“All right, I promise. Goodbye, Mother,” said the girl. “My love to Daddy.” She hung up.
“See more glass,” said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. “Did you see more glass?”
“Pussycat, stop saying that. It’s driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please.”
Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil’s shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, winglike blades of her back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
“It was really just an ordinary silk handkerchief—you could see when you got up close,” said the woman in the beach chair beside Mrs. Carpenter’s. “I wish I knew how she tied it. It was really darling.”
“It sounds darling,” Mrs. Carpenter agreed. “Sybil, hold still, pussy.”
“Did you see more glass?” said Sybil.
Mrs. Carpenter sighed. “All right,” she said. She replaced the cap on the sun-tan oil bottle. “Now run and play, pussy. Mommy’s going up to the hotel and have a Martini with Mrs. Hubbel. I’ll bring you the olive.”
Set loose, Sybil immediately ran down to the flat part of the beach and began to walk in the direction of Fisherman’s Pavilion. Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area reserved for guests of the hotel.
She walked for about a quarter of a mile and then suddenly broke into an oblique run up the soft part of the beach. She stopped short when she reached the place where a young man was lying on his back.