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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
THE DREAMERS
I don’t know what the universe means. I might have an idea. You might, too. Or not. All I can say to you is beware of dreams. They’re dangerous. I found out.
