The Red Basket

I

“Share your pool, mister? ”

It was Ilse, in green shorts and matching halter. Her feet were bare, her face without make-up and puffy with sleep. Her hair was yanked back in a ponytail, the way she’d worn it when she was eleven, and if not for the fullness of her breasts, she could have passed for that eleven-year-old.

“Any time, ” I said.

She sat beside me on the tiled lip of the pool. We were about halfway down, my butt on 5 and hers on FT.

“You’re up early, ” I said, but this didn’t surprise me. Illy had always been our restless one.

“I was worried about you. Especially when Mr. Wireman called Jack to say that nice old woman died. It was Jack who told us. We were still at dinner.”

“I know.”

“I’m so sorry.” She put her head on my shoulder. “And on your special night, too.”

I put my arm around her.

“Anyway, I only slept a couple of hours, and then got up because it was light. And when I looked out, who should I see sitting beside the pool but my father, all by himself? ”

“Couldn’t sleep anymore. I just hope I didn’t wake your m—” I stopped, aware of Ilse’s large, round eyes. “Don’t go getting any ideas, Miss Cookie. It was strictly comfort.”

It had not been strictly comfort, but what it had been was something I wasn’t prepared to explore with my daughter. Or myself, for that matter.

She slumped a little, then straightened and looked at me, head tilted, the beginnings of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“If you have hopes, that’s your business, ” I said. “But I would advise you not to get them up. I’m always going to care for her, but sometimes people go too far to turn back. I think… I’m pretty sure that’s the case with us.”

She looked back at the still surface of the pool, the little smile at the corners of her mouth dying away. I hated seeing it go, but maybe it was for the best. “All right, then.”

That left me free to move on to other matters. I didn’t want to, but I was still her father and she was in many ways still a child. Which meant that, no matter how badly I felt about Elizabeth Eastlake this morning, or how confused I might be about my own situation, I still had certain duties to fulfill.

“Need to ask you something, Illy.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Are you not wearing the ring because you don’t want your mother to see it and go nuclear… which I would fully understand… or because you and Carson—”

“I sent it back, ” she said in a flat and toneless voice. Then she giggled, and a stone rolled off my heart. “But I sent it UPS, and I insured it.”

“So… it’s over? ”

“Well… never say never.” Her feet were in the water and she kicked them slowly back and forth. “Carson doesn’t want it to be, so he says. I’m not sure I do, either. At least not without seeing how we do face to face. The phone or e-mail really isn’t the way to talk something like this out. Plus, I want to see if the attraction is still there, and if so, how much.” She glanced sideways, a little anxiously. “That doesn’t gross you out, does it? ”

“No, honey.”

“Can I ask you something? ”

“Yes.”

“How many second chances did you give Mom? ”

I smiled. “Over the course of the marriage? I’d say two hundred or so.”

“And how many did she give you? ”

“About the same.”

“Did you ever…” She stopped. “I can’t ask you that.”

I looked at the pool, aware of a very middle-class flush rising in my cheeks. “Since we’re having this discussion at six in the morning and not even the pool boy’s here yet, and since I think I know what your problem with Carson Jones is, you can ask. The answer is no. Not even once. But if I’m dead honest, I have to say that was more luck than stone-ass righteousness. There were times when I came close, and once when it was probably only luck or fate or providence that kept it from happening. I don’t think the marriage would have ended if the… the accident had happened, I think there are worse offenses against a partner, but they don’t call it cheating for nothing. One slip can be excused as human fallibility. Two can be excused as human frailty. After that—” I shrugged.

“He says it was just once.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. Her feet had slowed to a dreamy underwater drift. “He said she started coming on to him. And finally… you know.”

Sure. It happens that way all the time. In books and movies, anyway. Maybe sometimes in real life, too. Just because it sounded like a self-serving lie didn’t mean it was.

“The girl he sings with? ”

Ilse nodded. “Bridget Andreisson.”

“She of the bad breath.”

Faint smile.

“I seem to remember you telling me not too long ago that he’d have to make a choice.”

A long silence. Then: “It’s complicated.”

It always is. Ask any drunk in a bar who’s been thrown out by his wife. I kept quiet.

“He told her he doesn’t want to see her anymore. And the duets are off. I know that for a fact, because I checked some of the latest reviews on the Internet.” She colored faintly at this, although I didn’t blame her for checking. I would have checked, too. “When Mr. Fredericks — he’s the tour director — threatened to send him home, Carson told him he could if he wanted to, but he wasn’t singing with that holy blond bitch anymore.”

“Were those his exact words? ”

She smiled brilliantly. “He’s a Baptist, Daddy, I’m interpreting. Anyway, Carson stood his ground and Mr. Fredericks relented. For me, that’s a mark in his favor.”

Yes, I thought, but he’s still a cheater who calls himself Smiley.

I took her hand. “What’s your next move? ”

She sighed. The ponytail made her look eleven; the sigh made her sound forty. “I don’t know. I’m at a loss.”

“Then let me help you. Will you do that? ”

“All right.”

“For the time being, stay away from him, ” I said, and I discovered I wanted that with all my heart. But there was more. When I thought of the Girl and Ship paintings — especially the girl in the rowboat — I wanted to tell her not to talk to strangers, keep her hairdryer away from the bathtub, and jog only at the college track. Never across Roger Williams Park at dusk.

She was looking at me quizzically, and I managed to get myself in gear again. “Go right back to school—”

“I wanted to talk to you about that—”

I nodded, but squeezed her arm to show her I wasn’t quite finished. “Finish your semester. Make your grades. Let Carson finish the tour. Get perspective, then get together… understand what I’m saying? ”

“Yes…” She understood, but didn’t sound convinced.

“When you do get together, do it on neutral ground. And I don’t mean to embarrass you, but it’s still just the two of us, so I’m going to say this. Bed is not neutral ground.”

She looked down at her swimming feet. I reached out and turned her face to mine.

“When the issues aren’t resolved, bed is a battleground. I wouldn’t even have dinner with the guy until you know where you stand with him. Meet in… I don’t know… Boston. Sit on a park bench and work it out. Get it clear in your mind and make sure it’s clear in his. Then have dinner. Do a Red Sox game. Or go to bed, if you think it’s the right thing. Just because I don’t want to think about your sex-life doesn’t mean I don’t think you should have one.”

She relieved me considerably by laughing. At the sound, a waiter who still looked half-asleep came out to ask us if we wanted coffee. We said we did. When he went to get it, Ilse said: “All right, Daddy. Point taken. I was going to tell you that I’m going back this afternoon, anyway. I have an Anthro prelim at the end of the week, and there are a bunch of us who’ve formed a little study group. We call ourselves the Survivors’ Club.” She regarded me anxiously. “Would that be okay? I know you were planning on a couple of days, but now there’s this thing with your friend—”

“No, honey, that’s fine.” I kissed the tip of her nose, thinking that if I was close up, she wouldn’t see how pleased I was — pleased that she’d come for the show, pleased that we’d had some time together this morning, pleased most of all that she would be a thousand miles north of Duma Key by the time the sun went down tonight. Assuming she could get a flight reservation, that was. “And as for Carson? ”

She sat quiet for perhaps an entire minute, swinging her bare feet back and forth through the water. Then she stood up and took my arm, helping me to my feet. “I think you’re right. I’ll say that if he’s serious about our relationship, he’ll just have to put everything on hold until July 4th.”

Now that her decision was made, her eyes were bright again.

“That’ll get me to the end of the semester and a month of summer vacation besides. It’ll get him through to his last show at the Cow Palace, plus plenty of time to figure out if he’s as finished with Blondie as he thinks he is. Does it suit you, father dear? ”

“Down to the ground.”

“Here comes the coffee, ” she said. “Now the question is, how long until breakfast? ”

Ii

Wireman wasn’t at the morning-after breakfast, but he had reserved the Bay Island Room from eight to ten. I presided over two dozen friends and family members, most from Minnesota. It was one of those events people remember and talk about for decades, partly because of encountering so many familiar faces in an exotic setting, partly because the emotional atmosphere was so volatile.

On the one hand, there was a very palpable sense of Home Town Boy Makes Good. They had sensed it at the show, and their judgment was confirmed in the morning papers. The reviews in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the Venice Gondolier were great, but short. Mary Ire’s piece in the Tampa Trib, on the other hand, took up nearly a whole page and was lyrical. She must have written most of it ahead of time. She called me “a major new American talent.” My mother — always a bit of a sourpuss — would have said, Take that and a dime and you can wipe your ass in comfort. Of course that was her saying forty years ago, when a dime bought more than it does today.

Elizabeth, of course, was the other hand. There was no death-notice for her, but a boxed item had been added to the page of the Tampa paper carrying Mary’s review: WELL-KNOWN ART PATRON STRICKEN AT FREEMANTLE SHOW. The story, just two paragraphs long, stated that Elizabeth Eastlake, a long-time fixture on the Sarasota art scene and resident of Duma Key, had suffered an apparent seizure not long after arriving at the Scoto Gallery and had been taken by ambulance to Sarasota Memorial Hospital. No word of her condition was available at press time.

My Minnesota people knew that on the night of my triumph, a good friend had died. There would be bursts of laughter and occasional raillery, then glances in my direction to see if I minded. By nine-thirty, the scrambled eggs I’d eaten were sitting like lead in my stomach, and I was getting one of my headaches — the first in almost a month.

I excused myself to go upstairs. I’d left a small bag in the room I hadn’t slept in. The shaving kit contained several foil packets of Zomig, a migraine medication. It wouldn’t stop a full-blown Force 5, but it usually worked if I took a dose early enough. I swallowed one with a Coke from the bar fridge, started to leave, and saw the light on the phone flashing. I almost left it, then realized the message might be from Wireman.

It turned out there were half a dozen messages. The first four were more congratulations, which fell on my aching head like pellets of hail on a tin roof. By the time I got to Jimmy’s — he was the fourth — I had begun punching the 6-button on the keypad, which hurried me on to the next message. I was in no mood to be stroked.

The fifth message was indeed from Jerome Wireman. He sounded tired and stunned. “Edgar, I know you’ve got a couple of days earmarked for family and friends, and I hate like hell to ask you this, but can we get together at your place this afternoon? We need to talk, and I mean really. Jack spent the night here with me at El Palacio — he didn’t want me to be alone, that’s one helluva good kid — and we were up early, hunting for that red basket she was on about, and… well, we found it. Better late than never, right? She wanted you to have it, so Jack took it over to Big Pink. The house was unlocked, and listen, Edgar… someone’s been inside.”

Silence on the line, but I could hear him breathing. Then:

“Jack’s severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock, muchacho. Though you may already have an idea—”

There was a beep, and then the sixth message started. It was still Wireman, now rather pissed off, which made him sound more like himself.

“Fucking short-ass message tape! Chinche pedorra! Ay! Edgar, Jack and I are going over to Abbot-Wexler. They’re…” A brief pause as he worked to keep it together. “… the funeral home she wanted. I’ll be back by one. You really ought to wait for us before you go in your house. It isn’t trashed or anything, but I want to be with you when you look in that basket and when you see what got left in your studio upstairs. I don’t like to be mysterious, but Wireman ain’t putting this shit on a message-tape anybody might listen to. And there’s one more thing. One of her lawyers called. Left a message on the machine — Jack and I were still up in the fucking attic. He says I’m her sole beneficiary.” A pause. “La loterí a.” A pause. “I get everything.” A pause. “Fuck me. ”

That was all.

Iii

I punched 0 for the hotel operator. After a short wait, she gave me the number of the Abbot-Wexler Funeral Parlor. I dialed it. A robot answered, offering me a truly amazing array of death-oriented services (“For Casket Showroom, push 5”). I waited it out — the offer for an actual human being always comes last these days, a booby-prize for boobs who can’t cope with the twenty-first century — and while I waited I thought about Wireman’s message. The house unlocked? Really? My post-accident memory was unreliable, of course, but habit wasn’t. Big Pink did not belong to me, and I had been taught since earliest childhood to take especial care of what belonged to others. I was pretty sure I had locked the house. So if someone had been inside, why hadn’t the door been forced?

I thought for just a moment of two little girls in wet dresses — little girls with decayed faces who spoke in the grating voice of the shells under the house — and then pushed the image away with a shudder. They had been only imagination, surely, the vision of an overstrained mind. And even if they had been something more… ghosts didn’t have to unlock doors, did they? They simply passed right through, or drifted up through the floorboards.

“…0 if you need help.”

By God, I had almost missed my cue. I pushed 0, and after a few bars of something that sounded vaguely like “Abide with Me, ” a professionally soothing voice asked if it could help me. I suppressed an irrational and very strong urge to say: It’s my arm! It’s never had a decent burial! and hang up. Instead, cradling the phone and rubbing a spot over my right eyebrow, I asked if Jerome Wireman was there.

“May I ask which deceased he represents? ”

A nightmare image rose before me: a silent courtroom of the dead, and Wireman saying Your Honor, I object.

“Elizabeth Eastlake, ” I said.

“Ah, of course.” The voice warmed, became provisionally human. “He and his young friend have stepped out — they were going to work on Ms. Eastlake’s obituary, I believe. I may have a message for you. Will you hold? ”

I held. “Abide with Me” resumed. Digger the Undertaker eventually returned. “Mr. Wireman asks if you would join him and… uh… Mr. Candoori, if possible, at your place on Duma Key at two this afternoon. It says, ‘If you arrive first, please wait outside.’ Have you got that? ”

“I do. You don’t know if he’ll be back? ”

“No, he didn’t say.”

I thanked him and hung up. If Wireman had a cell phone, I’d never seen him carrying it, and I didn’t have the number in any case, but Jack had one. I dug the number out of my wallet and dialed it. It diverted to voicemail on the first ring, which told me it was either turned off or dead, either because Jack had forgotten to charge it or because he hadn’t paid the bill. Either one was possible.

Jack’s severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock.

I want to be with you when you look in that basket.

But I already had a pretty good idea about what was in the basket, and I doubted if Wireman had been surprised, either.

Not really.

Iv

The Minnesota Mafia was silent around the long table in the Bay Island Room, and even before Pam stood up, I realized they had been doing more than talking about me while I was gone. They had been holding a meeting.

“We’re going back, ” Pam said. “That is, most of us are. The Slobotniks had plans to visit Disney World when they came down, the Jamiesons are going on to Miami—”

“And we’re going with them, Daddy, ” Melinda said. She was holding Ric’s arm. “We can get a flight back to Orly from there that’s actually cheaper than the one you booked.”

“I think we could stand the expense, ” I said, but I smiled. I felt the strangest mixture of relief, disappointment, and fear. At the same time I could feel the bands that had been tightening in my head come unlocked and start dropping away. The incipient headache was gone, just like that. It could have been the Zomig, but the stuff usually doesn’t work that fast, even with a caffeine-laced drink to give it a boost.

“Have you heard from your friend Wireman this morning? ” Kamen rumbled.

“Yes, ” I said. “He left a message on my machine.”

“And how is he doing? ”

Well. That was a long story, wasn’t it? “He’s coping, doing the funeral parlor thing… and Jack’s helping… but he’s rocky.”

“Go help him, ” Tom Riley said. “That’s your job for the day.”

“Yes, indeed, ” Bozie added. “You’re grieving yourself, Edgar. You don’t need to be playing host right now.”

“I called the airport, ” Pam said, as if I had protested — which I hadn’t. “The Gulfstream’s standing by. And the concierge is helping to make the other travel arrangements. In the meantime, we’ve still got this morning. The question is, what do we do with it? ”

We ended up doing what I had planned: we visited the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

And I wore my beret.

V

Early that afternoon, I found myself standing in the boarding area at Dolphin Aviation, kissing my friends and relatives goodbye, or shaking their hands, or hugging them, or all three. Melinda, Ric, and the Jamiesons were already gone.

Kathi Green the Rehab Queen kissed me with her usual ferocity. “You take care of yourself, Edgar, ” she said. “I love your paintings, but I’m much more proud of the way you’re walking. You’ve made amazing progress. I’d like to parade you in front of my latest generation of crybabies.”

“You’re tough, Kathi.”

“Not so tough, ” she said, wiping her eyes. “Truth is, I’m a freakin marshmallow.”

Then Kamen was towering over me. “If you need help, get in touch ASAP.”

“Yep, ” I said. “You be the KamenDoc.”

Kamen smiled. It was like having God smile on you. “I don’t think all’s right with you yet, Edgar. I can only hope it will be right. No one deserves more to land with the shiny side up and the rubber side down.”

I hugged him. A one-armed hug, but he made up for it.

I walked out to the plane beside Pam. We stood at the foot of the boarding stairs while the others got on. She was holding my hand in both of hers, looking up at me.

“I’m only going to kiss you on the cheek, Edgar. Illy’s watching and I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.”

She did so, then said, “I’m worried about you. There’s a white look around your eyes that I don’t like.”

“Elizabeth—”

She shook her head a tiny bit. “It was there last night, even before she came to the gallery. Even when you were at your happiest. A white look. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that. I only saw it once before, back in 1992, when it looked for a little while like you might miss that balloon payment and lose the business.”

The jet engines were whining and a hot breeze was blowing her hair around her face, tumbling her careful beauty-shop curls into something younger and more natural. “Can I ask you something, Eddie? ”

“Of course.”

“Could you paint anywhere? Or does it have to be here? ”

“Anywhere, I think. But it would be different somewhere else.”

She was looking at me fixedly. Almost pleadingly. “Just the same, a change might be good. You need to lose that white look. I’m not talking about coming back to Minnesota, necessarily, just going… somewhere else. Will you think about it? ”

“Yes.” But not until I saw what was in the red picnic basket. And not until I’d made at least one trip to the south end of the Key. And I thought I could do that. Because Ilse was the one who’d gotten sick, not me. All I’d had was one of my red-tinged flashbacks to the accident. And that phantom itch.

“Be well, Edgar. I don’t know exactly what’s become of you, but there’s still enough of the old you to love.” She stood on tiptoe in her white sandals — bought specially for this trip, I had no doubt — and planted another soft kiss on my stubbly cheek.

“Thank you, ” I said. “Thank you for last night.”

“No thanks required, ” she said. “It was sweet.”

She squeezed my hand. Then she was up the stairs and gone.

Vi

Outside Delta departures again. This time without Jack.

“Just you and me, Miss Cookie, ” I said. “Looks like we closed down the bar.”

Then I saw she was crying and wrapped my arm around her.

“Daddy, I wish I could stay here with you.”

“Go back, honey. Study for your test and knock the hell out of it. I’ll see you soon.”

She pulled back. Looked at me anxiously. “You’ll be okay? ”

“Yes. And you be okay, too.”

“I will. I will.”

I hugged her again. “Go on. Check in. Buy magazines. Watch CNN. Fly well.”

“All right, Daddy. It was amazing.”

“ You’re amazing.”

She gave me a hearty smack on the mouth — to make up for the one her mother had held back on, perhaps — and went in through the sliding doors. She turned back once and waved to me, by then little more than a girl-shape behind the polarized glass. I wish with all my heart that I could have seen her better, because I never saw her again.

Vii

From the Ringling Art Museum I had left messages for Wireman — one at the funeral home and one on El Palacio ’s answering machine — saying I’d be back around three, and asking him to meet me there. I also asked him to tell Jack that if Jack was old enough to vote and party with FSU sorority girls, he was old enough to take care of his damned cell phone.

It was actually close to three-thirty when I arrived back on the Key, but both Jack’s car and Elizabeth’s vintage silver Benz were parked on the cracked square to the right of Big Pink, and the two of them were sitting on my back stoop, drinking iced tea. Jack was still wearing his gray suit, but his hair was once more in its customary disarray and he was wearing a Devil Rays tee under his jacket. Wireman was wearing black jeans and a white shirt, open at the collar; a Nebraska Cornhuskers gimme cap was cocked back on his head.

I parked, got out, and stretched, trying to get my bad hip in gear. They stood up and came to meet me, neither of them smiling.

“Everyone gone, amigo? ” Wireman asked.

“Everyone but my Aunt Jean and Uncle Ben, ” I said. “They’re veteran freeloaders, dedicated to squeezing a good thing to the very last drop.”

Jack smiled without much humor. “Every family’s got a few, ” he said.

“How are you? ” I asked Wireman.

“About Elizabeth I’m okay. Hadlock said it was probably for the best this way, and I suppose he’s right. Her leaving me what may amount to a hundred and sixty million dollars in cash, securities, and properties…” He shook his head. “That’s different. Maybe someday I’ll have the luxury of trying to get my head around it, but right now…”

“Right now something’s going on.”

“ Sí, señ or. And it’s very weird.”

“How much have you told Jack? ”

Wireman looked a bit uncomfortable. “Well, I tell you what, amigo. Once I started, it was damn hard to find a reasonable stopping place.”

“He told me all of it, ” Jack said. “Or so he claims. Including what he thinks you did about restoring his eyesight, and what you think you did to Candy Brown.” He paused. “And the two little girls you saw.”

“Are you okay with the Candy Brown thing? ” I asked.

“If it was up to me, I’d give you a medal. And the people of Sarasota would probably give you your own float in the Memorial Day parade.” Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets. “But if you told me last fall that stuff like this could happen outside of M. Night Shyamalan movies, I would have laughed.”

“What about last week? ” I asked.

Jack thought about it. On the other side of Big Pink, the waves came steadily in. Under my living room and bedroom, the shells would be talking. “No, ” he said. “Probably wouldn’t’ve laughed then. I knew from the first there was something about you, Edgar. You got here, and…” He ran the fingers of his two hands together, lacing them. And I thought that was right. That was how it had been. Like the fingers of two hands lacing together. And the fact that I only had one hand had never mattered.

Not here.

“What are you saying, hermano? ” Wireman asked.

Jack shrugged. “Edgar and Duma. Duma and Edgar. It was like they were waiting for each other.” He looked embarrassed, but not unsure.

I cocked a thumb at my house. “Let’s go in.”

“Tell him about finding the basket first, ” Wireman said to Jack.

Jack shrugged. “Wasn’t no thing; didn’t take twenty minutes. It was sitting up on top of some old bureau at the far end of the attic. Light from one of the vents to the outside was shining in on it. Like it wanted to be found.” He glanced at Wireman, who nodded agreement. “Anyway, we took it down to the kitchen and looked inside. It was heavier than hell.”

Jack talking about the heaviness of the basket made me think of how Melda, the housekeeper, had been holding it in the family portrait: with her arms bunched. Apparently it had been heavy back then, too.

“Wireman told me to bring the basket down here and leave it for you, since I had a key… only I didn’t need a key. Place was unlocked.”

“Was the door actually open? ”

“Nope. What I did first was turn my key and actually lock it again. Gave me a hell of a surprise.”

“Come on, ” Wireman said, leading the way. “Show and Tell time.”

There was a fair amount of Florida Gulf Coast scattered on the hardwood floor of the entry: sand, small shells, a couple of sophora husks, and a few bits of dried sawgrass. There were also tracks. The sneaker-prints were Jack’s. It was the others that made my skin freckle with goosebumps. I made out three sets, one large and two small. The small ones were the tracks of children. All of those feet had been bare.

“Do you see how they go up the stairs, fading as they go? ” Jack said.

“Yes, ” I said. My voice sounded faint and faraway to my own ears.

“I walked beside them, because I didn’t want to mess them up, ” Jack said. “If I’d known then what Wireman told me while we were waiting for you, I don’t think I could have gone up at all.”

“I don’t blame you, ” I said.

“But there was no one there, ” Jack said. “Just… well, you’ll see. And look.” He led me to the side of the stairs. The ninth riser was on our eye-level, and with the light striking across it, I could see, very faintly, the tracks of small bare feet pointing the other way.

Jack said, “This looks pretty clear to me. The kids went up to your studio, then came back down again. The adult stayed by the front door, probably as lookout… although if this was the middle of the night, there probably wasn’t much to look out for. Have you been setting the burglar alarm? ”

“No, ” I said, not quite meeting his eye. “I can’t remember the numbers. I keep them on a slip of paper in my wallet, but each time I came through the door turned into a race against time, me versus that fucking beeper on the wall—”

“It’s okay.” Wireman gripped my shoulder. “These burglars didn’t take; they left.”

“You don’t really believe Miss Eastlake’s dead sisters paid you another visit, do you? ” Jack asked.

“Actually, ” I said, “I think they did.” I thought that would sound stupid in the bright light of an April afternoon, with a ton of sunlight pouring down and reflecting off the Gulf, but it didn’t.

“In Scooby Doo, it would turn out to be the crazy librarian, ” Jack said. “You know, trying to scare you off the Key so he could keep the treasure for himself.”

“If only, ” I said.

“Suppose those small tracks were made by Tessie and Laura Eastlake, ” Wireman said. “Who made the bigger ones? ”

Neither of us replied.

“Let’s go upstairs, ” I said at last. “I want to look in the basket.”

We went up (avoiding the tracks — not to preserve them, but simply because none of us wanted to step on them) to Little Pink. The picnic basket, looking just like the one I’d drawn with the red pen I’d pilfered from Gene Hadlock’s examining room, was sitting on the carpet, but my eyes were drawn first to my easel.

“You can believe I beat a hasty retreat when I saw that, ” Jack said.

I could believe it, but I felt no urge to retreat. Quite the opposite. I was drawn forward instead, like an iron bolt to a magnet. A fresh canvas had been set up there and then, sometime in the dead of night — maybe while Elizabeth had been dying, maybe while I’d been having sex with Pam for the last time, maybe while I’d been sleeping beside her — a finger had dipped into my paint. Whose finger? I didn’t know. What color? That was obvious: red. The letters that staggered and draggled and dripped their way across the canvas were red. And accusing. They almost seemed to shout.

Viii

“Found art, ” I said in a dry, rattlebox voice that hardly sounded like my own.

“Is that what it is? ” Wireman asked.

“Sure.” The letters seemed to waver in front of me, and I wiped my eyes. “Graffiti art. They’d love it at the Scoto.”

“Maybe, but that’s some creepy shit, ” Jack said. “I hate it.”

So did I. And it was my studio, goddammit, mine. I had a lease. I snatched the canvas off the easel, momentarily expecting it to burn my fingers. It didn’t. It was just a canvas, after all, one I’d stretched myself. I put it against the wall, facing in. “Is that better? ”

“It is, actually, ” Jack said, and Wireman nodded. “Edgar… if those little girls were here… can ghosts write on canvas? ”

“If they can move Ouija board planchettes and write in window-frost, I imagine they could write on a canvas, ” I said. Then, rather reluctantly, I added: “But I don’t see ghosts unlocking my front door. Or putting a canvas up on the easel to begin with.”

“There wasn’t a canvas there? ” Wireman asked.

“I’m pretty sure not. The blank ones are all racked in the corner.”

“Who’s the sister? ” Jack wanted to know. “Who’s the sister they’re asking about? ”

“It must be Elizabeth, ” I said. “She was the only sister left.”

“Bullshit, ” Wireman said. “If Tessie and Laura were on the ever-popular other side of the veil, they wouldn’t have any problem locating sister Elizabeth; she was right here on Duma Key for over fifty-five years, and Duma was the only place they ever knew.”

“What about the others? ” I asked.

“Maria and Hannah both died, ” Wireman said. “Hannah in the seventies, in New York — Ossining, I think — and Maria in the early eighties, somewhere out west. Both married, Maria a couple of times. I know that from Chris Shannington, not Miss Eastlake. She sometimes talked about her father, but hardly ever about her sisters. She cut herself off from the rest of her family after she and John came back to Duma in 1951.”

where our sister?

“And Adriana? What about her? ”

He shrugged. “ Quié n sabe? History ate her up. Shannington thinks she and her new husband probably went back to Atlanta after the search for the babby-uns was called off; they weren’t here for the memorial service.”

“She might have blamed Daddy for what happened, ” Jack said.

Wireman nodded. “Or maybe she just couldn’t stand to hang around.”

I remembered Adriana’s pouty I-want-to-be-somewhere-else look in the family portrait and thought Wireman might be onto something there.

“In any case, ” Wireman went on, “she has to be dead, too. If she was alive, she’d be almost a hundred. Odds of that are mighty slim.”

where our sister?

Wireman gripped my arm and turned me to face him. His face looked drawn and old. “ Muchacho, if something supernatural killed Miss Eastlake in order to shut her up, maybe we ought to take the hint and get off Duma Key.”

“I think it might be too late for that, ” I said.

“Why? ”

“Because she’s awake again. Elizabeth said so before she died.”

“Who’s awake? ”

“Perse, ” I said.

“Who is that? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said. “But I think we’re supposed to drown her back to sleep.”

Ix

The picnic basket had been scarlet when it was new, and had faded only a little over its long life, perhaps because so much of it had been spent tucked away in the attic. I began by hefting one of the handles. The damn thing was pretty heavy, all right; I guessed about twenty pounds. The wicker on the bottom, although tightly woven, had sagged down some. I set it back on the carpet, pushed the thin wooden carry-handles down to either side, and flipped back the lid on hinges that squeaked slightly.

There were colored pencils, most of which had been sharpened down to stubs. And there were drawings made by a certain child prodigy well over eighty years ago. A little girl who’d fallen out of a pony-trap at the age of two and banged her head and awakened with seizures and a magical ability to draw. I knew this even though the drawing on the first page wasn’t a drawing at all — not really, but this: I flicked it up. Beneath was this:

After that, the pictures became pictures, growing in technique and sophistication with a speed that was beyond belief. Unless, that was, you happened to be a guy like Edgar Freemantle, who had done little more than doodle until an accident on a building site had taken his arm, crushed his skull, and nearly ended his life.

She had drawn fields. Palms. The beach. A gigantic black face, round as a basketball, with a smiling red mouth — probably Melda the housekeeper, although this Melda looked like an overgrown child in extreme close-up. Then more animals — raccoons, a turtle, a deer, a bobcat — that were naturally sized, but walking on the Gulf or flying through the air. I found a heron, executed in perfect detail, standing on the balcony railing of the house she had grown up in. Directly below it was another watercolor of the same bird, only this time it was hovering upside-down over the swimming pool. The gimlet eyes staring out of the picture were the same shade as the pool itself. She was doing what I’ve been doing, I thought, and my skin began to creep again. Trying to re-invent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream.

Would Dario, Jimmy, and Alice cream their jeans if they saw these? I thought there was no doubt.

Here were two little girls — Tessie and Laura, surely — with great big pumpkin smiles that deliberately overran the edges of their faces.

Here was a Daddy bigger than the house beside which he stood — had to be the first Heron’s Roost — smoking a cigar the size of a rocket. A smoke-ring circled the moon overhead.

Here were two girls in dark green jumpers on a dirt road with schoolbooks balanced on their heads the way some African native girls balanced their pots: Maria and Hannah, no doubt. Behind them came a line of frogs. In defiance of perspective, the frogs grew larger rather than smaller.

Next came Elizabeth’s Smiling Horses phase. There were a dozen or more. I leafed through them, then turned back to one and tapped it. “This is the one that was in the newspaper article.”

Wireman said, “Go a little deeper. You ain’t seen nuthin yet.”

More horses… more family, rendered in pencil or charcoal or in jolly watercolors, the family members almost always with their hands linked like paperdolls… then a storm, the water in the swimming pool lashed into waves, the fronds of a palm pulled into ragged banners by the wind.

There were well over a hundred pictures in all. She might only have been a child, but she had also been unbottling. Two or three more storm pictures… maybe the Alice that had uncovered Eastlake’s treasure-trove, maybe just a big thunderstorm, it was impossible to say for sure… then the Gulf… the Gulf again, this time with flying fish the size of dolphins… the Gulf with pelicans that appeared to have rainbows in their mouths… the Gulf at sunset… and…

I stopped, my breath caught in my throat.

Compared with many of the others I’d gone through, this one was dead simple, just the silhouette of a ship against the dying light, caught at the tipping-point between day and dark, but its simplicity was what gave it its power. Certainly I’d thought so when I drew the same thing on my first night in Big Pink. Here was the same cable, stretched taut between the bow and what might in Elizabeth’s time have been called a Marconi tower, creating a brilliant orange triangle. Here was the same upward shading of light, orange to blue. There was even the same scribbly, not-quite-careless overlay of color that made the ship — skinnier than mine had been — look like a phantom out there, trudging its way north.

“I drew this, ” I said faintly.

“I know, ” Wireman said. “I’ve seen it. You called it Hello. ”

I thumbed deeper, hurrying through big bunches of watercolors and colored pencil drawings, knowing what I would eventually find. And yes, near the bottom I came to Elizabeth’s first picture of the Perse. Only she had drawn it new, a slim three-masted beauty with sails furled, standing in on the blue-green waters of the Gulf beneath a trademark Elizabeth Eastlake sun, the kind that shoots off long happy-rays of light. It was a wonderful piece of work, almost begging for a calypso sound-track.

But unlike her other paintings, it also felt false.

“Keep going, muchacho. ”

The ship… the ship… family, four of them, anyway, standing on the beach with their hands linked like paperdolls and those big Elizabeth happysmiles… the ship… the house, with what looked like a Negro lawn jockey standing on its head… the ship, that gorgeous white swallow… John Eastlake…

John Eastlake screaming … blood running from his nose and one eye…

I stared at it, mesmerized. It was a child’s watercolor, but it had been executed with hellish skill. It depicted a man who looked insane with terror, grief, or both.

“My God, ” I said.

“One more, muchacho, ” Wireman said. “One more to go.”

I flicked back the picture of the screaming man. Old dried watercolors rattled like bones. Beneath the screaming father was the ship again, only this time it really was my ship, my Perse. Elizabeth had painted it at night, and not with a brush — I could still see the ancient dried prints of her child’s fingers in the swirls of gray and black. This time it was as if she had finally seen through the Perse ’s disguise. The boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes. Around her, blue in the light of a moon that did not smile or send out happy-rays, hundreds of skeleton arms rose from the water in a dripping salute. And standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing, vaguely female, wearing a decayed something that might have been a cloak, a winding shroud… or a robe. It was the red-robe, my red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my Girl and Ship paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up. This is everything awful, it said. This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it.

“Christ, ” I said, looking up at Wireman. “When, do you think? After her sisters —? ”

“Must have been. Must have been her way of coping with it, don’t you think? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said. Part of me was trying to think of my own girls, and part of me was trying not to. “I don’t know how a kid — any kid — could come up with something like that.”

“Race memory, ” Wireman said. “That’s what the Jungians would say.”

“And how did I end up painting this same fucking ship? Maybe this same fucking creature, only from the back? Do the Jungians have any theories about that? ”

“It doesn’t say Perse on Elizabeth’s, ” Jack pointed out.

“She would have been four, ” I said. “I doubt if the name would have made much of an impression on her.” I thought of her earlier pictures — the ones where this boat had been a beautiful white lie she had believed for a little while. “Especially once she saw what it really was.”

“You talk as if it were real, ” Wireman said.

My mouth was very dry. I went to the bathroom, drew myself a glass of water, and drank it down. “I don’t know what I believe about this, ” I said, “but I have a general rule of thumb in life, Wireman. If one person sees a thing, it could be a hallucination. If two people see it, chances of reality improve exponentially. Elizabeth and I both saw the Perse. ”

“In your imaginations, ” Wireman said. “In your imaginations you saw it.”

I pointed to Wireman’s face and said, “You’ve seen what my imagination can do.”

He didn’t reply, but he nodded. He was very pale.

“You said, ‘Once she saw what it really was, ’” Jack said. “If the boat in that picture is real, what is it, exactly? ”

“I think you know, ” Wireman said. “I think we all do; it’s pretty damned hard to miss. We’re just afraid to say it out loud. Go on, Jack. God hates a coward.”

“Okay, it’s a ship of the dead, ” Jack said. His voice was flat in my clean, well-lighted studio. He put his hands to his head and raked his fingers slowly through his hair, making it wilder than ever. “But I’ll tell you something, you guys: — if that’s what’s coming for me in the end, I sort of wish I’d never been born in the first place.”

X

I set the thick stack of drawings and watercolors aside on the carpet, delighted to get the last two out of my sight. Then I looked at what had been under her pictures, weighing the picnic basket down.

It was ammo for the spear-pistol. I lifted one of the stubby harpoons out. It was about fifteen inches long, and quite heavy. The shaft was steel, not aluminum — I wasn’t sure aluminum had even been used in the nineteen-twenties. The business-end was triple-bladed, and although the blades were tarnished, they looked sharp. I touched the ball of my finger to one, and a tiny bead of blood appeared on the skin instantly.

“You ought to disinfect that, ” Jack said.

“Yes indeed, ” I said. I turned the thing over in the afternoon sun, sending reflections bounding around the walls. The short harpoon had its own ugly beauty, a paradox perhaps reserved exclusively for certain weapons of efficiency.

“This wouldn’t go very far in water, ” I said. “Not as heavy as it is.”

“You’d be surprised, ” Wireman said. “The gun fires off a spring and a CO₂ cartridge. She bangs pretty good. And back in those days, short range was enough. The Gulf teemed with fish, even close in. If Eastlake wanted to shoot something, he could usually do it at point blank range.”

“I don’t understand these tips, ” I said.

Wireman said, “Nor do I. She had at least a dozen harpoons, including four mounted on the wall in the library, and none of them are like these.”

Jack had gone into the bathroom and come back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Now he took the harpoon I was holding and examined the triple-bladed tip. “What is it? Silver? ”

Wireman made his thumb and forefinger into a gun and pointed it at him. “Hold your cards, but Wireman thinks you have scored a Bingo.”

“And you don’t get that? ” Jack asked.

Wireman and I looked at each other, then at Jack again.

“You haven’t been watching the right movies, ” he said. “Silver bullets are what you use to kill werewolves. I don’t know if silver works on vampires or not, but obviously somebody thought it did. Or that it might.”

“If you’re suggesting Tessie and Laura Eastlake are vampires, ” Wireman said, “they must have built up a hell of a thirst since 1927.” He looked at me, expecting corroboration.

“I think Jack’s onto something, ” I said. I took the bottle of peroxide, dipped the finger I’d pricked into it, and splashed the bottle up and down a couple of times.

“Man-law, ” Jack said, grimacing.

“Not unless you were planning to drink it, ” I said, and after a moment’s consideration Jack and I both burst out laughing.

“Huh? ” Wireman asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Never mind, ” Jack said, still grinning. Then he grew serious again. “But there are no such things as vampires, Edgar. There could be ghosts, I’ll give you that much — I think almost everyone believes there could be ghosts — but there’s no such thing as vampires.” He brightened as an idea struck him. “Besides, it takes a vampire to make a vampire. The Eastlake twins drowned. ”

I picked up the short harpoon again, turning it from side to side, making the reflection from the tarnished tip tumble along the wall. “Still, this is suggestive.”

“Really, ” Jack agreed.

“So’s the unlocked door you found when you brought the picnic basket, ” I said. “The tracks. The canvas that was lifted out of the rack and put onto the easel.”

“You saying it was the crazy librarian after all, amigo? ”

“No. Just that…” My voice cracked, broke. I had to take another sip of water before I could say what needed saying. “Just that maybe vampires aren’t the only things that come back from the dead.”

“What are you talking about? ” Jack asked. “Zombies? ”

I thought of the Perse with her rotting sails. “Let’s say deserters.”

Xi

“Are you sure you want to be here alone tonight, Edgar? ” Wireman asked. “Because I’m not sure it’s such a great idea. Especially with that stack of old pictures for company.” He sighed. “You have succeeded in giving Wireman a first-class case of the willies.”

We were sitting out in the Florida room, watching the sun start its long, slow decline toward the horizon. I had produced cheese and crackers.

“I’m not sure this will work otherwise, ” I said. “Think of me as a gunslinger of the art world. I paint alone, podner.”

Jack looked at me over a fresh glass of iced tea. “You’re planning to paint? ”

“Well — sketch. It’s what I know how to do.” And when I thought back to a certain pair of gardening gloves — HANDS printed on the back of one, OFF on the back of the other — I thought sketching would be enough, especially if I did it with little Elizabeth Eastlake’s colored pencils.

I swung around to Wireman. “You have the funeral parlor tonight, correct? ”

Wireman glanced at his watch and heaved a sigh. “Correct. From six until eight. There’s another visitation tomorrow from noon until two. Relatives from afar will come to bare their teeth at the usurping interloper. That would be me. Then the final act, day after tomorrow. Funeral at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Osprey. That’s at ten. Followed by cremation at Abbot-Wexler. Burny-burny, hot-hot-hot.”

Jack grimaced. “Gross me out. ”

Wireman nodded. “ Death is gross, son. Remember what we sang as children? ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, and the pus runs out like shaving cream.’”

“Classy, ” I said.

“Yep, ” Wireman agreed. He selected another cracker, looked at it, then threw it violently back onto the tray. It bounced onto the floor. “This is nuts. The whole thing.”

Jack picked up the cracker, seemed to consider eating it, then put it aside. Perhaps he had decided eating crackers off a Florida room floor violated another man-law. Probably it did. There are so many.

I said to Wireman, “When you come back from the funeral parlor tonight, you check in on me, okay? ”

“Yes.”

“If I tell you I’m fine, to just go on home, you do it.”

“Don’t interrupt you if you’re communing with your muse. Or the spirits.”

I nodded, because he wasn’t that far off. Then I turned to Jack. “And you’re staying at El Palacio while Wireman’s at the funeral parlor, right? ”

“Sure, if that’s what you guys want.” He looked a little uneasy about it, and I didn’t blame him. It was a big house, Elizabeth had lived in it a long time, and it was where her memory was freshest. I would have been uneasy, too, if I hadn’t been sure the spooks on Duma Key were elsewhere.

“If I call you, come on the run.”

“I will. Call me on the house phone or my cell phone.”

“You sure your cell phone’s working? ”

He looked slightly shamefaced. “Battery was a little flat, is all. I got it charged in my car.”

Wireman said, “I wish I understood better why you feel like you have to keep fooling with this, Edgar.”

“Because it’s not over. For years it was. For years Elizabeth lived here very quietly, first with her father and then on her own. She had her charities, she had her friends, she played tennis, she played bridge — so Mary Ire told me — and most of all, she had the Suncoast art scene. It was the quiet, rewarding life of an elderly woman with lots of money and few bad habits other than her cigarettes. Then things started to change. La loterí a. You said it yourself, Wireman.”

“You really think something’s been making all this happen, ” he said. Not with disbelief; with awe.

“It’s what you believe, ” I said.

“Sometimes I do. It isn’t what I want to believe. That there’s something with a reach so long… with eyesight keen enough to see you… me… God knows who or what else…”

“I don’t like it either, ” I said, but that was far from the truth. The truth was I hated it. “I don’t like the idea that something may have actually reached out and killed Elizabeth — maybe scared her to death — just to shut her up.”

“And you think you can find out what’s going on from those pictures.”

“Some, yes. How much I won’t know until I try.”

“And then? ”

“It depends. Almost certainly a trip to the south end of the Key. There’s unfinished business there.”

Jack put down his tea-glass. “What unfinished business? ”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Her pictures may tell me.”

“Just as long as you don’t get in over your head and discover you can’t get back to shore, ” Wireman said. “That’s what happened to those two little girls.”

“I know it, ” I said.

Jack pointed his finger at me. “Take care of yourself. Man-law.”

I nodded and pointed back. “Man-law.”