Jerry closed his eyes.

“I was kind of hoping he’d resist arrest,” Zack said.

“No, you were not,” Anthony said. “You have plans for lunch. You’re arresting a master embezzler at Harvey ’s Diner. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” Zack pushed Jerry into the hall. “The weather. I hate February. And I hate office buildings.” He looked around at the smooth gray walls. “Maybe I will quit. Get a nice job out in the open someplace. No guns. You think I’d make a good forest ranger?”

“You know, you worry me,” Anthony said.

“That’s your problem.” Zack moved down the hall, prodding Jerry in front of him. “So, Jerry, what’d you do with the money?”


LUCY SAT SLUMPED across from her sister in a battered turquoise booth in Harvey ’s shabby diner and tortured her salad.

Tina scowled down at her own salad. “Are you sure it’s safe to eat here? I think turquoise Formica is bad for you, and I’m positive this lettuce is. It’s white.” She tapped a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it smoothly, like a forties’ movie star.

Lucy leaned forward to put her chin in her hand so she could pretend to listen to Tina, and her brassy hair fell into her face again. Tina smoothed a dark, silky strand of her own precisely cut hair, and Lucy looked at her with envy. Maybe they weren’t sisters. Maybe Mother had lied to them. No, they had the same cat face: wide forehead, big eyes, little mouth, pointed chin. It was just that Tina looked like a purebred, and she looked like something condemned at the pound.

Stop it, Lucy told herself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re just having a bad hair day.

Well, okay, a bad hair week. And then there was the divorce.

You’re just having a bad month. Pull yourself together. Spring is coming.

“You are going to get rid of his name, aren’t you?” Tina asked. “Lucy Savage Porter always sounded like you’d married a rabid bellboy.”

Shut up, Tina. Lucy blinked. “Could we talk about something else?” She squashed her hair back to peer around the dim restaurant, hoping no one else had heard. Since the place was not only dim but small, it was a real fear, but it was also almost empty. There was only a bored waitress leaning on a chipped plastic counter beside a fly-specked case of doughnuts, and two men in a booth identical to theirs on the opposite side of the room.

Lucy was having a hard time ignoring one of the men.

One was tall, slender, and elegant, leaning calmly back in the booth, not a crease in his beautifully cut tweed suit.

The other man was his antithesis. Shorter, thicker, tense as a coiled spring in a creased black leather jacket, he leaned across the table and stabbed his index finger into the Formica. His unshaven face looked as if it were made of slabs, his hair was dark and shaggy, and his smile came and went like a broken neon sign. He was so intense, he was practically bending the table with the force of his personality. Lucy had been reluctantly aware of him ever since they’d entered the diner, kicking herself for stealing glances at him but stealing them just the same.

This was the kind of man who could leave a woman scarred for life. She wasn’t so dumb after all. She could have ended up married to somebody like him instead of Bradley.

But think how much excitement she would have had before the end.

“No, that would have been dumb,” she said aloud.

“What would be?” Tina asked.

“Nothing.” Lucy turned back to her. “That’s a beautiful suit you’re wearing.”

“It should be. It cost a fortune. You couldn’t afford it. If you had to make a bad marriage, and I suppose you did since it runs in the family, couldn’t you at least have chosen somebody with money?”

“No.” Lucy picked up her fork and jabbed at her salad, spearing a cucumber slice because it was there. “Money isn’t important.”

“Oh? And what is important? And, whatever it is, why did you think that loser Bradley Porter had it? In fact, why did you marry him at all?”

Lucy thought of several cutting things to say about her sister’s second and third husbands and then blinked instead. “I married him because of the second law of thermonuclear dynamics.”

“You married him because of a physics theory?” Tina put her cigarette out in one of her salad tomatoes, pushed the bowl away, and lit up another. “Well, at least you didn’t say ‘for lo-o-ove.’” She blew her smoke away from Lucy. “So what’s the second law of thermodynamics?”

“It says that isolated systems move toward disorder until they reach their most probable form, and then they remain constant.”

“I don’t get it. And what does that have to do with Bradley?”

“Nothing. But it has everything to do with me.” Lucy pushed her bowl away with one hand and shoved her hair out of her eyes with the other. “I was an isolated system. I mean, there I was, living alone in that little apartment with Einstein for company, and Einstein is great company, but he’s also a dog.”

“I wondered if you’d noticed that.”

“Well, of course, I noticed. And I’d been teaching science for twelve years. Lecturing to kids all day and then going home alone to grade papers at night The only real social contacts I had were at your weddings.”

Tina stuck her tongue out at her and pulled a pepper strip from Lucy’s salad bowl.

“And then one day in class, we got to the second law, and I thought, ‘That’s me. I’m an isolated system, and I’m just going to get more isolated until I reach my most probable form which is probably where I am now, living in an apartment with Einstein.’ So I decided to get unisolated. And that’s when Bradley picked me up in the library and I thought, ‘This must be it Physics has brought us together.’ I mean, his timing was so perfect. It was so logical.”

Tina shook her head. “No wonder you’re so screwed up. Life is not logical, and marriage certainly isn’t. Stop analyzing things so much. Try impulse for a change.”

“I was impulsive once. I married Bradley after I’d only known him two months.” Lucy felt a twinge of shame even as she said the words. She’d been stupid. Really stupid. “So I’m not a fan of impulse anymore. And, no offense, but I don’t see impulse doing much for you.”

Tina smiled. “I’ve got twelve and a half million dollars, darling. And what have you got? A moth-eaten house and custody of three dogs. Impulse has done more for me than logic has for you. Just look at you. Do you ever have any fun?”

“Fun?” Lucy’s eyes went to the dark-haired man across the room. “Fun.” She shifted her gaze back to Tina and picked up her fork to attack her salad again. “I don’t think I’m the fun type.”

“Well, I think you’re taking life too seriously. It’s time you cut loose. Do something wild. Something spontaneous.”

Lucy frowned at her. “I told you. I did something spontaneous once. I married Bradley. Face it, Tina, I’m not the spontaneous type.”

Tina shook her head. “Marrying Bradley was not spontaneous. You just gave me a very sensible reason why you married him. Spontaneous is when it’s not sensible but you do it anyway because you want to.”

“That’s not spontaneous, that’s irresponsible.”

“Fine, then do something irresponsible. In fact, do something spontaneous and irresponsible. Do something just because you have the urge to do it, because it feels good. Do something selfish, just for you.”

Lucy’s eyes went back to the dark-haired man across the room. “I don’t think so.” She stabbed her salad again.

“How do you know unless you’ve tried it? You’ve never done anything selfish in your life.”

“Well, you know, I did,” Lucy said slowly, her fork frozen in her hand. “Once. In fact, I think that’s the real reason why I married Bradley. I dated Bradley because of the second law, but I think I married Bradley to get my house.”

Tina looked interested. “Really? That’s so unlike you.”

Lucy nodded. “I think I just convinced myself I loved him because he offered me the house.” She poked at her salad again, averting her eyes from Tina. “I love the house more than I ever loved Bradley. I think he knew it finally, and that’s why he cheated on me.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Tina put her cigarette out and leaned back in the booth. “This explains a lot. Is this what that fight you had last October was about?”

“How did you know…?”

“That’s when you moved upstairs to the attic bedroom. I never bought that story about Bradley snoring. I knew there had been a fight.”

“No.” Lucy frowned. “There wasn’t. We never fought. We just had a…disagreement. Over one of the dogs.”

Tina winced. “For anyone else that would be a minor disagreement. For you…if Bradley did something to one of those dogs, he couldn’t have known you very well. And this explains why you’re not brokenhearted over the divorce. You’re upset, but it’s not because you miss Bradley. You’re glad he’s gone, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Lucy whispered. “That’s awful, but I am.”

“No, it’s not. That’s healthy. What I don’t understand is what you’re so upset about. You’re free. You can do anything you want. What’s wrong with you?”

“I feel stupid,” Lucy said.

“What?” Tina leaned forward. “You? You’ve got more brains than…”

“Not real-life brains. I have science brains. But real life?” Lucy shook her head. “I don’t even know what happened in my marriage. I know it was awful for me, but I would have sworn to you that Bradley was happy and he loved me, and then out of the blue, I come home and find him with a blonde. In my house. And she says they’ve been having an affair in my bedroom, and he flusters around, obviously guilty, and when I get upset, he leaves.” She sat back. “He just leaves.”