Duma Key(118)

"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.