Dark Water Rising Read Online Free

week.
    “But that’s a whole month earlier than public schools,” I said. “I bet she’s not happy about that.”
    “What? You mean you’re not looking forward to school?”
    “Are you kidding?”
    Ben grinned and shrugged. “Right now, I can’t think of much else.”
    I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re really going to be a doctor, huh? Live a life filled with blood and guts?”
    He tossed me a surprised look. “Papa told me you were planning to go into medicine yourself. Did he get it wrong?”
    “Yeah, he did—for sure. My
father
is the one planning that career. I’m going to be a carpenter.”
    Ben raised an eyebrow and gave a slow nod. “You’re in a fix, then, aren’t you? According to Papa, Uncle Thomas has a powerful stubborn streak. Sounds like you’ll need all the luck you can get to squirm out of this one.”
    I laughed, but he was dead right.
    We turned south on Twenty-fourth Street and joined a stream of families walking to the great bathhouses built on pilings out over the water. The Pagoda Company’s twin buildings lay just ahead. Their sloping roofs of striped canvas made them look more like two giant circus tents staked out in the gulf than a bathhouse. Aswe neared the beach, I saw Murdoch’s, too, and beyond that, the three-story Olympia.
    Voices rose and fell on the wind, and I turned east toward what must’ve been ten blocks of ramshackle buildings.
    “That’s the Midway,” Ben said, pulling me in for a closer look.
    The air sizzled with frying clams and frankfurters, and rang with shouts from swimmers and cries from excited gulls. Merchants hawked seashells and saltwater taffy, kewpie dolls and satin pillows, and bellowed invitations to “step right up.” We walked past swimmers with beach balls tucked under their arms lined up next to people in street clothes, waiting for a chance at the penny arcades. And farther down the beach, I spotted a trestle that stretched out over the surf and back again.
    “Trolleys go out over the water?”
    “Sure. Some people want to experience the gulf high and dry.” He grinned. “Not everyone’s as brave as we are.”
    The way the beach looked today, I couldn’t imagine there’d be anyone left in town to take the trolley. It seemed most all of Galveston was here this evening, bathing, bicycling, or just driving carriages across the crisp-smooth sand.
    We chose the Pagoda for changing into our suits andtook their long boardwalk that started at the end of Twenty-fourth Street. The steps took us high above the beach, and, once out over the surf, I stopped to look down at the crowds gathered around ropes and barnacled pilings. They jumped waves in dark wool bathing suits, looking more like fleas on a stray dog’s ear than swimmers.
    All except one.
    I leaned out over the weathered handrail spotted white from gulls and tried to get a better look. My stomach fluttered, then lurched hard. It was the girl with sun-bright hair. At least it looked like her. By the time I glanced up again, Ben was gone, and I had to hurry to catch up.
    When we’d changed and finally gotten back to the beach, I saw Mama and waved. She looked a bit unsure of herself as she waved back at me from the door of a brightly painted portable bathhouse. A parade of these two-wheeled wagons lined the beach, waiting to be rolled out into the water a short way and hauled back in by horses, a convenience for swimmers who wanted to keep sand out of their stockings and shoes. I had to laugh, thinking of Mama inside, gripping the walls while the concessionaire pushed her toward the surf.
    While Ben and I bobbed in the water and rode the waves, I watched for the yellow-haired girl. I kept aneye on the warm surf around the Pagoda and under the splashy lettering painted across the side of the building where I’d last seen her.
A Ride on the Katy Is Like a Drive on the Beach,
the sign for MK & T Railway declared. I must’ve read those words a hundred times before the sky settled