I thought it was funny, but Sister didn’t even smile, just clicked on her left turn signal and pulled into the double driveway that made a “U” in front of an honest-to-God log cabin with a sign announcing it was the visitors’ center. A small parking lot was on the side of the building, and I expected Mary Alice to stop there. Instead, she headed out one of the roads that angled from the “U” like antennae toward the bay. A man stepped from a guard house at the entrance to the road and she slowed.

“Ma’am,” he said politely, “do you have a visitor’s pass?”

“No,” Sister said. “We’re not visiting, just looking.” And she drove on.

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” I said, nervously looking back at the guard standing in the middle of the road scratching his head.

“Then he should say what he means.”

“I suppose so.” What was the worst thing they could do to us? Run us out? I relaxed and looked around.

Other than the road, not much clearing had been done. Red flags and stakes with numbers on them marked the boundaries of lots. Tall pines leaned away from the Gulf, pushed constantly by the prevailing winds. Between them were the typical vegetation of the coastal piney woods and a lot of Sold signs.

“I’ll bet there are rattlesnakes in here big as a tractor tire,” I said.

“Looks about like it did when Tod Abernathy bought it,” Sister said. “Any money Millicent got offered for it, she should have taken.”

And then the road branched. We were almost to the bay when Sister said, “Look, Mouse. Can you believe that?”

It was a fairy-tale house, the only problem being that the imaginative architect had incorporated every fairy tale from Rapunzel and her tower to what looked suspiciously like a big shoe, but which must have been some kind of garden room. Painted a shrimp pink and trimmed in white gingerbread, the house perched on the edge of Choctawhatchee Bay.

“It looks like about five houses squashed together,” Mary Alice said, slowing so we could get a good look.

“It looks embarrassed.”

“And there’s a blue one.”

Five houses had been completed or were close to completion, five enormous houses, all rainbow colored, all mirrored in the bay. These, I realized, were situated on what was the prime location in Blue Bay Ranch. A couple of them already had piers and boat houses, but only the pink house seemed totally finished and occupied. A concrete block seawall prevented erosion by pushing the bay’s tides down the beach for others to worry about.

“Lord have mercy,” Sister said. “Who would ever have thought.”

“Boggles the mind,” I said. “Millicent was really in on something big, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, she was. Bless her heart.”

“This doesn’t look like one of those community developments, though. You know, with the sidewalks and all.”