10. Rattlesnakes .6

“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