Duma Key(150)

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:

PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=book cover"

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 re-invent 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 smoke-ring 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 sound-track.

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.