Soul Beach

about him being released.
    And then my fingers are already typing Danny Cross into the Google search box before I realise what I’m doing. Other words appear next to it, as the search engine tries to guess what I will type next. Danny Cross son of Vincent Cross, Danny Cross Cross Enterprises, Danny Cross plane, Danny Cross accident.
    And then, Danny Cross death .
    My throat feels tight, as though someone has knotted a scarf around my neck and is pulling hard. He’s real. And he’s dead.
    When I manage to breathe again, I’m light headed. I search for Danny Cross death and a list of pages pops up, along with the suggestion that I could try narrowing it down to Images or News .
    I click on the first link, which takes me to a page on an American TV website, headlined Magnate’s son feared dead in desert crash . Before I can read on, I notice the photograph.
    Now I realise why Danny looked familiar. I’ve seen this photo before.
    This Danny wears a tuxedo and white shirt, and a black bow tie lies loose on either side of his collar. His clothes couldn’t be more different to the ones Danny wears on the Beach, but the smile is the same. Confident, but not arrogant. Intelligent, but challenging, too. The eyes are different, though. They’re still green, but there’s none of the longing that drew me in the first time he looked at me on the Beach.
    I remember this picture of him from the papers, though I don’t remember many details of the story. Back then, death seemed irrelevant to me. Now I skim-read: private jet, en route to a family party, aerial searches, father’s business growing despite recession, one of America’s most eligible bachelors, ready to take up a place at Yale.
    I’m numb. I don’t know what I was expecting. Or perhaps I do. Maybe I never expected to find a Danny Cross at all, never mind one whose digitally reproduced eyes twinkle back at me right now. It makes it . . .
    Real.
    It makes Soul Beach real. I only realise now that I hadn’t completely believed in the place, or that I was really talking to my sister. After all, every detail could easily have sprung from my grieving mind.
    But this couldn’t. I look at the date on the news story: just over a year ago. The timing fits.
    What was I doing then? Lying by a pool at a resort in Greece, on the last family holiday before Meggie went to college. Mum had to use the guilt card to persuade her to come and I even had to skip the first week of term to fit in with my sister’s hectic social calendar, but once we got there, she was her usual shiny self. I had nothing to talk about except what GCSEs I’d be taking the next year, but she still let me tag along with her newly formed gang . . .
    I click some of the other links. After the plane went missing, it took the search teams a day and a night to find the crash scene. When they did, Danny was in the pilot’s seat, a long way from the wreckage, and his dad’s pilot had ejected, too, still in the passenger seat, bolt upright. That’s when I remember a detail I must have taken in at the time: the fact that the son of a multi-millionaire was arrogant enough to believe he could fly a plane without training. He paid the price for his vanity.
    The photograph below it shocks me. Metal confetti lies across an arid desert landscape, and it’s impossible to tell this used to be an aircraft: it also seems completely crazy that the two victims wouldn’t have been smashed to smithereens, too, but that’s what it says.
    The articles mention the pilot as an afterthought. He left a widow and two young daughters. Hardly anyone went to his funeral, yet it takes me only a couple of clicks to find a video of Danny’s from the local news channel in Boston.
    I feel a sharp stab as I watch his funeral, because it reminds me so much of Meggie’s. Danny’s father is stocky and serious, more like a bodyguard than a billionaire in his mourner’s suit. His mother, a blonde trophy wife, looks sedated as she walks in slow-mo into a whitewashed chapel. Danny’s brother is fourteen or fifteen, moon-faced and clumsy, the kid brother who was surely only ever meant to be in the shadows, and has suddenly become heir to an empire.
    And what an empire! The voiceover explains that Cross Enterprises includes chemical works and drugstores and a small selection of dot com companies, ‘purchased on the advice of Danny, who was widely seen as a hot prospect within the business world’.
    Inside the chapel, huge banners