Duma Key(18)

ii

There's a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido, from Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it's uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms, and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats. "The sea oats belong," Wireman once told me, "but the rest of that shit has no business growing without irrigation." For much of the time I spent on Duma Key, no one lived there but Wireman, the Bride of the Godfather, and me.

Sandy Smith was my Realtor in St. Paul. I had asked her to find me a place that was quiet - I'm not sure I used the word isolated, but I may have - but still within reach of services. Thinking of Kamen's advice, I told Sandy I wanted to lease for a year, and price wasn't an object, as long as I wasn't getting skint too bad. Even depressed and in more or less constant pain, I was averse to being taken advantage of. Sandy fed my requirements into her computer, and Big Pink was what came out. It was just the luck of the draw.

Except I don't really believe that. Because even my earliest pictures seem to have, I don't know, something.

Something.

iii

On the day I arrived in my rental car (driven by Jack Cantori, the young man Sandy Smith had hired through a Sarasota employment agency), I knew nothing about the history of Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key. Once over this bridge, I observed that the northern tip of the island was free of the vegetation that tangled the rest. Instead there was actual landscaping (in Florida this means palms and grass undergoing nearly constant irrigation). I could see half a dozen houses strung along the narrow, patchy band of road leading south, the last one of them a huge and undeniably elegant hacienda.

And close by, less than a football field's length from the Duma Key end of the drawbridge, I could see a pink house hanging over the Gulf.

"Is that it?" I asked, thinking Please let that be it. That's the one I want. "It is, isn't it?"

"I don't know, Mr. Freemantle," Jack said. "I know Sarasota, but this is the first time I've ever been on Duma. Never had any reason to come here." He pulled up to the mailbox, which had a big red 13 on it. He glanced at the folder lying between us on the seat. "This is it, all right. Salmon Point, number thirteen. I hope you're not superstitious."

I shook my head, not taking my eyes off it. I didn't worry about broken mirrors or crossing black cats' paths, but I'm very much a believer in... well, maybe not love at first sight, that's a little too Rhett-and-Scarlett for me, but instant attraction? Sure. It's the way I felt about Pam the first time I met her, on a double date (she was with the other guy). And it's the way I felt about Big Pink from the very first.

She stood on pilings with her chin jutting over the high-tide line. There was a NO TRESPASSING sign slanting askew on an old gray stick beside the driveway, but I guessed that didn't apply to me. "Once you sign the lease, you have it for a year," Sandy told me. "Even if it's sold, the owner can't kick you out until your time is up."

Jack drove slowly up to the back door... only with its face hanging over the Gulf of Mexico, that was the only door. "I'm surprised they were ever allowed to build this far out," he said. "I suppose they did things different in the old days." To him the old days probably meant the nineteen-eighties. "There's your car. Hope it's okay."

The car drawn up on the square of cracked pavement to the right of the house was the sort of anonymous American mid-size the rental companies specialize in. I hadn't driven since the day Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, and barely gave it a glance. I was more interested in the boxy pink elephant I'd rented. "Aren't there ordinances about building too close to the Gulf of Mexico?"

"Now, sure, but not when this place went up. From a practical standpoint, it's all about beach erosion. I doubt if this place hung out that way when it was built."

He was undoubtedly right. I thought I could see at least six feet of the pilings supporting the screened porch - the so-called Florida room. Unless those pilings were sunk sixty feet into the underlying bedrock, eventually the place was going into the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a matter of time.

As I was thinking it, Jack Cantori was saying it. Then he grinned. "Don't worry, though; I'm sure you'll get plenty of warning. You'll hear it groaning."

"Like the House of Usher," I said.

His grin widened. "But it's probably good for another five years or so. Otherwise it'd be condemned."

"Don't be so sure," I said. Jack had reversed to the driveway door, so the trunk would be easy to unload. Not a lot in there; three suitcases, one garment bag, a steel hardcase with my laptop inside, and a knapsack containing some primitive art supplies - mostly pads and colored pencils. I traveled light when I left my other life. I figured what I'd need most in my new one was my checkbook and my American Express card.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Someone who could afford to build here in the first place could probably talk a couple of B-and-C inspectors around."

"B- and-C? What's that?"