Duma Key(190)

I thought of the skeleton arms reaching up in the moonlight.

"So," Wireman said harshly. "The plan is for us to leave by boat, is it?"

"Yes."

"Press gang? Like in jolly old England?"

"Pretty much."

"I can't do that," Jack said. "I get seasick."

I smiled and sat down beside him. "Sea voyages aren't in the plan, Jack."

"Good."

"Can you open that chicken for me, and tear me off a leg?"

He did as I asked, and they watched, fascinated, as I devoured first one leg, then the other. I asked if anyone wanted the breast, and when they both said no, I ate that, too. Halfway through it I thought of my daughter, lying pale and dead in Rhode Island. I kept on eating, doing it methodically, wiping my greasy hands on my jeans between bites. Ilse would have understood. Not Pam and probably not Lin, but Illy? Yes. I was frightened of what lay ahead, but I knew Perse was frightened, too. If she hadn't been, she would not have tried so hard to keep us out. On the contrary, she would have welcomed us in.

"Time's wasting, muchacho, " Wireman said. "Daylight fleets."

"I know," I said. "And my daughter's dead forever. I'm still starving, though. Is there anything sweet? Cake? Cookies? A motherf*cking HoHo?"

There wasn't. I settled for another Pepsi and a few cucumber strips dipped in ranch dressing, which to me has always looked and tasted like slightly sweetened snot. At least my headache was fading. The images that had come to me in the dark the ones that had been waiting all those years inside Noveen's rag-stuffed head were also fading, but I had my own pictures to refresh them. I wiped my hands a final time and put the stack of torn and wrinkled sheets on my lap: the family album from hell.

"Keep an eye out for that heron," I told Wireman.

He looked around, glanced at the deserted ship ticking back and forth out there on the mild swell, then looked back at me. "Wouldn't the spear-pistol be better for Big Bird? With one of the silver harpoons attached?"

"No. The heron's something she just rides, the way a man rides a horse. She'd probably like it if we wasted one of the silvertips on it, but Perse is done getting what she likes." I smiled without humor. "That part of the lady's career is over."

iii

Wireman made Jack get up so he could strip the vines from the bench. Then we sat there, three unlikely warriors, two in their fifties and one barely out of his teens, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a ruined mansion on the other. The red basket and mostly depleted food-bag were at our feet. I thought I had twenty minutes to tell them what I knew, even half an hour, and that would still leave enough time.

I hoped.

"Elizabeth's connection with Perse was closer than mine," I said. "Much more intense than mine. I don't know how she stood it. Once she had the china figure, she saw everything, whether she was there or not. And she drew everything. But the worst pictures she burned before she left this place."

"Like the picture of the hurricane?" Wireman asked.

"Yes. I think she was afraid of their power, and she was right to be afraid. But she saw it all. And the doll stored it all up. Like a psychic camera. In most cases, I just saw what Elizabeth saw and drew what Elizabeth drew. Do you understand that?"

They both nodded.

"Start with this path, which was once a road. It went from Shade Beach to the barn." I pointed to the long, vine-coated outbuilding where I hoped we would find a ladder. "I don't think the bootlegger who wore it into the coral was Dave Davis, but I'm confident he was one of Davis's business associates, and that a fair amount of hooch came onto the Florida Suncoast by way of Duma Key. From Shade Beach to John Eastlake's barn, then across to the mainland. Mostly top-shelf stuff headed for a couple of jazz clubs in Sarasota and Venice, stored as a favor to Davis."

Wireman glanced at the declining sun, then at his watch. "Does this have any bearing on our current situation, muchacho? I assume it does."

"You bet." I produced a drawing of a keg with a fat screw-lid bung on top. The word TABLE had been sketched in a semicircle on the side, with SCOTLAND below it, in another semicircle. It was ragged work; I drew far better than I printed. "Whiskey, gents."

Jack indicated a vague, humanoid scribble on the keg between TABLE and SCOTLAND. The figure had been executed in orange, and one foot was raised behind it. "Who's the chick in the dress?"

"That's not a dress, it's a kilt. It's supposed to be a highlander."

Wireman raised his shaggy brows. "Won't win any awards for that one, muchacho."

"Elizabeth put Perse in some sort of midget whiskey barrel," Jack mused. "Or maybe it was Elizabeth and Nan Melda-"

I shook my head. "Just Elizabeth."

"How big was this thing?"

I held my hands about two feet from each other, considered, then moved them a little farther apart.

Jack nodded, but he was frowning, too. "She put the china figure in and screwed the cap back on. Or put the plug in the jug. And drowned Perse to sleep. Which seems f**ked up to me, boss. She was underwater when she started calling to Elizabeth, for God's sake. On the bottom of the Gulf!"

"Leave that for now." I put the sketch of the whiskey barrel on the bottom of the stack and showed them the next one. It was Nan Melda, using the telephone in the parlor. There was something furtive about the tilt of her head and the hunch of her shoulders, only a quick stroke or two, but it said all that needed to be said about how southern folk felt back in 1927 about black housekeepers using the parlor phone, even in an emergency.