Saul shrugged. “I hear ya.”
Soon the coroner’s station wagon arrived, brilliant white and so low-slung it nearly scraped the asphalt. Serious young men in white coats emerged and made their way down to the beach and soon had the body on its way back up in a litter like Frannie had seen before only in movies like All Quiet on the Western Front. These guys worked fast.
And then they were gone and so was most of the day. Frannie realized she hadn’t even worked out a schedule yet, but when she went to her uncle, he patted her shoulder and said he’d see her tomorrow.
Her bike turned out to be busted. Probably a cop car had clipped it; the rear tire was flat, and the rim seemed like it was a little crooked, to boot. Newp came out of the cafe and found her near the Kronos statue with her sorry wheels. Hooky and a bunch of the Legionnaires were heading into the cafe, and Frannie looked at them expectantly, not sure whom she could ask. Newp was quick, though. “You have a ride?”
The pack stopped. T-Bone looked back and said loudly, “I’ll give her a ride,” and Hooky cut that off with a swipe of his hand.
“I don’t have a car myself,” Hooky said. His face looked dark and distant. “Newp can give you a ride, maybe.”
Newp nodded and gestured for Frannie to follow him. His apron flitted in the breeze as he walked towards his car parked at the edge of the lot next to the highway. She started to follow, then noticed Truly standing in the lot next to Betty, upset to the bone still, swaying like she was about to fall over. Frannie took Truly by the hand and they found their way to Newp’s car.
Newp had a nearly new Corsair convertible with a big trunk, and Frannie tossed her bike into it as she told Newp where she lived. Then Betty rode in the front while Frannie and Truly rode in the back in silence. As they pulled out, Truly looked out the window and Frannie leaned her head on Truly’s shoulder. Truly started to cry.
Newp looked at them through the rear-view. “You know, I saw her. Darla. She was at the bonfire the other night.”
“Does that really happen?” Frannie asked. “People just get caught in seaweed and drown?”
Newp shook his head, not no but who knows. Betty still hadn’t said a word, but she turned in the seat and put her arm back, laying a hand on Frannie’s arm. When they got to Frannie’s place, it was dark, and Truly was sleeping.
Frannie pulled the bike out of the trunk of Newp’s car and began to wobble the poor thing up the walk.
“How you planning to get to work tomorrow?” Newp asked.
“I don’t know,” Frannie said, bone-weary.
“First real day,” Newp said. “Can’t miss that.”
“Yeah.”
Betty stuck her head out. “Oh, I’ll drive her.” She rolled her eyes, but she sounded warm. Newp and Betty, Frannie realized, always sounded warm.
The porch lights flickered, and Frannie saw that the lights in the kitchen were on. It was around eight o’clock. “But you don’t work in the morning,” Frannie said. “And neither does Newp.”
“Well,” Betty got out, leaning on the car door and putting a hand on the ragtop. “Riding with my brother wouldn’t be proper, would it? Just let me, Frannie. Truly will come too. It’ll be our pleasure.”
“Where does Truly live?”
“With her,” Truly spoke up, having woken up. “For the summer while we work on the band.”
Betty said, “You see? We’re already on an adventure. Let us take you to work.”
Frannie ran back to the car and hugged Betty. Frannie walked towards the house and rummaged for her keys. All of this felt so strange, like she had barged into someone’s diary. She didn’t feel like one of them, more like someone who had fallen into their laps.
“Hey,” Newp said as she crossed the headlight beams of the convertible. “Don’t look like it’s something you did. It’s sad; that’s all. It’s just something sad and it doesn’t have to make you feel anything more than that. Now we’ll see you tomorrow and that will be great.”
She was gonna bound. That had been her decision when she had spotted the Café Monstro for the first time. No more convalescing. She was gonna bound. Frannie turned back to him at her door. “Okay. You got it.”
She entered the house where her parents waited.
“I don’t understand,” Pop said. To Frannie, the form in the living room chair resembled the lion in Aesop’s fables, lying in wait. The cherry of his cigarette at the end of his hand was a glowing claw.
Frannie’s mother wore her robe with a collar that shimmered in the moonlight as she leaned in the kitchen doorway.
“Don’t understand...” Frannie responded.
“You left on your bicycle,” her mom said. “You don’t call all day. Did you work?”
“Of course I did,” Frannie said, flushing.
“Why didn’t you ride your bike home?”
“My bike got hit in the parking lot,” she said. Just a moment, there, where she thought through it all. She looked in her mom’s face and saw only worry, and she looked at her father and saw he was no lion. There would be secrets to keep, but this was not one. She realized she was going to tell them the whole story of the police who ran it over, and the girl found on the beach.
###
Hours later in her room, Frannie tossed and rose, standing in the dark, the reflection of her blue nightshirt flickering in the window. She turned on the radio and for a moment looked out the window and swore she could hear the ocean as the Everly Brothers sang “All I Have to Do is Dream.”
Then something in the driveway caught her eye. Something that was about pencil length, maybe, and at first it sparked, or glowed, she wasn't sure, and then went dark again. What the heck? She pressed her face against the window.
It looked like a flute, or something like that. Whatever. She should go back to bed. She had to work in the morning and--
She put her sandals on and crept down and outside, off the porch and around the bushes, to the driveway, listening to the rustle of wind in the palm trees all over the street. She could hear someone else’s radio down the block, playing “All in the Game.”
Many a tear has to fall…
But it's all…
In the game…
She tiptoed out to where Newp’s car had been parked hours earlier.
It was a piece of bamboo about a foot long. It must have been caught on some part of Newp’s car and been deposited here. As she picked it up it barely shown in the moonlight, the glow must have been a trick of the light. She rolled it in her hand, it was thicker than a flute, more like a spyglass. Bermuda grass and “All in the Game” still droning from a distant window.
Spyglass. She put it to her eye.
Someone else was looking at her through the other end.
Frannie saw the blink of a black eyeball and threw the stick instantly, watched it sail into the street. Then she thought better, running in her sandals to retrieve it. She picked it up, but she didn’t look through it again.
###
Who sleeps tonight?
Mid-May, a hot night. All across town most folks are finding their way to sleep, tossing off blankets and pajamas. Frannie’s parents wander to bed, satisfied that their gentle lectures, to which their daughter had paid no more attention than any of us ever did if we told the truth, had had great effect. Really, they know in their hearts: what will happen will happen. No pounding of fists against the walls of a study will reshape the panels there.