Duma Key(149)

"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.

PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=book cover"

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. " Qui n sabe? History ate her up. Shannington thinks she and her new husband probably went back to Atlanta after the search for the babby-uns 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.