“No he didn’t!” Tonia shouted, coming down toward them. “It’s not true, Kate. She took the chance from him! She killed him! Go on!”

Kate hesitated. She could push Susannah back off the edge, hard down into the water.

“Go on!” Tonia screamed. “She killed Ralph! She betrayed him, sent him to that filthy place to be murdered! On the toilet floor! Ralph… beautiful, happy, magical Ralph! Susannah destroyed him!” She was just behind Kate now, only feet away.

Susannah could hear the waves crash in behind her, then crunch on the stones, draw in and suck back. How many had there been while she was crouched here? Three, four, five?

Kate turned from Tonia to Susannah, and back.

“Do it!” Tonia cried again. “If you loved Ralph, do it! She took him from you! He didn’t want her, so she smashed everything.”

“He didn’t want any of us!” Susannah shouted desperately. “He only wanted the Senate-the power and the money!”

Kate swiveled back to Susannah and took another step toward her, her skin whipped by the wind, eyes wide.

Susannah saw Tonia just beyond her, the hatred naked in her face. “Haven’t you the guts to do it yourself?” she shouted. “No wonder Ralph wanted Kate! At least she has her own passions, not someone else’s! You coward!” She was crouching now, balanced.

Tonia’s lips pulled back in a snarl of anger and she lunged forward, knocking aside Kate, who slipped and fell, grasping onto the weed to save herself.

Susannah moved sideways, twisting her leg and falling as Tonia landed. Now they were side by side, only feet apart. Susannah started to crawl back up the slope again, her leg stabbing with pain.

“That’s right!” Tonia called with searing derision. “Crawl away! D’you think I can’t catch you?” She started forward, slowly, spinning it out.

Susannah heard the wave before she saw it, taller, heavier than the others, the sneaker wave with all the hungry power of the ocean within.

“The wave!” she called out. She did not want to warn Tonia, but the words were out before she thought. “Look out!”

Tonia was laughing. She did not believe her.

“Look out!” Susannah screamed.

The wave broke, high and white, pouring over rocks with an obliterating roar. It was only up to Tonia’s knees, but the strength of it tore away her feet from the ground and pulled her into its cauldron.

Kate was soaked, but she clung onto the weed and was left gasping.

Susannah was blinded for a moment, her clothes drenched with the spray, but she pushed the wet hair out of her eyes to see Tonia struggle, arms and legs flailing for a moment, then swallowed up, no more than a dark mass in the heart of the wave as it sucked back into the ocean and folded into itself back again into deep water.

Kate was sobbing, trying to stand up, her face ashen.

“You can’t do anything,” Susannah said quietly. “We’d better climb higher, there’ll be another one, there always is.”

“Did you… did you tell the police about Ralph?” Kate stammered.

“Yes.” She turned and met her eyes directly. “He was a thief, and he was going to be a corrupt senator. You think I should have helped him to do that?”

“But he… and you?” Kate said with disbelief.

“A cheat,” Susannah said for her. “Has it not occurred to you that if he would cheat on Tonia with you, then he would cheat on you with me-or anyone who would serve his cause?”

Kate looked crushed.

Susannah held out her hand. “Come on. We need to go higher, above all the waves, not just most of them.”

Kate clung onto her. “But… what about Tonia?”

“An accident,” Susannah replied. “Sneaker waves get people every year. I guess it’s not enough to get it right most of the time, it’s the weakness you didn’t think of that’ll destroy you.”

Kate put her hands up to her face. “She wanted me to kill you!’

“I know.” Susannah put her arm around her. “Come on.”

LOULY AND PRETTY BOY by ELMORE LEONARD

Here are some dates in Louly Ring’s life from 1912, the year she was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to 1931, when she ran away from home to meet Joe Young, following his release from the Missouri State Penitentiary.

In 1918 her daddy, a Tulsa stockyard hand, joined the U.S. Marines and was killed at Bois de Belleau during the World War. Her mom, sniffling as she held the letter, told Louly it was a woods over in France.

In 1920 her mom married a hardshell Baptist by the name of Otis Bender and they went to live on his cotton farm near Sallisaw, south of Tulsa on the edge of the Cookson Hills. By the time Louly was twelve, her mom had two sons by Otis and Otis had Louly out in the fields picking cotton. He was the only person in the world who called her by her Christian name, Louise. She hated picking cotton but her mom wouldn’t say anything to Otis. Otis believed that when you were old enough to do a day’s work, you worked. It meant Louly was finished with school by the sixth grade.

In 1924, that summer, they attended her cousin Ruby’s wedding in Bixby. Ruby was seventeen, the boy she married, Charley Floyd, twenty. Ruby was dark but pretty, showing Cherokee blood from her mama’s side. Because of their age difference Louly and Ruby had nothing to say to each other. Charley called her kiddo and would lay his hand on her head and muss her bobbed hair that was sort of reddish from her mom. He told her she had the biggest brown eyes he had ever seen on a little girl.

In 1925 she began reading about Charles Arthur Floyd in the paper: how he and two others went up to St. Louis and robbed the Kroger Food payroll office of $11,500. They were caught in Sallisaw driving around in a brand-new Studebaker they bought in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. The Kroger Food paymaster identified Charley saying, “That’s him, the pretty boy with apple cheeks.” The newspapers ate it up and referred to Charley from then on as Pretty Boy Floyd.

Louly remembered him from the wedding as cute with wavy hair, but kind of scary the way he grinned at you-not being sure what he was thinking. She bet he hated being called Pretty Boy. Looking at his picture she cut out of the paper Louly felt herself getting a crush on him.

In 1929, while he was still in the penitentiary, Ruby divorced him on the grounds of neglect and married a man from Kansas. Louly thought it was terrible, Ruby betraying Charley like that. “Ruby don’t see him ever again going straight,” her mom said. “She needs a husband the same as I did to ease the burdens of life, have a father for her little boy Dempsey.” Born in December of ‘24 and named for the world’s heavyweight boxing champ.

Now that Charley was divorced Louly wanted to write and sympathize but didn’t know which of his names to use. She had heard his friends called him Choc, after his fondness for Choctaw Beer, his favorite beverage when he was in his teens and roamed Oklahoma and Kansas with harvest crews. Her mom said it was where he first took up with bad companions, “those drifters he met at harvest time,” and later on working oil patches.

Louly opened her letter “Dear Charley,” and said she thought it was a shame Ruby divorcing him while he was still in prison, not having the nerve to wait till he was out. What she most wanted to know, “Do you remember me from your wedding?” She stuck a picture of herself in a bathing suit, standing sideways and smiling over her shoulder at the camera. This way her fourteen-year-old breasts, coming along, were seen in profile.

Charley wrote back saying sure he remembered her, “the little girl with the big brown eyes.” Saying, “I’m getting out in March and going to Kansas City to see what’s doing. I have given your address to an inmate here by the name of Joe Young who we call Booger, being funny. He is from Okmulgee but has to do another year or so in this garbage can and would like to have a pen pal as pretty as you are.”