Duma Key, Page 53

  "The cypress and redwood in this place would have been worth a fortune if somebody had come up and got it before it went to hell," Jack said. He bent down, seized the end of a protruding board, and pulled. It came up, bent almost like taffy, then broke off--not with a snap but a listless crump. A few woodlice came strolling from the rectangular hole below it. The smell that puffed up was dank and dark.

  "No scavenge, no salvage, and nobody up here partying hearty," Wireman said. "No discarded condoms or step-ins, not a single JOE LOVES DEBBIE spray-painted on a wall. I don't think anyone's been up here since John chained the door and drove away for the last time. I know that's hard to believe--"

  "No," I said. "It's not. The Heron's Roost at this end of the Key has belonged to Perse since 1927. John knew it, and made sure to keep it that way when he wrote his will. Elizabeth did the same. But it's not a shrine." I looked into the room opposite the formal parlor. It might once have been a study. An old rolltop desk sat in a puddle of stinking water. There were bookshelves, but they stood empty. "It's a tomb."

  "So where do we look for these drawings?" Jack asked.

  "I have no idea," I said. "I don't even . . ." A chunk of plaster lay in the doorway, and I kicked it. I wanted to send it flying, but it was too old and wet; it only disintegrated. "I don't think there are any more drawings. Not now that I see the place."

  I glanced around again, smelling the wet reek.

  "You could be right, but I don't trust you," Wireman said. "Because, muchacho, you're in mourning. And that makes a man tired. You're listening to the voice of experience."

  Jack went into the study, squishing across damp boards to get to the old rolltop. A drop of water plinked down on the visor of his cap, and he looked up. "Ceiling's caving in," he said. "There was probably at least one bathroom overhead, maybe two, and maybe a roof cistern to catch rainwater, back in the day. I can see a hanging pipe. One of these years it's gonna come all the way down, and this desk will go bye-bye."

  "Just make sure you don't go bye-bye, Jack," Wireman said.

  "It's the floor I'm worried about right now," he said. "Feels mushy as hell."

  "Come back, then," I said.

  "In a minute. Let me check this, first."

  He ran the drawers, one after the other. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing . . . more nothing . . . nothing . . ." He paused. "Here's something. A note. Handwritten."

  "Let's see it," Wireman said.

  Jack brought it to him, taking big, careful steps until he got past the wet part of the floor. I read over Wireman's shoulder. The note was scrawled on plain white paper in a big flat man's hand:

  August 19, '26

  Johnny--You want, you get. This is the last of the good stuff, & just for you, My Lad. The "champers" aint my best ever but "What The Hell." Single-malt's OK. CC for the "common herd" (ha-ha). 5 Ken in the keg. And as you asked, Table X 2, and in cera. I take no credit, just struck lucky, but it really is the last. Thanks for everything, Pal. See you when I get back this side of the puddle.

  DD

  Wireman touched Table X 2 and said, "The table is leaking. Does the rest of this mean anything to you, Edgar?"

  It did, but for a moment my damned sick memory refused to give it up. I can do this, I thought . . . and then thought sideways. First to Ilse saying Share your pool, mister?, and that hurt, but I let it because that was the way in. What followed was the memory of another girl dressed for another pool. This girl was all breasts and long legs in a black tank suit, she was Mary Ire as Hockney had painted her--Gidget in Tampa, she had called her younger self--and then I had it. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

  "DD was Dave Davis," I said. "In the Roaring Twenties he was a Suncoast mogul."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Mary Ire told me," I said, and a cold part of me that would probably never warm up again could appreciate the irony; life is a wheel, and if you wait long enough, it always comes back around to where it started. "Davis was friends with John Eastlake, and apparently supplied Eastlake with plenty of good liquor."

  "Champers," Jack said. "That's champagne, right?"

  Wireman said, "Good for you, Jack, but I want to know what Table is. And cera."

  "It's Spanish," Jack said. "You should know that."

  Wireman cocked an eyebrow at him. "You're thinking of sera--with an s. As in que sera, sera."

  "Doris Day, 1956," I said. "The future's not ours to see." And a good thing, too, I thought. "One thing I'm pretty sure of is that Davis was right when he said this was the last delivery." I tapped the date: August 19th. "The guy sailed for Europe in October of 1926 and never came back. He disappeared at sea--or so Mary Ire told me."

  "And cera?" Wireman asked.

  "Let it go for now," I said. "But it's strange--just this one piece of paper."

  "A little odd, maybe, but not completely strange," Wireman said. "If you were a widower with young daughters, would you want to take your bootlegger's last receipt with you into your new life?"

  I considered it, and decided he had a point. "No . . . but I'd probably destroy it, along with my stash of French postcards."

  Wireman shrugged. "We'll never know how much incriminating paperwork he did destroy . . . or how little. Except for having a little drinkie now and then with his pals, his hands may have been relatively clean. But, muchacho . . ." He put a hand on my shoulder. "The paper is real. We do have it. And if something's out to get us, maybe something else is looking out for us . . . just a little. Isn't that possible?"

  "It would be nice to think so, anyway. Let's see if there's anything else."

  ii

  It seemed at first there wasn't. We poked around all the downstairs rooms and found nothing but near-disaster when my foot plunged through the flooring in what must once have been the dining room. Wireman and Jack were quick, however, and at least it was my bad leg that went down; I had my good one to brace myself with.

  There was no hope of checking above ground-level. The staircase went all the way up, but beyond the landing and a single ragged length of rail beside it, there was only blue sky and the waving fronds of one tall cabbage palm. The second floor was a remnant, the third complete toast. We started back toward the kitchen and our makeshift step-down to the outside world with nothing to show for our exploration but an ancient note announcing a booze delivery. I had an idea what cera might mean, but without knowing where Perse was, the idea was useless.

  And she was here.

  She was close.

  Why else make it so fucking hard to get here?

  Wireman was in the lead, and he stopped so suddenly I ran into him. Jack ran into me, whacking me in the butt with the picnic basket.

  "We need to check the stairs," Wireman said. He spoke in the tone of a man who can't believe he has been such a dumb cluck.

  "I beg pardon?" I asked.

  "We need to check the stairs for a ha-ha. I should have thought of that first thing. I must be losing it."

  "What's a ha-ha?" I asked.

  Wireman was turning back. "The one at El Palacio is four steps up from the bottom of the main staircase. The idea--she said it was her father's--was to have it close to the front door in case of fire. There's a lockbox inside it, and nothing much inside the lockbox now but a few old souvenirs and some pictures, but once she kept her will and her best pieces of jewelry in there. Then she told her lawyer. Big mistake. He insisted she move all that stuff to a safe deposit box in Sarasota."

  We were at the foot of the stairs now, back near the hill of dead wasps. The stink of the house was thick around us. He turned to me, his eyes gleaming. "Muchacho, she also kept a few very valuable china figures in that box." He surveyed the wreck of the staircase, leading up to nothing but senseless shattery and blue sky beyond. "You don't suppose . . . if Perse is something like a china figure that John fished off the bottom of the Gulf . . . you don't suppose she's hidden right here, in the stairs?"

  "I think anything's possible. Be careful. Ver
y."

  "I'll bet you anything that there's a ha-ha," he said. "We repeat what we learn as children."

  He brushed away the dead wasps with his boot--they made a whispery, papery sound--and then knelt at the foot of the stairs. He examined the first stair riser, then the second, then the third. When he got to the fourth, he said: "Jack, give me the flashlight."

  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?"

  "Sometimes dolls fall out of favor," I said. I was looking at that red and smiling mouth. Still red after all these years. Red like the place memories went to hide when you were wounded and couldn't think straight. "Sometimes dolls get scary."

  "Her pictures talked to you, Edgar," Wireman said. He waggled the doll, then handed it to Jack. "What about her? Will the doll tell you what we want to know?"

  "Noveen," I said. "Her name's Noveen. And I wish I could say yes, but only Elizabeth's pencils and pictures speak to me."

  "How do you know?"

  A good question. How did I know?

  "I just do. I bet she could have talked to you, Wireman. Before I fixed you. When you still had that little twinkle."

  "Too late now," Wireman said. He rummaged in the food-stash, found the cucumber strips, and ate a couple. "So what do we do? Go back? Because I have an idea that if we go back, 'chacho, we'll never summon the testicular fortitude to return."

  I thought he was right. And meanwhile, the afternoon was passing all around us.

  Jack was sitting on the stairs, his butt on a riser two or three above the ha-ha. He was holding the doll on his knee. Sunshine fell through the shattered top of the house and dusted them with light. They were strangely evocative, would have made a terrific painting: Young Man and Doll. The way he was holding Noveen reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on just what. Noveen's black shoebutton eyes seemed to look at me, almost smugly. I seen a lot, you nasty man. I seen it all. I know it all. Too bad I'm not a picture you can touch with your phantom hand, ain't it?

  Yes. It was.

  "There was a time when I could have made her talk," Jack said.

  Wireman looked puzzled, but I felt that little click you get when a connection you've been trying to make finally goes through. Now I knew why the way he was holding the doll looked so familiar.

  "Into ventriloquism, were you?" I hoped I sounded casual, but my heart was starting to bump against my ribs again. I had an idea that here at the south end of Duma Key, many things were possible. Even in broad daylight.

  "Yeah," Jack said with a smile that was half-embarrassed, half-reminiscent. "I bought a book about it when I was only eight, and stuck with it mostly because my Dad said it was like throwing money away, I gave up on everything." He shrugged, and
Noveen bobbed a bit on his leg. As if she were also trying to shrug. "I never got great at it, but I got good enough to win the sixth-grade Talent Competition. My Dad hung the medal on his office wall. That meant a lot to me."

  "Yeah," Wireman said. "There's nothing like an atta-boy from a doubtful dad."

  Jack smiled, and as always, it illuminated his whole face. He shifted a little, and Noveen shifted with him. "Best thing, though? I was a shy kid, and ventriloquism broke me out a little. It got easier to talk to people--I'd sort of pretend I was Morton. My dummy, you know. Morton was a wiseass who'd say anything to anybody."

  "They all are," I said. "It's a rule, I think."

  "Then I got into junior high, and ventriloquism started to seem like a nerd talent compared to skateboarding, so I gave it up. I don't know what happened to the book. Throw Your Voice, it was called."

  We were silent. The house breathed dankly around us. A little while ago, Wireman had killed a charging alligator. I could hardly believe that now, even though my ears were still ringing from the gunshots.

  Then Wireman said: "I want to hear you do it. Make her say, 'Buenos dias, amigos, mi nombre es Noveen, and la mesa is leaking.' "

  Jack laughed. "Yeah, right."

  "No--I'm serious."

  "I can't. If you don't do it for awhile, you forget how."

  And from my own research, I knew he could be right. In the matter of learned skills, memory comes to a fork in the road. Down one branch are the it's-like-riding-a-bicycle skills; things which, once learned, are almost never forgotten. But the creative, ever-changing forebrain skills have to be practiced almost daily, and they are easily damaged or destroyed. Jack was saying ventriloquism was like that. And while I had no reason to doubt him--it involved creating a new personality, after all, as well as throwing one's voice--I said: "Give it a try."

  "What?" He looked at me. Smiling. Puzzled.

  "Go on, take a shot."

  "I told you, I can't--"

  "Try, anyway."

  "Edgar, I have no idea what she would sound like even if I could still throw my voice."