Public Secrets

shoulder. “So that’s what they’re doing here,” he murmured, studying the guards. “I thought they were narcs or something.”
“Bodyguards,” she said dully, then shrugged it off. “My father worries.”
“Yeah, I bet.” He remembered, clearly, the police photograph of a little boy. It left him with nothing else to say.
“I remember your father.” She began to draw idle circles in the sand. “He came to the hospital to see me after we lost my brother.”
“He’s a captain now,” Michael said for lack of anything else.
“That’s nice.” She’d been raised to be polite under any circumstances. “You’ll tell him I said hello, won’t you?”
“Sure.” They ran out of things to say so that the whoosh of the waves filled the gaps. “Ah, listen, do you want a Coke or something?”

She looked up, dazzled to be asked. It was the first time in her life she had had more than a five-minute conversation with a boy. Men, certainly. Her life had been full of men. But being asked to have a Coke with a boy only a few years her senior was a wonderful, and heady, experience. She nearly agreed before she remembered the guards. She couldn’t bear them watching.
“Thanks, but I’d better go. Da was going to pick me up in a couple of hours, but I don’t think I’m up to any more surfing today. I’ll have to call him.”
“I could take you.” He made a restless movement with his shoulders. It was stupid to feel so tongue-tied with a kid. But he couldn’t remember being more nervous since he’d asked Nancy Brimmer to the ninth-grade Valentine’s Dance. “Give you a ride home,” he continued as Emma stared at him. “If you want.”
“You probably have something you want to do.”
“No. Not really.”
He wanted to meet her father again, Emma decided after one ecstatic moment. A boy like him—why, he must have been at least eighteen—wouldn’t be interested in her. But the daughter of Brian McAvoy was different. She drummed up another smile as she got to her feet. He had saved her life. If seeing her father was the only payment she could make, then she would make it.
“I’d like a ride, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No big deal.” He caught himself before he shifted his feet in the sand. She probably thought he was a jerk.
“I’ll just be a minute.” She rushed off in the direction of the guards, snatching up her beach wrap and bag on the way. “My friend is giving me a ride home,” she said in her most dismissive tone.
“Miss McAvoy.” The guard named Masters cleared his throat. “It would be better if you called your father.”
“There’s no need to bother him.”
The second guard, Sweeney, mopped his sweaty forehead. “Your father wouldn’t like you taking rides from strangers.”
“Michael’s not a stranger.” The haughty tone made her feel nasty inside, but she would not, could not, be humiliated in front of Michael. “I know him, and so does my father. Michael’s father is a captain on the police force here.” She pulled the long, rainbow-colored T-shirt over her suit. “You’ll be following behind us, so what does it matter?” She turned, and keeping her head up, walked back to where Michael waited with their boards.
“Hold it.” Sweeney put a hand on Masters’s shoulder. “Let’s give the kid a break. She don’t get many.”

Michael’s gas gauge was hovering dangerously close to empty when he pulled up at the high iron gates in Beverly Hills. He saw the faint surprise on the guard’s face before the switch was thrown and the gates swung inward. He was sorry as he drove down the tree-lined drive that he had nothing but scruffy sandals and his old track jersey to wear with his bathing trunks.
The house was all pink stone and white marble, four towering stories of it that took up more than an acre of the trim green lawn. Double arched doors of etched glass stood at the entrance. He wasn’t sure if he should be amused or impressed by the peacock that strutted across the grass.
“Nice place.”
“It’s P.M.’s really. Or P.M.’s wife’s.” Emma found herself faintly embarrassed by the life-sized marble lions that flanked the entrance. “It used to belong to someone in the cinema—I can never remember who—but Angie did it all over. Anyway, she’s in Europe filming so we’re staying a few weeks. Have you got time to come in?”
“Ah, yeah, I got time.” He frowned down at the sand clinging to his feet. “If you’re sure it’s