Duma Key(195)

It says You should never have interfered with me.

Melda, still holding the Tessie-thing by the hair (it fights and kicks, but she's hardly aware of it), spins clumsily in the water and sees her, standing at the rail of her ship in her cloak of red. Her hood is down, and Melda sees she is not even close to human, she is something other, something beyond human understanding. In the moonlight her face is ghastly and full of knowing.

Rising from the water, thin skeleton arms salute her.

The breeze blows apart the snakes of her hair; Melda sees the third eye in Perse's forehead; sees it seeing her, and all will to resist is snuffed out in an instant.

At that moment, however, the head of the bitch-goddess snaps around as if she has heard something or someone tiptoeing up behind her.

She cries What?

And then: No! Put that down! Put it down! YOU CAN'T DO THAT!

But apparently Libbit can and has because the shape of the thing at the ship's rail wavers, turns watery... and then becomes nothing but moonlight. The skeleton arms slither back beneath the water and are gone.

The Emery-thing is gone, too disappeared but the twins shriek together in shared pain and desolation at their abandonment.

Melda cries to the Mister It's goan be all right!

She turns the one she's had by the hair a-loose. She doesn't think it will want anything to do with the living, not now, not for awhile.

She cries Libbit's done done it! She -

John Eastlake shrieks GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DAUGHTERS, YOU BAD NIGGER!

And he fires the harpoon pistol for the second time.

Do you see it strike home, piercing Nan Melda through? If so, the picture is complete.

Ah, God the picture is complete.

Chapter 20 Perse

i

The picture not the last full-blown Edgar Freemantle work of art, but the second-to-last showed John Eastlake kneeling on Shade Beach with his dead daughter beside him and the sickle moon, just risen above the horizon, behind him. Nan Melda stood thigh-deep in the water, with one little girl on either side of her; their damp, upturned faces were drawn long in expressions of terror and rage. The shaft of one of those short harpoons protruded from between the woman's br**sts. Her hands were clasped upon it as she looked unbelievingly at the man whose daughters she had tried so hard to protect, the man who had called her a bad nigger before taking her life.

"He screamed," I said. "He screamed until his nose bled. Until he bled from one eye. It's a wonder he didn't scream himself into a cerebral hemorrhage."

"There's no one on the ship," Jack said. "Not in this drawing, at least."

"No. Perse was gone. What Nan Melda hoped for actually happened. The business on the beach distracted the bitch just long enough for Libbit to take care of her. To drown her to sleep." I tapped Nan Melda's left arm, where I had drawn two quick arcs and made one tiny crisscross to indicate a reflection of weak moonlight. "And mostly because something told her to put on her mother's silver bracelets. Silver, like a certain candlestick." I looked at Wireman. "So maybe there is something on the bright side of the equation, looking out for us a little."

He nodded, then pointed to the sun. In another moment or two, it would touch the horizon, and the track of light beating across to us, now yellow, would deepen to pure gold. "But dark is when the bad things come out to play. Where is the china Perse now? Any idea where it ended up after all this on the beach?"

"I don't know exactly what happened after Eastlake killed Nan Melda, but I've got the general gist. Elizabeth..." I shrugged. "She'd shot her bolt, at least for awhile. Hit overload. Her father must've heard her screaming, and that's probably the only thing that could still bring him around. He must have remembered that, no matter how awful things were, he still had a live daughter at Heron's Roost. He might even have remembered that he had two more thirty or forty miles away. Which left him with a mess to clean up."

Jack pointed silently at the horizon, where the sun was now touching.

"I know, Jack, but we're closer than you think." I shuffled the last sheet of paper to the top of the pile. It was the barest of sketches, but there was no mistaking that knowing smile. It was Charley the Lawn Jockey. I got to my feet and turned them away from the Gulf and the waiting ship, which was now silhouetted, black against gold. "Do you see it?" I asked them. " I saw it, on our way up from the house. The real jockey statue, I mean, not the projection we saw on our way in."

They looked. "I don't," Wireman said, "and I think I would if it was there, muchacho. I know the grass is high, but that red cap should still stand out. Unless it's in one of the banana groves."

"Got it!" Jack cried, and actually laughed.

"The f**k you do, " Wireman said, stung. Then: "Where?"

"Behind the tennis court."

Wireman looked there, started to say he still didn't see it, then stopped. "I'll be a son of a bitch," he said. "The Christing thing's upside-down, isn't it?"

"Yes. And since it has no actual feet to stick up, that's the square iron base you see. Charley marks the spot, amigos. But first we need to go to the barn."

ii

I had no premonition of what was waiting for us inside the long, overgrown outbuilding, which was dark and stifling hot, and no idea that Wireman had drawn the Desert Eagle automatic until it went off.