"So what did you mean when you said 'so what'?" she asked, trying to distract him from the fact that she'd managed to get him both angry and disgusted with her all in the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds.

He looked at her, and she couldn't for the life of her read his expression.

But he finally said, "I meant, so what because of course we can run the O course in record time. We've been trained for it. And that's great, but it's no longer a big deal when we do it. But, see, at times our job involves going into places that are heavily guarded or hard to get to, and rescuing hostages. We bring those people out and get them to safety. Most of the time the hostages that we rescue are people who haven't trained on the O course for hours. Some of them don't ever run unless the store's closing and they're out of chocolate."

Joan nodded. "Point and match awarded to Lieutenant Muldoon."

"I want to show you the way a team of SEALs can deal with the additional challenge of an inexperienced, untrained individual."

Ah. "Like me."

"Exactly like you," he agreed.

They were at the obstacle course now, and Joan pointed to the thing he'd referred to as the cargo neta"a frame upon which a series of ropes were strung, going both vertically and horizontally, indeed like a giant net. It had to be at least fifty feet high. "And you think you can actually get me up and over that thing. Safely."

"I don't just think it. I know we can."

Joan looked at the rigging, looked back at Muldoon, and laughed. If they could get her over that, they could get Brooke Bryant over it, no problem. And wouldn't that be a photo op? "Okay, Super SEAL," she said. "Let's see you do it."

Chapter 4.

"I'm not here right now," Rene's answering machine drawled. "But I surely do want to talk to you. Leave a message at the beep, sugar, and I'll call you back."

"Rene, it's Mary Lou. Call me as soon as you get this. Please. I need to talk to you."

Lord Jesus, no one was home. No one? Yeah, right. It wasn't as if she had dozens of friends to call for a shoulder to cry on. Her sister Janine and her AA sponsor Rene were it. End of the very short list.

Mary Lou had called her day care lady first thing when she'd walked in the door, asking if it was okay that she didn't pick Haley up right at 2:15, the way she usually did.

Mrs. Ustenski had rea.s.sured her that Haley was making tired sounds, and that she could just as easily get in her nap here as at home. It was no problem.

So here Mary Lou was. Alone in her kitchen, stinking like a French fry.

And wanting a drink so badly that her hair was d.a.m.n near standing on end.

She could do it. With Haley safe at Mrs. U.'s, she could drive down to the Ladybug Lounge. She could walk inside and instantly be surrounded by the dark coolness. She'd take a deep breath of that sweet, stale, spilled beer smell and.. .

Mary Lou grabbed the phone and dialed Rene's number again. Again, her answering machine clicked on. She hung up the phone and pushed her way outside.

Rene and Janine weren't the only people on her list of friends. That list also included crazy Donny, who lived next door.

He was home. He was always home. Crazy people tended not to get out much, as a rule.

She crossed the lawn to his house. Rang the bell and knocked. Called out to him right through the door. "Donny, it's me. Mary Lou. Can I come in? Open up, hon."

She rang the bell again and again, until the curtain moved and he peered out at her. Checking, no doubt, to make sure she wasn't an alien, come to suck out his brains.

"What do you want?" he asked from behind the safety of his door. He had about forty dead bolts on the d.a.m.n thing. It took five minutes for him to open them all. If there was ever a fire, he'd never make it out alive.

"May I please come in?" Mary Lou called back to him.

Sam called Donny "the Nutjob" and rolled his eyes whenever Mary Lou brought the man some cookies or a ca.s.serole. It wasn't that he feared for Mary Lou's safety as she went inside the house of a man who was mentally ill. No, Sam's objections had to do with the fact that Mary Lou had managed to make Donny think of her as a friend. And because of that, the one time Donny had actually left his house in the entire tune they'd lived here had been to insert a series of reflectors on metal sticks in a circular pattern on the Starretts' front lawn.

He'd told thema"completely seriouslya"that it was to keep the alien ships from using their yard as a landing pad.

Sam wasn't openly rude to Donny's face, but he was never more than coolly polite, either, even when Donny made it clear that he thought Sam was just one step down from G.o.d, simply because he was a U.S. Navy SEAL. Sam chided Mary Lou for encouraging "the little freak"a"a cruel name that would have badly hurt Donny's feelings if he'd heard it, which he hadn't, thank G.o.d for small favors.

"I can't open the door," Donny called back to her now. "It's too dangerous today."

She could see that he'd wrapped a hat with aluminum foil again and was wearing it pulled way down over his earsa"to keep the aliens from being able to read his thoughts.

The hat came out of the front closet when he was having a particularly bad day.

"I need to talk to you," she said. She was going to explode if he didn't open this door. "Please, Donny. I'm always there for you when you need me. You know it. You call me, and I come over. So let me in, okay?"

"I can't do that today."

"Yes, you can. Just unlock the door. Ora"open the window. I'll come in through the window, so quick that the aliens won't be able to come in with me."

Donny backed away from the door. "That's what you'd say if you were an alien." He started to mutter and mumble to himself, chanting G.o.d knows whata"maybe incantations designed to keep the aliens at bay. Once he started doing that, there was no hope of having a regular conversation with Kim.

And Mary Lou's desperation and despair exploded in a burst of tempter. "Oh, for Christ's sake! I'm not an alien, you f.u.c.king freak!"

As soon as the words left her lips, she felt instantly like s.h.i.t on a stick. There was nothing Donny hated more than being called a freak. Except maybe having aliens really come down from Pluto and suck out his brains. And she wasn't even sure about that.

"Donny!" she called, ringing his doorbell again. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!"

He didn't answer. She listened hard, but now there was only silence from inside the house.

Mary Lou slumped down on the front steps to Donny's house, aware that she'd just shortened her list of friends by a full third. No wonder Sam hated her and sought comfort in the arms of another woman. No wonder Meg Nilsson and the other SEAL wives wanted nothing to do with her. No wonder she hadn't been able to make a single friend among the women and girls who worked at McDonald's.

She was a terrible person.

She started to cry.

She'd been holding it in since she was face-to-face with Alyssa at Mickey D's, but now it escaped, and she sobbed like a four-year-old with a skinned knee.

She was a terrible, lonely person.

She might as well go and get drunk. She might as well drink until she couldn't stand up, until she couldn't think, until she couldn't breathe anymore.

If it wasn't for Haley, she'd do it.

Of course if it wasn't for Haley, Mary Lou wouldn't be sitting right here. If it wasn't for Haley, she wouldn't be married to Sam.

Oh, Lord, all she'd ever wanted was to be married to someone like Sam Starrett and to live in a cute little house just like the one that she lived in.

Except here she was. On the surface, she had everything she'd ever wanted. But although Sam was her husband, he didn't love her. And although she finally had the house, it wasn't a real home.

G.o.d, it sucked.

And she wanted a drink as badly as she'd ever wanted anything in her life.

She pushed her giant a.s.s up and off Donny's concrete steps. She crossed his lawn and found herself standing out on her driveway.

Where her car was parked.

The car that she could climb into and use to drive herself to the Ladybug Lounge. It would be that easy.

Her keys were in her pocket. She took them out.

And threw them. As hard and as far as she could. All the way across her yard and into the yard of the neighbor on the other side of her house from Donny's. Into the carefully tended, thick patch of flowers and bushes next to the Robinsons' screened porch.

And then she sat down, right there in her driveway, and cried some more.

Wednesday, January 6,1944.

It was a day that would change her life forever, but Charlotte Fletcher had been completely unaware of that at the time.

She'd written in her diary, "Ate lunch at my desk again today, and still haven't managed to keep up with the typing. Stayed late, but Mrs. P. finally chased me out at 7:10.1 don't know why. I feel as if I'm helping the war effort while I'm there, and I've nothing to go home to. Mother F. was at her quilting circle at the church when I came in. This apartment that once held James's and my laughter is as silent and empty as I feel inside. And S. has brought yet another soldier home from the U.S.O. These walls and floors are paper thin. Or maybe the problem is mine. I find it impossible not to listen. Mother F. simply turns on the radio to mask the nightly noise, but I can't. Or maybe it's that I won't. It seems the perfect accompaniment to my misery as I lie alone and sleepless in this bed of mine that's far too cold."

That had been an added burden to her during the two years since James had been killeda"the fact that she missed the physical intimacy of their marriage so very sharply. It seemed petty and selfish, but she ached for more than just his smile and his arms around her. She missed his kisses, his touch, the way he'd quickly set her on fire.

Her loneliness was made worse by the upstairs tenant, Sally Slaggerty. Sally the s.l.u.t, Charlotte called her in her less kind moments. She'd moved into the apartment upstairs two months ago and seemed determined to have intimate relations with every member of the armed forces who pa.s.sed through Washington, D.C.

Charlotte again read the entry for January the sixth. "Ate lunch at my desk again today..." Nope, no mention at all of Vince, who'd come into the senator's office even earlier than she had that morning.

He'd been sitting there, in one of the straight-backed chairs that lined the outer office, waiting for a chance to talk to the senator, when she'd arrived at quarter to seven.

She might not have even noticed him were it not for the fact that he sat directly across from her desk. Whenever she looked up from her typing, there he was. Sometimes watching her, sometimes with his eyes shut.

He kept himself wrapped in a Navy overcoat. Only occasionally did she get a glimpse of the rumpled Marine uniform he wore beneath it.

He was painfully younga"Charlotte guessed nineteen at the most. He was quite handsome despite the fact that his face was thin and his cheeks hollow. His eyes and hair were both dark. He looked as Italian-American as his namea"Vincent DaCosta.

By ten A.M., Charlotte asked Mrs. Pierce in a low voice why the Marine had been kept waiting for so long.

Mrs. P. told her, also speaking quietly, that he hadn't an appointment. He'd been waiting outside the office door this morning when she'd unlocked it. Mrs. P. had informed him that the senator had no extra time today, but he asked if he might wait, on the chance that something might open up.

Charlotte ate her sandwich furtively at her desk, during one of the times he had his eyes closed. She knew that he must be hungry, but didn't know how to share lunch with such a handsome young man without seeming inappropriately forward.

At two P.M., when it became clear that the day was becoming more snarled rather than less, Charlotte went out from behind her desk and over to the Marine.

He got to his feet immediately, and she realized that he must've been injured recently, because, although he tried to hide it, she could see that it caused him pain just to stand.

"You're wasting your time today," she told him, quickly perching on the edge of the chair next to his, so that he could return to his seat as well. She didn't have time herself to be anything but direct. "I'm sorry, but Senator Howard will be going from one scheduled meeting to the next all afternoon. I think it would be wise for you to make an appointment."

"The next available appointment isn't for three weeks," the young man countered. He sat, but not before his face had turned another shade of pale. "I need to see him now."

"I'm sorry, buta"'

"Look, all I want is his ear for five short minutes."

"You and his wife," Charlotte said dryly. "Get in line."

The Marine didn't laugh. "It's very important," he said.

He may have been young and only an enlisted private in the Marines, but there was something about his dark eyes in that lean, pale face that was disconcerting.

"Everything that goes on in this office is very important," Charlotte informed him, retreating back behind her desk.

"May I wait here anyway, Miss... ?" he asked.

"Missus," she corrected him. "Fletcher. And yes, you may. It's still a free country, Private."

He smiled and it transformed his face, turning him from merely handsome into truly beautiful. "Yes, ma'am. I do believe that's what we're fighting for."

Joan liked both Jenk and Gilligan immediately.

Jenk was the shorter of the two. In fact, with his slight stature, his freckled face, and his cheerful smile, he looked to be even younger than Muldoon. More like a high school freshman than a Navy SEAL.

Gilligan was taller, with dark hair and an interesting.; angular nose that kept his face from being overly pretty.

They were both friendly and relaxed, and she didn't have to work overtime to make them laugh.

The SEAL nicknamed Cosmo was a different story. He not only was older than the other men, but he didn't say a word as she shook his hand in greeting. And although he kept his distance, running up and down the ropes as he rigged some kind of harness thingy to the top of the cargo net's frame, she got the sense that he was listening to everything that was being said.

It was entirely possible that he even smiled once or twice. But it was hard to tell, especially since he wore sungla.s.ses and she couldn't see his eyes.

They were all extremely physically fit. There was no doubt about ita"Brooke would enjoy this type of hands-on demonstration very much indeed. And the news photographers would be in heaven.

Anda"alleluiaa"there would finally be a positive news story and photo featuring Brooke Bryant on the front page of every paper across the country.

Muldoon took charge immediately, making sure they were ready to go. He gave orders effortlessly, without apology, maintaining his status of leader while at the same time managing to be a working part of the tight-knit unit.

It was more than obvious that the other mena"including Cosmo-the-silent-but-deadly, or maybe especially Cosmoa" completely respected him.

Joan couldn't help but be impressed.

Which, she suspected, was one of the reasons Muldoon had set up this little demonstration. Although she wasn't quite sure if his intention had been for her to be impressed by him, or by the Navy SEALs.

It was her guess that those two things were one and the same. Muldoon was the Navy SEALs, and the SEALs were made up of men like Muldoon.