Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  “Do you see how they go up the stairs, fading as they go?” Jack said.

  “Yes,” I said. My voice sounded faint and faraway to my own ears.

  “I walked beside them, because I didn’t want to mess them up,” Jack said. “If I’d known then what Wireman told me while we were waiting for you, I don’t think I could have gone up at all.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said.

  “But there was no one there,” Jack said. “Just … well, you’ll see. And look.” He led me to the side of the stairs. The ninth riser was on our eye-level, and with the light striking across it, I could see, very faintly, the tracks of small bare feet pointing the other way.

  Jack said, “This looks pretty clear to me. The kids went up to your studio, then came back down again. The adult stayed by the front door, probably as lookout … although if this was the middle of the night, there probably wasn’t much to look out for. Have you been setting the burglar alarm?”

  “No,” I said, not quite meeting his eye. “I can’t remember the numbers. I keep them on a slip of paper in my wallet, but each time I came through the door turned into a race against time, me versus that fucking beeper on the wall—”

  “It’s okay.” Wireman gripped my shoulder. “These burglars didn’t take; they left.”

  “You don’t really believe Miss Eastlake’s dead sisters paid you another visit, do you?” Jack asked.

  “Actually,” I said, “I think they did.” I thought that would sound stupid in the bright light of an April afternoon, with a ton of sunlight pouring down and reflecting off the Gulf, but it didn’t.

  “In Scooby Doo, it would turn out to be the crazy librarian,” Jack said. “You know, trying to scare you off the Key so he could keep the treasure for himself.”

  “If only,” I said.

  “Suppose those small tracks were made by Tessie and Laura Eastlake,” Wireman said. “Who made the bigger ones?”

  Neither of us replied.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said at last. “I want to look in the basket.”

  We went up (avoiding the tracks—not to preserve them, but simply because none of us wanted to step on them) to Little Pink. The picnic basket, looking just like the one I’d drawn with the red pen I’d pilfered from Gene Hadlock’s examining room, was sitting on the carpet, but my eyes were drawn first to my easel.

  “You can believe I beat a hasty retreat when I saw that,” Jack said.

  I could believe it, but I felt no urge to retreat. Quite the opposite. I was drawn forward instead, like an iron bolt to a magnet. A fresh canvas had been set up there and then, sometime in the dead of night—maybe while Elizabeth had been dying, maybe while I’d been having sex with Pam for the last time, maybe while I’d been sleeping beside her—a finger had dipped into my paint. Whose finger? I didn’t know. What color? That was obvious: red. The letters that staggered and draggled and dripped their way across the canvas were red. And accusing. They almost seemed to shout.

  viii

  “Found art,” I said in a dry, rattlebox voice that hardly sounded like my own.

  “Is that what it is?” Wireman asked.

  “Sure.” The letters seemed to waver in front of me, and I wiped my eyes. “Graffiti art. They’d love it at the Scoto.”

  “Maybe, but that’s some creepy shit,” Jack said. “I hate it.”

  So did I. And it was my studio, goddammit, mine. I had a lease. I snatched the canvas off the easel, momentarily expecting it to burn my fingers. It didn’t. It was just a canvas, after all, one I’d stretched myself. I put it against the wall, facing in. “Is that better?”

  “It is, actually,” Jack said, and Wireman nodded. “Edgar … if those little girls were here … can ghosts write on canvas?”

  “If they can move Ouija board planchettes and write in window-frost, I imagine they could write on a canvas,” I said. Then, rather reluctantly, I added: “But I don’t see ghosts unlocking my front door. Or putting a canvas up on the easel to begin with.”

  “There wasn’t a canvas there?” Wireman asked.

  “I’m pretty sure not. The blank ones are all racked in the corner.”

  “Who’s the sister?” Jack wanted to know. “Who’s the sister they’re asking about?”

  “It must be Elizabeth,” I said. “She was the only sister left.”

  “Bullshit,” Wireman said. “If Tessie and Laura were on the ever-popular other side of the veil, they wouldn’t have any problem locating sister Elizabeth; she was right here on Duma Key for over fifty-five years, and Duma was the only place they ever knew.”

  “What about the others?” I asked.

  “Maria and Hannah both died,” Wireman said. “Hannah in the seventies, in New York—Ossining, I think—and Maria in the early eighties, somewhere out west. Both married, Maria a couple of times. I know that from Chris Shannington, not Miss Eastlake. She sometimes talked about her father, but hardly ever about her sisters. She cut herself off from the rest of her family after she and John came back to Duma in 1951.”

  where our sister?

  “And Adriana? What about her?”

  He shrugged. “Quién sabe? History ate her up. Shannington thinks she and her new husband probably went back to Atlanta after the search for the babbyuns was called off; they weren’t here for the memorial service.”

  “She might have blamed Daddy for what happened,” Jack said.

  Wireman nodded. “Or maybe she just couldn’t stand to hang around.”

  I remembered Adriana’s pouty I-want-to-be-somewhere-else look in the family portrait and thought Wireman might be onto something there.

  “In any case,” Wireman went on, “she has to be dead, too. If she was alive, she’d be almost a hundred. Odds of that are mighty slim.”

  where our sister?

  Wireman gripped my arm and turned me to face him. His face looked drawn and old. “Muchacho, if something supernatural killed Miss Eastlake in order to shut her up, maybe we ought to take the hint and get off Duma Key.”

  “I think it might be too late for that,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s awake again. Elizabeth said so before she died.”

  “Who’s awake?”

  “Perse,” I said.

  “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’re supposed to drown her back to sleep.”

  ix

  The picnic basket had been scarlet when it was new, and had faded only a little over its long life, perhaps because so much of it had been spent tucked away in the attic. I began by hefting one of the handles. The damn thing was pretty heavy, all right; I guessed about twenty pounds. The wicker on the bottom, although tightly woven, had sagged down some. I set it back on the carpet, pushed the thin wooden carry-handles down to either side, and flipped back the lid on hinges that squeaked slightly.

  There were colored pencils, most of which had been sharpened down to stubs. And there were drawings made by a certain child prodigy well over eighty years ago. A little girl who’d fallen out of a pony-trap at the age of two and banged her head and awakened with seizures and a magical ability to draw. I knew this even though the drawing on the first page wasn’t a drawing at all—not really, but this:

  I flicked it up. Beneath was this:

  After that, the pictures became pictures, growing in technique and sophistication with a speed that was beyond belief. Unless, that was, you happened to be a guy like Edgar Freemantle, who had done little more than doodle until an accident on a building site had taken his arm, crushed his skull, and nearly ended his life.

  She had drawn fields. Palms. The beach. A gigantic black face, round as a basketball, with a smiling red mouth—probably Melda the housekeeper, although this Melda looked like an overgrown child in extreme close-up. Then more animals—raccoons, a turtle, a deer, a bobcat—that were naturally sized, but walking on the Gulf or flying through the air. I found a heron, executed in perfect detail, standing
on the balcony railing of the house she had grown up in. Directly below it was another watercolor of the same bird, only this time it was hovering upside-down over the swimming pool. The gimlet eyes staring out of the picture were the same shade as the pool itself. She was doing what I’ve been doing, I thought, and my skin began to creep again. Trying to reinvent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream.

  Would Dario, Jimmy, and Alice cream their jeans if they saw these? I thought there was no doubt.

  Here were two little girls—Tessie and Laura, surely—with great big pumpkin smiles that deliberately overran the edges of their faces.

  Here was a Daddy bigger than the house beside which he stood—had to be the first Heron’s Roost—smoking a cigar the size of a rocket. A smokering circled the moon overhead.

  Here were two girls in dark green jumpers on a dirt road with schoolbooks balanced on their heads the way some African native girls balanced their pots: Maria and Hannah, no doubt. Behind them came a line of frogs. In defiance of perspective, the frogs grew larger rather than smaller.

  Next came Elizabeth’s Smiling Horses phase. There were a dozen or more. I leafed through them, then turned back to one and tapped it. “This is the one that was in the newspaper article.”

  Wireman said, “Go a little deeper. You ain’t seen nuthin yet.”

  More horses … more family, rendered in pencil or charcoal or in jolly watercolors, the family members almost always with their hands linked like paperdolls … then a storm, the water in the swimming pool lashed into waves, the fronds of a palm pulled into ragged banners by the wind.

  There were well over a hundred pictures in all. She might only have been a child, but she had also been unbottling. Two or three more storm pictures … maybe the Alice that had uncovered Eastlake’s treasure-trove, maybe just a big thunderstorm, it was impossible to say for sure … then the Gulf … the Gulf again, this time with flying fish the size of dolphins … the Gulf with pelicans that appeared to have rainbows in their mouths … the Gulf at sunset … and …

  I stopped, my breath caught in my throat.

  Compared with many of the others I’d gone through, this one was dead simple, just the silhouette of a ship against the dying light, caught at the tipping-point between day and dark, but its simplicity was what gave it its power. Certainly I’d thought so when I drew the same thing on my first night in Big Pink. Here was the same cable, stretched taut between the bow and what might in Elizabeth’s time have been called a Marconi tower, creating a brilliant orange triangle. Here was the same upward shading of light, orange to blue. There was even the same scribbly, not-quite-careless overlay of color that made the ship—skinnier than mine had been—look like a phantom out there, trudging its way north.

  “I drew this,” I said faintly.

  “I know,” Wireman said. “I’ve seen it. You called it Hello.”

  I thumbed deeper, hurrying through big bunches of watercolors and colored pencil drawings, knowing what I would eventually find. And yes, near the bottom I came to Elizabeth’s first picture of the Perse. Only she had drawn it new, a slim three-masted beauty with sails furled, standing in on the blue-green waters of the Gulf beneath a trademark Elizabeth Eastlake sun, the kind that shoots off long happy-rays of light. It was a wonderful piece of work, almost begging for a calypso soundtrack.

  But unlike her other paintings, it also felt false.

  “Keep going, muchacho.”

  The ship … the ship … family, four of them, anyway, standing on the beach with their hands linked like paperdolls and those big Elizabeth happysmiles … the ship … the house, with what looked like a Negro lawn jockey standing on its head … the ship, that gorgeous white swallow … John Eastlake …

  John Eastlake screaming … blood running from his nose and one eye …

  I stared at it, mesmerized. It was a child’s watercolor, but it had been executed with hellish skill. It depicted a man who looked insane with terror, grief, or both.

  “My God,” I said.

  “One more, muchacho,” Wireman said. “One more to go.”

  I flicked back the picture of the screaming man. Old dried watercolors rattled like bones. Beneath the screaming father was the ship again, only this time it really was my ship, my Perse. Elizabeth had painted it at night, and not with a brush—I could still see the ancient dried prints of her child’s fingers in the swirls of gray and black. This time it was as if she had finally seen through the Perse’s disguise. The boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes. Around her, blue in the light of a moon that did not smile or send out happy-rays, hundreds of skeleton arms rose from the water in a dripping salute. And standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing, vaguely female, wearing a decayed something that might have been a cloak, a winding shroud … or a robe. It was the red-robe, my red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my Girl and Ship paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up. This is everything awful, it said. This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it.

  “Christ,” I said, looking up at Wireman. “When, do you think? After her sisters—?”

  “Must have been. Must have been her way of coping with it, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Part of me was trying to think of my own girls, and part of me was trying not to. “I don’t know how a kid—any kid—could come up with something like that.”

  “Race memory,” Wireman said. “That’s what the Jungians would say.”

  “And how did I end up painting this same fucking ship? Maybe this same fucking creature, only from the back? Do the Jungians have any theories about that?”

  “It doesn’t say Perse on Elizabeth’s,” Jack pointed out.

  “She would have been four,” I said. “I doubt if the name would have made much of an impression on her.” I thought of her earlier pictures—the ones where this boat had been a beautiful white lie she had believed for a little while. “Especially once she saw what it really was.”

  “You talk as if it were real,” Wireman said.

  My mouth was very dry. I went to the bathroom, drew myself a glass of water, and drank it down. “I don’t know what I believe about this,” I said, “but I have a general rule of thumb in life, Wireman. If one person sees a thing, it could be a hallucination. If two people see it, chances of reality improve exponentially. Elizabeth and I both saw the Perse.”

  “In your imaginations,” Wireman said. “In your imaginations you saw it.”

  I pointed to Wireman’s face and said, “You’ve seen what my imagination can do.”

  He didn’t reply, but he nodded. He was very pale.

  “You said, ‘Once she saw what it really was,’ ” Jack said. “If the boat in that picture is real, what is it, exactly?”

  “I think you know,” Wireman said. “I think we all do; it’s pretty damned hard to miss. We’re just afraid to say it out loud. Go on, Jack. God hates a coward.”

  “Okay, it’s a ship of the dead,” Jack said. His voice was flat in my clean, well-lighted studio. He put his hands to his head and raked his fingers slowly through his hair, making it wilder than ever. “But I’ll tell you something, you guys:—if that’s what’s coming for me in the end, I sort of wish I’d never been born in the first place.”

  x

  I set the thick stack of drawings and watercolors aside on the carpet, delighted to get the last two out of my sight. Then I looked at what had been under her pictures, weighing the picnic basket down.

  It was ammo for the spear-pistol. I lifted one of the stubby harpoons out. It was about fifteen inches long, and quite heavy. The shaft was steel, not aluminum—I wasn’t sure aluminum had even been used in the nineteen-twenties. The business-e
nd was triple-bladed, and although the blades were tarnished, they looked sharp. I touched the ball of my finger to one, and a tiny bead of blood appeared on the skin instantly.

  “You ought to disinfect that,” Jack said.

  “Yes indeed,” I said. I turned the thing over in the afternoon sun, sending reflections bounding around the walls. The short harpoon had its own ugly beauty, a paradox perhaps reserved exclusively for certain weapons of efficiency.

  “This wouldn’t go very far in water,” I said. “Not as heavy as it is.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Wireman said. “The gun fires off a spring and a CO2 cartridge. She bangs pretty good. And back in those days, short range was enough. The Gulf teemed with fish, even close in. If Eastlake wanted to shoot something, he could usually do it at point blank range.”

  “I don’t understand these tips,” I said.

  Wireman said, “Nor do I. She had at least a dozen harpoons, including four mounted on the wall in the library, and none of them are like these.”

  Jack had gone into the bathroom and come back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Now he took the harpoon I was holding and examined the triple-bladed tip. “What is it? Silver?”

  Wireman made his thumb and forefinger into a gun and pointed it at him. “Hold your cards, but Wireman thinks you have scored a Bingo.”

  “And you don’t get that?” Jack asked.

  Wireman and I looked at each other, then at Jack again.

  “You haven’t been watching the right movies,” he said. “Silver bullets are what you use to kill were-wolves. I don’t know if silver works on vampires or not, but obviously somebody thought it did. Or that it might.”

  “If you’re suggesting Tessie and Laura Eastlake are vampires,” Wireman said, “they must have built up a hell of a thirst since 1927.” He looked at me, expecting corroboration.