Read Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach for Free Online

everyone has a nice time."
    "Yes, Jonquil," Julian said, "that's quite enough," and Ray was grateful yet again for Daphne's reappearance. As Daphne brought the tray over he saw Jonquil's face revert to introverted blankness even though Tim had sent her a sympathetic wink. Ray felt for her too, though he wasn't sorry that the subject had been suppressed. Where the family was concerned, far worse was being left unspoken.
    ***
    Ray was watching Tim and Jonquil spin William on the grinning roundabout beyond the gap in the apartment block when Evadne came to find the family by the pool. "Your ride is here," she said.
    "Not ours," Julian said before anyone else could speak.
    "Yes, to go to Sunset Beach."
    "Then it's certainly not ours. We've no intention of going anywhere near such a place."
    "Sam from your travel will meet you there."
    Doug took the invitation out of the envelope. "This says we're to wait here."
    "Yes, to be taken."
    "She said nothing about that to us," Julian objected. "And it's emphatically not somewhere we want our son to be."
    "There won't be too much activity this early in the evening, do you think?" Natalie said.
    "I believe I've made my view clear."
    "I will tell the driver you are talking," Evadne said and left them.
    "I could stay with William," Sandra said. "If there are any trips you think I'd like, Ray, you can book them."
    "I was going to propose we vote," Julian said, "once we've heard the options."
    "Do we need to?" Pris wondered. "If there's something some of us aren't up for, they can do something else."
    "I understood the aim was to keep the family together." As Pris looked more abashed than Ray thought she had any reason to feel, Julian said "In the interests of fairness, everyone should choose what we do for a day."
    "How," Doug said, "if mum isn't there?"
    "You can phone William and me when you know what's on offer," Sandra said. "I'd like to sit him while I have the chance." She pushed herself off the lounger and made for the play area, calling "I'm going to play with you now, William."
    "We were looking after him," Jonquil protested.
    "You were, and very well too, but the welcome meeting won't be any fun for him."
    As the teenagers sauntered to the poolside Julian said "Quickly and quietly, please." Presumably he was ensuring William didn't realise they were going elsewhere, but Ray had the impression that he wasn't just addressing Tim and Jonquil.
    A minibus was parked outside the courtyard. The driver, a slow bulky man with not much less hair blackening his arms than topped his squarish head, slid the door shut once everyone had clambered in. As the vehicle moved off, Natalie said "Can you tell us where we're going, driver?"
    Ray tried not to mind how she increasingly sounded like her husband. "Sunset Beach," the driver said.
    "My wife is asking exactly where."
    "Bright Nights."
    "Is that a bar? We don't want to be surrounded by rowdies." When the driver gave him an uncomprehending look in the mirror Julian said "People who don't behave as they should."
    The driver gave a grunt or possibly a laugh. "In the day you are safe."
    The road had wandered away from the coast, but the pallid sandy beach was visible beyond an elongated field of grass. A swollen orange sun hovered above the sea and paced the minibus. Sunset Beach cut off the sunlight as the resort closed around the road, the sparsely populated pavements bordered by dormant neon. "At least some people have got up," Pris said.
    "More come out soon," said the driver.
    Ray assumed he was seeing recent arrivals, since they all looked in need of a tan. The minibus pulled up in front of the Bright Nights, where drinkers sat beneath the red-tiled roof of an extensive bar. If Ray's professional eye hadn't deserted him, quite a few weren't much older than Tim and Jonquil. Sam from the travel company came to meet the Thornton party, and Ray gave her the receipt for the taxi fare. "You nearly didn't see some of us," he said. "This chap wanted to