Stephen King - Duma Key

"Yep," I said. "You be the KamenDoc."

Kamen smiled. It was like having God smile on you. "I don't think all's right with you yet, Edgar. I can only hope it will be right. No one deserves more to land with the shiny side up and the rubber side down."

I hugged him. A one-armed hug, but he made up for it.

I walked out to the plane beside Pam. We stood at the foot of the boarding stairs while the others got on. She was holding my hand in both of hers, looking up at me.

"I'm only going to kiss you on the cheek, Edgar. Illy's watching and I don't want her to get the wrong idea."

She did so, then said, "I'm worried about you. There's a white look around your eyes that I don't like."

"Elizabeth-"

She shook her head a tiny bit. "It was there last night, even before she came to the gallery. Even when you were at your happiest. A white look. I don't know how to describe it any better than that. I only saw it once before, back in 1992, when it looked for a little while like you might miss that balloon payment and lose the business."

The jet engines were whining and a hot breeze was blowing her hair around her face, tumbling her careful beauty-shop curls into something younger and more natural. "Can I ask you something, Eddie?"

"Of course."

"Could you paint anywhere? Or does it have to be here?"

"Anywhere, I think. But it would be different somewhere else."

She was looking at me fixedly. Almost pleadingly. "Just the same, a change might be good. You need to lose that white look. I'm not talking about coming back to Minnesota, necessarily, just going... somewhere else. Will you think about it?"

"Yes." But not until I saw what was in the red picnic basket. And not until I'd made at least one trip to the south end of the Key. And I thought I could do that. Because Ilse was the one who'd gotten sick, not me. All I'd had was one of my red-tinged flashbacks to the accident. And that phantom itch.

"Be well, Edgar. I don't know exactly what's become of you, but there's still enough of the old you to love." She stood on tiptoe in her white sandals - bought specially for this trip, I had no doubt - and planted another soft kiss on my stubbly cheek.

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for last night."

"No thanks required," she said. "It was sweet."

She squeezed my hand. Then she was up the stairs and gone.

vi

Outside Delta departures again. This time without Jack.

"Just you and me, Miss Cookie," I said. "Looks like we closed down the bar."

Then I saw she was crying and wrapped my arm around her.

"Daddy, I wish I could stay here with you."

"Go back, honey. Study for your test and knock the hell out of it. I'll see you soon."

She pulled back. Looked at me anxiously. "You'll be okay?"

"Yes. And you be okay, too."

"I will. I will."

I hugged her again. "Go on. Check in. Buy magazines. Watch CNN. Fly well."

"All right, Daddy. It was amazing."

" You're amazing."

She gave me a hearty smack on the mouth - to make up for the one her mother had held back on, perhaps - and went in through the sliding doors. She turned back once and waved to me, by then little more than a girl-shape behind the polarized glass. I wish with all my heart that I could have seen her better, because I never saw her again.

vii

From the Ringling Art Museum I had left messages for Wireman - one at the funeral home and one on El Palacio 's answering machine - saying I'd be back around three, and asking him to meet me there. I also asked him to tell Jack that if Jack was old enough to vote and party with FSU sorority girls, he was old enough to take care of his damned cell phone.

It was actually close to three-thirty when I arrived back on the Key, but both Jack's car and Elizabeth's vintage silver Benz were parked on the cracked square to the right of Big Pink, and the two of them were sitting on my back stoop, drinking iced tea. Jack was still wearing his gray suit, but his hair was once more in its customary disarray and he was wearing a Devil Rays tee under his jacket. Wireman was wearing black jeans and a white shirt, open at the collar; a Nebraska Cornhuskers gimme cap was cocked back on his head.

I parked, got out, and stretched, trying to get my bad hip in gear. They stood up and came to meet me, neither of them smiling.

"Everyone gone, amigo?" Wireman asked.

"Everyone but my Aunt Jean and Uncle Ben," I said. "They're veteran freeloaders, dedicated to squeezing a good thing to the very last drop."

Jack smiled without much humor. "Every family's got a few," he said.

"How are you?" I asked Wireman.

"About Elizabeth I'm okay. Hadlock said it was probably for the best this way, and I suppose he's right. Her leaving me what may amount to a hundred and sixty million dollars in cash, securities, and properties..." He shook his head. "That's different. Maybe someday I'll have the luxury of trying to get my head around it, but right now..."

"Right now something's going on."

" S , se or. And it's very weird."

"How much have you told Jack?"

Wireman looked a bit uncomfortable. "Well, I tell you what, amigo. Once I started, it was damn hard to find a reasonable stopping place."

"He told me all of it," Jack said. "Or so he claims. Including what he thinks you did about restoring his eyesight, and what you think you did to Candy Brown." He paused. "And the two little girls you saw."

"Are you okay with the Candy Brown thing?" I asked.

"If it was up to me, I'd give you a medal. And the people of Sarasota would probably give you your own float in the Memorial Day parade." Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets. "But if you told me last fall that stuff like this could happen outside of M. Night Shyamalan movies, I would have laughed."

"What about last week?" I asked.

Jack thought about it. On the other side of Big Pink, the waves came steadily in. Under my living room and bedroom, the shells would be talking. "No," he said. "Probably wouldn't've laughed then. I knew from the first there was something about you, Edgar. You got here, and..." He ran the fingers of his two hands together, lacing them. And I thought that was right. That was how it had been. Like the fingers of two hands lacing together. And the fact that I only had one hand had never mattered.

Not here.

"What are you saying, hermano?" Wireman asked.

Jack shrugged. "Edgar and Duma. Duma and Edgar. It was like they were waiting for each other." He looked embarrassed, but not unsure.

I cocked a thumb at my house. "Let's go in."

"Tell him about finding the basket first," Wireman said to Jack.

Jack shrugged. "Wasn't no thing; didn't take twenty minutes. It was sitting up on top of some old bureau at the far end of the attic. Light from one of the vents to the outside was shining in on it. Like it wanted to be found." He glanced at Wireman, who nodded agreement. "Anyway, we took it down to the kitchen and looked inside. It was heavier than hell."

Jack talking about the heaviness of the basket made me think of how Melda, the housekeeper, had been holding it in the family portrait: with her arms bunched. Apparently it had been heavy back then, too.

"Wireman told me to bring the basket down here and leave it for you, since I had a key... only I didn't need a key. Place was unlocked."

"Was the door actually open?"

"Nope. What I did first was turn my key and actually lock it again. Gave me a hell of a surprise."

"Come on," Wireman said, leading the way. "Show and Tell time."

There was a fair amount of Florida Gulf Coast scattered on the hardwood floor of the entry: sand, small shells, a couple of sophora husks, and a few bits of dried sawgrass. There were also tracks. The sneaker-prints were Jack's. It was the others that made my skin freckle with goosebumps. I made out three sets, one large and two small. The small ones were the tracks of children. All of those feet had been bare.

"Do you see how they go up the stairs, fading as they go?" Jack said.

"Yes," I said. My voice sounded faint and faraway to my own ears.

"I walked beside them, because I didn't want to mess them up," Jack said. "If I'd known then what Wireman told me while we were waiting for you, I don't think I could have gone up at all."

"I don't blame you," I said.

"But there was no one there," Jack said. "Just... well, you'll see. And look." He led me to the side of the stairs. The ninth riser was on our eye-level, and with the light striking across it, I could see, very faintly, the tracks of small bare feet pointing the other way.

Jack said, "This looks pretty clear to me. The kids went up to your studio, then came back down again. The adult stayed by the front door, probably as lookout... although if this was the middle of the night, there probably wasn't much to look out for. Have you been setting the burglar alarm?"

"No," I said, not quite meeting his eye. "I can't remember the numbers. I keep them on a slip of paper in my wallet, but each time I came through the door turned into a race against time, me versus that fucking beeper on the wall-"

"It's okay." Wireman gripped my shoulder. "These burglars didn't take; they left."

"You don't really believe Miss Eastlake's dead sisters paid you another visit, do you?" Jack asked.

"Actually," I said, "I think they did." I thought that would sound stupid in the bright light of an April afternoon, with a ton of sunlight pouring down and reflecting off the Gulf, but it didn't.

"In Scooby Doo, it would turn out to be the crazy librarian," Jack said. "You know, trying to scare you off the Key so he could keep the treasure for himself."

"If only," I said.

"Suppose those small tracks were made by Tessie and Laura Eastlake," Wireman said. "Who made the bigger ones?"

Neither of us replied.

"Let's go upstairs," I said at last. "I want to look in the basket."

We went up (avoiding the tracks - not to preserve them, but simply because none of us wanted to step on them) to Little Pink. The picnic basket, looking just like the one I'd drawn with the red pen I'd pilfered from Gene Hadlock's examining room, was sitting on the carpet, but my eyes were drawn first to my easel.

"You can believe I beat a hasty retreat when I saw that, " Jack said.

I could believe it, but I felt no urge to retreat. Quite the opposite. I was drawn forward instead, like an iron bolt to a magnet. A fresh canvas had been set up there and then, sometime in the dead of night - maybe while Elizabeth had been dying, maybe while I'd been having sex with Pam for the last time, maybe while I'd been sleeping beside her - a finger had dipped into my paint. Whose finger? I didn't know. What color? That was obvious: red. The letters that staggered and draggled and dripped their way across the canvas were red. And accusing. They almost seemed to shout.

PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=book cover"

viii

"Found art," I said in a dry, rattlebox voice that hardly sounded like my own.

"Is that what it is?" Wireman asked.

"Sure." The letters seemed to waver in front of me, and I wiped my eyes. "Graffiti art. They'd love it at the Scoto."

"Maybe, but that's some creepy shit," Jack said. "I hate it."

So did I. And it was my studio, goddammit, mine. I had a lease. I snatched the canvas off the easel, momentarily expecting it to burn my fingers. It didn't. It was just a canvas, after all, one I'd stretched myself. I put it against the wall, facing in. "Is that better?"

"It is, actually," Jack said, and Wireman nodded. "Edgar... if those little girls were here... can ghosts write on canvas?"

"If they can move Ouija board planchettes and write in window-frost, I imagine they could write on a canvas," I said. Then, rather reluctantly, I added: "But I don't see ghosts unlocking my front door. Or putting a canvas up on the easel to begin with."