The Beach Girls by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

expensive and mechanized yachtsman’s paradise. Then all we common people will have to move out.”
    “Miss Yale, you have a lurid imagination.”
    I liked looking at him and talking to him. His hands were good, lean, strong and long-fingered. I have a thing about hands. And it was an ugly-nice face, not improved by the bulging purple bruise on the right cheekbone, the puffed lips and the split on the side of chin, iodined and bandaged by me. On a man that kind of a face is fine. I can tell you what it does to you if you are of the female persuasion and have a Halloween face.
    “You’re married, aren’t you?” I blurted. I have a nasty knack of not knowing what I’m going to say until I hear myself say it. In the past this has created quite a few problems down at the good old C of C.
    “I was married, Miss Christy. I married young. My wife is dead. I’ve got two kids in boarding school, two boys, fifteen and sixteen. They’re in summer camp now.”
    “Pry, pry, pry,” I said.
    “Why were you so positive about me being married? It’s happened before. I’ve always wondered.”
    I tried to figure out why I’d been so certain. “I suppose it’s a certain … aura of unavailability, Leo. Maybe a sort of naturalness in the company of a woman. As if you don’t have to prove anything. A woman senses the absence of the wolf call. Fix us some fresh things?”
    He looked at his empty glass and then held it out. “Shank of the evening, but please make mine look less like iced coffee without cream this time.”
    When I came back from the little galley with the two drinks he looked at me with evident curiosity. “While you were gone, Christy, I realized what’s been bothering me about you, on practically a subconscious level.”
    “Hey, now!”
    “Diction. When you talk casually you get that cracker slur and twang that I’ll swear is legitimate. But when you say something thoughtful, like telling me why I look married, you speak with a certain amount of precision.”
    “That calls for the story of my life, stranger. Lay back. My pappy and all us Yales were born right here. Of course, looking at the town now, it’s like saying you were born on a merry-go-round at a carnival. But it wasn’t like this when I was a little kid. It was quiet and nice. No neon and floodlights and swimming pools and horrible glass jalousies.
    “Born here twenty-nine years ago, to be desperately accurate, stranger. Me and my four brothers. They’re all older, all very conservative, all married. They’re scattered up and down the coast, disapproving violently of their little sister living on a houseboat in a junky marina. Disgraceful bohemianism. Mother was a doll, and Daddy sure wanted a Southern-type belle in the family. It confused him when I began to look like Mickey Rooney, from the neck up. But I did have a lovely voice. He decided if I couldn’t have looks, I could have brains, so I was the only Yale he sent North to school.
    “First year in boarding school I was playing a lady-like game of field hockey and a girl who looked like Tony Galento whaled me across the throat with her stick. I whispered for three months and when my voice came back, it came back like this. Like a boy with laryngitis at the time his voice is changing. Daddy wanted to sue. I spent six years in the North. Boarding school and Smith College. I came back and rattled around a while, then found my niche in the Elihu Beach Chamber of Commerce. I live aboard the
Shifless
with Helen Hass. The name of the boat is symbolic.”
    “Is it a bohemian life?” he asked.
    “That isn’t the word. I’d say casual. You’ve had a taste of how casual it can get tonight. You get a chance here to … say what you please and do what you please.There’re very nice people here, Leo. You’ll find that out if you stay. But I guess it’s sort of a revolt against the way most people live. It can get … violent around here. And funny. And crazy. It’s never