Duma Key

"Sure. Annmarie's got the duty until seven, although as a matter of practical fact, we share it most days. Why don't we walk up to the house? I've got a file. There isn't much in it, but there's at least one picture that's worth looking at. Chris Shannington had it in a box of his father's things. I walked up to the Casey Key Public Library with him and copied it." He paused. "It's a picture of Heron's Roost."

"As it was back then, you mean?"

We had started to stroll back up the boardwalk, but Wireman stopped. "No, amigo, you misunderstand. I'm talking about the original Heron's Roost. El Palacio is the second Roost, built almost twenty-five years after the little girls drowned. By then, John Eastlake's ten or twenty million had grown to a hundred and fifty million or so. War Is Good Business, Invest Your Son."

"Vietnam protest movement, 1969," I said. "Often seen in tandem with A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle."

"Good, amigo, " Wireman said. He waved a hand toward the riotous greenery that began just south of us. "The first Heron's Roost was out there, back when the world was young and flappers said poop-oopie-doop."

I thought of Mary Ire, not just tiddly or squiffy but downright drunk, saying Just the one house, sitting up there and looking like something you'd see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile.

"What happened to it?" I asked.

"So far as I know, nothing but time and decay," he said. "When John Eastlake gave up on recovering the bodies of his twins, he gave up on Duma Key, too. He paid off most of the help, packed his traps, took the three daughters who remained to him, got in his Rolls-Royce - he really had one - and drove away. A novel F. Scott Fitzgerald never wrote, that's what Chris Shannington said. Told me Eastlake was never at peace until Elizabeth brought him back here."

"Do you think that's something Shannington actually knows, or just a story he's gotten used to hearing himself tell?"

" Qui n sabe? " Wireman said. He stopped again and waved toward the southern end of Duma Key. "No overgrowth back then. You could see the original house from the mainland and vice-versa. And so far as I know, amigo, the house is still there. Whatever's left of it. Sitting and rotting." He reached the kitchen door and looked at me, unsmiling. " That would be something to paint, wouldn't it? A ghost-ship on dry land."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe it would."

viii

He took me into the library with the suit of armor in the corner and the museum-quality weapons on the wall. There, on the table next to the telephone, was a folder marked JOHN EASTLAKE/HERON'S ROOSTI. He opened it and removed a photograph showing a house that bore an unmistakable similarity to the one we were in - the similarity, say, of first cousins. Yet there was one basic difference between the two, and the similarities - the same basic footprint for both houses, I thought, and the same roof of bright orange Spanish tile - only underlined it.

The current Palacio hid from the world behind a high wall broken by only a single gate - there wasn't even a tradesman's entrance. It had a beautiful interior courtyard which few people other than Wireman, Annmarie, the pool girl, and the twice-weekly gardener ever saw; it was like the body of a beautiful woman hidden under a shapeless piece of clothing.

The first Heron's Roost was very different. Like Elizabeth's mansion in China Town, it featured half a dozen pillars and a broad, welcoming veranda. It had a wide drive sweeping boldly up to it, splitting what looked like two acres of lawn. Not a gravel drive, either, as Mary Ire had told me, but rosy crushed shells. The original had invited the world in. Its successor - El Palacio - told the world to stay the hell out. Ilse had seen that at once, and so had I, but that day we had been looking from the road. Since then my view had changed, and with good reason: I had gotten used to seeing it from the beach. To coming upon it from its unarmored side.

The first Heron's Roost had also been higher, three stories in front and four in back, so - if it really did stand on a rise, as Mary had said - people on the top floor would have had a breathtaking three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the Gulf, the mainland, Casey Key, and Don Pedro Island. Not bad. But the lawn looked strangely ragged - unkempt - and there were holes in the line of ornamental palms dancing like hula girls on either side of the house. I looked closer and saw that some of the upper windows had been boarded up. The roofline had a strangely unbalanced look, too. It took a second to realize why. There was a chimney at the east end. There should have been another at the west end, but there wasn't.

"Was this taken after they left?" I asked.

He shook his head. "According to Shannington, it was snapped in March of 1927, before the little girls drowned, when everyone was still happy and well. That isn't dilapidation you see, it's storm-damage. From an Alice."

"Which is what?"