Of course, within half an hour of a bemused Fed Ex guy dropping off a pouch with plane tickets in it, Lexi suddenly found herself wishing that she hadn’t agreed to go to Ile du Soleil.  She couldn’t be away from her house, from her projects, from her comfortable cocoon in Arcadia.  Surrounded by Dobie’s world, she’d turn into one of his bimbo girlfriends, lose her mind out on the massive salt flats and forget who she was entirely.  He was going to eat her up and there was nothing she could do about it.

She couldn’t remember having had anxiety attacks before Ren had died.  That bothered her, in the same way that feeling a little squiggle in the steering wheel did:  it wasn’t a big thing of itself, but it was indicative of something damaged deep within.

“What I need,” she told Malice and Teague, who were on the bed with her, “is a soul alignment.  Have you such a machine?”

Malice said, “mau,” and walked across Lexi’s stomach.

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”  Malice was going to travel with her, this time.  Her neighbor Sir William had volunteered to take care of the other five cats, but Malice would be happier near her, she suspected.  The silly black cat would stop eating if she wasn’t around.  “You’ll feel differently after an eighteen-hour plane ride, my pretty,” Lexi told the cat.  She bounced up off of the bed to go to her closet; she hadn’t even packed yet.  Not knowing how long she’d be gone hadn’t helped to keep her from procrastinating.  Probably she could get away with taking only the clothes on her back and a penknife, and Dobie would buy her whatever she needed, but there was something completely abhorrent in being dependent on him like that.  She had a feeling that he expected her to depend on him, and so she would do so as little as possible.  Lexi began flinging her favorite clothes into a pile on the bed, causing the cats to scatter indignantly. 

She’d need fun jewelry, too, or at least antisocial jewelry.  If Dobie expected to ambush her with a posh party full of posh people, she’d be happy to let them know that they were not the same. 

Why am I so defensive? she wondered. 

While she was wondering about that, the phone rang, and she answered it.  “Hello.  Why am I so defensive?” she asked whoever it was. 

“‘Cuz you’re guilty?”  It was Cygnet, who would certainly know if she was guilty or not.  “How’s it going, Lexicon?”

“It’s okay.  I’m just throwing clothes around.  Shouldn’t you be on the radio now?”

“I have Fridays off, ditz.  I stayed home instead of finding a one-night stand, and we’re watching both The Crow movies in a row and having popcorn.  Dee is taking a potty break.”

Dee was Cygnet’s sister; the two women lived together.  “I’m sorry I’m missing that,” Lexi said (even though the rape scene in The Crow made her uncomfortable in a way that few things did).  “I’m packing to go on vacation tomorrow, though.”

“Ooh, vacation?  Where ya going?”

“Ile du Soleil.  I feel strange.  Some part of me feels like I’m discreetly fleeing from the Nazis, and I can’t figure out why.”

“You’re going with Dobie and Victor, I presume.”  Cygnet was cheerfully jealous. 

“Yes, I’m sure you’d go in a minute.”  Lexi sighed with mock exasperation.  “I can’t believe your nerve.  I haven’t even had sex in this house yet.”

“You have no proof.”

“The squeaking bed and giggles left little doubt, Twinkie.  And believe me, hearing Victor giggle is a disturbing thing.”

“Ehh, well, it’s your loss.  You had access to both of ‘em way longer than I did.”

Lexi laughed.  “Okay, you’re right.  I haven’t felt moved to try, I guess.”

“No surprise there.  You ought to, though.  It’s been long enough.”

That set Lexi to wondering.  Was it too soon after Ren had died?  Was sex on the menu if she went to Dobie’s?  She wasn’t sure of the protocol, if there was any protocol.  It had been almost a year after all, but she just wasn’t interested, and it didn’t seem like there should be anything wrong with that. 

“Just remember to make it someone disposable,” Cygnet continued, blithely unaware of the thought-train she’d set in motion.

“Come again?”

“Disposable.  Like an insulin syringe–’use once and destroy.’  Just they way I like ‘em.”  She laughed.  “But seriously.  You lost Ren, the most wonderfullest guy ever.  The first person you’re with after him, you’re going to hate.”

“Am I?”

“You are.  You might not want to.  He might not even be that bad a person, but no matter how much fun you have, you’re going to hate yourself in the morning and you’re going to transfer that onto him.  You’re going to hate his guts and never want to see him again.”

“So, I should want to get laid, why?”

“To get that seal broken.  Get it over with.  Just grab the poolboy and fuck the beejeezus out of him.  And use protection, for God’s sake!  Poolboys are cute, but they can be total plague monkeys.  But seriously, I think…” Cygnet paused, sighed.  “I think it’s an important step in you getting better.  I know I’m being glib and shit, but it’s true, I don’t think you’re going to start living again until this happens.  And it’s going to suck, and I wish I could be there, but I’m not sitting outside the door listening to you squeak, ‘fuck me harder! Harder!’ ever again, not even to provide necessary consolation afterward.  Once was enough.”

Lexi laughed at Cygnet’s made-up memory.  “Someday someone’s going to kick your ass,” she said, quoting the movie Tremors.

Cygnet missed it.  “Promises, promises.  So how long are you going away for?”

“I don’t know, exactly.  A couple of weeks, maybe.  As long as it takes for Dobie to get sick of me and throw me out,” she added with a grin.

“Like that’ll happen.”

“Why does everyone say that?”

“It’s a rich guy thing.  He wants to feel like he could have you, too.  They were all jealous of you and Ren, you know.  He won’t be happy until he knows that he could’ve gotten you, too.”

“But he couldn’t have.”

“Well, I know that, and I’d tell him if he had the guts to call my show.  But he won’t ask.  It’s an ego thing.  He’s got to know that he could have all of the best toys.”

“In other words, the best way to get rid of him would be to sleep with him?”

“Mmmm–probably.  Could be fun, too.  He looks kind of like a young Cary Grant.”

“Ugh, I know.”

“What’s wrong with that?  You could pass for a big-boned Audrey Hepburn.  It’d be downright cute.”

“Okay, the first thing I’m going to have Dobie do is hire someone to come down to Westland and break your legs, if you don’t stop right there.”

“Ooh!  Have him send Victor!” Cygnet squealed, and both of them laughed. 

While Lexi talked, she folded the clothes on the bed, stacked them, added several pairs of shoes (multi-colored Converse All-Stars and her faithful clunky boots) to the pile.  Oh, and a swimsuit would be good, too.  Not the white one, though, it was transparent.  On second thought…no, on third thought, it stayed behind.  “Oh, hell, I need to take music, don’t I?”

“Yeah, there won’t be much bouncy stuff out on the ish-tay-tah,” Cygnet said.  “Unless someone has a precocious teenager, of course.”

“Children with the propensity to become ‘precocious’ are drowned at birth in these families,” Lexi said absently.  “It’s actually legal.”

“Do me a favor and take some Rancid with you.  Please.”

Lexi was already on her way downstairs to the ballroom, where all of the CDs lived.  “Will do.  My suitcase is getting kind of ridiculous, you know.”

“Remember to check your vibrator,” Cygnet advised.  It was an old joke–high school vintage, in fact.  “Don’t put it in your carryon.  Otherwise, customs will want to know what it is.”

“How did I ever travel without you?” Lexi said.  “Anyway, mine doesn’t require a car battery, like some people’s machinery.  Okay, CD shelf, let’s see, we need Boingo, we need HuG, we need KMFDM.”

“You need PWEI,” Cygnet added.  She was mentally creating a soundtrack for Lexi’s trip, and began rattling off music for her friend to take.  It wasn’t hard.  Lexi didn’t even question the suggestions, just grabbed them.

“Okay, two slots left.  Let’s see, I want to take Dear Diary, for sure.”

Dear Diary…This Shit Hurts was the name of Cygnet’s band’s as-yet-unreleased album.  Lexi had a demo copy.  “Aw, such flattery,” she said with false sarcasm.  “I’m getting all squooshy inside.”

“And I want Peepshow.  More Siouxsie.”  Lexi opened the jewel case, but the CD was gone.  That made no sense; she had carefully organized the whole shelf when she’d unboxed everything.  And it was unlikely that Dobie or Eddie had taken it.  “Hey, what gives?” she whined.

“What’s the matter?”

“Peepshow is missing.  I thought it–ohh, you know what?  Ren had it.  In his car.  Guess I won’t be listening to that one this week!”  Lexi uttered a screamy, hysterical laugh and started to cry.

The mood swing took Cygnet completely by surprise.  “Hey,” she said, too far away to do anything else.  “Hey, Lexi, I know, I know,” she said, aware that she really didn’t.  She fell uncomfortably silent.

Lexi moaned and knelt on the floor, feeling it all over again and ready for it to stop.  She bumped her forehead lightly against the ballroom’s hardwood floor.  That felt good, so she did it again.

Cygnet had an idea of what she was doing.  “Stop it, Lexi.  Quit hitting your head.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed.

“Then come down here, so I can do it for you.  I’ll know when to stop.”

“I can’t come down there.  I have to go on vacation.  It’s good for me.”

“Well, shit, I can’t argue with that.  You’re gonna be okay.  Maybe it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you’ll be okay.”

Lexi’s tears were subsiding, on the outside at least.  “I know,” she said, and sniffed.  “It’d be easier to just take a nap until I am, though.”

“Go on vacation, babe.  Stop thinking about shit.  Just be for a while.”

“Didn’t I say that to you once?”

“Yes, after that wedding thing.”  Five years earlier, Cygnet’s fiancee had decided to break it off with her–on their wedding day.  He’d made his point by not showing up for the ceremony.  Lexi had been instrumental in keeping her hot-tempered Texan friend from ending the day with a murder-suicide.  “It’s good advice.  You should take it once in a while.”

“We are all immune to our own advice,” Lexi said.  She sniffled again, and the brief explosion was momentarily subdued.  She’d cry some more after Cygnet was off the phone; it was too awkward this way.  One way or another, she had to have it all out by morning, of course.  She was leaving the country, after all.

Molly went downstairs and made herself a late-evening snack; vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and strawberries.  It was way too much food for this time of night, and she hadn’t worked out all week on account of not being able to go to the gym, and–fuck it, she was having a bad month.  She’d earned a goddamn midnight sundae. 

All the while she kept an eye on the time, though.  It was before ten-thirty, she still had time to call him, if she wanted to.  It was just a matter of deciding if she really, really wanted to.  Maybe she should call Katharine instead, and talk to her about him.  The only trouble with that was, Katharine had already heard plenty about Glen too, almost as much as Lexi had, and since Katharine was already married and so traditional about such things as to be annoying, she was looking at Glen as marriage material and hadn’t even met the guy yet.  Hardly an objective observer, was Katharine.

By the time the ice cream was gone, she decided that she was arguing over nothing, and called him.  She wanted to be his friend, even if nothing beyond that happened, and that was all this was.  A friendly phone call.

He sounded surprised when he answered the phone, like he often did, and Molly wondered (as she had before) if anyone else ever called him.  “Hi, Glen,” she said.  “I just called to say hello.  Can you chat?”

“Oh–sure.”  There was the sound of metal objects being moved around. 

“What’re you doing?”

“Car stuff,” he said.

“In your house?”

“Why not?  It’s too cold to work outside.  Besides, plenty of small parts can be cleaned in the dishwasher.”

Molly was horrified.  “You’re putting car parts in the dishwasher?  Jesus, Glen!”

She could hear him grinning.  “Why not?  It gets the dirt and dust off better than I could.  The only problem is brake dust–it sticks to the walls of the dishwasher, instead of rinsing off.  But everything else comes off great.”

“Remind me never to eat at your house,” she said.

“You can bring your own dishes.  How are things?”

“Good.  It’s winter, it’s freezing, and the tennis courts are closed so I sit home and read.”  The actual reason she couldn’t play tennis didn’t bear mentioning.  “How about you?”

He chuckled.  “About the same.  Not much fun driving old cars in the winter.  I generally stick to the new cars.  Generally.  Have you talked to Lexi about the Road Associates?  Is she happy?”

“She’s excited to pieces about it, silly!  If there’s one thing Lex enjoys, it’s belonging to secret societies.  Especially when she doesn’t have to make them up.  Does everyone like her okay?”

“Well, if I knew someone had a secret they weren’t willing to tell her, I certainly wouldn’t tell it to you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded playfully.

“It’s not hard to see that anything anyone says to one of you goes right to the other.  I’ve seen you two in operation.”

“You have seen exactly nothing.”  Molly held the phone with her shoulder so she could wash the dishes.  “You haven’t even gotten the full tour yet.”

“Oh?  And when do I get that?”

“I don’t know.”  Her voice was full of sudden mirth.  “Do you think you’re ready for what you might see?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Glen said gruffly, playing along with a cowboy accent.  “I reckon as I certainly could.”

“Well, I can’t show you over the phone.  You’ll just have to wait.”

“When will you be in Michigan again?  Hey, that rhymes.”

Had he just asked her that?  She couldn’t believe he’d brought it up.  Maybe there was hope after all.  “I don’t know.  Why?”

“It’s a surprise.”  It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask if she was interested in going to the Chicago Auto Show, but then he realized she probably wasn’t.  Of course, there were many things they could do in Chicago together.  He knew the city pretty well, and whether she did or not, it would be fun to show her the little quiet corners he’d found.  Then again, it was a bit presumptuous to assume she’d want to go off alone with him.  She flirted with him a lot, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything, despite what Molly (and Lexi) had said.  He could be wrong.  They could both be wrong.  Glen’s doubts raced around in a little spiral, and he ended up leaving it at that.

“So when are you publishing the article about Lexi?” Molly asked Glen after he got monosyllabic; she wasn’t sure what had gotten to him, but changed the subject since that was obviously what he wanted.  Overriding the temptation to push him on whatever mystery thing bothered him was surprisingly easy.

Glen was more comfortable with this direction.  “I don’t know exactly.  You know it’s never a story of absolutes.”

“I haven’t done much magazine work, actually.  I assumed it was more or less the same as doing a newspaper freelance piece.”

“Not really.  The lead times are longer.  You also get bumped a lot more frequently.  I haven’t really even finished this piece yet, and when it is, it’s possible that they’ll kick it around for a year before they run it.”  He sighed.  “I’ve really been dragging my feet, to be honest.  I should’ve finished it and gotten it out there right after she blew up the Crane-Packard in New York.  The collective media eye was on her for a day or two there, and that would’ve been striking when the proverbial iron was hot.”

“Why didn’t you finish it?”

“I don’t know.  It just didn’t feel done.”

“I know what that’s like.”  Her sarcasm went unnoticed, or unremarked-upon anyway.

“Maybe if I knew more about Ren.  I considered talking to some people who knew him, and getting their impressions of Lexi.”

“You can talk to me,” Molly offered, half-joking.  “I knew him.  And I’ve got plenty of impressions of Lexi.  You should see my impression of her in a toy store.”

Glen chuckled.  “Okay, then,” he said.  He wanted to keep talking to Molly, but was afraid she’d veer into some other subject he didn’t feel comfortable discussing and then he’d have to snub her yet again.  He was acutely aware that if he refused to chat with her enough times, she’d eventually lose interest in talking to him.  And she was obsessed with things, it seemed, that just weren’t “safe” subjects.  It was like she had a sixth sense for the soft spots and the secret places.  Talking about Lexi and Ren was safe ground though, he figured.  That way he could just sit and listen to her voice whose slightly nasal tone (very different from Jewel’s near-whisper) was starting to grow on him.  “I already know what you think of Lexi, but can you tell me about how she and Ren were together?  You’ve known her since you were kids.  Did he change her at all, when they met?”

“He rebuilt her,” Molly said.  “I guess that sounds bad, but it really wasn’t.  He was like a catalyst for her.  And I’ve heard people say that she did the same for him.  Before they met, Lexi was…she wasn’t mousy, exactly, but she wasn’t all there, either.  She had a very active internal life, and she went about her business quietly, if you can believe that.”

“I’m trying.”

“I mean…shit, what do I mean?”  Molly was at an uncharacteristic loss for words.  She closed her eyes, shutting off her view of the kitchen, and just talked.  “She had some of the same energy–and the same messed-up sense of style–that she does now, but it was measured out differently.  Lexi was the sort of person, back then, who would move heaven and earth for her friends but wouldn’t lift a finger to save herself.  She was willing to get into fights for her friends, would drive a thousand miles to help you move, or because you were crying over some jerk who dumped you, but she stuck with the abusive bastard she dated before Ren for almost three years, knowing he was a piece of monkeyshit the whole time.  She would just shrug like it was her lot in life to be stuck with Darron, and she’d make do with what little bits of happiness she could find.

“When she met Ren, she changed.  He unlocked her sense of self-worth, or something.  No, he did more than that.  I don’t know what he did.  Oh, hell, you really had to see them together.  It was almost frightening.  You’re familiar with the concept of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in theater and movies, right?”

Glen nodded.  He caught himself doing that on the phone with Molly a lot; he’d start picturing the way she talked with her hands, and responded accordingly, forgetting that she couldn’t actually see him.  “That’s when a character steps forward and addresses the audience, right?”

“Exactly.  You don’t see it a lot these days, except in comedy, but it’s been done in drama, too.  The characters who did it gave you a sense of being more powerful than the others, usually.  Even in funny movies, when it happens now, if a character suddenly turns to the camera and winks, they’ve got this otherworldliness about them for a moment.  Like they alone can see the cameras or the audience.  Like they’re in on the great cosmic joke of existence.  Have I lost you yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Lexi and Ren together were like that, but for real.  If they were characters in a play, I could see both of them, at the same time and with no apparent cue, turning to the audience and just making faces at them.  When you were around them, you could tell that they weren’t just in on the cosmic joke, they were making up new ones of their own.”

“Did Lexi stop helping others to help herself?”

“No.  She just realized–finally!–that she could use her energy for herself as well as for everyone else.  It’s not like she’s short of energy.  I think Ren taught her that, on some subconscious level.  They had their own language, I can barely tell you how they communicated.  It was usually verbal, but it wasn’t always.”

“I’ve heard that they finished each other’s sentences.”

“I think I told you that.  Yes, it’s true, and it was very irritating.  But cute, at the same time.”

“Were you jealous?”

“Hm?”  Molly was surprised.  Not only did the line of questioning change suddenly, but the tone of Glen’s voice did also.  She wasn’t sure he was aware of it, but he’d spoken more softly.  Either he’d heard jealousy in her voice, or he was jealous of Lexi and Ren himself.  “Plenty of people were,” she said.  “But I wasn’t one of them.  If a guy knew me that well, I think I’d be afraid of him.”

“Really?  Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess I’m a control freak.  Since things didn’t work out with Rich, I just…I need a guy I don’t feel like I have to compete with, to out-perform financially or professionally or whatever, and if I was with someone who could read my mind, I’d feel like I was at a disadvantage.  I think I’d go out of my way to trick him and hide things from him.”

“You’d be that self-destructive?”

“I think I might.  My demure demeanor hides the soul of an utter and complete bitch.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Glen said.  “I think that men who are afraid of strong women write them off as ‘bitches,’ because they don’t want to admit to being weaker.”

Molly laughed.  “Keep talking like that and you’ll make me want to get my hooks in you,” she said, deciding to risk being forward.

He seemed to take it as flirting, and didn’t back down.  “That could be fun,” was his reply.  “Do you fish for supper, or do you catch-and-release?”

“Depends on if you’re over the legal size limit, of course,” she responded quickly.

“I hate to fly,” Lexi told the driver who picked her up at the airport.  “It was a good flight, as far as flights go, but only the takeoff and landing are entertaining, to be honest.  The more time in between those two events, the less enjoyable the flight is.”

The driver didn’t have any response; he just steered the big Bentley through traffic.

She settled back in the seat.  “Of course it’s a necessary evil, flying.  It’s not like I could drive across the ocean, after all.  Sometimes the only way to get to someplace interesting is to fly.  Until they get around to building land bridges to connect the continents, that is.”

The driver merely nodded, clearly uninterested in conversation.

“Dobie likes his Bentleys, doesn’t he?” she tried.

“I wouldn’t know,” the driver said.  He didn’t even glance in the rearview mirror.

“Welcome to Ile du Soleil,” she muttered, sitting back in the seat and folding her arms.  With a stoneface like that, what was the point of getting a haircut and dressing up all cool?  She elected not to talk to him the rest of the drive.

Dobie lived on a huge chunk of land that had more trees and lawn on it than the spare salt desert surrounding it suggested there should be, with a single private road.  Instead of a gate, the drive was blocked by an array of ten stout pillars which rose four feet out of the driveway itself.  Each was embossed with what Lexi assumed was the Cassarell family crest.  She couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be, except for the rabbits.  Lexi forgot all about the rude driver, watching the landscaping slide past.  It was attractive, in a slightly artificial way, and there was certainly a lot of it.  Dobie seemed to have a modicum of taste, too–she’d been chary of seeing alabaster mermaid fountains, or something like that, but at worst Dobie’s estate looked like a golf course.

Eventually the house swerved into view.  “House” was a term used loosely, of course.  What did you call a house the size of a Best Western?  She considered saying that out loud, but couldn’t think of anything suitably funny to follow up with.  It would’ve been wasted on the driver anyway.  She found herself looking forward to seeing Dobie, but wasn’t sure if it was because she missed him, or because she was in the mood to see a familiar face.

The house captured her attention until the driver opened the trunk to get her suitcase–a duffle bag she’d actually picked up on the way to the airport.  She didn’t want him to carry it, so she pulled it out herself.  The oversized front doors were already open as she approached, and a man in a tuxedo stood on either side, one with a neat mustache and one without.  “Hi!” she said cheerfully to them.  The one without the mustache smiled back, but neither of them replied.  “Okay, someone had better talk to me,” Lexi said.  “I checked in the guide; people speak English in Ile du Soleil.”

“Of course we do,” Victor said.  He stepped out of the doorway, emerging from shadow into sudden sunlight without warning.

She jumped back, startled.  “Gah!  Don’t do that!”

“Welcome to Ile du Soleil.”

“Oh, don’t act like you mean it.  I’ve been on a plane for a day and a half, and they’ve quarantined my cat.  Where’s your boss?”

“He was called away on business,” Victor said, “and sends his apologies.  Come in and make yourself at home.” He stepped aside and bowed slightly.

“It’s good to see you too,” she said, meaning it.  “Where am I sleeping?”

“Are you tired?”

“I feel like I could suddenly become tired.  Jet lag does funny things to me.”

Victor nodded.  “Understood.” 

The foyer was airy yet cozy, with a skylighted ceiling that went all the way to the third floor and a staircase that wrapped along the house’s front wall, and everything was pristine enough that if someone had told her Dobie had built the entire house specifically for her arrival, she might have believed them.  The smooth hardwood floors would be a delight to skate on in stocking feet.  The house radiated out in spoke-like wings from the tremendous entry hall slash great room, with an arm going straight back to an equally massive and polished-wood dining room.  Beyond that was an outdoor dining area and a backyard that was no doubt the size of Vermont. 

It was the kind of place Lexi imagined Dobie greeting prospective business partners in.  First impressions were everything, of course, and who wouldn’t be impressed by the sheer, apparently seamless wood paneling that went partway up the walls and matched the floor and sort of flowed into a curved staircase that went around behind the door and up over her head to a landing and…”Um, what is that thing?” she asked, pointing up with her free hand.

Victor barely glanced.  “Aerial sculpture.  By Jessica Keizer.”

Lexi tilted her head back to get a better look at the massive yet delicate pieces of lacquered wood that rotated slowly, constantly changing the sculpture’s silhouette.  “Neato mosquito,” she said.  She had no idea who Jessica Keizer was, but it was pretty.

“Indeed.  If you’ll come this way, we can get you settled in.” 

“So which room is mine?  Can it be one with a refrigerator?  I like to snack at night, and I have a feeling it’ll be a long walk to the kitchen.”

Victor smiled tightly.  “They all have refrigerators,” he said, and led the way.  She followed, and dropped her bags in a predictably dark green, wood and leather room.  Lexi did a quick circuit of it.  “And the man of the house really isn’t here to give me a tour?” she asked.

“I’m sure he will, when he gets back,” Victor said.

“That’s too long to wait; I’ll do it myself.”

“Suit yourself.” 

Victor followed her, while she explored.  None of the rooms said, “Dobie.”  In fact, the house didn’t really either.  It felt more like a tremendously nice meeting facility than a home.  Opening doors, she quickly found two bathrooms that were larger than her master bedroom, a library as big as some public libraries and the indoor pool, but very little that looked like personal effects.

She hadn’t gotten halfway through the house, but Victor’s shadowing her was getting annoying, so she started running.  When she ran, he kept pace, which just made her run faster.  She changed directions without really paying attention to where she was going, and suddenly found herself in a restaurant-grade kitchen, all white tile and silver appliances and pots hanging from the ceiling.  There were two women in white chef’s outfits who seemed surprised when she burst in.  “Hello!” Lexi said on her way into the walk-in freezer.  “Do you have a Klondike bar?”  Slam.

Victor caught up a moment later.  She looked out at him through the window in the door, smiled, and stuck her tongue out at him.

Victor’s expression didn’t change, but he seemed to be smiling when he shot the bolt and locked her in.

Lexi wasn’t able to keep the expression of surprise and dismay off of her face, and she immediately looked for another way out.  There wasn’t one, but he let her out almost immediately, having gotten the satisfaction of scaring her a bit, and she stalked back into the kitchen without looking at him.

Ten minutes later she couldn’t remember where the kitchen was.  She went back and looked for it, but the doorway seemed to have disappeared, which made no sense whatsoever.

When Lexi gave up on looking for the kitchen, she discovered that Victor had disappeared as well.  In fact, it took her almost half an hour to find her room again.  During that time she didn’t see or hear any other human beings.  “Like a rat in a maze,” she said to herself, skimming her fingers over the railing of the balcony overlooking the entryway.  “Like a princess in a tower.”

The princess-in-a-tower sensation kicked into high gear the second afternoon, after she’d gotten a full night’s sleep and the airline had delivered Malice to the house.  By then Lexi had explored enough of the place to get a feel for it (she counted at least seventeen bedrooms, and there was an entire wing she couldn’t get into), had walked the grounds, splashed in the pool, taken a nap on a gazebo-dotted, tree-lined polyhedron of grass that was as manicured as a putting green, and had tried and failed to find both the kitchen and the garage.  She had found a greenhouse, a racquetball court, an indoor gym complete with sauna and spa, a helicopter pad and a fifty-seat movie theater.  Late in the afternoon she finally found the door to the garage as well, but it was locked.  To protest this, she’d found a decent sound system and played a variety of noisy, anti-social music at ear-bleeding volumes (in part to make good on Cygnet’s request), but if it bothered any of the staff, they didn’t complain.

Victor didn’t put in an appearance either.  One of the housekeeping staff, a cheerful, doughy woman named Maya, explained that he had joined Dobie, wherever both of them had gotten off to.  As it turned out, Maya was responsible for making sure Lexi had what she wanted, but when she asked for car keys and a local map, the answer was, “Oh, no, no.  Mr. Cassarell will escort you into town when he returns.”

“When will that be?” Lexi asked.

“I think he will be back tomorrow.  Perhaps the next day.”

“He told you guys to keep me here as revenge for my leaving him at my house, didn’t he?”

Maya blushed.  “I don’t know anything about that, Miss Crane,” she said.

“Oh, God, please call me Lexi.  Or, if you can do a good Sean Connery, call me Moneypenny.”

“I will try to remember, Miss Lexi.”

“That’s a good compromise, I guess.  So are you sure I can’t leave?  There’s nothing close enough to walk to.”

“Why would you want to walk somewhere?”

“I don’t know.  I might want a bottle of orange Crush or a hot dog or something to read, and I like having options.”

“I’ll have the kitchen staff prepare you an orange soda and an American-style hot dog,” Maya offered instantly.

Lexi shook her head.  “That’s not the point,” she said, but it was too late; Maya was off.  Lexi started to call her back, then decided that a hot dog wouldn’t be a terrible thing after all, and followed.

Tailing Maya did tell her where the kitchen was, and explained why she hadn’t found it before; it was a part of a completely separate network of hallways in the house.  Some of them ran parallel to the main halls, but with sparser décor, and tile floors instead of wood or marble or carpet.

“Oh, shit, it’s just like Biltmore,” Lexi said.  “You’ve got servants’ hallways.”

Maya nodded.  “It makes it easier to get through the house when Mr. Cassarell has guests.  If you’d prefer, I can meet you in the second-floor dining room…”

“Don’t be insane.  I like servants’ hallways.  I’m no better than you, and I’m not going to act like I am.  And you’re making me act like a cliché, so stop it.”

“Yes, Miss Lexi,” she replied.

Another day passed, and Dobie and Victor were still no-shows.  Lexi changed rooms, moving from the traditional wood-and-leather bedroom she’d started out in to a funny white and orange room on the third floor that was inexplicably decorated straight out of the mod sixties, complete with a round bed on a raised dais and two of those egg chairs.   The walls and carpet were creamy white, so the bed looked like a Tylenol floating in a bowl of milk.  The furniture was pushed up against the walls, and mostly in shades of orange.  There were two paintings on the walls, heavy on warm colors of course.  An orange-on-orange swirl had been painted on the ceiling as well.  It was tacky, but in a slightly endearing way, and she wondered if the design was Dobie’s idea, or someone else’s.  She was betting that it was someone else’s.  She also had a side bet going with herself that he’d never even seen this room.

The attached bathroom was decorated in an eye-searing shade of blue, and featured a round floor-level bathtub big enough for four.  How the hell did you isntall a sunken bathtub on the third frigging floor? Lexi had asked Maya, who had endeavored to find out until being told that it was a rhetorical question.  She had decided it was her favorite room in the house.  Malice approved, too, and the black cat looked good curled up in the middle of the white disc of the bed. 

On her fourth day at Dobie’s house, Lexi got up to watch the sun rise, then went back to bed and slept late.  After breakfast she found that her suitcase had been brought in and installed next to the dresser; it was empty, and all of her clothes had been put into the drawers. 

She spent the day swimming and practicing her archery, moving every twenty minutes to avoid the sprinklers that kept the grass and elaborate landscaping alive in the arid climate.  That evening, she commandeered the theater (not difficult, since she was the only person in the gigantic house who wasn’t working there) and watched The Hudsucker Proxy.  She got Maya and several of the staff to watch with her, and they seemed to enjoy the movie. 

It felt strange to be doing nothing.  For the past four years she and Ren had been perpetually active on one project or another, always moving, always scheming, and then after he’d died she had fallen off the edge of the world, into a nowhere-place.  Since getting herself back, Lexi had been wrapped up in projects–first Ren’s car, then getting the house taken care of, then dealing with the Road Associates–and that stuff had distracted her, kept her moving.

Now there was no motion, and no need to move.  It was a pleasant feeling, but at the same time it made her twitchy.  It was getting harder to keep herself from feeling like a bird in a gilded cage.  She tried to enjoy it, but couldn’t sit still for more than an hour or two at a stretch without becoming terminally restless.  Maya showed her the library; although Dobie had a book room as big as some community libraries, she couldn’t find a damned thing to read.  When Maya asked casually what kinds of books she was interested in, Lexi didn’t want to tell her.  The notion of having the right books magically appear didn’t feel right.  This was Dobie’s library, and there was nothing that interested her in it; this didn’t mean that it had to change.

Besides, Lexi wanted to pick her own books.  That was half of the fun.

Molly sat in front of her computer, utterly useless.  An open document sat in front of her, with a story waiting to be finished, and she couldn’t do it.  The damn thing was even outlined.  All she had to do was turn it all into sentences.  This had happened before.  All she had to do was put her fingers on the keyboard, and the rest would do itself.  It was so easy, and yet at random times it turned into a struggle. 

She put her elbows on the desk, tented her fingers, and looked out the window.  So much for the home office thing being more productive.  So much for the inspirational power of her antique cherry-wood desk, Art Deco filigrees, anachronistic computer on top and all.  Deadline, she reminded herself with a glance at her watch.  Two and a half hours from now. 

Come on, dammit.  Just one sentence.

Nothing doing this morning, though.  She pushed her chair back with a sigh and stood up, glaring at the computer as if it were somehow the PowerMac’s fault that she couldn’t get the writing machine in her head fired up.

The last thing she needed was to blow a deadline.  Dobie had found the opportunity of a lifetime for her–made it happen, in all probability–and she wasn’t going to give anyone a reason to take it away.

Wandering downstairs, she paused on the steps to admire the sun in her living room.  The house was a new-ish build, with a second-floor ceiling in the foyer slash great room, and windows all the way up.  She had a southeast view, so during the late morning and early afternoon the sun streamed in, nicely filtered by the curtains.  The three-bedroom house was larger than she needed for just herself, but she wasn’t ready to give it up yet.  Somehow the broken dreams it represented–growing old with Rich, the inevitable pitter-patter of little feet–didn’t bother her most days.  It was home, and that was that.  Two bedrooms upstairs, one downstairs, the extra upstairs room converted into an office.  Big bathroom, chintzy tub, three-car garage to house the antique car Rich was going to have some day.  Molly used the extra space to store the orange Ford Fairmont wagon she’d had since high school.  She had assumed her parents had sold the thing while she was away at college, and had been surprised to see it still sitting in the driveway when she graduated.  Of course, she didn’t want it, but the rusty old thing was endearing somehow, and she had the space for it now so what was the harm?

There were a lot of things like that in Molly’s house.  The carefully selected and matched antiques contrasted with score of things she’d had for so long she couldn’t bear to part with them.  Most were kept in the downstairs bedroom, whose door was generally kept closed.  It was less embarrassing that way.

The tax auditor–Annabella, her name had been, a surprisingly pretty name for such a nebbishy little lady–had left two days before, after finding nothing amiss in the records.  Molly had invited Annabella out for a night on the town some time, a raucous girls’ night out at the bars perhaps, and Annabella had blushed and agreed.

There had been plenty of time since to think about the weird coincidence of herself and Ian being audited at almost the same time.  Her paranoia wasn’t quite in full swing yet, but it was difficult to believe that it was a cosmic accident.  In fact, she could draw the lines pretty easily:  Becka Packard saw her, Lexi, and Ian as the primaries in the family’s recent humiliation.  And Lexi’s assets were all tied up with Ian’s–plus she hadn’t earned any money in the past year–so there was no point in siccing the IRS on her.  Molly worried that Glen might take some of the heat, but he hadn’t been directly involved and Becka didn’t know about him, apparently.  If he’d had trouble, he hadn’t mentioned it during any of their phone calls, at least.

She continued down the steps into the living room, and dropped onto the couch with a sigh.  It was a big leather sectional, chosen out of a catalog by Rich.  She hadn’t liked the looks of it at first, but it was comfy enough to have grown on her, and most guests seemed to be impressed by it.  Of course, they didn’t have to keep the damn biscuit-colored leather clean, either, but there were worse fates in life.

“Finish your story,” she told herself loudly, looking at the ceiling.  Deep inside herself, she felt the equivalent of a child’s mocking laugh and a slamming door in response.  Oh, well.  One of the nice things about living alone was that she could talk to herself.

She was struck by a sudden epiphany.  Becka had made much of Molly’s Italian heritage when they’d met briefly, in New York.  Could the audit have happened because the woman was so narrowminded she thought that Molly just had to have Mafia ties, somewhere?

“No,” Molly said, disbelieving and yet realizing that the chances were good that was the case.  She stood up and headed toward the kitchen with half an idea to call someone and tell them about it.  When she got there she remembered that Lexi was in Ile du Soleil.  Katharine wouldn’t be home this time of day, and she didn’t feel like calling Mom, who was freaked out enough about her life without bringing newfound rich and powerful enemies into it.

In the kitchen Molly noticed that the mystery smear on the stove was back, though, and that took the phone off of her mind.  Right smack in the middle of the stovetop there was a greasy smudge that always seemed to come back, no matter what she scrubbed it away with.  She was sure she wasn’t leaving spoons there (there was a spoon rest for that) and there wasn’t anyplace above that it could have come from.  And yet, here it was again, in spite of a (highly not recommended by the owner’s manual) recent Comet scrubdown. 

Molly ran her finger through the smear, testing its consistency, of which there was none.  She looked closely at it, sneering as if she could make it go away by force of will.  No, it really was a smudge, not a flaw in the paint, and it really had come back of its own accord.  She was going to have to call Mom about this some time.  For now, though, a shot of Formula 409 made it go away.  It would be back tomorrow.

As she was putting the cleaning stuff away, Molly felt the chill.  She looked toward its source, a short hallway that connected to the garage and also to the backyard.  The outside door was open a crack.

Her heart rate soared immediately.  She had been downstairs to make breakfast before sitting down to (fruitlessly) write this morning, and she’d have remembered leaving the door open all night.  Besides which, the alarm would have shrieked about it long ago.  For that matter, it should have chirped when the door opened.

She thought first of her gun.  Her father had insisted she buy it; it was a .32, in a locked box upstairs, in the closet, and unloaded.  She hadn’t fired it since her father had taken her to the range and taught her how to care for the horrible little thing.  Useless.

Molly picked up the cordless phone, turned it on (thank God, it was working), and dialed 9 and 1.  Then she approached the door, slowly.  The little hallway between kitchen and garage held no hiding spaces for anything larger than a dog, and it was empty.  The door leading to the garage was also closed.

She pushed the back door shut quickly, glancing outside as she locked the deadbolt.  She didn’t see any footprints in the snow, but it was patchy, the last fall having been a week ago and warm-ish temperatures since then giving the grass space to poke through.

She looked at the wall panel next to the door.  The open-door chirp was turned off.  Maybe she’d left it off.  Molly reset it.  She thought of the gun again, but even if she ran up there, dragged it out, and loaded it, any sixteen year-old crackhead would certainly be able to wrestle it away from her before she could get a shot off.

Her decision already made, Molly picked up her car keys and went straight for the front door.  She didn’t stop to grab her coat or purse, and she took the phone with her.  On her way to the neighbors’ house, she dialed that last 1.

The police were calm and understanding, and told her she’d done the right thing, which was music to the ears of Molly’s inner Girl Scout.  Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but feel sheepish when a pair of cops showed up, searched her house carefully, and found no hidden crackheads.  They were sympathetic and glad she’d called them of course, but Molly read a “stupid-scared-female” vibe from both of them.  Or maybe it was all in her head. 

Before they left, the phone rang.  It was Dobie.  “Good evening.  I haven’t called at a bad time, have I?”

“The opposite, in fact,” Molly said.  She explained the phantom break-in.  “I’m still feeling skittish; if you hadn’t called, I probably would have gone to my friend Katharine’s just so I don’t have to be in the house alone.”

“Well, I’m glad to be a serendipitous source of confidence,” he said.

“It’s nice to have billionaires calling out of the blue.  What can I do for you?”

“Just a quick question of strategy, I suppose.”  Molly could hear seagulls in the background; Dobie was calling from outdoors somewhere.  “While Lexi was on her way to my house, I got called away.  I’ve been down in Hamilton since she arrived three days ago.  I’m hoping to be back tomorrow, but I’m sure she’ll be a bit sore, and I was hoping you might have a suggestion as to an effective peace offering and apology.”

Molly laughed.  “Oh, that’s priceless,” she said.  It served Lexi right, for abandoning Dobie at her house without telling anyone where she was going.  She didn’t say this.  “Well, the best way to appease an enraged Lex is to just take her for a drive.  She’ll act like she doesn’t want to go, but she will, especially if it’s a cool car.  I don’t know cars well enough to say what she’d like.  Something Italian, maybe,” she added.  “Lex likes Italian cars, I think.  Except for Ferraris, she’s weird about them.  Just listen to her.  She’s pretty good about saying what she wants, generally.”

“Except that she speaks her own language,” Dobie replied.

“This is true.  And the only reliable translator was Ren.  It’s an incredibly sad thing when a couple’s secret language becomes a dead language, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Dobie said, sounding distracted and distant.  “I know a good seafood restaurant, down in Marjori.  Do you think she’ll appreciate that?”

“Lexi likes just about any kind of fish,” Molly said.  “And if it’s anything like that secret club you took me to, she’ll love it.  I’m jealous.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.  When I’m back in the States, we’ll have to go again.  My treat.  What do you think?”

“‘Tis a date,” Molly said.  The phantom burglar was forgotten, and she could feel her muse’s logjam beginning to break up.

After an early dinner (or was it a late lunch?), Dobie and Victor still hadn’t shown, so Lexi cajoled Maya into letting her into the garage.  Dobie had called her there to check out the cars, after all.  Might as well go and have a look.

Any lingering irritation Lexi felt over being abandoned in the house evaporated when the doors opened and she saw dozens of dust cloth-covered automobiles, a sea of them.  The garage looked just like any hotel’s parking garage, an expanse of column-studded concrete that ran the length of the house, and there were cars from wall to wall. 

“Hel-LO, nurse,” she said, a grin spreading across her face.

Lexi spent the next half hour pulling back car covers.  At first she was just curious; then it became a game to see if she could guess what was underneath the cover before it was revealed.  She got about eighty percent of them right, but that was only because Dobie had some surprisingly uncommon cars.  The assortment of Aston Martins, Ferraris and Jaguars new and old was to be expected, but he also had some considerably less common iron:  two OSCAs, a Scarab and a ’37 Buick convertible sedan, to name a few.  Classic race cars were mixed with newer luxury models and some cars that were notable only because they were rare.  It wasn’t hard to imagine Dobie scanning the auction and exotic car sales lists and picking everything that other people told him was desirable.  There was very little evidence of Dobie’s personality in the cars he had, other than the fact that all of them were immaculately kept.

She had uncovered less than half of the cars in the garage, before the main door began to rumble slowly open.  She expected it would be Dobie, come to preen in front of his cars and probably unaware that they were a lot more interesting than he was.  Lexi wondered if he’d let her drive all of them.  Noting the dust on the floor near the contact patches of many of their tires, piled up where a floor waxer couldn’t get at it, a lot of these cars rarely turned a wheel.  It was her duty to make Dobie exercise as many as possible while she was here, and she turned, prepared to tell him so.

The man in the garage door wasn’t Dobie, though.  He was way too big.  There was enough of him to make two or three Dobies, in fact, with a good-sized Thanksgiving turkey left over.  Lexi was looking at six feet, six inches of barrel-chested Russian.  He couldn’t possibly be anything else, with his bushy black mustache and beetled brows, and Lexi said, “Hi there!  Please, please tell me your name isn’t Dmitri.”

“No, ma’am,” he rumbled.  His voice was an octave or so lower than a 747 leaving the runway, and he had a thick Russian accent to go with it.  Lexi curled her toes in delight as it played up and down her spine.  “My name is Joseph.”

“I’m Lexi,” she chirped.

“I know, ma’am.”  He looked down at her.  His eyes looked black from where she was, but probably she just couldn’t see them.  “I take care of the cars.”

She could tell by the pride in his voice that he did more than just wash and wax them.  “Good.  I wanted to make sure they were in good hands,” she said, grinning.  “Is it okay if I keep looking?”

Joseph angled his head in a nod.  “If you would like to see the workshop, I would be happy to show it to you as well.”

“Cool!  Do you do all of the mechanical work in-house?”

“Mr. Cassarell sends some work out to be done by specialists,” he said.  “But not much.  I am expert in most Italian and German marques, and they are the most difficult.”

“Who fixes your French cars?” she asked with a smirk, thinking of painfully, notoriously complex classic Citroens. 

“Mr. Cassarell has only the Bugattis and the Talbot.  No other French cars.”

“You can work on a Bugatti?  You are a greater mechanic than I.  Which Bug does he have?”

Joseph seemed to bristle slightly at Lexi’s nickname for the legendary French nameplate, but he led the way to a pair of still-shrouded cars.  Lexi uncovered the Bugattis with a purr of excitement.  They were both blue, a Type 43 and a Type 51.  One was a roadgoing car, the other stripped down for racing, but they shared distinctive horsecollar grilles and big, eight-spoked wheels.

“How often does he drive them?” Lexi asked.

“The Bugattis are not driven, except to warm them.”

“That’s a massive, pulsating shame.  What’s next to them?” she asked, folding back the cover on the next car, which had a Thirties-racer silhouette also.

“That is the Talbot.”

Lexi slipped the cover carefully from the powder blue race car.  It was definitely a prewar Grand Prix car, with massive wire wheels and a single-seat cockpit.  Lexi liked it much better than its more famous cousin, the teardrop shaped Talbot-Lago, which she found kind of ugly.  This Talbot was much more purposeful, and much more honest.  Two big headlights were mounted right at the bottom of the grille, and faired into the front body.  The fenders were teardrop shaped, too, another attempt at rudimentary aerodynamics.  A token windshield was there to think about keeping debris out of the driver’s face.  Lexi ran her hands along the big black exhaust pipe that ran right under the driver’s door.  “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one of these, Joseph.”

“It is a nineteen thirty-seven model T-150C.  It was the works car, and it won the French Grand Prix and Tourist Trophy that year.”

She was already behind the wheel, hands on the massive steering wheel.  It was as large as a city bus’ wheel, to enable the driver to turn the massive, unassisted steering rack.  “I want to drive it,” she said.  She was going to drive it, even if she had to defeat Joseph in physical combat to do so.

“Mr. Cassarell does not drive this car either.”

“Maybe he doesn’t, but I do.  And I know it’s driveable, if you’re taking care of it.”

Joseph puffed himself up a little.  “Of course it is.  This car is in original condition.”

“Well, then, so am I, so there’s no problem, is there?”  Lexi wasn’t positive she could drive the thing; the only prewar racer she’d driven was a tiny two-liter Sunbeam, and that had been somewhat hairy.

The big Russian folded his arms with one hand under his chin, clearly conflicted.  “You are sure?  These cars can be very difficult to drive, especially for a woman.”

“Don’t be silly, women used to race 6.5 liter Bentleys,” she snapped.  “And I’m way tougher than any of them ever were.”  She had one more button to push.  “Besides which, what kind of damage could I do to it that you couldn’t fix?”  Lexi bounced in the Talbot’s driver’s seat and gave him her best sunshine smile.

Joseph frowned again, and rumbled in contemplation of the eager American girl who had invaded his garage.

She let it go for the moment, resolving to stay at Dobie’s house for at least as long as it took to get a drive in the Talbot.  “Oh, okay, I won’t drive it.  I have too many places to go; there’s a whole country to see and I haven’t seen much of it yet.  I’m going to leave insanely early tomorrow morning, in fact.  So what can I drive?”

“What do you want to drive?”

Lexi considered.  “Something with a long hood.”  She scanned the rows of cars she’d uncovered, and her eye fell up on a black 1961 Cadillac sedan with a blue leather interior.  Or should she take something that would annoy Dobie more?  The Caddy seemed to smile at her, though; it wanted to go out for a drive.

Molly awoke some time well after midnight, to the faint thump of an object hitting a wall.  The noise startled her awake, and she wasn’t sure it had really happened until it was repeated a moment later.  After the third thump, she realized that something was hitting her house, from the outside.

Such a thing bore investigation, since it was too cold for teenagers to be throwing rolls of toilet paper, and she’d done nothing to earn a TP’ing besides.  She rolled out of bed, put a robe on, and peeked through the blinds covering her bedroom window.

“I can see you in there!” a voice screamed from outside, and something slammed into the house right next to the window.  Molly flinched back instinctively, then looked again to see that there was a woman in her front yard throwing shoes at her second-floor bedroom window.  The yard seemed to be littered with shoes, and there was a large box with more next to the crazed thrower.  She had short blond hair brushed up in a spiky cut, and Molly had never seen her before.  “Come out here, whore!”

Molly turned on a light, then opened the window, mindful that a well-aimed shoe could probably come through the screen.  “I’m sorry,” she called down.  “Do I know you?”

“Don’t play that game with me!” the woman screamed.  “I found your little love nest, and all of your goddamn shoes!”  She threw another shoe, which flew well wide of its target and bounced off of the roof. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bitch!  I know about you and Michael!”

“Who the hell is Michael?” Molly asked, questioning herself as much as the woman in her yard, whose answer was an enraged growl and another fusillade of shoes.  “Listen, I hate to tell you this, but I think you’ve got the wrong house.  I’m not even dating right now, let alone stealing your man.  I don’t know anybody named Michael.”

“Liar!”  The woman scored a direct hit on Molly’s screen with a cowboy boot, and she had to duck as the mesh tore and the garish green and yellow boot sailed into the bedroom. 

“Goddammit!  Look what you did!  Will you listen to me?  You’ve got the wrong house!”  The only response she got to this was a wordless cry of rage as the woman in her yard ran back to a car parked on the street.  She kept up a steady stream of shouted invective the entire time; Molly saw that lights across the street and next door were coming on as the neighbors woke up.  Wonderful.

“I’m going to teach you!” the crazy lady yelled again.  She ran back into the shoe-strewn front yard, carrying a small cylindrical object.  For a moment Molly thought it was a gun, but then the woman struck a match and lit the fuse, holding the object out at arm’s length.

“Jesus wept,” Molly said under her breath as a brilliant red ball of sparks seemed to leap out of the woman’s hand and raced toward the house.  It struck the wall right next to the window and exploded in a blaze of light.  The woman was shooting a Roman candle at the house.  “Jesus!” Molly cried again as the next flare hit even closer to the open window, and she slammed the glass down lest the next one end up in her bedroom.  That would be just perfect, if this crazy lady set her house on fire.  From there, Molly ran to the phone and called the police.  She struggled to keep her voice calm, hearing the soft thuds of fireworks bouncing off of her house, and the dispatcher said she’d send a car right over and advised Molly not to go outside and confront the woman.  “Oh, you think?” she shot back.

Having called for help, Molly closed the blinds and went into her guest bedroom to wait.  The end of the episode was almost anticlimactic, with the woman being taken away in a squad car and Molly’s house relatively unscathed, other than some smudges of soot.  The shoes stayed in the front yard.  Molly’s pride, on the other hand, was seriously shaky by the time the police left.  Not only had they been called to her house for the second time in two days, but they assumed that she really had been cheating with this woman’s husband, and the thought rankled.  Not to mention the neighbors, who were abuzz with theories as to what was going on–and half of them probably assumed she’d been banging the mysterious Michael, too.  Mortifying.  At this rate, she was going to have to find a new place to live. 

Lexi awoke to find a glass of orange juice, a muffin and a local newspaper outside her door–clearly, Joseph had mentioned her early-departure plan to some member of the kitchen staff.  She looked at the paper long enough to determine that the Greens had won the majority they’d been hoping for, and to see that it wasn’t going to rain, and then she set off. 

The sun had only just broken the horizon when she set out across the salt desert that separated Dobie’s estate and the city of Marjori from the northern part of the island, one of three that made up Ile du Soleil.  According to the map, about a hundred and ten miles northwest was the city of Hamilton, and beyond that a land-bridge to the next island.  Driving across one of those engineering marvels would be cool, she decided, and began to plan an agenda for the day; breakfast in Hamilton, and then across the bridge was Lecroy.  There’d no doubt be a quaint store or two to poke her head into, and something fun to eat.  Lexi forgot all about being annoyed with Dobie, with thoughts of adventure in her head.

As she got on the freeway and set out into the featureless expanse of the salt desert, the deep blue horizon began to fade.  Lexi took a cassette from her pocket and slipped it into the player. Wailing, jangly guitars heralded the dawn; CCR was a good way to start the day, and it reminded her of her father, and a bit of Ren, without making her pine for the people she’d lost.  She put her foot down, and the Caddy’s massive V8 pulled the horizon toward her.

Hamilton was about an hour and a half away, and she arrived in time to watch the city wake up.  Lexi parked at a convenient gas station, bought a second breakfast, and sat on the Cadillac’s hood to eat it while she watched rush hour happen around her.  For the first time since arriving, she was in a pleasant mood.  If Dobie wanted to play games, she would be happy to play.  He was probably somewhat justified in ditching her at his house, since she’d done the same thing to him, but that wasn’t the point.  He was clearly laboring under the delusion that she actually wanted something from him, when she had everything that she wanted.  And if he wanted her, he could jolly well come and find her.

Time always sped past when she was watching cars; Lexi stayed on the hood for the better part of two hours.  The time-to-go feeling crept over her as noiselessly and gradually as the desire to stop and sit for a while had, making itself known as that familiar restlessness to do something, and she slipped off of the hood and went to the driver’s door. 

A bright green Toyota Previa minivan had pulled up to the gas station’s parking, and a man had gotten out of it.  The Previa caught Lexi’s eye, because blazing lime green wasn’t a color they offered the Previa in, at least not back at home.  There was a metallic green, she recalled, but nothing like this amazing, Kermit the Frog color.  It looked good on the ovoid minivan, she decided.

The man who had gotten out of the Previa was walking toward her.  He was tall, and wore a brown leather vest and an expensive pair of Gargoyles.  Lexi thought he looked like the Terminator, and dropped into the driver’s seat, wishing vaguely that Ren were there so she could throw a movie quote at him.  The Terminator turned as if to go past her, toward the pay phones, then abruptly stopped in front of her, drew a big, scary-looking pistol, and shot her in the forehead.

Lexi crabbed backward across the seat, but felt the impact and knew there wasn’t much point.  He shot her twice more, in the chest this time, and she slipped off of the blue leather and fell across the footwell, her hand flailing at the dash as she went down.  She lay there, full of the weird calm of the soon-to-be-dead.  She was looking up under the dash, and noticed that the wiring down there was neatly run, not a spaghetti-mess of electrical tape like a lot of old American cars were.  You did a good job, Joseph, she thought.  She looked down past her feet and saw the Terminator getting back into his van, driving away.  Only one person seemed to have noticed that he’d killed her, a wiry little old woman who rushed to the Cadillac’s door.  “Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, which seemed to be an understatement.

Beginning to wonder why she wasn’t completely dead yet, Lexi reached a shaking hand up to her face, felt wetness

“Are you okay?” the old woman asked.

“Of course I’m not okay, someone shot me in the head!”  Lexi took her hand away, unable to keep herself from looking at the gore.  “Mira Sorvino!  Why is my blood orange?” she asked.  Feeling the spot on her head bit more firmly, it wasn’t hurting so much any more.  That wasn’t because the back of her head was gone, but because there was no bullet hole.  Just more orange glop.  On her chest, she found the same story; the front of her perfectly-faded gray sundress was splattered orange.  “Did that guy shoot me with a paintball gun?”

“Are you American?”

“Isn’t everybody?” Lexi replied sulkily, sitting up and pulling herself back onto the seat.  She wiped paint off of her face.  “Where did that little green van go?”

“Little green van?”

“With the man who shot me in it.  I need to have a word with him.”

The woman pointed at the Cadillac.  “I think it was because of your car.”

“That’s completely unhelpful,” Lexi replied, deciding that she had no obligation to be nice to strangers right now.  She pulled the door closed and started the Cadillac, setting out in search of a lime-green Toyota Previa.

It took her about ten minutes to find it, but when she did it was going the other way on a boulevard street she couldn’t find an entrance to, naturally.  Lexi pursued her quarry as discreetly as she could, considering the car she was driving.  The Previa and the Terminator driving it headed deeper into Hamilton, which after a while began to remind her of Salt Lake City.  She wasn’t sure if it was because it actually looked like SLC or if it was because of the damn salt desert she’d just come out of, though.  The layout was linear like Salt Lake, like an oversized rural town, and the Previa was heading for the large square in the middle of downtown.

The minivan continued past the square and into a residential area.  The houses were large and older than she was.  Large trees masked the fact that the neighborhood was surrounded on three sides by ten- and twenty-story buildings.  The street narrowed and began to climb the slope of the shallow valley that Hamilton resided in, and the houses began to get larger.  Soon they had backed out of sight of the street and were hiding behind gates.

Lexi gave the Previa a bit more rope; he had to have noticed the Cadillac by now.   It was a block and a half ahead of her, turning left into a gated drive.

“Where are you going?” she asked herself.  When she got there, the Previa was gone, the gate closing slowly.

“I am a creature of apple pie and Chevrolet,” Lexi said.  She gunned the Cadillac’s engine, and the big car leapt forward, squeezing through the gate with barely enough space to avoid losing paint.  “Now I’m trespassing!” she yelled, and blew a raspberry.

Before she’d gone fifty yards up the drive, a black Mercedes SUV sped out from around a bend and stopped in front of her.  A second Mercedes came up behind the Cadillac, boxing her in.  She felt a thrill of excitement, the delicious feeling of being in trouble with a Rich Bastard who didn’t know who he was dealing with.  It was the same quiver she got from fucking with Dobie, only stronger.  Why did she like this feeling so much? 

A man in a suit appeared outside her window.  “Can I help you, miss?” he asked, leaning down only slightly.  His eyes were invisible behind sunglasses, and he was wearing a coily earpiece.  He looked so official she wanted to giggle.

“Are those the big MLs or the little ones?” Lexi asked, pointing at the Mercedes.  “I wish they’d distinguish them some other way than the stupid badges.  I can’t tell which engines they have.”

“This is a private drive,” he said, ignoring her question.  “Do you have some business here?”  The tone in his voice suggested that he knew she didn’t.

“Certainly.  I was following the green van.”

“On what business?”

“My own,” she said.  “I need to talk to the van’s owner.”

“I don’t believe he’s taking any meetings today.  If you’d like to leave your name and number…?”

“No, I wouldn’t like to leave my goddamn name and number,” Lexi said.  “That nimrod shot me in the tit with a paintball, and I think that means we know each other way too well for names and numbers and appointments.  Now move your truck, or I’ll drive through your flowerbed.”

The man looked the long, low Cadillac up and down, then leaned forward just enough to let his shoulder holster show.  “This vehicle yours?” he asked, a thinly veiled threat in his voice. 

“It’s mine enough,” Lexi said.  “And I don’t have time to waste watching you show your gun off and acting like you’re important.  Bye-bye now.”  She rolled the window up.  The suit’s unctuous smile became a look of irritation, and he rapped on the glass again.  Lexi sighed, then cranked the wheel around to the right and eased the Cadillac off of the drive.  The right-side tires sank three inches into topsoil and crushed gladiolus and pansies into blobs like melted crayons.  The suit outside the window banged on the Cadillac’s roof in outrage, and then pulled his gun.  “Oh, what are you going to do, shoot me?” she yelled through the glass, and drove off across the lawn.

There was a shout to stop.  She ignored it, waiting for the gunshot to explode the rear window.  It never came.

“I’ve already been shot once today, what do I have to be afraid of?”  Hell hath no fury, she thought.  “You’re goddamn right it doesn’t,” she agreed with herself.  The Cadillac crunched through another flowerbed as Lexi put it back on the pavement behind the Mercedes.  She couldn’t help glancing in the rearview mirror; it was an ML320, the littlest one, like she’d thought.  Another bend, a wall of shrubbery, and a house appeared in front of her.  It was a sprawling natural-rock mansion, with prominent solar panels on the roof and xeriscaping that took over from the grass once she got past the shrubs.  Lexi skimmed those details, zeroing in on the green Previa, which was parked in front of the house.  The man who’d shot her was halfway up the steps, talking to a group of men in suits of varying shades of blue and gray.  All of them looked up when the big Caddy came around the corner.  Lexi parked behind the Previa and went to meet the guy who’d shot her.

As she walked up to the group, looking oh-so-chipper in a faded gray sun dress (currently ruined by orange paint), knee-high boots and a purple leather jacket Molly had bought her in New York, two men stepped forward, suits like the ones that had accosted her on the drive.  In fact, they could’ve been clones of the same guy.  Speaking of him, she could hear the Mercedes coming, too.

Lexi let the suits block her path (holy crap! They had their hands on their guns) and called out, “Hi there!”  The group of men talking to the shooter gave her their attention immediately, and Lexi saw that Carino Rhoades, the new Solei prime minister, was at the center of the group.  “Oh, it’s you!” she said.  “I saw you on TV, wasn’t impressed.  Can I talk to the man in the vest?  I didn’t catch his name.  Yes, you!” she said, as the shooter realized she was referring to him.  Lexi waved and cocked her head.  “You shot me a few minutes ago, and ruined my favorite slouching dress and my morning, and I don’t even know what it was about.  Scared me to death, too–I thought I’d just been drilled by the Mafia for sure.  Anyway, I followed you in from town, and wanted to come up and ask you exactly what the fuck were you thinking and what the hell’s the matter with you?  You can answer those in any order you want.”

Carino Rhoades smiled and motioned to the suits, who stepped aside and put their weapons away.  “Mr. Goodman does enjoy his pranks,” he said.

“So do I,” Lexi replied.  Are you going to do it? she asked herself.  Of course I am.  She summoned the righteous anger that was already swirling through her veins, thought of her father, of Ren, then took four big steps forward and kneed Goodman in the balls.  He went down like an outdated Vegas casino.  “Is it funny now?”

The shock of the moment froze even the bodyguards, who moved first to Rhoades’ side.  That was the opposite direction from Lexi, who was already headed back to the Cadillac.  “Hey!” one of them yelled.  She didn’t look back to see if he’d drawn a gun, and pulled out onto the lawn to leave.  When all four tires were on the grass, she floored it.  The Caddy’s big-block spun the rear tires deliciously, leaving a trail of torn earth that looked like a question mark as she let the car spin around in a lazy donut until it was pointed back toward the gate.  She registered men running across the grass toward her in her peripheral vision, but didn’t wait to see what they wanted.  The Cadillac jumped back onto the drive well ahead of the Mercedes security vehicles, and Lexi was surprised to see the gate opening as she raced toward it.  Perhaps they’d assumed from her speed that she would’ve just driven through it anyhow; maybe they wanted to be rid of her.  In any case, she was back on the road and headed back down into Hamilton proper in moments, her dress properly avenged.

Glen usually stopped by to have lunch with Harold when he was in town for the Chicago Auto Show in early February.  He was usually able to wrangle an interesting press car, too–one of the perks of his job was his access to new cars to review and write about, a fact that the rest of the Road Associates were cheerfully jealous about. 

This year Glen had managed to find the new Ford Taurus SHO.  The silver high-performance sedan was dusted with salt, but still caught Harold’s eye as it pulled up to the curb in front of Harold’s house.  Glen was surprised to see that Harold wasn’t alone; Dick Sheehan was also on the porch, waving.

“Dick, you live in California,” Glen said as handshakes were exchanged.  “Doesn’t that mean you’re supposed to stay away from the Midwest during the winter?”

“What can I say?  Work’s got me on the road a lot.  That the new SHO?”

“It is.”

“How do you like it?”

“More power, not as fast, less personality,” Glen said.  “They shouldn’t have killed the manual transmission.”

“I hear that Yamaha engine is a nice V8 though,” Harold added as they went inside.  The living room was cozy, in a suburban, wood-and-glass way.  Only a small cabinet of racing trophies indicated Harold’s favorite pastime though; his wife had been firm about relegating the car stuff to the garage and basement.  “So what’s new and exciting at the auto show?”  Harold led Glen and Dick through into the kitchen, where they made themselves at home.

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” Glen said.

“Marianne’s working overtime this week, so it’s beer and sandwiches this afternoon, I’m afraid.”

“Fine by me,” Dick said.  “Glen, are you headed out to New York for the auto show there?”

“In April.”

“I brought some parts for you to take to Tully.  Squareback door trim, and some other old Volkswagen chrome that he didn’t want to ship.  Will they fit in your car?”

“No problem,” Glen said, accepting a can of 7-Up from Harold.  Sandwich fixings were being put in front of them.  “How did you get them on the plane?”

Dick grinned.  “I smiled nicely.  They were too big to fit in the overhead compartment, but the flight attendant was accommodating.”

“I do believe you could sweet-talk anyone into anything,” Harold said.

“When properly motivated, perhaps,” was Dick’s response.  He cracked open a beer and started making a sandwich.  “So.  Postmortem on this year’s nominees?”

“At this rate, we’re going to have to organize a washouts’ club,” Harold said somewhat sarcastically. 

Dick looked surprised.  “Bob Caret didn’t work out?”

Glen and Harold shared a look.  “Red mist city,” Glen said finally.  “We met down in Monroe–Tully, Harold, Charlie and Ron were there–and planned to caravan up to Port Huron.  Caret shows up in his ‘winter car,’ a ’67 Corvette that’s about two mufflers short of being a Pro-Street car.  Very cool.  He then proceeds to race up 75 to Detroit.  Nothing elegant about it.  In and out of traffic, passing on the right, the whole works.”

“Not at all graceful,” Harold agreed.  “I’m sure he’s a good racer, but nobody else was racing and he didn’t seem to understand that.”

Dick nodded in understanding. 

“The burnout in the restaurant parking lot didn’t help, either,” Glen added.  “Caret’s a good guy, but not exactly a Roadie.”

“So, since Neil Stephanos washed out, too–I can’t believe he called Porsche a ‘Nazi car’ when Jim and I were actually driving them–that leaves us with one new member for 1997?” Dick said.

“It would appear so,” Harold said.  He had constructed a sizeable sandwich, and mashed it down so it would fit in his mouth.  “Our numbers shall hold steady at sixteen, for the moment.  On a more serious note, have you heard about Roger?”  Glen and Dick both shook their heads.  “I’m glad you’re here, so I can tell you in person.”  Harold sighed.  “His cancer’s back.”

“Aw, shit,” Dick said.

“That about sums it up.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“When I talked to him on the phone, he said he wasn’t doing chemo this time.  Going to let it run its course.”

“How long?”

Harold shrugged.  “They’re saying nine to eighteen months.  ‘Course, you know Roger.  The first thing he did was remind me that they told his father that too, and the old guy hung on for another ten years.” 

“You don’t think that’ll be the case, though,” Glen said.

“No, I don’t.  So…let’s just make this a good summer.”

“Hasn’t Carrie tried to talk to him?”

“Of course she has, but you know how he gets.  He’s made up his mind, Dick.”

“Then we’ll make it a good summer,” Dick said.  “To Roger.”  He raised his beer, and Harold and Glen toasted with him.  “I’ll pull some strings and get us into Pebble,” he said, referring to the Pebble Beach concours car show. 

“Sounds good.  Should we tell the others?”

“I’ve already talked to Charlie,” Harold said.  “Roger didn’t want to make a fuss about it.  Tully and Jim know.”

“What about the toy run?”  Before Christmas, Roger and Harold organized charity toy deliveries with their classic cars; it was one of the few Road Associates events that routinely drew all of the members out of the woodwork.  It was also something Glen looked forward to for much of the year, though he hadn’t made much noise about this fact.

“Still a go,” was the reply.

“Good.  Let me know if you or Roger want any help organizing it.”

Lexi was back in the salt desert, headed toward Marjori, when she saw the blue lights on top of the white Saab pop on.  She had figured it might happen; the cop was sitting behind a low rise in the desert, and by the time she saw him she knew that if he was radaring, he’d already gotten her and the Cadillac’s speedo was nailed a couple of ticks above 100. 

She pulled obediently to the side to wait for him, and shut the big car off.  With the radio and engine silenced, the desert’s quiet pressed in around her.  Lexi had several moments to meditate upon the silence as the police Saab caught up and pulled in front of her.  That was a difference between US and Solei police, she’d seen–the Ile du Soleil cops always pulled in front of you instead of behind.

The officer was young and clean-cut with high-sided black hair and broad shoulders.  He looked incongruously like a really young Judd Nelson.  Lexi smiled at him, but he didn’t return the gesture. 

Hopefully the scowling cop wasn’t having a bad day.  Would points acquired in Ile du Soleil get back to her insurance at home?  Lexi rehearsed a couple of nice ice-breakers as the cop walked toward her car.  Saying something nice and smiling was often a good way to get out of even a healthy ticket.  Unless of course he was chasing her because of the thing at Carino Rhoades’ place, of course.

The police officer trumped anything she might have said by drawing his gun on her from twenty feet away.  “Get out of the car!” he barked.  Okay, maybe it did have something to do with the thing at Carino Rhoades’ place.  “Get out of the car or I will shoot you!” he yelled.

Lexi was so shocked, annoyed and on some level offended that she gaped at the man in disbelief.  She wouldn’t have been more surprised if he had peeled off his head and revealed himself to be Phyllis Diller.  As she hesitated, he quickly closed the distance between them and rammed the gun into her face.

“Hands where I can see them!” he shouted, even though both of her hands were on the wheel.  “Hands where I can see them!  Get out!  Out!”  He sounded almost like he was yelling for the sheer joy of yelling, yelling because he could.  With his free hand he opened the door.  Lexi unbuckled her seatbelt so as not to get tangled up in it, and the cop dragged her onto her hands and knees into the road next to the car.  She was kicked painfully in the tailbone, which sent her sprawling into the road itself, and Lexi looked back along the freeway she’d just driven, her cheek pressed against the hot pavement, as her hands were cuffed behind her back.  She was glad no cars were coming.

She was yanked up, spun, and thrust belly-first against the side of the car.  The cop screamed at her again, but his words spun around her head and she didn’t understand.

“I asked you for some identification!” he roared.  “Legs apart!  Apart!”  He kicked her instep and she fell to her knees.  With her hands cuffed, she couldn’t avoid hitting her chin on the Cadillac’s hood as she went down, and the cracking impact felt for a moment as though she’d shattered all of her teeth.

While she was recovering from that the cop dragged her back to her feet again.  He patted her down roughly, swatting at her breasts hard enough to elicit a gasp of pain, then spun her so her back was to the car, took a step back into the road, and pointed the gun at her again. 

Lexi blinked at him.  She wished, hotly and for just a moment, that a semi truck would barrel past and squash him like an éclair on a sumo wrestler’s futon.  Whatever the reason, it wasn’t a paintball gun pointed at her this time, and she was too conscious of being alone in the desert with a (possibly mentally unbalanced) cop.  His gun was clearly doing the thinking, and there were no witnesses.  He seized her arm, roughly, and led her forward to his car with one hand.  The gun was pressed against the side of her neck, the barrel hot and scalding even though it hadn’t been fired, and he ground it against her harder when she tried to pull away.   Don’t cry, she thought, feeling tears of fright well up in her eyes.  Goddamn you don’t cry.

Lexi hated being roughhoused, but she had no choice for now.  Impotent anger was rising quickly in her.  Her father had taught her that it was perfectly okay to respond to violence with violence, or by turning the other cheek, or with treachery, anything so long as your response was a measured, conscious one and not simple acquiescence or blind lashing out, and she had tried to hew to that lesson.  Lately she’d been mostly of the mood to respond in kind (hence her kneeing Mr. Goodman in the leaf) and the need to avenge the insult was burning hot and bright just now.  Lexi looked around the car, hoping for some clue as to the cop’s identity, but there was nothing.  The engine was off though.  It was getting hot.  Lexi hated hot.  Cold she could deal with; hot made her lightheaded and grouchy and sticky, even if everyone said Ile du Soleil had a dry heat.  It did nothing to improve her mood.  Neither did the conspicuous lack of room in the Saab’s back seat.  However, Officer Handgun was reminding her of Collie Entragian in Stephen King’s Desperation (which she had read on the flight to Ile du Soleil, incidentally), and that was enough to make her shut up.

The cop came back to the car and lowered himself into the driver’s seat.  “You’re American.  Is this your car?”

She was relieved that he was talking instead of shouting.  It was probably a good time to refrain from being a bitch.  “No.  I borrowed it.”

“Do you have permission to be driving this car?” he asked.

Once again she was struck by the fact that he hadn’t asked who she was.  “Of course I do.”

“May I see it?”  His eyes met hers in the mirror.

“Excuse me?”

“A letter of permission.  It’s required in this country, you know.”

It was?  “I don’t have an actual letter.”

“I see.”

Lexi turned around, looking out the back window.  She felt helpless, and disliked it intensely.  “I didn’t realize that was the case.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” the cop said, completely unmoved but seeming to be enjoying himself.  He hadn’t started the car, and it was stifling.  He murmured into his headset, running the Cadillac’s plate number. 

“Do I get a phone call?” 

“No.”  He was writing on a clipboard.

“What do you mean, no?” 

“You’re not in America any more, mademoiselle.  In case you hadn’t noticed.”

She bit off a snippish response.  “Then how soon can I call the embassy?”

“After you’re processed.”

“You banged my face on the side of the car.  I think my lip is bleeding.”  It felt like it was puffing up, at the very least.

“Good.”

Lexi kicked the back of his seat, which was an incredibly dumb thing to do as it brought Officer Handgun right back to the fore.  He spun in the seat and rammed the barrel of the gun right through the bars of the safety screen.  “Get back!” he yelled.  “Get back and get down!”  Lexi shrank in the seat, trying and failing to find an escape from that huge black eye.  The gun tracked her.

Just as suddenly, the cop relented, touching his earpiece.  “Go ahead,” he said neutrally, no trace of the screaming, spit-spraying rage in his voice.  “I understand,” he said finally.  “Thank you.”

The cop put the gun away and slid out of the car, then let Lexi out and uncuffed her.  “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said.  His eyes were unreadable, weirdly distant.  “You’re free to go.”

Lexi frowned.  “I think I missed part of this conversation.”

“Give my regards to Mr. Cassarell.  And enjoy your time in Ile du Soleil,” Officer Handgun said, slipping back into his car.  The Saab’s engine burbled to life, and the cop pulled away without another word.

Dobie typically rose at the crack of dawn, so the phone call at that hour wasn’t an inconvenience as he was already in his office.  Fully dressed and in his large home office before the sun was up, he had just begun to read the day’s e-mail when the call came.

It was Becka Packard.  “Hello, Dobie,” she said, her voice cool with affection.

“Good morning, Becka.  Well, I suppose it’s actually evening there.”

“Indeed it is.  You’re doing well, I assume?”

“Can’t complain.  We’ll have to see how I feel after next week’s election, of course.”  He leaned back in his chair, swiveling toward the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the east wall.  The shelves held a mixture of financial reports and plans, nonfiction biographies of various captains of industry, and several volumes of the Cassarell family tree.  The rest of the office was thick-carpeted and dark-wooded.  The windows were completely closed off with wooden blinds, and Dobie had a small trophy case next to the fax machine.

Becka hummed in agreement.  “It doesn’t sound like things are going well for the conservatives.”

“That’s an understatement.  It looks like the Greens will be controlling the parliament.  Lots of controversial legislation coming down the pipe.”

“I heard about the luxury tax.”

“For starters,” Dobie said.  “I can understand the purpose of it, but forty-five thousand is far too low a threshold.”  He kept the anger out of his voice as best he could.  It was hard not to feel that politicians who were simply pandering to the massive voting power of the lower classes were singling him out.

“They’ve talked of making it retroactive, also.”

“You’re kidding.”  Dobie hadn’t heard that.

Becka hummed affirmatively.  “To be levied on all purchases made up to twelve months prior to the proposed enactment date, they say.  It was in the morning’s Times.”

“They’ve gone completely mad,” was all Dobie could say.  “It sounds like I have a lot of phone calls to make in the next few days.  And I suspect a lot of favors will be cashed in.”

“I’d like to help any way I can,” Becka replied.

“Any support is good support.”

“In fact, you might be interested to hear that I’ll have the ear of some of the Greens themselves.  Carroll Carver, for instance.”

Dobie nodded, aware that Becka couldn’t see him.  Carroll Carver was one of the strongest voices of the Green party.  He was also one of the hands that controlled the Ravens, Ile du Soleil’s notorious international spy network.  Reportedly untouchable by bribery or scandal, Carver’s father had also been one of King Khorbin’s most vocal opponents.  “Do tell.”

“I’ll see if I can get him into a conversation,” she said.  “I might be able to influence him in some directions.”

“I’ll bet you just might.”

She gave a self-satisfied laugh at the flattery in his voice.  “Dobie dear, I didn’t call to talk entirely about politics, though.  I learned something recently that you might want to hear about.”

“What’s that?”

“Lexi Crane.”  Becka’s voice dropped from its cheerful register to an acid-dripping hate.  “I’ve got reliable information that suggests she’s in Ile du Soleil.”

In spite of himself, Dobie felt his palms get clammy.  He felt like a kid again, biting his lip to see how much trouble he was in and hoping he didn’t give himself away.  “Do tell?”

“Yes.  I don’t know why she’s gone there, but I was concerned that she might be trying to locate you.  I wanted you to be prepared.”

So he wasn’t caught, then.  “Thank you for the heads-up.”

“She’s dangerous, Dobie.”

“I know, ma’am.”  Best to say little.  A lie of omission was the best plan.  Additionally, Becka’s voice got a slightly manic tone when she talked about Lexi, and it was unnerving.

“I want you to do me a favor, Dobie.”

“What’s that?”

“I wish…I wish she’d never come back to America.  I wish she’d have some sort of accident, and then I’d never have to think about her or hear her voice or hear her laugh at me again.  Do you understand?”

He did, all too well.  He’d practically grown up at Becka’s feet, and Dobie knew that Becka was saying as directly as she dared that she wanted Lexi dead and she wanted him to orchestrate it.  “You shouldn’t think about this so much, Becka.”

“I can’t help it.  She took my son from me.  You can’t understand what that feels like.  She made him hate me, and then she took him out of this life.  And now she mocks me.”

“Has she been back to the estate?”

“No, of course not.  There is a restraining order, and I have made it expressly clear to our guards that they are to shoot her, if they see her, and I made sure that she knows this.” 

“Well,” was all Dobie could say.  There wasn’t an ending to that sentence, so he let it drop.  He had heard from Molly that Lexi had managed to negotiate some sort of deal where she was allowed on the grounds to visit Warren’s grave once a year, but now seemed like a staggeringly poor time to inquire about the details of it.

Becka’s voice shifted back to cheerful.  “Well, I don’t want to take any more of your time, I know you’re busy down there.  I just wanted to mention that woman to you, and let you know so you weren’t taken by surprise if she sought you out.”

“Thank you, Becka.”

“Let me know if you see her, or need any help.  I’ll be here to talk to.  And I’ll talk to Mr. Carver for you, also.”

“That’s great, Becka, thanks.”  Dobie hung up the phone with a sigh.

Ten minutes later Victor knocked once and entered the office.  He carried a tray with coffee and a newspaper which he’d just taken from one of the maids who was on her way in.  “Morning,” he said, placing the tray on the desk.

“Good morning, Victor.”

“What’s the news?”

“Becka Packard wants me to kill Lexi.”

“She knows she’s here?”

“Not at the house,” Dobie said, shaking his head.  “Just that she’s in Ile du Soleil.  I have no idea how she knows, though it doesn’t surprise me–Miss Crane does not seem to know the meaning of discreet.  She managed to get pulled over for speeding yesterday–they called me about her not having a letter of permission in the car.  I neglected to tell them that she’d taken it without asking.”

“And Becka wants you to kill her.”  Victor wasn’t surprised, just confirming.

“Of course she didn’t say so in so many words, but that was the general gist, yes.  She wants Lexi to have an accident.”

“What are you going to do?”  Victor sat across the table from his boss.  His eyes were level; he was content to arrange an accident for Lexi, or to help Dobie conceal her presence.  Either option was fine; it depended on what the boss wanted.

“I don’t know yet.  Becka says she can talk to Carroll Carver, about the Greens’ proposed law changes.”

Victor raised his eyebrows.  “Could be a good thing.”

“It could,” Dobie said, nodding.  “It could indeed.” 

“Maya was charged with keeping Lexi at the estate and out of trouble,” Victor said.  “Shall I have her dismissed?”

He considered for a moment, then shook his head.  “No, that won’t be necessary this time.”  Lexi seemed to have warmed up to the staff, and it wouldn’t do to have her wondering why there were personnel changes, after all.