“Yeah?”

“Chief, this is Hendricks. I hate to bother you this early, but—”

“What time is it?”

“Five-twenty.”

“Leonard, this better be good.”

“I think we’ve got a floater on our hands, Chief.”

“A floater? What in Christ’s name is a floater?”

It was a word Hendricks had picked up from his night reading. “A drowning,” he said, embarrassed. He told Brody about the phone call from Foote. “I didn’t know if you’d want to check it out before people start swimming. I mean, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day.”

Brody heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Where’s Kimble?” he said and then added quickly, “Oh, never mind. It was a stupid question. One of these days I’m going to fix that radio of his so he can’t turn it off.”

Hendricks waited a moment, then said, “Like I said, Chief, I hate to bother …”

“Yeah, I know, Leonard. You were right to call. As long as I’m awake, I might as well get up. I’ll shave and shower and grab some coffee, and on my way in I’ll take a look along the beach in front of Old Mill and Scotch, just to make sure your ‘floater’ isn’t cluttering up somebody’s beach. Then when the day boys come on, I’ll go out and talk to Foote and the girl’s date. I’ll see you later.”

Brody hung up the phone and stretched. He looked at his wife, lying next to him in the double bed. She had stirred when the phone rang, but as soon as she determined that there was no emergency, she lapsed back into sleep.

Ellen Brody was thirty-six, five years younger than her husband, and the fact that she looked barely thirty was a source of both pride and annoyance to Brody: pride because, since she looked handsome and young and was married to him, she made him seem a man of excellent taste and substantial attraction; annoyance because she had been able to keep her good looks despite the strains of bearing three children, whereas Brody—though hardly fat at six-foot-one and two hundred pounds—was beginning to be concerned about his blood pressure and his thickening middle. Sometimes during the summer, Brody would catch himself gazing with idle lust at one of the young, long-legged girls who pranced around town—their untethered breasts bouncing beneath the thinnest of cotton jerseys. But he never enjoyed the sensation, for it always made him wonder whether Ellen felt the same stirring when she looked at the tanned, slim young men who so perfectly complemented the long-legged girls. And as soon as that thought occurred to him, he felt still worse, for he recognized it as a sign that he was on the unfortunate side of forty and had already lived more than half his life.

Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think—thoughts of chances missed and lives that could have been. She saw people she had grown up with: prep school classmates now married to bankers and brokers, summering in Amity and wintering in New York, graceful women who stroked tennis balls and enlivened conversations with equal ease, women who (Ellen was convinced) joked among themselves about Ellen Shepherd marrying that policeman because he got her pregnant in the back seat of his 1948 Ford, which had not been the case.