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Pat Frank
Forbidden Area
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338068699
Table of Contents
Chapter One
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FORBIDDEN AREA
Chapter One
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There is no lonelier stretch of beach on the Atlantic than the twenty miles between Ponte Verda and St. Augustine, in northern Florida. A few hundred feet inland Highway A1A parallels the surf, but the coquina road is narrow, pocked, and avoided by wary tourists. It is no scenic drive. High dunes wall the highway from the sea, and where there are no dunes the ocean is curtained by cabbage palms and stunted magnolias fighting for root space in dense palmetto thickets. On a June night in the full of the moon this beach was inhabited only by a boy and a girl lying on a blanket in a white, spoon-shaped hollow between two dunes.
Henry Hazen and Nina Pope, both high school seniors from St. Augustine, had been there before. They called it "our place," and used it for immature love-making, and confidences, and for dreaming. They did not consider their dreams unreasonable. Nina wanted to go to New York and get a job as a secretary, either to some big business executive or a Broadway producer. She would have her own apartment with full-length mirrors, a built-in dressing table, and a stall shower with sliding glass doors. Henry wanted to be a researcher, or anyway an engineer, for some big electronics company. He would like to find this job in Miami, although he would fly to New York to see Nina, weekends. When he became chief of research, or owned his own company, or invented something really big, like radar, she would give up her job and they would get married. They would live in one of those new Miami houses where when you woke up you pressed a button, the bedroom wall opened, and you rolled out of bed into your own private swimming pool. All this might have to wait a few years. She didn't know how to type, as yet, and he had just signed up in the Marines.