"Seriously."
"Probably kill us if he thought he could get away with it."
"Could he get away with it, Mark?"
Pulling me close, he said into my neck, "Shit, no."
We were awakened the next morning by the sun, and after making love again we slept entangled in each other's arms until ten.
While Mark showered and shaved, I stared out at the day, and never had colors been so bright or the sun shone so magnificently on the tiny offshore island of Key West. I would buy a condo where Mark and I would make love for the rest of our lives. I would ride a bicycle for the first time since I was a child, take up tennis again, and quit smoking. I would work harder at getting along with my family, and Lucy would be our frequent guest. I would visit Louie's often and adopt PJ as our friend. I would watch sunlight dance over the sea and say prayers to a woman named Beryl Madison whose terrible death had given new meaning to my life and taught me to love again.
After brunch, which we ate in the room, I pulled Beryl's manuscript out of the knapsack while Mark looked on in disbelief.
"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.
"Yes. It's exactly what you think it is," I said.
"Where in God's name did you find it, Kay?" He got up from the table.
"She left it with a friend," I answered, and next we were propping pillows behind us, the manuscript between us on the bed as I told Mark all about my conversations with PJ.
Morning turned into afternoon, and we did not step outside the room except to place dirty dishes in the hall and replace them with sandwiches and snacks we ordered sent up as the spirit moved. For hours we said very little to each other as we turned through the pages of Beryl's Madison's life. The book was incredible, and more than once it brought tears to my eyes.
Beryl was a songbird born in a storm, a ragged bit of beautiful color clinging to the branches of a terrible life. Her mother had died, and her father had replaced her with a woman who treated Beryl with scorn. Unable to endure the world she lived in, she learned the art of creating one of her own. Writing was her way of coping, and it was a talent enhanced like artistry by the deaf and music by the blind. She could fashion from words a world I could taste, smell, and feel.
Her relationship with the Harpers was as intense as it was deranged. They were three volatile elements forming a thunderhead of unbelievable destruction when they finally lived together in that storybook mansion on its river of timeless dreams. Gary Harper bought and restored the great house for Beryl, and it was in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept that he robbed her one night of her virginity when she was only sixteen.
When she did not come down to breakfast the following morning, Sterling Harper went upstairs to check and found Beryl in a fetal position, crying. Unable to face that her famous brother had raped their surrogate daughter, Miss Harper battled the demons of her house with troops of denial. She never said a word to Beryl or attempted to intervene, but softly shut her door at night and slept her fitful sleep.
The molestation of Beryl continued, week after week, less frequently as she got older and finally ending with the Pulitzer Prize-winner's impotence, brought on by long evenings of hard drinking and other excesses, including drugs. When the interest from his accumulated book earnings and family inheritance could no longer support his vices, he turned to his friend, Joseph McTigue, who focused his kindly attentions and skills on Harper's precarious finances, eventually making the author "not only solvent again, but wealthy enough to afford the finest whiskey by the case and cocaine binges whenever he pleased."
According to Beryl, after she moved out Miss Harper painted the portrait over the library mantel, a portrait of a child robbed of innocence, intended unconsciously or not to torment Harper forever. He drank more, wrote less, and began suffering from insomnia. He began frequenting Culpeper's Tavern, a ritual encouraged by his sister, who used those hours to conspire against him with Beryl on the phone. The final blow came in a dramatic act of defiance when Beryl, encouraged by Sparacino, violated her contract.
It was her way of reclaiming her life and, in her words, "preserving the beauty of my friend, Sterling, by pressing the memory of her between these pages like wildflowers."
Beryl began her book very shortly after Miss Harper was diagnosed as having cancer. Their bond was inviolable, their love for each other immense.
Naturally, there were lengthy digressions about the books Beryl had written and the sources of her ideas. Excerpts from earlier works were included, and I suspected this might have explained the partial manuscript we found on her bedroom dresser after she was dead. It was hard to say. It was hard to know what had gone on in Beryl's mind. But I could see that her work was extraordinary, and sufficiently scandalous to have frightened Gary Harper and caused Sparacino to lust after it.
What I failed to see as the afternoon wore on was anything that raised the specter of Frankie. There was no mention in her manuscript of the ordeal that would eventually end her life. I supposed it was too much for her to contemplate. Perhaps, she hoped, it would pass with time.
I was nearing the end of Beryl's book when Mark suddenly put his hand on my arm.
"What?" I could barely tear my eyes away.
"Kay. Take a look at this," he said, lightly placing a page on top of the one I was reading.
It was the opening of Chapter Twenty-five, a page I had previously read. It took me a moment to see what I had missed. It was a very clean photocopy, and not an original typed page like all of the others.
"I thought you said this was the only copy," Mark quizzed me.
"I was under the impression that it was," I replied, mystified.
"I wonder if she made a copy and mixed up two of the pages."
"That's the way it looks," I considered. "But where is the copy, then? It hasn't turned up."
"Got no idea."
"You sure Sparacino doesn't have it?"
"I'm pretty sure I would know if he did. I've turned his office inside out during his absences and I've done the same to his house. Besides, I think he would have told me, at least when he thought we were buddies."
"I think we'd better go see PJ."
It was, we discovered, PJ's day off. He was not at Louie's or at home. Dusk was settling over the island before we finally caught up with him at Sloppy Joe's, by which time he was three sheets to the wind. I grabbed him at the bar and led him by the hand to a table.
I hastily made introductions. "This is Mark James, a friend of mine."
PJ nodded and lifted his longnecked bottle of beer in a drunken toast. He blinked several times, as if trying to clear his vision, while he openly admired my attractive masculine companion. Mark seemed oblivious.
Raising my voice above the din of the crowd and band, I said to PJ, "Beryl's manuscript. Did she make a copy of it while she was here?"
Taking a swig of beer and rocking to the music, he replied, "Don't know. She never said anything about it to me, if she did."
"But is it possible?" I persisted. "Might she have done this when she photocopied the letters she gave to you?"
He shrugged, beads of perspiration rolling down his temples, face flushed. PJ was more than drunk, he was stoned.
While Mark looked on impassively, I tried again. "Well, did she carry the manuscript with her when she went out to photocopy the letters?"
"… just like Bogie and Bacall…" PJ sang along in a hoarse baritone, slapping the edge of the table in rhythm with the mob.
"PJ!" I cried loudly.
"Man," he protested, his eyes riveted to the stage, "it's my favorite song."
So I sank back in my chair and let PJ sing his favorite song. During a brief break in the performance, I repeated my question. PJ drained his bottle of beer, then replied with surprising clarity, "All I remember is Beryl had the knapsack with her that day, okay? I gave it to her, you know. Something she could use down here to haul her shit around in. She headed off to Copy Cat or somewhere, and she sure as hell had the knapsack with her. So, yeah."