Duma Key

Wireman made Jack get up so he could strip the vines from the bench. Then we sat there, three unlikely warriors, two in their fifties and one barely out of his teens, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a ruined mansion on the other. The red basket and mostly depleted food-bag were at our feet. I thought I had twenty minutes to tell them what I knew, even half an hour, and that would still leave enough time.

I hoped.

"Elizabeth's connection with Perse was closer than mine," I said. "Much more intense than mine. I don't know how she stood it. Once she had the china figure, she saw everything, whether she was there or not. And she drew everything. But the worst pictures she burned before she left this place."

"Like the picture of the hurricane?" Wireman asked.

"Yes. I think she was afraid of their power, and she was right to be afraid. But she saw it all. And the doll stored it all up. Like a psychic camera. In most cases, I just saw what Elizabeth saw and drew what Elizabeth drew. Do you understand that?"

They both nodded.

"Start with this path, which was once a road. It went from Shade Beach to the barn." I pointed to the long, vine-coated outbuilding where I hoped we would find a ladder. "I don't think the bootlegger who wore it into the coral was Dave Davis, but I'm confident he was one of Davis's business associates, and that a fair amount of hooch came onto the Florida Suncoast by way of Duma Key. From Shade Beach to John Eastlake's barn, then across to the mainland. Mostly top-shelf stuff headed for a couple of jazz clubs in Sarasota and Venice, stored as a favor to Davis."

Wireman glanced at the declining sun, then at his watch. "Does this have any bearing on our current situation, muchacho? I assume it does."

"You bet." I produced a drawing of a keg with a fat screw-lid bung on top. The word TABLE had been sketched in a semicircle on the side, with SCOTLAND below it, in another semicircle. It was ragged work; I drew far better than I printed. "Whiskey, gents."

Jack indicated a vague, humanoid scribble on the keg between TABLE and SCOTLAND. The figure had been executed in orange, and one foot was raised behind it. "Who's the chick in the dress?"

"That's not a dress, it's a kilt. It's supposed to be a highlander."

Wireman raised his shaggy brows. "Won't win any awards for that one, muchacho."

"Elizabeth put Perse in some sort of midget whiskey barrel," Jack mused. "Or maybe it was Elizabeth and Nan Melda-"

I shook my head. "Just Elizabeth."

"How big was this thing?"

I held my hands about two feet from each other, considered, then moved them a little farther apart.

Jack nodded, but he was frowning, too. "She put the china figure in and screwed the cap back on. Or put the plug in the jug. And drowned Perse to sleep. Which seems fucked up to me, boss. She was underwater when she started calling to Elizabeth, for God's sake. On the bottom of the Gulf!"

"Leave that for now." I put the sketch of the whiskey barrel on the bottom of the stack and showed them the next one. It was Nan Melda, using the telephone in the parlor. There was something furtive about the tilt of her head and the hunch of her shoulders, only a quick stroke or two, but it said all that needed to be said about how southern folk felt back in 1927 about black housekeepers using the parlor phone, even in an emergency.

"We thought Adie and Emery read about it in the paper and came back, but the Atlanta papers probably didn't even cover the drowning of two little girls in Florida. When Nan Melda was sure the twins were missing, she called Eastlake - the Mister - on the mainland to give him the bad news. Then she called where Adie was staying with her new husband."

Wireman pounded his fist on his leg. "Adie told her Nanny where she was staying! Of course she did!"

I nodded. "The newlyweds had to've caught a train that very night, because they were home before dark the next day."

"By then the two middle daughters must have been home, too," Jack said.

"Yep, the whole family," I said. "And the water out there..." I gestured toward where the slim white ship rode at anchor, waiting for dark. "It was covered with small boats. The hunt for the bodies went on for at least three days, although they all knew those girls had to be dead. I imagine the last thing on John Eastlake's mind was trying to figure out how his eldest daughter and her husband got the news. All he could think during those days was his lost twins."

"THEY ARE GONE," Wireman murmured. "Pobre hombre."

I held up the next picture. Here were three people standing on the veranda of Heron's Roost, waving, as a big old touring car motored down the crushed shell driveway toward the stone posts and the sane world beyond. I had sketched in a scattering of palms and some banana trees, but no hedge; the hedge did not exist in 1927.

In the rear window of the touring car, two small white ovals were looking back. I touched each in turn. "Maria and Hannah," I said. "Going back to the Braden School."