Duma Key

Find what?

Probably it had been just another bit of gibberish, but I had nothing better to do, so I walked down the hall that would have been a dogtrot in a humbler house - the rain tapping the glass ceiling - and then climbed the wide staircase. I stopped five risers from the top, staring, then slowly climbed the rest of the way. There was something, after all: an enormous black-and-white photograph in a frame of narrow banded gold. I asked Wireman later how a black-and-white from the nineteen-twenties could have been blown up to such a size - it had to have been at least five feet tall by four wide - with so little blurring. He said it had probably been taken with a Hasselblad, the finest non-digital camera ever made.

There were eight people in the photograph, standing on white sand with the Gulf of Mexico in the background. The man was tall and handsome and appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a black bathing singlet that consisted of a strap-style shirt and trunks that looked like the close-fitting underwear basketball players wear nowadays. Ranged on either side of him stood five girls, the oldest a ripe teenager, the youngest identical towheads that made me think of the Bobbsey Twins from my earliest adventures in reading. The twins were wearing identical bathing dresses with frilled skirts, and holding hands. In their free hands they clasped dangly-legged, apron-wearing Raggedy Ann dolls that made me think of Reba... and the dark yarn hair above the vacantly smiling faces of the twins' dolls was surely RED. In the crook of one arm, the man - John Eastlake, I had no doubt - held girl number six, the toddler who would eventually become the snoring crone below me. Behind the white folks stood a young black woman of perhaps twenty-two, with her hair tied in a kerchief. She was holding a picnic basket, and judging from the way the not-inconsiderable muscles in her arms were bunched, it was heavy. Three bangled silver bracelets clung to one forearm.

Elizabeth was smiling and holding out her chubby little hands to whoever had taken this family portrait. No one else was smiling, although there might have been the ghost of one lurking around the corners of the man's mouth; he had a mustache, and that made it hard to tell. The young black nanny looked positively grim.

In the hand not occupied with supporting the toddler, John Eastlake held two items. One was a skin diver's facemask. The other was the harpoon pistol I had seen mounted on the wall of the library with the other weapons. The question, it seemed to me, was whether or not some rational Elizabeth had come out of the mental fog long enough to send me up here.

Before I could consider this further, the front door opened below me. "I'm back!" Wireman called. "Mission accomplished! Now who wants a drink?"

How to Draw a Picture (V)

Don't be afraid to experiment; find your muse and let her lead you. As her talent grew stronger, Elizabeth's muse became Noveen, the marvelous talking doll. Or so she thought. And by the time she discovered her mistake - by the time Noveen's voice changed - it was too late. But at first it must have been wonderful. Finding one's muse always is.

The cake, for instance.

Make it go on the floor, Noveen says. Make it go on the floor, Libbit!

And because she can, she does. She draws Nan Melda's cake on the floor. Splattered on the floor! Ha! And Nan Melda standing over it, hands on hips, disgusted.

And was Elizabeth ashamed when it actually happened? Ashamed and a little frightened? I think she was.

I know she was. For children, meanness is usually funny only when it's imagined.

Still, there were other games. Other experiments. Until finally, in '27...

In Florida, all out-of-season hurricanes are called Alice. It's a kind of joke. But the one that came screaming in off the Gulf in March of that year should have been named Hurricane Elizabeth.

The doll whispered to her in a voice that must have sounded like the wind in the palms at night. Or the retreating tide grating through the shells under Big Pink. Whispering as little Libbit lingered on the porch of sleep. Telling her how much fun it would be to paint a big storm. And more.

Noveen says There are secret things. Buried treasures a big storm will uncover. Things Daddy would like to find and look at.

And that turned the trick. Elizabeth cared only a little about painting a storm, but pleasing her Daddy? That idea was irresistible.

Because Daddy was angry that year. Mad at Adie, who wouldn't go back to school even after her European Tour. Adie didn't care about meeting the right people or going to the right deb balls. She was besotted with her Emery... who wasn't the Right Sort at all, in Daddy's view of things.

Daddy says He's not our kind, he's a Celluloid Collar, and Adie says He's my kind, no matter what collar, and Daddy's furious.