Duma Key(88)

His smile faded. "I will if I'm around, but I don't know how long I'll be around." He saw the look on my face and raised his hand. "I ain't tuning up the Dead March yet, but ask yourself this, mi amigo: am I still the right man to take care of Miss Eastlake? In my current condition?"

And because that was a can of worms I didn't want to open not this morning I asked, "How did you get the job in the first place?"

"Does it matter?"

"It might," I said.

I was thinking of how I'd started my time on Duma Key with one assumption that I had chosen the place and had since come to believe that maybe it had chosen me. I had even wondered, usually lying in bed and listening to the shells whisper, if my accident had really been an accident. Of course it had been, must have been, but it was still easy to see similarities between mine and Julia Wireman's. I got the crane; she got the Public Works truck. But of course there are people functioning human beings in most respects who will tell you they've seen the face of Christ on a taco.

"Well," he said, "if you expect another long story, you can forget it. It takes a lot to story me out, but for the time being, the well's almost dry." He looked at Elizabeth moodily. And perhaps with a shade of envy. "I didn't sleep very well last night."

"Short version, then."

He shrugged. His febrile good cheer had disappeared like the foam on top of a glass of beer. His big shoulders were slumped forward, giving his chest a caved-in look.

"After Jack Fineham 'furloughed' me, I decided Tampa was reasonably close to Disney World. Only when I got there, I was bored titless."

"Sure you were," I said.

"I also felt that some atonement was in order. I didn't want to go to Darfur or to New Orleans and work storefront pro bono, although that crossed my mind. I felt like maybe the little balls with the lottery numbers on them were still bouncing somewhere and one more was waiting to go up the pipe. The last number."

"Yeah," I said. A cold finger touched the base of my neck. Very lightly. "One more number. I know the feeling."

" S , se or, I know you do. I was waiting to do good, hoping to balance the books again. Because I felt they needed balancing. And one day I saw an ad in the Tampa Tribune. 'Wanted, Companion for elderly lady and Caretaker for several premium island rental properties. Applicant must supply resume and recommendations to match excellent salary and benefits. This is a challenging position which the right person will find rewarding. Must be bonded.' Well, I was bonded and I liked the sound of it. I interviewed with Miss Eastlake's lawyer. He told me the couple who'd previously filled the position had been called back to New England when the parent of one or the other had suffered a catastrophic accident."

"And you got the job. What about -?" I pointed in the general direction of his temple.

"Never told him. He was dubious enough already wondered, I think, why a legal beagle from Omaha would want to spend a year putting an old lady to bed and rattling the locks on houses that are empty most of the time but Miss Eastlake..." He reached out and stroked her gnarled hand. "We saw eye-to-eye from the first, didn't we dear?"

She only snored, but I saw the look on Wireman's face and felt that cold finger touch the back of my neck again, a little more firmly this time. I felt it and knew: the three of us were here because something wanted us here. My knowing wasn't based on the kind of logic I'd grown up with and built my business on, but that was all right. Here on Duma I was a different person, and the only logic I needed was in my nerve-endings.

"I think the world of her, you know," Wireman said. He picked up his napkin with a sigh, as though it were something heavy, and wiped his eyes. "By the time I got here, all that crazy, febrile shit I told you about was gone. I was husked out, a gray man in a blue and sunny clime who could only read the newspaper in short bursts without getting a blinder of a headache. I was holding onto one basic idea: I had a debt to pay. Work to do. I'd find it and do it. After that I didn't care. Miss Eastlake didn't hire me, not really; she took me in. When I came here she wasn't like this, Edgar. She was bright, she was funny, she was haughty, flirty, capricious, demanding she could hector me or humor me out of a blue mood if she chose to, and she often chose to."

"She sounds smokin."

"She was smokin. Another woman would have given in completely to the wheelchair by now. Not her. She hauls her hundred and eighty up on that walker and plods around this air-conditioned museum, the courtyard outside... she even used to enjoy target-shooting, sometimes with one of her father's old handguns, more often with that harpoon pistol, because it's got less kick. And because she says she likes the sound. You see her with that thing, and she really does look like the Bride of the Godfather."

"That's how I first saw her," I said.

"I took to her right away, and I've come to love her. Julia used to call me mi compa ero. I think of that often when I'm with Miss Eastlake. She's mi compa era, mi amiga. She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone."

"I'd say you struck lucky."

"Maybe s , maybe no. Tell you this, it's going to be hard to leave her. What's she gonna do when a new person shows up? A new person won't know about how she likes to have her coffee at the end of the boardwalk in the morning... or about pretending to throw that f**king cookie-tin in the goldfish pond... and she won't be able to explain, because she's headed into the fog for good now."