Duma Key(170)

I broke into a run.

xi

I unlocked the door and left my keys hanging in the lock. Lurched to the phone and saw the message light blinking. I pushed the PLAY button. The robot's expressionless male voice told me that this message had been received at 6:48 AM, which meant I had missed it by less than half an hour. Then Pam's voice burst out of the speaker. I bent my head, the way you'd bend your head to try and keep a burst of jagged glass fragments from flying directly into your face.

"Edgar, the police called and they say Illy's dead! They say a woman named Mary Ire came to her apartment and killed her! One of your friends! One of your art friends from Florida has killed our daughter!" She burst into a storm of harsh and ugly weeping... then laughed. It was horrible, that laugh. I felt as if one of those flying shards of glass had cut into my face. "Call me, you bastard. Call and explain yourself. You said she'd be SAFE! "

Then more crying. It was cut off by a click. Next came the hum of an open line.

I reached out and pushed the OFF button, silencing it.

I walked into the Florida room and looked at the tennis balls, still bobbing in on the waves. I felt doubled, like a man watching a man.

The dead twins had left a message in my studio Where our sister? Had Illy been the sister they meant?

I could almost hear the hag laughing and see her nodding.

"Are you here, Perse?" I asked.

The wind rushed in through the screens. The waves crashed on the shore with metronome-like regularity. Birds flew over the water, crying. On the beach I could see another burst-open tennis ball crate, already half-buried in the sand. Treasure from the sea; fair salvage from the caldo. She was watching, all right. Waiting for me to break down. I was quite sure of it. Her what? her guardians? might sleep in the daytime, but not her.

"I win, you win," I said. "But you think you got your lasties, don't you? Clever Perse."

Of course she was clever. She'd been playing the game for a long time. I had an idea she'd been old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt. Sometimes she slept, but now she was awake.

And her reach was long.

My phone began to ring. I went back in, still feeling like two Edgars, one earthbound, the other floating above the earthbound Edgar's head, and picked it up. It was Dario. He sounded upset.

"Edgar? What's this shit about not releasing the paintings to-"

"Not now, Dario," I said. "Hush." I broke the connection and called Pam. Now that I wasn't thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

Pam was calmer. I don't know what she'd taken, but it was already working. We talked for twenty minutes. She wept through most of the conversation, and was intermittently accusatory, but when I made no effort to defend myself, her anger collapsed into grief and bewilderment. I got the salient points, or so I thought then. There was one very salient point that we both were missing, but as a wise man once said, "You can't hit em if you can't see em," and the police representative who called Pam didn't think to tell her what Mary Ire had brought to our daughter's Providence apartment.

Besides the gun, that was. The Beretta.

"The police say she must have driven, and almost nonstop," Pam said dully. "She never could have gotten a gun like that on an airplane. Why did she do it? Was it another f**king painting?"

"Of course it was," I said. "She bought one. I never thought of that. I never thought of her. Not once. It was Illy's f**king boyfriend I was worried about."

Speaking very calmly, my ex-wife that's what she surely was now said: " You did this."

Yes. I had. I should have realized Mary Ire would buy at least one painting, and that she'd probably want a canvas from the Girl and Ship series the most toxic of all. Nor would she have wanted the Scoto to store it, not when she lived right up the road in Tampa. For all I knew, she might have had it in the trunk of her beat-up Mercedes when she dropped me at the hospital. From there she could have gone right to her place on Davis Islands to get her home protection automatic. Hell, it would have been on her way north.

That part I should have at least guessed. I had met her, after all, and I knew what she thought of my work.

"Pam, something very bad is happening on this island. I-"

"Do you think I care about that, Edgar? Or about why that woman did it? You got our daughter killed. I don't ever want to talk to you again, I don't want to see you again, and I'd rather poke out my eyes than ever have to look at another picture of yours. You should have died when that crane hit you." There was an awful thoughtfulness in her voice. "That would have been a happy ending."

There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my nineteen-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

Then, slowly, I walked back out through the door. I left it open. There seemed no reason to lock it now. There was a broom meant for sweeping sand off the walk leaning against the side of the house. I looked at it and my right arm began to itch. I lifted my right hand and held it in front of my eyes. It wasn't there, but when I opened it and closed it, I could feel it flex. I could also feel a couple of long nails biting into my palm. The others felt short and ragged. They must have broken off. Somewhere perhaps on the carpet upstairs in Little Pink were a couple of ghost fingernails.