Duma Key

He tried to say more, but couldn't. He leaned over, laughing so hard he had to brace his hands on his knees. I saw the joke, but couldn't share it... and not only because my daughter was dead in Rhode Island. Wireman was only laughing now because at first he had been as frightened as Jack and I, as frightened as Libbit must have been. And why had she been frightened? Because someone, quite likely by accident, had put the wrong idea in her imaginative little head. My money was on Nan Melda, and - maybe - a bedtime story meant only to soothe a child who was still fretful from her head injury. Maybe even insomniac. Only this bedtime story had lodged in the wrong place, and grown TEEF.

Mr. Blue Breeches wasn't like the frogs we'd seen back on the road, either. Those had been all Elizabeth, and there'd been no malevolence about them. The lawn jockey, however... he might originally have come from little Libbit's battered head, but I had an idea that Perse had long since appropriated him for her own purposes. If anyone got this close to Elizabeth's first home, there it was, all ready to scare the intruder away. Into a stay at the nearest lunatic asylum, maybe.

Which meant there might be something here to find, after all.

Jack looked nervously toward where the sunken path - which really did look as if it had been big enough to accommodate a cart or even a truck, once upon a time - dropped down and out of sight. "Will it be back?"

"It doesn't matter, muchacho, " Wireman said. "It's not real. That picnic basket, on the other hand, needs to be carried. So mush. On, you huskies."

"Just looking at it made me feel like I was losing my mind," Jack said. "Do you understand that, Edgar?"

"Of course. Libbit had a very powerful imagination, back in the day."

"What happened to it, then?"

"She forgot how to use it."

"Jesus," Jack said. "That's horrible."

"Yes. And I think that kind of forgetting is easy. Which is even more horrible."

Jack bent down, picked up the basket, then looked at Wireman. "What's in here? Gold bars?"

Wireman grabbed the bag of food and smiled serenely. "I packed a few extras."

We worked our way up the overgrown driveway, keeping an eye out for the lawn jockey. It did not return. At the top of the porch steps, Jack set the picnic basket down with a little sigh of relief. From behind us came a flurry and flutter of wings.

We turned and saw a heron alight on the driveway. It could have been the same one that had been giving me the cold-eye from El Palacio' s tennis court. Certainly the gaze was the same: blue and sharp and without an ounce of pity.

"Is that real?" Wireman asked. "What do you think, Edgar?"

"It's real," I said.

"How do you know?"

I could have pointed out that the heron was casting a shadow, but for all I knew, the lawn jockey had been casting one, as well; I had been too amazed to notice. "I just do. Come on, let's go inside. And don't bother knocking. This isn't a social call."

xiii

"Uh, this could be a problem," Jack said.

The veranda was deeply shadowed by mats of hanging Spanish Moss, but once our eyes had adjusted to the gloom, we could see a thick and rusty chain encircling the double doors. Not one but two padlocks hung down from it. The chain had been run through hooks on either jamb.

Wireman stepped forward for a closer look. "You know," he said, "Jack and I might be able to snap one or both of those hooks right off. They've seen better days."

"Better years, " Jack said.

"Maybe," I said, "but the doors themselves are almost certainly locked, and if you go rattling chains and snapping hooks, you're going to disturb the neighbors."

"Neighbors?" Wireman asked.

I pointed straight up. Wireman and Jack followed my finger and saw what I already had: a large colony of brown bats sleeping in what looked like a vast hanging cloud of cobweb. I glanced down and saw the porch was not just coated but plated with guano. It made me very glad I was wearing a hat.

When I looked up again, Jack Cantori was at the foot of the steps. "No way, baby," he said. "Call me a chicken, call me a candy-ass, call me any name in the book, I'm not going there. With Wireman it's snakes. With me it's bats. Once-" He looked like he had more to say, maybe a lot, but didn't know how to say it. He took another step back, instead. I had a moment to contemplate the eccentricity of fear: what the weird jockey hadn't been able to accomplish (close, but that only counts in horseshoes), a colony of sleeping brown bats had. For Jack, at least.

Wireman said, "They can carry rabies, muchacho - did you know that?"

I nodded. "I think we should look for the tradesman's entrance."

xiv