Free Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

the back door of the house, which was open. The front door was, too. A river of salt-sweet air rushed through it and I could see the entire big room and the front porch beyond it, and beyond that the lines of the dunes retreating down to the beach and the sea. The tide was coming in full, and white surf laced the blue-and-green water. I had a jumbled impression of old wicker and frayed grass rugs and a litter of newspapers and books, and coffee cups and crumpled napkins, and a huge, dead stone fireplace at one end. At the other, narrow stairs climbed up into the gloom of the second floor. A clutter of fishing rods stood propped beside the front screen door, and for some reason, a battered yellow sea kayak rested on the porch beside a rope hammock. There was no one in the house.
    There was a note, though, pinned to the battered trestle table with a bottle of insect repellent.
    “On beach,” it said. “Bring more towels and some ice from the freezer and another umbrella. Welcome, Anny!”
    It was signed simply “C.” Camilla, I thought. My throat tightened.
    “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said in a small voice.
    “There’s bound to be one around here that’ll fit you,” Lewis said. “Go upstairs and look in the first bedroom on the right. That’s Camilla and Charlie’s. She’s the keeper of the spare bathing suits. People keep leaving them; there must be twenty of them by now.”
    “I can’t just go into their room—”
    “Oh, go on. Nobody cares about that. Sometimes you’ll wake up and somebody will be rooting through your dresser drawer or your suitcase, looking for a stamp or your car keys, or most likely an Alka-Seltzer. This is a pretty socialist house.”
    I crept up the dark old stairs and into the tiny bedroom overlooking the porch roof. There was a big old mahogany bed, a rice bed I thought, piled high with yellowed lace pillows and covered with an ivory cotton coverlet. Except for end tables and a couple of lopsided lamps and a massive old chest of drawers, there was little else in the room. It smelled of salt and camphor and generations. And then I saw a small alcove that held a slender writing desk and a lamp and piles and piles of papers and clippings and stamps and stationery, its envelopes undoubtedly stuck together with damp, and a beautiful green silk–covered book that I assumed was a journal or a diary of some sort. Beach roses wilted in a little bisque vase. Camilla’s corner, the place where she truly lived.
    In the bottom drawer of the chest I found the bathing suits, neatly folded in tissue paper and smelling of lavender. There must indeed have been twenty of them, and from the look of them, they spanned at least thirty years. I finally found a pink-flowered cotton suit with a little skirt that shouted Lilly Pulitzer, and put it on in the dimness, and crept back downstairs holding my shorts and shirt before me.
    “It’s perfect,” Lewis said, grinning, pulling my folded clothes away from me to look. “It’s you. If you’d put on a bikini, I’d have taken you straight home.”
    “The latest thing up there is one of those Rose Marie Reid things with the puffy legs and the fronts so boned that they stand a foot away from your boobs. I had one in high school. I looked like the front end of a fifty-three Studebaker.”
    He laughed and kissed me on the forehead, and we took the towels and ice and the big, skewed umbrella and went down the front steps and across the long board walkway over the dune and onto the beach.
    The tide was full in, and the sun stood directly overhead, so the whole beach and sea were a sheet of blinding glitter. The light swallowed the world; it was as if I had been stricken sightless by light. It even sucked in sound. I could see groups of people down the beach, under umbrellas, and children whooping and splashing in the surf, and gulls wheeling overhead. But I could not hear them, nor the soft hush of the surf as it ran far up the beach to lose