Duma Key - Stephen King

"Did the father remarry?" I still couldn't remember his name.

Wireman helped me out. "John? No."

"You're not going to tell me he raised six girls out here. That's just too gothic."

"He tried, with the help of a nanny. But his eldest ran off with a boy. Miss Eastlake had an accident that almost killed her. And the twins..." He shook his head. "They were two years older than Elizabeth. In 1927 they disappeared. The presumption is they tried to go swimming, got swept away by an undertow, and drowned out there in the caldo grande."

We looked at the water for a little while - those deceptively mild waves running up the beach like puppies - and said nothing. Then I asked if Elizabeth had told him all of this.

"Some. Not all. And she's mixed up about what she does remember. I found a passing mention of an incident that had to be the right one on a Web site dedicated to Gulf coast history. Had a little e-mail correspondence with a guy who's a librarian in Tampa." Wireman raised his hands and waggled his fingers in a typing mime. "Tessie and Laura Eastlake. The librarian sent me a copy of the Tampa paper from April 19th, 1927. The headline on the front page is very stark, very bleak, very chilling. Three words. THEY ARE GONE."

"Jesus," I said.

"Six years old. Elizabeth would have been four, old enough to understand what had happened. Maybe old enough to read a newspaper headline as simple as THEY ARE GONE. The twins dead and Adriana, the oldest, eloped off to Atlanta with one of his plant managers... no wonder John had had enough of Duma for awhile. He and the remaining three moved to Miami. Many years later, he moved back here to die, and Miss Eastlake cared for him." Wireman shrugged. "Pretty much as I'm caring for her. So... do you see why an old lady with onset-Alzheimer's might consider Duma a bad place for daughters?"

"I guess so, but how does an old lady with onset-Alzheimer's find the phone number of her new tenant?"

Wireman gave me a sly look. "New tenant, old number, autodial function on all the phones back there." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Any other questions?"

I gaped at him. "She has me on autodial?"

"Don't blame me; I came in late on this movie-show. My guess is that the Realtor who handles things for her programmed the rental properties into the phones. Or maybe Miss Eastlake's business manager. He pops down from St. Petersburg every six weeks or so to make sure she's not dead and I'm not stealing the Spode. I'll ask him the next time he shows up."

"So she can call any house on the north end of the Key at the touch of a button."

"Well... yeah. I mean, they are all hers." He patted my hand. "But you know what, muchacho? I think your button is going to have a little nervous breakdown this evening."

"No," I said, not even thinking about it. "Don't do that."

"Ah," Wireman said, exactly as if he understood. And who knows, maybe he did. "Anyway, that explains your mystery caller - although I have to tell you, explanations have a way of thinning out on Duma Key. As your story demonstrates."

"What do you mean? Have you had... experiences?"

He looked at me squarely, his large tanned face inscrutable. The chilly late January wind gusted, blowing sand around our ankles. It also lifted his hair, once again revealing the coin-shaped scar above his right temple. I wondered if someone had poked him with the neck of a bottle, maybe in a bar fight, and tried to imagine someone getting mad at this man. It was hard to do.

"Yes, I've had... experiences, " he said, and hooked the first two fingers of each hand into little quotation marks. "It's what makes children into... adults. Also what gives English teachers something to bullshit about in first year... lit courses." Each time with the air-quotes.

Okay, he didn't want to talk about it, at least not then. So I asked him how much of my story he believed.

He rolled his eyes and sat back in his chair. "Don't try my patience, vato. You might be mistaken about a few things, but you ain't nuts. I got a lady up there... sweetest lady in the world and I love her, but sometimes she thinks I'm her Dad and it's Miami circa nineteen thirty-four. Sometimes she pops one of her china people into a Sweet Owen cookie-tin and tosses it into the koi pond behind the tennis court. I have to get em out when she naps, otherwise she pitches a bitch. No idea why. I think by this summer she may be wearing an adult didey full-time."

"Point?"

"The point is I know loco, I know Duma, and I'm getting to know you. I'm perfectly willing to believe you had a vision of your friend dead."

"No bullshit?"

"No bullshit. Verdad. The question is what you're going to do about it, assuming you're not eager to see him into the ground for - may I be vulgar? - buttering what used to be your loaf."

"I'm not. I did have this momentary thing... I don't know how to describe it..."

"Was it a momentary thing where you felt like chopping off his dick, then putting out his eyes with a hot toasting-fork? Was it that momentary thing, muchacho?" Wireman made the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a gun and pointed it at me. "I was married to a Mexican lassie, and I know jealousy. It's normal. Like a startle-reflex."

"Did your wife ever..." I stopped, suddenly aware all over again that I'd only met this man the day before. That was easy to forget. Wireman was intense.

"No, amigo, not to my knowledge. What she did was die on me." His face was perfectly expressionless. "Let's not go there, okay?"

"Okay."

"Thing to remember about jealousy is it comes, it goes. Like the afternoon showers down here during the mean season. You're over it, you say. You should be, because you ain't her campesino no more. The question is what you're going to do about this other thing. How you going to keep this guy from killing himself? Because you know what happens when the happy-family cruise is over, right?"

For a moment I said nothing. I was translating that last bit of Spanish, or trying to. You ain't her farmer no more, was that right? If so, it had a bitter ring of truth.

" Muchacho? Your next move?"

"I don't know," I said. "He's got e-mail, but what do I write to him? 'Dear Tom, I'm worried you're contemplating suicide, please reply soonest'? I bet he's not checking his e-mail while he's on vacation, anyway. He's got two ex-wives, and still pays alimony to one of them, but he's not close to either. There was one kid, but he died in infancy - spina bifida, I think - and... what? What? "

Wireman had turned away and sat slouched in his chair, looking out at the water, where pelicans were diving for their own high tea. His body English suggested disgust.

He turned back. "Quit squirming. You know damn well who knows him. Or you think you do."

"Pam? You mean Pam?"

He only looked at me.

"Are you going to talk, Wireman, or only sit there?"

"I have to check on my lady. She'll be up by now and she's going to want her four o'clockies."

"Pam would think I'm crazy! Hell, she still thinks I'm crazy!"

"Convince her." Then he relented a little. "Look, Edgar. If she's been as close to him as you think, she'll have seen the signs. And all you can do is try. Entiendes? "

"I don't understand what that means."

"It means call your wife."

"She's my ex."

"Nope. Until your mind changes, the divorce is just a legal fiction. That's why you give a shit what she thinks about your state of mind. But if you also care about this guy, you'll call her and tell her you have reason to think he's planning to highside it."

He heaved himself out of his chair, then held out his hand. "Enough palaver. Come on and meet the boss. You won't be sorry. As bosses go, she's a pretty nice one."

I took his hand and let him pull me out of what I presumed was a replacement beach chair. He had a strong grip. That was something else I'll never forget about Jerome Wireman; the man had a strong grip. The boardwalk up to the gate in the back wall was only wide enough for one, so I followed, limping gamely along. When he reached the gate - which was a smaller version of the one in front and looked as Spanish as Wireman's offhand patois - he turned toward me, smiling a little.

"Josie comes in to clean Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she's willing to keep an ear out for Miss Eastlake during her afternoon nap - which means I could come down and look at your pictures tomorrow afternoon around two, if that suits."

"How did you know I wanted you to? I was still working up the nerve to ask."

He shrugged. "It's pretty obvious you want someone to look before you show them to the guy at that gallery. Besides your daughter and the kid who runs your errands, that is."

"The appointment's on Friday. I'm dreading it."

Wireman waggled his hand in the air and smiled. "Don't worry," he said. He paused. "If I think your stuff is crap, I'm going to tell you so."

"That works."

He nodded. "Just wanted to be clear." Then he opened the gate and led me into the courtyard of Heron's Roost, also known as Palacio de Asesinos.

ii

I'd already seen the courtyard, on the day I'd used the front entrance to turn around, but on that day I'd gotten little more than a glance. I'd mostly been concentrating on getting myself and my ashen-faced, perspiring daughter back to Big Pink. I'd noticed the tennis court and the cool blue tiles, but had missed the koi pool entirely. The tennis court was swept and ready for action, its paved surface two shades darker than the courtyard tile. One turn of the chrome crank would bring the net taut and ready. A full basket of balls stood on wire stilts, and made me think briefly of the sketch Ilse had taken back to Providence with her: The End of the Game.

"One of these days, muchacho, " Wireman said, pointing at the court as we walked by. He had slowed down so I could catch up. "You and me. I'll take it easy on you - just volley-and-serve - but I hunger to swing a racket."

"Is volley-and-serve what you charge for evaluating pictures?"

He smiled. "I have a price, but that ain't it. Tell you later. Come on in."

iii

Wireman led me through the back door, across a dim kitchen with large white service islands and an enormous Westinghouse stove, then into the whispering interior of the house, which shone with dark woods - oak, walnut, teak, redwood, cypress. This was a Palacio, all right, old Florida style. We passed one book-lined room with an actual suit of armor brooding in the corner. The library connected with a study where paintings - not stodgy oil portraits but bright abstract things, even a couple of op-art eye-poppers - hung on the walls.

Light showered down on us like white rain as we walked the main hall ( Wireman walked; I limped), and I realized that, for all of the mansion's grandeur, this part of it was no more than a glorified dogtrot - the kind that separates sections of older and much humbler Florida dwellings. That style, almost always constructed of wood (sometimes scrapwood) rather than stone, even has a name: Florida Cracker.

This dogtrot, filled with light courtesy of its long glass ceiling, was lined with planters. At its far end, Wireman hung a right. I followed him into an enormous cool parlor. A row of windows gave on a side courtyard filled with flowers - my daughters could have named half of them, Pam all of them, but I could only name the asters, dayflowers, elderberry, and foxglove. Oh, and the rhododendron. There was plenty of that. Beyond the tangle, on a blue-tiled walk that presumably connected with the main courtyard, stalked a sharp-eyed heron. It looked both thoughtful and grim, but I never saw a one on the ground that didn't look like a Puritan elder considering which witch to burn next.

In the center of the room was the woman Ilse and I had seen on the day we tried exploring Duma Key Road. Then she'd been in a wheelchair, her feet clad in blue Hi-Tops. Today she was standing with her hands planted on the grips of a walker, and her feet - large and very pale - were bare. She was dressed in a high-waisted pair of beige slacks and a dark brown silk blouse with amusingly wide shoulders and full sleeves. It was an outfit that made me think of Katharine Hepburn in those old movies they sometimes show on Turner Classic Movies: Adam's Rib, or Woman of the Year. Only I couldn't remember Katharine Hepburn looking this old, even when she was old.

The room was dominated by a long, low table of the sort my father had had in the cellar for his electric trains, only this one was covered in some light wood - it looked like bamboo - rather than fake grass. It was crowded with model buildings and china figurines: men, women, children, barnyard animals, zoo animals, creatures of mythical renown. Speaking of mythical creatures, I saw a couple of fellows in blackface that wouldn't have passed muster with the N-double-A-C-P.

Elizabeth Eastlake looked at Wireman with an expression of sweet delight I would have enjoyed drawing... although I'm not sure anyone would have taken it seriously. I'm not sure we ever believe the simplest emotions in our art, although we see them all around us, every day.

"Wireman!" she said. "I woke up early and I've been having such a wonderful time with my chinas!" She had a deep southern-girl accent that turned chinas into CHA-nahs. "Look, the family's at home!"

At one end of the table was a model mansion. The kind with pillars. Think Tara in Gone With the Wind and you'll be fine. Or fahn, if you talk like Elizabeth. Around it were ranged almost a dozen figures, standing in a circle. The pose was strangely ceremonial.

"So they are," Wireman agreed.

"And the schoolhouse! See how I've put the children outside the schoolhouse! Do come see!"

"I will, but you know I don't like you to get up without me," he said.

"I didn't feel like calling on that old talkie-walkie. I'm really feeling very well. Come and see. Your new friend as well. Oh, I know who you are." She smiled and crooked a finger at me to come closer. "Wireman tells me all about you. You're the new fellow at Salmon Point."

"He calls it Big Pink," Wireman said.

She laughed. It was the cigarettey kind that dissolves into coughing. Wireman had to hurry forward and steady her. Miss Eastlake didn't seem to mind either the coughing or the steadying. "I like that!" she said when she was able. "Oh hon, I like that! Come and see my new schoolhouse arrangement, Mr...? I'm sure I've been told your name but it escapes me, so much does now, you are Mr...?"

"Freemantle," I said. "Edgar Freemantle."

I joined them at her play-table; she offered her hand. It wasn't muscular, but was, like her feet, of a good size. She hadn't forgotten the fine art of greeting, and gripped as well as she could. Also, she looked at me with cheerful interest as we shook. I liked her for her frank admission of memory troubles. And, Alzheimer's or not, I did far more mental and verbal stuttering than I'd seen so far from her.

"It's good to know you, Edgar. I have seen you before, but I don't recall when. It will come to me. Big Pink! That's sassy!"

"I like the house, ma'am."

"Good. I'm very glad if it gives satisfaction. It's an artist's house, you know. Are you an artist, Edgar?"

She was looking at me with her guileless blue eyes. "Yes," I said. It was the easiest, the quickest, and maybe it was the truth. "I guess I am."

"Of course you are, hon, I knew right away. I'll need one of your pictures. Wireman will strike a price with you. He's a lawyer as well as an excellent cook, did he tell you that?"