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from?” Kae asked, another question out of the blue. “Your voice has a funny accent.”
    “I grew up in Oklahoma,” he told her. “But I live here now.”
    “Why?”
    Shea took in a large breath and held it for a moment, before blowing it out. “There was a tornado. My dad died,” he said slowly, carefully, as if the words themselves might hurt him. “Gramma is the only family I have left.”
    “I’m sorry about your dad,” she said, holding his eyes with her gaze. She reached out to touch his arm. Under her gentle hand, his skin tingled, radiating warmth through his body. Shea felt himself relax, and was immediately glad that he’d told her the truth.
    The girl touched her other hand to her neck and suddenly, a sharp jolt ran from the base of Shea’s spine down one leg, as if he’d received an electric shock. Lucky jumped to his feet and began to bark at the girl. Startled, Kae quickly released her grasp of his arm and took a step backward. Shea squatted down to scratch behind Lucky’s ear. “It’s okay, Lucky. Just static electricity or something.”
    “I hope we can be friends,” Kae smiled, blinking her eyes finally. He noticed how long and thick her eyelashes were.
    “Me too.” As Shea returned her smile, his eyes rested on the length of black cord around the girl’s neck. Her fingers were wrapped around the stone dangling from the end, a round black stone with a hexagonal hole through its middle, identical to the one he’d plucked from the waves the previous morning. “Where did you…?”
    “Hey, you kids!” A loud, crackling voice interrupted his question. Shea turned toward the parking lot and saw a police cruiser parked there with its blue lights flashing. “No dogs on the beach,” boomed the amplified voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker.
    Hurriedly, he bent to clip the leash onto Lucky’s collar. When he looked up, Kae had disappeared. “Where’d she run off to?” he puzzled as he tugged on the leash. He and Lucky ran across the sand, stopping for a second to grab the bag of garbage.
    When they reached the parking lot, Shea dropped the full bag into the barrel. The police cruiser was parked at the front edge of the lot, lights silently flashing blue and white. Shea approached the car warily. His experiences with police were limited to the day of the tornado.
    “I’m sorry, officer. My grandmother said it would be okay if we got off the beach before eight.”
    “The sign says no dogs, May through October.” The officer wore mirrored sunglasses despite the fact the sun was barely over the horizon. “That means no dogs on the beach. Period. The fine is a hundred dollars.”
    “I’m sorry, officer,” Shea repeated. He realized he was staring at his own reflection in the mirrored glasses, but seeing a very different scene. A scene in Oklahoma, where a similar looking cop had walked into his history class to excuse him from school.
    He tore his eyes from the mirrored lenses and tried to see this police officer and not the Oklahoma trooper. “Officer L. Tandy, Harwich Police Department,” he said, reading the shiny brass nameplate hanging on the uniform pocket, right over the shiny silver badge.
    “What’s your name, boy? I haven’t seen you around.” Officer L. Tandy’s voice had lost some of its edge, but the crisply ironed uniform still made Shea uncomfortable.
    “MacNamara, sir. Shea MacNamara.”
    The officer gave Shea the once over, pushing the sunglasses down to the end of his long beaky nose. “I went to school with your father and your Uncle Rick,” the officer said, nodding his head. He opened his mouth to continue, then seemed to reconsider. Peering past Shea he asked, “Wasn’t there someone else on the beach with you? I thought I saw two of you by the jetty.”
    Shea shrugged his shoulders. “She left.”
    “You’d better get home, too, before you miss the school bus,” Officer Tandy said, pushing his glasses back up his thin nose. He made no further