Duma Key (76 page)

“Is that a rat?” Wireman asked.

“Big ole blind woodchuck,” Noveen said. “Same thing as Charley, really. She got Libbit to draw it in the breadbox, and it
was
in the breadbox. A joke. Libbit 'us sorry, but the bad water-woman? Nuh-
uh
. She
never
sorry.”

“And Elizabeth—Libbit—
had
to draw,” I said. “Didn't she?”

“You know
dat,
” Noveen said. “Don't you?”

I did. Because the gift is hungry.

viii

Once upon a time, a little girl fell and did her head wrong in just the right way. And that allowed something—something female—to reach out and make contact with her. The amazing drawings that followed had been the come-on, the carrot dangling at the end of the stick. There had been smiling horses and troops of rainbow-colored frogs. But once Perse was out—what had Noveen said?—sugar-candy was mos'ly done. Libbit Eastlake's talent had turned in her hand like a knife. Except it was no longer really
her
hand. Her father didn't know. Adie was gone. Maria
and Hannah were away at the Braden School. The twins couldn't understand. But Nan Melda began to suspect, and . . .

I flipped back and looked at the little girl with the finger on her lips.

She's listening, so shhhh. If you talk, she'll hear, so shhhh. Bad things can happen, and worse things are waiting. Terrible things in the Gulf, waiting to drown you and take you to a ship where
you'll live something that's not life. And if I try to tell? Then the bad things may happen to all of us, and all at once.

Wireman was perfectly still beside me. Only his eyes moved, sometimes looking at Noveen, sometimes looking at the pallid arm that flickered in and out of view on the right side of my body.

“But there was a safe place, wasn't there?” I asked. “A place where she could talk. Where?”

“You know,” Noveen said.

“No, I—”

“Yessir, you do. You sho do. You only forgot awhile. Draw it and you see.”

Yes, she was right. Drawing was how I'd reinvented myself. In that way, Libbit

(
where our sister
)

was my kin. For both of us, drawing was how we remembered how to remember.

I flipped to a clean sheet. “Do I have to use one of her pencils?” I asked.

“Not no mo. You be fine with any.”

So I rummaged in my pack, found my Indigo, and began drawing. I drew the Eastlake swimming pool with no hesitation—it was like giving up thought and allowing muscle memory to punch in a phone number. I drew it as it had been when it had been
bright and new and full of clean water. The pool, where for some reason Perse's hold slipped and her hearing failed.

I drew Nan Melda, up to her shins, and Libbit up to her waist, with Noveen tucked under her arm and her pinafore floating around her. Words floated out of my strokes.

Where yo new doll now? The china doll?

In my special treasure-box. My heart-box.

So it
had
been there, at least for awhile.

And what her name?

Her name is Perse.

Percy a boy's name.

And Libbit, firm and sure:
I
can't help it. Her name is Perse.

All right den. And you say she
can't hear us here.

I
don't think so
 . . .

That's good. You say you c'n make things come. But listen to me, child
—

ix

“Oh my God,” I said. “It wasn't Elizabeth's idea. It was
never
Elizabeth's idea. We should have known.”

I looked up from the picture I had drawn of Nan Melda and Libbit standing in the pool. I realized, in a distant way, that I was very hungry.

“What are you talking about, Edgar?” Wireman asked.

“Getting rid of Perse was Nan Melda's idea.” I turned to Noveen, still sitting on Jack's knee. “I'm right, aren't I?”

Noveen said nothing, so I passed my right hand
over the figures in my swimming-pool drawing. For a moment I saw that hand, long fingernails and all.

“Nanny didn't know no better,” Noveen said an instant later from Jack's leg. “And Libbit be trustin Nanny.”

“Of course she did,” Wireman said. “Melda was almost the child's mother.”

I had visualized the drawing and erasing as happening in Elizabeth's room, but now I knew better. It had happened at the pool. Perhaps even
in
the pool. Because the pool had been, for some reason, safe. Or so little Libbit had believed.

Noveen said, “It din' make Perse gone, but it sholy did get her attention. I think it
hoit
dat bitch.” The voice sounded tired now, croaky, and I could see Jack's Adam's apple sliding up and down in his throat again. “I
hope
it did!”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably it did. So . . . what came next?” But I knew. Not the details, but I knew. The logic was grim and irrefutable. “Perse took her revenge on the twins. And Elizabeth and Nan Melda knew. They knew what they did. Nan Melda knew what
she
did.”

“She knew,” Noveen said. It was still a female voice, but it was edging closer to Jack's all the time. Whatever the spell was, it wouldn't hold much longer. “She held on until the Mister found their tracks down on Shade Beach—tracks goin into the water—but after that she couldn't hold on no longer. She felt she got her babby-uns killed.”

“Did she see the ship?” I asked.

“Seen it that night. You cain't see that boat at night and not believe.”

I thought of my
Girl and Ship
paintings and knew that was the truth.

“But even before the Mister rung the high sheriff on the s'change to say his twins was missin and probably drownded, Perse done spoke to Libbit. Tole her how it was. An' Libbit tole Nanny.”

The doll slumped, its round cookie-face seeming to study the heart-shaped box from which it had been exhumed.

“Told her what, Noveen?” Wireman asked. “I don't understand.”

Noveen said nothing. Jack, I thought, looked exhausted even though he hadn't moved at all.

I answered for Noveen. “Perse said, ‘Try to get rid of me again and the twins are just the beginning. Try again and I'll take your whole family, one by one, and save you for last.' Isn't that right?”

Jack's fingers flexed. Noveen's rag head nodded slowly up and down.

Wireman licked his lips. “That doll,” he said. “Exactly whose ghost is it?”

“There are no ghosts here, Wireman,” I said.

Jack moaned.

“I don't know what he's been doing,
amigo,
but he's done,” Wireman said.

“Yes, but we're not.” I reached for the doll—the one that had gone everywhere with the child artist. And as I did, Noveen spoke to me for the last time, in a voice that was half hers and half Jack's, as if both of them were struggling to come through at the same time.

“Nuh-uh, not
dat
hand—you need dat hand to draw wit'.”

And so I reached out the arm I used to lift Monica
Goldstein's dying dog out of the street six months ago, in another life and universe. I used that hand to grasp Elizabeth Eastlake's doll and lift it off Jack's knee.

“Edgar?” Jack said, straightening up. “Edgar, how in
hell
did you get your—”

—
arm back,
I suppose he said, but I don't know for sure; I didn't hear the finish. What I saw were those black eyes and that black maw of a mouth ringed with red. Noveen. All these years she had been down there in the double dark—under the stair and in the tin box—waiting to spill her secrets, and her lipstick had stayed fresh all the while.

Are you set?
she whispered inside my head, and that voice wasn't Noveen's, wasn't Nan Melda's (I was sure of that), wasn't even Elizabeth's; that was all Reba.
You all set and ready to draw, you nasty man? Are you ready to see the rest? Are you ready to see it all?

I wasn't . . . but I would have to be.

For Ilse.

“Show me your pictures,” I whispered, and that red mouth swallowed me whole.

Be prepared to see it all. If you want to create—God help you if you do, God help you if you can—don't you dare commit the immorality of stopping on the surface. Go deep and take your fair salvage. Do it no matter how much it hurts.

You can draw two little girls
—
twins
—
but anyone can do that.
Don't stop there just because the rest is a nightmare. Do not neglect to add the fact that they are standing thigh-deep in water that should be over their heads. A witness
—
Emery Paulson, for instance
—
could see this if he looked, but so many people
aren't prepared to see what is right in front of their eyes.

Until, of course, it's too late.

He's come down to the beach to smoke a cigar. He can do this on the back porch or on the veranda, but some strong compulsion has urged him down the rutted road Adie calls Drunkard's Boulevard and then down the steeper, sandy path to the beach. This voice has suggested his cigar will taste better here. He can sit on a fallen log the waves have cast up and watch the after-ashes of the sunset, as orange fades to tangerine and the stars go blue. The Gulf will look pleasant in such light, the voice suggests, even if the Gulf has had the bad taste to mark the beginning of his marriage by swallowing two of his beloved's little sisters.

But there's more to watch than just a sunset, it seems. There's a ship out there. It's an old-fashioned one, a pretty, slim-hulled thing with three masts and furled sails. Instead of sitting on the log, he walks down the beach to where the
dry sand becomes wet and firm and packed, marveling at that swallow-shape against the fading sunset. Some trick of the air makes it seem as if the day's last red is shining right through the hull.

He is thinking this when the first cry comes, chiming in his head like a silver bell:
Emery!

And then comes another:
Emery, help! The undertow! The rip!

That is when he sees the girls, and his heart gives a springing leap. It seems to rise all the way to his throat before falling back into place, where it dashes double-time. The unlit cigar tumbles from his fingers.

Two little girls, and they look just the same. They appear to be wearing identical jumpers, and although Emery should not be able to distinguish colors in this dying light, he can: one jumper is red, with an
L
on the front; the other is blue, with a
T
.

The rip!
the girl with the
T
on her jumper calls, holding out her arms in supplication.

The undertow!
calls the girl with the
L
.

And although neither girl appears to be in the slightest danger of drowning, Emery doesn't hesitate. His joy won't let him hesitate, nor his bright certainty that this is a miracle opportunity: when he turns up with the twins, his previously distant father-in-law will change his tune in a hurry. And the silver chimes those voices ring in his head, they urge him forward, too. He rushes to rescue Adie's sisters, to gather the lost girls in and splash with them to shore.

Emery!
That's Tessie, her eyes dark in her china-pale face . . . but her lips are
red.

Emery, hurry!
That's Laura, with her dripping white hands held out to him and her lank curls pasted against her white cheeks.

He cries
I'm coming, girls! Hold on!

Splashing toward them, now up to his shins, now his knees.

He cries
Fight it!
as though they are doing anything but standing there in water that is only thigh-deep on them, although he's now up to his own thighs and he's six feet and two inches tall.

The water of the Gulf
—
still chilly in mid-April
—
is up to his chest when he reaches them, when he reaches out to them, and when they seize him with hands that are stronger than any little girls' hands should be; by the time he's close enough to see the silvery gleam in their glazed eyes and smell the salty, dead-fish aroma coming from their rotting hair, it's too late. He struggles, his cries of joy and his entreaties to fight the undertow turning first to yells of protest and then to screams of horror, but by then it is far too late. The screams do not last long, in any case. Their small hands have become cold claws digging deep into his flesh as they pull him deeper, and the water fills his mouth, drowning his screams. He sees the ship against the last cold ashes of the sunset, and
—
how did he not see it before? how did he not know?
—
realizes it is a hulk, a plague ship, a deathship. Something is waiting for him there, something in a shroud, and he would scream if he could, but now the water fills his eyes and there are other hands, ones that feel like nothing but stripped radiations of bone, closing around his ankles. A talon pulls off a shoe, then tweaks a toe
 . . . 
as if it means to play “This little piggy went to market” with him as he drowns.

As Emery Paulson drowns.

i

Someone was yelling in the dark. It sounded like
Make him stop screaming
. Then there was a flat hard whacking sound and the dark lit up deep red, first on one side, then in the back. The red rolled toward the front of the darkness like a cloud of blood in water.