Duma Key - Stephen King

I didn't go to the celebratory dinner afterwards, though. I made my excuses, then sent Pam and the girls on with Kamen, Kathi, and some others from Minneapolis. Watching them pull away, I realized I hadn't made arrangements for a ride to the hospital. While I was standing there in front of the gallery, wondering if Alice Aucoin had left yet, a beat-to-shit old Mercedes pulled up beside me, and the passenger window slid down.

"Get in," Mary Ire said. "If you're going to Sarasota Memorial, I'll drop you off." She saw me hesitate and smiled crookedly. "Mary's had very little to drink tonight, I assure you, and in any case, the Sarasota traffic goes from clogged to almost zero after ten PM - the old folks take their Scotch and Prozac and then curl up to watch Bill O'Reilly on TiVo."

I got in. The door clunked when it shut, and for one alarming moment I thought my ass was going to keep descending until it was actually on Palm Avenue. Finally my downward motion stopped. "Listen, Edgar," she said, then hesitated. "Can I still call you Edgar?"

"Of course."

She nodded. "Lovely. I couldn't remember with perfect clarity what sort of terms we parted on. Sometimes when I drink too much..." She shrugged her bony shoulders.

"We're fine," I said.

"Good. As for Elizabeth... not so good. Is it?"

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. The streets were almost deserted, as promised. The sidewalks were dead empty.

"She and Jake Rosenblatt were a thing for awhile. It was pretty serious."

"What happened?"

Mary shrugged. "Can't say for sure. If you forced me to guess, I'd say that in the end she was just too used to being her own mistress to be anyone else's. Other than on a part-time basis, that is. But Jake never got over her."

I remembered him saying Fuck the rules, Miss Eastlake! and wondered what he had called her in bed. Surely not Miss Eastlake. It was a sad and useless bit of speculation.

"Maybe this is for the best," Mary said. "She was guttering. If you'd known her in her prime, Edgar, you'd know she wasn't the sort of woman who'd want to go out that way."

"I wish I had known her in her prime."

"Can I do anything for your family?"

"No," I said. "They're having dinner with Dario and Jimmy and the whole state of Minnesota. I'll join them later if I can - maybe for dessert - and I'm booked into the Ritz, where they're all staying. If nothing else, I'll see them in the morning."

"That's nice. They seemed nice. And understanding."

Pam actually seemed more understanding now than before the divorce. Of course now I was down here painting and not up there yelling at her. Or trying to staff her with a butter-fife.

"I'm going to praise your show to the skies, Edgar. I doubt if that means much to you tonight, but perhaps it will later on. The paintings are just extraordinary."

"Thank you."

Ahead, the lights of the hospital were twinkling in the dark. There was a Waffle House right next door. It was probably good business for the cardiac unit.

"Will you give Libby my love, if she's in any condition to take note of such things?"

"Sure."

"And I have something for you. It's in the glove compartment. Manila envelope. I was going to use it to bait the hook for a follow-up interview, but fuck it."

I had some problems with the old car's glove compartment button, but finally the little door fell open like a corpse's mouth. There was a lot more than a manila envelope in there - a geologist could have taken core-samples probably going back to 1965 - but the envelope was in front, and it had my name printed on it.

As she pulled up in front of the hospital, in a spot marked 5 MINUTES PICK-UP AND DROP-OFF, Mary said: "Prepare to be amazed. I was. An old copy-editor friend of mine chased that down for me - she's older than Libby, but still sharp."

I bent back the clasps and slid out two Xeroxed sheets of an ancient newspaper story. "That," Mary said, "is from the Port Charlotte Weekly Echo. June of 1925. It's got to be the story my friend Aggie saw, and the reason I could never find it is because I never looked as far south as Port Charlotte. Also, the Weekly Echo gave up the ghost in 1931."

The streetlight beneath which she'd parked wasn't good enough for the fine print, but I could read the headline and see the picture. I looked for a long time.

"It means something to you, doesn't it?" she asked.

"Yes. I just don't know what."

"If you figure it out, will you tell me?"

"All right," I said. "You might even believe it. But Mary... this is one story you'll never print. Thanks for the ride. And thanks for coming to my show."

"Both my pleasure. Remember to give Libby my love."

"I will."

But I never did. I had seen Elizabeth Eastlake for the last time.

ix

The ICU nurse on duty told me that Elizabeth was in surgery. When I asked for what, she told me she wasn't sure. I looked around the waiting room.

"If you're looking for Mr. Wireman, I believe he went to the cafeteria for coffee," the nurse said. "That's on the fourth floor."

"Thanks." I started away, then turned back. "Is Dr. Hadlock part of the surgical team?"

"I don't think so," she said, "but he's observing."

I thanked her again and went in search of Wireman. I found him in a far corner of the caff, sitting in front of a paper cup about the size of a World War II mortar shell. Except for a scattering of nurses and orderlies and one tense-looking family group in another corner of the room, we had the place to ourselves. Most of the chairs were upended on the tables, and a tired-looking lady in red rayon was working out with a mop. An iPod hung in a sling between her breasts.

"Hola, mi vato," Wireman said, and gave me a wan smile. His hair, neatly combed back when he made his entrance with Elizabeth and Jack, had fallen down around his ears, and there were dark circles around his eyes. "Why don't you grab yourself a cup of coffee? It tastes like factory-made shit, but it do prop up a person's eyelids."

"No, thanks. Just let me borrow a sip of yours." I had three aspirin in my pants pocket. I fished them out and swallowed them with some of Wireman's coffee.

He wrinkled his nose. "In with all your germy change. That's nasty."

"I have a strong immune system. How is she?"

"Not good." He looked at me bleakly.

"Did she come around at all in the ambulance? Say anything else?"

"She did."

"What?"

From the pocket of his linen shirt, Wireman took an invitation to my show, with THE VIEW FROM DUMA printed on one side. On the other he'd scrawled three notes. They jagged up and down - from the motion of the ambulance, I assumed - but I could read them:

"The table is leaking."

"You will want to but you mustn't."

"Drown her back to sleep."

They were all spooky, but that last one made the flesh on my arms prickle.

"Nothing else?" I asked, handing the invitation back.

"She said my name a couple of times. She knew me. And she said yours, Edgar."

"Have a look at this," I said, and slid the manila envelope across the table.

He asked where I'd gotten it and I told him. He said it all seemed a little convenient, and I shrugged. I was remembering something Elizabeth had said to me - The water runs faster now. Soon come the rapids. Well, the rapids were here. I had a feeling this was only the start of the white water.

My hip was starting to feel a little better, its late-night sobbing down to mere sniffles. According to popular wisdom, a dog is a man's best friend, but I would vote for aspirin. I pulled my chair around the table and sat next to Wireman, where I could read the headline: DUMA KEY TOT BLOSSOMS FOLLOWING SPILL - IS SHE A CHILD PRODIGY? Beneath was a photograph. In it was a man I knew well in a bathing suit I knew well: John Eastlake in his slimmer, trimmer incarnation. He was smiling, and holding up a smiling little girl. It was Elizabeth, looking the same age as in the family portrait of Daddy and His Girls, only now she was holding out a drawing to the camera in both hands and wearing a gauze bandage wrapped around her head. There was another, much older girl in the picture - big sister Adriana, and yes, she could have been a carrot-top - but to begin with, Wireman and I paid little attention to her. Or to John Eastlake. Or even to the toddler with the bandage around her head.

"Holy wow," Wireman said.

The picture was of a horse looking over a fence rail. It wore an unlikely (and un-equine) smile. In the foreground, back-to, was a little girl with lots of golden ringlets, holding out a carrot the size of a shotgun for the smiling horse to eat. To either side, bracketing the picture almost like theater curtains, were palm trees. Above were puffy white clouds and a great big sun, shooting off happy-rays of light.

It was a child's picture, but the talent that had created it was beyond doubt. The horse had a joie de vivre that made the smile the punchline of a cheerful joke. You could put a dozen art students in a room, tell them to execute a happy horse, and I was willing to bet not one of them would be able to match the success of that picture. Even the oversized carrot felt not like a mistake but part of the giggle, an intensifier, an artistic steroid.

"It's not a joke," I muttered, bending closer... only bending closer did no good. I was seeing this picture through four aggravating levels of obfuscation: the photograph, the newspaper reproduction of the photograph, the Xerox of the newspaper reproduction of the photograph... and time itself. Over eighty years of it, if I had the math right.

"What's not a joke?" Wireman asked.

"The way the size of the horse is exaggerated. And the carrot. Even the sunrays. It's a child's cry of glee, Wireman!"

"A hoax is what it is. Got to be. She would have been two! A child of two can't even make stick-figures and call em mommy and daddy, can she?"

"Was what happened to Candy Brown a hoax? Or what about the bullet that used to be in your brain? The one that's now gone?"

He was silent.

I tapped CHILD PRODIGY. "Look, they even had the right fancy term for it. Do you suppose if she'd been poor and black, they would have called her PICKANINNY FREAK and stuck her in a sideshow somewhere? Because I sort of do."

"If she'd been poor and black, she never would have made the paper at all. Or fallen out of a pony-trap to begin with."

"Is that what hap-" I stopped, my eye caught by the blurry photograph again. Now it was big sis I was looking at. Adriana.

"What?" Wireman asked, and his tone was What now?

"Her bathing suit. Look familiar to you?"

"I can't see very much, just the top. Elizabeth's holding her picture out in front of the rest."

"What about the part you can see?"

He looked for a long time. "Wish I had a magnifying glass."

"That would probably make it worse instead of better."

"All right, muchacho, it does look vaguely familiar... but maybe that's just an idea you put in my head."

"In all the Girl and Ship paintings, there was only one Rowboat Girl I was never sure of: the one in No. 6. The one with the orangey hair, the one in the blue singlet with the yellow stripe around the neck." I tapped Adriana's blurred image in the photocopy Mary Ire had given me. "This is the girl. This is the swimming suit. I'm sure of it. So was Elizabeth."

"What are we saying here?" Wireman asked. He was skimming the print, rubbing at his temples as he did so. I asked if his eye was bothering him.

"No. This is just so... so fucking..." He looked up at me, eyes big, still rubbing his temples. "She fell out of the goddam pony-trap and hit her head on a rock, or so it says here. Woke up in the doctor's infirmary just as they were getting ready to transport her to the hospital in St. Pete. Seizures thereafter. It says, 'The seizures continue for Baby Elizabeth, although they are moderating and seem to do her no lasting harm.' And she started painting pictures!"

I said, "The accident must have happened right after the big group portrait was taken, because she looks exactly the same, and they change fast at that age."

Wireman seemed not to notice. "We're all in the same rowboat," he said.

I started to ask him what he meant, then realized I didn't have to. " S , se or, " I said.

"She fell on her head. I shot myself in the head. You got your head crushed by a payloader."

"Crane."

He waved his hand as if to indicate this made no difference. Then he used the hand to grip my surviving wrist. His fingers were cold. "I have questions, muchacho. How come she stopped painting? And how come I never started?"

"I can't say for certain why she stopped. Maybe she forgot - blocked it out - or maybe she deliberately lied and denied. As for you, your talent's empathy. And on Duma Key, empathy got raised to telepathy."

"That's bullshi..." He trailed off.

I waited.

"No," he said. "No. It's not. But it's also completely gone. Want to know something, amigo?"

"Sure."

He cocked a thumb at the tense family group across the room from us. They had gone back to their discussion. Pop was now shaking his finger at Mom. Or maybe it was Sis. "A couple of months ago, I could have told you what that hoopdedoo was about. Now all I could do is make an educated guess."

"And probably come out in much the same place," I said. "Would you trade one for the other in any case? Your eyesight for the occasional thoughtwave?"

"God, no!" he said, then looked around the caff with an ironic, despairing, head-cocked smile. "I can't believe we're having this discussion, you know. I keep thinking I'll wake up and it'll all be as you were, Private Wireman, assume the position."

I looked him in the eye. "Ain't gonna happen."

x

According to the Weekly Echo, Baby Elizabeth (as she was referred to almost throughout) began her artistic endeavors on the very first day of her at-home convalescence. She quickly went on, "gaining skill and prowess with each passing hour, it seemed to her amazed father." She started with colored pencils ("Sound familiar?" Wireman asked), before progressing to a box of watercolors the bemused John Eastlake brought home from Venice.

In the three months following her accident, much of it spent in bed, she had done literally hundreds of watercolors, turning them out at a rate John Eastlake and the other girls found a little frightening. (If "Nan Melda" had an opinion, it wasn't offered in print.) Eastlake tried to slow her down - on doctor's orders - but this was counterproductive. It caused fretfulness, crying fits, insomnia, bouts of fever. Baby Elizabeth said when she couldn't draw or paint, "her head hurted." Her father said that when she did paint, "She ate like one of the horses she liked to draw." The article's author, one M. Rickert, seemed to find this endearing. Recalling my own eating binges, I found it all too familiar.

I was going over the muddy print for the third time, with Wireman where my right arm would have been, if I'd had a right arm, when the door opened and Gene Hadlock came in. He was still wearing the black tie and bright pink shirt he'd had on at the show, although the tie had been pulled down and the collar was loosened. He was still wearing green scrub pants and green bootees over his shoes. His head was down. When he looked up I saw a face that was as long and sad as an old bloodhound's.

"Eleven- nineteen," he said. "There was never really a chance."