Duma Key - Stephen King

Pam was calmer. I don't know what she'd taken, but it was already working. We talked for twenty minutes. She wept through most of the conversation, and was intermittently accusatory, but when I made no effort to defend myself, her anger collapsed into grief and bewilderment. I got the salient points, or so I thought then. There was one very salient point that we both were missing, but as a wise man once said, "You can't hit em if you can't see em," and the police representative who called Pam didn't think to tell her what Mary Ire had brought to our daughter's Providence apartment.

Besides the gun, that was. The Beretta.

"The police say she must have driven, and almost nonstop," Pam said dully. "She never could have gotten a gun like that on an airplane. Why did she do it? Was it another fucking painting?"

"Of course it was," I said. "She bought one. I never thought of that. I never thought of her. Not once. It was Illy's fucking boyfriend I was worried about."

Speaking very calmly, my ex-wife - that's what she surely was now - said: " You did this."

Yes. I had. I should have realized Mary Ire would buy at least one painting, and that she'd probably want a canvas from the Girl and Ship series - the most toxic of all. Nor would she have wanted the Scoto to store it, not when she lived right up the road in Tampa. For all I knew, she might have had it in the trunk of her beat-up Mercedes when she dropped me at the hospital. From there she could have gone right to her place on Davis Islands to get her home protection automatic. Hell, it would have been on her way north.

That part I should have at least guessed. I had met her, after all, and I knew what she thought of my work.

"Pam, something very bad is happening on this island. I-"

"Do you think I care about that, Edgar? Or about why that woman did it? You got our daughter killed. I don't ever want to talk to you again, I don't want to see you again, and I'd rather poke out my eyes than ever have to look at another picture of yours. You should have died when that crane hit you." There was an awful thoughtfulness in her voice. "That would have been a happy ending."

There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my nineteen-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

Then, slowly, I walked back out through the door. I left it open. There seemed no reason to lock it now. There was a broom meant for sweeping sand off the walk leaning against the side of the house. I looked at it and my right arm began to itch. I lifted my right hand and held it in front of my eyes. It wasn't there, but when I opened it and closed it, I could feel it flex. I could also feel a couple of long nails biting into my palm. The others felt short and ragged. They must have broken off. Somewhere - perhaps on the carpet upstairs in Little Pink - were a couple of ghost fingernails.

"Go away," I told it. "I don't want you anymore, go away and be dead."

It didn't. It wouldn't. Like the arm to which it had once been attached, the hand itched and throbbed and ached and refused to leave me.

"Then go find my daughter," I said, and the tears began to flow. "Bring her back, why don't you? Bring her to me. I'll paint anything you want, just bring her to me."

Nothing. I was just a one-armed man with a phantom itch. The only ghost was his own, drifting around just over his head, observing all this.

The creeping in my flesh grew worse. I picked the broom up, weeping now not just from grief but also from the horrible discomfort of that unreachable itch, then realized I couldn't do what I needed to do - a one-armed man can't snap a broomhandle over his knee. I leaned it against the house again and stomped it with my good leg. There was a snap, and the bristle end went flying. I held the jagged end up in front of my streaming eyes and nodded. It would do.

I went around the corner of the house toward the beach, a distant part of my mind registering the loud conversation of the shells beneath Big Pink as the waves dashed into the darkness there and then withdrew.

I had one fleeting thought as I reached the wet and shining hardpack, dotted here and there with tennis balls: The third thing Elizabeth had said to Wireman was You will want to, but you mustn't.

"Too late," I said, and then the string tethering the Edgar over my head broke. He floated away, and for a little while I knew no more.

17 - The South End of the Key

i

I next remember Wireman coming along and picking me up. I remember walking a few steps, then recalling that Ilse was dead and collapsing to my knees. And the most shameful thing was that, even though I was heartbroken, I was also hungry. Starving.

I remember Wireman helping me in through the open door and telling me it was all a bad dream, that I'd been having the horrors, and when I told him no, it was true, Mary Ire had done it, Mary Ire had drowned Ilse in Ilse's own bathtub, he had laughed and said that now he knew it. For one horrible moment I believed him.

I pointed to the answering machine. "Play the message," I said, and went into the kitchen. Staggered into the kitchen. When Pam started in again - Edgar, the police called and they say Illy's dead! - I was eating fistfuls of Frosted Mini-Wheats straight from the box. I had a queer sense of being part of a prepared slide. Soon I would be placed under a microscope and studied. In the other room, the message ended. Wireman cursed and played it again. I kept eating cereal. The time I'd spent on the beach before Wireman came along was missing. That part of my memory was as blank as my early hospital stay after my accident.

I took a final handful of cereal, crammed it into my mouth, and swallowed. It stuck in my throat, and that was good. That was fine. I hoped it would choke me. I deserved to choke. Then it slid down. I went shuffle-limping back into the living room. Wireman was standing beside the answering machine, wide-eyed.

"Edgar... muchacho... what in God's name -?"

"One of the paintings," I said, and kept on shuffling. Now that I had something in my stomach, I wanted some more oblivion. If only for a little while. Only it was more than wanting, actually; it was needing. I had broken the broomhandle... then Wireman came along. What was in the ellipsis? I didn't know.

I decided I didn't want to know.

"The paintings...?"

"Mary Ire bought one. I'm sure it was one from the Girl and Ship series. And she took it with her. We should have known. I should have known. Wireman, I need to lie down. I need to sleep. Two hours, okay? Then wake me and we'll go to the south end."

"Edgar, you can't... I don't expect you to after..."

I stopped to look at him. It felt as though my head weighed a hundred pounds, but I managed. " She doesn't expect me to, either, but this ends today. Two hours."

Big Pink's open door faced east, and the morning sun struck brightly across Wireman's face, lighting a compassion so strong I could barely look at it. "Okay, muchacho. Two hours."

"In the meantime, try to keep everyone clear." I don't know if he heard that last part or not. I was facing into my bedroom by then, and the words were trailing away. I fell onto my bed, and there was Reba. For a moment I considered throwing her across the room, as I had considered throwing the phone. Instead I gathered her to me and pressed my face against her boneless body and began to cry. I was still crying when I fell asleep.

ii

"Wake up." Someone was shaking me. "Wake up, Edgar. If we're going to do this, we have to get rolling."

"I dunno - I'm not sure he's going to come around." That voice was Jack's.

"Edgar!" Wireman slapped first one side of my face, then the other. Not gently, either. Bright light struck my closed eyes, flooding my world with red. I tried to get away from all these stimuli - there were bad things waiting on the other side of my eyelids - but Wireman wouldn't let me. " Muchacho! Wake up! It's ten past eleven!"

That got through. I sat up and looked at him. He was holding the bedside lamp in front of my face, so close I could feel the heat from the bulb. Jack was standing behind him. The realization that Ilse was dead - my Illy - struck at my heart, but I pushed it away. " Eleven! Wireman, I told you two hours! What if some of Elizabeth's relatives decide to-"

"Easy, muchacho. I called the funeral home and told them to keep everyone off Duma. I said that all three of us had come down with German measles. Very contagious. I also called Dario and told him about your daughter. Everything with the pictures is on hold, at least for now. I doubt if that's a priority with you, but-"

"Of course it is." I got to my feet and rubbed my hand over my face. "Perse doesn't get to do any more damage than she already has."

"I'm sorry, Edgar," Jack said. "So damn sorry for your loss. I know that doesn't carry much water, but-"

"It does," I said, and maybe in time it would. If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say I can do this even when you know you can't.

I saw that one of them had brought the rest of my clothes, but for today's work I'd want the boots in the closet instead of the sneakers at the foot of the bed. Jack was wearing Georgia Giants and a long-sleeved shirt; that was good.

"Wireman, will you put on coffee?" I asked.

"Do we have time?"

"We'll have to make time. There's stuff I need, but what I need first is to wake up. You guys can use a little fuel, too, maybe. Jack, help me with my boots, would you?"

Wireman left for the kitchen. Jack knelt, eased on my boots, and tied them for me. "How much do you know?" I asked him.

"More than I want to," he said. "But I don't understand any of it. I talked to that woman - Mary Ire? - at your show. I liked her."

"I did, too."

"Wireman called your wife while you were sleeping. She wouldn't talk to him very long, so then he called some guy he met at your show - Mr. Bozeman?"

"Tell me."

"Edgar, are you sure-"

"Tell me." Pam's version had been broken and fragmentary, and even that was no longer clear in my mind - the details were obscured by an image of Ilse's hair floating on the surface of an overflowing bathtub. That might or might not be accurate, but it was hellishly bright, hellishly particular, and it had blotted out almost everything else.

"Mr. Bozeman said the police found no sign of forced entry, so they think your daughter must have let her in, even though it was the middle of the night-"

"Or Mary just hit buzzers until somebody else let her in." My missing arm itched. It was a deep itch. Sleepy. Dreamy, almost. "Then she walked up to Illy's apartment and rang the bell. Let's say that she pretended to be someone else."

"Edgar, are you guessing, or-"

"Let's say she pretended to be from a gospel group called The Hummingbirds, and let's say she called through the door that something bad had happened to Carson Jones."

"Who's- "

"Only she calls him Smiley, and that's the convincer."

Wireman was back. So was the floating Edgar. Edgar-down-below saw all the mundane things of a sunshiny Florida morning on Duma Key. Edgar-over-my-head saw more. Not everything; just enough to be too much.

"What happened then, Edgar?" Wireman asked. He spoke very softly. "What do you think?"

"Let's say that Illy opens the door, and when she does, she finds a woman pointing a gun at her. She knows this woman from somewhere, but she's been through one bad scare already that night, she's disoriented, and she can't place her - her memory chokes. Maybe it's just as well. Mary tells her to turn around, and when she does... when she does that..." I began to cry again.

"Edgar, man, don't," Jack said. He was almost crying himself. "This is just guesswork."

"It's not guesswork," Wireman said. "Let him talk."

"But why do we need to know-"

"Jack... muchacho... we don't know what we need to know. So let the man talk."

I heard their voices, but from far away.

"Let's say Mary hit her with the gun when she turned around." I wiped my cheeks with the heel of my hand. "Let's say she hit her several times, four or five. In the movies, you get clopped once and you're out like a light. In real life, I doubt if it's like that."

"No," Wireman murmured, and of course this game of let's-say turned out to be all too accurate. My If-So-Girl's skull had been fractured in three places from repeated overhand blows, and she bled a great deal.

Mary dragged her. The blood-trail led across the living room/kitchen (the smell of the burnt sketch very likely still hanging in the air) and down the short hallway between the bedroom and the nook that served as Illy's study. In the bathroom at the end of the hall, Mary filled the tub and in it she drowned my unconscious daughter like an orphan kitten. When the job was done, Mary went into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and shot herself in the mouth. The bullet exited the top of her skull, splattering her ideas about art, along with a good deal of her hair, on the living room wall behind her. It was then just shy of four AM. The man downstairs was an insomniac who knew the gunshot for what it was and called the police.

"Why drown her?" Wireman asked. "I don't understand that."

Because it's Perse's way, I thought.

"We're not going to think about that right now," I said. "All right?"

He reached out and squeezed my remaining hand. "All right, Edgar."

And if we get this business done, maybe we'll never have to, I thought.

But I had drawn my daughter. I was sure of it. I'd drawn her on the beach.

My dead daughter. My drowned daughter. Drawn in sand for the waves to take.

You will want to, Elizabeth had said, but you mustn't.

Oh, but Elizabeth.

Sometimes we have no choice.

iii

We swallowed strong coffee in Big Pink's sunny kitchen until sweat was standing out on our cheeks. I took three aspirin, adding another layer of caffeine, then sent Jack to get two Artisan pads. And I told him to sharpen every colored pencil he could find while he was upstairs.

Wireman filled a plastic carry-sack with supplies from the fridge: carrot stubs, cucumber strips, a six-pack of Pepsi, three large bottles of Evian water, some roast beef, and one of Jack's Astronaut Chickens, still in its see-thru capsule.

"Surprised you can even think of food," he said, with the tiniest touch of reproach.

"Food doesn't interest me in the slightest," I said, "but I may have to draw stuff. In fact, I'm positive I'll have to draw stuff. And that seems to burn calories by the carload."

Jack returned with the pads and pencils. I pawed it over, then sent him back upstairs for art-gum erasers. I suspected there would be more stuff I'd want - isn't there always? - but I couldn't think what it might be. I glanced at the clock. It was ten to twelve.

"Did you Polaroid the drawbridge?" I asked Jack. "Please tell me you did."

"Yeah, but I thought... the German measles story..."

"Let me see the photos," I said.