Duma Key - Stephen King

"A- plus. Hannah's the one with breasts. She was fourteen in '27."

We studied the fax sheet in silence for a few moments. E-mail would have been better. The fax had annoying dark vertical lines running through it, blurring some of the print, but the headline was clear enough: STORM PROVES TREASURE-HUNTING BOON TO AMATEUR DIVER. And the picture was clear enough, too. Eastlake's hairline had receded a little. As if to compensate, his narrow bandleader's mustache was now closer to a walrus. And although he was still wearing the same black bathing singlet, it was now under severe stress... and actually popped under one arm, I thought, although the picture's resolution wasn't quite good enough to be certain. It appeared Dad Eastlake had packed on some pork between 1925 and 1927 - the B-movie actor would have trouble getting roles if he didn't start skipping desserts and doing more work in the gym. The girls flanking him weren't as sloe-eyed-sexy as their big sister - you looked at Adriana and thought about hot afternoons in a haymow, you looked at these two and wondered if they were getting their schoolwork done - but they were pretty in a not-quite-there-yet way, and their excitement shone out in the picture. Sure it did.

Because, spread before them on the sand, was treasure.

"I can't make it all out, and the damn caption's blurry," I complained.

"There's a magnifying glass in the desk, but let me save you a headache." Wireman picked up a pen and pointed with the tip. "That's a medicine bottle, and that there is a musket-ball - or so Eastlake claims in the story. Maria's got her hand on what appears to be a boot... or the remains of one. Next to the boot-"

"Pair of spectacles," I said. "And... a necklace-chain?"

"The story claims it's a bracelet. I don't know. All I could swear to is a metal loop of some kind, overgrown with crud. But the older girl's definitely holding out an earring."

I scanned the story. In addition to the stuff on view, Eastlake had found various eating utensils... four cups he claimed were "Italianate"... a trivet... a box of gears (whatever that might mean)... and nails without number. He had also found half a China Man. Not a Chinaman; a China Man. It wasn't pictured, at least not that I could see. The story said Eastlake had been diving on the eroded reefs west of Duma Key for fifteen years, sometimes to fish, often just to relax. He said he had found all sorts of litter, but nothing of interest. He said that the Alice (he called it that) had generated some remarkably big waves, and they must have shifted the sand inside the reef just enough to reveal what he called "a dumping field."

"He doesn't call it a wreck," I said.

"It wasn't," Wireman said. "There was no boat. He didn't find one, and neither did the dozens of people who helped him try to recover the bodies of his little girls. Only detritus. They would have found a wreck if there was a wreck to find; the water on the southwest end of the Key is no more than twenty-five feet deep all the way out to what remains of Kitt Reef, and it's pretty clear now. Back then it was like turquoise glass."

"Any theories about how it came to be there?"

"Sure. The best is that some boat close to foundering came blowing in a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years before, shedding shit as it came. Or maybe the crew was tossing stuff overboard to stay afloat. They made repairs after the storm was over and went on their way. It would explain why there was a swath of detritus for Eastlake to find, and also why none of it was particularly valuable. Treasure would have stayed with the ship."

"And the reef wouldn't have ripped the keel out of a boat that got blown in here back in the 1700s? Or 1600s?"

Wireman shrugged. "Chris Shannington says no one knows what the geography of Kitt Reef might have been a hundred and fifty years ago."

I looked at the spread-out loot. The smiling middle daughters. The smiling Daddy, who was soon going to have to buy himself a new bathing costume. And I suddenly decided he hadn't been sleeping with the nanny. No. Even a mistress would have told him he couldn't have a newspaper photo of himself taken in that old thing. She would have found a tactful reason, but the real one was right in front of me, after all these years; even with less-than-perfect vision in my right eye, I could see it. He was too fat. Only he didn't see it, and his daughters didn't see it, either. Loving eyes did not see.

Too fat. Something there, wasn't there? Some A that practically demanded a B.

"I'm surprised he talked about what he found at all," I said. "If you happened on stuff like this today and then blabbed to Channel 6, half of Florida would show up in their little putt-putts, hunting for doubloons and pieces of eight with metal detectors."

"Ah, but this was another Florida," Wireman said, and I remembered Mary Ire using the same phrase. "John Eastlake was a rich man, and Duma Key was his private preserve. Besides, there were no doubloons, no pieces of eight - just moderately interesting junk uncovered by a freak storm. For weeks he went down and dived where that debris was scattered on the floor of the Gulf - and it was close in, according to Shannington; at low tide, you could practically wade to it. And sure, he was probably keeping an eye out for valuables. He was a rich man, but I don't think that vaccinates a man against the treasure-bug."

"No," I said. "I'm sure it doesn't."

"The nanny would have gone with him on his treasure-hunting expeditions. The three still-at-home girls, too: the twins and Elizabeth. Maria and Hannah were back at their boarding school in Bradenton, and big sis had run off to Atlanta. Eastlake and his little ones probably had picnics down there."

"How often?" I began to see where this was going.

"Often. Maybe every day while the debris field was at its richest. They wore a path from the house to what was called Shade Beach. It was half a mile, if that."

"A path two adventurous little girls could follow on their own."

"And one day did. To everyone's sorrow." He swept the pictures back into the folder. "There's a story here, muchacho, and I suppose it's marginally more interesting than a little girl swallowing a marble, but a tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."

He brooded a moment.

"What probably happened is that one day in April of 1927, when Tessie and Laura were supposed to be napping, they decided to get up, sneak down the path, and go hunting for treasure at Shade Beach. Probably they meant to do no more than wade in as far as their knees, which is all they were permitted to do - one of the stories quotes John Eastlake as saying that, and Adriana backed him up."

"The married daughter who came back."

"Right. She and her new husband returned a day or two before the search for the bodies was officially called off. That's according to Shannington. Anyway, one of the little girls maybe saw something gleaming a little further out and started to flounder. Then-"

"Then her sister tried to save her." Yes, I could see it. Only I saw Lin and Ilse as they'd been when they were small. Not twins, but for three or four golden years nearly inseparable.

Wireman nodded. "And then the rip took em both. Had to've been that way, amigo; that's why the bodies weren't found. Off they went, heigh-ho for the caldo largo."

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant by the rip, then remembered a painting by Winslow Homer, romantic but of undeniable power: Undertow.

The intercom on the wall beeped, startling us both. Wireman struck the folder with his arm as he turned around, knocking photocopies and faxes everywhere.

"Mr. Wireman!" It was Annmarie Whistler. "Mr. Wireman, are you there?"

"I'm here," Wireman said.

"Mr. Wireman?" She sounded agitated. Then, as if to herself: "Jesus, where are you?"

"The fucking button," he muttered, and went to the wall unit, not quite running. He pushed the button. "I'm here. What's wrong? What's happened? Did she fall?"

"No!" Annmarie cried. "She's awake! Awake and aware! She's asking for you! Can you come?"

"Right away," he said, and turned to me, grinning. "Do you hear that, Edgar? Come on!" He paused. "What are you looking at?"

"These," I said, and held out the two pictures of Eastlake in his bathing dress: the one where he was surrounded by all his daughters, and the one taken two years later, where he was flanked by just Maria and Hannah.

"Never mind em now - didn't you hear her? Miss Eastlake is back!" He booked for the door. I dropped his folder on the library table and followed him. I had made the connection - but only because I'd spent the last few months cultivating the art of seeing. Cultivating it strenuously.

"Wireman!" I called. He'd gone the length of the dogtrot and was halfway up the staircase. I was limping as fast as I could and he was still pulling away. He waited for me, not very patiently. "Who told him the debris field was there?"

"Eastlake? I assume he stumbled on it while pursuing his diving hobby."

"I don't think so - he hadn't been in that bathing suit for a long time. Diving and snorkeling may have been his hobby in the early twenties, but I think that around 1925, eating dinner became his chief diversion. So who told him?"

Annmarie came out of a door near the end of the hall. There was a goofy, unbelieving grin on her face that made her look half her forty years.

"Come on," she said. "This is wonderful."

"Is she- "

"She is," came Elizabeth's cracked but unmistakable voice. "Come in here, Wireman, and let me see your face while I still know it."

ix

I lingered in the hall with Annmarie, not sure what to do, looking at the knickknacks and the big old Frederic Remington at the far end - Indians on ponies. Then Wireman called for me. His voice was impatient and rough with tears.

The room was dim. The shades had all been drawn. Air conditioning whispered through a vent somewhere above us. There was a table next to her bed with a lamp on it. The shade was green glass. The bed was the hospital kind, and cranked up so she could almost sit. The lamp put her in a soft spotlight, with her hair loose on the shoulders of a pink dressing gown. Wireman sat beside her, holding her hands. Above her bed was the only painting in the room, a fine print of Edward Hopper's Eleven AM, an archetype of loneliness waiting patiently at the window for some change, any change.

Somewhere a clock was ticking.

She looked at me and smiled. I saw three things in her face. They hit me one after the other like stones, each one heavier than the last. The first was how much weight she'd lost. The second was that she looked horribly tired. The third was that she hadn't long to live.

"Edward," she said.

"No- " I began, but when she raised one hand (the flesh hanging down in a snow-white bag above her elbow), I stilled at once. Because here was a fourth thing to see, and it hit hardest of all -not a stone but a boulder. I was looking at myself. This was what people had seen in the aftermath of my accident, when I was trying to sweep together the poor scattered bits of my memory - all that treasure that looked like trash when it was spread out in such ugly, naked fashion. I thought of how I had forgotten my doll's name, and I knew what was coming next.

"I can do this," she said.

"I know you can," I said.

"You brought Wireman back from the hospital," she said.

"Yes."

"I was so afraid they'd keep him. And I would be alone."

I didn't reply to this.

"Are you Edmund?" she asked timidly.

"Miss Eastlake, don't tax yourself," Wireman said gently. "This is-"

"Hush, Wireman," I said. "She can do this."

"You paint," she said.

"Yes."

"Have you painted the ship yet?"

A curious thing happened to my stomach. It didn't sink so much as it seemed to disappear and leave a void between my heart and the rest of my guts. My knees tried to buckle. The steel in my hip went hot. The back of my neck went cold. And warm, prickling fire ran up the arm that wasn't there.

"Yes," I said. "Again and again and again."

"You're Edgar," she said.

"Yes, Elizabeth. I'm Edgar. Good for you, honey."

She smiled. I guessed no one had called her honey in a long time. "My mind is like a tablecloth with a great big hole burned into it." She turned to Wireman. " Muy divertido, s ? "

"You need to rest," he said. "In fact, you need to dormir como un tronco."

She smiled faintly. "Like a log. Yes. And I think when I wake up, I'll still be here. For a little while." She lifted his hands to her face and kissed them. "I love you, Wireman."

"I love you, too, Miss Eastlake," he said. Good for him.

"Edgar?... Is it Edgar?"

"What do you think, Elizabeth?"

"Yes, of course it is. You're to have a show? Is that how we left things before my last..." She drooped her eyelids, as if to mime sleep.

"Yes, at the Scoto Gallery. You really need to rest."

"Is it soon? Your show?"

"In less than a week."

"Your paintings... the ship paintings... are they on the mainland? At the gallery?"

Wireman and I exchanged a look. He shrugged.

"Yes," I said.

"Good." She smiled. "I'll rest, then. Everything else can wait... until after you have your show. Your moment in the sun. Are you selling them? The ship pictures?"

Wireman and I exchanged another look, and the message in his eyes was very clear: Don't upset her.

"They're marked NFS, Elizabeth. That means-"

"I know what it means, Edgar, I didn't fall out of an orange tree yesterday." Inside their deep pockets of wrinkles, caught in a face that was receding toward death, her eyes flashed. "Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. And however hard it is for you. Break them up, send them to the four winds. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Will you do it?"

I didn't know if I would or not, but I recognized her signs of growing agitation from my own not-so-distant past. "Yes." At that point, I would have promised her to jump to the moon in seven-league boots, if it would have eased her mind.

"Even then they may not be safe," she mused in an almost-horrified voice.

"Stop, now," I said, and patted her hand. "Stop thinking about this."

"All right. We'll talk more after your show. The three of us. I'll be stronger... clearer... and you, Edgar, will be able to pay attention. Do you have daughters? I seem to remember that you do."

"Yes, and they're staying on the mainland with their mother. At the Ritz. That's already arranged."

She smiled, but the corners drooped almost at once. It was as if her mouth were melting. "Crank me down, Wireman. I've been in the swamp... forty days and forty nights... so it feels... and I'm tired."

He cranked her down, and Annmarie came in with something in a glass on a tray. No chance Elizabeth was going to drink any of it; she had already corked off. Over her head, the loneliest girl in the world sat in a chair and looked out the window forever, face hidden by the fall of her hair, naked but for a pair of shoes.

x

For me, sleep was long in coming that night. It was after midnight before I finally slipped away. The tide had withdrawn, and the whispered conversation under the house had ceased. That didn't stop the whispered voices in my head, however.