Aside from the families there was also the same (or a similar) knot of teenagers that had been there almost every day: girls in bikinis tossing their hair around, slim-chested, hairless boys goofing around in front of them. The bizarre mating rituals of the young. The disgraced writer observed the bizarre . . . No, never mind. It was so uninteresting to read about somebody watching somebody else. Unless you were reading a thriller and you knew the person watching was either going to murder or get murdered. Just ask Leonard Puckett. (House with a View, a stand-alone.)

Anthony could also see one towheaded boy of four or five, wearing green pajamas, marching toward the ocean like a man on a mission, arms swinging, knees high. He looked an awful lot like— Who did he look like? Anthony wracked his brain while he waited for one of the parents to go after the kid. All of the parents were too busy setting up their elaborate beach homes-away-from-home; nobody was watching the boy. The boy was getting just a little too close to the water. (Also, who brought their kid to the beach in pajamas? Every other kid there was wearing a bathing suit and a sun hat.)

“Hey!” called Anthony. “Hey, the kid!” The calling was futile—the wind snatched away his words as soon as he uttered them. “Hey!” he called again, louder this time. “The kid! Watch that kid near the water! Watch your kid!”

Oh, hell. They couldn’t hear him. Anthony ran down the deck stairs and pushed his way through the path that led to the beach. Once there, he scanned the sand. No small boy. His heart was thumping against his rib cage; his breath was ragged in his throat. He was out of shape, that was for sure. He searched the beach again. The families were to the left. He thought he saw a flash of green far to the right. He took a deep breath, and he ran.

“Dude!” said one of the teenagers as he sprinted past. “Where’s the fire?”

“Go to hell,” Anthony said, or would have, if he’d had the breath. He could feel his un-taut belly bouncing. He kept running. When he got to the flash of green, he saw that it was the pajamas, and he saw that the pajamas were on the boy, and that the boy had waded out to his knees—almost to his waist. He saw also that the waves had picked up, and that the water was no longer flat. Out in the water, a surfer was optimistically paddling out. Anthony ran into the water and grabbed the boy under the arms, lifting him onto dry sand.

“Okay,” he panted. “Okay, there you go. It’s okay. You okay, buddy?”

The boy screwed up his face and started to cry, and now Anthony saw that this was the boy from the grocery store, the one who lived in the cottage next door, with the mother who wanted to borrow sugar and liked to read books by Leonard Puckett. The boy looked to be about Max’s age. Tiny baby teeth, no spaces yet where any had fallen out. Pudge in his cheeks. He cried like Max cried too, as though the world had done him a grave injustice.