Duma Key

"Don't worry," he said, then picked up the ladder and handed me the flash. "Shine it down there, Edgar. I need both hands for what I'm doing."

It seemed to take him forever to get the ladder placed to his satisfaction, but finally the feet were on the bottom, between the bones of Nan Melda's outstretched arm (I could still see the silver bracelets, although now overgrown with moss) and one of Adie's legs. The ladder was really very short, and the top rung was two feet below ground-level. That was all right; Jack could steady me to begin with. I thought of asking him again about the container for the china figure, then didn't. He seemed completely at ease on that score, and I decided to trust him all the way. It was really too late to do otherwise.

In my head a voice, very low, almost meditative, said: Stop now and I'll let you go free.

"Never," I said.

Wireman looked at me without surprise. "You heard it, too, huh?"

viii

I lay on my stomach and backed into the hole. Jack gripped my shoulders. Wireman stood beside him with the loaded harpoon pistol in his hands and the three extra silvertips stuck in his belt. Between them, the flashlight lay on the ground, spraying a bright light into a tangle of uprooted weeds and vines.

The stench of the cistern was very strong, and I felt a tickling on my shin as something scurried up my leg. I should have tucked my pants cuffs into the tops of my boots, but it was a little late to go back and start over.

"Do you feel the ladder?" Jack asked. "Are you there yet?"

"No, I..." Then my foot touched the top rung. "There it is. Hang on."

"I've gotcha, don't worry."

Come down here and I'll kill you.

"Go on and try," I said. "I'm coming for you, you birch, so take your best shot."

I felt Jack's hands tighten spasmodically on my shoulders. "Jesus, boss, are you s-"

"I'm sure. Just hold on."

There were half a dozen rungs on the ladder. Jack was able to hold onto my shoulders until I'd gotten down three, and then I was chest-deep. He offered me the flashlight. I shook my head. "Use it to spot me."

"You don't get it. You don't need it for light, you need it for her."

For a minute I still didn't get it.

"Unscrew the lens cap. Take out the batteries. Put her inside. I'll hand you down the water."

Wireman laughed without humor. "Wireman likes it, ni o." Then he bent to me. "Now go on. Bitch or birch, drown her and let's have done with her."

ix

The fourth rung snapped. The ladder tilted, and I fell off with the flashlight still clamped between my side and my stump, first shining up at the darkening sky, then illuminating lumps of coral coated with moss. My head connected with one of these and I saw stars. A moment later I was lying on a jagged bed of bones and staring into Adriana Eastlake Paulson's eternal grin. One of those pallid toads leaped at me from between her mossy teeth and I batted at it with the barrel of the flashlight.

"Muchacho!" Wireman shouted, and Jack added, "Boss, are you all right!"

I was bleeding from the scalp - I could feel it running down my face in warm streams - but I thought I was okay; certainly I had been through worse in the Land of a Thousand Lakes. And the ladder, although aslant, was still standing. I looked to my right and there was the moss-covered Table Whiskey keg we'd come all this way to find. There were two toads on it now instead of one. They saw me looking and leaped into my face, eyes bulging, mouths gaping. I had no doubt that Perse wished they had teeth, like Elizabeth's big boy. Ah, the good old days.

"I'm okay," I said, batting the toads away and struggling to sit up. Bones broke beneath me and all around me. Except... no. They didn't break. They were too old and damp to break. They first bent, then popped. "Send down the water. It's okay to drop it in the bag, just try not to hit me in the head with it."

I looked at Nan Melda.

I'm going to take your silver bracelets, I told her, but it's not stealing. If you're somewhere close and can see what I'm doing, I hope you'll think of it as sharing. A kind of passing-on.

I slipped them off her remains and put them on my own left wrist, raising my arm and letting gravity slide them up to the catch-point. Above me, Jack was hanging head-down into the cistern. "Watch out, Edgar!"

The bag came down. One of the bones I'd broken in my fall punched through the plastic and water came trickling out. I yelled in fright and anger, opened the bag, looked inside. Only a single plastic bottle had been punctured. The other two were still whole. I turned to the moss-covered ceramic keg, slipped my hand into the thicket of slime under it, and worked it free. It didn't want to come, but the thing inside had taken my daughter and I meant to have it. Finally it rolled toward me, and when it did, a good-sized chunk of coral slipped away on the other side of it and thudded to the muddy bottom of the cistern.