Duma Key

"Maybe you better not. Maybe finding out we talked would push him right over the edge." With a touch of malice she added, "Then you'll be the one losing sleep."

It was a possibility I hadn't thought of, but she had a point. Tom and Wireman were alike in one way: both needed help and I couldn't drag them to it. An old bon mot bounced into my head, maybe apropos, maybe not: you can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think. Maybe Wireman could tell me who had said it. And when.

"So how did you know he meant to kill himself?" she asked. "I want to know, and by God you're going to tell me before I hang up. I did my part and you're going to tell me."

There it was, the question she hadn't asked before; she'd been too fixated on how I'd found out about her and Tom in the first place. Well, Wireman wasn't the only one with sayings; my father had a few, as well. One was, when a lie won't suffice, the truth will have to do.

"Since the accident, I've been painting," I said. "You know that."

"So?"

I told her about the sketch I'd drawn of her, Max from Palm Desert, and Tom Riley. About some of my Internet explorations into the world of phantom limb phenomena. And about seeing Tom Riley standing at the head of the stairs in what I supposed was now my studio, naked except for his pajama pants, one eye gone, replaced by a socket filled with congealed gore.

When I finished, there was a long silence. I didn't break it. At last she said, in a new and cautious voice: "Do you really believe that, Edgar - any of it?"

"Wireman, the guy from down the beach..." I stopped, infuriated in spite of myself. And not because I didn't have any words. Or not exactly. Was I going to tell her the guy from down the beach was an occasional telepath, so he believed me?

"What about the guy from down the beach, Edgar?" Her voice was calm and soft. I recognized it from the first month or so after my accident. It was her Edgar's-Going-Section-Eight voice.

"Nothing," I said. "It doesn't matter."

"You need to call Dr. Kamen and tell him about this new idea of yours," she said. "This idea that you're psychic. Don't e-mail him, call him. Please."

"All right, Pam." I felt very tired. Not to mention frustrated and pissed off.

"All right what?"

"All right, I'm hearing you. You're coming in loud and clear. No misunderstandings whatsoever. Perish the goddam thought. All I wanted was to save Tom Riley's life."

To that she had no answer. And no rational explanation for what I had known about Tom, either. So that was where we left it. My thought as I hung up the phone was No good deed goes unpunished.

Maybe it was hers, too.

vi

I felt angry and lost. The dank, dreary weather didn't help. I tried to paint and couldn't. I went downstairs, took up one of my sketch-pads, and found myself reduced to the sort of doodles I'd done in my other life while taking phone calls: cartoon shmoos with big ears. I was about to toss the pad aside in disgust when the phone rang. It was Wireman.

"Are you coming this afternoon?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

"I thought maybe with the rain-"

"I planned on creeping down in the car. I'm certainly not doing squat here."

"Good. Just don't plan on Poetry Hour. She's in the fog."

"Bad?"

"As bad as I've seen her. Disconnected. Drifting. Confused." He took a deep breath and let it out. It was like listening to a gust of wind blow through the telephone. "Listen, Edgar, I hate to ask this, but could I leave her with you for awhile? Forty-five minutes, tops. The Baumgartens have been having trouble with the sauna - it's the damned heater - and the guy coming out to fix it needs to show me a cut-off switch or something. And to sign his work-order, of course."

"Not a problem."

"You're a prince. I'd kiss you, but for those sore-raddled lips of yours."

"Fuck you very much, Wireman."

"Yeah, everyone loves me, it's my curse."

"Pam called me. She talked to my friend Tom Riley." Considering what the two of them had been up to it felt strange to be calling Tom a friend, but what the hell. "I think she took the air out of his suicide plan."

"That's good. So why do I hear lead in your voice?"

"She wanted to know how I knew."

"Not how you knew she was bumping uglies with this guy, but-"

"How I diagnosed his suicidal depression from fifteen hundred miles away."

"Ah! And what did you say?"

"Not having a good lawyer present, I was reduced to the truth."

"And she thought you were un poco loco."

"No, Wireman, she thought I was muy loco."

"Does it matter?"

"No. But she's going to brood about this - believe me when I say Pam's U.S. Olympic Brooding Team material - and I'm afraid my good deed could explode in my younger daughter's face."

"Assuming your wife's looking for someone to blame."

"It's a safe assumption. I know her."

"That would be bad."

"It'd rock Ilse's world more than it deserves to be rocked. Tom's been like an uncle to her and Melinda their whole lives."

"Then you'll have to convince your wife that you really saw what you saw, and your daughter had nothing to do with it."