ason was in the kitchen, showing Hilda how to prepare what he wanted to eat for lunch, when Courtney Maitland arrived, so Joe O'Hara went to the front door to let her in. "I'll tell Courtney to keep it short," he told Leigh.

"No, don't do that. I'd like her to stay for a while."

"Just don't let her talk you into playing gin rummy with her," he said, opening the door, "because she cheats."

"I do not," Courtney retorted, stepping into the foyer.

Over her shoulder, Leigh smiled at the sixteen-year-old's latest fashion statement. Tall, slim, and flat-chested, she was wearing her permed dark hair pulled up into a thick ponytail over her left ear, a red woolen scarf around her neck, a sweatshirt that said Nirvana, a pair of jeans with huge holes in the knees and thighs, and a pair of combat boots, unlaced. For earrings, she'd chosen what appeared to be three-inch-long gold safety pins.

"I didn't realize you and Joe knew each other," Leigh said.

"I hung around up here while you were in the hospital," Courtney explained. "It was the only way I could find out anything."

In front of the sofa, Courtney gazed down at Leigh's face, and it was the first time Leigh had ever seen her look solemn, but her remark was typically and refreshingly irreverent. "Wow," she said. "When I saw the pictures of your car on TV being brought back here on a wrecker, I thought you'd look like you'd been in a really bad accident."

"How do I look?"

"Like you've been rollerblading," she said with an impish grin. "On your face."

Leigh laughed, and the sound of it seemed foreign and unfamiliar to her.

"Do you have company?" Courtney asked as Jason's voice drifted in from the kitchen. "If you do, I can come back later."

"No, don't go. In fact, you'll be doing me a favor if you stay. The man who is here is a good friend who thinks that conversation is just what I need, but I'm having a little trouble concentrating on the subjects that interest him right now."

O'Hara had been standing close by, waiting to ask Courtney if she wanted something to drink. "Why don't you let Courtney play gin rummy with him," he said crossly. "He'll be flat broke in a half hour and need to borrow money for a taxi."

Courtney gave him a disgusted look. "I will be on my very best behavior," she promised Leigh. "I will listen to him very attentively and say all the right things."

"Just be yourself. I'm not worried about anything you may say. I'm worried about what Jason may say in front of you."

"Really? That's a switch. My father usually breaks into a cold sweat whenever I walk into a room with strangers in it." To O'Hara she said, "If you want to try to win your money back, I'll give you a chance later, in the kitchen."

"I'll go find an ATM machine in the meantime. You want your usual—Coke with a maraschino cherry and a shot of chocolate syrup?"

"My God, that sounds vile! " Jason said, walking in with a plate in his right hand and a martini in his left.

Leigh introduced them to each other. "Courtney is enrolled in a special writing program at Columbia for gifted high school students," she told Jason as he put his plate and drink on the coffee table. With one glance, he took in the teenager's tattered jeans and well-worn combat boots, and dismissed her with a shrug. "Good," he said without a trace of interest.

Leigh flinched at his rudeness. "Courtney, this is Jason Solomon, who wrote Blind Spot. "

"It got great reviews when Leigh was in it," she said, sitting down carefully on Leigh's sofa.

Jason frowned at her casual use of Leigh's first name and then addressed her in the superior tone of an adult lecturing a backward eight-year-old. "Miss Kendall," he emphasized, "is a very fine actress, but it takes more than fine acting to make a Broadway play a critical success."

Instead of replying, Courtney snapped her fingers, jumped up, and headed for the kitchen. "I forgot to tell O'Hara to skip the ice in my Coke."

As soon as he thought she was out of earshot, Jason leaned forward. "Do you know the couple she's staying with in your building?"

"No."

"Well, you ought to warn them. I know another wealthy couple who let an impoverished student move in with them while she went to school. The girl seduced their son when he came home for Christmas, she got pregnant, and it cost them a fortune to pay her off. She wanted the boy to marry her! Girls like Courtney have big social ambitions. They attend school on scholarships while trying to ingratiate themselves with wealthy, unsuspecting families like the one she's staying with—" He glanced over his shoulder, saw Courtney coming toward them with a Coke in her hand, and broke off.

Leigh considered setting him straight, but she was so disappointed in his assumptions that she decided to either let Courtney handle it or let him go on thinking whatever he wanted. She smiled at Courtney as she sat down on the sofa. "Did you find out what your journalism class assignment is yet—the assignment that's going to account for half your final grade?"

Courtney nodded. "We have to interview the most famous or influential person we can possibly get access to, and the harder it normally is to get an interview with that person, the higher our grade will be. Grades will also be based on the quality of the interview, the uniqueness of the 'slant' we take for the interview, the quality of any new or unusual information we extract from that person, and the overall quality of our reporting. Only one Awill be given. I have the highest average in the class right now, but not by a big margin, so the pressure is really on me."

"Do you have any idea who you want to interview?"

She shot Leigh a guilty smile. "You were the first person I thought of, but we're supposed to really dig around for… well… new information, buried secrets, things no one else has discovered in their interviews. Even if you had any deep, dark secrets, I wouldn't want to betray them to anyone."

"Thank you for that," Leigh said with a relieved sigh. "Who else do you have in mind?"

"No one yet. Camille Bingley is going to interview Archbishop Lindley—he's a friend of her dad's. She thinks she might be able to get him to reveal new things about the problems in the Catholic Church right now. Brent Gentner's father is a friend of Senator Kennedy's, and Brent is positive he can get an interview with the senator." She paused to sip her drink. "In order for me to outdo Camille and Brent, I'd have to get an interview with the pope or the president."

Jason's voice was amused. "Do you think you could pull that off?"

"If I wanted to. The problem is that the pope is really sick, and the president already gives lots of interviews—"

"Even if that weren't true, they might be a little difficult for you to reach," Jason pointed out condescendingly.

Courtney gaped at him as if she couldn't believe anyone was as obtuse as he. "I wouldn't telephone them myself. I would call Noah and ask him to do it."

"Noah—as in 'the ark'?" Jason joked.

"Noah—as in my brother."

"I see. Your brother, Noah, has a direct line to the pope and the president?"

"I'm not sure about the pope. We're not Catholic, but Noah donated the land where—"

Suddenly Jason tied her brother's first name to Courtney's last name, and came up with the name of a renowned Florida billionaire. "Your brother is Noah Maitland?" he exclaimed.

"Yes."

"The Noah Maitland?"

"I'm sure there are others. I don't think Noah has copyrighted his name yet. He's probably tried, though," she added with an irreverent grin.

Leigh knew what was coming next, and she braced herself. Jason was a brilliant wordsmith, but he'd made the mistake of openly patronizing a sixteen-year-old who had a genius IQ and absolutely no social inhibitions about saying whatever it took to shock her adversary into speechlessness. Leigh had seen Courtney in action on a few other occasions.

"The Noah Maitland from Palm Beach?" Jason persisted.

"Yes."

Jason gaped at her youthful, freckled face and undeveloped figure. "How could that happen?"

"The same way it always happens: Sperm meets egg, fertilization occurs—"

"I mean," Jason interrupted, "I was under the impression Noah Maitland was in his forties."

"He is. Noah and I have the same father, but different mothers."

"Ah," Jason said, his mind inevitably focusing on the possibility of obtaining yet another backer for a future play, a backer with bottomless pockets. Trying to atone for his former blatant disinterest in her, he began plying Courtney with the sort of questions he assumed other people must ask sixteen-year-olds. "And do you have any other brothers or sisters?"

"No, but my father has had four wives, so I'm sure he tried."

"It must have been terribly lonely for you growing up," he said sympathetically.

"Not at all. Two of my father's wives were nearly as young as I was. I played with them."

Jason gawked at her, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, and Leigh reached for Courtney's hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze. "Courtney, you don't realize it, but this is a momentous occasion. Normally, Jason is responsible for saying the sort of things that make people look exactly as he does right now."

Jason reached the same conclusion, and for a moment he stared at Courtney with what appeared to be disgruntled awe; then he leaned back and grinned at her. "I'll bet you are a first-class pain in the ass."

"No," she corrected him proudly, "I am a world-class pain in the ass."

Since Jason and Courtney seemed to have established a reasonably cordial truce, Leigh leaned back against the sofa and pulled a peach cashmere throw over her that she'd been using earlier.

Their voices ebbed and flowed around her.

Her eyes closed…

She awoke with a start when Jason kissed her cheek. "I'm leaving. My ego cannot bear another affront. Not only did my hostess fall asleep while I was talking, but that irritating brat just relieved me of fifty dollars in two hands of gin rummy in the kitchen."

When he left, Leigh listened for a while to O'Hara and Courtney playing cards in the kitchen; then she forced herself to get up. Michael Valente would be arriving at any time, and she decided to splash cold water on her face and brush her hair. For nearly a week, she'd been wound tight with tension, unable to sleep, shaking inside and outside. Now she could barely put one foot in front of the other.