10. Rattlesnakes .4

“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.”