Sloan reached behind her and picked up a small black object on the table. Smiling, she said, "If you really don't like hiking down highways and across fields in the dark—if you'd rather not spend a terrifying night jumping in and out of your car, hiding and fearing for your life—then I'm happy to recommend an alternative." Lifting her arm, she held up the cellular telephone she'd taken from the table, and her smile vanished. "Please get one of these," Sloan implored. "Please," she said again for emphasis. "You can buy one for under one hundred dollars, and if you only use it for emergencies, the monthly cost for airtime isn't much. I realize that for some of you the cost of a cheap cell phone and monthly service may put a strain on your budget, but you can't put a dollar value on your life, and it's your life you're risking without one. If you have one of these when you're stranded at night in a car, you don't have to spend the night hiking or hiding. You can phone a tow truck, or the police department, or your husband or boyfriend and tell them you'll be waiting near the car. After that, all you have to do is stay out of sight until the help you're expecting arrives.

"Oh, one more thing," she added as Jess walked into the room. "If you've phoned the police, stress that you'll be near the car, not in it. Don't just leap out from behind a bush when we get there."

"Why not?" Sara challenged, smiling directly at Jess.

"Because," Jess said dryly, "it scares the hell out of us when that happens."

Everyone laughed, but Sloan had a much different impression of that ostensibly innocent exchange between Sara and Jess. Sara, who was always nice to everyone, had actually meant to force Jess into admitting to fear in front of a roomful of women. Sloan knew that as surely as she knew that Jess, who never took any gibe—or any woman—seriously, had truly resented Sara's "joke." They were two of the most attractive, most personable people in all of Bell Harbor. And they couldn't stand each other. They were Sloan's closest friends, and the undercurrent of animosity between them had finally risen to the surface and was bursting out into the open.

Sloan finished her lecture with a reminder that the next session would include some physical self-defense moves and reminded them to wear suitable clothing; then she turned off the television set and removed the video cartridge from the VCR. She'd completely forgotten that Carter Reynolds had reared up out of the dark highway of her own past.

Unfortunately, her respite lasted only until Sara got her alone.

6

"I can't believe Carter Reynolds is your father!" Sara burst out excitedly the moment the heavy doors of city hall swung closed behind them. "I can not believe it," she repeated, thinking of the articles she'd seen about him in the "Palm Beach Social Section" of Bell Harbor's Sunday newspaper.

"I've never been able to believe it myself," Sloan said wryly. "Actually, I've never had any reason to believe it," she added as they walked across the parking lot toward her car.

Sara scarcely heard that; her thoughts were racing down another track. "When we were little kids, you told me your parents got divorced when you were a baby, but you forgot to mention your father is… is… Carter Reynolds!" she said, lifting her arms to the sky, palms up, as if addressing heaven. "My God, just his name makes me think of yachts and Rolls-Royces and banks and… money. Mountains and mountains of glorious money! How could you keep a secret like that from me all these years?"

Sloan hadn't had a private moment to think about his call, but Sara's awed exuberance only hardened her own determination to remain unaffected by Carter Reynolds's illness, his tardy attempt to get to know her, and especially his money. "He isn't my father, except in the biological sense. In all these years, I've never received so much as a birthday card or a Christmas card, or even a phone call from him."

"But he called you today, didn't he? What did he want?"

"He wanted me to come to Palm Beach for a visit so we could get to know each other. I told him no. Absolutely no," Sloan said, hoping to eliminate any debate from Sara. "It's too late for him to try to play father," she said as she slid her key into the lock on the door of her car.

Sara was intensely loyal to Sloan, and under ordinary circumstances she would readily have empathized with Sloan's decision to reject a parent who had rejected Sloan since babyhood. However, from Sara's point of view, there was nothing "ordinary" about being the daughter of a man who could make Sloan into an heiress. "I don't think you should be so hasty," she said, thinking madly for some sort of excuse she could offer for the inexcusable. She voiced the first lame possibility that came to mind.

"I don't think men need to be close to their children the way women do," Sara reasoned. "It's as if they lack some sort of parental chromosome, or something."

"Sorry," Sloan said lightly, "but you can't attribute his utter disinterest in me to defective genetics. From everything I've read, he positively dotes on my sister. They play tennis together; they ski together, they play golf together. They're a team, and a winning one. I've lost count of how many trophies I've seen the two of them holding on to."

"Your sister! That's right! My God, you have a sister, too!" Sara exclaimed, sounding amazed. "I can't believe it… you and I made mud pies together, we did homework together, we even got chicken pox together, and now I discover that you not only have a rich socialite for a father, but you also have a sister you've never told me about."

"I just told you nearly everything I know about her—which is only what I've seen in the newspapers. Beyond that, all I know is that her name is Paris and she's a year older than I am. I've never heard from her, either."

"But how did all this happen?"

Sloan glanced at her watch. "I've only got an hour to eat and change clothes, then I'm on duty until nine. If you really want to talk about this, could we do it at my place?"

Sara was almost as flexible as she was fascinated. "I really want to talk about this," she said, already starting toward her red Toyota two parking spaces away. "I'll meet you at your place."

The stucco house Sloan had bought years ago was on a corner directly across from the beach—a tiny two-bedroom place on a narrow lot in a ten-block neighborhood of tiny, forty-year-old houses. The aging neighborhood's proximity to the ocean combined with the diminutive size of the houses had made them extremely desirable to young people with the energy and determination to fix them up but without a lot of cash to do it. As a result of the imagination and dedication of these first-time home owners, the entire neighborhood had acquired a quaint, eclectic look with avant-garde clapboard houses existing in happy harmony next to storybook cottages of stucco and brick.