I said, 'Jail? Teddy, the lady ought to get a reward. Or a bounty. After what you've done?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm running for the senate-"
I put my hand on his mouth, silencing him. I didn't want to hear it. After a moment, I said, "You need to answer one question. If you expect me to help you, it'd better be the truth. Why did you kill Dorothy?"
"I'm not answering anything. I need a doctor."
"No answers, no doctor. Why'd you murder that child?"
The smile that grew out of his mouth was infuriating. "Honesdy?"
"If you're capable."
"Because it felt good and… I like it. The power."
"That's what I'll tell the cops."
The smile widened. "No… won't happen. They won't believe you. They never have. They never will."
I said, "For them to believe you, Ted, they've got to hear you," and I dropped the pillowcase over his face.
When she'd calmed down, I said to Nora. "You're safe now. You didn't do anything wrong. Get your clothes on. Did Ted bring the wooden totem aboard?"
She nodded. Her face was pale; wet with tears. She looked very fragile in the cabin light.
"Find it and bring it with you."
I touched my pockets as I went toward the steps. The gold medallion was in one. The syringe the old woman had given me was in the other. If I sold the medallion and the totem, the Egyptian cat and the rest of the artifacts, it would make a sizable scholarship fund. Or maybe donate everything to the museum. One way or another, keep the name Dorothy Copeland alive.
Topside, I made sure my skiff was still in tow, then seated myself at Namesake' s helm. I touched the LCD window of the Cetrek autopilot. I saw that it was keeping us on a flawless heading of 312 degrees, directly at Coon Key Light, but at the very slow idle speed of only three knots.
The yacht was equipped with a steering wheel, but also some kind of computer-type joy stick that I didn't know how to operate. I disengaged the autopilot, turned the wheel and the yacht came around. I pointed her bow out to sea. Felt
Nora come up beside me and lean her warm weight against my shoulder, as I listened to the robotic voice from the VHF radio say, "… Hurricane Charles continues to move northeasterly at a speed of eighteen knots, with sustained winds measured at a hundred thirty knots. Charles is expected to make landfall at ten a.m. tomorrow. Mandatory evacuation has been declared for Marco Island and the neighboring cities of…"
I switched off the radio and said, "You remember how to run my boat?"
She nodded.
"I'm going to help you get aboard, then cut you loose. I want you to follow me until I get this boat up to speed, but not too close. Pay attention because I'm going to jump. I'll blink this boat's running lights twice to warn you, then go over the port side. It'll be on your left. All you have to do is put my skiff in neutral. Don't worry about finding me. I'll swim to you. Can you do that?"
Nora's voice had regained some strength, and I felt like hugging her when she said, "Of course I can do it. I'm not an invalid, for God's sake. Don't treat me like one."
I was experimenting with the autopilot, learning how it worked. I also had both radar screens on, watching the scanning arm show blobs of islands, nothing else. I figured out that the Doppler was also linked to the computer screen built into the console, and I accessed a perfect satellite picture of the storm: a red vortex less than three hundred miles away.
That gave me an idea. I touched the cursor to the center of the hurricane, and punched the exact heading into the autopilot, 225 degrees. I clicked on Auto-track and then Engage. Waited for a moment, then felt the autopilot take control of the steering, running direcdy southwest toward the target I had designated.
"What are you doing?"
I said, "Teddy likes eyes? His computer's got him headed for a big one."
A few minutes later, with Nora trailing me in the skiff, I throttled the Hinckley up to a jarring twenty knots. I made sure the servo-systems were vectoring properly. Then I jumped overboard into the black water.
A little after 9:30 that night, Nora and I dragged ourselves through the wind, up the highest Indian mound of Dismal Key. We had flashlights, tent, mosquito netting, sandwiches and beer, each of us muling bags. We were soaked, exhausted.
I'd tied my skiff in the mangroves with a spider webbing of lines to hold her. Even if the storm surge was more than fifteen feet or higher, we'd be safe and so would my boat.
The walls of Al's shack were still standing, the screen broken out of the windows. But I didn't want to be inside a building, not in a wind that was expected to exceed a hundred miles an hour. It took me a while to find what I was looking for, but I finally did: a room-sized hole dug into the shell mound, the ironic hermit's bomb shelter. It wasn't far from the key lime and avocado trees that grew there. The hole would provide windbreak enough that the tent would survive. Even if the tent didn't, we would.
That night, cuddled together to stay warm, Nora said into my ear, "I don't know which part of it's a dream, which of it's real. It's the drug. I can still feel it, but it's wearing off. I can't believe what I did to him."
I said, "I think you're imagining things. What do you think you did?"
After she told me, I pulled her closer and said, "You're not the one. I did it. Your brain mistranslated. It happens all the time in dreams. When I ate those mushrooms, the same thing happened to me."
"Are you positive?"
"I'll swear to it. Besides, he deserved it."
She moved her face onto my chest. "I would love to believe that."
"Then do."
Hurricane Charles hit the next morning. Stick your head out the window of a car doing sixty, then imagine what it would be like to try the same thing at a hundred-twenty. Once and just once, I poked my head up above ground level. It was like being sprayed with an industrial sand blaster. Lips and cheeks flutter; the eyes blur. I got a momentary glance at boiling storm clouds. High overhead, I saw a full-grown Australian pine go tumbling past. The tree had to be a couple hundred feet or more in the air. Mostly what we did was hold tight to one another, soaked and cold from driving rain, our eyes closed in the freight train rush of wind.
The sound is what surprised me most. The sound of wind was deafening, numbing.
Then, at a little after eleven, it stopped; everything stopped. The wind, the noise all gone. I crawled out of our threadbare tent and looked through broken trees. In the eye of a hurricane, there exists an illustrative calm, as if to underscore the energy of the storm just passed, the power of the storm to come.
I looked down into a bay that had been drained of water. Along with beer botdes and the lapstrake of ruined boats was a litter of pottery shards, whole bowls and shell tools: the detritus of a people who'd survived storms on this island for thousands of years.
Then I looked up into the sky, pausing to study the unexpected cirrus formations. The clouds formed concentric circles within concentric circles. At the center of the smallest circle was a starburst cross of sunlight that illuminated ice crystals in the high ionosphere.
I took the gold medallion from my pocket, handed it to Nora. She looked from the sky to the medallion, then back to the sky. She was nodding. "I think so. Yes. I can see it. The designs, they're like a storm etching. But how could Dorothy have known? Someone with that kind of gift, I wish I could have met her."
To the west, drifting above Ten Thousand Islands, was the ghost of a crescent moon.
I said, "Me, too."
Epilogue
On Friday, a little more than a week after Hurricane Charles joined the ranks of Donna, Andrew, Floyd and other killer storms that have hit the Florida coast, I sat in the reading chair by the north window of my stilt house, next to my telescope and shortwave radio.