The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (40 page)

“Well . . . I guess one wouldn’t hurt.”

“It never hurt me when I was your age, although it does now, so you’ll have to pardon me for not joining you. Decaf coffee and a little sweet tea are the strongest drinks I take these days. Ice?”

Wayland holds up two fingers, and Beecher adds two cubes to the drink with the slow ceremony of old age. Wayland takes a sip and high color immediately dashes into his cheeks. It is the flush, Judge Beecher thinks, of a man who enjoys his tipple. As Wayland sets his glass down he says, “Do you mind if I ask what the hurry is? You’re all right, I take it?”

The judge doubts if young Wayland takes it that way at all. He’s not blind.

“A-country fair,” he says, see-sawing one hand in the air and sitting down with a grunt and a wince. Then, after consideration, he says, “Do you really want to know what the hurry is?”

Wayland considers the question, and Beecher likes him for that. Then he nods.

“It has to do with that island we took care of just now. Probably never even noticed it, have you?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Most people don’t. It barely sticks out of the water. The sea turtles don’t even bother with that old island. Yet it’s special. Did you know my grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War?”

“No, sir, I did not.” Wayland speaks with exaggerated respect, and Beecher knows the boy believes his mind is wandering. The boy is wrong. Beecher’s mind has never been clearer, and now that he’s begun, he finds that he wants to tell this story at least once, before . . .

Well, before.

“Yes. There’s a photograph of him standing on top of San Juan Hill. It’s around here someplace. Grampy claimed to have fought in the Civil War as well, but my research—for my memoirs, you understand—proved conclusively that he couldn’t have. He would have been a mere child, if born at all. But he was quite the fanciful gentleman, and he had a way of making me believe the wildest tales. Why would I not? I was only a child, not long from believing in Kris Kringle and the tooth fairy.”

“Was he a lawyer, like you and your father?”

“No, son, he was a thief. The original Light-Finger Harry. Anything that wasn’t nailed down. Only like most thieves who don’t get caught—our current governor might be a case in point—he called himself a businessman. His chief business—and chief thievery—was land. He bought bug- and gator-infested Florida acreage cheap and sold it dear to folks who must have been as gullible as I was as a child. Balzac once said, ‘Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.’ That’s certainly true of the Beecher family, and please remember that you’re my lawyer. Anything I say to you must be held in confidence.”

“Yes, Judge.” Wayland takes another sip of his drink. It is by far the finest Scotch he has ever drunk.

“Grampy Beecher was the one who pointed that island out to me. I was ten. He had care of me for the day, and I suppose he wanted some peace and quiet. Or maybe what he wanted was a bit noisier. There was a pretty housemaid, and he may have been in hopes of investigating beneath her petticoats. So he told me that Edward Teach—better known as Blackbeard—had supposedly buried a great treasure out there. ‘Nobody’s ever found it, Havie,’ he said—Havie’s what he called me—‘but you might be the one. A fortune in jewels and gold doubloons.’ You’ll know what I did next.”

“I suppose you went out there and left your grandfather to cheer up the maid.”

The judge nods, smiling. “I took the old wooden canoe we had tied up to the dock. Went like my hair was on fire and my tail feathers were catching. Didn’t take but five minutes to paddle out there. Takes me three times as long these days, and that’s if the water’s smooth. The island’s all rock and brush on the landward side, but there’s a dune of fine beach sand on the Gulf side. It never goes away. In the eighty years I’ve been going out there, it never seems to change. At least not geographically.”

“Didn’t find any treasure, I suppose?”

“I did, in a way, but it wasn’t jewels and gold. It was a name, written in the sand of that dune. As if with a stick, you know, only I didn’t see any stick. The letters were drawn deep, and the sun struck shadows into them, making them stand out. Almost as if they were floating.”

“What was the name, Judge?”

“I think you have to see it written to understand.”

The judge takes a sheet of paper from the top drawer of his desk, prints carefully, then turns the paper around so Wayland can read it: ROBIE LADOOSH.

“All right . . . ” Wayland says cautiously.

“On any other day, I would have gone treasure-hunting with this very boy, because he was my best friend, and you know how boys are when they’re best friends.”

“Joined at the hip,” Wayland says, smiling.

“Tight as a new key in a new lock,” Wayland agrees. “But it was summer and he’d gone off with his parents to visit his mama’s people in Virginia or Maryland or some such northern clime. So I was on my own. But attend me closely, counselor. The boy’s
actual
name was Robert LaDoucette.”

Again Wayland says, “All right . . . ” The judge thinks that sort of leading drawl could become annoying over time, but it isn’t a thing he’ll ever have to actually find out, so he lets it go.

“He was my best friend and I was his, but there was a whole gang of boys we ran around with, and everyone called him Robbie LaDoosh. You follow?”

“I guess,” Wayland says, but the Judge can see he doesn’t. That’s understandable; Beecher has had a lot more time to think about these things. Often on sleepless nights.

“Remember that I was ten. If I had been asked to spell my friend’s nickname, I would have done it just this way.” He taps ROBIE LADOOSH.

Speaking almost to himself, he adds: “So some of the magic comes from me. It
must
come from me. The question is, how much?”

“You’re saying you didn’t write that name in the sand?”

“No. I thought I made that clear.”

“One of your other friends, then?”

“They were all from Nokomis Village, and didn’t even know about that island. We never would have paddled out to such an uninteresting little rock on our own. Robbie knew it was there, he was also from the Point, but he was hundreds of miles north.”

“All right . . . ”

“My chum Robbie never came back from that vacation. We got word a week or so later that he’d taken a fall while out horseback riding. He broke his neck. Killed instantly. His parents were heartbroken. So was I, of course.”

There is silence while Wayland considers this. While they both consider it. Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the judge supposes. He hears them every night. It’s the modern age, and in some ways—in many—he’ll be glad to be shed of it.

At last Wayland says, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the judge says. “What do you think I’m saying?”

But Anthony Wayland is a lawyer, and refusing to be drawn in is an ingrained habit with him. “Did you tell your grandfather?”

“On the day the telegram about Robbie came, he wasn’t there to tell. He never stayed in one place for long. We didn’t see him again for six months or more. No, I kept it to myself. And like Mary after she gave birth to Jesus, I considered these things in my heart.”

“And what conclusion did you draw?”

“I kept canoeing out to that island to look at the dune, and that should answer your question. There was nothing . . . and nothing . . . and nothing. I guess I was on the verge of forgetting all about it, but then I went out one afternoon after school and there was another name written in the sand.
Printed
in the sand, to be courtroom-exact. No sign of a stick that time, either, although I suppose a stick could have been thrown into the water. This time the name was Peter Alderson. It meant nothing to me until a few days later. It was my chore to go out to the end of the road and get the paper, and it was my habit to scan the front page while I walked back up the drive—which, as you know from driving it yourself, is a good quarter-mile long. In the summer I’d also check on how the Washington Senators had done, because back then they were as close to a Southern team as we had.

“This particular day, a headline on the bottom of the front page caught my eye: WINDOW WASHER KILLED IN TRAGIC FALL. The poor guy was doing the third-floor windows of the Sarasota Public Library when the scaffolding he was standing on gave way. His name was Peter Alderson.”

The judge can see from Wayland’s face that he believes this is either a prank or some sort of elaborate fantasy the Judge is spinning out. He can also see that Wayland is enjoying his drink, and when the Judge moves to top it up, Wayland doesn’t say no. And, really, the young man’s belief or disbelief is beside the point. It’s just such a luxury to tell it.

“Maybe you see why I go back and forth in my mind about where the magic lies,” Beecher says. “I
knew
Robbie, and the misspelling of his name was my misspelling. But I didn’t know this window washer from Adam. In any case, that’s when the dune really started to get a hold on me. I began going out every day when I was here, a habit that’s continued into my very old age. I respect the place, I fear the place, but most of all, I’m addicted to the place.

“Over the years, many names have appeared on that dune, and the people the names belong to always die. Sometimes it’s within the week, sometimes it’s two, but it’s never more than a month. Some have been people I knew, and if it’s by a nickname I knew them, it’s the nickname I see. One day in 1940 I paddled out there and saw GRAMPY BEECHER drawn into the sand. He died in Key West three days later. Heart attack.”

With the air of someone humoring a man who is mentally unbalanced but not actually dangerous, Wayland asks, “Did you never try to interfere with this . . . this process? Call your grandfather, for instance, and tell him to see a doctor?”

Beecher shakes his head. “I didn’t know it was a heart attack until we got word from the Monroe County medical examiner, did I? It could have been an accident, or even a murder. Certainly there were people who had reasons to hate my grandfather; his dealings were not of the purest sort.”

“Still . . . he was your grandfather and all . . . ”

“The truth, counselor, is that I was afraid. I felt—I still feel—as if there on that island, there’s a hatch that’s come ajar. On this side is what we’re pleased to call ‘the real world.’ On the other is all the machinery of the universe, running at top speed. Only a fool would stick his hand into such machinery in an attempt to stop it.”

“Judge Beecher, if you want your paperwork to sail through probate, I’d keep quiet about all this. You might think there’s no one to contest your will, but when large amounts of money are at stake, third and fourth cousins have a way of coming out of the woodwork. And you know the criterion: ‘Being of sound mind and body.’ ”

“I’ve kept it to myself for eighty years,” Beecher says, and in his voice Wayland can hear
objection overruled.
“Never a word until now. And I’m sure you won’t talk.”

“Of course not,” Wayland says.

“I was always excited on days when names appeared in the sand—unhealthily excited, I’m sure—but terrified of the phenomenon only once. That single time I was deeply terrified, and fled back to the Point in my canoe as if devils were after me. Shall I tell you?”

“Please.” Wayland lifts his drink and sips. Why not? Billable hours are, after all, billable hours.

“It was 1959. I was still on the Point. I’ve always lived here except for the years in Tallahassee, and it’s better not to speak of them although I now think part of the hate I felt for that provincial backwater of a town, perhaps even most of it, was simply a masked longing for the island, and the dune. I kept wondering what I was missing, you see.
Who
I was missing. Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power. Perhaps you find that unlovely. The truth often is.

“So. 1959. Harvey Beecher lawyering in Sarasota and living at Pelican Point. If it wasn’t pouring down rain when I got home, I’d always change into old clothes and paddle out to the island for a look-see before supper. On this particular day I’d been kept at the office late, and by the time I’d gotten out to the island, tied up, and walked over to the dune side, the sun was going down big and red, as it so often does over the Gulf. What I saw stunned me. I literally could not move.

“There wasn’t just one name written in the sand that evening but many, and in that red sunset light they looked as if they had been written in blood. They were crammed together, they wove in and out, they were written over and above and up and down. The whole length and breadth of the dune was covered with a tapestry of names. The ones down by the water had been half erased.”

Wayland looks awed in spite of his core disbelief.

“I think I screamed. I can’t remember for sure, but yes, I think so. What I
do
remember is breaking the paralysis and running away as fast as I could, down the path to where my canoe was tied up. It seemed to take me forever to unpluck the knot, and when I did, I pushed the canoe out into the water before I climbed in. I was soaked from head to toe, and it’s a wonder I didn’t tip over. Although in those days I could have easily swum to shore, pushing the canoe ahead of me. Not these days; if I tipped my kayak over now, that would be all she wrote.”

“Then I suggest you stay onshore, at least until your will is signed, witnessed, and notarized.”

Judge Beecher gives the young man a wintry smile. “You needn’t worry about that, son,” he says. He looks toward the window, and the Gulf beyond. His face is long and thoughtful. “Those names . . . I can see them yet, jostling each other for place on that blood-red dune. Two days later, a TWA plane on its way to Miami crashed in the Glades. All one hundred and nineteen souls on board were killed. The passenger list was in the paper. I recognized some of the names. I recognized many of them.”

“You saw this. You saw those names.”

“Yes. For several months after that I stayed away from the island, and I promised myself I would stay away for good. I suppose drug addicts make the same promises to themselves about their dope, don’t they? And like them, I eventually weakened and resumed my old habit. Now, counselor: do you understand why I called you out here to finish the work on my will, and why it had to be tonight?”