patio closer to the house, with a brightly-coloured football and a mini trampoline.
The house itself was low and squat and painted white, battered by its proximity to the sea and the salt. A trellis of rust trails ran down the walls from every metal fixing. Almost the whole of the wall facing the ocean was made of glass that tilted downwards, presumably to fend off the glare from the water. I didn’t know much about real estate prices in Daytona Beach, but if the view alone counted for anything, then this was right up there. Until the next hurricane hit, of course.
The two cops had almost reached the foot of the steps. They were studying Trey and me, trying to work out if we belonged in the garden, or if they had a good enough reason to follow us up.
“Keep walking towards the house,” I whispered to the kid. I let my gaze scan casually across the cops, nodded and gave them a smile and a cheery wave. Failing to make eye contact doesn’t work with people who’ve been trained to spot someone acting shifty.
I turned back towards the house, then swore softly under my breath as a grey-haired woman in a loose sacky dress appeared at one of the windows. She stilled, narrowing her eyes and sticking her chin out as though she needed glasses to positively identify us as strangers at that distance.
I glanced round, making the pretence of pointing out a diving pelican to Trey. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the cops lean his bike against the stair rail and put his foot on the first step. His partner stayed on the beach.
A trickle of sweat ran between my shoulder blades. I hunched them, feeling the SIG dig into the back of my belt. The knife I’d taken from the skinny kid the night before weighed heavy in my shorts’ pocket.
“Morning, officers,” said a man’s deep voice at that moment. “Can I help you boys?”
We all turned to find a slim elderly man with a neatly trimmed white van Dyke beard approaching up the beach, his stride long and rangy. He wore a battered Panama hat and a very faded T-shirt that had once advertised the 1989 Daytona 500. In his right hand he carried a bulging string bag.
“Oh hi, Walt, how you doing today?” said the cop who’d been about to climb up after us. He turned and stepped down onto the beach again.
“I’m doing good, Mikey,” the old guy said. “So, you boys smell breakfast cooking, or what?”
“No.” The cop laughed and shook his head. “You have folk visiting?” And he nodded in our direction.
Walt looked up then from under the brim of the Panama and a pair of piercing grey eyes under bushy eyebrows locked onto mine, straight and steady. I stared back at him and tried to impart pleading and desperation. I suppose there was a certain amount of fear there, too.
For what I’d have to do if he said no.
For a long moment, Walt didn’t move, then he gave me an almost imperceptible nod. “Yeah,” he said, his voice was slow and rolling, like he was reading a story on the radio. “You guys hungry?” he called to us. “Harriet’s making her special blueberry pancakes.”
I checked the house again. The old woman had moved to the open doorway now. She was standing just behind the mosquito screen, looking anxious.
Walt climbed the steps and came towards us. He paused a few strides away to turn and wave a small salute to the police. The cop he’d called Mikey waved back and collected his bike. The pair of them began to move off.
Walt watched them go, then turned back to us. Close to, I could see the bag he’d been carrying was filled with seashells.
“So,” he said calmly, “can I ask you folks what you’re doing in my back yard?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “we made a mistake – took a wrong turn. We were just looking for the way off the beach and—”
I broke off as Walt’s wildly sprouting eyebrows did a strange jiggle of surprise. “English, huh?” he said. “I have a daughter went to college over there – Manchester. You know it?” He pronounced the name with all the emphasis on the
“Erm, yeah, I’m from that part of the country. My mother and father still live near Manchester,” I said, grasping at the association. I thought of my parents’ substantial Georgian house in the stockbroker belt of Cheshire and reckoned that my mother would faint at the suggestion that they were anywhere near the outskirts of the city itself, but they weren’t here to contradict me.
Walt beamed. “Well, that’s just great,” he said. “Why don’t you both come inside and you can tell Harriet and me all about Manchester while we have a bite of breakfast.”
“Oh really, sir, we couldn’t put you out like that,” I said quickly, even though my empty stomach was already grumbling at the mention of those blueberry pancakes.
“No, no,” Walt said. “It’s no trouble. Harriet always cooks for a full house. That woman could feed a battleship. There’ll be waffles, bacon, eggs, hash browns . . .”
He let his voice trail off artfully, those canny eyes shifting between the two of us. The expression on Trey’s face was so pained at my continued resistance to food it was almost comical.
I flicked my eyes past him. The two cops were still in sight, stopping someone else further along the beach. I looked back and found Walt had been watching me carefully.
I smiled back at him. “Well, if you’re sure, then that’s very kind of you, sir,” I said. “We’d love to stay for breakfast.”
Nine
Walt led us into the house through the screen door where his wife had been uneasily observing our approach. She stepped back without speaking as we trooped into her kitchen, confining whatever doubts she may have had about Walt’s foolhardy actions to a single hurried look.
“Now, now, Harriet,” Walt said, catching it. He hooked the Panama onto a peg by the door and dumped the bag of shells on a worktop. Then he turned to face her, taking both her small hands gently in his, engulfing them completely. He was a good head taller than she was and he had to drop his chin to meet her eyes. “This young lady here’s from Manchester, where Grace went to school. How could I hear that and not invite them in for some good home cooking?”
She smiled indulgently at him, but didn’t look much reassured.
I moved forwards and put my hand out. “I’m Charlie and this is Trey. It’s very nice to meet you,” I said in my best well brought-up voice. “I’ve never been to America before and I’m overwhelmed by your husband’s generosity in inviting us into your home like this.”
Her shoulders relaxed a little. That was different, I saw. National pride was at stake. She disengaged herself from her husband and took the hand I’d offered. Her grip was firm rather than strong, the skin thin and soft.
“You’re very welcome,” she said. “I’ll get right on it. How d’you take your coffee?”
She poured us both a cup of the real stuff from a pot on the side. I added sugar to mine to try and stop my hands from shaking, aware that I hadn’t managed to keep anything down since that midday snack at the park yesterday. Besides, there’s only so much adrenaline your body can produce without giving it an outlet and mine was threatening to swamp me.
Trey and I hovered and drank our coffee while Harriet cooked and Walt fussed around, setting the table and generally getting in her way. They kept up a friendly banter between the two of them as they worked together. Trey watched, fascinated.
“OK, we’re nearly all set,” Walt announced, putting four glasses and a jug of iced water onto the large oval table near the kitchen window. “Either of you two kids need to use the bathroom before we eat?”
I glanced down at the dirty state of my hands and took him up on the offer. He pointed me in the right direction and left me to it, which was rather more trusting than I would have been, given the circumstances.
The back of the house, the one facing the water, was almost entirely open-plan, with just an island unit between the dining kitchen and the large living room, and a study area at the far side. Two ceiling-mounted fans lazily stirred the air in the living room.
Off that room were two hallways, one of which contained the bathroom and what looked like a couple of spare bedrooms. The bathroom was clean but shabby, the short little shallow bath marked by years of hard
