Duma Key - Stephen King

That basket.

Elizabeth's damned picnic basket.

It was red.

vii

Wireman's hope that Elizabeth was coming around began to seem unjustified. She remained a muttering lump in her wheelchair, every now and then stirring enough to cry out for a cigarette in the cracked voice of an aging parrot. He hired Annmarie Whistler away from Bay Area Private Nursing to come in and help him four days a week. The extra help might have eased Wireman's workload, but it did little to comfort him; he was heartsore.

But that was something I only glimpsed from the corner of my eye as April rolled in, sunny and hot. Because, speaking of hot... there I was.

Once Mary Ire's interview was published, I became a local celebrity. Why not? Artist was good, especially in the Sarasota area. Artist Who Used to Build Banks and Then Turned His Back on Mammon was better. One-Armed Artist of Blazing Talent was the absolute Golden Motherfucker. Dario and Jimmy scheduled a number of follow-up interviews, including one with Channel 6. I emerged from their Sarasota studio with a blinding headache and a complimentary CHANNEL 6 SUNCOAST WEATHER-WATCHER bumper sticker, which I ended up plastering on one of the MEAN DOGS sawhorses. Don't ask me why.

I also took over the Florida end of the travel-and-hospitality arrangements. Wireman was by then too busy trying to get Elizabeth to ingest anything but cigarette smoke. I found myself consulting with Pam every two or three days about the guest-list from Minnesota and travel arrangements from other parts of the country. Ilse called twice. I thought she was making an effort to sound cheerful, but I could have been wrong. My attempts to find out how her love-life was progressing were kindly but firmly blocked. Melinda called - to ask for my hat-size, of all things. When I asked why, she wouldn't tell. Fifteen minutes after she hung up, I realized: she and her French ami really were buying me a fucking beret. I burst out laughing.

An AP reporter from Tampa came to Sarasota - he wanted to come to Duma, but I didn't like the idea of a reporter tramping around in Big Pink, listening to what I now thought of as my shells. He interviewed me at the Scoto instead, while a photographer took pictures of three carefully selected paintings: Roses Grow from Shells, Sunset with Sophora, and Duma Road. I was wearing a Casey Key Fish House tee-shirt, and a photo of me - baseball cap on backwards and one short sleeve empty except for a nub of stump - ran nationwide. After that, my telephone rang off the hook. Angel Slobotnik called and talked for twenty minutes. At one point, he said he always knew I had it in me. "What?" I asked. His reply was "Bullshit, boss," and we laughed like maniacs. Kathi Green called; I heard all about her new boyfriend (not so good) and her new self-help program (wonderful). I told her about how Kamen had shown up at the lecture and saved my ass. By the end of that call she was crying and saying she'd never had such a gutty, come-from-behind patient. Then she said when she saw me she was going to tell me to drop and give her fifty sit-ups. That sounded like the old Kathi. To top it all off, Todd Jamieson, the doctor who had probably saved me from a decade or two as a human rutabaga, sent me a bottle of champagne with a card reading, Cannot wait to see your work.

If Wireman had bet me on whether or not I'd get bored and pick up a brush again before the show, he would have lost. When I wasn't getting ready for my big moment, I was walking, reading, or sleeping. I mentioned this to him on one of the rare afternoons when we were together at the end of El Palacio 's boardwalk, drinking green tea under the striped umbrella. This was less than a week before the show.

"I'm glad," he said simply. "You needed to rest."

"What about you, Wireman? How are you doing?"

"Not great, but I will survive - Gloria Gaynor, 1978. It's sadness, mostly." He sighed. "I'm going to lose her. I kidded myself that maybe she was coming back, but... I'm going to lose her. It's not like Julia and Esmeralda, thank God, but it still weighs on me."

"I'm sorry." I laid my hand over his. "For her and for you."

"Thanks." He looked out at the waves. "Sometimes I think she won't die at all."

"No?"

"No. I think the Walrus and the Carpenter will come for her, instead. That they'll just lead her away like they did those trusting Oysters. Lead her away down the beach. Do you remember what the Walrus says?"

I shook my head.

"'It seems a shame to play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick.'" He swiped an arm across his face. "Look at me, muchacho, crying just like the Walrus. Ain't I stupid."

"No," I said.

"I hate to face the idea that this time she's gone for good, that the best part of her went off down the beach with the Walrus and the Carpenter and there's nothing left but a fat old piece of suet that hasn't quite forgotten how to breathe yet."

I said nothing. He wiped his eyes again with his forearm and drew in a long, watery breath. Then he said, "I looked into the story of John Eastlake, and how his daughters were drowned, and what happened after - do you remember asking me to do that?"

I did, but it seemed long ago, and unimportant. What I think now is that something wanted it to seem that way to me.

"I went surfing around on the Internet and came up with a good deal from the local newspapers and a couple of memoirs that are available for download. One of them - I shit you not, muchacho - is called Boat Trips and Beeswax, A Girlhood in Nokomis, by Stephanie Weider Gravel-Miller."

"Sounds like quite a trip down memory lane."

"It was. She talks about 'the happy darkies, picking oranges and singing simple songs of praise in their mellifluous voices.'"

"I guess that was before Jay-Z."

"Got that right. Even better, I talked to Chris Shannington, over on Casey Key - you've almost certainly seen him. Colorful old geezer who walks everyplace with this gnarled briarwood cane, almost as tall as he is, and a big straw hat on his head. His father, Ellis Shannington, was John Eastlake's gardener. According to Chris, it was Ellis who took Maria and Hannah, Elizabeth's two older sisters, back to the Braden School ten days or so after the drowning. He said, 'Those chirrun were heartbroken for the babby-uns.'"

Wireman's imitation of the old man's southern accent was eerily good, and I found myself for some reason thinking of the Walrus and the Carpenter again, walking up the beach with the little Oysters. The only part of the poem I could remember clearly was the Carpenter telling them they'd had a pleasant run, but of course the Oysters couldn't answer, for they'd been eaten - every one.

"Do you want to hear this now?" Wireman asked.

"Have you got time to tell me now?"

"Sure. Annmarie's got the duty until seven, although as a matter of practical fact, we share it most days. Why don't we walk up to the house? I've got a file. There isn't much in it, but there's at least one picture that's worth looking at. Chris Shannington had it in a box of his father's things. I walked up to the Casey Key Public Library with him and copied it." He paused. "It's a picture of Heron's Roost."

"As it was back then, you mean?"

We had started to stroll back up the boardwalk, but Wireman stopped. "No, amigo, you misunderstand. I'm talking about the original Heron's Roost. El Palacio is the second Roost, built almost twenty-five years after the little girls drowned. By then, John Eastlake's ten or twenty million had grown to a hundred and fifty million or so. War Is Good Business, Invest Your Son."

"Vietnam protest movement, 1969," I said. "Often seen in tandem with A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle."

"Good, amigo, " Wireman said. He waved a hand toward the riotous greenery that began just south of us. "The first Heron's Roost was out there, back when the world was young and flappers said poop-oopie-doop."

I thought of Mary Ire, not just tiddly or squiffy but downright drunk, saying Just the one house, sitting up there and looking like something you'd see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile.

"What happened to it?" I asked.

"So far as I know, nothing but time and decay," he said. "When John Eastlake gave up on recovering the bodies of his twins, he gave up on Duma Key, too. He paid off most of the help, packed his traps, took the three daughters who remained to him, got in his Rolls-Royce - he really had one - and drove away. A novel F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote, that's what Chris Shannington said. Told me Eastlake was never at peace until Elizabeth brought him back here."

"Do you think that's something Shannington actually knows, or just a story he's gotten used to hearing himself tell?"

" Qui n sabe? " Wireman said. He stopped again and waved toward the southern end of Duma Key. "No overgrowth back then. You could see the original house from the mainland and vice-versa. And so far as I know, amigo, the house is still there. Whatever's left of it. Sitting and rotting." He reached the kitchen door and looked at me, unsmiling. " That would be something to paint, wouldn't it? A ghost-ship on dry land."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe it would."

viii

He took me into the library with the suit of armor in the corner and the museum-quality weapons on the wall. There, on the table next to the telephone, was a folder marked JOHN EASTLAKE/HERON'S ROOSTI. He opened it and removed a photograph showing a house that bore an unmistakable similarity to the one we were in - the similarity, say, of first cousins. Yet there was one basic difference between the two, and the similarities - the same basic footprint for both houses, I thought, and the same roof of bright orange Spanish tile - only underlined it.

The current Palacio hid from the world behind a high wall broken by only a single gate - there wasn't even a tradesman's entrance. It had a beautiful interior courtyard which few people other than Wireman, Annmarie, the pool girl, and the twice-weekly gardener ever saw; it was like the body of a beautiful woman hidden under a shapeless piece of clothing.

The first Heron's Roost was very different. Like Elizabeth's mansion in China Town, it featured half a dozen pillars and a broad, welcoming veranda. It had a wide drive sweeping boldly up to it, splitting what looked like two acres of lawn. Not a gravel drive, either, as Mary Ire had told me, but rosy crushed shells. The original had invited the world in. Its successor - El Palacio - told the world to stay the hell out. Ilse had seen that at once, and so had I, but that day we had been looking from the road. Since then my view had changed, and with good reason: I had gotten used to seeing it from the beach. To coming upon it from its unarmored side.

The first Heron's Roost had also been higher, three stories in front and four in back, so - if it really did stand on a rise, as Mary had said - people on the top floor would have had a breathtaking three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the Gulf, the mainland, Casey Key, and Don Pedro Island. Not bad. But the lawn looked strangely ragged - unkempt - and there were holes in the line of ornamental palms dancing like hula girls on either side of the house. I looked closer and saw that some of the upper windows had been boarded up. The roofline had a strangely unbalanced look, too. It took a second to realize why. There was a chimney at the east end. There should have been another at the west end, but there wasn't.

"Was this taken after they left?" I asked.

He shook his head. "According to Shannington, it was snapped in March of 1927, before the little girls drowned, when everyone was still happy and well. That isn't dilapidation you see, it's storm-damage. From an Alice."

"Which is what?"

"Hurricane season officially starts June fifteenth down here and lasts about five months. Out-of-season storms with torrential rains and high winds... as far as the old-timers are concerned, they're all Alice. As in Hurricane Alice. It's kind of a joke."

"You're making that up."

"Nope. Esther - the big one in '26 - missed Duma completely, but the Alice in March of '27 hit it pretty much dead-on. Then it blew inland and drowned in the Glades. It did the damage you see in this picture - not much, really; blew down some palms, knocked out some glass, tore up the lawn. But in another way, its effects are still being felt. Because it seems pretty certain it was that Alice that led to the drowning deaths of Tessie and Laura, and that led to everything else. Including you and me standing here now."

"Explain."

"Remember this?"

He took another photo from his folder, and I certainly did remember it. The big one was on the second-floor landing of the main staircase. This was a smaller, sharper copy. It was the Eastlake family, with John Eastlake wearing a black bathing singlet and looking like a Hollywood B-list actor who might have specialized in detective movies and jungle epics. He was holding Elizabeth. One hand cupped her plump little bottom. The other held that harpoon pistol, and a face-mask with an attached snorkel.

"Judging just by Elizabeth, I'm going to guess this might have been taken around 1925," Wireman said. "She looks two, going on three. And Adriana" - he tapped the eldest - "looks like she might be seventeen going on thirty-four, wouldn't you say?"

Indeed. Seventeen and ripe, even in her it-covers-damn-near-everything bathing suit.

"She's already got that sulky, pouty I-want-to-be-somewhere-else look, too," Wireman said. "I wonder just how surprised her father was when she up and eloped with one of his plant managers. And I wonder if he wasn't, in his heart of hearts, glad to see her go." He put on his Chris Shannington drawl. "Run off to Atlanta with a boy in a tie and an eyeshade." Then he quit it. I guessed the subject of little dead girls, even ones lost eighty years ago, was still a tender one with him. "She and her new hubby came back, but by then it was just a hunt for the bodies."

I tapped the grim-faced black nanny. "Who was this?"

"Melda or Tilda or maybe even, God save us, Hecuba, according to Chris Shannington. His father knew, but Chris no longer remembers."

"Nice bracelets."

He glanced at them without much interest. "If you say so."

"Maybe John Eastlake was sleeping with her," I said. "Maybe the bracelets were a little present."

" Qui n sabe? Rich widower, young woman - it's been known to happen."

I tapped the picnic basket, which the young black woman was holding with both hands, her arms bunched as though it was heavy. Heavier than just a few sandwiches could account for, you'd think... but maybe there was a whole chicken in there. And maybe a few bottles of beer for ole massa, as well - a little reward after he'd finished his day's dives. "What color would you say that hamper is? Dark brown? Or is it red?"

Wireman gave me a strange look. "In a black-and-white photograph, it's hard to tell."

"Tell me how the storm led to the deaths of the little girls."

He opened the folder again and handed me an old news story with an accompanying photograph. "This is from the Venice Gondolier, March 28th, 1927. I got the original info on the net. Jack Cantori called the paper, got someone to make a copy and shoot me a fax. Jack's terrific, by the way."

"No argument there," I said. I studied the photo. "Who are these girls? No - don't tell me. The one on his left's Maria. Hannah's on his right."