10. Rattlesnakes

July–August 2020

I wasn’t surprised when I saw the elderly woman pushing the double stroller with the empty seats; I had been forewarned. This was on Rattlesnake Road, which winds the four-mile length of Rattlesnake Key on the Florida Gulf Coast. Houses and condos to the south; a few McMansions at the north end.

There’s a blind curve half a mile from Greg Ackerman’s McMansion, where I was staying that summer, bouncing around like the last pea in an oversized can. Tangled undergrowth higher than my head (and I’m six-four) flanked the road, seeming to press in and make what was narrow to begin with even narrower. The curve was marked on either side by fluorescent green plastic kids, each bearing the warning SLOW! CHILDREN AT PLAY. I was walking, and at the age of seventy-two, in the simmering heat of a July morning, I was going plenty slow. My plan was to walk to the swing gate which divides the private part of the road from the part the county maintains, then go back to Greg’s house. I was already wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

I hadn’t been entirely sure Greg wasn’t putting me on about Mrs. Bell, but here she was, and pushing her oversized stroller toward me. One of the wheels had a squeak and could have used some oil. She was wearing baggy shorts, sandals with knee-length socks, and a big blue sunhat. She stopped, and I remembered Greg asking me if her problem—that’s what he called it—would give me a problem. I said it wouldn’t, but now I wondered.

“Hello. I think you must be Mrs. Bell. My name is Vic Trenton. I’m staying at Greg’s house for awhile.”

“A friend of Greg’s? How nice! An old friend?”

“We worked in the same Boston ad agency. I was a copywriter and he—”

“Pictures and layout, I know. Before he made the big bucks.” She pushed the double pram closer, but not too close. “Any friend of Greg’s, so on and so forth. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Since we’re going to be neighbors for as long as you’ll be here, please call me Alita. Or Allie, if you like. Are you okay? No sign of this new flu?”

“I’m okay. No cough, no fever. I assume you are, too.”

“I am. Which is good, as old as I am, and with a few of the usual old-person medical issues. One of the few nice things about being here in the summer is how most people clear out. I saw on the news this morning that Dr. Fauci is saying there could be a hundred thousand new cases every day. Can you believe that?”

I told her I had seen the same thing.

“Did you come here to get away from it?”

“No. I needed some time off and the place was offered to me, so I took it.” That was far from the whole story.

“I think you’re a little crazy to be vacationing in this part of the world during the summer, Mr. Trenton.”

According to Greg, you’re the one who’s crazy, I thought. And judging by the stroller you’re wheeling around, he wasn’t wrong.

“Vic, please,” I said. “Since we’re neighbors.”

“Would you like to say hello to the twins?” She gestured to the pram. On the seat of one was a pair of blue shorts, on the other a pair of green ones. Draped over the backs of the seats were joke shirts. One said BAD, the other BADDER. “This one is Jacob,” indicating the blue shorts, “and this one is Joseph.” She touched the shirt that said BADDER. It was a brief touch, but gentle and loving. Her look was calm but cautious, waiting to see how I’d respond.

Nutty? Yes indeed, but I wasn’t terribly uncomfortable. There were two reasons for that. One, Greg had clued me in, saying that Mrs. Bell was otherwise perfectly sane and in touch with reality. Two, when you spend your working life in the advertising business, you meet a lot of crazy people. If they’re not that way when they come onboard, they get that way.

Just be pleasant, Greg told me. She’s harmless, and she makes the best oatmeal raisin cookies I’ve ever tasted. I wasn’t sure I believed him about the cookies—admen are prone to superlatives, even those who have left the job—but I was perfectly willing to be pleasant.

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Very nice to meet you.”

Not being there, Jacob and Joseph made no reply. And not being there, the heat didn’t bother them and they would never have to worry about Covid or skin cancer.

“They’ve just turned four,” Allie Bell said. This woman having four-year-old twin boys would be a good trick, I thought, since she looked to be in her mid-sixties. “Old enough to walk, really, but the lazy things would rather ride. I dress them in different colored shorts because sometimes even I get confused about which is which.” She laughed. “I’ll let you get on with your walk, Mr. Trenton—”

“Vic. Please.”

“Vic, then. By ten it will be ninety in the shade, and the humidity, don’t even talk about it. Say goodbye, boys.”

Presumably they did so. I wished them a good day and told Allie Bell it was nice to meet her.

“The same,” she said. “And the twins think you look like a nice man. Don’t you, boys?”

“You’re right, I am,” I assured the empty seats of the double pram.

Allie Bell beamed. If it was a test, I seemed to have passed. “Do you like cookies, Vic?”

“I do. Greg said oatmeal raisin is your specialty.”

“Spécialitie de la maison, oui, oui,” she said, and trilled a laugh. There was something faintly worrisome about it. Probably it was the context. You aren’t introduced to long-dead twins every day. “I will bring you some in the near future, if you don’t mind me stopping by.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But in the evening. When it cools off a little. I have a tendency to lose my breath in the middle of the day, although it doesn’t bother Jake and Joe. And I always bring my pole.”

“Pole?”

“For the snakes,” she said. “Ta-ta, very nice to meet you.” She rolled the pram past me, then turned back. “Although this is no time to enjoy the Gulf Coast. October and November is the time for that.”

“Duly noted,” I said.

I originally thought the Key was named for its shape, which looks remarkably snakelike from the air, twisting and doubling back on itself as it does, but Greg told me there were rattlers, a regular infestation of them, until the early eighties. That was when the building boom hit the Keys south of Siesta and Casey. Up until then those lower keys had been left to doze.

“The snakes were a kind of ecological blip,” Greg said. “I guess in the beginning a few of them might have swum across from the mainland… can snakes swim?”

“They can,” I told him.

“Or maybe they hitched a ride in the bilge of a supply boat or something. Hell, maybe even in the hold of some rich guy’s cabin cruiser. They bred in the undergrowth, where the birds had a hard job getting at the young. Rattlesnakes don’t lay eggs, you know. The mamas squeeze out eight or ten at a time and that’s a lot of snakeskin boots, let me tell you. Those fuckers were everywhere. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They got driven north when the southern part of the Key started being developed. Then, when the rich folks came in—”

“Like you,” I said.

“Well, yes,” he said with appropriate modesty. “The stock market has been good to this boy, especially Apple.”

“And Tesla.”

“True. I tipped you on that, but you, being the cautious New Englander that you are—”

“Quit it,” I said.

“Then, when the rich folks came in and started building their McMansions—”

“Like yours,” I said.

“Please, Vic. Unlike some of the stucco and cement horrors in this part of Florida, mine is architecturally pleasing.”

“If you say so.”

“When the rich folks started to build, the contractors found the snakes everywhere. They were teeming. The builders killed the ones on the lots where they were working—Gulf side and Bay side—but there wasn’t an organized snake hunt until after the Bell twins. The county wouldn’t do anything even then, arguing that the north end of the Key was privately owned and developed, so the contractors put together a posse and had a snake hunt. I was still working at MassAds then and day-trading on the side, so I wasn’t around, but I’ve heard that a hundred men and women—a hundred at least—in gloves and high boots started where the swing gate is now and worked their way north, beating the brush and killing every snake they found. Mostly rattlers, but there were others as well—blacksnakes, grass snakes, a couple of copperheads, and, hard to believe but true, a fucking python.”

“They killed the non-poisonous ones as well as the kind that bite?”

“Killed em all,” Greg said. “Hasn’t been many snakes spotted on the Key since.”

He called that night. I was sitting out by his pool, sipping a gin and tonic and looking at the stars. He wanted to know how I was enjoying the house. I said I was enjoying it just fine and thanked him again for letting me stay there.

“Although this is no time to enjoy the Key,” he said. “Especially with most of the tourist attractions shut down because of Covid. The best times—”

“October and November. Mrs. Bell told me. Allie.”

“You met her.”

“Yes indeed. Her and the twins. Jacob and Joseph. At least I met their shorts and shirts.”

There was a pause. Then Greg said, “Are you okay with that? I was thinking about Donna when I offered you the place. I never thought about how it might make you remember—”

I didn’t want to go there, even after all those years. “It’s fine. You were right. Allie Bell seems like a very nice woman, otherwise. Offered me cookies.”

“You’ll love them.”

I thought of the little round spots of color in her cheeks. “She assures me she doesn’t have Covid—which she called the new flu—and she wasn’t coughing, but she didn’t look exactly healthy.” I thought of the double stroller with its empty shirts and shorts. “Physically, I mean. She said something about having medical issues.”

“Well, she’s in her seventies—”

“That old? I guessed sixties.”

“She and her husband were the first ones to build on the north end, and that was back when Carter was president. All I’m saying is that when you get into your seventies your equipment is off the warranty.”

“I haven’t seen anyone else, but I’ve only been here three days. Not even all unpacked.” Not that I’d brought much. Mostly I’d been catching up on my reading, just as I’d promised myself I’d do when I retired. When I watched TV, I muted the commercials. I’d be happy to never see another ad in my life.

“Buddy, it’s summer. The summer of Covid, no less. Once you’re past the swing gate, it’s just you and Alita. And—” He stopped.

“And the twins,” I finished. “Jake and Joe.”

“You’re sure it doesn’t bother you? I mean, considering what happened to—”

“It doesn’t. Bad things happen to kids sometimes. It happened to me and Donna and it happened to Allie Bell. Our son was a long time ago. Tad. I’ve put it to rest.” A lie. Some things you never put to rest. “But I have a question.”

“And I have an answer.”

That made me laugh. Greg Ackerman, older and richer, but still a smartass. When we had the Brite Company’s soft drink account, he once came to a meeting with a bottle of Brite Cola, with the distinctive long neck, sticking out of his unzipped fly.

“Does she know?”

“Not sure I follow.”

I was pretty sure he did.

“Does she know that stroller is empty? Does she know her little boys died thirty years ago?”

“Forty,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. And yeah, she knows.”

“Are you positive or only pretty sure?”

“Positive,” he said, then paused. “Almost.” That was Greg, too. Always leave yourself an out.

I watched the stars and finished my drink. Thunder bumbled and rumbled on the Gulf and there were unfocused flashes of lightning, but I thought those were empty threats.

I finished unpacking my second suitcase, something that should have been done two days ago. When that was done—it took all of five minutes—I went to bed. It was the 10th of July. In the larger world, Covid cases had passed three million just in the United States. Greg had told me I was welcome to stay in his place all the way through September, if I wanted. I told him I thought six weeks would be enough to clear my head, but now that it had cooled off, I thought I might stay longer. Wait out the dread disease.

The silence—broken only by the sleepy sound of waves hitting Greg’s shingle of beach—was exquisite. I could get up with the sun and take my walks earlier than I had today… and maybe give Allie Bell a miss by doing so. She was pleasant enough, and I thought Greg was right—she had at least three of her four wheels on the road, but that double pram with the shorts of different colors on the seats… that was creepy.

“Bad and Badder,” I murmured. The master bedroom’s slider was open and a puff of breeze lifted the thin white curtains, turning them into arms.

I got Greg’s concern about the phantom twins as they related to me. At least now I did. My understanding came late, but wasn’t better late than never the accepted wisdom? I had certainly never made the connection to my life when he first told me about Alita Bell’s eccentricity. That connection was to my son, who also died, and at roughly the same age as Jacob and Joseph. But Tad wasn’t the reason I felt I had to get away from New England, at least for awhile. That grief was old. In this ridiculously oversized house and during these hot summer weeks, I had a new one to deal with.

I dreamed of Donna, as I often did. In this one we were sitting on the couch in our old living room, holding hands. We were young. We weren’t talking. That was all, that was the whole dream, but I woke up with tears on my face. The wind was blowing harder now, a warm wind, but it made the curtains look more like reaching arms than ever. I got up to close the slider, then went out on the balcony instead. In the daytime you could see the entire sweep of the Gulf from the upstairs bedrooms (Greg had told me I was welcome to use the master, so that’s what I did), but in the early hours of the morning there was only black. Except for the occasional flashes of lightning, which were closer now. And the thunder was louder, the threat of a storm no longer empty.

I stood at the rail above the flagstone patio and the swimming pool with my tee-shirt and boxers flapping around me. I could tell myself it was the thunder that had awakened me, or the freshening wind, but of course it was the dream. The two of us on the couch, holding hands, unable to talk about what was between us. The loss was too big, too permanent, too there.

It wasn’t rattlesnakes that killed our son. He died of dehydration in a hot car. I never blamed my wife for it; she almost died with him. I never even blamed the dog, a St. Bernard named Cujo, who circled and circled our dead Ford Pinto for three days under the hammering summer sun.

There’s a book by Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that perfectly described what happened to my wife and son. The house where our car died—because of a plugged needle valve that would have taken a mechanic five minutes to fix—was far out in the country and deserted. The dog was rabid. If Tad had a guardian angel, he was on vacation that July.

All that happened a long time ago. Decades.

I went back inside, closed the slider, and latched it for good measure. I lay back down and was almost asleep when I heard a faint squeaking sound. I sat bolt upright, listening.

You get crazy ideas sometimes, ones that would seem ridiculous in broad daylight but seem quite plausible in the small hours of the morning. I couldn’t remember if I’d locked the house, and it was all too easy to imagine that Allie, a lot crazier than Greg believed, was downstairs. That she was pushing the double stroller with the squeaky wheel across the great room to the kitchen, where she would leave a Tupperware container of oatmeal raisin cookies. Pushing the stroller and believing that her twin sons, forty years dead, were sitting in the seats.

Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.

Yes, I could see her. I could even see Jake and Joe… because she could see them. Only because I wasn’t her I could see they were dead. Pale skin. Glazed eyes. Swollen legs and ankles because that was where the snakes had bitten.

It was ridiculous, idiotic. Even then, sitting upright in bed with the sheet puddled in my lap, I knew it. And yet:

Squeak. Pause. Squeak.

I turned on the bedside lamp and crossed the room, telling myself I wasn’t scared. I turned on the room’s overhead light, then reached through the doorway and turned on the upstairs gallery’s track lighting, also telling myself no one was going to clutch my groping hand and I wasn’t going to scream if someone did.

I went halfway across the gallery and looked over the waist-high rail. No one was in the great room, of course, but I could hear the first spatters of rain hitting the downstairs windows. And I could hear something else, as well.

Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.

I had neglected to turn off the overhead paddle fan. That was what was squeaking. In the daytime I hadn’t even heard it. The switch was at the head of the stairs. I flipped it. The fan coasted to a stop, giving one more squeak as it did so. I went back to bed but left the table lamp on, turned to its lowest setting. If I had another dream, I didn’t remember it in the morning.

I slept in, probably because of my late-night scare, and skipped my walk, but I was up early on the next three mornings, when the air was fresh and even the birds were silent. I took my walk to the swing gate and back, seeing plenty of rabbits but no humans. I passed the Bell mailbox at the head of a driveway enclosed by rhododendrons but could barely glimpse the house, which was on the bay side and screened by trees and more rhododendrons.

During weekday working hours I heard leaf blowers and saw a couple of landscaping trucks parked in Allie’s driveway when I went to the grocery store, but I think she was otherwise alone. As was I. Plus, we were both singles who had outlived their mates. It might make a decent romcom (if anyone made romcoms about old people, that is—The Golden Girls being the exception that proves the rule), but the thought of putting a move on her held zero appeal. Less than zero, actually. What would we do? Push the invisible twins together, one on each side of the stroller? Pretend to feed them SpaghettiOs?

Greg had a caretaker, but he had asked me to water the flowers in the big pots flanking the doors on the driveway side and poolside. I was doing that one twilit evening ten or twelve days after I moved in. I heard the squeaky wheel and turned off the hose. Allie was pushing the pram down the driveway. She was wearing a kind of shoulder sling. In it was a stainless steel pole with a U-shaped hook at the end. She asked me if I was still feeling all right. I said I was.

“I am, too. I come bearing cookies.”

“That’s very nice of you,” I said, although I wouldn’t have minded if she had forgotten. Tonight there were red shorts spread on one stroller seat and white ones on the other. Shirts were again draped over the backs. One said SEE YA LATER ALLIGATOR, the other AFTER AWHILE CROCODILE. If there had been actual kids in those tees, they would have looked cute. As it was… no.

Still, she was my neighbor and harmless enough. So I said, “Hello, Jake” and “Hello, Joe, what do you know?”

Allie trilled her laugh. “You are very sweet.” Then, looking straight at me, she said, “I know they aren’t there.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Allie didn’t seem to mind.

“And yet sometimes they are.”

I remembered Donna once saying something similar. This was months after Tad died and not long before we divorced. Sometimes I see him, she said, and when I told her that was stupid—by then we had recovered enough to say unkind things to each other—she said, No. It’s necessary.

Allie’s sling had a pouch on one side. She reached into it and brought out a Ziploc bag of cookies. I took them and thanked her. “Come in and have one with me.” I paused, then added, “And bring the boys, of course.”

“Of course,” she said, as if to ask, What else?

There was a set of inside stairs going from the garage to the first floor. She halted the pram at the foot of them and said, “Get out, boys, hustle on up, it’s all right, we’re invited.” Her eyes actually followed their progress. Then she put her sling on one of the seats.

She saw me looking at the snake pole and smiled. “Try it, if you like. You’ll be surprised at how light it is.”

I pulled it out and hefted it. It couldn’t have been more than three pounds.

“Steel, but hollow. The sharp point on the end of the hook is to stick them with, but they’re too fast for me.” She held out her hand and I gave her the pole. “Usually you can push them, but if they still won’t go…” She lowered the prod, then gave it a quick lift. “You can flip them into the brush. But you have to do it fast.”

I wanted to ask if she’d ever actually used it and decided I already knew the answer. If there were invisible boys, there were invisible snakes. QED. I settled for saying it looked very useful.

“Very necessary,” she said.

Halfway up the stairs, Allie stopped, patted her chest, and took a few deep breaths. Those hard red spots were back in her cheeks.

“Are you all right?”

“Just a few missed beats of the old ticker. It’s not serious, and I have pills. I suppose I ought to take a couple. Perhaps you’d give me a glass of water?”

“What about milk? Nothing goes better with cookies.”

“Milk and cookies sounds like a treat.”

We climbed the rest of the stairs. She sat down at the kitchen table with a soft grunt. I poured two small glasses of milk and put half a dozen oatmeal raisin cookies on a plate. Three for her, three for me was what I thought, but I ended up eating four. They really were very good.

At one point she got up and called, “Boys, no trouble and no messes! Mind your manners!”

“I’m sure they will. Are you feeling better?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“You have a little…” I tapped my upper lip.

“A milk mustache?” She actually giggled. It was sort of charming.

When I handed her a napkin from the caddy on the lazy susan, I saw her looking at my hand. “Is your wife not with you, Vic?”

I touched my ring. “No. She died.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh! I’m so sorry. Was it recent?”

“Fairly recent. Would you like another cookie?”

The lady might have been off-kilter about her children, but she knew a Keep Out sign when she saw one… or heard one. “Okay, but don’t tell my doctor.”

We chatted awhile, but not about rattlesnakes, invisible children, or dead wives. She talked about the Coronavirus. She talked about Florida politicians, who she believed were hurting the environment. She said the manatees were dying because of fertilizer runoff in the water, and encouraged me to visit Mote Marine Aquarium on City Island in Sarasota and see some, “if they’re still open.”

I asked her if she’d like a little more milk. She smiled, shook her head, got to her feet, wavered a little, then stood steady. “I have to get the boys home, it’s past their bedtime. Jake! Joe! Come on, you guys!” She paused. “There they are. What have you boys been up to?” Then, to me: “They were in that room at the end of the hall. I hope they didn’t disarrange anything.”

The room at the end of the hall was Greg’s study, where I went to read in the evenings. “I’m sure they didn’t.”

“Little boys have a tendency to clutter, you know. I may let them push the stroller back. I get tired so easily these days. Would you like that, boys?”

I saw her down the stairs to the garage, ready to grab her arm if she tottered, but the milk and cookies seemed to have pepped her up.

“I’ll just get you started,” she told the twins, and turned the stroller around. “We wouldn’t want you to bump Mr. Trenton’s car, would we?”

“Bump away,” I said. “It’s a rental.”

That made her giggle again. “Come along, kiddos. We’ll have a bedtime story.”

She pushed the pram out of the garage. The first stars were coming out and it was cooling off. July days are harsh on the Gulf Coast, I’d found that out, but the evenings can be gentle. The snowbirds miss that.

I walked with her as far as the mailbox.

“Oh, look at them, they’ve run ahead.” She raised her voice. “Not too far, boys! And watch for snakes!”

“I guess you’ll have to push the stroller yourself,” I said.

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” She smiled, but I thought her eyes were sad. Maybe it was only the light. “You must think I’m a regular nutbird.”

“No,” I said. “We all have our ways of coping. My wife…”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I wasn’t going to tell her what my wife had said during the last hard months of our marriage (our first marriage): Sometimes I see him. That was a can of worms I didn’t want to open. I watched her go, and as she disappeared into the gloom of twilight lensing to full dark, I heard that squeaky wheel and thought I should have oiled it for her. It only would have taken a minute.

I went back to the house, locked up, and rinsed off our plates. Then I picked up the book I was reading, one of the Joe Pickett novels, and went down to Greg’s office. I had no interest in Greg’s workstation, hadn’t even turned on the desktop computer, but he’s got a hell of a nice easy chair with a standing lamp nearby. The perfect place to read a good novel for a couple of hours before bed.

He’s also got a cat named Buttons, now presumably residing in Greg’s East Hampton abode with Greg and his current girlfriend (who would no doubt be at least twenty years younger than Greg, perhaps even thirty). Buttons had a little wicker basket of toys. It was now on its side with the lid open. A couple of balls, a well-chewed catnip mouse, and a colorful rubber fish lay on the floor. I looked at these a long time, telling myself I must have kicked the basket over earlier in the day and just not noticed. Because really, what else could it have been? I put the toys back in and closed the lid.

Greg’s caretaker was Mr. Ito. He came twice a week. He always wore brown shirts, brown knee-length shorts with sharp creases, brown socks, brown canvas shoes. He also wore a brown pith helmet jammed down to his extremely large ears. His posture was perfect and his age was… well, ageless. He reminded me of the sadistic Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and I kept expecting him to pass on Colonel Saito’s motto to his less than energetic son: “Be happy in your work.”

Except Mr. Ito—first name Peter—was the furthest thing from sadistic, and a native Floridian born in Tampa, raised in Port Charlotte, and living across the bridge in Palm Village. Greg was his only client on Rattlesnake Key, but he had plenty of homes on Pardee, Siesta, and Boca Chita. Printed on the sides of his panel trucks (he drove one, his lackadaisical son the other) was the motto AH SO GREEN. I suppose it would have been considered racist if his name had been McSweeney.

It was getting on for August when I spied him taking a break one day, standing in the shade and drinking from his canteen (yes, he had one). He was watching his son circling Greg’s tennis court on a riding mower. I came out onto the patio and stood beside him.

“Just taking a break, Mr. Trenton,” he said, putting on his mask. “Back at it in a minute. I don’t deal with the heat as well as I used to.”

“Wait until you get to my age,” I said. “I’m curious about something. Do you remember the Bell twins? Jake and Joe?”

“Oh my God, yes. Who could forget? 1982 or ’83, I think. Terrible thing. I was as young as that idiot when it happened.” He pointed to his son Eddie, who appeared to be communing with his phone as he mowed around the court. I half-expected him to roll across it at any time. That could spell disaster.

“I’ve met Allie, and… well…”

He nodded. “Sad lady. Sad, sad lady. Always pushing her stroller. I don’t know if she really believes the kiddies are in it or not.”

“Maybe it’s both,” I said.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no?”

I shrugged.

“What happened to them was a fucking shame, if you’ll pardon my French. She was young when it happened. Thirty? Might have been, or a bit older. Her husband was much older. Henry was his name.”

“Is it true snakes got the kids?”

He pulled down his mask, took another drink from his canteen, put his mask back in place. I’d left mine in the house.

“Yeah, it was snakes. Rattlers. There was an inquest, and the verdict was death by misadventure. The papers were more discreet back then and there was no social media… except people talk, and that’s a kind of social media, wouldn’t you say?”

I agreed it was.

“Mr. Bell was in his office upstairs, making calls. He was some sort of grand high poobah in the investment business. Like your friend Mr. Ackerman. The missus was taking a shower. The boys were playing in the backyard, where there was a high gate, supposedly locked. Only it really wasn’t, only looked that way. The county detective in charge of the investigation said the gate latch had been painted over several times on account of rust, and it didn’t catch the way it was supposed to and those boys got out. She used to push em in the stroller—don’t know if it’s the same one she’s got now or not—but they could walk just fine and they must have decided to go to the beach.”

“They didn’t take the boardwalk?”

Mr. Ito shook his head. “No. I don’t know why. No one knows why. The searchers could see where they went in, there were broken branches and a little piece of a shirt hanging from one of them.”

SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, I thought.

“It’s about four hundred yards from Rattlesnake Road to the beach, all of it choked with undergrowth. They made it about halfway. One of them was dead when the searchers found them. The other died before they could get him back to the road. My Uncle Devin was in the search party and he said each of those little boys had been bit over a hundred times. I don’t believe that, but I guess it was a lot. Most of the bites—the punctures—were on their legs, but there were more on their necks and faces.”

“Because they fell down?”

“Yeah. Once the poison started to work, they would have fallen down. There was only one rattler left when the search party found the boys. One of the men killed it with a snake pole. That’s a kind of thing, has a hook—”

“I know what they are. Allie carries one when she walks near dark.”

Mr. Ito nodded. “Not that there are many snakes now. Certainly no rattlers. There was a hunting party two days later. Plenty of men, a regular posse. Some were building contractors and their crews, the rest were from Palm Village. Uncle Devin was in on that one, too. They went north, beating the bush. Killed over two hundred rattlers on the way is what I heard, not to mention assorted other wrigglies. They finished up on the point of land between Daylight Pass and Duma Key… at least where Duma used to be, it’s underwater now. Some of the snakes swam away and probably drowned. The rest were killed right there. Uncle Devin said another four or five hundred, which has got to be bullshit, pardon my French. But I guess there were plenty. Henry Bell was part of that group, but he wasn’t in at the finish. He fainted from the heat and the excitement. And the sorrow, I guess. Mrs. Bell never saw the little boys where they died, only after they’d been, you know, fixed up in the funeral parlor, but their father was part of the search party that found them. They took him to the hospital. He died of a heart attack not long after. Probably never got over it. I mean, who would?”

I could relate to that. Some things you don’t get over.

“How did they kill all those snakes?” I had been to the end of the Key, to that small triangle of shell beach between the pass and the little crown of greenery which is all that remains of Duma Key, and I just couldn’t picture such a mass of snakes there.

Before he could answer, there was a loud clattering. Eddie Ito had driven onto the tennis court after all.

“Oy, oy, oy!” Mr. Ito screamed, and ran toward him, waving his arms.

Eddie looked up from his phone, startled, and hauled the riding mower back onto the lawn before it could do major damage to the court surface, although there would be plenty of dirt and clods to clean up. So I never got the end of the story.

Donna and I buried our son’s body in Harmony Hill Cemetery, but that was the least part of him. We found that out in the months that followed. He was still there, between us. We tried to find a way around him and back to each other and couldn’t do it. Donna was withdrawn, suffering from PTSD, taking pills and drinking too much. I couldn’t blame her for getting stranded at the Camber farm, so I blamed her for an affair she’d had with a loser named Steve Kemp. It was brief and meaningless and had nothing to do with the goddam clogged needle valve, but the more I scratched that sore place the more inflamed it became.

Once she said, “You’re blaming me because you can’t blame the universe.”

That could have been true, but it didn’t help. The divorce, when it came, was no-fault and not contentious. I could say it was amicable, but it wasn’t. By then we were both just too emotionally exhausted to be angry at each other.

That night, after hearing Mr. Ito’s version of the twins’ deaths—hardly reliable, but maybe in truth’s ballpark—I had trouble falling asleep. When I did, it was thin. I dreamed that the double pram was rolling slowly down the driveway from the road. At first I thought it was rolling by itself, a ghost pram, but when the security lights came on I saw the twins were pushing it. They looked exactly alike and I thought, No wonder she puts them in different shorts and shirts. Beneath their mops of blond hair, the faces were somehow wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t the faces; maybe it was their necks, which looked swollen. As if they were suffering from the mumps. Or Covid. When they got closer I saw their arms were also swollen, and marked with red dots like flakes of red pepper.

Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause.

They came closer still, and I saw there was a rattlesnake in each of the seats, squirming and coiling. They were bringing me the snakes as a gift, maybe. Or as a punishment. I had been away when my son died, after all. My reason for going to Boston, trouble with an advertising account, was partly an excuse. I was angry about Donna’s affair. No, furious. I needed to cool down.

I never wished her dead, I tried to tell the little blank-eyed children, but maybe that was only half-true. Love and hate are also twins.

I came to a soupy consciousness but at first thought I was still dreaming because I could still hear that rhythmic squeaking. It was the fan in the great room—had to be—so I got up to turn it off. I hadn’t even reached the bedroom door before realizing the squeaking had stopped. I walked down the gallery, still more asleep than awake, and didn’t even have to turn on the light to see that the fan blades were motionless.

It was the dream, I thought. It just followed me into half-waking.

I went back to bed, fell into real sleep almost at once, and this time there were no dreams.

I overslept because I’d been awake in the middle of the night. At least I thought I had; maybe the walk down the gallery to check on the fan had also been part of the dream. I didn’t think so but couldn’t be sure.

I wouldn’t have walked if the day had been hot, but one of the Gulf Coast’s fabled cold fronts had come in overnight. They’re never very cold, you have to live through a Maine winter to experience a real cold front, but it was in the seventies, and the breeze was refreshing. I toasted myself an English muffin, buttered it liberally, and set out for the swing gate.

I hadn’t gone a quarter of a mile before I saw buzzards circling—both the black ones and the red-headed turkey vultures. They’re ugly, awkward birds, so big it’s hard for them to fly. Greg told me they show up by the hundreds if there’s a red tide, gobbling the dead fish that wash up on the beach. But there had been no red tide that summer—the prickling in your lungs is impossible to mistake for anything else—and these birds appeared to be over the road instead of the beach.

I expected to find a dead rabbit or armadillo squashed in the road. Maybe someone’s runaway cat or puppy. But it wasn’t an animal. It was Allie. She was lying on her back by her mailbox. The double stroller was overturned at the head of her driveway. The shorts and shirts had spilled out and were lying on the crushed shell. Half a dozen buzzards were squabbling over her, hopping around, jostling each other, pecking at her arms and legs and face. Only pecking isn’t the right word. They were snatching at her flesh with their big beaks. I saw one of them—a redheaded turkey buzzard that had to weigh five pounds—dig into her exposed bicep and raise her arm, shaking its head and making her hand wiggle. As if she were waving at me.

After a moment of shocked paralysis I charged them, windmilling my arms and yelling. Several took clumsy flight. Most of the others backed off along the road in big clumsy hops. Not the one with its beak in her arm, though; it continued to shake its head, trying to tear a strip of flesh loose. I wished for Allie’s snake pole—a baseball bat would have been even better—but you know what they say about wishes, beggars, and horses. I saw a fallen palm frond, picked it up, and began waving it.

“Get away!” I shouted. “Get away, you fucker!”

Those fronds weigh almost nothing, but the dry ones make a loud rattling sound. The buzzard gave one more yank of its head and then launched itself and flew past me with a scrap of Allie’s arm in its beak. Those black eyes seemed to mark me, to say your turn will come. I punched at it but missed.

There was no question that she was dead, but I knelt beside her to make sure. I’m old now, and they tell me that one’s thought processes dim even if you’re not struck by Alzheimer’s or dementia—the slipp’d pantaloon, and all that—but I think I’ll never forget what the carrion birds had done to the nice lady who needed to pretend her long-dead children were still alive. The woman who had brought me oatmeal raisin cookies. Her mouth was open and with the lower lip gone, she appeared to be wearing a terminal snarl. The buzzards had gotten half of her nose and both of her eyes. Blood-rimmed sockets stared at me with terminal shock.

I went to the far side of the road and threw up my English muffin and my morning coffee. Then I returned to her. I didn’t want to. What I wanted was to run back to Greg’s house as fast as my creaky old-man legs would carry me. But if I did that, the buzzards would return and resume their meal. Some were circling overhead. Most were roosting in the Australian pines and palmettos, like vultures in a horror movie version of a New Yorker cartoon. I had my phone and called 911. I reported what had happened and said I would stay with the body until the police arrived. An ambulance would probably also arrive, much good it would do.

I wished I had something to cover her mutilated face and realized I did. I set the stroller upright, moved it to the thick wall of rhododendron and sea grape at the side of the driveway, and took one of the shirts draped on the back. I put it over what was left of her face. Her legs were splayed and her skirt was up to her thighs. I knew from TV that you’re not supposed to move a body until the police come, but I decided fuck that. I put her legs together. They had also been pecked, and I thought those red dots looked like snakebites. I took the other shirt and covered her legs from below her knees to her shins. One shirt was black, the other white, but they both said the same thing: I’M A TWINDAVIDUAL!

I sat down beside her, waiting for the police and wishing I’d never come to Rattlesnake Key. Duma was the Key that was supposed to have been haunted—so Mr. Ito had told me—but as far as I was concerned, Rattlesnake was worse. If for no other reason than it, unlike Duma, was still there.

The Bell driveway was bordered with bigger shells. I picked some up and every time one of those buzzards came close, I pegged a shell at it. I only hit one, but it gave out a very satisfying squawk.

I waited for the sirens. I tried not to look at the dead woman with the tee-shirts over her face and legs. I thought about oatmeal raisin cookies and about a trip I made to Providence ten years before. I was sixty-two then and thinking about retirement. I didn’t know what I’d do with my so-called golden years, but the joy I’d always felt in the advertising biz—composing just the right slogan to go with just the right idea—had started to grow very thin.

I was there, along with two other hotshots in the Boston agency, to talk to an eloquence of lawyers: Debbin Debbin, if you please. Their headquarters was in Providence, but they had offices in all the New England states, specializing in auto accident claims, disabilities, and slip-and-fall injuries. The Debbins’ crew wanted an aggressive ad campaign that would blanket all the TV stations from Cranston to Caribou. Something jazzy, they said. Something that will make people call that 800 number. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting, which was apt to be long and contentious. Lawyers think they know everything.

I was sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel the night before, waiting for my compatriots, Jim Woolsy and Andre Dubose, to come down from their rooms. The plan was to go out to Olive Garden and brainstorm, the ultimate goal being to come up with two good pitches. No more than two. Lawyers think they know everything, but lawyers also get easily confused. I had a notepad on which I’d jotted: WHY GET FUCKED WHEN YOU CAN DO THE FUCKING? CALL DEBBIN DEBBIN!

Probably a non-starter. I flipped the pad closed, put it in my jacket pocket, and glanced into the bar. That’s all I did. I think about that sometimes, how I might have looked out the window, or back at the elevators to see if Jim and Andre were coming. But I didn’t. I glanced into the bar.

There was a woman on one of the stools. She was dressed in a dark blue pants suit. Her hair, black and streaked with white, was styled in the kind of cut, maybe what hairdressers call a Dutch bob, that brushed the nape of her neck. Her face was only a quarter turned to me as she raised her glass to sip, but I didn’t need to see more. There are things we just know, aren’t there? The tilt of a person’s head. The way the jaw angles into the chin. The way one shoulder might always be slightly lifted, as if in a humorous shrug. The gesture of a hand brushing back a wing of hair, the first two fingers held out, the other two curled toward the palm. Time always has a tale to tell, wouldn’t you say? Time and love.

It’s not her, I thought. It can’t be.

All the time knowing it was. Knowing it could be no one else. I hadn’t seen her in over two decades, we’d fallen completely out of touch, not even holiday cards for the last dozen or so years, but I knew her at once.

I got up on legs that felt numb. I walked into the bar. I sat down next to her, a stranger who had once been my closest friend, the object of my lust and my love. The woman who had once killed a rabid dog in defense of her son but too late, too late, too late.

“Hey, you,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She turned, startled, ready to say whatever it was she meant to say, thanks but I’m meeting someone, thanks but I’m not looking for company… and saw me. Her mouth made a perfect O. She swayed backward on the stool. I caught her by the shoulders. Her eyes on mine. Her dark blue eyes on mine.

“Vic? Is it really you?”

“Is this seat taken?”

Jim and Andre did the brainstorming session by themselves, and the lawyers ended up greenlighting a really awful advertising campaign featuring a has-been cowboy star. I took my ex to dinner, and not at Olive Garden. Our first meal together since three months after the divorce. The last ended in a bitter argument; she threw her salad plate at me and we got kicked out. “I never want to see you again,” she said. “If you need to tell me something, write.”

She walked away without looking back. Reagan was president. We thought we were old but we didn’t know what old was.

There were no arguments that night in Providence. There was a lot of catching up and a fair amount of drinking. She came back to my room. We spent the night. Three months later—long enough for us to make sure this wasn’t just some kind of holding-onto-the-past mirage—we remarried.

The police came in three cruisers—maybe overdoing it for one dead old woman. And yes, there was an ambulance. The shirts were removed from Allie Bell’s corpse and after an examination by the EMTs and the sort of in situ photographs no one wants to look at, my neighbor was zipped into a body bag.

The county cop who took my statement was P. ZANE. The one who took the photographs and videotaped my statement was D. CANAVAN. Canavan was younger, and curious about the stroller and the child-sized clothing. Before I could explain, Zane said, “She’s kinda famous. Loopy but nice enough. Ever heard that song, ‘Delta Dawn’?”

Canavan shook his head, but as a country music fan in general and a Tanya Tucker fan in particular, I knew the one he was talking about. The similarity wasn’t exact, but it wasn’t bad.

I said, “It’s a song about a woman who keeps looking for her long-gone lover. Mrs. Bell liked to push around her twins, although they were also long-gone. They died years ago.”

Canavan thought it over, then said, “That’s fucked up.”

I thought, Maybe you have to have lost a child to understand.

One of the EMTs joined us. “There’ll be an autopsy, but I’m guessing it was a stroke or heart attack.”

“I’m betting on heart attack,” I said. “She took pills for arrhythmia. They might be in her dress pocket. Or…”

I went to the stroller and looked in the twin pouches on the backs of the seats. In one there were two little Tampa Rays baseball caps and a tube of sunblock. In the other was a bottle of pills. The EMT took it and looked at the label. “Sotalol,” he said. “For fast or irregular heartbeat.”

I thought she might have overturned the stroller while trying to get her medication. What else could it have been? She certainly hadn’t seen a rattlesnake.

“I imagine you’ll have to testify at the inquest,” Officer Zane said. “Are you going to be around for awhile, Mr. Trenton?”

“Yes. This summer it seems like everybody’s sticking around.”

“True,” he said, and self-consciously adjusted his mask. “Walk with us. Let’s see if she left the house open. We should lock it up if she did.”

I pushed the stroller, mostly because nobody told me not to. Zane had taken the pills and put them in an envelope.

“Jesus,” Canavan said. “I’m surprised that squeaky wheel didn’t drive her nuts.” Then, considering what he’d just said: “Although I guess she sorta was.”

“She brought me cookies,” I said. “I meant to oil it that night, but I forgot.”

The house behind the wall of rhododendron and palmetto wasn’t a McMansion. In fact, it looked like the sort of summer place that in the mid-twentieth century, long before the Richie Rich types discovered the Gulf Coast Keys, might have been rented to a couple of fishermen or a vacationing family for fifty or seventy dollars a week.

There was a bigger, newer addition behind it, but not big enough (or vulgar enough) to qualify for McMansion status. The garage was connected to the house by a breezeway. I looked in, cupping my hands against the glass, and saw a plain old Chevy Cruze. There was enough light coming through the side windows for me to make out the two small child seats side by side in the back.

Officer Zane knocked on the door of the house, a formality, then tried the knob. It opened. He told Canavan to come with him and roll videotape, presumably so he could show his bosses, including the county attorney, that they hadn’t lightfingered anything. Zane asked if I wanted to come in. I declined, but after they had gone inside, I tried the side door of the garage. It was also unlocked. I wheeled the stroller inside and parked it beside the car. There were thunderstorms forecast for later in the day, and I didn’t want it getting wet.

“Be good boys,” I said. The words were out before I knew I was going to say them.

Zane and Canavan came out ten minutes later, Canavan still videotaping as Zane worked through a loaded keyring, trying various ones until he got one to fit the front door.

“House was totally open,” he said to me. “Windows and all. I locked the back and the patio doors from the inside. Must have been a trusting soul.”

Well, I thought, she had her kids with her, and maybe they were the only things she really cared about.

After some more hunting on the deceased woman’s keyring, Zane locked the garage. By then Canavan had turned off the video camera. The three of us walked back to the road. The cops pulled their masks down around their necks. I had forgotten mine again; I hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone.

“Ito works for you, doesn’t he?” Zane asked. “Japanese-American guy from the Village?”

I said he did.

“Also for Mrs. Bell?”

“No, just me. She had Plant World for the grounds. I sometimes saw their trucks. Maybe twice a week.”

“But no caretaker? No one to fix a clogged drain or patch the roof?”

“Not that I know of. Mr. Ito might.”

Zane scratched his chin. “She must have been handy. Some women are. Just because you think your kids are still alive forty years later doesn’t mean you can’t replace a washer or a windowpane.”

“Not handy enough to oil the wheel on that squeaky stroller,” Canavan said.

“Maybe she liked it,” I said. “Or…”

“Or nothing,” Canavan said, and laughed. “Nobody likes a squeaky wheel. Don’t they say that’s the one that gets the grease?”

Zane didn’t reply. I didn’t, either, but I thought maybe the kids had liked it. Maybe it had even lulled them off to sleep after a big day of playing and swimming. Squeak… pause… squeak… pause… squeak…

The ambulance and two of the police cars were gone when we got back to where I’d found her body. Before departing, the other cops had strung yellow DO NOT CROSS tape from palms on either side of the driveway. We ducked under it. I asked Officer Zane what was going to happen with the house, and who was going to take care of her final expenses.

He said he had no idea. “She probably had a will. Somebody’ll have to go through the place and find it, plus her phone and any other paperwork. Her children and husband are dead, but there must be relatives somewhere. Until we get this straightened out, you could lend us a hand, Mr. Trenton. You and Ito keep an eye on the house, would you mind doing that? This could take awhile. Partly it’s the paperwork, but mostly it’s because we’ve only got three detectives. Two are on vacation and one’s sick.”

“Covid,” Canavan said. “Tris had got it bad, I’m hearing.”

“I can do that,” I said. “I guess you want to make sure nobody finds out the place is empty and takes advantage.”

“That’s it. Although hyenas who rob a deceased person’s house usually do it because they read the obituary, and who’s going to write an obituary for Mrs. Bell? She was alone.”

“Why don’t I put her name and what I know about her on Facebook?”

“Okay, good. And we’ll get it on the news.”

“What about Super Gramp?” Canavan said. “Could he go through the house? Look for a will and maybe an address book?”

“You know what, that’s a good idea,” Zane said.

“Who’s Super Gramp?” I asked.

“Andy Pelley,” Zane said. “Semi-retired. Refuses to go all the way to full retired. He helps out when we need a hand.”

“Charter member of the 10-42 Club,” Canavan said. He snickered, which earned him a frown from Zane.

“What’s that?”

“Cops who can’t quite bring themselves to pull the pin,” Zane said. “But Pelley’s good police, got a lot of experience, and he’s fishing buddies with one of the local judges. I bet he could get a Writ of Exigent Circumstances, or whatever it’s called.”

“So I wouldn’t have to actually go inside the house—”

“Nope, nope, you can’t,” Zane said. “That’ll be Pelley’s job, if he agrees to do it. But thanks for calling it in. And for keeping the fucking buzzards off her. They messed her up, but it could have been a lot worse. Sorry your morning walk got ruined.”

“Shit happens. I think Confucius said that.”

Canavan looked puzzled, but Zane laughed. “Ask Mr. Ito if he knows anything about Mrs. Bell’s relatives when you see him.”

“I will.”

I watched them get into their cruiser and waved as they went around the next bend. Then I walked back home. I thought about Donna. I thought about Tad, our lost boy, who would now—if not for a plugged needle valve—be in his forties and starting to go gray. I thought about Allie Bell, who made good oatmeal cookies and who said I know they aren’t there. And yet sometimes they are.

I thought about the double pram parked in the dark garage, next to the Chevy Cruze with its no-nonsense blackwall tires. I thought about saying be good boys… even though the pram was empty.

It wasn’t fair. True of the Bell twins, true of my son, true of my twice-married wife. The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.

By the time I got back to the house, I was hungry. No, ravenous. I scrambled up four eggs and toasted another English muffin. Donna would have said my hunger was healthy, life-affirming, a spit in the eye of death, but maybe I was just hungry. Finding a dead woman at the head of her driveway and waving away the buzzards who wanted to eat her must have burned a lot of calories. I couldn’t get her ruined face out of my mind, but I ate everything on my plate anyway, and this time held it down.

Because the day was pleasant instead of oppressively hot (“Hotter than dog-snot” was how Mr. Ito liked to put it), I decided to walk after all… but not down to the swing gate, which would mean passing the spot where I’d found Allie. I took Greg’s boardwalk to the beach instead. The first part of it was hemmed in by palmettos and junk palms, which turned it into a green tunnel. The raccoons seemed to like that part, and I was careful to avoid the little clumps of their scat. There was a gazebo at the end of the boardwalk. After that the trees fell away to a wide sweep of beach grass and dune reeds. The sound of the waves was mild and soothing. Gulls and terns circled, loafing on the Gulf breeze. There were other birds, too—big ’uns and little ’uns. Greg was an amateur ornithologist and would have known them all. I did not.

I looked south where there were great tangles of underbrush. A few palms poked above them, but they looked tattered and unhealthy, probably because the trash growth was sucking up most of the nutrient-rich groundwater. It was there that Jake and Joe must have come to grief. I could see the Bell boardwalk, and if they had only taken that instead of trying to play jungle explorers they would also be in their forties, maybe pushing their own youngsters in that old stroller. If onlies are also rattlesnakes, I think. They are full of poison.

I left the gazebo behind and headed north along the beach, which was wide and wet and shining in the sun. There would be a lot less beach that afternoon, and almost none by evening, when the tide was high. Mr. Ito said it didn’t used to be that way; he said it was global warming, and by the time Eddie was his age, the beach would be gone.

It was a pleasant walk with the Gulf on my left and the dunes on my right. Greg Ackerman’s was the last house on the Key; north of his property, county land took over and the tangled undergrowth reappeared, growing so close to the beach that I occasionally had to brush away palmetto branches and step over big clumps of beach naupaka. Then the foliage ended and the beach widened into a lopsided triangle deep in shells. Here and there I spotted shark’s teeth, some as big as my index finger. I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, thinking I’d give them to Donna. Then I remembered, oh snap, that my wife was dead.

Bitten again, I thought.

The triangle was lopsided because Daylight Pass had cut off the beach. Water ran against the tide from Calypso Bay, first fighting the mild Gulf waves and swirling in a whirlpool before joining them. It was a hurricane that opened Daylight, which had been closed ninety years before. So I’d read in A Pictorial History of the South Keys, which had been on Greg’s coffee table when I took up residence. Across the way was a floating patch of greenery, all that remained of Duma Key, which had been inundated in the same hurricane that opened the pass.

I lost interest in picking up shark’s teeth—remembering your wife is dead will do that, I guess—so just put my hands in my pockets and looked at the shell beach where Rattlesnake Key ended. It was to this dead end that the hunting party had driven the infestation of snakes. A group of lawyers is an eloquence; a group of rattlesnakes is a rhumba. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. The mind isn’t just a venomous reptile that sometimes bites itself; it’s also an enthusiastic garbage picker. Freddy Cannon released his 45s on the Swan label, which bore the message DON’T DROP OUT. James Garfield’s middle name was Abram. Those are also things I know but don’t know how I know.

I stood there with the breeze rippling my shirt and the birds circling overhead and the green mop of foliage that marks what’s left of Duma Key rising and falling with the waves, as if it were breathing. How had they driven the snakes here? That was a thing I didn’t know. And once they got them here, how had they killed those that didn’t try to escape by swimming away? I didn’t know that, either.

I heard a squeak from behind me. Then another. The sweat on the nape of my neck turned cold. I didn’t want to turn my head because I was sure I’d see that double stroller with the dead twins inside it, swollen from snakebites. But because I had nowhere to go (like the rattlers), and didn’t believe in ghosts, I did. There were a couple of gulls standing there—white heads, black bodies, beady eyes asking what the hell I was doing trespassing on their spot.

Because I was scared, I threw a couple of shark’s teeth at them. They weren’t as big as the shells I’d thrown at the buzzards, but they did the job. The gulls flew off, squawking indignantly.

Squawking.

What I’d heard behind me had been squeaking—like the wheel that needs some grease. I told myself that was bullshit and could almost believe it. The breeze brought the smell of something that might have been kerosene or gasoline. It didn’t surprise me; Florida politicians, from the governor right down to the city and town councils, are more interested in business than they are in preserving the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem. They abuse it and eventually they will lose it.

I looked for the telltale rainbow of gas or oil on the surface, or turning at the edges of that constant whirlpool, and saw nothing. Breathed deep and smelled nothing. Went back home… which was how I was now thinking of Greg Ackerman’s house.

I don’t know if remarriages work, as a rule. If there are statistics, I haven’t seen them. Ours did. Was it because of the long gap? Those years when we didn’t see each other, then fell out of touch completely? The shock of reconnection? That might have been part of it. Or was it because the terrible wound of our son’s death had had time to heal? Maybe, but I wonder if couples ever get over a thing like that.

Speaking just for myself, I thought of Tad less often, but when I did, the hurt was nearly as strong as ever. One day at the office I remembered how I used to read him the Monster Words before bedtime—a catechism that was intended to banish his fear of the dark—and had to sit down on a toilet in the office bathroom and cry. That wasn’t a year or two or even ten after it happened; that was when I was in my fifties. Now I’m in my seventies, and I still don’t look at pictures of him, although there was a time when I stored many on my phone. Donna said she did, but only on what would have been his birthday—a kind of ritual. But she was always stronger than I was. She was a soldier.

I think most first marriages are about romance. I’m sure there are exceptions, people who marry for money or to improve their station in life some other way, but the majority are powered by the giddy, gliding feeling pop songs are written about. “The Wind Beneath My Wings” is a good example, both because of the feeling it evokes and because of the corollary the song doesn’t go into: eventually the wind dies. Then you have to flap those wings if you don’t want to crash land. Some couples find a tougher love that endures after the romance thins away. Some couples discover that tougher love just isn’t in their repertoire. Instead of discussing money, they argue about it. Suspicion replaces trust. Secrets blossom in the shadows.

And some marriages break up because a child dies. Allie Bell’s didn’t, but might have if her husband hadn’t died not long after. No coronary for me, only panic attacks. I kept a paper bag in my briefcase and huffed into it when they came on. Eventually they stopped.

When Donna and I remarried there was an older love, kinder and more reserved. There were none of the money arguments that bedevil many young couples who are just starting out; I had done well in the ad biz, and Donna was the superintendent of one of the biggest school districts in southern Maine. On the evening I saw her in that bar, she was in Providence for a New England conference of school administrators. Her yearly salary wasn’t as big as mine, but it was generous. We both had 401k’s. Our financial needs were met.

The sex was satisfactory, although without a lot of fireworks (except maybe for that first time after our long—ha-ha—layoff). She had her house, I had mine, and that was how we lived. The commute wasn’t a big problem. It turned out that we’d been living just seventy miles apart for all those in-between years. We weren’t together all the time, and that was okay. We didn’t need to be. When we were, it was like being with a good friend that you just happened to sleep with. We worked at the relationship in a way that couples just starting out don’t need to do, because they have that wind beneath their wings. Older couples, especially those with a terrible darkness in their past that they need to avoid, have to flap. That’s what we did.

Donna took early retirement, and in 2010 we became a one-house couple: mine, in Newburyport. It was her decision. At first I thought it was because she wanted more together time, and I was right about that. Just not why she felt more together time had become necessary. We spent a week getting her settled, then she asked one sunshiny October Saturday if I’d walk with her by the rock wall that divides my property from the Merrimack River. We held hands and kicked through the leaves, listening to the crackle and smelling that sweet cinnamon odor they get before they go limp and start to decay. It was a beautiful afternoon with big fat clouds sailing across a blue sky. I said it looked like she had lost weight. She said that was true. She said it was because she had cancer.

I was afraid that thinking about the buzzards tearing into Allie would keep me awake, so I went poking through Greg’s double-sized medicine cabinet (always a bit of a hypochondriac, my friend) and found an Ambien prescription with four left in the bottle. According to the label, this particular helping of sleep medicine had expired in May of 2018, but I thought what the hell and took a couple. Maybe they worked, maybe it was just the placebo effect, but I slept all night, and with no dreams.

I woke refreshed at seven the next morning and decided to make my regular walk, feeling I couldn’t avoid the spot where Allie died for the rest of my stay. I put on shorts and sneakers and went downstairs to start the Keurig. Greg’s driveway opens into a large courtyard on the side of the house. A window at the foot of the stairs looks out on this courtyard. I got two steps from the bottom of the stairs and froze, staring.

The stroller was out there.

I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t quite take it in. I felt it had to be a trick of the shadows, only in that early morning light there were no shadows… except, that is, for the one thrown by the stroller. It was there. It was real. More than the object itself, the shadow proved it. Shadows don’t exist unless there’s something to make them.

After my initial brain-freeze, I was afraid. Someone, some mean person, had come here and left that stroller to freak me out. It worked. I was freaked out. I couldn’t think who would have done such a thing, certainly not Officers Zane or Canavan. Mr. Ito had probably heard of Mrs. Bell’s death—news travels fast in small communities—but he wasn’t the practical joker type, and his son spent most of the time in Internet dreamland. There were no usual suspects, and in a way that didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone had come to my house in what the pulp novelists call the dead of night.

Had I locked up? In my initial shock and fright (at first I wasn’t even angry), I couldn’t remember. I’m not sure I could have remembered my late wife’s middle name just then, had I been asked. I rushed to the front door: locked. I went to the one that gave on the pool and the patio: locked. I went to the back door, which opens into the garage, and that one was locked, too. So at least no one had actually been inside, doing a midnight creep. It should have been a relief but it wasn’t.

One of the copsmust have left that thing, I thought. Zane locked the garage and took the keys.

There was logic there, but I just didn’t believe it. Zane had seemed solid, dependable, far from dumb. Also, was a key to the garage really necessary? Probably not. The lock on the side door looked like the kind you could pop with a coathanger or credit card.

I went out to look at the stroller. I thought there might be a note of the sort that would be left behind in a creepy Grade C suspense movie: You’re next and Go back where you came from both came to mind.

There was no note. There was something worse. Yellow shorts on one seat, red shorts on the other. Not the same ones as yesterday. And shirts draped across the backs, also not the same. I didn’t want to touch those shirts and didn’t have to in order to read what was on them: TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Twin shirts for sure, but the twins who had worn these were long dead.

What to do with the goddam stroller was the question, and a good one. Now that the reality of it being there was setting in, my first shock, closely followed by fear, was being replaced by curiosity and anger: what a shit way to start the morning. I had my cell phone in the pocket of my shorts. I called the County Sheriff’s Department and asked for Officer P. Zane. The receptionist put me on hold, then came back and said Officer Zane was off-duty until the following Monday. I knew better than to ask for a cop’s personal number, so instead asked the dispatcher to please tell him Victor Trenton had called, and would he please call back?

“I’ll see what I can do,” the woman said, a non-response that did nothing to ameliorate my shitty morning.

“You do that,” I said, and ended the call.

Mr. Ito would also not be in until the following Monday, and I wasn’t expecting any other company, but I had no intention of letting that stroller sit in the courtyard. I decided to push it back to Mrs. Bell’s and return it to the garage. It was on my usual walk, after all, and I might be able to tell if some practical joker/mean person had forced the garage door. First, though, I took a couple of photos of the perambulator in situ, to show Zane. Assuming he was interested, that was. He might be less than happy that I’d moved the stroller from the courtyard where I found it, but was it evidence of a crime? Had Allie Bell been beaten to death with a perambulator, perforce? No. I was just returning it to where we’d put it.

I pushed it up the road under the simmering morning sun. Maybe the residual effects of the Ambien were still in my system, because once the fear had been dispelled by the pram’s prosaic ordinariness (even the shorts and shirts were prosaic, the sort of clothing available in any Walmart or Amazon), I fell into a kind of daze. I suppose if I’d been in bed, or even lying on the sofa, I would have drifted off into sleep. But because I was walking on Rattlesnake Road, I just let my mind float on its own current.

Squeaky wheel or no squeaky wheel (I really should oil it, I thought), the stroller was easy to push, especially without any four-year-old boys to weigh it down. I did it with my left hand. With my right I touched the shirts hanging over the backs of the seats—first one, then the other. I didn’t realize what I was doing until later.

I thought of the boys crossing the road and then fighting their way toward the beach through the undergrowth. Not angry about it, not using their little-boy cusswords if they got whapped in the face by a backswinging frond or when a jutting branch scraped an arm. Not angry, not impatient, not wishing they’d taken the boardwalk. They were deep in a shared fantasy—jungle explorers wearing newspaper hats their father had made them out of the Tribune’s Sunday color funnies. Somewhere ahead there might be a treasure chest left behind by pirates, or a gigantic ape like King Kong, a movie they had seen on Tampa Matinee at four o’clock, sitting crosslegged before the TV until their mom commandeered it for the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.

They hear the rattling, low at first but getting louder and closer as they push heroically onward. At first they ignore it, then make the fatal mistake of dismissing it. Joe thinks it might be bees and they could find honey. Jake asks him how many times his brother would like to get stung and tells him not to be stupid. They are after treasure. Honey is not treasure. The rattling sound is coming from the left and the right. No problem! The way to the beach is straight ahead. They can already hear the waves and they will paddle their feet before digging in the sand for gold (and building a castle if the treasure hunt yields no results). They want to wade in the water because it’s hot, a hot day like the one my little boy had to deal with. He had no water in which to paddle his feet, he was trapped in a hot car with his mommy because there was a monster outside. The monster wouldn’t leave and the car wouldn’t go.

They don’t see the dip because it’s masked by a tangle of bushes. Those bushes also hide a den of snakes—a rhumba of rattlers—that lives in its shade. Jake and Joe, side by side, could go around this overgrown clump of greenery, but that’s not how brave explorers roll. Brave explorers go straight ahead, hacking away the greenery with invisible machetes.

That’s what they do, and because they’re walking side by side, they plunge into the dip together. And into the snakes. There are dozens of them. Some are still young—snakelets—and although they can bite, they cannot (contrary to popular belief) inject poison. But their bites are still painful, and most of the rattlers are adults in full protection mode. They shoot their diamond-shaped heads forward and sink their fangs deep.

The boys cry out—ow and don’t and what and that hurts.

They are bitten multiple times on the ankles and calves. Joe goes to one knee. A snake strikes his thigh and wraps its body around his knee like a tourniquet. Jake struggles out of the brush-filled dip wearing snakes like ankle bracelets. That rattling sound fills the world. He tries to pull Joe to his feet and a snake sinks its fangs into the meat of his small palm as quick as winking. Joe is on his belly now, with snakes crawling all over him. He tries to protect his face, at least, and can’t. He’s bitten on his neck and cheeks, and when he turns his head in a futile effort to get away, on his nose and mouth. His face begins to swell.

Jake turns and begins to blunder back to the road and the Bell house on the other side, still wearing snakes around his ankles. One falls off. The other begins to twine its way up toward the leg of the boy’s shorts, a rattlesnake barber pole. Why does he run, when the two of them have always done everything together? Is it because he knows his twin brother is already beyond help? No. Because he’s in a blind panic? No—not even blind panic could cause him to abandon Joe. It’s because he wants to get Daddy if he’s still home, Mommy if Daddy isn’t. It’s not panic, it’s a rescue mission. Jake pulls the snake off his leg and has a moment to see its beady assessing eyes before it buries its fangs in his wrist. He flings it away and tries to run but he can’t run, the poison is coursing through him now, making his heart beat erratically, making it hard to breathe.

Joe is no longer screaming.

Jake’s vision doubles, then triples. He can no longer even walk, so he tries to crawl. His hands are swelling up like cartoon gloves. He tries to say his brother’s name and can’t because his throat—

What brought me out of this vision was the clack and whine of the swing gate going up. The stroller I was pushing had broken the photoelectric beam that operates it. In my zombie state I’d walked far past Allie’s driveway. I saw my right hand was still going back and forth, touching first one shirt (TWEEDLEDEE) and then the other (TWEEDLEDUM). I pulled it back as if it were touching something hot. The day was still relatively cool, but my face was wet with sweat and my tee-shirt was dark with it. I had only been walking (at least I thought so; couldn’t remember for sure), but I was breathing fast, as if at the end of a two-hundred-yard dash.

I pulled the stroller back and the swing gate went down. I asked myself what had just happened, but thought I knew. The other members of my team at the agency would have laughed—except maybe for Cathy Wilkin, who had an imagination that stretched further than taglines for toilet bowl cleaner—but I had no other way to explain it. I had seen movies and at least one TV documentary where so-called clairvoyants were called in by the police to help locate the bodies of people who were presumed dead. As bloodhounds are given an article of clothing to get the scent they’re supposed to follow, the psychics were given articles that were deemed important to the person they were supposed to locate. Mostly the results had been bullshit, but in a few cases it had worked. Or seemed to.

It was the shirts. Touching the shirts. And the part about Tad? Those were my own memories intruding on whatever vibe I’d been getting from those shirts. My son finding his way into my strange state of seeing wasn’t surprising. He had died at about the same age as the Bell twins, and at close to the same time. Triplets instead of twins. Tragedy calling to tragedy.

As I turned the stroller and started back, the vividness of my vision started to fade. I began to question the idea that I’d had an authentic psychic experience. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what happened to the Bell twins, after all; maybe my mind had just added some details, like the concealed dip they’d fallen into. It might not have happened that way at all. Plus, there was no denying that I’d been in an extremely suggestible state because of the pram showing up as it had.

That I couldn’t explain.

I ducked under the yellow tape and pushed the stroller up the curving driveway to the Bell house. Squeak, squeak, squeak. The garage’s side door was standing open, swinging lazily back and forth in a light breeze. There were no splinters above or beneath the lock plate, and none on the door itself. It could have been loided with a credit card, but it hadn’t been forced.

I studied the doorknobs, both outside and inside. There was a keyhole in the middle of the outside knob, which Officer Zane had used to lock the door. You didn’t need a key to lock the inside. There was a button in the middle of that knob and all you had to do was push it.

The solution is simple, I thought. It was the twins. It was Jacob and Joseph. They just turned the inside knob. The button would pop out and the door would open. Easy as winking. Then they pushed the stroller down to my place, Jake on one side and Joe on the other.

Sure. And if you believed that, you’d believe we won in Vietnam, the moon landing was faked, the horror-stricken parents at Sandy Hook were crisis actors, and 9/11 was an inside job.

And yet the garage door was open.

And the stroller had turned up at my house, a quarter of a mile away.

My phone rang. I jumped. It was Officer P. Zane. The receptionist at the Sheriff’s Department had come through after all.

“Hello, Mr. Trenton, what can I do you for?” He sounded more relaxed today, and much more Southern. Probably because it was his day off and he was in civilian mode.

“I’m at the Bell house,” I said, and told him why. I hardly need to add that I left out the part about my vision of the boys falling into the camouflaged snakepit.

There was a moment of silence when I finished. Then he said, “Go ahead and put that stroller back in the garage, why don’t you?” He sounded unsurprised and not very concerned. Of course he hadn’t had a vision of snakes crawling all over Joe Bell as he shrieked. “Somebody played a practical joke on you. Teenagers most likely, sneaking up Rattlesnake Road to see where the crazy lady died. She kind of had that reputation in Palm Village.”

“You really think that’s what it was?”

“What else could it be?”

Ghosts, I thought. Ghost children. But I wasn’t going to say it. I didn’t even like thinking it. “Maybe you’re right. They must have popped the lock with a credit card or driver’s license, though. There’s no sign of damage.”

“Sure. Nothing to popping a lock like that.”

“Easy as winking.”

He chuckled. “Got that right. Just put the stroller back and close the door. Deceased lady’s keys are at the substation. Andy Pelley will pick em up. You remember who I’m talking about?”

“Sure. Super Gramp.”

He laughed. “Right, but don’t call him that to his face. Anyway, he got his judge friend to sign that Exigent Circumstances widget so he can go in and do a search for next of kin and local contacts. Andy’s a sharp old bird. If anyone’s been in there, he’ll know. We at least have to find someone who’ll take responsibility for the lady’s remains.”

Remains, I thought, watching the door swing back and forth in the breeze. What a word. “I guess she can’t just stay in the morgue, can she?”

“We don’t even have one. She’s at the Perdomo Funeral Home on the Tamiami. Listen, since you’re there and the garage is open, would you mind going inside and see if the lady’s car got vandalized in any way? Punctured tires, broken windows, cracked windshield? Because we’d have to take that a little more serious.”

“Happy to. Sorry to interrupt you on your day off.”

“Don’t you worry. I’ve had my breakfast and now I’m just sitting out back and reading the paper. Call me if anything’s wrong with the car. If there is, I’ll inform Andy. And Mr. Trenton?”

“Why don’t you make it Vic?”

“Okay, Vic. If you feel like the kids who took that stroller down to Mr. Ackerman’s house might do it again—the sort of kids who pull shit like that ain’t what you’d call creative—you can roll it back and put it in your garage.”

“I think I’ll leave it here.”

“Fair enough. You have a good day, now.”

As I rolled the pram into the garage, rocking up the front end to get it over the jamb, I realized I hadn’t told Zane about the shorts and shirts, either.

The garage wasn’t air conditioned, and I began to sweat almost as soon as I was through the door. Other than needing a trip through the nearest car wash—the sides and windshield were crusted with salt—Allie’s Chevy Cruze looked okay. I found myself staring at the empty car seats in the back (of course they were empty) and made myself look away. There were a number of cardboard cartons stacked along the back wall. Neatly lettered in Magic Marker on each was THE Js.

My mother had a saying, Only snooping is lower than gossip, but my father liked to tease her with another one: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.

I opened one of the boxes and saw board jigsaw puzzles, the kind with sturdy pieces in the shapes of animals. I opened another and found picture books: Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, the Berenstain Bears. Several more contained clothes, including shorts and paired tee-shirts with various cute twin-isms on them. So this was where the shorts and shirts on the stroller had come from. The question I had was whether or not a prankster would have known how Allie placed those things on the stroller, like a child dressing invisible dolls. Officer Zane would have said yeah, word gets around. I wasn’t so sure.

Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does. This was a lesson I re-learned when I opened the last carton. It was filled with toys. Matchbox cars, Playstix, Star Wars figures, a folded Candy Land game, and a dozen plastic dinosaurs.

Our son had Matchbox cars and toy dinosaurs. Loved them.

My eyes stung and my hands weren’t quite steady as I closed up the carton. I wanted to get out of this hot, still garage. And maybe off Rattlesnake Key, too. I had come to finish grieving for my wife and all the years we’d foolishly wasted apart, not to re-open the long-healed wound of my boy’s terrible death. Certainly not to have psychic flashes of the Inside View type. I thought I’d give it another two or three days to be sure, and if I felt the same I’d call Greg, thank him, and tell Mr. Ito to keep an eye on the place. Then I’d head back to Massachusetts, where it was hot in August but not insanely hot.

On the way out, I saw some tools—a hammer, a screwdriver, a couple of wrenches—on a shelf to the left of the door. There was also an old-fashioned oil can, the kind with a metal base you pump with your fingers and a long nozzle that reminded me a little of Allie Bell’s snake pole. I decided that even though I had no intention of pushing the pram back to Greg’s house, I could at least oil that squeaky wheel. If there was any oil left in the can, that was.

I picked it up and saw there was something else on the shelf. It was a file folder with JAKE AND JOE written on it. And, in bigger letters: SAVE THIS!

I flipped it open and saw two paper hats made out of the Sunday color funnies. I forgot all about oiling the squeaky wheel, and I didn’t want to touch those homemade hats. Touching them might bring on another vision. In that hot garage, the idea didn’t seem silly but all too plausible.

I shut the garage door and went home. When I got there I turned on my phone and searched for Tampa Matinee. I didn’t want to do it, but I’d found the hats, so I did. Siri brought me to a nostalgia site created by a former employer of WTVT, Tampa’s CBS affiliate since back in the day. There was a list of local programs from the fifties to the nineties. A puppet show in the morning. A teen dance party on Saturday afternoons. And Tampa Matinee, an afternoon movie that ran from four to six each weekday afternoon until 1988. Once upon a time, only three years after my son died, Joe and Jake had sat crosslegged in front of the TV, watching King Kong clinging to the top of the Empire State Building.

I had no doubt of it.

We had ten years after remarrying. Nine of them, before the cancer came back, were good. The last year… well, we tried to make it good, and for the first six months we mostly succeeded. Then the pain started to ramp up, going from serious to very serious to the kind where you can think of nothing else. Donna was brave about it; that lady had no shortage of guts. Once she faced a rabid St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat. With the cancer burning through her she had no weapon except for her own will, but for a long time that was enough. Near the end she was little more than a shadow of the woman I’d taken to bed that night in Providence, but to me her beauty remained.

She wanted to die at home and I honored her wish. We had a day nurse and a part-time night nurse, but I mostly took care of her myself. I fed her, and when she could no longer make it to the bathroom, I changed her. I wanted to do those things because of all the missed years. There was a tree behind our house that split apart—maybe because of a lightning strike—and then grew back together, leaving a heart-shaped hole. That was us. If the metaphor seems overly sentimental, deal with it. I’m telling the truth as I understand it. As I felt it.

Some people have worse luck. We did our best with what we were given.

I lay in bed staring up at the slowly turning blades of the overhead fan. I was thinking of the stroller with the squeaky wheel, and the newspaper hats, and the toy dinosaurs. But mostly I thought of the night Donna died, which was a memory I had avoided. Now it seemed somehow necessary. There was a nor’easter with heavy snow blowing and drifting in a forty-mile-an-hour wind. The night nurse called from Lewiston at three that afternoon and canceled. The roads, she said, were impassable. The lights flickered several times but hadn’t gone out, which was good. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if they did. Donna had been switched from OxyContin tablets to a morphine pump in late December. It stood sentinel by her bed, and it ran on electricity. Donna was sleeping. It was cold in our bedroom—the furnace couldn’t keep up with that howling January wind—but her thin cheeks were wet with sweat and what remained of her once thick hair clung to the fragile curve of her skull.

I knew she was close to the end, and so did her oncologist; he had taken the limiter off the morphine pump and now its little light always glowed green. He gave me the obligatory warning that too much would kill her, but didn’t seem overly concerned. Why would he? The cancer had eaten most of her already, and was now gobbling the leftovers. I sat beside her as I had for most of the time during the last three weeks. I watched her eyes moving back and forth under her bruised-looking lids as she dreamed her dying dreams. There was a bag inside the pump, I reasoned, and maybe if the power went out I could get a screwdriver from the basement and—

Her eyes opened. I asked how she was doing, how bad the pain was.

“Not bad,” she said. Then: “He wanted to see the ducks.”

“Who did, honey?”

“Tad. He said he wanted to see the ducks. I think it was the last thing he said to me. What ducks, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember any ducks? Maybe the time we took him to the Rumford Petting Zoo?”

I didn’t remember ever taking him there. “Yeah, that’s probably it. I think—”

She looked past me. Her face brightened. “Oh my God! You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!”

I turned my head. No one there, of course, but I knew who she was seeing. The wind gusted, shrieking around the eaves and throwing snow against the shuttered bedroom window so hard that it sounded like gravel. The lights dimmed, then came back, but somewhere a door crashed open.

“You wouldn’t brEATHE!” Donna screamed.

I went gooseflesh from head to toe. I think my hair stood up. I’m not sure, but I really think it did. I wouldn’t have believed she still had the strength to scream, but she always surprised me. Right to the end she surprised me. The wind was in the house now, a burglar eager to turn the place upside down. I could feel it rushing under the closed bedroom door. Something in the living room fell and broke.

“brEATHE, Tad! brEATHE!”

Something else fell over. A chair, maybe.

Donna had somehow managed to get up on her elbows, supported by upper arms not much thicker than pencils. Now she smiled and lay back down. “All right,” she said. “I will. Yes.”

It was like listening to one end of a phone conversation.

“Yes. Okay. Good. Thank God you are. What?” She nodded. “I will.”

She closed her eyes, still smiling. I left the room to shut the front door, where there was already a fantail of snow almost an inch deep. When I came back, my wife was dead. You may scoff at the idea that our son came to escort her out of this life, and you are welcome to. I, on the other hand, once heard my little boy’s voice coming from his closet while he was dying a dozen miles away.

I never told anyone about that, not even Donna.

These memories circled and circled. They were buzzards, they were rattlesnakes. They pecked, stung, wouldn’t let me go. Around midnight I took two more of Greg’s expired Ambien, lay back down, and waited for them to work. Still thinking of how Donna saw Tad grown to manhood as she passed out of the world. That her life ended in such a way should have had a calming effect on me, but it didn’t. The memory of her deathbed kept connecting to the vision I’d had of the boys falling into the snakepit and coming back to reality to discover my hand going back and forth between TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Feeling their leavings. Their remains.

I thought, What if I saw them the way Donna saw Tad at the end? What if I actually saw them? Allie did; I know she did.

Seeing Tad had comforted Donna as she crossed the border from life to death. Would those boys comfort me? I didn’t think so. Their comforter was gone. I was a stranger. I was… what? What was I to them?

I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to be haunted by them, and the idea that it might be happening… that was what was keeping me awake.

I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the rhythmic squeaking. It started all at once and there was no way I could pretend it was the overhead fan in Greg’s living room; it was coming from the en suite bathroom of this very bedroom.

Squeakand squeak and squeak.

I was terrified as a person can only be when they’re alone in a house at the end of a mostly deserted road. But if Donna could face down a rabid St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat in defense of her son, surely I could look into the bathroom. It even crossed my mind, as I turned on the night table lamp and got out of bed, that I was imagining that sound. Hadn’t I read somewhere that Ambien can cause hallucinations?

I walked to the left of the bathroom door and stood there against the wall, biting my lip. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Now the squeaking was louder than ever. It was a big bathroom. Someone was pushing that stroller around in there, back and forth, back and forth.

I reached around the jamb, terribly afraid—I think we always are in such situations—that a hand would close over mine. I found the light switch, fumbled with it for an agonizing length of time that was probably only two or three seconds, and flicked it up. The overheads were fluorescents, nice and bright. In most cases, light is a reliable dispeller of night terrors. Not this time. I still couldn’t see into the bathroom from where I was standing, but on the wall opposite I could see a large shadow going back and forth. It was too amorphous for me to be sure it was that goddamned stroller, but I knew it was. And were the boys pushing it?

How else could it have gotten here?

Boys, I tried to say, but all that came out was a dry whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Boys, you’re not wanted here. You’re not welcome here.”

I realized I was speaking a bastardized version of the Monster Words, with which I had once comforted my little boy.

“It’s my bathroom, not yours. It’s my house, not yours. Go back to where you came from.”

And where would that be? In two child-sized coffins under the earth of Palmetto Grove Cemetery? Were their rotting bodies—their rotting remains—pushing that stroller maniacally back and forth? Were pieces of their dead flesh falling off onto the floor?

Squeakand squeak and squeak.

The shadow on the wall.

Gathering every last ounce of my courage, I stepped away from the wall and went through the door. The squeaking stopped. The abandoned stroller was standing in front of the glass shower stall. Now there were two pairs of black pants draped over the seats and two black coats draped over the backs. Those were burial suits, meant to be worn forever.

While I stared at the pram, frozen by the horror of this thing that had no earthly way to be there, a rattling replaced the pram’s squeaky wheel. It was low at first, as if coming from a distance, but rising until it was the sound of dry bones being shaken in a dozen gourds. I had been looking at the shower stall. Now I looked at Greg’s fancy clawfoot tub, which was long and deep. It was filled to the brim with rattlesnakes. As I watched, one small, supplicating hand rose from the twisting mass, that bathtub rhumba, and stretched out to me.

I fled.

It was the stroller that brought me back to myself.

It was standing in the middle of the flagstone courtyard, just as it had before… only now its shadow was being thrown by a three-quarter moon instead of morning light. I have no memory of running downstairs, wearing only the gym shorts I slept in, or out the patio door. I know I must have come that way because I found it standing open when I went back in.

I left the stroller where it was.

I went back upstairs, dreading every step, telling myself it had been a dream (except for the stroller outside; its presence was undeniable), knowing it hadn’t been. Not a vision, either. It had been a visitation. The only thing that kept me from spending the rest of the night in my rental car with the doors locked was my clear sense that the visitation was over. The house was empty again except for me. Soon, I told myself, it would be entirely empty. I had no intention of staying on Rattlesnake Key when I had a perfectly good house to go back to in Newburyport. The only ghost there was the memory of my dead wife.

The bathroom was empty, as I’d known it would be. There were no rattlesnakes in the tub and no wheel-tracks on the faux marble floor. I went to the gallery and looked down on the courtyard, hoping the stroller would be gone, too. No such luck. It stood there in the moonlight, as real as roses.

But at least it was outside.

I went back to bed, and believe it or not, I slept.

The stroller was still there in the morning, this time with identical white shorts on the seats. Only when I got closer I saw they weren’t completely identical after all. There were red pinstripes running down the legs of one and blue down the other. The shirts bore identical crows, one named HECKLE and one named JEKYLL. I had no intention of rolling it back down to Allie Bell’s house. After a long career in the advertising business, I knew an exercise in futility when I encountered one. I put it in my garage instead.

You might ask if it all seemed like a dream in the bright light of morning—with the exception of the restless stroller, that is. The answer is simple: it did not. I had heard the squeaking and seen the moving shadow as the twins pelted their pram furiously back and forth in that bathroom, which was almost the size of a modest apartment’s living room. I had seen the tub filled with snakes.

I waited until nine o’clock to call Delta Airlines. A recorded voice advised me that all reservation agents were currently busy and invited me to hold. I did, at least until a version of “Stairway to Heaven” by the One Hundred Comatose Strings came on, then gave up and went to American. Same thing. JetBlue, ditto. Southwest had a flight to Cleveland on Thursday, no connecting flight scheduled to Boston, but that might change, the agent told me. It was hard to tell. Thanks to the Coronavirus, everything was crazy.

I booked the flight to Cleveland, thinking if no connecting flight materialized I could rent a car, drive to Boston, and Uber to Newburyport. By then it was nine-thirty. I was very aware of the stroller sitting out in my garage. It was like having a hot stone in my pocket.

I went to the Hertz site on my phone and was put on terminal hold. Same with Avis and Enterprise. An agent answered the phone at Budget, checked his computer, and told me they had no oneway rental cars available in Cleveland. That left Amtrak and the bus lines, but by then I was frustrated and tired of holding the phone to my ear. I kept thinking of the stroller, the shirts, the child-sized black burial suits. The light of a hot August day should have helped. It didn’t. The more my options closed off, the more I wanted—needed—to get out of Greg’s house and away from Allie Bell’s down the road. What had felt like a place to recover near the serenity of the Gulf now felt like a prison.

I got a cup of coffee, paced around the kitchen, and tried to think of what I should do, but it was hard to think of anything but the stroller (squeak) and the matching shirts (squeak) and the black burial suits (squeak). The coffins had also been matching. White, with gold handles. I knew this.

I drank the coffee black and another penny dropped: the nighttime visitation might be over but the haunting was still going on.

Thursday. I concentrated on that. I had a flight at least as far as Cleveland on Thursday. Three days from now.

Get off the Key until then. Do that much, at least. Can you?

At first I thought I could. Easy as winking. I grabbed my phone, found Barry’s Resort Hotel in Palm Village, and called. Surely they would have a room where I could stay for three nights; hadn’t I seen on the news that few people were traveling this summer? Why, the place would probably welcome me (squeak) with open arms!

What I got was a recorded message short and to the point: “Thank you for calling Barry’s Resort Hotel. We are closed until further notice.”

I called Holiday Inn Express in Venice and was told they were open but taking no new guests. Motel 6 in Sarasota didn’t answer at all. As a last resort (little pun there—squeak!) I called the Days Inn in Bradenton. Yes, I was told, they had rooms. Yes, I could reserve one providing I passed a temperature check and wore a mask. I took the room, although Bradenton was forty miles away and two counties over. Then I went outside to try and clear my head before packing. I could have gone through the garage, but chose the patio door instead. I didn’t want to look at the stroller, let alone oil the squeaky wheel. The twins might not like it.

I was standing by the pool when an F-150 pickup truck, blinding in the summer sun, came down the driveway and pulled up in the courtyard, exactly where I’d found the goddam stroller both times. The man who got out was wearing a tropical shirt with parrots on it, very large khaki shorts, and a straw sunhat of the type only lifelong residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast can seem to get away with. He had a seamed, suntanned face and a really huge walrus mustache. He saw me and waved.

I went down the steps from the patio to the courtyard, already holding out my hand. I was glad to see him. It broke the repeating loop in my head. I think seeing anyone would have done it, but I was pretty sure I knew who this was: Super Gramp.

Instead of taking my hand, he offered his elbow. I gave it a bump, thinking this was now the new normal. “Andy Pelley. And you’re Mr. Trenton.”

“Right.”

“Don’t have the Covid, Mr. Trenton?”

“No. Do you?”

“Clean as a whistle, as far as I know.”

I was grinning like a fool, and why? Because I was happy to see him. So happy to not be thinking about black suits and white coffins and squeaky wheels. “You know who you look like?”

“Oh boy, do I ever. Get it all the time.” Then, with a smile below the mustache and a twinkle in his eye, he did a passable Wilford Brimley imitation. “Quaker Oats! It’s the right thing to do!”

I laughed giddily. “Perfect! Nailed it!” Babbling. Couldn’t help it. “That was a seriously good campaign, and I should know, because—”

“Because you used to be in advertising.” He was still smiling, but I had been wrong about the twinkle in those blue eyes. It was actually a look of assessment. A cop look. “You handled the Sharp Cereals account, didn’t you?”

“A long time ago,” I said, thinking: He’s looked me up online. Investigated me. Why, I don’t know. Unless he thinks I—

“Got a few questions for you, Mr. Trenton. Maybe we could go inside? Awful hot out here. Guess the cold front’s gone the way of the blue suede shoe.”

“Of course. And really, make it Vic.”

“Vic, Vic, got it.”

I meant to take him up the steps to the patio, but he was already headed for the garage. He stopped when he saw the stroller.

“Huh. Preston Zane told me you returned that to Mrs. Bell’s garage.”

“I did. Someone brought it back. Again.” I wanted to resume babbling, telling him I didn’t know why, had no idea why the stroller was following me around, following me like a bad smell (if a bad smell could squeak, that was), but the assessing look was back in his sun-crinkled eyes and I made myself stop.

“Huh. Two nights in a row. Wow.”

His eyes saying how unlikely that was, asking me if I was lying, asking if I had a reason to lie, something to hide. I wasn’t lying, but I certainly did have something to hide. Because I didn’t want to be dismissed as a crazy person. Or even considered as someone who’d had something to do with Allie Bell’s death, the fabled “person of interest.” But that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?

“Why don’t we go inside and grab some air conditioning, Vic?”

“Fine. I made coffee, if you—”

“Nope, goes right through me these days. But I wouldn’t mind a glass of cold water. Maybe even with an ice cube in it. You’re really not sick, are you? Because you look a little pale.”

“I’m not.” Not the way he thought.

Pelley took no chances. He took a mask out of his voluminous shorts and put it on as soon as we were inside. I got him icewater and poured myself more coffee. I thought about donning my own mask and decided not to. I wanted him to see my whole face. We sat at the kitchen table. Each time he sipped his water he pulled the mask down, then returned it to its place. The mustache made it bulge.

“I understand you found Mrs. Bell. Must have been a shock.”

“It was.” The sense of relief at having company—another human being in the Haunted Mansion—was being replaced by caution. This guy might be in what Canavan had called the 10-42 Club, but Zane was right; he was sharp. I thought I was in for an interrogation rather than a courtesy stop-by.

“Happy to tell you what happened, how I found her, but since I’ve got you here, I’m curious about something.”

“Are you, now?” Those eyes on mine. There were smile lines radiating out from their corners, but they weren’t currently at work.

“Officer Zane told me you’ve been around here for a long time.”

“Donkey’s years,” he said, sipping his water, wiping at his mustache with one big farmer’s hand, then returning the mask to its place.

“I know about the rattlesnakes that killed Mrs. Bell’s twins. What I’m curious about is how the posse got rid of them. Do you know?”

“Oh, you bet.” For the first time he seemed to relax. “Should, since I was in on that snake hunt. Every cop in the county who didn’t have the duty was in on it, plus plenty more guys and even a few gals. Must have been a hundred of us. Maybe more. A regular island party, except no one was having fun. Was a hot day, a lot hotter than this one, but all of us were wearing boots, long pants, shirts with long sleeves, gloves, masks like the one I’m wearing now. And veils.”

“Veils?”

“Some were beekeepers’ veils, some were made of that stuff—tulle, maybe—ladies wear on their Sunday hats. At least they did in the old days. Because, y’see—” Leaning forward, staring me in the eye, and looking more like Wilford Brimley than ever. “Y’see, a snake’ll sometimes rear up. If it’s scared enough, that is. Spray that poison instead of injecting it. If it gets in your eyes…” He waved his hand. “Short trip to your brain. Goodnight and good luck.” And then, with no pause: “I see your midnight visitor brought back Mrs. Bell’s snake pole, too.”

He meant to catch me off-guard, and he succeeded. “What?”

“Saw it in the garage, leaning against the back wall.” His gaze never leaving mine, waiting for my eyes to shift away, or any other tell. I held my eyes steady, but I blinked. Couldn’t help it.

“You must have missed that.”

“I… did. I guess…” I didn’t know how to finish, so I just shrugged.

“Recognized it right away by the little silver ring on the handle. Lady went just about everywhere with it, at least on the Key. Many folks along Rattlesnake Road and over the swing bridge in the Village knew it, too.”

“And the stroller,” I said.

“Yeah, she liked to push the stroller. Talking to it sometimes. Talking to those gone boys of hers. I’ve seen her doing it myself.”

“So did I.”

He waited. I thought of saying that stroller was in my bathroom last night and the dead twins were pushing it.

“You asked about the snakes.” He sipped his water and wiped his mustache with a cupped hand. Up went the mask. “The Great Snake Drive of Eighty-Two or Eighty-Three. I’d have to look it up to be sure. Or maybe you already did, Vic?”

I shook my head.

“Well, those of us who didn’t have snake poles had baseball bats, rug beaters, or tennis rackets. All kinds of things. To whack the brush with, you know. Also fishing nets. No shortage of nets on the Gulf. All the west coast keys are narrow, and this one’s narrower than most. Gulf on one side, Calypso Bay on the other. Only six hundred yards across at its widest point and that’s down by the swing bridge. This end, where the rattlers migrated to when all the building started down south, is about half that. From here you can see both the Gulf and the bay, right?”

“From the side yard, yes.”

“This house wasn’t even there then. Just palmettos and beach naupaka—the snakes loved that—and trash pines. Plus lots of bushes I don’t even know the names of. We spread out in a line, from the Gulf to Calypso, and north we went, beating the bushes and dragging those nets and pounding on the ground. Snakes don’t have much hearing, but they can feel vibrations. They knew we were coming. You could see the foliage shaking, especially the naupaka. Must have felt like an earthquake to em. And when we got toward the end of the Key, where the greenery ends, we could see em. Those suckers were everywhere. It was like the ground was moving. We couldn’t believe it. And the rattling. I can hear it still.”

“Like dry bones in a gourd.”

He gave me a fixed look. “Right. How do you know that?”

“Seen them in the Franklin Park Zoo.” I told this lie with a straight face. “That’s in Boston. Also, you know, in nature programs.”

“Well, it’s a good description. Only you have to think of dozens of gourds, maybe hundreds, and a whole graveyard full of bones.”

I thought of Greg’s big bathtub. And one hand rising out of the writhing mass.

“Have you been to the north end of the Key, Vic?”

“I walked up there just the other day.”

He nodded. “I haven’t been there on foot since the snake hunt, but I’ve seen it plenty of times out fishing. The Key has changed a lot in the last forty years or so, been built up something terrible, but the north end is just the same now as it was then. A shell beach that looks like a great big lopsided triangle, am I right?”

“Just right,” I said.

He nodded. The mask went down. A sip of water. The mask went up.

“That’s where the snakes ended up, with no place to go except Daylight Pass. Backs to the water, you could say, except snakes are all back, aren’t they? That half-acre of beach was covered with them. You couldn’t see the shells at all, except every now and then for a split second or two as they moved around, shaking their tails. They were crawling all over each other, too. Enough poison in those snakes to kill half the people in Tampa, you would have said.

“We had a bunch of firemen from the Palm Village station and a bunch more from up Highway 41 in Nokomis. Big strapping fellows. Had to be, because they had twenty-gallon Smokechaser packs on their backs. What used to be called Indian pumps. Those things are made more for fighting brush fires, of which we have a lot, but they didn’t hold water that day. They were filled with kerosene. When we had the snakes—most of em, folks found strays for months after—with nothing but water behind them, those boys sprayed them very good and proper. Then my old friend Jerry Gant, Palm Village Fire Chief, long gone, fired up a Bernzomatic propane torch and flung it. Those rattlers went up in a sheet of flame, and the stink—oh my God, it was terrible, and I could never get it out of my clothes. None of us could. Washing em didn’t do any good. They had to be burned, like the snakes.”

He sat quiet for a moment, eyes on his glass of water. He would return to the reason he’d come, but right now he wasn’t here at all. He was seeing those burning rattlesnakes and smelling their stench as they writhed in the flames.

“Duma was still there back then, and some of the snakes swam for it. Maybe a few even made it, but most drowned. I don’t know if you noticed there’s a whirlpool where the water from the bay meets the water from the Gulf—”

“I’ve seen it.”

“That whirlpool… that eddy… was stronger when Duma Key was still there, because the water came through with a lot more force. I bet it’s sixteen feet deep right there where the water spins, maybe more. Dug out the channel bed, you know. Plus the tide was low that day, which increases the spill from the bay. We saw snakes spinning in that eddy, some still on fire.

“And that, Vic, was the Great Snake Drive of Eighty-Whatever.”

“Quite a story.”

“Now you tell me one. About how you knew Alita Bell and how you found her.”

“I didn’t know her at all, and I only saw her twice. Alive, I mean. The second time she brought me oatmeal raisin cookies. We ate some at this very table. Had them with milk. I said hello to the twins.”

“Did you, now?”

“Maybe it sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like the polite thing to do. Because in all other ways she struck me as completely rational. In fact—” I frowned, trying to remember. “She said she knew they weren’t there.”

“Huh.”

Hadn’t she also said and yet they are? I thought so, but I couldn’t quite remember. If she had, she was right. I knew that now for myself.

“And someone brought that stroller back. Not once, but twice.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t see anyone.”

“No.”

“Didn’t hear anyone.”

“No.”

“Didn’t notice the motion lights going on, either? Because I know Ackerman had em put in.”

“No.”

“Didn’t bring the snake pole back, either?”

“No.”

“Tell me about how you found her.”

I did, including the part about throwing a shell—maybe more than one, I had been upset and was no longer sure—to get the buzzards away from her body. “I told all that to Officers Zane and Canavan.”

“I know you did. It’s in their report. Except of course for the stroller turning up the second time. That’s what you call new information.”

“I can’t help you with that. I was asleep.”

“Huh.” Down went the mask. He finished his water. Up went the mask. “Pete Ito says you’re planning on staying until September, Mr. Trenton.”

It wasn’t lost on me that he’d spoken to Mr. Ito. Nor was it lost on me that he had reverted to my last name.

“Plans change. Finding a dead woman being pecked at by buzzards can do that to a person. I have a reservation at the Bradenton Days Inn tonight and a flight from Tampa to Cleveland on Thursday. Transportation the rest of the way to my home in Massachusetts is TBD. Things are pretty crazy in America just now.”

Crazy. That word seemed to come out with more force than I intended.

“Crazy all over the world,” Pelley said. “Why would you come down here in the summer, anyway? Most people don’t, unless they’ve got free coupons from Disney World.”

If he had talked to Pete Ito, I was sure he knew. Yes, this was an interrogation, all right. “My wife died recently. I’ve been trying to come to grips with it.”

“And you… what? Feel like you’ve got it gripped pretty good just now?”

I looked at him dead on. He didn’t look like Wilford Brimley to me anymore. He looked like a problem.

“What is this about, Deputy Pelley? Or should I call you Mr. Pelley? I understand you’re retired.”

“Semi. Not a detective these days, but a part-time deputy in good standing. And you need to cancel your flight plans.” Was there a slight emphasis on the word flight? “I’m sure they’ll take the charge off your credit card. Motel room, too. I guess you could go as far as Barry’s over in the Village, but—”

“Barry’s is closed. I tried it. What’s—”

“But tell you what, I’d be more comfortable if you stayed right here until Mrs. Bell has been autopsied. Which is to say, Mr. Trenton, the County Sheriff’s Department would be more comfortable.”

“I’m not sure you could stop me.”

“I wouldn’t test that if I were you. Just a friendly piece of advice.”

I heard it then, faint but audible: Squeak and squeak and squeak.

I told myself I didn’t. Told myself it was ridiculous. Told myself I wasn’t in a story called “The Tell-Tale Pram.”

“Again, Mr. Pelley… Deputy Pelley… what’s this about? You’re acting like the woman was murdered and I’m a suspect.”

Pelley was unperturbed. “Autopsy will most likely tell us how she died. Most likely that’ll let you off the hook.”

“I had no idea I was on one.”

“As for what this is about—complicating matters, you could say—there’s this. Found it on the kitchen table when I went in her house this morning at six o’clock.”

He fiddled with his phone, then passed it over. He had taken a picture of a white business envelope. On it in neat cursive was To Be Opened In Event Of My Death and Alita Marie Bell.

“The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I went ahead and opened it. Swipe to the next photo.”

I did. The note that had been in the envelope was written in the same neat cursive. And the date at the top—

“This is the day after we had the milk and cookies!”

The squeaks were coming from below, in the garage. And as with the police in the Poe story, Pelley didn’t seem to hear them. But he was an old guy, and maybe on the deaf side.

“Was it, now?”

“Yes, and some nice conversation.” I wasn’t going to tell him that Allie had sent Jake and Joe into Greg’s study to play, and I’d later found the wicker basket of cat toys overturned. That was the last thing I was going to tell this sharp-eyed (but possibly dull-eared) man. Nor would I tell him that I had conversed, more or less, with the twins myself. Hello, Jake. Hello, Joe, what do you know?

It had been a harmless nod to an old lady’s wistful fantasy. So I’d thought, but who knows when you open the door to a haunting? Or how?

“Go on and read the rest.”

I did. It was brief and informal.

This is my last will and testament, revoking all previous wills. Which is silly, because in my case there are no others. I am sound of mind if a little less so in body. I leave this house, my bank account at First Sun Trust, my investment account with Building the Future LLC, and all other worldly possessions to VICTOR TRENTON, currently living at 1567 Rattlesnake Road. My lawyer, who I didn’t consult when I wrote this, is Nathan Rutherford in Palm Village.

Signed,

Alita Marie Bell

There was another signature below it, in a different hand: Roberto M. Garcia, Witness.

I forgot about the squeaking from the garage (or maybe it stopped). I read her death-letter—nothing else to call it—over again. A third time. Then I slid Pelley’s phone back across the table, a little harder than I had to. He blocked it like a hockey puck with one tanned and wrinkled hand.

“That’s crazy.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“I only met her twice. Three times, if you count finding her dead.”

“No idea why she’d leave you everything?”

“No. And hey, that… that note… will never stand up in court. I’d say her relatives would go nuclear, but they won’t have to because I won’t contest it.”

“Roberto Garcia owns Plant World. They did her groundskeeping.”

“Yes, I’ve seen their trucks in her driveway.”

“Bobby G has also been around here for donkey’s years. If he says he saw her write that—and I have spoken to him and he says yeah, he did, although she held her hand over it when he signed so he didn’t know what was in it—then I gotta believe it.”

“Doesn’t change anything.” My words came out okay, but my whole face felt numb, as if I’d been shot up with Novocain. The oddest thing. “This lawyer will get in touch with her relatives, and—”

“I also talked to Nate Rutherford. Known him—”

“Donkey’s years, I’m sure. You’ve been busy, Deputy Pelley.”

“I get around,” he said, and not without satisfaction. “He’s been Mrs. Bell’s lawyer for…” He seemed to consider donkey’s years and decided it should be put to bed. “… for decades. He pretty much took over her affairs after Mrs. Bell’s husband and boys died. She was what they call prostrate with grief. And you know what? He says she doesn’t have any relatives.”

“Everybody has relatives. Donna—my late wife—claimed that her family went back to Mary Stuart, also known as Mary, Queen of—”

“Queen of Scots, I did go to school once upon a time, Mr. Trenton, back when all the phones had dials and cars came without seatbelts. I asked Nate how much the lady’s estate might total up to and he declined to say. But considering the property—bay to Gulf, very fine—I’d guess quite a tasty chunk of change.”

I got up, rinsed my coffee cup, and filled it with water. Giving myself time to think. Also listening for the stroller, but that was quiet.

I came back to the table and sat down. “Are you seriously suggesting that I somehow coerced the lady into writing a jackleg will… and then… what? Killed her?”

The eyes, boring into mine. “I think you just suggested that, Mr. Trenton. But since you have… did you?”

“Good Christ, no! I talked to her twice! I indulged her little fantasy! Then I found her dead! Of a heart attack, most likely—she told me she had arrhythmia.”

“No, I don’t really believe that, which is why I’m not here asking you to make an official statement. But you see the position it puts me—the department—in, don’t you? Lady makes out what they call a holograph will just before she dies, gets it witnessed up, and the man—the stranger—who finds her body also turns out to be the benny-fishie.”

“She must have been crazy about more than just her kids,” I muttered, and found myself thinking about that song Officer Zane had mentioned—“Delta Dawn.”

“Maybe sí, maybe no. In any case the autopsy’s probably going on as we speak. That’ll tell us something. And you’ll have to testify at the inquest, of course. That will be official.”

My heart sank. “When?”

“Maybe not for a couple of weeks. It’ll be by one of those computer video links. FaceTime, Zoom, I dunno. I can barely use this fancy phone.”

I didn’t believe that for a minute.

“In any case, it’d be good if you stuck around, Vic.” Now my first name felt like a trap. “In fact, I have to insist. The way things are, with the Covid running wild, it would probably be safest for you to stay right here, buttoned up and masked in town. Don’t you think?”

That might have been when I began to realize what Alita Bell had done, although it wouldn’t coalesce until that evening.

Or maybe it hadn’t been her. I thought of Donna on that last night. How she’d looked past me, her dying eyes growing bright one last time. Oh my God, she’d said. You’re all grown up!

Children couldn’t plot and plan. Adults, on the other hand…

“Vic?”

“Hmm?”

The smile lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Kind of thought I’d lost you for a minute.”

“No, I’m here. Just… processing.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot to process, isn’t it? For me, too. Like one of those mystery novels. I think you better stick to your original plan. Stay until September. Take your walks in the morning or in the cool of the evening. Have a swim in the pool. We need to figure this out if we can.”

“I’ll think about it.”

The smile lines disappeared. “Think hard, and while you’re thinking, stay in-county.” He rose and hitched at the belt of his shorts. “And now I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

“I’ll see you out.”

“No need, I can find my way.”

“I’ll see you out,” I repeated, and he raised his hands as if to say have it your way.

We went down the stairs to the garage. He paused partway and asked, with just the right combination of curiosity and sympathy, “How did your wife die, Vic?”

It was a normal enough question, no reason to believe he wanted to find out if there had been anything suspicious about it, but I had an idea that was in his mind. And not just in the back of it, either.

“Cancer,” I said.

He went the rest of the way down the stairs. “Very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. Will you be taking the stroller back to the Bell house? You could put it in the back of your truck.” I wanted to be rid of it.

“Well, yes,” he allowed, “I could. But what would be the point? It might just come back again, if this… prankster… is determined to have his little joke at your expense. We send a cruiser up Rattlesnake Road once or twice a night, but that still leaves a lot of dead time. And there are some officers down with Covid. Might be just as easy to leave it here.”

He doesn’t think there’s any prankster, I thought. He thinks it was me. Both times. He doesn’t know why, but that’s what he believes.

“What about fingerprints?”

He scratched the back of his seamed and deeply tanned neck. “Yeah, could do, I’ve got a fingerprint kit in my truck, but that would mean taking transfers of any prints I made, and I might mess it up. Hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

I hadn’t noticed that and didn’t now.

He brightened. “You know what? I can at least dust those chrome bars and take some pictures with my phone if I find anything. No point trying the handgrips, they’re rubber, and those little arms beside the seats are fabric. But those metal push-bars are, yeah, ideal for prints. Did Zane or Canavan touch it?”

“I’m not sure, but I think just me. And Allie Bell, of course.”

He nodded. At this point we were still at the foot of the stairs. We hadn’t gone out into the garage yet.

“So I could find two sets of prints—yours and Mrs. Bell’s. Although unlikely. Most people would just use the rubber handgrips.”

“I think I reached down and tilted the stroller up to get it over the doorjamb and into her garage. If I did, I could have wrapped my hands on those rods just below the grips. You might not find fingerprints, but there would be palmprints.”

He nodded, and we went into Greg’s garage. He headed outside to get his fingerprint kit, but I took his elbow to stop him. “Look,” I said, and pointed at the stroller.

“What about it?”

“It’s been moved. When I brought it in from the courtyard, I put it next to the driver’s side of my car. Now it’s on the passenger side.”

So I had heard the squeaking.

“Can’t remember for sure.”

His frown—the vertical line between his brows so deep I couldn’t see the bottom—told me he did remember but didn’t want to believe it.

“Come on, Andy.” I used his given name deliberately, an old ad conference trick I employed when arguments got heated. I wanted us to be in this together, if possible. “You’ve been a police officer long enough for observation to be a habit. That stroller was in the shade. Now it’s on the other side of my car and in the sun.”

He thought about it and shook his head. “Couldn’t say for sure.”

I wanted to make him admit it, wanted to tell him I’d heard that squeaky wheel when the pram had been moved even if he hadn’t, wanted to shake the arm I was holding. Instead I let it go. It was hard, but I did it. Because I didn’t want him to think I was crazy… and if he thought I was the one moving the stroller at night between the Bell house and Greg’s, he was already halfway to drawing that conclusion. And there was Allie Bell’s weird holograph will for him to think about, too. Did he really believe Allie and I were bare acquaintances who had only met twice? Would I have believed it?

I had an idea the questions were just beginning for me.

“I’ll get my little kit,” Pelley said. “Although I’m not hopeful.”

He drove off in his pickup ten or fifteen minutes later, after reminding me again not to leave the county, saying it would be a real bad idea. He told me that he or one of the full-time county detectives would be in touch after the autopsy.

That was a long day. I tried to nap and couldn’t. On several occasions I thought I heard the squeaky wheel and went down to the garage. The stroller hadn’t moved. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard it when Pelley was sitting at my kitchen table; that was real. Later on it was something else. Imagination, you would say, but it wasn’t. Not exactly. I thought it was a form of teasing. You can believe that or not, but I felt sure of it.

No; I knew.

Once when I heard that squeaking (not real, but real in my head) and I went down to the garage, I thought I saw the shadows of snakes on the wall. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them. The shadows were gone. They hadn’t been there, but they had been. Now there was only the stroller, sitting in the sunlight on the cement garage floor and casting its sane shadow.

Around noon, as I was eating a chicken salad sandwich, I thought of oiling that squeaky wheel after all—there was 3-In-One on the worktable in the second garage bay—and decided against it. I didn’t like the idea of touching the stroller, but I could have; I wasn’t hysterical or phobic about it. Only I remembered the old Aesop’s fable about the mice that belled the cat. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to be able to hear it coming.

I felt the same about the stroller. Especially after Pelley dusted the chrome rods and found nothing—not even the random smudges and bits of dust he would have expected. “I think it’s been wiped. By your prankster.”

Looking right at me when he said it.

That evening I walked the length of Rattlesnake Key to the swing bridge. A long walk for an old man, but I had a lot to think about. I started by asking myself again if I was crazy. The answer was an emphatic no. The snakes in the tub and the waving hand could have been a stress-induced hallucination (I didn’t believe it, but granted the possibility). The stroller in the bathroom, on the other hand, had been there. I’d only seen its shadow, but the sound of the squeaky wheel had been unmistakable. And when it was in the garage, it had moved. I’d heard it. I didn’t think Pelley had, but he knew it was in a different place, although he didn’t want to admit it to me (or probably to himself).

The swing bridge was a 24/7 deal. That night it was being manned by Jim Morrison (“Not of the Doors,” he always liked to say), a guy who was probably older than either Pelley or me. We talked for awhile when I got there—the weather, the upcoming election, how Covid had emptied the baseball stadiums except for cardboard cutouts of make-believe people. Then I asked him about Mrs. Bell.

“You found her, right?” Jim said. We were outside his little booth, where he had a television, a beat-up easy chair, and a toilet cubicle. He was wearing his yellow high-visibility vest and his red cap with RATTLESNAKE KEY on the visor. A toothpick jutted from one corner of his seamed mouth.

“Yes.”

“Poor lady. Poor old soul. She never got over losing those boys of hers. Pushed that stroller everywhere.”

Which was a perfect lead-in for what I really wanted to ask. “Do you think she really believed the boys were in it?”

He scratched his stubbly chin as he thought it over. “Can’t say for sure, but I think she did, at least some of the time. Maybe even most of the time. I think she made herself believe it. Which is a dangerous thing, in my opinion.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Better to accept the dead, wear the scar, and move on.”

I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“Were you in on the big snake hunt after they died? Andy Pelley told me about it.”

“Oh yeah, I was there. To this day I can smell those rattlers as they burned. And do you know what? Sometimes I think I see em, especially around this time of day.” He leaned over the rail and spit his toothpick into the Gulf of Mexico. “Dusk, you know. Real things seem thinner then, at least to me. My wife used to say I shoulda been a poet, with ideas like that. After the stars come out, I’m okay. I’ll see plenty tonight. I’m on until twelve, then Patricia takes over.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d get many boats wanting to go through at this time of the year, especially at night.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Lookit there.” He pointed to the moon, which was just coming up and beating silver across the water. “Folks like a moonlight cruise. Makes em romantic. Dark of the moon’s different, at least in summer. Then it’s mostly Coast Guard boats. Or DEA. Those boys are always in a hurry. Like blaring their horns could make this old bridge open any faster.”

We talked a little more and then I said I’d better be heading back.

“Yes,” Jim said. “Long walk for a man getting on in years. But you’ll have the moon to light your way.”

I told him good evening and started back across the bridge.

“Vic?”

I turned back. He was leaning against his little booth, arms folded across his vest. “Two weeks after my wife died, I came down in the middle of the night for a glass of water and saw her sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her favorite nightgown. The kitchen light wasn’t on, and the room was shadowy, but it was her, all right. I’d swear to it before God Almighty. Then I turned on the light, and…” He raised one loosely fisted hand and opened the fingers. “Gone.”

“I heard my son after he died.” It seemed perfectly right to give that up after what Jim had told me. “Speaking from the closet. And I’d swear to that.”

He only nodded, wished me goodnight, and went back into his booth.

For the first mile of my walk home, maybe a little more, there were plenty of houses, first those of ordinary size but getting bigger and fancier as I went. There were lights in a few of them with cars parked in the shell driveways, but most of the houses were dark. Their owners would come back after Christmas and leave before Easter. Depending on the pandemic situation, of course.

Once I passed the swing gate at the north end of the Key, the few McMansions on this part of the island were hidden behind the rhododendrons and palmettos that closed in on both sides of the road. The only sounds were the crickets, the waves breaking on the Gulfside beach, a whippoorwill, and my own footfalls. By the time I reached the yellow police tape closing off Mrs. Bell’s driveway, it was almost full dark. That three-quarter moon had risen enough to light my way, but it was still mostly blocked by the foliage that grows in Florida’s hothouse climate.

As soon as I passed Allie’s driveway, the squeaking started. It was thirty or forty feet behind me. My skin broke out in bumps. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I stopped, unable to walk, let alone run (not that with my creaky hips I could have run far, anyway). I understood what was happening. They had been waiting for me in their driveway. Waiting for me to pass so they could follow me back to Greg’s. What I remember most about that first moment is how my eyes felt. Like they were swelling in their sockets. I remember thinking that if they popped I’d be blind.

The squeaking stopped.

Now I could hear another sound: my own heartbeat. Like a muffled drum. The whippoorwill had fallen silent. So had the crickets. A drop of cold sweat trickled slowly down from the hollow of my temple to the angle of my jaw. I took a step. It was hard. Then another. A little easier. A third, easier still. I began to walk again, but it was as if I were on stilts. I had gotten perhaps fifty feet closer to Greg’s house when the squeaking started again. I stopped and the squeaking stopped. I started forward on my invisible stilts and the squeaking started. It was the stroller. The twins pushing the stroller. They started when I started and stopped when I stopped. They were grinning, I was sure of it. Because it was a fine joke on their new… new what? What, exactly, was I to them?

I was afraid I knew. Allie Bell had left me her house, money, and investments. But that wasn’t all she had left me. Was it?

“Boys,” I said. My voice was not my own. I was still facing forward and my voice was not my own. “Boys, go home. It’s past your bedtime.”

Nothing. I waited for cold hands to touch me. Or to see dozens of snakes weaving their way across the moonlit road. The snakes would be cold, too. Until they bit, that was. Once the poison was injected, the heat would begin. Spreading toward my heart.

No snakes. The snakes are gone. You could see them but they wouldn’t be real.

I walked. The stroller followed. Squeak and squeak and squeak.

I stopped. The stroller stopped. I was close to Greg’s house now, I could see the bulk of it against the sky, but that was no relief. They could come in. They had come in.

See us. See us. See us.

Roll us. Roll us. Roll us.

Dress us. Dress us. Dress us.

The thoughts were maddening, like one of those earworm songs that gets in your head and won’t leave. “Delta Dawn,” for instance. But I could stop them. I knew what would make them go away, at least temporarily.

They also knew.

See us. Roll us. Dress us.

I didn’t dare turn around, but there was something I could do. If I dared. My phone was in the pocket of my shorts. I took it out, opened the camera app, and reversed the image so I was looking at my own terrified face, corpse-pale in the moonlight. I raised the phone over my shoulder so I could look behind me without actually turning my head. I tried to steady my hand. Hadn’t realized it was shaking until then.

Jacob and Joseph weren’t there and neither was the stroller… but their shadows were there. Two human shapes and the angular one of the double buggy their mother had pushed them around in. I can’t say those disembodied shadows were worse than actually seeing them would have been, but they were terrible enough. I pushed the button to take a photograph with my thumb, sure it wouldn’t work, but I heard the click.

See us. Roll us. Push us.

I closed the photo app and opened the voice memo.

See us, roll us, push us.

I thought those shadows were too long to be the shadows of four-year-old children and thought again of Donna at the end of her life: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

SEE US ROLL US PUSH US!

I started walking again. The squeaking followed me, close at first, then gradually falling behind. By the time I reached Greg’s house it was gone, but the clamoring thoughts—not voices, thoughts—in my head were louder than ever. They were my thoughts, but I was being forced to think them.

The stroller was back in the courtyard. Of course it was, and casting the same angular shadow I’d seen on my phone. The shirts were still neatly draped over the seats; HECKLE on one and JEKYLL on the other. I knew how to quiet the storm in my head. I touched the backs of the seats. I touched the shirts. The clamoring, repetitive thoughts died. I pushed the stroller back into the garage, then stepped away from it, waiting. The thoughts didn’t return. But they would, of course. Next time they would be louder and more insistent. Next time they would want more than my touch.

Next time they’d want to go for a ride.

I locked the doors—as if that would do any good—and turned on every light in the house. Then I sat at the kitchen table and looked at my phone. I had a missed call from Nathan Rutherford, but I had more pressing business than Allie Bell’s lawyer. I looked at the picture I’d taken. It was a little blurred because my hand had never stopped shaking, but the shadows of the boys and the pram were there. Nothing was casting them. The road was empty. Next I opened the voice memo app and pushed play. For twenty seconds I heard the rhythmic squeaking of the pram’s bad wheel. Then it faded away.

I thought about getting in touch with Andy Pelley, because I was sure he’d registered the different position of the stroller when our talk was over. He’d given me his card. I could email him the photo and the voice memo, but he’d reject both. He’d say the shadows were of the palmettos. He might know better, but that’s what he would say. And the squeaky wheel? He’d think I did that myself, running the stroller back and forth in the garage while I recorded. He might not say so, but he would think so. He was a cop, not a ghost hunter.

But maybe that was okay. I had empiric proof for myself. I had already known what was happening was real, but the thought that it was all in my head had lingered in the background, even so.

I sat at the kitchen table with my palms pressed against my forehead, thinking. Just a few missed beats of the old ticker, Allie had said when I asked if she was okay, but suppose she had been a lot sicker than she claimed? And knew it? Suppose it wasn’t just arrhythmia but congestive heart failure? Even cancer, one of those like glioblastoma that’s a death warrant.

Suppose she was resigned to her own death but not to the deaths of her little boys? They had already died once, after all, but had come back. Or she had brought them back. And then…

“Suppose she met me,” I said.

Yes, suppose.

I called Nathan Rutherford, introduced myself, and immediately cut to the chase: I had no interest in Allie Bell’s estate.

I think his chuckle was more cynical than surprised. “Nevertheless, Mr. Trenton, you seem to have it.”

“Ridiculous. Find her relatives.”

“She claimed she had none. That after her husband died, and the little Js—that’s what she called them—she was the last sprig on the family tree. It’s the only reason that poor excuse for a will could ever stand up. Her estate is worth a good deal of money. Seven figures, perhaps even eight. She must have been taken with you, sir.”

No, I thought, I’m the one who was taken. But I don’t intend to stay taken.

“It’s put me in a lousy position, Mr. Rutherford. I found her, and pending the autopsy I look like a man with a motive for killing her. You see that, right?”

“Did you have any reason to believe you were in line to inherit? Perhaps you saw that scrap of a will before Mrs. Bell’s decease?”

“No, but Deputy Pelley told me the envelope it was in was unsealed. A county attorney who wanted to make a case could say I had access to it.”

“Time will take care of this,” Rutherford said. Which meant nothing. He had adopted a soothing voice he probably used on distraught clients. Those with money, at least, and it seemed that I now had a lot more than what was in my 401k. “If the will is unchallenged and goes through probate, you can do what you wish with the proceeds. Sell the house. Give the money away to worthy charities, should you decide to do so.”

He didn’t go on to say that charity begins at home, but his tone suggested it. I had had enough. He wanted to discuss the serpentine legal trail that lay ahead, but I had my own serpents to worry about. It was dark outside and I was scared. I thanked him and ended the call.

Had she made her will and then killed herself, with an overdose of Digoxin or sotalol?

No, I thought. The little Js wouldn’t like that. I could end up in the county jail, where see us roll us dress us would do no good. The verdict at the inquest will be accidental death, but in the meantime I’ll be here… and they’ll be here.

“Because they want me to stay,” I whispered.

I took a shower, put on a pair of gym shorts, closed the door to the en suite bathroom, and lay down on Greg Ackerman’s big double bed. As a more-or-less swinging bachelor, he’d probably shared it with any number of honeys. My own honey was gone. In the ground. Like my son.

I crossed my arms over my chest in an unconscious gesture of protection and stared up at the ceiling. It hadn’t been her, it had been them. They wanted me to stay. They wanted to work on me. They wanted me to take over from their mother, so they wouldn’t have to go to wherever uneasy revenants go to. They liked it right here on Rattlesnake Key. Where—if I didn’t want my head filled with tumbling and repetitive thoughts, if I didn’t want to hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel behind me—I would live in Allie’s house. I would eat in Allie’s kitchen and sleep in Allie’s bed. I would push them in their stroller.

I would eventually come to see them.

I don’t have to stay here, I thought. I’ve got a rental car with a full tank of gas. I can get away. Away from them. I don’t think the County Sheriff will issue a warrant for my arrest, although some judge might issue a bench warrant ordering me to come back pending the inquest… Rutherford would know, and I guess he’s my lawyer now… but I’d fight it. And while the lawyers wrangled, Jake and Joe would be getting weaker. Because she’s gone and I’m what they have.

Yes. All true enough. And I was scared, you can believe that. There’s a line from Scorsese’s Mean Streets that’s always resonated with me: “You don’t fuck around with the infinite.” But I was also angry. I had been put in a box I wasn’t supposed to escape. Not by their mother—in my heart I was sure that Allie Bell hadn’t been in on this—but by a couple of kids. Dead kids, in fact.

I had no secret weapon to fight them with, no cross or garlic to ward off vampires (which, if I was right, is sort of what they were), no rite of exorcism, but I had my mind, and I was too damn old to be pushed around by Bad and Badder.

If Allie hadn’t built the box I was in, how could they have done it? Most little boys—I had one, remember—can hardly plan a trip to the bathroom.

I fell asleep thinking of Donna, minutes from her end: You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

I didn’t come awake in the dark at least, because I hadn’t turned off the lights. This time the stroller’s squeaky wheel wasn’t coming from the en suite; it was further away. I thought it was in the part of the house Greg grandly called “the guest quarters.” Those quarters consisted of a small living room on the ground floor and a spiral staircase leading up to a bedroom and attached bathroom on the second.

The stroller was in the guest bedroom. The real stroller might be still in the garage, but the ghostly one was also real, and so were the twins pushing it so maniacally back and forth.

The thoughts seeped back in. They were low at first but grew louder, as if an unseen hand was turning up the volume. See us, roll us, dress us. See us, roll us, dress us! SEE US, ROLL US, DRESS US!

I lay on my back, clutching my hands together on my chest, biting my lip, trying to make the thoughts—their thoughts, my thoughts—stop. I might as well have insisted that the sun not go down. I could still think other thoughts—how long that would last I didn’t know—and there seemed to be only three courses of action I could pursue: lie here and go mad once those earworms swallowed everything; go down and touch the stroller in the garage, which would silence them for the time being; or confront the twins. That’s what I decided to do.

I thought, I won’t be driven mad by children.

And I thought, roll us, roll us, push us, push us. We’re yours, you’re ours.

I got off the bed and started down the upstairs gallery to the guest quarters. Halfway there the squeaking wheel stopped. I didn’t, and the thoughts—roll us, push us, dress us, we’re yours, you’re ours—didn’t, either. I didn’t hesitate at the door, which was ajar. If I had stopped to think in the part of my mind that was still capable of independent thought, I would have turned tail and run. What was I going to do in there? I had no idea. Telling them to go home or get a spanking certainly wouldn’t work.

What I saw froze me in place. The stroller was beached in the middle of the floor. Jacob and Joseph were in the guest bed. They were no longer children… yet they were. The bodies under the coverlet were long, the bodies of full-grown men, but the heads, although grotesquely swollen, were those of children. Rattlesnake poison had so bloated those heads that they had become pumpkins with Halloween faces. Their lips were black. Their foreheads, cheeks, and necks were stippled with snakebites. The eyes were sunken but hellishly alive and aware. They were grinning at me.

Bedtime story! Bedtime story! Bedti—

Then they were gone. The stroller was gone. One minute the twins were there, waiting for their bedtime story. At the next the room was empty. But the coverlet was turned down on both sides in neat triangles, and that bed had been perfectly made when I came here from Massachusetts. I had seen it for myself.

My legs were stilt legs again. I went into the room on them and looked at the bed where the boys had been. I didn’t mean to sit on it but I did because my knees gave out. My heart was still thundering away and I could hear myself, as at a distance, gasping for breath.

This is how old men die, I thought. When I’m found—probably by Pete Ito—the medical examiner would conclude it was a heart attack. They wouldn’t know I had been scared to death by two dead men with the heads of children.

Only the twins wouldn’t like me to die, would they? Now that their mother was gone, I was their only link to the world in which they wanted to stay.

I reached out to touch a turned-down triangle of coverlet with each hand and knew they didn’t like this bed. They had their own beds in the house down the road. Good beds. Their mother would have kept their room just the way it had been on the day they died, forty-some years ago. Those were the beds they liked, and when I lived there I would tuck them in at night and read them Winnie-the-Pooh, as I had to Tad. I certainly wouldn’t read them Tad’s Monster Words, because they were the monsters.

When I could get up, I walked slowly back down to the gallery to my own room. I might not sleep, but I didn’t think I’d hear the stroller’s squeaky wheel again that night. The visitation was over.

There was never a question of keeping the car in which my son had died. We wouldn’t have kept it even if it hadn’t been bashed at a dozen places by the dog trying to get in and get at them. A wrecker brought it back to our house. Donna refused to even look at that, either. I didn’t blame her.

There was no junkyard in Castle Rock. The closest was Andretti’s, in Gates Falls. I called them. They came, got the Pinto—the death car—and ran it through the crusher. What came out was a cube shot through with bright seams of glass—windows, taillights, headlights, windshield. I took a picture. Donna wouldn’t look at it.

By then the arguments had started. She wanted me to go on her weekly pilgrimages to Harmony Hill, where Tad was buried. I refused that as she had refused to look at the crushed cube of the death car. I said Tad was at the house for me, and always would be. She said that sounded highflown and noble, but it wasn’t true. She said I was afraid to go. Afraid I’d break down, and of course she was right. I imagine she saw it in my face every time she looked at me.

She was the one who moved out. I came back from a business trip to Boston and she was gone. There was a note. It said the usual things, you can probably guess: Can’t go on this way… start a new life… turn the page… blah-blah-blah. The only really original thing was the line she’d scrawled under her name, perhaps as an afterthought: I’m still in love with you and I hate you and I’m leaving before hate gets the upper hand.

Probably I don’t have to tell you I felt the same way about her.

Deputy Zane called me the next morning while I was spooning up Rice Chex—not enjoying them, just gassing up for the day. He said the autopsy had been completed. Alita Bell, wife to Henry, mother to Jacob and Joseph, had died of a heart attack.

“The ME said it was amazing she lived as long as she did. She had ninety per cent blockages, but that wasn’t all. There was cardiac scarring, which means she’d suffered a number of previous heart attacks. Small ones, you know. He also said… well, never mind.”

“No, go ahead. Please.”

Zane cleared his throat. “He said even little heart attacks, ones you might not even feel, impair cognition. That could explain why she sometimes believed her children were still alive.”

I thought of telling him that I knew her children were alive, or half-alive, and I’d never had a heart attack. I think I almost did tell him.

“Mr. Trenton? Vic?”

“Just thinking about that,” I said. “Does this let me off the hook for the inquest?”

“Nope, you still have to be here for that. You found the body.”

“But if it was a heart attack, pure and simple—”

“Oh, it was. But there won’t be a toxicology report for another couple of days. Need to find out what was in her stomach. Just dotting i’s and crossing t’s, you know.”

I thought it might be a little more. I thought Andy Pelley wanted to make sure that Allie Bell’s last-minute legatee hadn’t fed her something. Digoxin in her scrambled eggs at an early breakfast, perhaps. Meanwhile, Zane was talking and I had to ask him to rewind.

“I was saying there’s a problem. Kinda unique. We’ve got a body, but no burial instructions. Andy Pelley says you might be on the hook for that.”

“Wait, what? I’m supposed to plan a funeral?”

“Probably not a funeral,” Zane said, sounding a trifle embarrassed. “Other than the bridge tenders and maybe Lloyd Sunderland—he lives on the other side of the bridge—I don’t know who’d come.”

I think her kids would, I thought. Although no one would see them. Except, maybe, for their surrogate dad.

“Vic? Mr. Trenton? Did I lose you?”

“Right here. I have the name of her lawyer. My lawyer now, I guess, at least until this gets straightened out. I better give him a call once it gets to business hours.”

“That’s a good idea. You do that. And have a good day.”

As if.

I didn’t want the rest of my cereal, which I hadn’t been tasting anyway. I rinsed the bowl in the sink (see us) and put it in the dishwasher (dress us) and wondered what to do next. Like I didn’t know.

Take us for a walk. Roll us!

I held out against the thoughts—partly my thoughts, that was the worst of it—until I got some clothes on, then gave up. I went out to the garage and grasped the handles of the stroller. I felt a sigh of relief, mine or theirs or both, I didn’t know. The rat-run in my head ceased. I thought of rolling the pram down to the swing gate and knew it was a bad idea. Jacob and Joseph had already wedged their way into my consciousness. The more I did what they wanted, the easier it would be for them to control me.

What I had seen in the guest bedroom stayed with me: men’s bodies, children’s heads swollen with poison. They had grown in death; they had stayed the same. They had the will of men and the simple and selfish desires of small children. They were powerful, and that was bad. But they were also psychotic.

That said, that accepted, I could still feel a certain amount of sympathy. They had fallen among rattlesnakes. They had been stung to death by serpents. Who would not be driven insane by such an ending to life? And who would not want to come back and have the childhood that had been denied to them, even if that meant taking someone prisoner to do it?

I rolled the stroller back and forth across the concrete floor of the garage a few times, as if trying to lull colicky, cranky babies to sleep. I wondered if it could have been anyone and guessed it couldn’t have been. I was perfect. A man alone, one suffering his own grief.

I let go of the handles and waited for see us roll us dress us to come back. It didn’t. I left the garage, wanting to feel the warmth of the morning sun on my living face. I lifted my head and closed my eyes, seeing red as the blood in my eyelids lit up. I stood that way, as if in worship or meditation, hoping for a solution to a problem that was beyond existential. One I couldn’t tell anyone about.

I’m supposed to see her into the ground because she has no one… on this side of the veil, at least. But am I not the same? My parents are dead, my older brother is dead, my wife is dead. Who will bury me? And what will those twins from hell do—supposing they get their way and I stay here, a male version of Delta Dawn—when I pass? Given my age and the actuarial tables, it won’t be all that long. Will they shrivel and just fade away? I can bury Allie, but who will bury me?

I opened my eyes and saw Allie’s snake pole lying on the courtyard cobbles, exactly where the stroller had been parked each time it returned. It crossed my mind that it might be another illusion, like the tub full of snakes, and knew it wasn’t. This wasn’t a vision or a visitation. Nor had the twins put it here. The stroller was their thing.

I picked it up. It was real, all right. The steel pole was warm in my hand. If it had lain out here much longer on the shadeless cobbles, it would have been almost too hot to handle. No one had been here, so who had taken it from the garage?

As I held it I realized my parents, brother, and wife weren’t the only loved ones in my life who were dead. There was one more. One who had also died a terrible death at a young age.

“Tad?”

It should have sounded pathetic at best, crazy at worst: an old man speaking his long-dead son’s name in the empty courtyard of an absurdly oversized house on a Florida key. It didn’t, so I said it again.

“Tad, are you there?”

Nothing. Only the snake pole, which was undeniably real.

“Can you help me?”

There was that ramshackle gazebo at the end of Greg’s boardwalk. I went out there with the snake pole over my shoulder, the way an old-time soldier might carry his rifle… and while the pole had no bayonet, it did have that wicked hook at the end. On the gazebo’s floor were a few mold-streaked lifejackets that didn’t look like they’d save anyone’s life and an ancient boogie board decorated with a scattering of raccoon shit. I sat on the bench. It creaked beneath my weight. I didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to know Greg didn’t spend much time out here by the beach; he had a Gulf Coast house worth six or eight million dollars, and this outpost looked like a forgotten privy somewhere in the wilds of Bossier Parish, Louisiana. But I hadn’t come here to appreciate the architecture. I had come here to think.

Oh, but that was bullshit. I had come here to try and summon my dead son.

There were methods of summoning, assuming the dead hadn’t drifted away to wherever they go when they lose interest in this world; I had looked some up on the Internet before coming out here. You could use a Ouija board, which I didn’t have. You could use a mirror or candles, both of which I did… but after what I’d seen on my cell phone’s screen last night, I didn’t dare try it. There were spirits in Greg’s house, but the ones I was sure of weren’t friendly. So in the end I’d come out here to this uncared-for gazebo empty-handed. I sat and looked out at a beach unmarked by a single track and a Gulf unmarked by a single sail. In February or March, both the beach and the water would have been packed. In August there was only me.

Until I felt him.

Or someone.

Or just wishful thinking.

“Tad?”

Nothing.

“If you’re there, kiddo, I could use a little help.”

But he wasn’t a kiddo, not anymore. Four decades had passed since Tad Trenton died in that hot car with the rabid St. Bernard patrolling the dooryard of a farmhouse as deserted as the north end of Rattlesnake Key. The dead could age. I had never considered the possibility, but knew it now.

But only if they wanted to. Allowed themselves to. It was apparently possible to both grow and not grow, a paradox that had produced the gruesome hybrids I’d seen in the guest room’s double bed: man-things with the bloated heads of poisoned children.

“You don’t owe me anything. I came too late. I know that. I admit that. Only…” I stopped. You’d think a man could say anything when he’s alone, wouldn’t you? Only I wasn’t entirely sure I was. Nor was I sure what I wanted to say until I said it.

“I mourned you, Tad, but I let you go. In time, Donna did, too. That’s not wrong, is it? Forgetting is what would be wrong. Holding on too tightly… I think that makes monsters.”

I had the snake pole across my lap. “If you left this for me, I really could use a little help.”

I waited. There was nothing. There was also something, either a presence or the hope of an old man who had been scared half to death and forced to remember old hurts. Every snake that ever bit him.

Then the thoughts came back, driving away whatever delicate thing might have come to visit me.

Dress us, roll us, see us. See us, dress us, roll us!

The kids wanted me. The kids who wanted to be my kids. And they were also my thoughts, that was the horror of it. Having your own mind turned against you is a gilt-edged invitation to insanity.

What interrupted them—partially, at least—was the honking of a horn. I turned and saw someone waving to me. Just a silhouette at the edge of the courtyard, but the shapes of the spindly legs beneath the baggy shorts were enough to tell me who my company was. I waved back, propped the snake pole against the gazebo’s railing, and headed back along the boardwalk. Andy Pelley met me halfway.

“Good morning, Mr. Trenton.”

“Vic, remember?”

“Vic, Vic, right. I was out this way and thought I’d drop by.”

Bullshit you were, I thought. And I thought roll us, dress us, see us, we’re waiting for you.

“What can I do for you?”

“I thought I’d fill you in on the autopsy.”

“Officer Zane already called and told me.”

I couldn’t see if he frowned at that because of the way his bushy mustache held his mask away from his face, but his eyebrows—also bushy—drew together, so I think he did.

“Well, good. Good.”

Bullshit you think it’s good, I thought, and thought roll us roll us you’ll feel better you know you will.

We walked back to the house. The boardwalk was too narrow for us to go side by side, so I led the way. The thoughts—mine, that I couldn’t banish—were giving me a headache.

“Still waiting on the toxicology, of course.”

We reached the end of the boardwalk and strolled across the courtyard past his truck, me still leading the way. He wasn’t here just to tell me about the autopsy. I knew that and knew I needed a clear mind to deal with him.

“So Officer Zane said. Also that I’ll still have to be at the inquest. Do you have something for me, Deputy? Because I was sitting out there, doing some thinking and trying to be peaceful. Meditation, you might call it.”

“And I’ll let you get back to it. Just a few questions, is all.”

We went into the garage, where it was marginally cooler. I went to the stroller. As I neared it, the thoughts ramped up: DRESS US! ROLL US! SEE US!

For a moment I did seem to see them, not as monstrosities but as the children they’d been when they died. Just for a moment. When I gripped one of the stroller handles, they were gone… assuming they’d been there at all. And the maddening litany in my head ceased. I rolled the perambulator back and forth.

Just something to do with my hands, Andy. Think nothing of it.

“I looked you up a little,” Andy said.

“I know you did.”

“Terrible thing what happened to your own little boy. Just terrible.”

“It was a long time ago. Andy, are you on this case? If there is a case? Were you assigned to it? Because somehow I doubt that.”

“No, no,” he said, raising his hands in a perish the thought gesture. “But you know how it is—you can take the man out of the cops, but you can’t take the cop out of the man. Probably the same in your business. Advertising, wasn’t it?”

“You know it was, and the answer is no. On the rare occasions when I watch network TV instead of streaming, I mute the ads. You really have no business here at all, do you?”

“Now, I wouldn’t go that far. I just… man, I’m curious. This is a funny business. Meaning funny-peculiar, not funny-haha. You must see that.”

Back and forth went the stroller, a few feet ahead, a few feet back. Soothing the kids, keeping them quiet.

“Why would she leave you everything? That gets me. And I bet you know.”

That was true. I did.

“I don’t.”

“And why do you keep bringing that stroller back from her place? Because it’s got to be you, doesn’t it? No one else out here this time of year.”

“Not me.”

He sighed. “Talk to me, Vic. Why not? If her tox screen comes back negative, you got away with whatever you got away with.”

So there it was. He thought I’d killed her.

“Help an old duffer out. It’s just the two of us.”

I didn’t like this Wilford Brimley lookalike, who had interrupted me while I was trying something delicate. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but that didn’t make me feel any better about him, so I pretended to consider what he was asking for. I said, “Show me your phone.”

Even the bulge of his mustache couldn’t quite hide the smile on his mouth. I couldn’t gauge the exact quality of that smile, but I’d be willing to bet it was of the you got me, partner variety. The phone came out of the baggy shorts, and yes, it was recording.

“Must have hit that by accident.”

“I’m sure. Now turn it off.”

He did so with no argument. “Now it really is just the two of us. So satisfy my curiosity.”

“All right.” I took a dramatic pause—the kind that usually worked with clients before you unveiled the ad campaign they’d come to see—and then led with two lies followed by the stone truth.

“I don’t know why someone keeps bringing her stroller back. That’s number one. I don’t know why she left that crazy will. That’s number two. And here’s number three, Deputy Pelley: I didn’t kill her. The inquest goes a long way toward proving she died of natural causes. The toxicology report will go the rest of the way.”

I hoped it would. Hoped that the ghost twins hadn’t somehow gotten into her head and compelled her to swallow a bunch of her heart meds so they could jump to a marginally more healthy host. You’d think a tox report showing she’d ingested too many pills would run counter to their best interests, and you would be right… but they were children.

“Now I think you should go.” I stopped rolling the stroller. “And take this thing with you.”

“I don’t want it,” he said, and seemed surprised at the vehemence in his own voice. He knew something was wrong with it, oh yes. He started out of the garage, then looked back. “I’m not done with you.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Andy, just do something else. Go fishing. Enjoy your retirement.”

He went back to his truck, got in, revved the engine, and peeled out hard enough to leave a rubber tattoo on the courtyard pavers. I thought I might as well go back to the gazebo… at least until the earworms started up again.

Not really earworms. Snakes. Snakes in my head, two of them, and if I didn’t do what they wanted, they’d inject their poison from sacs that never emptied.

In a way I didn’t blame Pelley for his suspicions. Allie’s lawyer, Rutherford, probably had some of his own. The whole thing was wrong. The most wrong thing of all was my current wretched position. What was unpleasant today would be terrible tonight. They were stronger at night. What had Jim the bridge keeper said? Dusk, you know. Real things seem thinner then.

It was true. And once night comes, the wall between real things and a whole other plane of existence can disappear completely. One thing seemed sure—any chance of contacting my dead son was gone. The old cop had broken the spell. Best to just sit for awhile, looking out at the Gulf. Try to get Pelley—I’m not done with you—out of my mind. Think about what to do while I still could think.

When I got to the gazebo I just stood there, looking in. Pelley wasn’t the only one not done with me, it seemed. Tad—or someone—had made contact after all. The snake pole was no longer leaning against the railing. It was lying on the gazebo’s floor. The litter of old lifejackets had been pushed aside. Scratched into one of the planks—by the sharp point of the snake pole’s hook, I had no doubt—were two letters. A third had been started but left incomplete.

I looked at those letters and knew what I had to do. It had been staring me in the face all along. Jacob and Joseph—Heckle and Jekyll, Bad and Badder—weren’t as all-powerful as they seemed. In the end they only had one link to the world of the living now that their mother was gone.

The two letters scrawled on the plank were PR. The one that had been started and then abandoned was the slanted bar of an A.

Pram.

If it could be all finished and done with when it’s done, then it may as well be done quickly.

That was Macbeth’s idea about such matters as this, and he was a thinking cat. I believed I might—might—be able to deal with my two hybrid harpies if I acted fast. If I didn’t, and the thought-snakes burrowed deeper into my mind, I might end with only two choices: suicide or a life as their surrogate father. As their slave.

I went back to the house and into the garage, just ambling along: look at me, not a care in the world.

The thoughts started up at once. I no longer need to tell you what they were. I took hold of the stroller’s handles and rolled it back and forth, listening to the hellish squeaking. If I couldn’t get rid of them I’d oil that bad wheel. Of course I would. More! I’d drape different shirts over the backs of the chairs! Put different shorts on the seats! When I took up residence in the Bell house (which would become the Trenton house), I would talk to them. I would turn down their beds at night and read to them from In the Night Kitchen, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Corduroy. I would show them the pictures!

“How are you, boys?”

Good, good.

“Do you want to go for a ride?”

Yes, yes.

“All right, why don’t we do that? I just need to take care of a couple of things. I’ll be right back.”

I went in the house and grabbed my phone off the kitchen table. I checked the county tide chart and liked what I saw. It was going out, and would be at dead low shortly after 11 AM. Soon.

I was still wearing my workout shorts and a tee-shirt with the arms cut off. I dropped the shirt on the floor, kicked off my sandals, and hurried upstairs. I put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I jammed on a Red Sox hat. I had no boots, but in the downstairs closet I found a pair of galoshes. They were Greg’s, and too big for me, so I went back upstairs and put on three more pairs of socks to bulk up my feet. By the time I was back downstairs, I was sweating in spite of the air conditioning. Outside, in the August heat, I would be sweating even more.

Andy Pelley said they’d driven the snakes to the northern end of the Key, where those that didn’t burn had drowned, but he had also said the line of beaters probably hadn’t gotten all of them. I had no idea if the Js could call those that might be left. Maybe they couldn’t, or maybe there weren’t any at all after forty years, but I had dressed for snakes just in case. One thing I did know is that Florida is a reptile-friendly environment.

I looked under the sink and found a pair of rubber kitchen gloves. I yanked them on and went back out to the garage, pasting a big smile on my face. I’m sure if anyone had heard me talking to that empty stroller, they would have thought me as crazy as Allie Bell. But it was just me. And them, of course.

“Want to walk instead?” Trying to sound teasing. Trying to sell the concept, as we used to say. “Big boys like you can probably walk, right?”

No! Roll us, roll us!

“Will you be good if I take you on the beach?”

Yes! Roll us, roll us!

Then, chilling me all the way to my core:

Roll us on the beach, Daddy!

“Okay,” I said, thinking Only one boy ever had the right to call me that, you little shits. “Here we go.”

We cut across the courtyard in the hot August sunshine—squeak and squeak and squeak. I was sweating like a pig inside the sweatshirt already. I could feel it rolling down my sides to the waistband of my jeans. I pushed the stroller along the boardwalk, the slats rumbling under the wheels. Easy enough so far. The beach would be harder. I might get bogged down. I’d have to stay near the water, where the sand was packed and wet. That might work. It might not.

I rolled the pram through the gazebo. I picked up the snake pole on the way and placed it horizontally between the stroller’s wide handles.

“Having fun, boys?”

Yes! Yes!

“Sure you don’t want to get out and walk?” Please, no.

Roll us! Roll us!

“Okay, but hold on. Little bump here.”

I eased the stroller down the single slumped step between the gazebo and the line of beach naupaka and seagrass. Then we were on the sand. I had the slope to help me as I pushed the stroller down to the harder pack at the edge of the water. The buckles of the galoshes jingled.

“Wheee!” I said. My face was running with sweat, but my mouth was dry. “Having fun, boys?”

Yes! Roll us!

I was beginning to be able to tell them apart. That was Joe. Jake was silent. I didn’t like that.

“Jake? Having fun, big fella?”

Ye-es…

Didn’t like the edge of doubt, either. Something else not to like—they were separating from me. Getting stronger. More there. Some of it was the stroller, but some of it was me. I had opened myself to them. I had to. There had been no choice.

I turned north and pushed the stroller. Little birds—the ones I called peeps—strutted ahead of us, then flew. The galoshes jingled and splashed. The wheels of the stroller threw up tiny rainbows in the thin water where the Gulf gave way to the land. The sand was firm but still harder to push through than on the planks of the boardwalk. Soon my breath was rasping in and out of my throat. I wasn’t in bad shape, never drank to excess and never smoked at all, but I was in my seventies.

Jake: Where are you taking us?

“Oh, just for a little ride.” I wanted to stop, take a rest, but I was afraid the wheels would get mired if I even slowed down. “You wanted to go for a roll, I’m taking you for a roll.”

Jake: I want to go back.

That was more than doubt. That was suspicion. And Joe caught it from his brother just as I supposed he’d caught his brother’s colds.

Joe: Me too! I’m tired! The sun is too hot! We should have worn our hatties!

“Just a little fur—” I began, and that was when the snakes began to come out of the naupaka and palmetto. Big ones, dozens of them, flooding down to the beach. I hesitated, but only for a second—any longer and the stroller would have been stuck. I pushed them through the snakes and they were gone. Like the ones in the tub.

Jake: Back! Take us back! TAKE US BACK!

Joe: I don’t liiike it here! He started to cry. I don’t like the snakies!

“We’re treasure hunters.” I was panting now. “Maybe we’ll even see King Kong, like in the movie. How about that, you little rascals?”

Ahead I could see the triangle of heaped shells where Rattlesnake Key ended. Beyond it was Daylight Pass, with its eternal whirlpool. Andy said that eddy had dug the bed of the pass deep there. I didn’t remember how deep, sixteen feet, maybe. But those heaped shells between me and the water were a problem. The stroller would get bogged down in them for sure, and crawling across them were a couple of snakes I didn’t believe were illusions, or ghosts. They were too there. Leftovers from the great snake hunt? Newcomers? It didn’t matter.

Jake, not begging but commanding: Take us back! Take us back or you’ll be sorry!

I’m sorry already, I thought. I couldn’t say it aloud; I didn’t have enough breath left. My heart was running amok. I expected it to simply burst like an over-inflated balloon at any second.

To my horror, the twins were swimming into existence. Their men’s bodies were too big for the stroller’s double seats, but were in them, just the same. Their swollen children’s heads turned to look at me, eyes black and malevolent, the red pepper of snakebites stippling their cheeks and foreheads. As if they were suffering from an apocalyptic case of chickenpox.

This pair of snakes was real, all right. Their bodies made a dry shushing sound as their sinuous S-curves spiraled through the shells. Their tails rattled—dry bones in a gourd.

Jake: Bite ’im, bite ’im good!

Joe: Bite ’im, make him stop! Make him take us back!

When they struck, it felt like BBs hitting the rubber galoshes. Or maybe hailstones. The stroller finally stuck fast, wheels-deep in shells. The men-children inside it were twisted around, staring at me, but it seemed they couldn’t get out. At least not yet. One of the rattlers was gripping my right foot through the galosh, its head spiraling up. Because the stroller was stuck anyway—beached, so to speak—I let it go in favor of the snake pole. I plunged it down, hoping not to give myself a nasty gash but knowing I couldn’t afford to hesitate. I caught a loop with the hook and flung the snake toward the water. The other struck at my left galosh. For one moment I saw its black eyes staring up at me and thought they were the same eyes as the ones looking at me from the stroller. Then I brought the hook down and speared it behind its triangular head. When I raised the snake pole I felt its tail thwap my shoulder, perhaps looking for a grip. It didn’t find one. I flung it. For one moment it was a writhing scribble against the sky, then it was in the water.

The stroller was rocking back and forth as the things inside it—visible yet ephemeral—struggled to get out. They still couldn’t. The stroller was their link to the world, and to me. I couldn’t push it any further, so I dropped the snake pole and tipped it over. I heard them scream as they hit the shells, and then they were gone. By that I mean I could no longer

(see us, see us)

see them, but they were still there. I could hear Jake shrieking and Joe crying. Sobbing, really, as he had probably sobbed when he realized he was covered with rattlesnakes and his too-short life was ending. Those sounds made me sorry—I was sure my son had also cried while he and Donna were broiling in that Pinto—but that didn’t stop me. I had to finish what I started, if I could.

Gasping, I dragged the stroller toward the pass. Toward the whirlpool.

Jake: No! No! You’re supposed to take care of us! Roll us! Push us! Dress us! No!

His brother only shrieked with terror.

I was twenty feet from the water’s edge when flames burst up all around me. They weren’t real, they had no heat, but I could smell kerosene. The stench was so strong it made me cough. The coughing turned into gagging. The blinding white heaps of shells were gone, replaced by a carpet of burning snakes. They weren’t real, either, but I could hear the popcorn sound of their rattles bursting in the heat. They struck at me with heads that weren’t there.

I reached the water. I could push the stroller in, but that wouldn’t be good enough. They might be able to get the haunted thing out, just as they’d somehow managed to get it from the Bell house to Greg’s. But I’ve been told that men or even women—small women—are sometimes able to lift cars off their trapped children. And once upon a time, a woman named Donna Trenton had fought a 150-pound St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat… and won. If she could do that, surely I could do this.

That stroller didn’t weigh 150, but it might have gone 30. If the things had been in it, and if they’d also had actual weight, I never could have lifted it even to my waist. But they didn’t. I hoisted it by the struts above the back wheels. I twisted my hips to the right, producing an audible creaking from my back. I turned the other way and slung the stroller like the world’s clumsiest discus. It splashed down only five feet from the edge of the shell beach. Not far enough, but the current from Calypso Bay was running strong with the ebbing tide. The stroller, tilting this way and that, was pulled into the whirlpool. They were in it again. Maybe they had to be in it. I got one more look at those terrible faces before they were carried away. When the stroller came back around it was sinking, the seats underwater. Its occupants were gone. One of the shirts floated away, then the other. I heard a final shriek of anger in my head; that was Jake Bell, the stronger of the two. The next time the stroller came around on its watery carousel, only the handles were above water. The time after, it was gone except for a watery sunflash three or four feet down.

The flames were also gone. And the burning snakes. Only the stench of kerosene remained. A pair of blue shorts floated toward me. I picked up the snake pole, hooked them, and flung them out into the Gulf.

My back creaked again. I bent over, trying to soothe it. When I straightened up and looked across Daylight Pass, I saw a lot more than a few masses of floating green. Duma Key was there. It looked as real as the hand that had risen out of the tub of snakes, or the horrible hybrid beings lying in the guest room bed. I could see palm trees and a pink house standing on stilts. And I could see a man. He was tall, dressed in jeans and a plain white cotton shirt. He waved to me.

Oh my God, Donna said in the seconds before she died. You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!

I waved back. I think he smiled, but I can’t be sure because by then my eyes were filled with tears, making liquid prisms that quadrupled the brightness of the sun. When I wiped them away, Duma Key was gone and so was he.

It took only ten minutes to roll the pram down to the end of the Key. Or maybe it was fifteen—I was a little too busy to check my watch. Returning to the gazebo and the boardwalk took me three quarters of an hour because my back kept seizing up. I undressed as I went, pulling off the gloves, peeling off the sweatshirt, kicking off the galoshes, sitting down on the sand long enough to pull off the jeans. Doing those things wasn’t as painful as walking, but they hurt plenty. So did getting up after shucking the jeans, but I was lighter. And the horrible rat-run of thoughts in my mind was gone. For me that made the back pain—which continues to this day—a fair trade. I walked the rest of the way wearing only my shorts.

Back in the house I found Tylenol in Greg’s medicine cabinet and took three. The pills didn’t kill the pain, but at least muted it. I slept for four hours—dreamless, blessed sleep. When I woke up, my back was so stiff that I had to make a plan—Step A, Step B, Step C—to sit up, get off the bed, and on my feet. I took a hot shower and that helped some. I couldn’t face using a towel, so I air-dried.

Downstairs—step by wincing step—I thought of calling Pelley, but I didn’t want to talk to him. No more than the fucking man in the fucking moon, Donna would have said.

I called Zane instead. He asked how he could help me and I said I was calling to report a missing stroller. “Did someone from your department—Pelley, maybe—finally decide to come and pick it up?”

“Huh. I don’t think so. Let me check and call you back.”

Which he did, eventually, and told me no one from the County Sheriff’s office had picked up the stroller. No reason to, really, he said.

“Whoever brought it up here twice must have finally taken it back to her place,” I said.

He agreed. And that was where the matter of the haunted stroller ended.

May 2023

All that was almost three years ago. I’m back in Newburyport, and never want to visit the Sunshine State again. Even Georgia would be too close.

Alita Bell’s tox screen showed nothing suspicious, which took me off the hook. Nathan Rutherford saw to Allie’s burying. He and I attended the funeral. So did Zane and Canavan, an old party named Lloyd Sunderland (accompanied by his dog), and half a dozen swing bridge operators.

Andy Pelley also attended. At the reception, he came up to me as I waited my turn for a Dixie cup of punch. The smell of whiskey wafted from below his mustache. There was no mask to mute it. “I still think you got away with something, bub,” he said, and headed for the door—not quite straight—before I could reply.

I testified at the Zoom inquest from Greg’s house. There were no gotcha questions. In fact, the medical examiner gave me a strong attaboy for doing my best to keep the buzzards off the deceased until the proper authorities could arrive.

No relatives ever came out of the woodwork to challenge Alita Bell’s scrap of a will. Said scrap’s trip through probate was a long one, but by June of 2022, everything that was hers was mine. Incredible but true.

I put the Bell property up for sale, knowing no one would want the house, which was fairly run down in spite of Allie’s reputed handywoman skills. The land it stood on was a different matter. It sold in October of ’22 for just shy of seven million dollars. Bay to Gulf, you know; prime real estate. Another McMansion will stand there soon enough. Allie’s other assets totaled six million. After taxes and the other barnacles that attach to any large estate, that thirteen million total boiled down to 4.5. A nice little windfall, if you ignore the terrible children that were supposed to come with it.

I put half a million in my retirement fund—call it for services rendered and a back that will probably pain me until I die. The rest I gave to the All Faiths Food Bank in Sarasota, which was very happy—over the fucking moon, Donna would have said—to accept the money. The only other exception I made was the eight thousand dollars that went to Counselor Rutherford.

Allie’s funeral expenses.

I stayed at Greg’s house until after the inquest, when the matter of Alita Bell was officially closed. During that time there were no visions and no squeaky wheels to trouble me. Of course I still checked the courtyard and the garage for the stroller first thing each morning, even before putting the coffee on. It isn’t just grief that leaves scars. Terror does, too. Especially supernatural terror.

But the twins were gone.

One day I asked Mr. Ito to show me the dip where Jacob and Joseph had come to grief on their fatal walk through the underbrush to the beach. He was willing enough, and after some casting about, we found it. In fact, Mr. Ito almost fell into it. Although it was hard to tell, being filled with naupaka and tangles of oxeye daisies so big they looked like mutants, I thought it was about as long as Greg’s luxurious tub in the master bathroom, and almost as deep.

I had the keys to the Bell house, and I went in there just once. I was curious about the final thing—vision, hallucination, take your pick—I had experienced on the shell beach as I dragged the stroller toward the water: flames, a carpet of snakes, the stench of kerosene. The twins had died before the great snake hunt, so how could they have known about it?

The house was just as Allie left it when she took the ghost twins for their last roll (by her, anyway). There was a plate in the sink with a knife and fork laid across it. On the counter was a box of Wheaties with the bottom chewed out by some small, foraging critters. I forced myself to look into the boys’ bedroom. I had thought she would have kept it as it had been during Jake’s and Joe’s short lives, and I was right. There were twin beds. The sheets and pillowcases were printed with cartoon dinosaurs. Tad had exactly the same set. This realization horrified and in some way comforted me at the same time.

I closed the door. On it, in colorful stick-on letters, was THE KINGDOM OF TWINS.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew it when I found it. Henry Bell’s study had also been kept as it was all those years before. Yellow legal pads were neatly stacked to the left of his IBM Selectric typewriter, folders to the right. On each side, like paperweights, were framed pictures: Joe on the legal pads, Jake on the folders. There was a picture of Allie, looking impossibly young and beautiful, on one wall.

On another wall were three framed black-and-white photographs of the great snake hunt. One showed men unloading trucks, putting on Smokechaser packs—called Indian pumps in those unenlightened days—and donning protective gear. Another showed men in a line, beating the underbrush as they drove the snakes north. The third showed the triangle of shell beach as thousands of snakes charred and died in the flames. I knew that Jake and Joe had haunted this house long before they had haunted mine. Perhaps Allie had even rolled them in here, and showed them the photographs.

See, boys? That’s what happened to the bad snakies that hurt you!

I left. I was glad to go. I never went back.

Just one more thing.

Will Rogers said land is the one thing they’re not making any more of, and in Florida land is gold, especially since the pandemic hit. And while they may not be making any more of it, reclamation isn’t out of the question.

The county has begun talking about reclaiming Duma Key.

A consortium of real estate agents (including the one who sold Mrs. Bell’s house for me) hired a remediation company to investigate the possibility. At a meeting attended by the county commissioners and chaired by the county administrator, several experts from Land Gold, Inc. put on a PowerPoint lecture, complete with an idealized artist’s conception of Duma risen from the deeps. It would be relatively easy and inexpensive, they said; just close Daylight Pass again, which would choke off the water’s flow. A year or so of dredging, and there you have it.

They are discussing it as I write this. The environmentalists are raising holy hell, and I give money every other month to the Save Daylight Pass organization that has formed, but in the end it’s going to happen, because in Florida—especially the parts where the rich tend to gravitate—money trumps everything. They will close the pass, and in the process they will surely find a certain rusty stroller. I’m sure that by then the awful things that inhabited it will be gone.

Almost sure.

If they’re not, I hope they have no interest in me. Because if there ever comes a night when I hear that squeaky stroller wheel approaching, God help me.

God help me!

Thinking of John D. MacDonald