Duma Key(174)

This was mildly interesting, but Wireman still hadn't actually answered my question. So I asked it again.

"She also claimed there are snakes," he said, finally turning around. "I have a horror of snakes. Have ever since I was a little boy and woke up one morning on a camping trip with my folks to discover I was sharing my sleeping bag with a milkie. It had actually worked its way into my undershirt. It sprayed me with musk. I thought I was f**king poisoned. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," I said. "Did you tell her that story before or after she told you about the snake infestation on the south end?"

Stiffly, he said: "I don't remember." Then he sighed. "Probably before. I see what you're saying she wanted to keep me away."

I didn't say it, you did, I thought. What I said was, "It's mostly Jack I'm worried about. But it's better to be safe."

" Me? " Jack looked startled. "I don't have anything against snakes. And I know what poison oak and poison ivy look like. I was a Boy Scout."

"Trust me on this," I said, and began to sketch him. I worked quickly, resisting the urge to go into detail... as part of me seemed to want to do. While I was working, the first angry car horn began to honk on the coast side of the drawbridge.

"Sounds to me like the drawbridge is stuck again," Jack said.

"Yes," I agreed, not looking up from my drawing.

v

I sped along even more quickly with Wireman's sketch, but I again found myself having to fight the urge to fall into the work... because when I was in the work, the pain and grief were at bay. The work was like a drug. But there would be only so much daylight, and I didn't want to meet Emery again any more than Wireman did. What I wanted was for this to be over and for the three of us to be off-island far off-island by the time those sunset colors started to rise out of the Gulf.

"Okay," I said. I had done Jack in blue and Wireman in blaze orange. Neither was perfect, but I thought both sketches caught the essentials. "There's just one more thing."

Wireman groaned. " Edgar! "

"Nothing I need to draw," I said, and flipped the cover of the pad closed on the two sketches. "Just smile for the artist, Wireman. But before you do, think of something that makes you feel particularly good."

"Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack."

His brow furrowed... then smoothed out. He smiled. As always, it lit up his whole face and made him a new man.

I turned to Jack. "Now you."

And because I really did feel that he was the more important of the two, I watched him very closely when he did.

vi

We didn't have a four-wheel drive, but Elizabeth's old Mercedes sedan seemed a reasonable substitute; it was built like a tank. We drove to El Palacio in Jack's car, and parked just inside the gate. Jack and I switched our supplies over to the SEL 500. Wireman's job was the picnic basket.

"A few other things while you're in there, if you can," I said. "Bug-spray, and a really good flashlight. Have you got one of those?"

He nodded. "There's an eight-cell job in the gardening shed. It's a searchlight."

"Good. And Wireman?"

He gave me a what now look the exasperated kind you do mostly with your eyebrows but said nothing.

"The spear-pistol?"

He actually grinned. "S , se or. Para fijaciono."

While he was gone, I stood leaning against the Mercedes, looking at the tennis court. The door at the far end had been left open. Elizabeth's semi-domesticated heron was inside, standing by the net. It looked at me with accusing blue eyes.

"Edgar?" Jack touched my elbow. "Okay?"

I was not okay, and wouldn't be okay for a long time again. But...

I can do this, I thought. I have to do this. She does not get to win.

"Fine," I said.

"I don't like it that you're so pale. You look like you did when you first came here." Jack's voice cracked on the last couple of words.

"I'm fine," I said again, and briefly cupped the back of his neck. I realized that, other than shaking his hand, it was probably the only time I had touched him.

Wireman came out clutching the handles of the picnic basket in both hands. He had three long-billed hats stacked on his head. John Eastlake's harpoon pistol was tucked under his arm. "Flashlight's in the basket," he said. "Ditto Deep Woods Off, and three pairs of gardening gloves I found in the shed."

"Brilliant," I said.

" S . But it's quarter of one, Edgar. If we're going, can we please go?"

I looked at the heron on the tennis court. It stood by the net, as still as a hand on a broken clock, and looked back at me pitilessly. That was all right; it is, for the most part, a pitiless world.

"Yes," I said. "Let's go."

vii

Now I had memory. It was no longer in perfect working order, and to this day I sometimes get confused about names and the order in which certain things happened, but every moment of our expedition to the house at the south end of Duma Key remains clear in my mind like the first movie that ever amazed me or the first painting that ever took my breath away ( The Hailstorm, by Thomas Hart Benton). Yet at first I felt cold, divorced from it all, like a slightly jaded patron of the arts looking at a picture in a second-rate museum. It wasn't until Jack found the doll inside the staircase going up to nowhere that I started to realize I was in the picture instead of just looking at it. And that there was no going back for any of us unless we could stop her. I knew she was strong; if she could reach all the way to Omaha and Minneapolis to get what she wanted, then all the way to Providence to keep it, of course she was strong. And still I underestimated her. Until we were actually in that house at the south end of Duma Key, I didn't realize how strong Perse was.