She opened her front door and went out onto the landing. All was quiet in the alley; no strange cars parked nearby. She could hear the waves. The sun had made its way over the top of her apartment and shimmered above the ocean in front of her. Sometimes that was all that kept her going: glimpses of sunlight like glimpses of hope. Two seagulls were fighting over part of a hamburger in a fast-food container they’d pulled out of the trash can in the alley. She took a deep breath and stretched her arms up high over her head and let the breath out in a huge sigh.
She knew that this investigation, and baiting a possible murderer to get him to come out of the woodwork and expose himself, which she’d just done with that tweet, was dangerous. But when she asked herself Can I handle this? her answer was yes. She refused to live her life afraid. One time she’d told Tom about ripping into a guy on the street who had catcalled her, and he’d said, “Madison, the way you talk to guys I’d think you either had a really big guy nearby or were carrying a gun.” She had neither. Maybe she didn’t have much to back it up, but she wouldn’t be intimated by anyone. It wasn’t that she was brave; she just didn’t like being afraid. And she was a great investigator. She could do this.
As she released her arms and bent all the way down to put her palms flat on the sun-washed deck, she saw her neighbor Ryan walking up the path in their shared garden, surfboard under his arm. He kept his surfboard under an overhang below her apartment. As he walked toward the hutch, he stared up at her; he didn’t know she could see him through her hair from her bent position.
“Hi Ryan,” she said while upside down.
“Oh!” He stopped and shifted from bare foot to bare foot, his long hair full of sand and clinging to his wetsuit. “Hi there. I didn’t even see you.” Right, Madison thought. You mean you didn’t know I could see you staring at me. She stood up and grabbed her hair to replace it into the bun it had fallen out of.
“What are you up to?” Ryan asked. He wasn’t unattractive; in fact, he would normally be Madison’s type. Meaning likely a criminal, she thought wryly. She definitely liked bad boys, and he was rugged, confident, and a surfer. But she hadn’t thought it wise to date someone who lived downstairs from her, just across the neatly manicured garden that the landlord had fashioned after an English countryside. Also, even though she and Dave weren’t exclusive, she didn’t think he’d appreciate her bringing another surfer into the picture—one he probably surfed with every day. She hadn’t asked, but Ryan and Dave likely knew each other, even if just casually. La Jolla, especially Windansea, was a very small town.
“Not much.” Then she realized she should probably question him about anyone he might have seen hanging out around her apartment—or putting a note on her door. “Do you have a minute?” she asked.
He didn’t answer for a second; he just stared up the stairs at her with his mouth open. The moment went on a little too long, to where Madison thought she might need to repeat herself.
“Right now?” he said. “With me?”
Now she was confused. He was younger than she was, maybe twenty-five to her thirty-five, and with the rapidly changing vernacular among people younger than she that made her jump to urbandictionary.com on a daily basis, she wondered if she’d just accidentally propositioned him. Was there a double meaning to “Do you have a minute?” Was it like “Netflix and chill” or something?
“I’m not sure what you think I’m asking you,” she said. “I’m wondering if I can talk to you for a second. Just talk.”
“Oh,” he said. Then he laughed. She hadn’t seen him laugh before. His laugh was disarming. “It’s just you never talk to me. I … no I didn’t think you were … no. Let me just get out of my wetsuit and take a shower and I’ll knock on your door?”
“Awesome.” She watched him stow his surfboard and then hobble down the cement path to his front door. He lived with three roommates in the front house; in the 1920s, her apartment was the carriage house for his house. His was a classic California Craftsman home, with carefully crafted built-ins like bookcases and breakfast nooks, although she hadn’t seen the inside of his house specifically. Maybe that would change soon, Madison thought. She loved a guy with a great laugh. He was a bit young, which was why she’d never really paid attention to him. But these days a guy ten years younger wasn’t that big a deal. That’s what she would tell herself, anyway.
She went inside her apartment and started going through her tweets to see if she’d missed anything that should go on the whiteboard. She’d mentioned rideshare drivers the most in her tweets. Surely the police had checked that? Couldn’t a rideshare service tell where its drivers had been on a particular day and time? She wrote that down as a lead to follow up on.
About ten minutes later there was a knock at her door.
“That was fast,” she said as she let Ryan in.
“Yeah, I just had to rinse the sand off, you know.” He was about six feet tall and had changed into board shorts and a green surf-competition T-shirt. He had the classic Southern California surfer accent, like Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The surfers in San Diego didn’t have quite that thick of an accent, but Madison was always amused by how close they sounded to that famous surfer played by Sean Penn. The only thing Madison felt he’d gotten wrong: the surfers she knew were laid-back only up to a point. Madison had lived at Windansea long enough to see the rougher side to surfers, which for some reason hadn’t made it into popular culture. When kooks—surfer terminology for someone who couldn’t surf—tried to ride the notoriously difficult surf break at Windansea, they might find themselves confronted in the parking lot on Neptune Place afterward. It wasn’t just territorial, although that was certainly part of it; when you didn’t know what you were doing in dangerous waves, you could get someone else killed. And surfers spent their days paddling out against heavy surf, so they were deceptively strong. The fact that they also spent time doing community service work just made them perfect men to Madison: strong, brave, and kind. Just the thought of it made her swoon.
Ryan was looking out the windows of her apartment. “Damn, you have the view alright!” he said. “I always imagined what it would look like from up here, but this is better than I thought.”
Madison was standing behind him when he said this. Ryan turned around, smiling, still amazed by the view, and then he saw the look on Madison’s face.
It took her a moment to find her voice. “You’ve ‘always imagined’ what it would look like from up here?”
“I just … sorry, I just …” And then he blushed.
“Do you want a beer?” she asked. She walked into the kitchen while she tried to figure out what had just happened. Why was he imagining what her view was like?
“Yeah, a beer, that’s cool,” he said. “I don’t … like … think about being up here or anything. That sounded really weird. It just seemed like there’d be a cool view from here, and there is.” He looked like he wanted to die. It was kind of cute.
“The view was definitely the selling point.” She walked into the room and handed him his beer. She pointed to the wingback chair and indicated that he should sit. She sat in her office chair.