Author's note: I took some inspiration for this from "What Becky Saw", by my co-author Tanista.

A sandcastle: but not just any sandcastle. A solid three feet by three feet square, with a corresponding moat, and turrets that she's built up to reach her shoulder height (well, when she's sitting). Walls protected with jagged seashells. Four bits of white satin tied to sticks serve as corner flags.

It is the most extravagant thing in sight (Jacques had raised an eyebrow when she'd asked him to recommend a totally isolated stretch of beach, but to do him credit, had found her one). And she's finished it all herself.

"I did it, Chris," Becky whispers. "I really did it."

She wonders, sometimes, what life would have been like if her brother hadn't died in that crash. If he'd made the move east with her. Easier, with both of them to face down Mission City? Harder, if Uncle Mac had been forced to give them up?

What's happened has happened, though, and she tries not to think about the past too much. But they'd been looking forward to their summer off so much...agreeing that next time they had time and sun and the perfect beach day, they'd build a sand fort big enough for them both to sit in.

And then the accident.

So after years of inland Minnesota, it's nice to be able to put this to bed at last. Faster then she'd expected, actually, it helps having an uncle who understands structural engineering. Even if he isn't here just now...off with Jacques again, for a wine tasting. Weird. Mac doesn't drink much, and when he does it's usually hard liquor - but then, they are in California.

"I wonder what you'd do now, Chris," Becky murmurs. "Go buy an ice cream? Swim? Watch girls?"

As though the words have inspired the reality, a girl pops into sight from behind a sand dune, her bikini strings fluttering behind her as she runs. Coming along the beach with a frantic intensity that doesn't seem quite natural, in this lazy warm sunshine (to think that it's winter back home!) Splashing through the shallows. Becky finds herself puzzled. Anybody in that much of a hurry ought to be running on the sand proper, which is hard-packed and would offer easier footing.

Like she wants to get away, but doesn't want to be tracked.

On impulse, Becky pulls out one of her flags, and waves it in the air.

XXXXXXXXX

"Don't follow me," her brother always says to Ashton Cooke, when he leaves.

He has to order her every time, because she wants to know what he's been up to. Murdoc was fourteen, she only nine, when he rescued the two of them from an obscurely deprived farm in the Sussex downs. (When her childhood started- because what had happened before certainly hadn't counted.) Since then he's made sure she's enjoyed every conceivable comfort, had her every wish granted, except one- just what it is he's doing to pay all the bills.

Well. She's a week shy of her twenty-third birthday, will be graduating from Cambridge in a matter of months, and more than mature enough to learn what's going on. It isn't something law-abiding; otherwise he wouldn't have kept her on the move like that, with a new flat and a new name every three months. Something profitable, obviously. And she doubts it's sexual. Her brother's incapacity for romance strikes her as indifference, not abhorrence.

So she'd set herself to finding out.

Now- with a stitch in her side, three assassins with guns after her, and a desperate need to find her brother- Ashton is rather wishing she hadn't bothered. She pounds along the beach, keenly desperate for a hiding place, or a street outfit to replace the one she'd had to abandon, when they'd started shooting her rowboat into fragments-

small miracle! A friendly face, a flag beckoning her into a sandcastle of simply preposterous size. It's the work of a moment to leap the parapet. Another, to gratefully hide herself under the pile of flowery towels.

Her benefactress glances down at her. Blue eyes, hair that shines a burnished copper in the Californian sun. Not just friendly, but familiar, somehow.

"Who's after you?"

"Three men- they say they're police officers, but they aren't." At least, I hope not! "I don't- I don't know how to make anyone believe they're not."

"How d'you know, then?"

"I saw them murder someone. In cold blood, I think it was a mob hit." She risks peeking over the castle wall. They're distant, but moving in, slow but sure.

Those warm blue eyes study hers. Sympathetic, but assessing.

"Okay."

"You believe me?"

Her benefactress shrugs.

"Maybe I'm wrong. But if I'm choosing between saving an innocent, or punishing the guilty..."

XXXXXXXXX

"Hello," Penny calls, cheerfully. "I brought you an ice cream! I had to guess what you'd like, so I told them double chocolate, with chocolate sauce and chocolate sprinkles and chocolate chunks…"

"That was a pretty good guess," Becky says, putting down her book with a smile. "Thanks."

"What happened to that sand castle you were going to build?" Penny asks, settling down with her own demure iced lemonade. "You said that's why you didn't want to go shopping with me- oh, I bet you've just been reading this whole time, haven't you?"

"Some reading," Becky says, in a rather slow voice like her uncle's drawl, "has definitely been happening. Yeah."

"Silly Becky. You could read back in Minnesota."

"Also true," Becky agrees, with lazy good humour. She pulls the deck chair into an upright position, and starts licking at her cone. "So, find any nice bargains?"

"Oh, lots! I found the loveliest pink feather boa- brand new, not all ragged and moth-eaten. And some swishy velvet cloaks, lots of things the theatre's been needing. You should have come too. Hello, officers," she adds. "Lovely day, isn't it?"

"Not exactly," the foremost one says. "This is very important. We're tracking a dangerous criminal, a murderer who's just fled the scene of the crime. A woman-" his eye rests on Becky, appreciatively. "Maybe a head taller than you, long blonde hair, striped zebra bikini. Have you seen anyone like that along here?"

Becky considers. "No. And I've been on this beach all morning, so I ought to have noticed."

"Like I said," one of the others puts in. "We should have gone back the other way, that's where the girl was heading."

"Isn't that awful," Penny says, shivering dramatically. "A murderess, and not just on stage! Becky, let's go back to the hotel, quick."

"I'm pretty comfortable here," Becky says. "Maybe I'll get some more reading done, who knows?"

"Oh- Becky Grahme, you are hopeless."

"Thanks." She nods at the uniformed men, as they depart. "You know what I really would like, though?"

"You just name it, and I'll get it!"

"Just some alone time. I mean, I spent a week cooped up in a hotel room with three other girls- this is the first time I've had a minute to myself all week. Why don't we meet up at the hotel for lunch around one? And then I promise you can take me shopping or whatever for the rest of the afternoon."

Penny blinks. "Lunch, on top of all that ice cream?"

"Sure. Like Jack says, you want to balance out your four major food groups. Ice cream, pizza, potato chips-"

"Oh, him," Penny interrupts. "Becky, I don't think you want to hang around people like that."

"People like what?"

"Criminals! I can't think why your uncle lets him run the shop on Wednesdays. Isn't he afraid that Jack might steal something, or run off with the cash register or something?"

Becky starts chewing into her waffle cone. "Jack wouldn't do that. Penny, you can't always trust to labels. Or take what people say at face value."

"I know you can't take what Jack says at face value. Do you know, he made friends with one of my grandmother's business associates, and- and I don't quite know what happened, but he gave Jack a lot of money for an investment, and something went wrong, and he never saw it again. But in three weeks, Jack was in prison. I just don't think he's wholesome."

"Okay, so maybe you don't want to go trusting him with bundles of unmarked bills or anything," Becky says, wiping ice cream off her mouth. "Maybe think about it this way. Your grandmother was a criminal, too. And very proud of it, she must have said so to just about everybody she met."

"Well, I never! That isn't the same thing at all!"

"No," Becky says, very quietly. "Because your grandmother would never have agreed to give up a whole day out of her week, so that my overworked uncle could have a rest. Penny, we trust him because he's been there for us. We tide him over when the taxi business is slack, because we know he'll repay the favour when we need one. When you're living as close to the edge as we do, it makes all the difference in the world to know there's someone you can count on- and for us, that's Jack Dalton. So yeah. I am missing him, and maybe there was nothing to be done about those plane tickets- but we're out here, having a good time, and he's probably going to spend Christmas with nothing but a whiskey bottle for company. And I feel like we're letting him down."

Penny looks distinctly unconvinced. "I still think there's much nicer people in Mission City. Like Jacques. Now, Jacques..."

XXXXXXXXX

"Oh my god," Ashton says, when Becky unearths her (she's been breathing through a strategically placed straw, quiet as a mouse). "I thought that she'd never leave."

"Penny can be like that," Becky agrees. "Or worse- be glad she didn't start on any theatre anecdotes, or you'd have been stuck under there all day. So now what? Do you want to go to the police, tell them about the impersonators?"

"I can't," Ashton says, brushing sand off herself. "See, my brother's all wrapped up in it too. I have to get in touch with him before we do anything else- he has a permanent suite at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think that's where we need to start."

"That's a coincidence, I'm staying there too. So we might as well go together."

"...you're not going to let me out of your sight, are you?"

"Nope."

"But I thought you wanted to sit and read? I mean- this might be dangerous."

"Sit and read, when there's an adventurous mystery going on?" Becky asks. "Not on your life!"

"I'm really hoping," Ashton mutters, "that it isn't going to come to that…"