Intruder

I

Twenty minutes later I sat in Little Pink with my sketch-pad on my lap and the red picnic basket beside me. Directly ahead, filling the western-facing window with light, was the Gulf. Far below me was the murmur of the shells. I had set my easel aside and covered my paint-splattered work-table with a piece of toweling. I laid the remains of her freshly sharpened colored pencils on top of it. There wasn’t much left of those pencils, which were fat and somehow antique, but I thought there’d be enough. I was ready.

“Bullshit I am, ” I said. I was never going to be ready for this, and part of me was hoping nothing would happen. I thought something would, though. I thought that was why Elizabeth had wanted me to find her drawings. But how much of what was inside the red basket did she actually remember? My guess was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had happened to her when she was a child even before the Alzheimer’s came along to complicate things. Because forgetting isn’t always involuntary. Sometimes it’s willed.

Who would want to remember something so awful that it had made your father scream until he bled? Better to stop drawing completely. To just go cold turkey. Better to tell people you can hardly even draw stick figures, that when it comes to art you’re like wealthy alums who support their college sports teams: if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. Better to put it out of your mind completely, and in your old age, creeping senility will take care of the rest.

Oh, some of that old ability may still remain — like scar-tissue on the dura of the brain from an old injury (caused by falling out of a pony-trap, let’s say) — and you might have to find ways to let that out once in awhile, to express it like a build-up of pus from an infection that will never quite heal. So you get interested in other people’s art. You become, in fact, a patron of the arts. And if that’s still not enough? Why, maybe you begin to collect china figures and buildings. You begin to build yourself a China Town. No one will call creating such tableaux art, but it’s certainly imaginative, and the regular exercise of the imagination — its visual aspect in particular — is enough to make it stop.

Make what stop?

The itch, of course.

That damnable itch.

I scratched at my right arm, passed through it, and for the ten thousandth time found only my ribs. I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first sheet.

Start with a blank surface.

It called to me, as I was sure such blank sheets had once called to her.

Fill me up. Because white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember. Make. Show. Draw. And when you do, the itch will go away. For awhile the confusion will subside.

Please stay on the Key, she had said. No matter what happens. We need you.

I thought that might be true.

I sketched quickly. Just a few strokes. Something that could have been a cart. Or possibly a pony-trap, standing still and waiting for the pony.

“They lived here happily enough, ” I told the empty studio. “Father and daughters. Then Elizabeth fell out of the pony-trap and started to draw, the off-season hurricane exposed the debris field, the little girls drowned. Then the rest of them pop off to Miami, and the trouble stops. And, when they came back nearly twenty-five years later…”

Beneath the pony-trap I printed FINE. Paused. Added AGAIN. FINE AGAIN.

Fine, the shells whispered far below. Fine again.

Yes, they had been fine, John and Elizabeth had been fine. And after John died, Elizabeth had continued being fine. Fine with her art shows. Fine with her chinas. Then things had for some reason begun to change again. I didn’t know if the deaths of Wireman’s wife and daughter had been a part of that change, but I thought they might have been. And about his arrival and mine on Duma Key I thought there was no question. I had no rational reason for believing that, but I did.

Things on Duma Key had been okay… then strange… then for a long time they’d been okay again. And now…

She’s awake.

The table is leaking.

If I wanted to know what was happening now, I had to know what had happened then. Dangerous or not, I had to.

Ii

I picked up her first drawing, which wasn’t a drawing at all but just an uncertain line running across the middle of the paper. I took it in my left hand, closed my eyes, and then pretended I was touching it with my right, just as I had with Pam’s HANDS OFF gardening gloves. I tried to see my right fingers running over that hesitant line. I could — sort of — but I felt a kind of despair. Did I mean to do this with all of the pictures? There had to be twelve dozen, and that was a conservative estimate. Also, I wasn’t exactly being overwhelmed with psychic information.

Take it easy. Rome wasn’t built in an hour.

I decided a little Radio Free Bone couldn’t hurt and might help. I got up, holding the ancient piece of paper in my right hand, and of course it went fluttering to the floor because there was no right hand. I bent to pick it up, thinking I had the saying wrong, the saying was Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But Melda says nour.

I stopped, holding the sheet of paper in my left hand. The hand the crane hadn’t been able to get to. Was that an actual memory, something that had come drifting out of the picture, or just something I’d made up? Just my mind, trying to be obliging?

“It’s not a picture, ” I said, looking at the hesitant line.

No, but it tried to be a picture.

My ass went back onto the seat of my chair with a thump. It wasn’t a voluntary act of sitting; it was more a case of my knees losing their lock and letting go. I looked at the line, then out the window. From the Gulf to the line. From the line to the Gulf.

She had tried to draw the horizon. It had been her first thing.

Yes.

I picked up my pad and seized one of her pencils. It didn’t matter which one as long as it was hers. It felt too big, too fat, in my hand. It also felt just right. I began to draw.

On Duma Key, it was what I did best.

Iii

I sketched a child sitting on a potty chair. Her head was bandaged. She had a drinking glass in one hand. Her other arm was slung around her father’s neck. He was wearing a strap-style undershirt and had shaving cream on his cheeks. Standing in the background, just a shadow, was the housekeeper. No bracelets in this sketch, because she didn’t always wear them, but the kerchief was wrapped around her head, the knot in front. Nan Melda, the closest thing to a mother Libbit ever knew.

Libbit?

Yes, that was what they called her. What she called herself. Libbit, little Libbit.

“The littlest one of all, ” I murmured, and flicked back the first page of the sketch-pad. The pencil — too short, too fat, unused for over three-quarters of a century — was the perfect tool, the perfect channel. It began to move again.

I sketched the little girl in a room. Books appeared on the wall behind her and it was a study. Daddy’s study. The bandage was wound around her head. She was at a desk. She was wearing what looked like a housecoat. She had a

(ben-cil)

pencil in her hand. One of the colored pencils? Probably not — not then, not yet — but it didn’t matter. She had found her thing, her focus, her mé tier. And how hungry it made her! How ravenous!

She thinks I will have more paper, please.

She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

“She literally drew herself back into the world, ” I said, and my body broke out in gooseflesh from head to toe — for hadn’t I done the same? Hadn’t I done exactly the same, here on Duma Key?

I had more work to do. I thought it was going to be a long and exhausting evening, but I felt I was on the verge of great discoveries, and what I felt wasn’t fright — not then — but a kind of copper-mouthed excitement.

I bent down and picked up Elizabeth’s third drawing. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. Moving with greater and greater speed. Sometimes I stopped to draw, but mostly I didn’t have to. The pictures were forming in my head, now, and the reason I didn’t have to put them down on paper seemed clear to me: Elizabeth had already done that work, long ago, when she had been recovering from the accident that nearly killed her.

In the happy days before Noveen began to talk.

Iv

At one point during my interview with Mary Ire, she said discovering in my middle age that I could paint with the best of them must have been like having someone give me the keys to a souped-up muscle car — a Roadrunner or a GTO. I said yes, it was like that. At another point she said it must have been like having someone give me the keys to a fully furnished house. A mansion, really. I said yes, like that, too. And if she had gone on? Said it must have been like inheriting a million shares of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you bet. To soothe her. Because those questions were about her. I could see the longing look in her eyes when she asked them. They were the eyes of a kid who knows the closest she’s ever going to get to realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee performance. She was a critic, and lots of critics who aren’t called to do what they write about grow jealous and mean and small in their disappointment. Mary wasn’t like that. Mary still loved it all. She drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you discovered that, even though you were on the wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly gained the ability to fly past the face of the moon. So even though it wasn’t like having a fast car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished house, I told her it was. Because you can’t tell anyone what it’s like. You can only talk around it until everyone’s exhausted and it’s time to go to sleep.

But Elizabeth had known what it was like.

It was in her drawings, then in her paintings.

It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you. Even from that first line — that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky — she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

Perse hadn’t been in it. Not at first.

I was sure of that.

V

For the next four hours, I slipped in and out of Libbit’s world. It was a wonderful, frightening place to be. Sometimes I scribbled words — The gift is always hungry, start with what you know — but mostly it was pictures. Pictures were the real language we shared.

I understood her family’s quick arc from amazement to acceptance to boredom. It had happened partly because the girl was so prolific, maybe more because she was part of them, she was their little Libbit, and there’s always that feeling that no good can come out of Nazareth, isn’t there? But their boredom only made her hunger stronger. She looked for new ways to wow them, sought new ways of seeing.

And found them, God help her.

I drew birds flying upside-down, and animals walking on the swimming pool.

I drew a horse with a smile so big it ran off the sides of its face. I thought it was right around then that Perse had entered the picture. Only —

“Only Libbit didn’t know it was Perse, ” I said. “She thought—”

I thumbed back through her drawings, almost to the beginning. To the round black face with the smiling mouth. At first glance I had dismissed this one as Elizabeth’s portrait of Nan Melda, but I should have known better — it was a child’s face, not a woman’s. A doll’s face. Suddenly my hand was printing NOVEEN beside it in strokes so hard that Elizabeth’s old canary-yellow pencil snapped on the last stroke of the second N. I threw it on the floor and grabbed another.

It was Noveen that Perse had spoken through first, so as not to frighten her little genius. What could be less threatening than a little black girl-dolly who smiled and wore a red kerchief around her head, just like the beloved Nan Melda?

And was Elizabeth shocked or frightened when the doll began to speak on its own? I didn’t think so. She might have been fiercely talented in that one narrow way, but she was still only a child of three.

Noveen told her things to draw, and Elizabeth —

I grabbed my sketch-pad again. Drew a cake lying on the floor. Splattered on the floor. Little Libbit thought that prank was Noveen’s idea, but it had been Perse, testing Elizabeth’s power. Perse experimenting as I had experimented, trying to find out how powerful this new tool might be.

Next had come the Alice.

Because, her doll whispered, there was treasure and a storm would uncover it.

So not an Alice at all, not really. And not an Elizabeth, because she hadn’t been Elizabeth yet — not to her family, not to herself. The big blow of ’27 had been Hurricane Libbit.

Because Daddy would like finding a treasure. And because Daddy needed to think of something besides —

“She’s made her bed, ” I said in a harsh voice that didn’t sound like my own. “Let her sleep in it.”

— besides how mad he was at Adie for running off with Emery, that Celluloid Collar.

Yes. That was how it had been on the south end of Duma Key, back in ’27.

I drew John Eastlake — only it was just his fins showing against the sky, and the tip of his snorkel, and a shadow beneath. John Eastlake diving for treasure.

Diving for his youngest daughter’s new doll, although he probably didn’t believe it.

Beside one flipper I printed the words FAIR SALVAGE.

The images rose in my mind, clearer and clearer, as if they had been waiting all these years to be liberated, and I wondered briefly if every painting (and every implement used to make them), from those on the walls of caves in central Asia to the Mona Lisa, held such hidden memories of their making and makers, encoded in their strokes like DNA.

Swim n kick til I say stop.

I added Elizabeth to the picture of Diving Daddy, standing up to her chubby knees in the water, Noveen tucked under her arm. Libbit almost could have been the doll-girl in the sketch Ilse had demanded — the one I had titled The End of the Game.

And after he saw all those things, he hug me hug me hug me.

I made a hurried little sketch of John Eastlake doing just that, his facemask pushed up on top of his head. The picnic basket was nearby, on a blanket, and the speargun was resting on top of it.

He hug me hug me hug me.

Draw her, a voice whispered. Draw Elizabeth’s fair salvage. Draw Perse.

But I wouldn’t. I was afraid of what I might see. And what it might do to me.

And what about Daddy? What about John? How much had he known?

I flipped through her drawings to the picture of John Eastlake screaming, with blood running from his nose and one eye. He had known plenty. Probably too late, but he had known.

What exactly had happened to Tessie and Lo-Lo?

And to Perse, to shut her up for all those years?

What exactly was she? Not a doll, that much seemed sure.

I could have gone on — a picture of Tessie and Lo-Lo running down a path, some path, hand-in-hand, was already asking to be drawn — but I was beginning to come out of my half-trance and was scared almost to death. Besides, I thought I knew enough to be going on with; Wireman could help me figure out the rest, I was almost sure of it. I closed my sketch-pad. I put down that long-gone little girl’s brown pencil — now just a nubbin — and realized I was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. But that kind of hangover wasn’t new to me, and there was plenty to eat in the refrigerator.

Vi

I went downstairs slowly, my head spinning with images — an upside-down heron with blue gimlet eyes, the smiling horses, the boat-size swim-fins on Daddy’s feet — and I didn’t bother with the living room lights. There was no need to; by April I could have navigated the route from the foot of the stairs to the kitchen in pitch blackness. By then I had made that solitary house with its chin jutting over the edge of the water my own, and in spite of everything, I couldn’t imagine leaving it. Halfway across the room I stopped, looking out through the Florida room to the Gulf.

There, riding at anchor no more than a hundred yards from the beach, clear and unmistakable in the light of a quarter-moon and a million stars, was the Perse. Her sails had been furled, but nets of rope sagged from her ancient masts like spiderwebs. The shrouds, I thought. Those are its shrouds. She bobbed up and down like a long dead child’s rotten toy. The decks were empty, so far as I could see — of both life and souvenirs — but who knew what might be belowdecks?

I was going to faint. At the same instant I realized this, I realized why: I had stopped breathing. I told myself to inhale, but for one terrible second, nothing happened. My chest remained as flat as a page in a closed book. When it rose at last, I heard a whooping sound. That was me, struggling to go on with life in a conscious state. I blew out the air I had just taken in and inhaled more, a little less noisily. Black specks flocked in front of my eyes in the dimness, then faded. I expected the ship out there to do the same — surely it had to be a hallucination — but it remained, perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long and a little less than half that in the beam. Bobbing on the waves. Rocking from side to side just a little, too. Bowsprit wagging like a finger, seeming to say Ouuu, you nasty man, you’re in for it n —

I slapped myself across the face hard enough to bring water to my left eye and the ship was still right there. I realized that if it was there — truly there — then Jack would be able to see it from the boardwalk at El Palacio. There was a phone on the far side of the living room, but from where I was standing, the one on the kitchen counter was closer. And it had the advantage of being right under the light switches. I wanted lights, especially the ones in the kitchen, those good hard fluorescents. I backed out of the living room, not taking my eyes off the ship, and hit all three switches with the back of my hand. The lights came on, and I lost sight of the Perse — of everything beyond the Florida room — in their bright, no-nonsense glare. I reached for the phone, then stopped.

There was a man in my kitchen. He was standing by my refrigerator. He was wearing soaked rags that might once have been blue jeans and the kind of shirt that’s called a boat-neck. What appeared to be moss was growing on his throat, cheeks, forehead, and forearms. The right side of his skull was crushed in. Petals of bone protruded through the lank foliage of his dark hair. One of his eyes — the right — was gone. What remained was a spongy socket. The other was an alien, disheartening silver that had nothing to do with humanity. His feet were bare, swollen, purple, and burst through to the bone at the ankles.

It grinned at me, lips splitting as they drew back, revealing two lines of yellow teeth set into old black gums. It raised its right arm, and here I saw what must have been another relic of the Perse. It was a manacle. One old and rusty circlet was clamped around the thing’s wrist. The other one hung open like a loose jaw.

The other one was for me.

It emitted a loose hissing sound, perhaps all its decayed vocal cords could produce, and began to walk toward me under the bright no-nonsense fluorescents. It left footprints on the hardwood floor. It cast a shadow. I could hear a faint creaking and saw it was wearing a soaked leather belt — rotten, but for the time being, still holding.

A queer soft paralysis had come over me. I was conscious, but I couldn’t run even though I understood what that open manacle meant, and what this thing was: a one-man press gang. He would clamp me and take me aboard yonder frigate, or schooner, or barquentine, or whatever-the-hell-it-was. I would become part of the crew. And while there might not be cabin boys on the Perse, I thought there were at least two cabin girls, one named Tessie and one named Lo-Lo.

You have to run. At least clock it one with the phone, for Christ’s sake!

But I couldn’t. I was like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The best I could do was to take one numb step backward into the living room… then another… then a third. Now I was in the shadows again. It stood in the kitchen doorway with the white light of the fluorescents striking across its damp and rotted face and throwing its shadow across the living room carpet. Still grinning. I considered closing my eyes and trying to wish it away, but that wasn’t going to work; I could smell it, like a Dumpster behind a restaurant that specializes in fish dinners. And —

“Time to go, Edgar.”

— it could talk, after all. The words were slushy but understandable.

It took a step into the living room. I took another of my numb steps backward, knowing in my heart it would do no good, that compensation wasn’t enough, that when it got tired of playing it would simply dart forward and clamp that iron manacle on my wrist and drag me, screaming, down to the water, down to the caldo largo, and the last sound I’d hear on the living side would be the grating conversation of the shells under the house. Then the water would fill my ears.

I took another step back just the same, not sure I was even moving toward the door, only hoping, then another… and a hand fell on my shoulder.

I shrieked.

Vii

“What the fuck is that thing? ” Wireman whispered in my ear.

“I don’t know, ” I said, and I was sobbing. Sobbing with fear. “Yes I do. I do know. Look out at the Gulf, Wireman.”

“I can’t. I don’t dare take my eyes off it.”

But the thing in the doorway had seen Wireman now — Wireman who’d come in through the open door just as it had itself, Wireman who had arrived like the cavalry in a John Wayne Western — and had stopped three steps inside the living room, its head slightly lowered, the manacle swinging back and forth from its outstretched arm.

“Christ, ” Wireman said. “That ship! The one in the paintings! ”

“Go on, ” the thing said. “We have no business with you. Go on, and you may live.”

“It’s lying, ” I said.

“Tell me something I don’t know, ” Wireman said, then raised his voice. He was standing just behind me, and he almost blew out my eardrum. “ Leave! You’re trespassing! ”

The drowned young man made no reply, but it was every bit as fast as I had feared. At one moment it was standing three steps inside the living room. At the next it was right in front of me, and I had only the vaguest, flickering impression of it crossing the distance between. Its smell — rot and seaweed and dead fish turning to soup in the sun — bloomed and became overwhelming. I felt its hands, freezing cold, close over my forearm, and cried out in shock and horror. It wasn’t the cold, it was how soft they were. How flabby. That one silver eye peered at me, seeming to drill into my brain, and for a moment there was a sensation of being filled with pure darkness. Then the manacle clamped on my wrist with a flat hard clacking sound.

“ Wireman! ” I screamed, but Wireman was gone. He was running away from me, across the room, as fast as he could.

The drowned thing and I were chained together. It dragged me toward the door.

Viii

Wireman was back just before the dead man could pull me over the threshold. He had something in his hand that looked like a blunt dagger. For a moment I thought it must be one of the silver harpoons, but that was only a powerful bit of wishful thinking; the silver harpoons were upstairs with the red picnic basket. “Hey! ” he said. “Hey, you! Yeah, I’m talking to you! Cojudo de puta madre! ”

Its head snapped around as fast as the head of a snake about to strike. Wireman was almost as fast. Holding the blunt object in both hands, he drove it into the thing’s face, striking home just above the right eyesocket. The thing shrieked, a sound that went through my head like shards of glass. I saw Wireman wince and stagger back; saw him struggle to hold onto his weapon and drop it to the sandy floor of the entryway. It didn’t matter. The man-thing which had seemed so solid spun into insubstantiality, clothes and all. I felt the manacle around my wrist also lose its solidity. For a moment I could still see it and then it was only water, dripping onto my sneakers and the carpet. There was a larger wet patch where the demon sailor had been only a moment before.

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 family 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.

“Jesus, ” Jack said, “if I’m as cynical as you two when I get old, I think I’ll turn in my badge.”

“That’s Jesus- Krispies to you, son, ” Wireman said, and actually laughed. It was a stunned sound, but there. And that was good.

“Everyone’s interest began to wane, ” I said. “And that was probably true for Elizabeth, as well. I mean, who gets bored quicker than a three-year-old? ”

“Only puppies and parakeets, ” Wireman said.

“A creative burn at three, ” Jack said, bemused. “Fucking awesome concept.”

“So she started to… to…” I stopped, for a moment unable to go on.

“Edgar? ” Wireman asked quietly. “All right? ”

I wasn’t, but I had to be. If I wasn’t, Tom would only be the beginning. “It’s just that he looked good at the gallery. Good, you know? Like he’d put it all together again. If not for her meddling—”

“I know, ” Wireman said. “Drink some of your water, muchacho. ”

I drank some of my water, and forced myself back to the business at hand. “She started to experiment. She went from pencils to fingerpaints to watercolors in — I think — a period of weeks. Plus some of the pictures in the picnic basket were done in fountain-pen, and I’m pretty sure some were done with house-paint, which I’d been meaning to try myself. It has a look when it dries—”

“Save it for your art-class, muchacho, ” Wireman said.

“Yeah. Yeah.” I drank some more water. I was starting to get back on track. “She started to experiment with different media, too. If that’s the right word; I think it is. Chalk on brick. Sand-drawings on the beach. One day she painted Tessie’s face on the kitchen counter in melted ice cream.”

Jack was leaning forward, hands clasped between his muscular thighs, frowning. “Edgar… this isn’t just blue-sky? You saw this? ”

“In a way. Sometimes it was actual seeing. Sometimes it was more like a… a wave that came out of her pictures, and from using her pencils.”

“But you know it’s true.”

“I know.”

“She didn’t care if the pictures lasted or not? ” Wireman asked.

“No. The doing mattered more. She experimented with media, and then she started to experiment with reality. To change it. And that’s when Perse heard her, I think, when she started messing with reality. Heard her and woke up. Woke up and started calling.”

“Perse was with the rest of that junk Eastlake found, wasn’t she? ” Wireman asked.

“Elizabeth thought it was a doll. The best doll ever. But they couldn’t be together until she was strong enough.”

“Which she are you talking about? ” Jack asked. “Perse or the little girl? ”

“Probably both. Elizabeth was just a kid. And Perse… Perse had been asleep for a long time. Sleeping under the sand, full fathom five.”

“Very poetic, ” Jack said, “but I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do I, ” I said. “Because her I don’t see. If Elizabeth drew pictures of Perse, she destroyed them. I find it suggestive that she turned to collecting china figures in her old age, but maybe that’s just a coincidence. What I know is that Perse established a line of communication with the child, first through her drawings, then through her up-to-then favorite doll, Noveen. And Perse instituted a kind of… well, exercise program. I don’t know what else you’d call it. She persuaded Elizabeth to draw things, and those things would happen in the real world.”

“She’s been playing the same game with you, then, ” Jack said. “Candy Brown.”

“And my eye, ” Wireman said. “Don’t forget fixing my eye.”

“I’d like to think that was all me, ” I said… but had it been? “There have been other things, though. Small things, mostly… using some of my pictures as a crystal ball…” I trailed off. I didn’t really want to go there, because that road led back to Tom. Tom who should have been fixed.

“Tell us the rest of what you found out from her pictures, ” Wireman said.

“All right. Start with that out-of-season hurricane. Elizabeth summoned it up, probably with help from Perse.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me, ” Jack said.

“Perse told Elizabeth where the debris was, and Elizabeth told her father. Among the litter was a… let’s say there was a china figure, maybe a foot high, of a beautiful woman.” Yes, I could see that. Not the details, but the figure. And the empty, pupil-less pearls that were her eyes. “It was Elizabeth’s prize, her fair salvage, and once it was out of the water, it really went to work.”

Jack spoke very softly. “Where would a thing like that have come from to begin with, Edgar? ”

A phrase rose to my lips, from where I don’t know, only that it wasn’t my own: There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to hear it, not even in that well-lighted room, so I only shook my head.

“I don’t know. And I don’t know what country’s flag that ship might have been flying when it blew in here, maybe scraping its hull open on the top of Kitt Reef and spilling some of its cargo. I don’t know much of anything for sure… but I think that Perse has a ship of her own, and once she was free of the water and completely welded to Elizabeth Eastlake’s powerful child’s mind, she was able to call it.”

“A ship of the dead, ” Wireman said. His face was childlike with fear and wonder. Outside, a wind shook the massed foliage in the courtyard; the rhododendrons nodded their heads and we could hear the steady, sleepy sound of the waves pounding the shore. I had loved that sound ever since coming to Duma Key, and I still loved it, but now it frightened me, too. “A ship called… what? Persephone? ”

“If you like, ” I said. “It’s certainly crossed my mind that Perse was Elizabeth’s way of trying to say that. It doesn’t matter; we’re not talking Greek mythology here. We’re talking about something far older and more monstrous. Hungry, too. That much it does have in common with vampires. Only hungry for souls, not blood. At least that’s what I think. Elizabeth had her new ‘doll’ for no more than a month, and God knows what life was like at the first Heron’s Roost during that time, but it couldn’t have been good.”

“Did Eastlake have the silver harpoons made then? ” Wireman asked.

“I can’t tell you. There’s so much I don’t know, because what I do know comes from Elizabeth, and she was little more than an infant. I have no sense of what happened in her other life, because by then she’d quit drawing. And if she remembered the time when she did—”

“She was doing her best to forget it, ” Jack finished.

Wireman looked glum. “By the end, she was well on her way to forgetting everything.”

I said, “Remember the pictures where everybody seems to be wearing these big, loopy drug-addict grins? That was Elizabeth, trying to remake the world she remembered. The pre-Perse world. A happier one. In the days before her twin sisters drowned, she was one scared kid, but she was afraid to say anything, because she felt that the things going wrong were all her fault.”

“What things? ” It was Jack.

“I don’t know exactly, but there’s one picture of an old-timey Negro lawn jockey standing on his head, and I think that stands for everything. I think that for Elizabeth, in those last days, everything seemed to be standing on its head.” There was more than that to the lawn jockey — I was almost positive — but I didn’t know what, and this probably wasn’t the time to chase after it, anyway. “I think in the days before and just after Tessie and Laura drowned, the family might almost have been prisoners at Heron’s Roost.”

“And only Elizabeth would have known why? ” Wireman asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Nan Melda might have known some of it. Probably knew some of it.”

“Who was at that house during the period after the treasure-find and before the drownings? ” Jack asked.

I thought about it. “I suppose Maria and Hannah might have come home from school for a weekend or two, and Eastlake could have been away on business for part of March and April. The ones who were surely there that whole time were Elizabeth, Tessie, Laura, and Nan Melda. And Elizabeth tried to draw her new ‘friend’ out of existence.” I licked my lips. They were very dry. “She did it with her colored pencils, the ones in the basket. This was just before Tessie and Laura drowned. Maybe the night before. Because their drownings were punishment, right? The way Tom killing Pam was supposed to be my punishment, for prying. I mean, you see that? ”

“Christ almighty, ” Jack whispered. Wireman was very pale.

“Until then, I don’t think Elizabeth understood.” I thought about this, then shrugged. “Hell, I can’t remember how much I understood when I was four. But until then probably the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life — other than falling out of that pony-trap, and I’ll bet she didn’t even remember that — was getting turned over her Daddy’s knee and paddled or having her hand slapped for trying to take one of Nan Melda’s jam tarts before they were cooled. What did she know about the nature of evil? All she knew was that Perse was naughty, Perse was a bad doll instead of a good doll, she was out of control and getting out-of-controller all the time, she had to be sent away. So Libbit sat down with her pencils and some drawing paper and told herself, ‘I can do this. If I go slow and do my best work, I can do this.’” I stopped and passed my hand over my eyes. “I think that’s right, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. It could be mixed up with what I remember about myself. My mind playing more tricks. More stupid fucking pet tricks.”

“Take it easy, muchacho, ” Wireman said. “Go slow. She tried to draw Perse out of existence. How does one do a thing like that? ”

“Draw and then erase.”

“Perse didn’t let her? ”

“Perse didn’t know, I’m almost sure of it. Because Elizabeth was able to hide what she meant to do. If you ask me how, I can’t tell you. If you ask me if it was her own idea — something she thought up by herself at the age of four—”

“Not beyond belief, ” Wireman said. “In a way, it’s four-year-old thinking.”

“I don’t understand how she could have kept it from this Perse, ” Jack said. “I mean… a little kid? ”

“I don’t know, either, ” I said.

“In any case, it didn’t work, ” Wireman said.

“No. It didn’t. I think she made the drawing, and I’m sure she did it in pencil, and I think when she was done, she erased the whole thing. It probably would have killed a human being the way I killed Candy Brown, but Perse wasn’t human. All it did was make her angry. She paid Elizabeth back by taking the twins, whom she idolized. Tessie and Laura didn’t go down that path to the Shade Beach to look for more treasure. They were driven. They ended up in the water, and they were lost.”

“Only not for good, ” Wireman said, and I knew he was thinking of certain small footprints. Not to mention the thing that had been in my kitchen.

“No, ” I agreed. “Not for good.”

The wind blew again, this time hard enough to send something thudding against the Gulf side of the house. We all jumped.

“How did it get this Emery Paulson? ” Jack asked.

“I don’t know, ” I said.

“And Adriana, ” Wireman said. “Did Perse get her, too? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said. “Maybe.” Reluctantly I added: “Probably.”

“We haven’t seen Adriana, ” Wireman said. “There’s that.”

“Not yet, ” I said.

“But the little girls drowned, ” Jack said. Like he was trying to get it straight. “This Perse-thing lured them into the water. Or something.”

“Yes, ” I said. “Or something.”

“But then there was a search. Outsiders.”

“There had to be, Jack, ” Wireman said. “People knew they were gone. Shannington, for one.”

“I know that, ” Jack said. “It’s what I’m saying. So Elizabeth and her Dad and the housekeeper just dummied up? ”

“What other choice? ” I asked. “Was John Eastlake going to tell forty or fifty volunteers ‘The boogeylady took my daughters, look for the boogeylady? ’ He might not even have known. Although he must have found out at some point.” I was thinking of the picture of him screaming. Screaming and bleeding.

“ What other choice covers it for me, ” Wireman said. “I want to know what happened after the search was over. Just before she died, Miss Eastlake said something about drowning her back to sleep. Did she mean Perse? And if she did, how does a thing like that work? ”

I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

“ Why don’t you know? ”

“Because the rest of the answers are on the south end of the island, ” I said. “At whatever’s left of the original Heron’s Roost. And I think that’s where Perse is, too.”

“All right, then, ” Wireman said. “Unless we’re prepared to vacate Duma posthaste, it seems to me that we ought to go there.”

“Based on what happened to Tom, we don’t even have that choice, ” I said. “I sold a lot of paintings, and the guys at the Scoto won’t hold them forever.”

“Buy them back, ” Jack suggested. Not that I hadn’t already thought of that myself.

Wireman shook his head. “Plenty of the owners won’t want to sell, not even at twice the price. And a story like this wouldn’t convince them.”

To this, no one said anything.

“But she’s not quite as strong in daylight, ” I said. “I’d suggest nine o’clock.”

“Fine by me, ” Jack said, and stood up. “I’ll be here at quarter of. Right now I’m going back across the bridge to Sarasota.” The bridge. That started an idea knocking around in my head.

“You’re welcome to stay here, ” Wireman said.

“After this conversation? ” Jack raised his eyebrows. “With all due respect, dude, no way. But I’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Long pants and boots are the order of the day, ” Wireman said. “It’ll be overgrown down there, and there could be snakes.” He scrubbed a hand up the side of his face. “Looks like I might be missing tomorrow’s viewing at Abbot-Wexler. Miss Eastlake’s relatives will have to bare their teeth at each other. What a pity… hey, Jack.”

Jack had started for the door. Now he turned back.

“You don’t happen to have any of Edgar’s art, do you? ”

“Mmm… well…”

“Fess up. Confession’s good for the soul, compañ ero. ”

“One sketch, ” Jack said. He shuffled his feet, and I thought he was blushing. “Pen and ink. On the back of an envelope. A palm tree. I… ah… I fished it out of the trash basket one day. Sorry, Edgar. My bad.”

“S’okay, but burn it, ” I said. “Maybe I’ll be able to give you another one when all this is over.” If it ever is, I thought but didn’t add.

Jack nodded. “Okay. You want a ride back to Big Pink? ”

“I’ll stay here with Wireman, ” I said, “but I do want to go back to Big Pink first.”

“Don’t tell me, ” Jack said. “Jammies and a toothbrush.”

“No, ” I said. “Picnic basket and those silver har—”

The telephone rang, and we all looked at each other. I think I knew right away that it was bad news; I felt that sinking as my stomach turned into an elevator. It rang again. I looked at Wireman, but Wireman just looked at me. He knew, too. I picked it up.

“It’s me.” Pam, heavy-voiced. “Brace yourself, Edgar.”

When someone says something like that, you always try to fasten some kind of mental safety belt. But it rarely works. Most people don’t have one.

“Spill it.”

“I got Bozie at home and told him what you said. He started asking questions, which was no surprise, but I told him I was in a hurry and didn’t have any answers anyway, so — short form — he agreed to do as you asked. ‘For old times’ sake, ’ he said.”

That sinking sensation was getting worse.

“After that I tried Ilse. I wasn’t sure I’d reach her, but she just got in. She sounded tired, but she’s back, and she’s okay. I’ll check on Linnie tomorrow, when—”

“ Pam —”

“I’m getting to it. After Illy I called Kamen. Someone answered on the second or third ring, and I started my spiel. I thought I was talking to him.” She paused. “It was his brother. He said Kamen stopped in Starbucks for a latte on his way back from the airport. Had a heart attack while he was waiting in line. The EMTs transported him to the hospital, but it was only a formality. The brother said Kamen was DRT — dead right there. He asked me why I was calling, and I said it didn’t matter now. Was that all right? ”

“Yes.” I didn’t think Kamen’s sketch would have any effect on the brother, or anyone else; I thought its work was done. “Thank you.”

“If it’s any consolation, it could have been a coincidence — he was a hell of a nice guy, but he was also packing a lot of extra pounds. Anyone who looked at him could see that.”

“You could be right.” Although I knew she wasn’t. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“All right.” She hesitated. “Take care of yourself, Eddie.”

“You too. Lock your doors tonight, and set the alarm.”

“I always do.”

She broke the connection. On the other side of the house, the surf was disputing with the night. My right arm was itching. I thought: If I could get at you, I believe I’d cut you off all over again. Partly to stop the damage you can do, but mostly just to shut you up.

But of course it wasn’t my gone arm, or the hand which had once lived at the end of it, that was the problem; the problem was the woman-thing in the red robe, using me like some kind of fucked-up Ouija board.

“What? ” Wireman asked. “Don’t keep us in suspense, muchacho, what? ”

“Kamen, ” I said. “Heart attack. Dead.”

I thought of all the pictures stored at the Scoto, pictures that were sold. They’d be safe for a little while where they were, but in the end, money talks and bullshit walks. That wasn’t even a man-law, it was the motherfucking American way.

“Come on, Edgar, ” Jack said. “I’ll run you to your place, then drive you back here.”

Xiv

I won’t say our trip upstairs to Little Pink was exactly serene (I had the silver candlestick, and carried it at port arms all the time we were inside), but it was uneventful. The only spirits in the place were the agitated voices of the shells. I put the drawings back in the red picnic basket. Jack snagged the handles and carried it downstairs. I had his back the whole way, and locked Big Pink’s door behind us. Much good that would do.

While we were riding back to El Palacio, a thought occurred to me… or recurred. I’d left my digital Nikon behind and didn’t want to go back for it, but—

“Jack, do you have a Polaroid camera? ”

“Sure, ” he said. “A One-Shot. It’s what my Dad calls ‘old but serviceable.’ Why? ”

“When you come tomor