Duma Key, Page 46

  I felt thicker warmth on my face and wiped blood from my nose and off my upper lip. Wireman had fallen over a hassock. I helped him up and saw his nose was bleeding, too. A line of blood also ran down the side of his throat from his left ear. It rose and fell with the rapid beat of his heart.

  "Christ, that scream," he said. "My eyes are watering and my ears are ringing like a motherfucker. Can you hear me, Edgar?"

  "Yes," I said. "Are you all right?"

  "Other than thinking I just saw a dead guy disappear in fucking front of me? I guess so." He bent down, picked the blunt cylinder off the floor, and kissed it. "Glory be to God for dappled things," he said, then barked laughter. "Even when they're not dappled."

  It was a candlestick. The tip, where you were supposed to stick your candle, looked dark, as if it had touched something very hot instead of something cold and wet.

  "There are candles in all Miss Eastlake's rentals, because we lose the power out here all the time," Wireman said. "We have a gennie at the big house, but the other places don't, not even this one. But unlike the smaller houses, this one does have candlesticks from the big house, and they just happen to be silver."

  "And you remembered that," I said. Marveled, really.

  He shrugged, then looked at the Gulf. So did I. There was nothing there but moonlight and starlight on the water. For now, at least.

  Wireman gripped my wrist. His fingers closed over it where the manacle had been, and my heart jumped. "What?" I said, not liking the new fear I saw in his face.

  "Jack," he said. "Jack's alone at El Palacio."

  We took Wireman's car. In my terror, I'd never noticed the headlights or heard it pull in beside my own.

  ix

  Jack was okay. There had been a few calls from old friends of Elizabeth's, but the last one had come at quarter of nine, an hour and a half before we came bursting in, bloody and wide-eyed, Wireman still waving the candlestick. There had been no intruders at El Palacio, and Jack hadn't seen the ship that had been anchored for awhile in the Gulf off Big Pink. Jack had been eating microwave popcorn and watching Beverly Hills Cop on an old videotape.

  He listened to our story with mounting amazement, but no real disbelief; this was a young man, I had to remind myself, that had been raised on shows like The X-Files and Lost. Besides, it fit with what he'd been told earlier. When we were done, he took the candlestick from Wireman and examined the tip, which looked like the burnt filament in a dead lightbulb.

  "Why didn't it come for me?" he asked. "I was alone, and totally unprepared."

  "I don't want to bruise your self-esteem," I said, "but I don't think you're exactly a priority to whoever's running this show."

  Jack was looking at the narrow red mark on my wrist. "Edgar, is that where--"

  I nodded.

  "Fuck," Jack said in a low voice.

  "Have you figured out what's going on?" Wireman asked me. "If she sent that thing after you, she must think you have, or that you're close."

  "I don't think anyone will ever know all of it," I said, "but I know who that thing was when it was alive."

  "Who?" Jack was staring at me with wide eyes. We were standing in the kitchen and Jack was still holding the candlestick. Now he put it aside on the counter.

  "Emery Paulson. Adriana Eastlake's husband. They came back from Atlanta to help with the search after Tessie and Laura went missing, that much is true, but they never left Duma Key again. Perse saw to that."

  x

  We went into the parlor where I had first met Elizabeth Eastlake. The long, low table was still there, but now it was empty. Its polished surface struck me as a pitch-perfect mockery of life.

  "Where are they?" I asked Wireman. "Where are her chinas? Where's the Village?"

  "I boxed everything up and put it in the summer-kitchen," he said, pointing vaguely. "No real reason, I just . . . I just couldn't . . . muchacho, would you like some green tea? Or a beer?"

  I asked for water. Jack said he'd take a beer, if that was all right. Wireman set off to get them. He made it as far as the hallway before starting to cry. They were big, noisy sobs, the kind you can't stifle no matter how hard you try.

  Jack and I looked at each other, then looked away. We said nothing.

  xi

  He was gone a lot longer than it usually takes to get two cans of beer and a glass of water, but when he came back, he had regained his composure.

  "Sorry," he said. "I don't usually lose someone I love and poke a candlestick in a vampire's face in the same week. Usually it's one or the other." He shrugged his shoulders in an effort at insouciance. It was unsuccessful, but I had to give him points for trying.

  "They're not vampires," I said.

  "Then what are they?" he asked. "Expatiate."

  "I can only tell you what her pictures told me. You have to remember that, no matter how talented she might have been, she was still only a child." I hesitated, then shook my head. "Not even that. Hardly more than a baby. Perse was . . . I guess you'd say Perse was her spirit-guide."

  Wireman cracked his beer, sipped it, then leaned forward. "And what about you? Is Perse your spirit-guide, as well? Has she been intensifying what you do?"

  "Of course she has," I said. "She's been testing the limits of my ability and extending them--I'm sure that's what Candy Brown was about. And she's been picking my material. That's what the Girl and Ship paintings were about."

  "And the rest of your stuff?" Jack asked.

  "Mostly mine, I think. But some of it--" I stopped, suddenly struck by a terrible idea. I put my glass aside and almost knocked it over. "Oh Christ."

  "What?" Wireman asked. "For God's sake, what?"

  "You need to get your little red book of phone numbers. Right now."

  He went and got it, then handed me the cordless telephone. I sat for a moment with it in my lap, not sure who to call first. Then I knew. But there is one rule of modern life even more ironclad than the one which states that there's never a cop around when you need one: when you really need a human being, you always get the answering machine.

  That's what I got at Dario Nannuzzi's home, at Jimmy Yoshida's, at Alice Aucoin's.

  "Fuck!" I cried, slamming the disconnect button with my thumb when Alice's recorded voice started in with "I'm sorry I'm not here to take your call right now, but--"

  "They're probably still celebrating," Wireman said. "Give it time, amigo, and it'll all quiet down."

  "I don't have time!" I said. "Fuck! Shit! Fuck!"

  He put a hand on mine, and spoke soothingly. "What is it, Edgar? What's wrong?"

  "The pictures are dangerous! Maybe not all, but some, for sure!"

  He thought about it, then nodded. "Okay. Let's think about this. The most dangerous ones are probably the Girl and Ship series, right?"

  "Yes. I'm sure that's the case."

  "They're almost certainly still at the gallery, waiting to be framed and shipped."

  Shipped. Dear God, shipped. Even the word was scary. "I can't let that happen."

  "Muchacho, getting sidetracked is what you can't let happen."

  He didn't understand this wasn't a sidetrack. Perse could whistle up a great wind when she wanted to.

  But she needed help.

  I found the number of the Scoto and dialed it. I thought it was just possible that someone might be there, even at quarter of eleven on the night after the big shindig. But the ironclad rule held, and I got the machine. I waited impatiently, then pressed 9 to leave a general message.

  "Listen, you guys," I said, "this is Edgar. I don't want you to send any of the paintings or drawings out until I tell you, okay? Not a single one. Just put a hold on em for a few days. Use any excuse you have to, but do it. Please. It's very important."

  I broke the connection and looked at Wireman. "Will they?"

  "Considering your demonstrated earning power? You bet. And you just spared yourself a long, involved conversation. Now can we get back to--"

  "Not yet." My famil
y and friends would be the most vulnerable, and the fact that they'd gone their separate ways afforded me no comfort. Perse had already demonstrated that her reach was long. And I had started meddling. I thought she was angry with me, or frightened of me, or both.

  My first impulse was to call Pam, but then I remembered what Wireman had said about sparing myself a long, involved conversation. I consulted my own untrustworthy memory instead of Wireman's little book . . . and for once, under pressure, it came through.

  But I'll get his answering machine, I thought. And I did, but at first I didn't know it.

  "Hello, Edgar." Tom Riley's voice, but not Tom's voice. It was dead of emotion. It's the drugs he takes, I thought . . . although that deadness hadn't been there at the Scoto.

  "Tom, listen and don't say anyth--"

  But the voice went on. That dead voice. "She'll kill you, you know. You and all your friends. The way she's killed me. Only I'm still alive."

  I staggered on my feet.

  "Edgar!" Wireman said sharply. "Edgar, what's wrong?"

  "Shut up," I said. "I need to hear."

  The message seemed to be over, but I could still hear him breathing. Slow, shallow respiration coming from Minnesota. Then he resumed.

  "Being dead is better," he said. "Now I have to go and kill Pam."

  "Tom!" I shouted at the message. "Tom, wake up!"

  "After we're dead we're going to be married. It's to be a shipboard wedding. She promised."

  "Tom!" Wireman and Jack crowding in, one gripping my arm, the other gripping my stump. I hardly noticed.

  And then:

  "Leave a message at the beep."

  The beep came and then the line went silent.

  I didn't hang up the phone; I dropped it. I turned to Wireman. "Tom Riley's gone to kill my wife," I said. And then went on, although the words didn't feel like mine: "He may have done it already."

  xii

  Wireman didn't ask for an explanation, just told me to call her. I put the telephone back to my ear, but couldn't remember the number. Wireman read it to me, but I couldn't punch it in; the bad side of my vision had, for the first time in weeks, come over all red.

  Jack did it for me.

  I stood listening to the phone ring in Mendota Heights, waiting for Pam's bright, impersonal voice on the answering machine--a message saying she was in Florida but would return calls soon. Pam who was no longer in Florida, but who might be lying dead on her kitchen floor, with Tom Riley next to her, just as dead. This vision was so clear I could see blood on the cabinets, and on the knife in Tom's stiffening hand.

  One ring . . . two . . . three . . . the next would kick the answering machine into life . . .

  "Hello?" It was Pam. She sounded breathless.

  "Pam!" I shouted. "Jesus Christ, is it actually you? Answer me!"

  "Edgar? Who told you?" She sounded totally bewildered. And still breathless. Or maybe not. That was a Pam-voice I knew: slightly foggy, the way she sounded when she had a cold, or when she was . . .

  "Pam, are you crying?" And then, belatedly: "Told me what?"

  "About Tom Riley," she said. "I thought you might be his brother. Or--please, God, no--his mother."

  "What about Tom?"

  "He was fine on the trip back," she said, "laughing and showing off his new sketch, playing cards in the back of the plane with Kamen and some of the others." Now she did start to cry, big sobs like static, her words coming in between. It was an ugly sound, but it was also beautiful. Because it was alive. "He was fine. And then, tonight, he killed himself. The papers will probably call it an accident, but it was suicide. That's what Bozie says. Bozie has a friend on the cops who called and told him, and then he called me. Tom drove into a retaining wall at seventy miles an hour or more. No skid-marks. This was on Route 23, which means he was probably on his way here."

  I understood everything, and I didn't need any phantom arm to tell me, either. There was something Perse wanted, because she was angry with me. Angry? Furious. Only Tom had had a moment of sanity--a moment of courage--and had taken a quick detour into a concrete cliff.

  Wireman was making crazy what's-going-on gestures in front of my face. I turned away from him.

  "Panda, he saved your life."

  "What?"

  "I know what I know," I said. "The sketch he was showing off in the plane . . . it was one of mine, right?"

  "Yes . . . he was so proud . . . Edgar, what are you--"

  "Did it have a name? Did the sketch have a name? Do you know?"

  "It was called Hello. He kept saying, 'Don't look much like Minnesota dere' . . . doing that dumb Yooper thing of his . . ." A pause, and I didn't break in because I was trying to think. Then: "This is your special kind of knowing. Isn't it?"

  Hello, I was thinking. Yes, of course. The first sketch I'd done in Big Pink had also been one of the powerful ones. And Tom had bought it.

  Goddamned Hello.

  Wireman took the phone from me, gently but firmly.

  "Pam? It's Wireman. Is Tom Riley . . . ?" He listened, nodding. His voice was very calm, very soothing. It was a voice I'd heard him use with Elizabeth. "All right . . . yes . . . yes, Edgar's fine, I'm fine, we're all fine down here. Sorry about Mr. Riley, of course. Only you need to do something for us, and it's extremely important. I'm going to put you on speaker." He pushed a button I hadn't even noticed before. "Are you still there?"

  "Yes . . ." Her voice was tinny but clear. And she was getting herself under control.

  "How many of Edgar's family and friends bought pictures?"

  She considered. "Nobody in the family bought any of the actual paintings, I'm sure of that."

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  "I think they were sort of hoping--or maybe expecting's the word--that in time . . . on the right birthday, or maybe at Christmas . . ."

  "I understand. So they didn't get anything."

  "I didn't say that. Melinda's boyfriend also bought one of the sketches. What's this about? What's wrong with the pictures?"

  Ric. My heart jumped. "Pam, this is Edgar. Did Melinda and Ric take the sketch with them?"

  "With all those airplanes, including transatlantic? He asked that it be framed and shipped. I don't think she knows. It was of flowers done in colored pencils."

  "So that one's still at the Scoto."

  "Yes."

  "And you're sure nobody else in the family bought paintings."

  She took maybe ten seconds to consider. It was agony. At last she said, "No. I'm positive." You better be, Panda, I thought. "But Angel and Helen Slobotnik bought one. Mailbox with Flowers, I believe it's called."

  I knew the one she was talking about. It was actually titled Mailbox with Oxeyes. And I thought that one was harmless, I thought that one was probably all mine, but still . . .

  "They didn't take it, did they?"

  "No, because they were going to Orlando first, fly home from there. They also asked that it be framed and shipped." No questions now, only answers. She sounded younger--like the Pam I had married, the one who'd kept my books back in those pre-Tom days. "Your surgeon--can't remember his name--"

  "Todd Jamieson." I said it automatically. If I'd paused to think, I wouldn't have been able to remember.

  "Yes, him. He also bought a painting, and arranged for shipment. He wanted one of those spooky Girl and Ship ones, but they were spoken for. He settled for a conch-shell floating on the water."

  Which could be trouble. All the surreal ones could be trouble.

  "Bozie bought two of the sketches, and Kamen bought one. Kathi Green wanted one, but said she couldn't afford it." A pause. "I thought her husband was sort of a dork."

  I would have given her one if she'd asked, I thought.

  Wireman spoke up again. "Listen to me now, Pam. You've got work to do."

  "All right." A little fog still in her voice, but mostly sharp. Mostly right there.

  "You need to call Bozeman and Kamen. Do it right away."

  "
Okay."

  "Tell them to burn those sketches."

  A slight pause, then: "Burn the sketches, okay, got it."

  "As soon as we're off the phone," I put in.

  A touch of annoyance: "I said I got that, Eddie."

  "Tell them I'll reimburse them their purchase price times two, or give them different sketches, whichever they want, but that those sketches aren't safe. They are not safe. Have you got that?"

  "Yep, I'll do it right now." And she finally asked a question. The question. "Eddie, did that Hello picture kill Tom?"

  "Yes. I need a callback."

  I gave her the phone number. Pam sounded like she was crying again, but still repeated it back perfectly.

  "Pam, thank you," Wireman said.

  "Yeah," Jack added. "Thanks, Mrs. Freemantle."

  I thought she'd ask who that was, but she didn't. "Edgar, do you promise the girls will be okay?"

  "If they didn't take any of my pictures with them, they'll be fine."

  "Yes," she said. "Your goddamned pictures. I'll call back."

  And she was gone, without a goodbye.

  "Better?" Wireman asked when I hung up.

  "I don't know," I said. "I hope to God it is." I pressed the heel of my hand first against my left eye, then against my right. "But it doesn't feel better. It doesn't feel fixed."

  xiii

  We were quiet for a minute. Then Wireman asked, "Was Elizabeth falling out of that pony-trap really an accident? What's your best guess?"

  I tried to clear my mind. This stuff was important, too.

  "My best guess is that it was. When she woke up, she suffered from amnesia, aphasia, and God knows what else as a result of brain injuries that were beyond diagnosis in 1925. Painting was more than her therapy; she was a genuine prodigy, and she was her own first great artwork. The housekeeper--Nan Melda--was also amazed. There was that story in the paper, and presumably everyone who read it was amazed over breakfast . . . but you know how people are--"

  "What amazes you at breakfast is forgotten by lunch," Wireman said.