulous treasure lies.

  Libbit says I will, but do you promise I can have the china dolly?

  Daddy says Any doll is yours—fair salvage.

  The muse saw it and the girl painted it. So their future is set.

  9—Candy Brown

  i

  Two nights later I painted the ship for the first time.

  I called it Girl and Ship to begin with, then Girl and Ship No. 1, although neither was its real name; its real name was Ilse and Ship No. 1. It was the Ship series even more than what happened to Candy Brown that decided me on whether or not to show my work. If Nannuzzi wanted to do it, I’d go along. Not because I was seeking what Shakespeare called “the bubble reputation” (I owe Wireman for that one), but because I came to understand that Elizabeth was right: it was better not to let work pile up on Duma Key.

  The Ship paintings were good. Maybe great. They certainly felt that way when I finished them. They were also bad, powerful medicine. I think I knew that from the first one, executed during the small hours of Valentine’s Day. During the last night of Tina Garibaldi’s life.

  ii

  The dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but it was vivid beyond my power to describe in words, although I captured some of the feeling on canvas. Not all, but some. Enough, maybe. It was sunset. In that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange, then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.

  Silhouetted against that furnace light was a three-masted derelict. The ship’s rotted sails hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes and rips. There was no one alive on board. You only had to look to know that. There was a feeling of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had housed some plague that had burned through the crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood, hemp, and sailcloth. I remember feeling that if a gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop dead on the deck with its feathers smoking.

  Floating about forty yards away was a small rowboat. Sitting in it was a girl, her back to me. Her hair was red, but the hair was false—no live girl had tangled yarn hair like that. What gave away her identity was the dress she wore. It was covered with tic-tac-toe grids and the printed words I WIN, YOU WIN, over and over. Ilse had that dress when she was four or five … about the age of the twin girls in the family portrait I’d seen on the second floor landing of El Palacio de Asesinos.

  I tried to shout, to warn her not to go near the derelict. I couldn’t. I was helpless. In any case it didn’t seem to matter. She only sat there in her sweet little rowboat on the mild red rollers, watching and wearing Illy’s tic-tac-toe dress.

  I fell out of my bed, and on my bad side. I cried out in pain and rolled over on my back, listening to the waves from outside and the soft grinding of the shells under the house. They told me where I was but did not comfort me. I win, they said. I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

  My missing arm seemed to burn. I had to put a stop to it or go crazy, and there was only one way to do that. I went upstairs and painted like a lunatic for the next three hours. I had no model on my table, no object in view out my window. Nor did I need any. It was all in my head. And as I worked, I realized this was what all the pictures had been struggling toward. Not the girl in the rowboat, necessarily; she was probably just an added attraction, a toehold in reality. It was the ship I had been after all along. The ship and the sunset. When I thought back, I realized the irony of that: Hello, the pencil-sketch I’d made on the day I came, had been the closest.

  iii

  I tumbled into bed around three-thirty and slept until nine. I woke feeling refreshed, cleaned out, brand-new. The weather was fine: cloudless and warmer than it had been in a week. The Baumgartens were getting ready to return north, but I had a spirited game of Frisbee with their boys on the beach before they left. My appetite was high, my pain-level low. It was nice to feel like one of the guys again, even for an hour.

  Elizabeth’s weather had also cleared. I read her a number of poems while she arranged her chinas. Wireman was there, caught up for once and in good spirits. The world felt fine that day. It occurred to me only later that George “Candy” Brown might well have been abducting twelve-year-old Tina Garibaldi at the same time I was reading Richard Wilbur’s poem about laundry, “Love Calls Us to the Things of the World,” to Elizabeth. I chose it because I happened to see an item in that day’s paper saying it had become something of
a Valentine’s Day favorite. The Garibaldi kidnapping happened to be recorded. It occurred at exactly 3:16 PM, according to the time-stamp on the tape, and that would have been just about the time I paused to sip from my glass of Wireman’s green tea and unfold the Wilbur poem, which I had printed off the Internet.

  There were closed-circuit cameras installed to watch the loading-dock areas behind the Crossroads Mall. To guard against pilferage, I suppose. What they caught in this case was the pilferage of a child’s life. She comes into view crossing right to left, a slim kid dressed in jeans with a pack on her back. She was probably planning to duck into the mall before going the rest of the way home. On the tape, which the TV stations replayed obsessively, you see him emerge from a rampway and take her by the wrist. She turns her face up to his and appears to ask him a question. Brown nods in reply and leads her away. At first she’s not struggling, but then—just before they disappear behind a Dumpster—she attempts to pull free. But he’s still holding her firmly by the wrist when they disappear from the camera’s view. He killed her less than six hours later, according to the county medical examiner, but judging by the terrible evidence of her body, those hours must have seemed very long to that little girl, who never harmed anyone. They must have seemed endless.

  Outside the open window, The morning air is all awash with angels, Richard Wilbur writes in “Love Calls Us to the Things of the World.” But no, Richard. No.

  Those were only sheets.

  iv

  The Baumgartens departed. The Godfreys’ dogs barked them goodbye. A Merry Maids crew went into the house where the Baumgartens had been staying and gave it a good cleaning. The Godfreys’ dogs barked them hello (and goodbye). Tina Garibaldi’s body was found in a ditch behind the Wilk Park Little League field, naked from the waist down and discarded like a bag of garbage. Her mother was shown on Channel 6 screaming and harrowing at her cheeks. The Kintners replaced the Baumgartens. The folks from Toledo vacated #39 and three pleasant old ladies from Michigan moved in. The old ladies laughed a lot and actually said Yoo-hoo when they saw me or Wireman coming. I have no idea if they put the newly installed Wi-Fi at #39 to use or not, but the first time I played Scrabble with them, they fed me my lunch. The Godfreys’ dogs barked tirelessly when the old ladies went on their afternoon walks. A man who worked at the Sarasota E-Z JetWash called the police and said the guy on the Tina Garibaldi tape looked very much like one of his fellow car-washers, a guy named George Brown, known to everyone as Candy. Candy Brown had left work around 2:30 on Valentine’s Day afternoon, this man said, and hadn’t returned until the next morning. Claimed he hadn’t felt well. The E-Z JetWash was only a block from the Crossroads Mall. Two days after Valentine’s, I came into the Palacio kitchen and found Wireman sitting at the table with his head thrown back, shaking all over. When the shakes subsided, he told me he was fine. When I said he didn’t look fine, he told me to keep my opinions to myself, speaking in a brusque tone that was unlike him. I held up three fingers and asked him how many he saw. He said three. I held up two and he said two. I decided—not without misgivings—to let it go. Again. I was not, after all, my Wireman’s keeper. I painted Girl and Ship Nos. 2 and 3. In No. 2, the child in the rowboat was wearing Reba’s polka-dotted blue dress, but I was pretty sure it was still Ilse. And in No. 3 there was no doubt. Her hair had returned to the fine cornsilk I remembered from those days, and she was wearing a sailor-blouse with blue curlicue stitching around the collar that I had reason to remember very well: she’d been wearing it one Sunday when she’d fallen out of the apple tree in our back yard and broken her arm. In No. 3 the ship had turned slightly, and I could read the first letters of its name on the prow in flaking paint: PER. I had no idea what the rest of the letters might be. That was also the first painting with John Eastlake’s spear-pistol in it. It was lying loaded on one of the rowboat’s seats. On the eighteenth of February, a friend of Jack’s showed up to help with repairs to some of the rental properties. The Godfreys’ dogs barked gregariously at him, inviting him to come on over any time he felt like having a chunk removed from his hip-hop-jeans-clad buttsky. Police questioned Candy Brown’s wife (she also called him Candy, everyone called him Candy, he had probably invited Tina Garibaldi to call him Candy before torturing and killing her) about his whereabouts on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day. She said maybe he was sick, but he hadn’t been sick at home. He hadn’t come home until eight o’clock or so that night. She said he had brought her a box of chocolates. She said he was an old sweetie about things like that. On the twenty-first of February, the country-music folks took their sports car and went boot-scootin back to the northern climes from whence they’d come. No one else moved in to take their place. Wireman said it signaled the turn of the snowbird tide. He said it always turned earlier on Duma Key, which had zero restaurants and tourist attractions (not even a lousy alligator farm!). The Godfreys’ dogs barked ceaselessly, as if to proclaim the tide of winter vacationers might have turned, but it was a long way from out. On the same day the boot-scooters left Duma, the police showed up at Candy Brown’s home in Sarasota with a search warrant. According to Channel 6, they took several items. A day later, the three old ladies at #39 once more fed me my lunch at Scrabble; I never so much as sniffed a Triple Word Score, but I did learn that qiviut is a word. When I got home and snapped on the TV, the BREAKING NEWS logo was on Channel 6, which is All Suncoast, All of the Time. Candy Brown had been arrested. According to “sources close to the investigation,” two of the items taken in the search of the Brown house were undergarments, one spotted with blood. DNA testing would follow as day follows night. Candy Brown didn’t wait. The following day’s newspaper quoted him as saying to police, “I got high and did a terrible thing.” This was what I read as I drank my morning juice. Above the story was The Picture, already as familiar to me as the photo of Kennedy being shot in Dallas. The Picture showed Candy with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi’s wrist, her face turned up to his questioningly. The telephone rang. I picked it up without looking at it and said hello. I was preoccupied with Tina Garibaldi. It was Wireman. He asked if maybe I could come down to the house for a little while. I said sure, of course, started to say goodbye, and then realized I was hearing something, not in his voice but just under it, that was a long way from normal. I asked him what was wrong.