Duma Key

While he was gone, I stood leaning against the Mercedes, looking at the tennis court. The door at the far end had been left open. Elizabeth's semi-domesticated heron was inside, standing by the net. It looked at me with accusing blue eyes.

"Edgar?" Jack touched my elbow. "Okay?"

I was not okay, and wouldn't be okay for a long time again. But...

I can do this, I thought. I have to do this. She does not get to win.

"Fine," I said.

"I don't like it that you're so pale. You look like you did when you first came here." Jack's voice cracked on the last couple of words.

"I'm fine," I said again, and briefly cupped the back of his neck. I realized that, other than shaking his hand, it was probably the only time I had touched him.

Wireman came out clutching the handles of the picnic basket in both hands. He had three long-billed hats stacked on his head. John Eastlake's harpoon pistol was tucked under his arm. "Flashlight's in the basket," he said. "Ditto Deep Woods Off, and three pairs of gardening gloves I found in the shed."

"Brilliant," I said.

" S . But it's quarter of one, Edgar. If we're going, can we please go?"

I looked at the heron on the tennis court. It stood by the net, as still as a hand on a broken clock, and looked back at me pitilessly. That was all right; it is, for the most part, a pitiless world.

"Yes," I said. "Let's go."

vii

Now I had memory. It was no longer in perfect working order, and to this day I sometimes get confused about names and the order in which certain things happened, but every moment of our expedition to the house at the south end of Duma Key remains clear in my mind - like the first movie that ever amazed me or the first painting that ever took my breath away ( The Hailstorm, by Thomas Hart Benton). Yet at first I felt cold, divorced from it all, like a slightly jaded patron of the arts looking at a picture in a second-rate museum. It wasn't until Jack found the doll inside the staircase going up to nowhere that I started to realize I was in the picture instead of just looking at it. And that there was no going back for any of us unless we could stop her. I knew she was strong; if she could reach all the way to Omaha and Minneapolis to get what she wanted, then all the way to Providence to keep it, of course she was strong. And still I underestimated her. Until we were actually in that house at the south end of Duma Key, I didn't realize how strong Perse was.

viii

I wanted Jack to drive, and Wireman to sit in the back seat. When Wireman asked why, I said I had my reasons, and I thought they'd become apparent in short order. "And if I'm wrong about that," I added, "no one will be any more delighted than me."

Jack backed onto the road and turned south. More out of curiosity than anything else, I punched on the radio and was rewarded with Billy Ray Cyrus, bellowing about his achy breaky heart. Jack groaned and reached for it, probably meaning to find The Bone. Before he could, Billy Ray was swallowed in a burst of deafening static.

" Jesus, turn it off! " Wireman yelped.

But first I turned it down. Reducing the volume made no difference. If anything, the static grew louder. I could feel it rattling the fillings of my teeth, and I punched the OFF button before my eardrums could start bleeding.

"What was that?" Jack asked. He had pulled over. His eyes were wide.

"Call it bad environment, why don't you," I said. "A little something left over from those Army Air Corps tests sixty years ago."

"Very funny," Wireman said.

Jack was looking at the radio. "I want to try it again."

"Be my guest," I told him, and placed my hand over my left ear.

Jack pushed the power button. The static that came roaring out of the Mercedes's four speakers this time seemed as loud as a jet fighter's engine. Even with my palm over one ear, it ripped through my head. I thought I heard Wireman yell, but I wasn't sure.

Jack pushed the power button again and the hellish blizzard of noise cut out. "I think we should skip the tunes," he said.

"Wireman? All right?" My voice seemed to be coming from far away, through a steady low ringing noise.

"Rockin," he said.

ix

Jack might have made it a little way beyond the point where Ilse got sick; maybe not. It was hard to tell once the growth got high. The road narrowed to a stripe, its surface humped and buckled by the roots running beneath it. The foliage had interlaced above us, blotting out most of the sky. It was like being in a living tunnel. The windows were rolled up, but even so, the car was filling with a green and fecund jungle smell.

Jack tested the old Mercedes's springs on a particularly egregious pothole, thumped up over a ridge in the pavement on the far side, then slammed to a stop and put the transmission in PARK.

"I'm sorry," he said. His mouth was quivering and his eyes were too big. "I'm-"

I knew perfectly well what he was.