Tango Key (41 page)

"I came back."

He lit a cigarette, fixed the pillow against the headboard, and leaned back. "Our friend's taking a cold shower, and I just ordered him some breakfast. He's not leaving this room until he's sober."

"You're letting him go?"

"What am I gonna arrest him for? Bad judgment? Intoxication? He doesn't know where Eve is. I don't think he's had any idea what's been going on with her since day one." Frederick patted the bed beside him and she sat down. "So what were Kincaid and that weirdo weasel friend of his doing outside?"

"He's not a weirdo weasel." He's my bookie, Gene. "It so happens he's got street contacts that had already located Murphy, Gene."

"Good for him. Too bad his contacts can't conjure Eve."

She sat there, debating about whether to show him the note or handle it on her own. Something of what she was feeling must've shown on her face, because Frederick said, "Just spit it out, will you?"

She looked at him, started to tell him, then changed her mind. "Nothing," she said. "It's nothing."

July 6, 10:00 A.M.

"D
addy?"

Her voice pings against the dark, sounds like an insect flying into a screen, a pane of glass. She giggles. She calls for her daddy again. Little tremors of fear chill her. She is now on a ladder, descending from the hole inside the panel to another hole, deeper and deeper into the earth. The thought of so many tons of earth on top of her, earth and the farmhouse and the cliff itself, makes her head throb. Her gums. She tries not to think about what will happen if the structure of everything suddenly collapses. She'll be buried alive. She will suffocate. She will . . .

"Daddy, you down there? Daddy? C 'mon, pleathe anther."

But he doesn't. They have played this game before, when he was high, but not drunk. That was when they'd played all their games, it seemed. Daddy laughing, Daddy's breath smelling sweetly of gin.

Her right foot swings away from the rung on the ladder, kicking out into the blackness, then down, onto the next rung. Yes, that's right, she tells herself. One step at a time, lower and lower.

This is Pleskin's bomb shelter.

The thought floats into her head, a thought gliding as lazily as a swan, and she isn't sure what it means. She knows what a bomb is, she knows what a shelter is, but who is Pleskin? Where are the bombs?

She begins to shake again. She clutches the ladder, sucking air in through her broken, jagged teeth, squeezing her eyes shut against the dark.

"Another thep, Evie," she whispers to herself. "Another thep and then another."

Down, down, down, so far down into the belly of the blackness. Down forever.

But then she touches bottom. The floor is hard and cool against her bare feet, but the blackness is everywhere. It makes her dizzy. She's a fish. The blackness is water. She can breathe it. She lowers herself to the floor and then stretches out on her stomach, moving her arms and legs as though she is swimming, propelling herself slowly across the floor. She hears the bubbles of her indrawn breath.

Maybe she is a fish inside of another fish. Maybe this is like the story of Jonah in the belly of a whale. She has been swallowed by a whale. She is crawling through the whale's belly. The whale is swimming deep inside the sea, and she is deep inside the whale. She giggles. She has to pee. But if she does it here, won't the whale get mad? It might spit her up. The idea of being spit out into the open sea terrifies her worse than the dark, worse than being inside the whale. She crawls a little faster. She bumps into something and yelps. Food? Has she bumped into food in the whale's belly?

She rocks back on her heels, her hands at her mouth, her breathing quick, uneven. Then, slowly, carefully, she reaches out with her hands and pats the thing in front of
her. It feels . . . like a
box. Yes, a box. The whale has swallowed a box. She rips into it, her hands tearing at the flaps, digging up under them, diving into the contents.

Oh. What's this? Something small. It fits in the palm of her hand. It's hard and cool. Glass? Yes, it's a glass. Deeper now, she digs deeper and deeper. Something else. Long and cool and slick. She brings it to her nose, sniffing it. A sweet scent. Like . . . roses? No. But it smells like a flower, she just doesn't know what kind. Then, at the end of it, her fingers touch something skinny and rough. A little tongue. A wick. She's holding a candle. Excited now, she digs even deeper, looking for matches.

She finds numerous objects, some that she can identify, others that she cannot. She grips the candle firmly in her right hand and scoots along the floor on her buttocks. More boxes. Daddy has left her boxes to play with. Daddy has filled them with things. Daddy has created a complicated game this time, but she will play. She likes to play. Daddy has made the lights go out and made this place, this hole. That's it. When Daddy went down the hole, he slid into the whale's belly and then he left her these things. He's filled the whale's belly with boxes. She laughs. She had boxes to take with her on the boat and then . . .

Boat? What boat?

She pushes the heel of her hand against the side of her head, pounds it once, twice, three times, and hisses, "Thop it, juth thop it!"

She isn't sure who she's talking to.

No. Wait. She remembers now. She's talking to the little devils inside her head, the ones her mother said made her Evie mean.
Those devils inside you make you nasty, Evie, they make you do things that get you punished.

And now the devils are feeding her thoughts that don't belong to her. About boats. About bomb shelters. About someone named Pleskin. The devils blow the Unremembered thing up, up from the floor of her brain, and it covers her eyes like a wet sheet. She rips it off and throws it off into the dark, scooting forward again.

Her feet strike something directly in front of her. She rolls onto her toes, reaches out, pats the objects. A table. It's a long, wooden table. How could the whale swallow a table? No, it isn't possible. The devils in her head are tricking her. The table isn't real.

But if it isn't real, how come it feels real? The top of it is cool, slick, and . . . Her hand hits something, and it crashes to the floor. The sound rings out sharply in the silence of the whale's belly, startling her. She drops the candle. She pats around frantically, looking for it, but it has rolled away.

She waits a moment before she reaches down to where the glass broke. Splinters and shards poke at her palms. She feels. . . MATCHES. Hundreds of matchbooks, maybe thousands, maybe more matchbooks than she can count. She grabs at one, fumbles with it, strikes a match.

The flame is beautiful. It dances in the dark, its frail light illuminating the table. Books. A stack of
National Geographics
. Several copies of
Life
. And on the other side of the table, a couch, a wall. And there . . .

The flame bites at her fingertips and she drops it, strikes three this time, and holds them above her head. The whale's belly looks like a room. This must be a clever whale. It has not only swallowed a table, magazines and books, and a couch, but a sink over there against the far wall, and to her left, a screen of some sort, the kind of screen she saw a long time ago in a Japanese movie, and boxes, so many boxes and cartons.

She even finds her candle, off to her left on the floor. She grabs for it. Holds the flame against it. The wick hisses, flickers, then catches. She gets slowly to her feet, whispers, "Daddy?"

He is hiding behind the screen. She giggles as she moves toward it, one hand cupping the flame. But behind the screen there's a bed, a dresser, and beyond that a second screen, and behind that screen a toilet with a small sink, and beneath the sink a metal basin filled with bars of soap that are still in their pretty wrappers.

She drips some wax onto the edge of the sink, twists the candle down into it, and uses the toilet. The stinging is worse. Much worse. She can barely pee the stinging is so bad. She presses her arms against her stomach, whimpering at the sharp stinging. She reaches for toilet paper, but the roll is empty. And there's no closet, no cabinet under the sink like there is at home. The stinging is worse when she finishes, and as she gets up and turns to flush the toilet, she sees blood in the bowl.

BLOODBLOODBLOOD.

She hugs her arms to her waist and stares at the blood, turning the water pink now, and begins to cry.

My period. I got my period.

No. It's the stinging. She is passing blood. She remembers when her mother had this so bad she finally couldn't go to the bathroom anymore. Her stomach bloated. She went to the hospital. And that was where she died.
Of what? What did Mama die of?
There's a name for it.
A name.
Kidney failure.

Mama had a fever.

Do I?

She touches her hand to her forehead. She is burning up. Her skin is on fire. She's going to die down here, in the whale's belly, alone.

She doubles over, and the flame hisses and goes out.

The matches. Where are the matches? Where did she put them? Oh God, the matches. The dark is terrible. It pushes against her, encircles her with its fat arms, its cool, fat arms, and it squeezes at her . . .

Eve grabs for the candle, ripping it out of its nest of wax, and backs away from the sink, her sobs sliding into the dark, being gobbled up by the dark. She stumbles back, back into the screen, and falls as it falls. Her head strikes something, and then she is part of the blackness, melting into it, one with it.

July 6, 1:25 P.M.

B
y early afternoon, when Aline parked in front of Murphy's house, the temperature had climbed into the high nineties. The sky was a bleached white scrim laced with ribbons of blue, and the air quivered with the cries of crickets. She knew exactly how the crickets felt, all right, as if the heat were sucking the last bit of moisture from their bodies. She knew because on the way back into town from the Cliff Motor Lodge, the air conditioner in the Honda had quit.

She got out, tugging at the sides of her blouse, and hurried through the gate. She reached into the mailbox to the right of the front door and quickly went through the stuff as she stood there. Bills, a letter from Monica's brother, from Murphy's parents, who were in upstate New York for the summer, and then a plain white envelope with no return address, mailed from Tango Key yesterday.

Steam it open or take it with me?

She knew she had some time before Murphy left the motel, so she let herself into the house with her key and walked back into the kitchen. She filled the kettle with water and set it on the burner. While the water was coming to a boil, she used the time to cruise through the rooms to see if anything was different since the night she'd been in here. Things looked pretty much the same, except that now there were sheets on Murphy's bed and more clothes in the closet.

The kettle whistled, and she returned to the kitchen and steamed the letter open. To her surprise, it was written in ballpoint ink, not typed, and wasn't from "A concerned citizen," but from Eve.
I'll be at the old Pleskin place tonight at ten. Eve.

The farmhouse: she couldn't have been hiding out there since she'd left, because Dobbs had checked the place. But she could easily have been somewhere nearby, in all the wilderness at that end of the island.

But what the hell did the note mean? If Murphy and Eve were in this together, then Murphy would've known where Eve was or where she was going to be, so she wouldn't have had to send him a note and he wouldn't have made those pathetic calls. What seemed more plausible was that Eve had gotten greedy—she wanted money from the sale of the frog and Murphy. She intended to sell the frog to whoever would buy and then sail off into Never-Never Land with Murphy. But was she really naive enough to believe Ortiz wouldn't go to the cops?

She called Ortiz's office and waited while his secretary buzzed him. A long wait. The hum of the fridge and the relentless tick of the clock over the sink filled the quiet. It seemed that vestiges of Murphy's state of mind lingered like smoke in the air.

"Aline?"

"Yes. Hi. Carlos. I saw Ryan. He gave me the note. Have you heard anything else?"

"Not from whoever sent the note, but I didn't expect to. However, I got a call from Alan. It seems he received a response to his newspaper ad and wanted to know what he should do. I told him not to do anything, that I was taking care of it."

"Someone called him?"

"No, a letter arrived at the hotel. Hold on a second. He read it to me over the phone. Let me find my notes."

She heard him shuffling papers, then he said, "Okay, here it is," and he began to read: " 'Mr. Cooper, I have information for you about the frog. If you're interested, be on the Tango boardwalk today at three P.M. in front of Pepe's Cafe.' Same time I'm supposed to be there. What do you want me to do, Aline?"