Mirabella sniffed and whispered miserably, “I know.”

There was a flurry of leave-taking while everyone paid one last visit to the bathroom, traded hugs and goodbyes and promises to call, and then the Mercedes crunched away down the driveway and turned left onto the paved road. Mirabella watched, rubbing her arms against the chill, until she could no longer see the big car’s taillights in the dusk. Then she turned and went back inside.

She walked through the house, turning on a light here, turning one off there, tidying… setting things to rights. It was always a relief to have her home back to normal again. As much as she loved her family, and had come to love Jimmy Joe’s, Mirabella did cherish her space and her privacy. And order. Yes, she did like things to be orderly-organized, planned, everything in its place.

Maybe, she thought with a rare flash of insight, that was what she found hard to take about her oldest sister. Eve-and her life-were so disorderly. Chaotic, tempestuous, impulsive, spontaneous, uninhibited-qualities many found charming, Mirabella knew, but she found them discomfiting. Even alarming.

Feeling indefinably better, she was heading upstairs to check on the condition of the bathrooms when the doorbell rang. Back down the stairs she went, utterly mystified. Peepholes being all but unheard of in her part of the world, Mirabella called through the door, “Who is it?”

There was a pause, and then… “FBI, ma‘am,” said a voice-a man’s voice, and strangely familiar. “Jake Red-Sold-we’ ve spoken on the phone.”

Mirabella threw open the door and stared at the man who stood there on her front porch. She was unable to utter a single word, her heart was pounding so hard.

The first thing she thought was that he didn’t look like an FBI agent. Not at all the way she’d pictured him. He was wearing casual clothes-didn’t all FBI agents wear suits and ties?-and his hair was unruly, with a tendency to stick out in spikes, as if he’d slept on it wrong. He had a long, melancholy face and grave, deep-set eyes and a bad case of five o‘clock shadow.

But he was holding his ID up in front of his chest, holding it into the light where she could see it. She stared at it intently, then back at his face.

“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Starr,” he said in his grave voice. “May I come inside? I’d like to talk to you. It’s about your sister.”

Mirabella’s heart lurched. “Summer? But I thought that was over.”

“No, ma‘am. This is about your other sister. Eve.”

“Evie?” said Mirabella faintly. She thought, I was right I was right.

“If you’ll let me come in,” said Agent Redfield, “I’ll explain everything.”


“You want to do what?” Don Coffee shouted. “Are the two of you completely out of your minds?”

Birdie raised his eyebrows in a look that said plainly, Hey, don’t look at me.

Thanks, buddy, Jake thought as he shuffled gamely into the breech. “We believe there’d be a minimum of risk-”

“Have you forgotten,” his supervisor interrupted in a derisive tone, “what happened the last time I authorized an operation involving the use of a private residence? This particular residence? The only thing that saved us from civilian casualties, as I recall, was some quick thinking on the part of a couple of household pets.”

Jake threw up his hands and muttered, “Aw, for Pete’s sake-”

But before he could say more and maybe get himself in real hot water, Birdie interceded, saying diplomatically, “Sir, the difficulties encountered on that operation involved a hurricane. The odds against that happening a second time have got to be…way up there.” Coffee snorted. Birdie glanced at Jake and cleared his throat. “If I’m not mistaken, sir, hurricane season officially ends on the thirtieth of November.”

Coffee muttered something sarcastic about December and blizzards, and Birdie argued that Charleston, South Carolina, didn’t really have all that many blizzards, but by that time Jake had regained control of his temper.

He said patiently, “The difference here is that we have a definite time frame, and we will be on the premises the whole time. We’ll go in there in advance, have the place wired before anybody else gets there. This is a surveillance operation, nothing more. Every move Cisneros makes will be on camera. If he finds what he’s looking for, we wait until he’s clear of the premises before we make a move. If he doesn’t find it, no harm, no foul.” He glared at his supervisor, arms outstretched and eyebrows raised to add an unspoken “Well?”

Coffee glared back at him. Then exhaled and growled, “Redfield, I can think of a dozen things that could go wrong.”

So could Jake, but there was no way in hell he was going to admit it. “We’re going to be there to make sure it doesn’t.”

“There will be children there.”

“Yes, sir. We’ve factored that in. We intend to make every possible provision to ensure their safety.”

Coffee rose and disgustedly sailed a file folder onto his desk. “Ah, damn,” he muttered with a sigh, “I miss the old Mafia. At least they had rules about involving families-wives and kids. These newcomers-the Russians, Asians, Colombians, freelancers-they’re capable of anything. All bets are off.”

Jake and his partner looked at each other. Jake cleared his throat. “Does that mean-”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve got your authorization. But Redfield, hear this-” and he leaned forward on his hands and drilled him with his patented cold-steel stare “-you’d better make damn sure nothing happens to make me regret it. I don’t intend for my career in federal law enforcement to end with this operation. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Jake and Birdie chorused.

“Okay. You’ve got…what is it, three weeks? I’ll expect the full details of the operation on my desk by tomorrow morning. I assume you’ve talked to all the parties involved? You have their full cooperation?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jake staunchly, “full and wholehearted.” Which was an understatement-the Waskowitz sisters had expressed delight and enthusiasm for the plan.

With one notable exception. Jake wasn’t afraid of very many things, but when he thought about how Eve was going to take to the idea of using her family’s Christmas gathering to set a trap for her fiancé, he got a bad case of the cold-and-clammies…

Chapter 14

If Eve had found the pace of her days monotonous before the Thanksgiving holiday, afterward they seemed to crawl by with a soul-sapping tedium she imagined must be akin to doing hard time in a maximum-security prison.

Sonny left the Saturday after Thanksgiving to go back to Las Vegas to tend to business, which was an immense relief to her for more reasons than one. He’d been in a mood ever since the blowup in the Jacuzzi, still sulking over his enforced celibacy, so being around him was already a strain. Add to that her feelings of guilt over what had happened between her and Jake in the sleeper of Jimmy Joe’s eighteen-wheeler…

No, not guilt, exactly. It wasn’t guilt she felt when she thought of that. Longing… hunger… craving… desire-yes, all of those. But not guilt. She felt certain that if ever in her life she had done something right, making love with Jake was it. It was regret at not being able to repeat the occasion that was hard to abide and to hide from those around her, and a sense of impatience at time being wasted, a deep and constant yearning to be with someone, and to be someplace, other than where she was.

To make matters worse, the lovely autumn days had finally come to an end. Although winter would not officially arrive for weeks, the weather had already declared its intent. Chilly drizzle alternated with a dreary overcast. Everything was wet, a cold dampness that penetrated clear to the bone, and stayed that way for days on end. California desert-raised, Eve longed for even a glimpse of the sun.

Somehow the days did pass. She went, trembling inside, to her first scheduled physical therapy session after the holiday, but Jake didn’t show, and she was too proud to ask the FBI’s therapist about him. After that she called and made excuses not to go, claiming she had a cold and didn’t feel up to it.

Then, after stubbornly refusing to give up her daily walks along the fog-shrouded marshes, she actually did come down with a cold, her first in years and one of the worst she’d ever suffered. She spent her days in front of the television, sniffling into soggy tissues over the likes of Casablanca and An Affair To Remember, as the pounds that had slipped away unnoticed a few weeks before came gleefully home, and brought friends. The calendar rolled over into December, and she still had not given a thought to Christmas.

On Saturday morning, the week after Thanksgiving, Sergei interrupted the death scene in A Farewell To Arms to inform her, with sneering deference, that she had a telephone call.

“Who is it?” Eve asked soggily and without much interest, blowing her nose. Surely not Sonny; it wasn’t even seven o‘clock in the morning in Las Vegas-practically the middle of the night to a night owl like him.

“She said she is your sister,” said Sergei stiffly. He handed her a cordless phone and went out.

Eve sniffed and punched the button. “H‘lo? Bella…?”

“It’s me, Summer. Evie? Are you crying?”

“What? Oh, doh-well, yeah, but…dot really. I was watching this ridiculous movie. Plus I have a cold. What’s up? You sound upset. Is everything-”

“Oh, Evie. It’s Bella. She’s gone into early labor! She might lose the baby. I’m going up there now-can you come?”


It was afternoon when Eve pushed through the Augusta hospital’s slow-to-open automatic doors with two beefy and edgy-looking men close on her heels. A lavender-haired lady in a pink smock at the information desk in the main lobby directed her to Maternity on the fourth floor.