The End of the Game

I

Wireman offered a Lunesta to help me sleep. I was sorely tempted, but declined. I took one of the silver harpoons, however, and Wireman did likewise. With his hairy belly sloping slightly over his blue boxers and one of John Eastlake’s specialty items in his right hand, he looked like some amusing Real Guy version of Cupid. The wind had gotten up even higher; it roared along the sides of the house and whistled around the corners.

“Bedroom doors open, right? ” he asked.

“Check.”

“And if something happens in the night, holler like hell.”

“Roger that, Houston. You do the same.”

“Is Jack going to be all right, Edgar? ”

“If he burns the sketch, he’ll be fine.”

“You doing okay with what happened to your friends? ”

Kamen, who taught me to think sideways. Tom, who had told me not to give up the home field advantage. Was I doing okay with what happened to my friends.

Well, yes and no. I felt sad and stunned, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I also felt a certain low and slinking relief; humans are, in some ways, such complete shits. Because Kamen and Tom, although close, stood just outside the charmed circle of those who really mattered to me. Those people Perse hadn’t been able to touch. And if we moved fast, Kamen and Tom would be our only casualties.

“ Muchacho? ”

“Yeah, ” I said, feeling called back from a great distance. “Yeah, I’m okay. Call me if you need me, Wireman, and don’t hesitate. I don’t expect to get many winks.”

Ii

I lay looking up at the ceiling with the silver harpoon beside me on the bedtable. I listened to the steady rush of the wind and the steady tumble of the surf. I remember thinking, This is going to be a long night. Then sleep took me.

I dreamed of little Libbit’s sisters. Not the Big Meanies; the twins.

The twins were running.

The big boy was chasing them.

It had TEEF.

Iii

I woke with most of my body on the floor but one leg — my left — still propped on the bed and fast asleep. Outside, the wind and surf continued to roar. Inside, my heart was pounding almost as hard as the waves breaking on the beach. I could still see Tessie going down — drowning while those soft and implacable hands clasped her calves. It was perfectly clear, a hellish painting inside my head.

But it wasn’t the dream of the little girls fleeing the frog-thing that was making my heart pound, not the dream that caused me to wake up on the floor with my mouth tasting like copper and every nerve seeming to burn. It was, rather, the way you wake from a bad dream realizing that you forgot something important: to turn off the stove, for instance, and now the house is filled with the smell of gas.

I pulled my foot off the bed and it hit the floor in a burst of pins and needles. I rubbed it, grimacing. At first it was like rubbing a block of wood, but then that numb sensation started to leave. The sensation that I’d forgotten something vital did not.

But what? I had some hopes that our expedition to the south end of the Key might put an end to the whole nasty, festering business. The biggest hurdle, after all, was belief itself, and as long as we didn’t backslide in the bright Florida sunshine tomorrow, we were over that one. It was possible we might see upside-down birds, or that a gigantic hop-frog monstrosity like the one in my dream might try to bar our way, but I had an idea those were essentially wraiths — excellent for dealing with six-year-old girls, not so good against grown men, especially when armed with silver-tipped harpoons.

And, of course, I would have my pad and pencils.

I thought Perse was now afraid of me and my newfound talent. Alone, still not recovered from my near-death experience (still suicidal, in fact), I might have been an asset instead of a problem. Because in spite of all his big talk, that Edgar Freemantle really hadn’t had another life; that Edgar had just switched the backdrop of his invalid’s existence from pines to palms. But once I had friends again… saw what was all around me and reached out to it…

Then I’d become dangerous. I don’t know exactly what she had in mind — other than regaining her place in the world, that is — but she must have thought that when it came to mischief-making, the potential for a talented one-armed artist was great. I could have sent poison paintings all over the globe, by God! But now I had turned in her hand, just as Libbit had. Now I was something first to be stopped, then discarded.

“You’re a little late for that, bitch, ” I whispered.

So why did I still smell gas?

The paintings — especially the most dangerous ones, the Girl and Ship series — were safely under lock and key, and off-island, just as Elizabeth had wished. According to Pam, nobody in our circle of family and friends had taken sketches except for Bozie, Tom, and Xander Kamen. It was too late for Tom and Kamen, and I’d have given a great deal to change that, but Bozie had promised to burn his, so that was all right. Even Jack was covered, because he’d owned up to his little act of thievery. It had been smart of Wireman to ask him, I thought. I was only surprised he hadn’t asked if I’d given Jack some artwork myse —

My breath turned to glass in my throat. Now I knew what I’d forgotten. Now, in this deep crease of the night with the wind roaring outside. I’d been so fixated on the goddam show that I’d never thought much about who I might have given work to before the show.

Can I have it?

My memory, still apt to be so balky, sometimes surprised me with bursts of Technicolor brilliance. It provided one now. I saw Ilse standing barefoot in Little Pink, dressed in shorts and a shell top. She was standing by my easel. I had to ask her to move so I could see the picture she was so taken with. The picture I didn’t even remember doing.

Can I have it?

When she stood aside, I saw a little girl in a tennis dress. Her back was turned, but she was the focus of the picture. The red hair marked her as Reba, my little love, that girlfriend from my other life. Yet she was also Ilse — Rowboat Ilse — and Elizabeth’s big sister Adriana as well, for that was Adie’s tennis dress, the one with the fine blue loops along the hem. (I couldn’t know this, but I did; it was news that had come whispering up from Elizabeth’s pictures — pictures done when she was still known as Libbit.)

Can I have it? This is the one I want.

Or the one something wanted her to want.

I tried Ilse, Pam had said. I wasn’t sure I’d reach her, but she just got in.

All around the doll-girl’s feet were tennis balls. Others floated shoreward on the mild waves.

She sounded tired, but she’s okay.

Was she? Was she really? I had given her that damned picture. She was my Miss Cookie, and I could refuse her nothing. I had even named it for her, because she said artists had to name their pictures. The End of the Game, I’d told her, and now that clanged in my head like a bell.

Iv

There was no phone extension in the guest bedroom, so I crept out into the hall with my silver harpoon clutched in one hand. In spite of my need to get through to Ilse as soon as possible, I took a moment to peer in through the open doorway across the hall. Wireman was lying on his back like a beached whale, snoring peacefully. His own silver harpoon was beside him, along with a glass of water.

I went past the family portrait, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. Here the rush of the wind and the roar of the surf was louder than ever. I picked up the phone and heard… nothing.

Of course. Did you think Perse would neglect the phones?

Then I looked at the handset and saw buttons for two lines. In the kitchen, at least, just picking up the phone wasn’t enough. I said a little prayer under my breath, pushed the button marked LINE 1, and was rewarded with a dial tone. I moved my thumb to the button, then realized I couldn’t remember Ilse’s telephone number. My address book was back at Big Pink, and her telephone number had gone entirely out of my head.

V

The phone began to make a sirening sound. It was small — I had laid the handset down on the counter — but it seemed loud in the shadowy kitchen, and it made me think of bad things. Police cars responding to acts of violence. Ambulances rushing to the scenes of accidents.

I pushed the cut-off button, then leaned my head against the chilly brushed-steel front of El Palacio ’s big refrigerator. In front of me was a magnet reading FAT IS THE NEW THIN. Right, and dead was the new alive. Next to the magnet was a magnetized pad-holder and a stub of pencil on a string.

I pushed the LINE 1 button again and dialed 411. The automated operator welcomed me to Verizon Directory Assistance and asked me for city and state. I said “Providence, Rhode Island, ” enunciating as though on stage. So far, so good, but the robot choked on Ilse no matter how carefully I enunciated. It rolled me over to a human operator, who checked and told me what I had already suspected: Ilse’s number was unpublished. I told the operator I was calling my daughter, and the call was important. The operator said I could talk to a supervisor, who would probably be willing to make an enquiry call on my behalf, but not until eight AM eastern time. I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was 2: 04.

I hung up and closed my eyes. I could wake up Wireman, see if he had Ilse in his little red address book, but I had a gnawing intuition even that might take too long.

“I can do this, ” I said, but with no real hope.

Of course you can, Kamen said. What is your weight?

It was a hundred and seventy-four, up from an all-time adult low of one-fifty. I saw these numbers in my mind: 174150. The numbers were red. Then five of them turned green, one after the other. Without opening my eyes, I seized the stub of the pencil and wrote them on the pad: 40175.

And what is your Social Security number? Kamen enquired further.

It appeared in darkness, bright red numbers. Four of them turned green, and I added them to what I had already scrawled. When I opened my eyes I had printed 401759082 in a drunken, downward-tending sprawl on the pad.

It was right, I recognized it, but I was still missing a number.

It doesn’t matter, the Kamen inside my head told me. Keypad phones are an amazing gift to the memory-challenged. If you clear your mind and punch what you already have, you’ll hit the last number with no problem. It’s muscle memory.

Hoping he was right, I opened LINE 1 again and punched in the area code for Rhode Island and then 759–082. My finger never hesitated. It punched the last number, and somewhere in Providence, a phone began to ring.

Vi

“Hel-lo? … Who… zit? ”

For a moment I was sure I’d blown the number after all. The voice was female, but sounded older than my daughter. Much. And medicated. But I resisted my initial impulse to say “Wrong number” and hang up. She sounded tired, Pam had said, but if this was Ilse, she sounded more than tired; she sounded weary unto death.

“Ilse? ”

No answer for a long time. I began to think the disembodied someone in Providence had hung up. I realized I was sweating, and heavily enough so I could smell myself, like a monkey on a branch. Then the same little refrain:

“Hel-lo? … Who… zit? ”

“Ilse! ”

Nothing. I sensed her getting ready to hang up. Outside the wind was roaring and the surf was pounding.

“Miss Cookie! ” I shouted. “Miss Cookie, don’t you dare hang up this phone! ”

That got through. “Dad… dee? ” There was a world of wonder in that broken word.

“Yeah, honey — Dad.”

“If you’re really Daddy…” A long pause. I could see her in her own kitchen, barefoot (as she had been that day in Little Pink, looking at the picture of the doll and the floating tennis balls), head down, hair hanging around her face. Distracted, maybe almost to the point of madness. And for the first time I began to hate Perse as well as fear her.

“Ilse… Miss Cookie… I want you to listen to me—”

“Tell me my screen name.” There was a certain shocked cunning in the voice now. “If you’re really my Daddy, tell me my screen name.”

And if I didn’t, I realized, she’d hang up. Because something had been at her. Something had been fooling her, pawing her over, drawing its webs around her. Only not an it. She.

Illy’s screen name.

For a moment I couldn’t remember that, either.

You can do this, Kamen said, but Kamen was dead.

“You’re not… my Daddy, ” said the distracted girl on the other end of the line, and again she was on the verge of hanging up.

Think sideways, Kamen advised calmly.

Even then, I thought, without knowing why I was thinking it. Even then, even later, even now, even so —

“You’re not my Daddy, you’re her, ” Ilse said. That drugged and dragging voice, so unlike her. “My Daddy’s dead. I saw it in a dream. Goodb—”

“ If so! ” I shouted, not caring if I woke Wireman or not. Not even thinking about Wireman. “ You’re If-So-Girl! ”

A long pause from the other end. Then: “What’s the rest of it? ”

I had another moment of horrible blankness, and then I thought: Alicia Keyes, keys on a piano —

“88, ” I said. “You’re If-So-Girl88.”

There was a long, long pause. It seemed forever. Then she began to cry.

Vii

“Daddy, she said you were dead. That was the one thing I believed. Not just because I dreamed it but because Mom called and said Tom died. I dreamed you were sad and walked into the Gulf. I dreamed the undertow took you and you drowned.”

“I didn’t drown, Ilse. I’m okay, I promise you.”

The story came out in fragments and bursts, interrupted by tears and digressions. It was clear to me that hearing my voice had steadied her but not cured her. She was wandering, strangely unfixed in time; she referred to the show at the Scoto as if it had occurred at least a week ago, and interrupted herself once to tell me that a friend of hers had been arrested for “cropping.” This made her laugh wildly, as if she were drunk or stoned. When I asked her what cropping was, she told me it didn’t matter. She said it might even have been part of her dream. Now she sounded sober again. Sober… but not right. She said the she was a voice in her head, but it also came from the drains and the toilet.

Wireman came in at some point during our conversation, turned on the kitchen fluorescents, and sat down at the table with his harpoon in front of him. He said nothing, only listened to my end.

Ilse said she had begun to feel strange — “eerie-feary” was what she actually said — from the first moment she came back into her apartment. At first it was just a spaced-out feeling, but soon she was experiencing nausea, as well — the kind she’d felt the day we had tried to prospect south along Duma Key’s only road. It had gotten worse and worse. A woman spoke to her from the sink, told her that her father was dead. Ilse said she’d gone out for a walk to clear her head after that, but decided to come right back.

“It must be those Lovecraft stories I read for my Senior English Project, ” she said. “I kept thinking someone was following me. That woman.”

Back in the apartment, she’d started to cook some oatmeal, thinking it might settle her stomach, but the very sight of it when it started to thicken nauseated her — every time she stirred it, she seemed to see things in it. Skulls. The faces of screaming children. Then a woman’s face. The woman had too many eyes, Ilse said. The woman in the oatmeal said her father was dead and her mother didn’t know yet, but when she did, she would have a party.

“So I went and lied down, ” she said, unconsciously reverting to the diction of childhood, “and that’s when I dreamed the woman was right and you were dead, Daddy.”

I thought of asking her when her mother had called, but I doubted if she’d remember, and it didn’t matter, anyway. But, my God, hadn’t Pam sensed anything wrong besides tiredness, especially in light of my phone call? Was she deaf? Surely I wasn’t the only one who could hear this confusion in Ilse’s voice, this weariness. But maybe she hadn’t been so bad when Pam called. Perse was powerful, but that didn’t mean it still didn’t take her time to work. Especially at a distance.

“Ilse, do you still have the picture I gave you? The one of the little girl and the tennis balls? The End of the Game, I called it.”

“That’s another funny thing, ” she said. I had a sense of her trying to be coherent, the way a drunk pulled over by a traffic cop will try to sound sober. “I meant to get it framed, but I didn’t get around to it, so I tacked it on the wall of the big room with a Pushpin. You know, the living room/kitchen. I gave you tea there.”

“Yes.” I’d never been in her Providence apartment.

“Where I could look… look at it… but then when I camed back… hnn…”

“Are you going to sleep? Don’t go to sleep on me, Miss Cookie.”

“Not sleeping…” But her voice was fading.

“Ilse! Wake up! Wake the fuck up! ”

“Daddy! ” Sounding shocked. But also fully awake again.

“What happened to the picture? What was different about it when you came back? ”

“It was in the bed’oom. I guess I must have moved it myself — it’s even stuck on the same red Pushpin — but I don’t remember doing it. I guess I wanted it closer to me. Isn’t that funny? ”

No, I didn’t think it was funny.

“I wouldn’t want to live if you were dead, Daddy, ” she said. “I’d want to be dead, too. As dead as… as… as dead as a marble! ” And she laughed. I thought of Wireman’s daughter and did not.

“Listen to me carefully, Ilse. It’s important that you do as I say. Will you do that? ”

“Yes, Daddy. As long as it doesn’t take too long. I’m…” The sound of a yawn. “… tired. I might be able to sleep, now that I know you’re all right.”

Yes, she’d be able to sleep. Right under The End of the Game, hanging from its red Pushpin. And she’d wake up thinking that the dream had been this conversation, the reality her father’s suicide on Duma Key.

Perse had done this. That hag. That bitch.

The rage was back, just like that. As if it had never been away. But I couldn’t let it fuck up my thinking; couldn’t even let it show in my voice, or Ilse might think it was aimed at her. I clamped the phone between my ear and shoulder. Then I reached out and grasped the slim chrome neck of the sink faucet. I closed my fist around it.

“This won’t take long, hon. But you have to do it. Then you can go to sleep.”

Wireman sat perfectly still at the table, watching me. Outside, the surf hammered.

“What kind of stove do you have, Miss Cookie? ”

“Gas. Gas stove.” She laughed again.

“Good. Get the picture and throw it in the oven. Then close the door and turn the oven on. High as it will go. Burn that thing.”

“No, Daddy! ” Wide awake again, as shocked as when I’d said fuck, if not more so. “I love that picture! ”

“I know, honey, but it’s the picture that’s making you feel the way you do.” I started to say something else, then stopped. If it was the sketch — and it was, of course it was — then I wouldn’t need to hammer it home. She’d know as well as I did. Instead of speaking I throttled the faucet back and forth, wishing with all my heart it was the bitch-hag’s throat.

“Daddy! Do you really think—”

“I don’t think, I know. Get the picture, Ilse. I’m going to hold the phone. Get it and stick it in the oven and burn it. Do it right now.”

“I… okay. Hold on.”

There was a clunk as the phone went down.

Wireman said, “Is she doing it? ”

Before I could reply, there was a snap. It was followed by a spout of cold water that drenched me to the elbow. I looked at the faucet in my hand, then at the ragged place where it had broken off. I dropped it in the sink. Water was spouting from the stump.

“I think she is, ” I said. And then: “Sorry.”

“ De nada. ” He dropped to his knees, opened the cupboard beneath the sink, reached in past the wastebasket and the stash of garbage bags. He turned something, and the gusher spouting from the broken faucet started to die. “You don’t know your own strength, muchacho. Or maybe you do.”

“Sorry, ” I said again. But I wasn’t. My palm was bleeding from a shallow cut, but I felt better. Clearer. It occurred to me that once upon a time, that faucet could have been my wife’s neck. No wonder she had divorced me.

We sat in the kitchen and waited. The second hand on the clock above the stove made one very slow trip around the dial, started another. The water coming from the broken faucet was down to a bare rivulet. Then, very faintly, I heard Ilse, calling: “I’m back… I’ve got it… I—” Then she screamed. I couldn’t tell if it was surprise, pain, or both.

“Ilse! ” I shouted. “Ilse! ”

Wireman stood up fast, bumping his hip against the side of the sink. He raised his open hands to me. I shook my head — Don’t know. Now I could feel sweat running down my cheeks, although the kitchen wasn’t particularly warm.

I was wondering what to do next — who to call — when Ilse came back on the phone. She sounded exhausted. She also sounded like herself. Finally like herself. “Jesus Christ in the morning, ” she said.

“What happened? ” I had to restrain myself from shouting. “Illy, what happened? ”

“It’s gone. It caught fire and burned. I watched it through the window. It’s nothing but ashes. I have to get a Band-Aid on the back of my hand, Dad. You were right. There was something really, really wrong with it.” She laughed shakily. “Damn thing didn’t want to go in. It folded itself over and…” That shaky laugh again. “I’d call it a paper-cut, but it doesn’t look like a paper-cut, and it didn’t feel like one. It feels like a bite. I think it bit me.”

Viii

The important thing for me was that she was all right. The important thing for her was that I was. We were fine. Or so the foolish artist thought. I told her I’d call tomorrow.

“Illy? One more thing.”

“Yes, Dad.” She sounded totally awake and in charge of herself again.

“Go to the stove. Is there an oven light? ”

“Yes.”

“Turn it on. Tell me what you see.”

“You’ll have to hold on, then — the cordless is in the bedroom.”

There was another pause, shorter. Then she came back and said, “Ashes.”

“Good, ” I said.

“Daddy, what about the rest of your pictures? Are they all like this one? ”

“I’m taking care of it, honey. It’s a story for another day.”

“All right. Thank you, Daddy. You’re still my hero. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

That was the last time we spoke, and neither of us knew. We never know, do we? At least we ended by exchanging our love. I have that. It’s not much, but it’s something. Others have it worse. I tell myself that on the long nights when I can’t sleep.

Others have it worse.

Ix

I slumped down across from Wireman and propped my head on my hand. “I’m sweating like a pig.”

“Busting Miss Eastlake’s sink might’ve had something to do with that.”

“I’m sor—”

“Say it again and I’ll smack you, ” he said. “You did fine. It’s not every man who gets to save his daughter’s life. Believe me when I say that I envy you. Do you want a beer? ”

“I’d throw it up all over the table. Got milk? ”

He checked the fridge. “No milk, but we are go for Half-n-Half.”

“Give me a shot of that.”

“You’re a sick, sick puppydick, Edgar.” But he gave me a shot of Half-n-Half in a juice glass, and I tossed it off. Then we went back upstairs, moving slowly, clutching our stubby silver-tipped arrows like aging jungle warriors.

I went back into the guest bedroom, lay down, and once more gazed up at the ceiling. My hand hurt, but that was okay. She’d cut hers; I’d cut mine. It fit, somehow.

The table is leaking, I thought.

Drown her to sleep, I thought.

And something else — Elizabeth had said something else, as well. Before I could remember what it was, I remembered something much more important: Ilse had burned The End of the Game in her gas oven and had suffered no more than a cut — or maybe a bite — on the back of her hand.

Should have told her to disinfect that, I thought. Should disinfect mine, too.

I slept. And this time there was no giant dream-frog to warn me.

X

A thud woke me as the sun was rising. The wind was still up — higher than ever — and it had blown one of Wireman’s beach chairs against the side of the house. Or maybe the gay umbrella beneath which we had shared our first drink — iced green tea, very cooling.

I pulled on my jeans and left everything else lying on the floor, including the harpoon with the silver tip. I didn’t think Emery Paulson would be back to visit me, not by daylight. I checked on Wireman, but that was only a formality; I could hear him snoring and whistling away. He was once more on his back, arms thrown wide.

I went downstairs to the kitchen and shook my head over the broken faucet and the juice glass with the dried Half-n-Half scum on its sides. I found a bigger glass in a cupboard and filled it with oj. I took it out on the back porch. The wind blowing in from the Gulf was strong but warm, lifting my sweaty hair back from my brow and temples. It felt good. Soothing. I decided to walk to the beach and drink my juice there.

I stopped three-quarters of the way down the boardwalk, about to take a sip of my juice. The glass was tipped, and some of it splattered on one bare foot. I barely noticed.

Out there on the Gulf, riding in toward shore on one of the large, wind-driven waves, was a bright green tennis ball.

It means nothing, I told myself, but that wouldn’t hold water. It meant everything, and I knew it from the moment I saw it. I tossed the glass into the sea oats and broke into a lunging lurch — the Edgar Freemantle version of running that year.

It took me fifteen seconds to reach the end of the boardwalk, maybe even less, but in that time I saw three more tennis balls floating in on the tide. Then six, then eight. Most were off to my right — to the north.

I wasn’t watching where I was going and plunged off the end of the boardwalk into thin air, arms whirling. I hit the sand still running and might have stayed up if I’d landed on my good leg, but I didn’t. A zigzag of pain corkscrewed up my bad one, shin to knee to hip, and I went sprawling in the sand. Six inches in front of my nose was one of those damned tennis balls, its fuzz soaked flat.

DUNLOP was printed on the side, the letters as black as damnation.

I struggled to my feet, looking wildly out at the Gulf. There were only a few incoming balls in front of El Palacio, but farther north, near Big Pink, I saw a green flotilla — a hundred at least, probably many more.

It means nothing. She’s safe. She burned the picture and she’s asleep in her apartment a thousand miles from here, safe and sound.

“It means nothing, ” I said, but now the wind blowing my hair back felt cold instead of warm. I began to limp toward Big Pink, down where the sand was wet and packed and shining. The peeps flew up in front of me in clouds. Every now and then an incoming wave would drop a tennis ball at my feet. There were lots of them now, scattered on the wet hardpack. Then I came to a burst-open crate reading Dunlop Tennis Balls and FACTORY REJECTS NO CANS. It was surrounded by floating, bobbing tennis balls.

I broke into a run.

Xi

I unlocked the door and left my keys hanging in the lock. Lurched to the phone and saw the message light blinking. I pushed the PLAY button. The robot’s expressionless male voice told me that this message had been received at 6: 48 AM, which meant I had missed it by less than half an hour. Then Pam’s voice burst out of the speaker. I bent my head, the way you’d bend your head to try and keep a burst of jagged glass fragments from flying directly into your face.

“Edgar, the police called and they say Illy’s dead! They say a woman named Mary Ire came to her apartment and killed her! One of your friends! One of your art friends from Florida has killed our daughter! ” She burst into a storm of harsh and ugly weeping… then laughed. It was horrible, that laugh. I felt as if one of those flying shards of glass had cut into my face. “Call me, you bastard. Call and explain yourself. You said she’d be SAFE! ”

Then more crying. It was cut off by a click. Next came the hum of an open line.

I reached out and pushed the OFF button, silencing it.

I walked into the Florida room and looked at the tennis balls, still bobbing in on the waves. I felt doubled, like a man watching a man.

The dead twins had left a message in my studio — Where our sister? Had Illy been the sister they meant?

I could almost hear the hag laughing and see her nodding.

“Are you here, Perse? ” I asked.

The wind rushed in through the screens. The waves crashed on the shore with metronome-like regularity. Birds flew over the water, crying. On the beach I could see another burst-open tennis ball crate, already half-buried in the sand. Treasure from the sea; fair salvage from the caldo. She was watching, all right. Waiting for me to break down. I was quite sure of it. Her — what? her guardians? — might sleep in the daytime, but not her.

“I win, you win, ” I said. “But you think you got your lasties, don’t you? Clever Perse.”

Of course she was clever. She’d been playing the game for a long time. I had an idea she’d been old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt. Sometimes she slept, but now she was awake.

And her reach was long.

My phone began to ring. I went back in, still feeling like two Edgars, one earthbound, the other floating above the earthbound Edgar’s head, and picked it up. It was Dario. He sounded upset.

“Edgar? What’s this shit about not releasing the paintings to—”

“Not now, Dario, ” I said. “Hush.” I broke the connection and called Pam. Now that I wasn’t thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

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.