Duma Key(183)

iii

It was easy to tell myself that Perse wasn't hiding in a secret compartment under the stairs that would be too easy but I remembered the chinas Elizabeth liked to secrete in her Sweet Owen cookie-tin and felt my pulse speed up as Jack rummaged in the picnic basket and brought out the monster flashlight with the stainless steel barrel. He slapped it into Wireman's hand like a nurse handing a doctor an instrument at the operating table.

When Wireman trained the light on the stair, I saw the minute gleam of gold: tiny hinges set at the far end of the tread. "Okay," he said, and handed back the flashlight. "Put the beam on the edge of the tread."

Jack did as told. Wireman reached for the lip of the riser, which was meant to swing up on those tiny hinges.

"Wireman, just a minute," I said.

He turned to me.

"Sniff it first," I said.

"Say what?"

"Sniff it. Tell me if it smells wet."

He sniffed the stair with the hinges at the back, then turned to me again. "A little damp, maybe, but everything in here smells that way. Want to be a little more specific?"

"Just open it very slowly, okay? Jack, shine the light directly inside. Look for wetness, both of you."

"Why, Edgar?" Jack asked.

"Because the Table is leaking, she said so. If you see a ceramic container a bottle, a jug, a keg that's her. It'll almost certainly be cracked, and maybe broken wide open."

Wireman pulled in a breath, then let it out. "Okay. As the mathematician said when he divided by zero, here goes nothing."

He tried to lift the stair, with no result.

"It's locked. I see a tiny slot... must have been a hell of a small key-"

"I've got a Swiss Army knife," Jack offered.

"Just a minute," Wireman said, and I saw his lips tighten down as he applied upward pressure with his fingertips. A vein stood out in the hollow of his temple.

"Wireman," I started, "be carefu-"

Before I could finish, the lock old and tiny and undoubtedly rotted with rust snapped. The stair-tread flew up and tore off at the hinges. Wireman tumbled backward. Jack caught him, and then I caught Jack in a clumsy one-armed hug. The big flashlight hit the floor but didn't break; its bright beam rolled, spotlighting that grisly pile of dead wasps.

"Holy shit," Wireman said, regaining his feet. "Larry, Curly, and Moe."

Jack picked up the flashlight and shone it into the hole in the stairs.

"What?" I asked. "Anything? Nothing? Talk!"

"Something, but it's not a ceramic bottle," he said. "It's a metal box. Looks like a candy box, only bigger." He bent down.

"Maybe you better not," Wireman said.

But it was too late for that. Jack reached in all the way up to his elbow, and for one moment I was sure his face would lengthen in a scream as something battened on his arm and yanked him down to the shoulder. Then he straightened again. In his hand he held a heart-shaped tin box. He held it out to us. On the top, barely visible beneath speckles of rust, was a pink-cheeked angel. Below that, in old-fashioned script, these painted words:

ELIZABETH HER THINGS

Jack looked at us questioningly.

"Go on," I said. It wasn't Perse I was positive of that now. I felt both disappointed and relieved. "You found it; go on and open it."

"It's the drawings," Wireman said. "It must be."

I thought so, too. But it wasn't. What Jack lifted out of the rusty old heart-shaped box was Libbit's dolly, and seeing Noveen was like coming home.

Ouuuu, her black eyes and scarlet smiling mouth seemed to be saying. Ouuu, I been in there all that time, you nasty man.

iv

When I saw her come out of that box like a disinterred corpse out of a crypt, I felt a terrible, helpless horror come stealing through me, beginning at the heart and radiating outward, threatening to first loosen all my muscles and then unknit them completely.

"Edgar?" Wireman asked sharply. "All right?"

I did my best to get hold of myself. Mostly it was the thing's toothless smile. Like the jockey's cap, that smile was red. And as with the jockey's cap, I felt that if I looked at it too long, it would drive me mad. That smile seemed to insist that everything which had happened in my new life was a dream I was having in some hospital ICU while machines kept my twisted body alive a little while longer... and maybe that was good, for the best, because it meant nothing had happened to Ilse.

"Edgar?" When Jack stepped toward me, the doll in his hand bobbed in its own grotesque parody of concern. "You're not going to faint, are you?"

"No," I said. "Let me see that." And when he tried to pass it to me: "I don't want to take it. Just hold it up."

He did as I asked, and I understood at once why I'd had that feeling of instant recognition, that sense of coming home. Not because of Reba or her more recent companion although all three were ragdolls, there was that similarity. No, it was because I had seen her before, in several of Elizabeth's drawings. At first I'd assumed she was Nan Melda. That was wrong, but -

"Nan Melda gave this to her," I said.

"Sure," Wireman agreed. "And it must have been her favorite, because it was the only one she ever drew. The question is, why did she leave it behind when the family left Heron's Roost? Why did she lock it away?"