Duma Key

He asked where I'd gotten it and I told him. He said it all seemed a little convenient, and I shrugged. I was remembering something Elizabeth had said to me - The water runs faster now. Soon come the rapids. Well, the rapids were here. I had a feeling this was only the start of the white water.

My hip was starting to feel a little better, its late-night sobbing down to mere sniffles. According to popular wisdom, a dog is a man's best friend, but I would vote for aspirin. I pulled my chair around the table and sat next to Wireman, where I could read the headline: DUMA KEY TOT BLOSSOMS FOLLOWING SPILL - IS SHE A CHILD PRODIGY? Beneath was a photograph. In it was a man I knew well in a bathing suit I knew well: John Eastlake in his slimmer, trimmer incarnation. He was smiling, and holding up a smiling little girl. It was Elizabeth, looking the same age as in the family portrait of Daddy and His Girls, only now she was holding out a drawing to the camera in both hands and wearing a gauze bandage wrapped around her head. There was another, much older girl in the picture - big sister Adriana, and yes, she could have been a carrot-top - but to begin with, Wireman and I paid little attention to her. Or to John Eastlake. Or even to the toddler with the bandage around her head.

"Holy wow," Wireman said.

The picture was of a horse looking over a fence rail. It wore an unlikely (and un-equine) smile. In the foreground, back-to, was a little girl with lots of golden ringlets, holding out a carrot the size of a shotgun for the smiling horse to eat. To either side, bracketing the picture almost like theater curtains, were palm trees. Above were puffy white clouds and a great big sun, shooting off happy-rays of light.

It was a child's picture, but the talent that had created it was beyond doubt. The horse had a joie de vivre that made the smile the punchline of a cheerful joke. You could put a dozen art students in a room, tell them to execute a happy horse, and I was willing to bet not one of them would be able to match the success of that picture. Even the oversized carrot felt not like a mistake but part of the giggle, an intensifier, an artistic steroid.

"It's not a joke," I muttered, bending closer... only bending closer did no good. I was seeing this picture through four aggravating levels of obfuscation: the photograph, the newspaper reproduction of the photograph, the Xerox of the newspaper reproduction of the photograph... and time itself. Over eighty years of it, if I had the math right.

"What's not a joke?" Wireman asked.

"The way the size of the horse is exaggerated. And the carrot. Even the sunrays. It's a child's cry of glee, Wireman!"

"A hoax is what it is. Got to be. She would have been two! A child of two can't even make stick-figures and call em mommy and daddy, can she?"

"Was what happened to Candy Brown a hoax? Or what about the bullet that used to be in your brain? The one that's now gone?"

He was silent.

I tapped CHILD PRODIGY. "Look, they even had the right fancy term for it. Do you suppose if she'd been poor and black, they would have called her PICKANINNY FREAK and stuck her in a sideshow somewhere? Because I sort of do."

"If she'd been poor and black, she never would have made the paper at all. Or fallen out of a pony-trap to begin with."

"Is that what hap-" I stopped, my eye caught by the blurry photograph again. Now it was big sis I was looking at. Adriana.

"What?" Wireman asked, and his tone was What now?

"Her bathing suit. Look familiar to you?"

"I can't see very much, just the top. Elizabeth's holding her picture out in front of the rest."

"What about the part you can see?"

He looked for a long time. "Wish I had a magnifying glass."

"That would probably make it worse instead of better."

"All right, muchacho, it does look vaguely familiar... but maybe that's just an idea you put in my head."

"In all the Girl and Ship paintings, there was only one Rowboat Girl I was never sure of: the one in No. 6. The one with the orangey hair, the one in the blue singlet with the yellow stripe around the neck." I tapped Adriana's blurred image in the photocopy Mary Ire had given me. "This is the girl. This is the swimming suit. I'm sure of it. So was Elizabeth."

"What are we saying here?" Wireman asked. He was skimming the print, rubbing at his temples as he did so. I asked if his eye was bothering him.

"No. This is just so... so fucking..." He looked up at me, eyes big, still rubbing his temples. "She fell out of the goddam pony-trap and hit her head on a rock, or so it says here. Woke up in the doctor's infirmary just as they were getting ready to transport her to the hospital in St. Pete. Seizures thereafter. It says, 'The seizures continue for Baby Elizabeth, although they are moderating and seem to do her no lasting harm.' And she started painting pictures!"

I said, "The accident must have happened right after the big group portrait was taken, because she looks exactly the same, and they change fast at that age."