The Deadly Truth (The Dr Basil Willing Mysteries Book 3) by Helen McCloy

Author:Helen McCloy [McCloy, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books
Published: 2021-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

I

After a half hour’s uneasy sleep, Basil was awakened by a hot red sun that crept over the eastern rim of the sand dunes, burned away the mist, and cast oblique blue shadows across the porch. The barn swallows that still lingered about the nest they had built under the eaves last spring were making a tremendous racket. He climbed into bathing trunks. Twenty-two steps took him from his bed to the ocean.

These mornings alone with sun and sand and sea were worth all the inconveniences of living at the Hut. There were no cabanas and no badminton, no screaming children trying to ride the billows on inflated rubber horses, no adults revealing knock-knees and bow-legs, pimples and paunches as they tried to acquire a suntan. There were no cocktail parties, no poker games, and no bars. Neither were there any lifeguards or ropes and floats where you could cling in case of sudden cramp. But insecurity seemed a small price to pay for peace and independence on such a morning. The young day was bright and clean as freshly minted gold. The birds were chattering as if they had never seen the sun rise before. Even the air was fresh and sweet as if no living thing had ever breathed it until this moment. The earth could not have seemed more new and lovely to Adam himself at his first sunrise in the garden of Eden.

The sea water had cooked so many weeks in the summer sun, it was warmer than the air. Basil waded out to the surf, dived through the crest of a curling breaker, swam through a billowy channel where the water was over his head, and came to rest on the sand bar that runs all along the South Shore, where the water was only waist deep. Then he swam out beyond the sand bar where the water was twenty or thirty feet deep. The receding shoreline looked almost as far away as the horizon though actually so much nearer. When he turned back he had a curiously foreshortened, inverted view of the land — a fish-eye view that made the bluff look like a great cliff and the dunes a narrow strip of sand. It might have been a desert island instead of a populous neighbourhood only three hours’ drive from Times Square.

He came out of the warm, restless salt water into a cool wind with all the buoyancy imparted by champagne and none of the giddiness. The damp sand was like a written record of every event since high tide. There were the tracks of his own sneakers and of Roger’s city shoes made just at dawn. There were the star-shaped print of a gull and the sinister little trail of a beach rat, rather like a briar-stitched seam. Nearer the sea was the broad print of a man’s foot in heavy walking shoes. Basil took that for the coastguard’s trail, until he saw running close beside it the four-leafed clover spoor of a big dog’s paw.

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