“Do I!” She laughed.
But just then there erupted a bunch of cheers, all the gang making agitated sounds and even beating their chests. They all were running to shore.
Newp’s eyes traveled back to the beach to the little hut next to the shaping tables and he and Frannie walked the few yards to the sand in silence. Someone had emerged from the hut and stood there in silence, drinking in the sand and the sun.
“What’s going on?”
“Someone for you to meet,” Newp said.
Her first thought was that he looked like Tarzan, golden-tan and brown-haired, with shoulders and back muscles like a Corvette and blue eyes that blazed and flashed, sad and wise. He wore a straw hat and cutoff denim pants, no shirt, and a necklace of shells and shark’s teeth.
Several of the guys had fallen to their knees and were stretching out their arms, saluting him like a tribal chief. “He is awakened!” one of them said. “Lo, he approaches!” this guy, who had coke-bottle glasses and blond hair, was the same joker who had called her Guppy.
The fellow in the straw hat didn’t respond, but held out a hand and someone almost magically put a beer in it. He tipped the beer and caught sight of Newp and Frannie about twenty feet away. He winked. The joker winked, like Superman.
Frannie had had enough of this absurd display. “Newp, are ya gonna introduce me to your friend?”
“Oh, sure, Frannie,” Newp said. “This is Hooky—short for Hookele, but we call him Hooky.”
“Hookele?”
“It means great chief,” the coke-bottle kid said. “Hookele is the chief of all the boardsmen, the lord of the surfers, he travels the world looking for waves. He toils not but for the surf and eats not but to sustain his surfing.”
“Well, Byron,” the great chief said, “I don’t know about all that.”
“Are these your worshippers, Lord Hookele?” Frannie said. She was nervous as he turned the slightly crinkled eyes—how old was this guy?—towards her, and it came out in toughness.
“They’re my friends,” he said, and his eyes caught her teasing, but it all slid off like water on fiberglass.
“That’s right, we’re Hooky’s Legionnaires,” said Newp. “Hooky, we’re teaching Frannie here to surf.”
“That’s nuts,” one of the boys said. “We don’t bring dates by day.”
“I’m not a date,” Frannie said. She looked at Newp, smiling. “I’m not a date, am I a date?”
“I—you,” Newp said. That was helpful.
“Girls don’t surf Laguna,” one of Hooky’s boys said. “That’s just the way it is; this is peaceful ground.”
“I don’t know,” Hooky said. “How’d you wind up with this loser, Angel?”
“She works at Cafe Monstro and made some friends and some enemies while helping me,” Newp said. “I owed her one.”
“So you’re gonna pay in surf lessons.” Hooky concluded. He tilted his head, studying Frannie’s entire four-eleven frame. Then he turned to another boy, who had been silent all the while. “Go-Go! We have a board for her?”
Go-Go pursed his lips. “Maybe. I made one for my nephew. It’s banged up, but eh.”
“Throw her back, Hooky,” one boy said. “We got a good thing here and she’s too small yet.”
“Hey,” Hooky snapped a finger. “Respect.” He looked back at Newp and Frannie. “I guess we’ll see what you can do.”
Frannie throbbed with relief and hadn’t the slightest idea why.
Hooky continued, turning to another boy, “Go-go, see if we have a board that will fit. Something light. It needs to—”
A scream cut across the beach.
While everyone else had startled or jumped, Hooky had merely grimaced and started to run towards the scream. Newp was next and the pair led the rest of them along the cliffs.
Frannie was close behind, wincing with what felt like hundreds of tiny cuts from shells in the sand. When they came around the bend in the cliffs, she saw Truly, the girl from Newp’s band.
Truly was crouched in the sand with her hand over her mouth, and at her feet was what looked at first like a mound of seaweed until Frannie saw a girl’s arm stretched out from it. It was a girl, all right, her blanched face looking out from below her own hair and a mound of weeds.
Truly grabbed the girl and lifted its shoulders, crying, and when Frannie saw the body’s bare breasts she ran forward to put herself between the body and the boys. It just seemed like the thing to do. A terrible thing to be exposed like that, the least you can hope for is someone to stick up for you.
“We need to call the police,” Hooky said.
Frannie turned back to Truly, sitting right next to this dead body. That wasn’t freaking Frannie out yet, but the white lips and the blue skin would come back hard to her later, she knew. “Truly,” she said, looking away from the body. “Who is this, do you know this girl?”
“It’s Darla,” Truly said, her voice shaking. “She’s a college girl, I’ve talked to her, you know, a lot. Ugh, my God, she was a swimmer, she was a good swimmer.”
Newp had come closer. “Well,” he said, “you and I both know that even a good swimmer can get caught in seaweed or get confused, get caught in a riptide, I mean, you can get bonked on the head by a boat.”
“I’ll call from Saul’s,” Frannie said. She ran up the first stairway she found and then headed south on Ocean Highway, past blinding chrome fins and cars. She reached the Hotel Riviera and ran across to the Cafe, the asphalt burning her feet. She burst in and found her uncle and his phone. Someone was dead.
The next few hours were a blur for Frannie. The police came in giant black monster cars that seemed like surfboards of their own, black uniforms that couldn’t possibly be comfortable in this heat.
Above the beach, Frannie waited at the side of the highway with Newp and Hooky as a crowd gathered on the beach. Newp had called for his sister, and Betty was with Truly now.
Saul had gone down to the beach since the call had come from his place, and now he looked up the cliff and gestured for the three up there to come down.
“You see anything?” one cop asked Hooky. Hooky said no and showed the cop a card he pulled from the back of his cut-offs, probably his driver license, and it vaguely struck Frannie as funny to imagine Hooky waiting in line at some DMV somewhere. “You a little old for this crowd?” the cop said.
“Twenty-eight,” Hooky said. “Is that too old?” Then he glanced at Frannie and she felt a little dirty for him.
“What happens now?” Truly asked, stepping forward and away from Betty.
The cop turned to Saul, which Frannie took as a sign that the cop was done talking to kids. “I think she’ll be taken to County—do you know if there was anyone…”
“She has a brother in the Army,” Truly said. “In Alabama.”
The cop addressed Saul. “Maybe we can get the info.”
Saul said, “You know, just because you ignore her does not mean she ceases to exist,” he said, tilting his head at Truly.
“You’re busting my chops already?” the cop said. “You got a restaurant up there? I can have some people check it out.”