Duma Key

Yes. That was how it had been on the south end of Duma Key, back in '27.

I drew John Eastlake - only it was just his fins showing against the sky, and the tip of his snorkel, and a shadow beneath. John Eastlake diving for treasure.

Diving for his youngest daughter's new doll, although he probably didn't believe it.

Beside one flipper I printed the words FAIR SALVAGE.

The images rose in my mind, clearer and clearer, as if they had been waiting all these years to be liberated, and I wondered briefly if every painting (and every implement used to make them), from those on the walls of caves in central Asia to the Mona Lisa, held such hidden memories of their making and makers, encoded in their strokes like DNA.

Swim n kick til I say stop.

I added Elizabeth to the picture of Diving Daddy, standing up to her chubby knees in the water, Noveen tucked under her arm. Libbit almost could have been the doll-girl in the sketch Ilse had demanded - the one I had titled The End of the Game.

And after he saw all those things, he hug me hug me hug me.

I made a hurried little sketch of John Eastlake doing just that, his facemask pushed up on top of his head. The picnic basket was nearby, on a blanket, and the speargun was resting on top of it.

He hug me hug me hug me.

Draw her, a voice whispered. Draw Elizabeth's fair salvage. Draw Perse.

But I wouldn't. I was afraid of what I might see. And what it might do to me.

And what about Daddy? What about John? How much had he known?

I flipped through her drawings to the picture of John Eastlake screaming, with blood running from his nose and one eye. He had known plenty. Probably too late, but he had known.

What exactly had happened to Tessie and Lo-Lo?

And to Perse, to shut her up for all those years?

What exactly was she? Not a doll, that much seemed sure.

I could have gone on - a picture of Tessie and Lo-Lo running down a path, some path, hand-in-hand, was already asking to be drawn - but I was beginning to come out of my half-trance and was scared almost to death. Besides, I thought I knew enough to be going on with; Wireman could help me figure out the rest, I was almost sure of it. I closed my sketch-pad. I put down that long-gone little girl's brown pencil - now just a nubbin - and realized I was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. But that kind of hangover wasn't new to me, and there was plenty to eat in the refrigerator.

vi

I went downstairs slowly, my head spinning with images - an upside-down heron with blue gimlet eyes, the smiling horses, the boat-size swim-fins on Daddy's feet - and I didn't bother with the living room lights. There was no need to; by April I could have navigated the route from the foot of the stairs to the kitchen in pitch blackness. By then I had made that solitary house with its chin jutting over the edge of the water my own, and in spite of everything, I couldn't imagine leaving it. Halfway across the room I stopped, looking out through the Florida room to the Gulf.

There, riding at anchor no more than a hundred yards from the beach, clear and unmistakable in the light of a quarter-moon and a million stars, was the Perse. Her sails had been furled, but nets of rope sagged from her ancient masts like spiderwebs. The shrouds, I thought. Those are its shrouds. She bobbed up and down like a long dead child's rotten toy. The decks were empty, so far as I could see - of both life and souvenirs - but who knew what might be belowdecks?

I was going to faint. At the same instant I realized this, I realized why: I had stopped breathing. I told myself to inhale, but for one terrible second, nothing happened. My chest remained as flat as a page in a closed book. When it rose at last, I heard a whooping sound. That was me, struggling to go on with life in a conscious state. I blew out the air I had just taken in and inhaled more, a little less noisily. Black specks flocked in front of my eyes in the dimness, then faded. I expected the ship out there to do the same - surely it had to be a hallucination - but it remained, perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long and a little less than half that in the beam. Bobbing on the waves. Rocking from side to side just a little, too. Bowsprit wagging like a finger, seeming to say Ouuu, you nasty man, you're in for it n -