Duma Key

"And one day did. To everyone's sorrow." He swept the pictures back into the folder. "There's a story here, muchacho, and I suppose it's marginally more interesting than a little girl swallowing a marble, but a tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."

He brooded a moment.

"What probably happened is that one day in April of 1927, when Tessie and Laura were supposed to be napping, they decided to get up, sneak down the path, and go hunting for treasure at Shade Beach. Probably they meant to do no more than wade in as far as their knees, which is all they were permitted to do - one of the stories quotes John Eastlake as saying that, and Adriana backed him up."

"The married daughter who came back."

"Right. She and her new husband returned a day or two before the search for the bodies was officially called off. That's according to Shannington. Anyway, one of the little girls maybe saw something gleaming a little further out and started to flounder. Then-"

"Then her sister tried to save her." Yes, I could see it. Only I saw Lin and Ilse as they'd been when they were small. Not twins, but for three or four golden years nearly inseparable.

Wireman nodded. "And then the rip took em both. Had to've been that way, amigo; that's why the bodies weren't found. Off they went, heigh-ho for the caldo largo."

I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant by the rip, then remembered a painting by Winslow Homer, romantic but of undeniable power: Undertow.

The intercom on the wall beeped, startling us both. Wireman struck the folder with his arm as he turned around, knocking photocopies and faxes everywhere.

"Mr. Wireman!" It was Annmarie Whistler. "Mr. Wireman, are you there?"

"I'm here," Wireman said.

"Mr. Wireman?" She sounded agitated. Then, as if to herself: "Jesus, where are you?"

"The fucking button," he muttered, and went to the wall unit, not quite running. He pushed the button. "I'm here. What's wrong? What's happened? Did she fall?"

"No!" Annmarie cried. "She's awake! Awake and aware! She's asking for you! Can you come?"

"Right away," he said, and turned to me, grinning. "Do you hear that, Edgar? Come on!" He paused. "What are you looking at?"

"These," I said, and held out the two pictures of Eastlake in his bathing dress: the one where he was surrounded by all his daughters, and the one taken two years later, where he was flanked by just Maria and Hannah.

"Never mind em now - didn't you hear her? Miss Eastlake is back!" He booked for the door. I dropped his folder on the library table and followed him. I had made the connection - but only because I'd spent the last few months cultivating the art of seeing. Cultivating it strenuously.

"Wireman!" I called. He'd gone the length of the dogtrot and was halfway up the staircase. I was limping as fast as I could and he was still pulling away. He waited for me, not very patiently. "Who told him the debris field was there?"

"Eastlake? I assume he stumbled on it while pursuing his diving hobby."

"I don't think so - he hadn't been in that bathing suit for a long time. Diving and snorkeling may have been his hobby in the early twenties, but I think that around 1925, eating dinner became his chief diversion. So who told him?"

Annmarie came out of a door near the end of the hall. There was a goofy, unbelieving grin on her face that made her look half her forty years.

"Come on," she said. "This is wonderful."

"Is she- "

"She is," came Elizabeth's cracked but unmistakable voice. "Come in here, Wireman, and let me see your face while I still know it."

ix

I lingered in the hall with Annmarie, not sure what to do, looking at the knickknacks and the big old Frederic Remington at the far end - Indians on ponies. Then Wireman called for me. His voice was impatient and rough with tears.

The room was dim. The shades had all been drawn. Air conditioning whispered through a vent somewhere above us. There was a table next to her bed with a lamp on it. The shade was green glass. The bed was the hospital kind, and cranked up so she could almost sit. The lamp put her in a soft spotlight, with her hair loose on the shoulders of a pink dressing gown. Wireman sat beside her, holding her hands. Above her bed was the only painting in the room, a fine print of Edward Hopper's Eleven AM, an archetype of loneliness waiting patiently at the window for some change, any change.

Somewhere a clock was ticking.

She looked at me and smiled. I saw three things in her face. They hit me one after the other like stones, each one heavier than the last. The first was how much weight she'd lost. The second was that she looked horribly tired. The third was that she hadn't long to live.

"Edward," she said.