Duma Key

"Of course I did. I don't write everything I know" - she tipped me a wink - "but I like to know everything."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing. Not in the Tribune, not in the Sarasota or Venice papers, either. So maybe it was just a story. Hell, maybe all that stuff about her father storing Dave Davis's whiskey on Duma Key was just a story, too. But... I'd've bet money on Aggie Winterborn's memory. And Elizabeth had a look on her face when I asked her about it."

"What kind of look?"

"An I'm- not-telling-you look. But all that's a long time ago, much booze under the bridge since, and you can't ask her about it now, can you? Not if she's as bad as you say."

"No, but maybe she'll come back. Wireman says she has before."

"We'll hope," Mary said. "She's a rarity, you know. Florida's full of old people - they don't call it God's waiting room for nothing - but precious few of em grew up here. The Suncoast Elizabeth remembers - remembered - really was another Florida. Not the hurry-scurry sprawl we have now, with the domed stadiums and the turnpikes going everywhere, and not the one I grew up in, either. Mine was the John D. MacDonald Florida, back when people in Sarasota still knew their neighbors and the Tamiami Trail was a honky-tonk. Back then people sometimes still came home from church to find alligators in their swimming pools and bobcats rooting in their trash."

She was actually very drunk, I realized... but that didn't make her uninteresting.

"The Florida Elizabeth and her sisters grew up in was the one that existed after the Indians were gone but before old Mr. White Man had fully conshol... consolidated his hold. Your little island would have looked very different to you. I've seen the pictures. It was cabbage palms covered in strangler fig and gumbo limbo and slash pine inland; it was liveoak and mangrove in the few places the ground was wet. There was Cherokee bean and inkberry low on the ground, but none of that jungle shit that's growing out there now. The beaches are the only thing that's the same, and the sea oats, of course... like the hem of a skirt. The drawbridge was there at the north end, but there was just one house."

"What caused all that growth?" I asked. "Do you have any idea? I mean three quarters of the island is buried in it."

She might not have heard. "Just the one house," she repeated. "Sitting up there on the little rise of ground toward the south end and looking like something you'd see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile. Pillars and a crushed gravel drive. You had your grand view of the Gulf to the west; your grand view of the Florida coast looking east. Not that there was much to see; just Venice. Village of Venice. Sleepy li'l village." She heard how she sounded and pulled herself together. "Excuse me, Edgar. Please. I don't do this every day. Really, you should take my... my excitement... as a compliment."

"I do."

"Twenty years ago I would have tried to get you into bed instead of drinking myself stupid. Maybe even ten. As it is, I can only hope I haven't scared you away for good."

"No such luck."

She laughed, a caw both barren and cheery. "Then I hope you'll come back soon. I make a mean red gumbo. But right now..." She put an arm around me and led me to the door. Her body was thin and hot and rock-hard beneath her clothes. Her gait was just south of steady. "Right now I think it's time for you to go and for me to take my afternoon siesta. I regret to say I need it."

I stepped out into the hall, then turned back. "Mary, did you ever hear Elizabeth speak of the deaths of her twin sisters? She would have been four or five. Old enough to remember something so traumatic."

"Never," Mary said. "Never once."

ii

There were a dozen or so chairs lined up outside the lobby doors, in what was a thin but comfortable band of shade at quarter past two in the afternoon. Half a dozen oldsters were sitting there, watching the traffic on Adalia Street. Jack was also there, but he was neither watching the traffic nor admiring the passing ladies. He was tipped back against the pink stucco and reading Mortuary Science for Dummies. He marked his place and got up as soon as he saw me.

"Great choice for this state," I said, nodding at the book with the trademark google-eyed nerd on the cover.

"I've got to pick a career sometime," he said, "and the way you're moving lately, I don't think this job is going to last much longer."

"Don't hurry me," I said, feeling in my pocket to make sure I had my little bottle of aspirin. I did.

"Actually," Jack said, "that's just what I'm going to do."

"Have you got someplace you have to be?" I asked, limping down the cement walk beside him and into the sunshine. It was hot. There's spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

"No, but you've got a four o'clock appointment with Dr. Hadlock in Sarasota. I think we can just make it, if the traffic's kind."