Duma Key(101)

He says I'll be damned if there isn't something down there!

And when he came back to little Libbit, he hug her hug her hug her.

I knew it. I drew it. With the red picnic basket on a blanket nearby and the speargun sitting on top of the basket.

He went out again, and the next time he came in with an armload of antiquity held awkwardly against his chest. Later he would begin using Nan Melda's market basket, a lead weight in the bottom to pull it down more easily. Later still came a newspaper photo with much of the rescued rickrack the "treasure" spread out before a smiling John Eastlake and his talented, fiercely focused daughter. But no china doll in that picture.

Because the china doll was special. It belonged to Libbit. It was her fair salvage.

Was it the doll-thing that drove Tessie and Lo-Lo to their deaths? That created the big boy? Just how much did Elizabeth have to do with it by then? Who was the artist, who the blank surface?

Some questions I have never answered to my own satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it's perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.

Chapter 11 The View from Duma

i

The next morning, early, Wireman and I stood in the Gulf plenty cold enough to be an eye-popper up to our shins. He had walked in, and I had followed without question. Without a single word. Both of us were holding coffee cups. He was wearing shorts; I had paused just long enough to roll my pants to my knees. Behind us, at the end of the boardwalk, Elizabeth slouched in her chair, looking grimly out at the horizon and grizzling down her chin. A large part of her breakfast still lay before her. She had eaten some, scattered the rest. Her hair was loose, blowing in a warm breeze from the south.

The water surged around us. Once I got used to it, I loved the silky feel of that surge: first the lift that made me feel as if I'd magically dieted off twelve pounds or so, then the backrun that pulled sand out from between my toes in small, tickling whirlpools. Seventy or eighty yards beyond us, two fat pelicans drew a line across the morning. Then they folded their wings and dropped like stones. One came up empty, but the other had breakfast in its bill. The small fish disappeared down the hatch even as the pelican rose. It was an ancient ballet, but no less pleasing for that. South and inland, where the green tangles rose, another bird cried "Oh-oh! Oh-oh!" over and over.

Wireman turned toward me. He didn't look twenty-five, but he looked younger than at any time since I'd met him. There was no redness at all in his left eye, and it had lost that disjointed, I'm-looking-my-own-way cast. I had no doubt that it was seeing me; that it was seeing me very well.

"Anything I can ever do for you," he said. "Ever. In my life. You call, I come. You ask, I do. It's a blank check. Are you clear on that?"

"Yes," I said. I was clear on something else, as well: when someone offers you a blank check, you must never, ever cash it. That wasn't a thing I thought out. Sometimes understanding bypasses the brain and proceeds directly from the heart.

"All right, then," he said. "It's all I'm going to say."

I heard snoring. I looked around and saw that Elizabeth's chin had sunk to her chest. One hand was fisted around a piece of toast. Her hair whirled around her head.

"She looks thinner," I said.

"She's lost twenty pounds since New Year's. I'm slipping her those maxi-shakes Ensure, they're called once a day, but she won't always take em. What about you? Is it just too much work that's got you looking that way?"

"What way?"

"Like the Hound of the Baskervilles recently bit off your left asscheek. If it's overwork, maybe you ought to knock off and stretch out a little." He shrugged. "'That's our opinion, we welcome yours,' as they say on Channel 6."

I stood where I was, feeling the lift and drop of the waves, and thinking about what I could tell Wireman. About how much I could tell Wireman. The answer seemed self-evident: all or nothing.

"I think I better fill you in on what happened last night. You just have to promise not to call for the men in the white coats."

"All right."

I told him about how I'd finished his portrait mostly in the dark. I told him about seeing my right arm and hand. Then seeing the two dead girls at the foot of the stairs and passing out. By the time I finished, we'd waded back out of the water and walked to where Elizabeth was snoring. Wireman began to clean her tray, sweeping the refuse into a bag he took from the pouch hanging on one arm of her chair.

"Nothing else?" he asked.

"That isn't enough?"

"I'm just asking."

"Nothing else. I slept like a baby until six o'clock. Then I put you the painting of you in the back of the car and drove down here. When you're ready to see it, by the way-"

"All in good time. Think of a number between one and ten."

"What?"

"Just humor me, muchacho."

I thought of a number. "Okay."

He was silent for a moment, looking out at the Gulf. Then he said, "Nine?"

"Nope. Seven."

He nodded. "Seven." He drummed his fingers against his chest for a few moments, then dropped them into his lap. "Yesterday I could have told you. Today I can't. My telepathy thing that little twinkle is gone. It's more than a fair trade. Wireman is as Wireman was, and Wireman says muchas gracias. "