BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family Read Free

room for my things?" said Elinor, as the black man pushed his paddle against the bricks of the Osceola Hotel.
    "No," replied Oscar regretfully, "we are pretty tight in here now. I tell you what, though—soon as Bray gets us to dry land, he can come back here and pick 'em up."
    "I cain't go inside that place!" Bray protested.
    "Bray, you are gone do it!" said Oscar. "You realize what Miss Elinor has just been through for four days? When you and me and Mama and Sister were high and dry? And eating breakfast, dinner, and a little supper and complaining just because we brought two packs of cards away with us instead of four? You realize what Miss Elinor must have been thinking about, all alone in that hotel, with the water rising?"
    "Bray," said Elinor Dammert, "I have just two little bags and I put 'em right beside the window on the floor. All you have to do is reach in."

    • • •

    Bray paddled in silence, headed back the way he and Oscar had come. He stared at the back of the young woman who had had no business at all being found where she was found.
    Oscar, in the front of the boat, wanted very much to find something to say to Miss Elinor Dammert, but could think of nothing at all—certainly no remark came to mind that would justify his turning right around in the boat and awkwardly speaking to her over his shoulder. Lucidly, as he thought it, the carcass of a large raccoon suddenly bobbed to the surface of the oily black water when they had just passed the town hall, and Oscar explained that pigs, attempting to swim through the floodwater, had slashed their own throats with their forefeet. It was an undetermined point whether they all had drowned or bled to death. Miss Elinor smiled and nodded and said nothing. Oscar said nothing further, and did not turn around again until Bray was paddling past Oscar's own house. "That's where I live," said Oscar, pointing out the second story of the submerged Cas-key mansion. Miss Elinor nodded and smiled, and said that it looked like a very big and very pretty house and she wished she could see it sometime when it wasn't underwater. Oscar heartily concurred in that wish; Bray did not. Only a few minutes later Bray ran the boat up between two large exposed roots of a vast live oak that marked the town line to the northwest. Oscar stood out of the boat, balancing on one of the roots, and then helped Elinor on to dry land. Elinor turned to Bray. "Thank you," she said. "I really do 'predate you going back. Those two bags are all I've got, Bray, and I've got to have them or I've got nothing. I put 'em both right inside the window, and all you have to do is reach inside." Then she and Oscar set out together for the Zion Grace Church, which was on high ground a mile away, where the first families of Perdido had taken refuge.
    A quarter of an hour later, Bray had maneuvered the little boat back against the side of the Osceola Hotel. The water, in even so short a time, had dropped several inches. He sat for several moments just staring at that blank open window, wondering how he would ever get the courage up to stick his arm inside and retrieve the bags. "Hungry!" he cried aloud to himself. "What'd that white woman eat?!" The sound of his own voice strengthened him—even though it had defined a portion of that unpleasant mystery he felt surrounded Elinor Dammert—and he turned the boat so that he could lean his shoulder against the brick wall of the hotel. Holding on to the concrete casement with one hand, he reached his other arm quickly into the room. His hand closed around the handle of a suitcase. He jerked it out of the window and into the boat. He took a deep breath, and thrust his arm in once more.
    His hand closed around... nothing.
    He jerked it out again. He stared at the sun a moment through squinting eyes, cocked his ear and heard nothing but the scraping of the boat against the orange bricks of the hotel, thrust his hand in again and moved it all about beneath the window