BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

underbrush, from the green boughs of the pines, and almost in billows from the stream itself.
    The branch was shallow, narrow, clear, and quick—quite unlike the dark, deep waters of the Blackwater and the Perdido. It made its way through the pine forest in a course that changed markedly every year, it seemed. It tore away the carpet of pine needles and left bare the soft shale beneath, hollowing out channels in the stone, throwing up diminutive islands of sand and pebbles.
    Annie Bell Driver stood on the edge of the branch—it was too volatile a stream to have built up anything like a bank—and looked up and down what she could see of its length. There was a turn into the forest about a hundred feet up, and another turn in the opposite direction about fifty feet down. The woman with the muddy-red hair wasn't to be seen. Annie Bell wondered whether she should walk upstream or downstream or return to the church, leaving the woman to her privacy. After all, having remained four days in the top floor of a half-submerged hotel, she would not have had an opportunity for washing except in the floodwaters—and that was an expedient which was no expedient at all, for it left one only dirtier than before, and was decidedly unhealthful.
    Annie Bell decided to walk around the downstream bend, and turned in that direction. It was only then she noticed Elinor Dammert's black bag resting at one end of a sandbar directly across the water from where she stood. She had not noticed it before because it blended in so well with the rank vegetation on the opposite side of the branch.
    The thought passed suddenly through her mind that Elinor Dammert, having survived the flooding of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers, had drowned in this tiny unnamed branch, but then she realized that in order to drown, one must first find a spot deep enough to cover one's head completely, and such spots were rare in the length of this shallow course. It was, in fact, so notoriously safe a stream that Annie Bell had never warned even her youngest children against using it. It wasn't deep enough to drown them, and it was too quick-moving to breed moccasins and leeches.
    But if her bag was here, and she couldn't possibly be drowned, then where was Elinor Dammert?
    Annie Bell Driver took two steps downstream and was reaching for a pine branch to lift her over a patch of soggy ground when she stopped suddenly. Her foot dropped to the earth and sank in until the water seeped through the holes for her laces.
    There, beneath the water in a narrow trench that seemed to have been specially carved for her body, lay Elinor Dammert, quite naked. She clutched a clump of water weeds with each hand, but was perfectly still.
    "Good Lord above!" cried Annie Bell Driver aloud. "She has gone and drowned herself!"
    She stared. Though the water was clear and only deep enough to cover the body, it had worked a kind of visual transformation: Miss Elinor's skin seen through that rapidly running water seemed leathery, greenish, tough—and Miss Elinor's skin, Miz Driver had noted, was of a pellucid whiteness. Moreover, even as the preacher stared, a distorting transformation seemed to come over the features of the other woman's submerged face. While before it had been handsome and narrow and fine-featured, now it seemed wide and flat and coarse. The mouth stretched to such an extent that the lips seemed to disappear altogether. The eyes beneath their closed lids grew into large, circular domes. The lids themselves became almost transparent, and the dark slit was set directly across the bulging eyeball like a pen-drawn Equator on a child's globe.
    She wasn't dead.
    The thin, stretched lids over those protuberant domes drew slowly apart and two immense eyes— the size of hen's eggs, Miz Driver thought wildly— stared up through the water and met the gaze of the Hard-Shell preacher.
    Annie. Bell Driver fell back against a tree. The branch she had been holding on to above her head