Summer Beach - Jan Moran Page 0,2

border. It was far too late to wake her. Besides, with a house full of teenagers, Marina would be sleeping on the couch and listening to silly adolescent jokes.

Though she loved her nephews, that was not what she needed right now.

Shivering against the cool ocean breeze, Marina tugged at her old bedroom window until she heard a pop. “Whoa, ouchy mama!” she cried out in pain, reverting to the creative cuss words she’d used when the kids were young that had somehow stuck.

The window didn’t budge, but one of her artificial red nails had snapped off, taking part of her natural nail with it. She held up her throbbing forefinger, assessing the damage. “That’s it. You’re all coming off.” One more vestige of her former life she could get rid of for a while. She shook her hand. “Yowzer roo,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

At the studio, Babe had once heard her, arched a finely tattooed eyebrow, and walked away, shaking her head as if Marina were an old dinosaur.

“Where are you, Ginger?” Marina peeked in another window. When she had fled the disaster of her life in San Francisco this morning, it hadn’t occurred to her that Ginger might not be here. Besides, her grandmother was often a night owl, a habit honed from her time spent in Europe with her husband Bertrand Delavie, a career diplomat.

The fashionable people often dined until after midnight, dear child.

That memory earned a fleeting smile, despite her pulsating injury.

Marina marched toward the front porch. Get creative, Ginger would always say. She could sleep on the porch until Ginger returned, but that could be days if her grandmother had gone on a trip. Or she could find a motel or inn.

As she ducked under a set of low-hanging wind chimes she hadn’t recalled, her spiky high heel caught between two pavers and snapped, jerking her ankle at an awkward angle. Flailing and cursing under her breath again, she regained her balance, though her ankle protested.

“These are going, too,” she muttered in disgust. She tore off her shoes—two-hundred dollars on sale at Nordstrom down the drain. For that price, she could’ve bought several pairs of comfortable walking shoes or great massages—which would have made her feel so much better.

She was tired of nosebleed heel heights, though that was the style expected of her at work. Hal had called her stylish kitten-heels and flats old-lady shoes and asked if she were getting ready for retirement.

The nerve of that brat. Women didn’t need to all look like Babe-the-Barbie. Son of a billionaire or not, Marina had told Hal precisely what she thought of him on the way out the door this morning.

Marina hobbled along the side of the house toward the swing to nurse her injuries.

How many times had she sat on that swing, kicking sand from her bare feet and listening to her grandmother? No one could tell a story like Ginger, so nicknamed because of her ginger-colored hair at birth, which she still kept stylishly tinted. But Marina preferred to think it was because of her grandmother’s spicy personality.

Ginger’s stories, even the ones that were supposedly true, were forever morphing in her nimble mind. Some might think it was because Ginger was nearly eighty now, but no, Marina had been listening to stories that shifted like the tides for as long as she could remember.

Ginger seemed to have lived as many lives as a cat. Maybe Ginger did that to entertain them, sort of like Pippi Longstocking. When called out on details that didn’t jibe with an earlier version of the story, Ginger would simply arch an eyebrow with a Mona Lisa smile and say, “That’s how I remember it today.”

Now, every time Marina put pressure on her foot, sharp pains ripped through her ankle. Only a few more steps.

As she turned the corner, a powerful flashlight cut through the darkness, blinding her.

A man’s voice rang out. “Who’s there?”

Marina screamed and stumbled back, her ankle collapsing on her. Waving her arms in slow motion, she crashed to the ground. Pepper spray, she thought frantically, but it was safely tucked in her purse. In the car. Would she become a lead story—if it bleeds, it leads—like the ones she had delivered for years? The self-defense training Ginger had insisted all the girls take kicked in. She couldn’t run, but she could kick.

“Ma’am, I am not going to hurt you,” came a firm, reassuring voice. “I’m Chief Clarkson of the Summer Beach Police Department. Are you hurt?”

Shielding