We didn't meet Jenny at the Rheingold pavilion, at least not right away. We were on our way in one of those VIP trams when the driver, checking in with his dispatcher, was told to take 'those Brillstein girls' over to the 'Atomedic' station with no further explanation. With our heads properly swelled by the days attention, we figured maybe The Fair wanted some more publicity pictures. We were greeted in the lobby by a worried looking Heather telling us that Jenny had some sort of fainting spell or something.

"Geeze... What happened? Some glass get broken? Cuz she has a problem with that."

"No... we'd just finished loading the car... I'd tipped up the hand truck so we could return it but it fell back down... When I looked over at her she was sliding down the side of her car. I tried to talk to her to see what's the matter but she was completely out of it for like maybe a minute. I have a cousin with epilepsy that gets like that."

We explained to her about the suicide jumper who'd smashed down on top of her car and how a crashing sound gets to her sometimes. Heather asked if she'd seen an analyst about that and we told her that Jenny didn't think it would do any good. She has this idea that psychiatry is really only about digging up things you'd maybe forgotten about to get to the heart of whatever was the matter with you. She knew damn well the root of what ailed her so why throw good money after bad?

"Ugh... That sister of yours seems to have gone through to the pit of my subconscious..."

It was fair to say we weren't expecting to run into Doug Montelli on a night like this - or ever again for that matter. Figuring maybe his wing was bothering him, we asked him all friendly-like what he was in for. It turned out he'd been trying to catch our show but kept missing it and happened to be in the clinic looking to get a compress for that bum shoulder of his for the drive home. Naturally he was concerned about Jenny too.

"I'm fi-i-i-ine," she crabbed. "I didn't eaten much all day and I got a little light headed... Can we go eat no-o-o-o-o-ow?"

The medics had nothing to hold her on so she was let out with the admonition to eat better. Not one to disregard sound medical advice, we all resumed our journey to Rheingold's 'Little Old New York' pavilion where Jenny 'filled her prescription' with a heaping plate of corned beef and German potato salad to go with her complimentary glass of the magic elixir that is Rheingold beer. We and Heather had filled up beforehand so we went three ways on a basket of soft pretzels and mustard to nosh on and four ways on a pitcher of beer for when that first free one runs out. We got to our café table just in time for the hurdy-gurdy man to begin grinding out 'The Sidewalks of New York'.

"He was the partner of my ex-boss... had a falling out last spring. Big mess... was on the news all summer practically."

"Ohhh... that was you? Wow... Wait... didn't you used to be Lady Desdemona?"

"Yeah... that's something they never let you stop being... even if you never really were. Still... it had its fun moments... and I got to write off a trip to Europe. Y'know... if you plan of going anywhere with that art of yours, you better incorporate if you wanna keep any of the money you make."

"Yeah, that lady from the gallery... Elizabeth, was telling me that... So... what was it like being one of those 'ladies they talk about' for real?"

"Wasn't exactly thrilled about it... but it wasn't all that bad... I knew I was in the right... and I could back it up if I had to... The thing that bothered me more... it was the fuss everyone was making over saving that little kid's life... Oh, that's what really got to me... I coulda taken being thought of as some wanton little stinker, but... Man... why couldn't it have gone down like that whole 'Surf Angel' business? Call me selfish, but it sure must've been nice to have something really big like that all to yourself... and nobody can come along and try to take little pieces of it away from you."

"I'm sorry but I just don't understand that kind of thinking at all... Life is precious... You so much as said it yourself... Hey, it's like the man said, save a life, save the world... A little well deserved publicity isn't gonna hurt anyone... and it sure helped you out in the end."

"Yeah, but that sorta thing eats you up inside. All the things I was thinking about when I was in the middle of it... I had no way of knowing if I was already too late or worse if... It's just not something I wanted them finding out about. Why give 'em the satisfaction?"

"I dunno... 'peace through understanding' maybe? From the way that guy was talking, it looked like he was trying to say something."

"That ship has sailed... My contract was up and I was going to leave anyway. I don't want to talk about it anymore. It's the twins' birthday... which reminds me..."

Jenny drew a couple wrapped presents from that snail bag of hers and handed them to us. For our collection of twins-related memorabilia she gave us an old time poster for the Dolly Sisters she'd found in a Hollywood poster store. The other present was a random assortment of 'French' postcards wrapped inside one of those boxes blank checks come in for our 'other' collection.

The ones in the envelope looked like and in fact were younger visions of Eloise and her friend Verna gamboling about in their garden. We showed Heather the one where Eloise is letting a bronze fountain cherub 'pee' on her chest while Verna looks on with the explanation that she's the wife of that guy we were all talking about.

"Whoa! I didn't know they had 'golden showers' back then!"

"Oh, they had everything back then," Jenny replied. "You should read the things we couldn't run in that serialization of her life story. Those Weimar Germans were really into the fetish scene. I don't know how they're gonna make that into a movie."

Jenny wouldn't have to wait long to find out how as there was a message from Eddie waiting for her when we finally got home. While she dialed the company exchange to return his call, we retreated to our room to put away our presents, equipment and memories of the day. The reckoning to come with our parents can wait for tomorrow. Or not. At a quarter to eleven, we got a telephone call from dear old dad fuming about that 'Siamese cat-nap' picture. News sure travels fast these days. We let him carry on for maybe a half hour before we cut him off with our standard 'What are you ashamed of us?' histrionics. That buys us a ten minute guilt salvo starting with 'I'm only trying to look out for my little girls' followed by tales of the days when kidnappers roamed the dusty plains of Oklahoma and ending with 'mother wants to know when you two are coming home'.

"We were thinking of letting Jenny fly us home. She's got her physical coming up and she's probably gonna want to prove herself. Anyways her friend Naomi is letting us do a story... you know the one where we profile a modern version of that turn of the century family Life ran with last year? We figure it'd be nice to get some shots of her in the air."

It was perhaps the most informally laid plans for the near future and still things didn't turn out that way. With Mother Platt still working the Olympic games on the other side of the world, Jenny, with the tacit approval of her father, managed to get an appointment with one of their approved doctors on Thursday. That gave her the whole of Wednesday at Zahn's field to shake the dust off her flying craft. It had been a good over seven months since she'd been at the helm.

We all arrived at the field to find the Platt family's flying craft parked next the main hanger getting looked over by the mechanic, who in turn was being looked over by a couple of men in gray flannel suits holding notepads. They must've been satisfied with whatever they were looking at, because they were gone by the time we'd made the short walk over from the parking lot.

"Hey Douglie! What brings you to this side of the island? Gonna have another go at the waves?"

"I was thinking of taking flying lessons! Surf bum thing didn't work out so good... Hey, you supposed to be messin' around up there... oh..."

He had just ambled close enough to make out the 'Platt Air Services' livery plastered on the side.

"I remember you sayin' your dad had a plane, but a DC-3? The airlines are still using these..."

"Actually this is a C-47. Dad used to fly these during the war. Picked this up at a surplus auction after... They were practically giving these away! Hey, come on up... I need ya for something."

You couldn'tve seen someone move faster if you asked a couple Oklahoma twins if they wanted to sit in the cab of a locomotive. Jenny met him halfway down the cabin to give him the nickel tour. Not that there was anything special to see, a 'head' in the back, five rows of four across seating with a couple bench seats up front that covered a pair of equipment lockers. Between the cabin and the cockpit was a food service vestibule.

"On some of our longer flights, we buy meals from the same catering service the airlines use. Never fails to impress the clients... but you want to see the flight deck, don't you?"

Of course he did. Ever the gracious host, she offered him the captains chair and ever the gracious guest he demurred, saying something about having to earn that sort of thing and taking the copilot's chair. We planted ourselves in the jump seat behind Jenny as she pulled out the preflight checklist cards and handed one to Douglas.

"Hey... are we going somewhere?"

"Oh no... we just have enough fuel for an engine run up... Maybe we'll do a taxi around the field... this may have been cheap to buy but it gets a little spendy to use. Operating costs are a bit more than any of them Cessnas down there. We like to fly with a full load whenever we can... Now... I want to see if this leg of mine is back up to strength... I'm gonna need you to stand on the rudder pedals a little while I try to move them on my side... No you don't hafta try and stop me. I'm just trying to simulate a wind load... Ohhhh... that's a nice strong breeze..."

"Huh? I said 'nice strong breeze'. Why do you ask?"

"I thought you said 'nice strong beat'... sounded familiar for some reason."

Sounded familiar to us too but before we could say anything, Jenny had turned her attention to going down the checklist for an engine run up. A minute or two of flipping switches and twiddling dials and the engines whirled to life with a cough or two in the meantime. She played with the throttles and mixture controls for another minute till she was satisfied with their settings. After sitting motionless for a couple more minutes she looked back at the checklist, then poked her head out the window to ask the mechanic to pull away the wheel chocks, 'little Jenny' felt like going out for a spin.

With less than seventy gallons of fuel in tanks that could hold over eight hundred, we weren't going to go very far but we sure were light enough to make good time on the way. She did a couple runs up and down the largely unused three thousand foot runway before nosing her way to the leeward end of the forty-two hundred footer.

"Y'know," Jenny mused as she opened the throttle, "I feel like doing a Howard Hughes today."

Before Douglas could ask that was she was calling airspeeds as we rolled down the runway. We were two-thirds of the way down when the plane got noticeably quieter. We were in the air. Sure you could reach down and pick apples off the trees whizzing below, but we were airborne. The green turned to blue and we leveled off at around a hundred-fifty feet as we crossed the South Bay. We were out in the Atlantic when Jenny eased into the long slow turnaround for home, forming a grand figure-8 in the sky as she made her alignment turn back into the wind for landing.

The turn had been wide enough to bring us with eyeshot of that beach in Hecksher Park where the Surf Angel washed ashore. Jenny offered to fly in for a closer look but Douglas wasn't particularly interested. While Jenny did her post-flight walk around, he fished a wad of wax paper out of his pocket and stared at it, as if debating his next move.

"Uhm.. Jen... I had a reason for coming out here..."

As Jenny turned her attention to him, he carefully unwrapped the wad of paper.

"What'cha got there Douglie?"

"One of the reporters gave me this... didn't exactly say where he got it."

"He only gave me part of it... the other part they pulled out of my skull. See how they match? He didn't say where he got it but I remember he gave you a lot of good coverage after that scandal thing broke. Figured you might know something about it."

"He was up in my office at home... and I remember him playing with a tooth like that. Now I've had one laying around for years... Gee... you don't suppose he'd had it all along and was trying to get more story than was there?"

"So you know nothing about this?"

"I don't have a lot of memory from that day. Wish I could help you, but... I don't know, maybe some people are just better off not being found. At least that's how I would've wanted it."

Later that evening, as we were getting ready for bed, we looked over to Jenny's room to find her rummaging through dresser and cabinet drawers. Not finding what she was looking for, she crossed the hall and continued her quest in her office. Still not finding what she was looking for, she raced downstairs to the dining room to search the White Metal Cabinet from top to bottom, pulling out and returning boxes all the way down. At long last she found her prize, the fully intact thresher shark's tooth she'd saved. Running her fingers though her hair and scratching her head, she puzzled over it for a spell before returning it to its box, cleaning up her mess and going back upstairs to bed.

There wasn't much to be said about Jenny's flight physical except that she took it passed it and was now qualified to fly the J Platt and Company plane on the company's time and dime for the following year. Even if she hadn't passed, she still had time left on her Class Three certificate, though she would've grounded herself anyway. To commemorate the symbolic end of her summer tribulations, she had Avi and Jamie move that medical bed from the sun porch to the garage where it was folded up, covered with a tarp and shoved into a corner, with the hope that it would never be used again.

Jenny was straightening up the sun porch when she got a call from Bitsey congratulating her on her bill of good health and inquiring about her plans for the weekend. We hadn't asked about having her fly us back to Oklahoma so she said she was up for anything. They wanted to put together some sort of flying day trip with some friends but they hadn't figured on a destination yet. Maybe a half hour later Jenny gets a call from her dad. How about a nice trip to Corning, New York? A couple executives were in town to visit the fair and wanted a ride back on Sunday and anyway he had some business in Albany to attend to. She told him of Bitsey's tentative plans and suggested he call her to work out the details of arranging a tour of their glass museum.

We had no objections.

"Just so you know, you'll be earning your keep on this trip. Dad has a job in Albany he could use your help on."

You have to go and twist our arms.

We were back at the airport to look over the equipment Jenny's dad wanted our help with when one of those men in suits from the other day returned. By way of an introduction, he tapped the frame of the open door with his notepad, poked his head inside and asked which one of us was Jennifer Platt. A stupid question once he got a better look at us. Flashing what we thought was a notepad but was in fact his badge, he identified himself as Secret Service and asked if he could come aboard.

"Yeah come on in... we have no secrets here. Here... put that away willya... What can we do ya for?"

As it turned out, Miss Kennedy had some family business to take care of and needed to send the kids to Boston. She was looking for a private charter so he was here to check out the plane and for that matter, to check Jenny out as well.

"If she can go on Sunday we have a group from Wellesley on a museum tour. They'll probably fill the back four rows... There's two executives coming along... and dad... and the twins, they can ride the bench seats so there should be plenty of room. If they're going with a governess or a lady agent willing to serve meals... we could have a hot lunch and no-one'd be the wiser..."

"You think you can get that kind of load out of such a small field?"

"We can... but we normally take on just enough fuel to ferry us to Mac Arthur Islip and do all our loading there. Of course we could just as easily load up at Teterboro... or Westchester County... Whatever's best for you guys..."

"Teterboro probably... You mind if I poke around the cockpit a little?"

"Help yourself... hope you know what you're looking for. I'll be flying this crate... so my butt's gonna be on the line too. You a pilot by any chance?"

"Used to be... flew C-54s during the Berlin Airlift. I'm one of those worrier types and eventually I just had to stop flying altogether. If you don't love what you're doing, you should go do something else, you know what I mean? So now I get paid to worry... Speaking of... What's this thing?"

"Oh... we rent out this plane to one of those Negro Pilots associations, New England chapter I think... so they get get some flight hours in. That's their mascot... See the sign pinned to his chest? ''Won't trust my gauges' said Mister DuPree. Now he's done gone and hung from a tree.' Pretty sick stuff... They'd been looking for that... Lucky thing you showed up..."

He thanked her for her cooperation and asked for a passenger manifest as soon as Jenny could get one from Bitsey, so they could do their background checks. Jenny gave him Bitsey's number at the college so they could hash out a final itinerary since she the travel agent in the family. The only concern on Jenny's part was that everything ran on time this weekend as it was an intricate schedule that depended on being over Albany well before sunset.

With a long day of flying ahead, the task of picking up the Wellesley group was farmed out to Wesley, the only other Class Two pilot in the immediate family. Taking the family along, he departed on Saturday so they'd be able to get in a night on the town as well. Janice and the kids would spend the day in Boston and be picked up later that evening. Our party met the plane at Mac Arthur field sometime around a quarter to eight. To our surprise and Jenny's dismay, the flight had been packed to the last seat. Bitsey assured her that half of the girls were getting off at Teterboro for a day in The City with Brenda and would take the train home.

While the Wellesley girls stretched their legs on the tarmac, father and daughter Platt did a quick walk around with Wesley. Everybody had their rituals to perform and we busied ourselves checking the equipment locker. With everyone reboarded, Bitsey and Brenda did their head count, demurely checking their clipboards while calling the roll. Once everyone was tallied, they gave the 'all clear' to Jenny and took their seats up front.

The flight to Teterboro was brief but memorable. Some of the girls had heard about that Surf Angel so Jenny made sure the flight path crossed the landmarks of the story. For someone with few real memories of the events she sure had a good grasp on what had been reported. Once over the harbor, she did a long, graceful S-turn over Manhattan so both sides of the plane could get the million dollar view, and she didn't have to put too much of a strain on her legs on the final approach to Teterboro. Our stomachs were pleased as well.

At Teterboro the schedule fell behind on account of everyone but us showing up late. The catering truck, the bus for Brenda's group, those two Corning executives that were the reason for this trip in the first place and even Miss Kennedy's kids had yet to arrive by the time Jenny had rolled to a stop near the courtesy lounge. Jenny's dad suggested that everyone might want to use the extra time to 'change the oil' while he, Jenny and Bitsey looked into what was holding up everyone else.

Ironically enough, Jenny was the last person to board once everyone else showed up or returned, although those Corning executives were a close second. It seems they had enjoyed the last night of the Worlds Fair with a client of theirs a little too well, so they invited him along to finish their deal in more sober surroundings.

"Well... don't you have crust..."

It was fair to say Walter Drake was the last person Jenny was expecting to see today.

"Jenny! Nice of you to join us! Why don'tcha have a seat next to me? Here... I saved it special just for you... C'mon now... don't be so stuck up. It's not very attractive in a lady..."

Jenny did a quick head roll and tried to continue on to the flight deck. Walter, never one to take a hint, grabbed her by the elbow and right in front of everybody, pulled her down into the seat next to him like she belonged to him or something.

"Now look... I'm... serious... This childishness has got to end... It's very unprofessional and it's unfair to me... it's not fair to Emily and its certainly not fair to my partner, who you could at least do the courtesy of returning a phone call after all that we've gone through. Let's just have this out no, so we can put this behind us."

We're not telepathic, but man, could we feel the humiliation poor Jenny was going through. All she could do was stare pathetically at her old man. She hated having to go to him for help and Jenny's dad knew it. Looking at his watch, he flashed a devilish look at Jenny.

"That pilot sure is taking his time... must be hung over... again."

"Yeah, that's very unprofessional of him..."

"Can't be all that hard to fly an aeroplane... bet even you could do it."

"Is that a challenge?"

Jenny's dad cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

"Hey kids... look at this," shouted Jenny from the flight deck, "They got everything written down on these cards! This'll be easy!"

Old man Drake look positively frantic as she start flipping switches and twiddling dials and really panicked once the engines sputtered to life.

"You're not really gonna start that? Hey now... a joke's a joke but that's just going too far!"

He made a move to get up but Jenny's dad stopped him, saying, "Let the girl fly her plane... she's been looking forward to this all summer..."

"Plattair Twenty One One Two to tower. We're about ready to pull back from the gate if you wanna give us a tee time, thank you..."

While Jenny shut the cockpit door with a loud clank, Walter Drake slumped back into his seat like a 'full bird' colonel busted down to PFC. Somewhere near the Pennsylvania border, Jenny asked the lady Secret Service agent who'd stationed herself at the service vestibule if 'the kids' would like to join her on the flight deck. They'd boarded next to last and were sitting in the back row all this time so when they came forward there was a excited murmur of recognition amongst the Wellesley girls. Those Corning executives barely noticed but Walter sure looked someone who'd underestimated the worth of a twenty-five dollar a day 'office girl'.

"Friends of the family on her mother's side," Jenny's dad helpfully noted. "but we like to keep to our side of the island..."

While they made small talk we got up and made our way to the service vestibule to listen in on Jenny and 'the kids'. As she was telling them how her dad introduced to flying she was ito borrow a phrase from their old man, passing the torch along to them. Now Jenny made a good faith effort to give equal time to the both of them, but it was 'John John' who lingered longest in the co-pilot's seat.
Caroline was content to ride the jump seat and watch as Jenny point out all the dials and gauges.

"...and that's the 'horizon indicator'... if it's dark or hazy out, that lets you know where you are in the sky. Now that's important because when you're in the air, your senses don't necessarily work like they should and people have a habit of blaming their instruments first... I remember my dad telling me of this squadron of Navy planes that got disoriented... The lead pilot mistook the islands of Bahama for the Florida Keys and kept saying that his compass had gone haywire... Ground control was able to get a radio fix on them, but they refused to follow instructions and they were never heard from again... Sometimes you gotta let go of your instincts and trust your instruments."

The Corning Museum of Glass was pretty much what it advertised itself as being. Glass, glass and if you got bored with all the glass, more glass. We really only cared about the glass at the end our our camera and the ones holding our drinks but Jenny enjoyed herself. It helped that Walter and those executive had repaired themselves to the black glass slab of their home office. After walking our way through the history of glass we were moved onto their displays of glass in the modern days. Apart from the trade show stuff there were push-button exhibits that let you test the different properties of that miracle material and some glassblowers doing live demonstrations.

We didn't feel like watching the Stueben Glass demonstrations so we skipped ahead to the gift shop to see if they had any glass snails. They had three so we bought 'em all and asked the sales lady that if anyone else came in looking for snails, and somebody would, to tell them they'd sold those out weeks ago. We drifted back into the tour as Jenny talked to somebody about some designs of hers.

"...and I was thinking that if you mixed strands of colored glass fibers in with cement and molded them into blocks... with the light behind them you'd get an interesting effect..."

That one raised eyebrows as did her idea of fusing glass flanges to sheets of plate glass to eliminate the need for external mounting strips. She wanted a tower as purely glass on the outside as you could possibly get.

Our eyes had thoroughly glazed over by the time everyone was herded back to the bus for the trip back to the field. Jenny was a little disappointed that the gift shop didn't have any snails. We suggested that maybe 'Snailie Claus' would leave a few under the tree. Jenny's dad was taking this leg of the flight so Walter was given a seat in the rear so that Jenny could have the bench seat to herself. After a Salisbury steak lunch, everyone was a little sleepy so the lights were dimmed, the curtains drawn and we all catnapped our way across the heart of New York state.

We were all awakened shortly before the final approach to Schenectady County the next stop on the grand tour. Another bus waited to ferry the Wellesley girls to the Van Curler hotel for tea and cakes while we set up for the surveying job in Albany. Walter was told he would have to make his own way home as they were heading to Boston next and might be staying overnight.

Father and daughter Platt flew together with the Government Man riding the jump seat as we stationed ourselves by the camera. The 'mission profile' required us to photograph the brownstone blocks due south of the Capitol building all the way down to a city park. The city's one big skyscraper stood right next door and would serve as a landmark for our photo run. We made a couple passes to familiarize ourselves and to calibrate the lens before making a half dozen more for real. With daylight to spare, we returned to Schenectady, packed our equipment and with the tour parties reboarded, headed into the evening for the homeward legs of our journey. No bus awaited our plane in Boston as the girls had come to the field in their own cars. Janice and her kids arrived just in time to see Miss Kennedy's kids and their security detail thank Jenny for the trip on the way to the car that was waiting for them.

We were sometime over the Atlantic when Janice bolted upright in her seat. Mouthing the name 'Jacqueline', it finally hit her that a grand joke had indeed been played on her.

Let that be a lesson to you Jan.

Things were peaceful in the Platt home during that last week of Evelyn's absence. Jenny's friend Cheryl had come up from Chicago for a few days. A beanpole like Jenny with a smooth husky voice, she sported a curly wavy coif of short blonde hair as her trademark. Jenny had warned us that Cheryl could be 'rather tactile with people' and sure enough, when we were introduced, she had turned us around by the shoulder to get a better look at us. Wasn't too shy about it either. To flesh out that article of ours, we took several snaps of their time together. Most of their time was spent going over their 'visionary' projects around whatever flat surface was available. Even their jaunts out to sea were spent in the discussion of architecture and when they weren't talking about buildings they were talking about food - New York versus Chicago cuisine mostly.

Cheryl was perhaps the only citizen of the Windy City willing to own up to liking New York-style pizza and didn't even mind the Kosher stuff we had up in the Panorama offices while our story project was being laid out. Actually looking at all the stuff we'd taken over the years we had forgotten how often we'd been employed as the summertime photographer for the Platts. Still there were pictures we didn't take that made the article. Alongside Nicky's picture that we and Jenny had posed for last spring was a still frame of Avi's attempt to film our first try at surfing the day before. We had been well clear but from his angle it looked like we were about to clothesline poor Jenny.

The rumblings of August Nineteen-fourteen couldn't match the dread brought on by Evelyn's return from Japan. We had seen her poke and prod the tarp covered hospital bed in the garage so when she idly suggest to Jenny that maybe she ought to think about scheduling an appointment for her flight physical we knew she was baiting a trap. Jenny was no fool.

"Gee... if I didn't know you better, I'd suspect you want me to get my checkup in the hopes that I'd fail on account of not having being fully recovered yet. Either that or you found that bed in the garage and know perfectly well that I'd probably taken it already."

"I was only going to say that Mis'ess Kennedy had spoken to me over the phone sometime last week... Wanted to see if maybe you'd still be interested in that project she'd been talking about with you. But... if you're not up to it..."

It's fair to say that we all could've save a considerable amount of time and money if we'd taken the hint given to us when Jenny pulled all the blueprints the Company had on the government and private sector interests involved in the building of Dealey Plaza. They'd been stored in one of those expandable folders with the camera bellows side and a built-in elastic band to keep them closed. These were the only set that showed the project as it was built and any hitman worth their salarium would've wanted a look at them. The elastic band had fused to the folder in such a way that our opening it caused it to finally disintegrate. They hadn't been looked at in years.

Still, a job's a job and after a week and a half to get her ducks in a row, we were winging our way to Dallas with a prize crew of Company engineers. We flew commercial this time on account of Brenda's family having a few seats on the Delta Airlines board they could rent to us cheap. With the money she saved, Jenny could spring for a Lincoln convertible.

"All my Brooklyn friends just love these cars," she trilled to the rental agent. "You can fit three, maybe four bodies in the trunk, easy! Say... how do you get to Houston Street? I'm looking for a dressmaker..."

We took a back way into the plaza parked as closely to the presumed second assassin's nest as we could and unpacked our gear. It was lunchtime and people from the surroundings were taking theirs while tourists milled about. With Sheriff Misener squaring things with the locals, Jenny had the run of the place but she wanted to see what they could get away with before someone got suspicious so she hadn't reported her presence to them yet.

It had taken all of two minutes and seventeen seconds from the time Jenny unpacked and assembled her dad's two-piece camping rifle to the time she was discovered by a concerned citizen.

"Shootin' the president... Why do you ask?"

"Aw gee lady... this town's done been in the doghouse for the whole year since the last killin'. Why can't you folks pick on some other town? Like Tulsa... or Oklahoma City... Damn Sooners.. always makin' a ruckus whenever the rodeo's in town..."

He seemed relieved when she produced her press card, like someone who wouldn't be giving his life for his country today after all. Jenny seemed disappointed that her notion of 'Manny X' assembling his rifle on site didn't pan out on the first try. More importantly, she hadn't seen him coming.

"Maybe your 'Manny X' was a colored fellow... Little harder to find a shadow in the shade y'know..."

"Yeah but it's darker down there. Ought to be easy enough to chuck a hand grenade into the back seat where nobody's lookin'."

"Yes'm but they didn't. Oughta know 'cuz I was leanin' over that railing right back over there. Had my girl with me. Heard three shots... thought we'd heard a car window break... turned out to be one of the pop bottles hittin' the concrete... see we'd brought our lunch with us."

"You ever tell the police any of this?"

"No... Y'see she was real upset so I had to take her home. Yeah, I know... but we'd just seen a man's face come off clear in front of us... and by the time we'd got our heads together, they done found the man who did it in the meantime... We never saw who done it so why walk into trouble when you ain't in it? Not like the police are on friendly terms with our kind anyhow... Hey this ain't gonna be in the papers or nuthin' is it?"

"Don't worry. I can't use testimony that can't be checked against a statement to the police. You'd be amazed how many people come out of the woodwork after a sensational case to say they'd seen the whole thing or that they were a part of it somehow. Had a suicide jumper land on my car a few years back and every so often we'll get a call from someone claiming to be me, wanting to sell their story. Not that I don't think you're on the square."

"People do that? Now... now that's just wrong!"

Taking Jenny's 'Sharpie' marker, he looked at the Norelco cartridge in Jenny's Carry-corder 150, thought for a minute, then festooned the cassette with drawings of a cross and three triangles with a pair of dots inside each of them.

"Maybe in the future, nobody'll know what that means."

His final words before the tape was stopped, removed and packed away for it's days of rest inside the White Metal Cabinet.

With high noon coming up, Jenny and her team busied themselves taking measurements, pictures and readings of the light and shadow conditions surround our selected sniper's nest to the idle bemusement of the crowd. A few people asked why we were concentrating on one spot to which Jenny replied that it was the only area with enough pictures taken of it to be worth the bother. The tourist crowd was reasonably cooperative and Jenny was even able to keep some sort of peace with the natives still smarting from that deep wound to their civic pride. It helped that she opted to schedule the more intrusive surveying work she'd planned on at night when the street could be closed off without as much of a bother to the living city.

In the meantime she had a few audio tests to conduct that involved playing the demonstration cartridge that came with her little tape recorder in various locales including the window where the 'known' assassin had fired from to assess the acoustical environment. The park was pretty echoey - even the little snap made when the machine was put in play mode reverberated like a rifle crack. Jenny was a little winded on account of running up and down those six floors so she democratically called for a break time for everyone to take their engineers photo beneath the colonnade in front of our proposed sniper's nest.

"Well I'll be dipped! You really were gonna do that investigation... That thing isn't loaded is it?"

"If this were a movie... I'd point this at your nut and pull the trigger... not that I'd ever take chances even with a gun I know is unloaded. That wouldn't be right."

"Yeah... I suppose I'd have it coming. That was an awful stunt I pulled on you... even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I knew I shouldn'ta done that..."

"I was real sore about things and kinda scare too. Emily kept puttin' the fear of god in my by telling me you had given something to old man Van De Lay."

"You Drakes sure know how to eat the Florsheims..."

"Yeah... I wanted to apologize right then and there but you were otherwise occupied... then all hell broke out with the trial and all that... I figured I was the last person you ever wanted to see..."

"At least that was a good call... so what have you been up to?"

"Would you believe... gettin' eaten by worms?"

"Worms? Worms! Are you shitting me?"

"No sir-ree-bob! They was worms all right. See I'd gone over to Africa to work with this geologist studying this volcano - I forget his last name but he says you know his brother. Don't remember gettin' bit... but I must've cuz I was taking my first hot bath in weeks and all these worms kept pokin' out of my thigh..."

"Oh man... I woulda been your best friend for life to see that. Worms..."

"Yeah... Well I'll tell you what... next time some colored person complains about life in this country... well at least the worms here wait till yer dead to eat ya... Tell you another thing. I'm headin' to Alaska as soon as this leg is healed up. They're lookin' for oil up there and the bugs only get you in the summertime... So you think there was a second shooter?"

"Lookin' pretty hit or miss now... well mostly miss... I don't know if you have places to be right now but if you wanna come back here around nightfall... we brought over one of those laser ray guns from Cambridge. Gonna fire it at some ballistic gel targets."

"I was just gonna head back home... but if you don't mind me being underfoot, I've got nuthin' better to do. What are you fixin' to do right now?"

"We're 'fixin' to get a tank of compressed air so we can tie it into the chamber of this rifle. If this thing works in the field like we had it working in the lab, we ought to be able to simulate a muzzle suppressed gunshot... and to answer your original question, no this wasn't loaded."

Lowering the barrel, she added, "Legally speaking, this is not even a real gun anymore."

Still he had been badly shaken by what he'd gone though and it was only on account of the lady that was with him being out today that he agreed to go along with Jenny's test. All he had to do was stand on the spot and pretend to film the passing traffic. Even though she showed him the contraption they were using, he was still suspicious and asked several times if they were going to shoot off a 'full round' before he was willing to get up on the colonnade.

"Oh no Mister Zapruder... I would only play a trick that dirty on someone I loved very dearly... like my little sister Janice..."

Mister Zapruder wasn't too good with heights so Jenny had to lock arms with him as he made a couple sweeps with one of our cameras - his was locked away because he never wanted to use it again. With a jerk of the head she signaled for her man with the rifle to squeeze off a round. As she expected he stopped filming and looked over to where that piffft sound had come from. Checking to see if he was willing to go on to the next test and getting a nod in reply, she asked her rifleman to 'go ahead and chamber a round' to see if he could get away with more than one shot. He'd barely swung the bolt up when everyone heard a groan of discomfort and us calling 'Darlin'!'

Jenny had tipped two maybe three inches before maybe a half dozen hands latched onto her and she never touched the floor of the colonnade. She looked awful crumpled against the stockade fence like an open sack of feed and was unresponsive for at least a minute and a half. Even worse, when she finally came to, it was Jenny that suggested that they 'do a smart thing' and get her to a doctor though she did have the sense of humor to request that they take her to any hospital but Parkland on account of them batting zero-zero-zero so far with people involved in the Kennedy assassination. Even though the rental car was brought up to only a few paces from where she'd been set down, the walk was still arduous enough that she suggested that maybe the third time's the charm.

"Gawd... I hope they don't tell me it's 'girl hormones'," Jenny groaned. "You could have a knife sticking out of your skull and they'll still tell you it's your damn hormones..."

They really do. Jenny stayed lucid enough to describe her symptoms to the admitting nurse, dizziness, nausea and intermittent loss of equilibrium, before going down for the count again.

"We'll keep her overnight for observation... we just got the blood work back... looks like your friend just has a bad case of morning sickness."

"Morning sickness. In the afternoon."

It was fair to say that we were a tad on the dubious side.

"Different people have different reactions. Half the women we see don't show any symptoms at all... Now... going by she'd told me... she had a fainting spell about three weeks ago..."

"Yeah on the thirteenth... but that was a stress reaction. She has this thing about certain loud noises... like if you drop a buncha plates?"

"Well these things don't usually show up till around the sixth week... should only be a couple more weeks of this left to go... Due date maybe... last of May... first of June. Now... which one of you lucky fellows is the father?"

Men just love hearing that question. While the men in her crew looked down at the floor or at random spots on the wall, our better half meekly raised her hand and muttered, "Uhm... yeah... that would be me. Uh... Sorry?"

We found Jenny in bed chipping away the slab of hospital mystery meat while talking to Pete on the telephone. He had stayed behind to keep a watch over the survey gear they didn't have packed in the trunk when they took Jenny to the hospital and to wait for the man from Cambridge with the Laser equipment.

"I'm having Hasenpfeffer... if a rabbit gets killed on your account they let you eat it..."

Long pause as he figures out what medical test involved leporicide.

"Oh no... listen... I'm one hundred percent sure it wasn't yours. No... bullpen cleared out the night I got home from that country club... and anyway the doctor said symptoms don't show up for six weeks and you came in on the first of the month... the timing's just not there."

He didn't believe her.

Not that its any of your business... but yes... I was able to scrape together some sort of a social life this summer... somebody I'd met last year in LA. What can I say? We made up for lost time."

"You've got enough troubles in your life as it is. No need to saddle yourself with something that's none of your business in the first place. I've got money coming to me so I'm taken care of... Look... when you chased after me like that... I was in the mood to see what it would lead to... so I figured what the hell... it was a one time thing and I'm sorry if I hurt you in any way... but I figure we both broke even in this exchange. It wouldn't work out... I'd hafta make peace with your dad and I just can't do that... some wounds just cut too deep and I got so much on him... it'd just be a big mess. Besides... you had a leg full of worms and you didn't think to pick up the telephone and brag about 'em? How can I trust a man after that? I mean... worms man! Worms!"

He couldn't argue with that sort of logic. Hanging up the phone, she patted the living thing under her belly with a smile. Worms.

At her insistence, the evening tests were completed in her absence. They were fairly straightforward test. Fire a Laser beam from the known and presumed snipers nests into a Perspex skull filled with a thermoreactive gelatin to see what kind of trajectory path we'd end up with. With Jenny not here even the fun of having the cops open and close the street at our bidding was gone. We did get some results. The known assailant's shot check out as expected, an entry wound behind the upper right back of the head that skimmed the underside of the skull, just like in the movie. As for our second assailant's shot, his would've gone though the right temple to somewhere under and behind the left ear. Any kind of deflection and there could've been a dead Miss Kennedy. We sent the survey team home and booked a room in town for ourselves to await Jenny's discharge.

A few days later a report of Jenny's findings was written up and delivered to Miss Kennedy who accepted it with thanks and congratulations to Jenny. With no second gunman, Panorama ran with the Warren Commission report with maybe a couple paragraphs mentioning 'tests performed by an independent research team' that backed up The Report's conclusions. Bits and pieces of Jenny's report did surface in other publications within the Panorama family from time to time but in the face of an ever-growing cottage industry that traded in assassination theories, reasoned scientific inquiry never stood a chance. The New Religion had chosen their martyr.

Jenny packed the collected materials of her report into a box for the White Metal Cabinet and went on with her life. She had other plans to busy herself with. Much to the chagrin of Janice who got no such courtesy, Evelyn took an extended leave from her job to minister to her first born daughter. With 'morning sickness' actually starting to occur in the morning more often, her sickbed was hauled back over to the sun porch so Jenny wouldn't have to negotiate the stairs so often. While day trips to Brasilia were out of the question, her work, travel and social schedule weren't affected all that much. We did most of the legwork for her Panorama assignments and with a perfectly good rumpus room in the cellar, her friends could come party with her.

It was a well received story amongst the members of the clergy and was reprinted in many a religious publication whose readers would debate the implications of such a device on the editorial pages. She was just coming out of the morning sickness phase of her pregnancy by the time she started getting requests for interviews so if you wanted one you either had to come to the house or talk to her on the phone. Most reporters chose to call her so when asked where she got her ideas from and when she'd mention that she was friends with 'a set of twins that share the same body', nobody interviewing her over the telephone realized she was talking about us. Referring to her own condition she would say that she'd wondered what it would be like to have been 'born' inside a full grown adult with all their memories, habits and emotional connections still inside the brain.

Inevitably, that would lead to questions about her current condition and the fact that she was as of yet unmarried. Her story was that Eddie had been given the good news but it seems he'd been having so many difficulties in the production of that movie of his that Jenny worried that if he took even the short time off needed to marry her, he wouldn't return to the set. Jenny hadn't been able to travel so she was trying to arrange a long distance civil ceremony through the American embassy on account of the country Eddie was working in had arbitrarily refused to sanction such a union on their soil. It was suggested that an American flagged ship could wait outside territorial waters long enough for Eddie to come aboard but in the end the right strings got pulled and on the Saturday before Thanksgiving vows were hastily exchanged over the J Platt and Company switchboard.

Thanksgiving almost didn't happen at the Platt residence on account of Janice throwing a fit about wanting to host the family at her house, an unrealistic proposal given the size of her venue. She suggested using the clubhouse but that was to be towed out to Platt Island for use as a construction trailer during that restoration project before the winter freeze set in. If Janice's grousing wasn't enough, Emily wanted to host her own dinner which if nothing else meant Jamie wasn't going to be there. Oddly enough, Jenny seemed willing to go to that one but then her other city friends sent invites to their dinners and she had to turn all of them down. To make things more interesting, Lori called to say she didn't want to spend the day with her folks and could she join wherever Jenny was going as a representative of her brother? Avi was going to spend Turkey Day with the family of this girl he was dating so we offered the use of our place as a neutral territory.

By Christmas Jenny was getting a tad more voluptuous. Her breasts had grown 'from tits to boobs' as she put it and her tummy, making up for ground lost on account of morning sickness, was filling in nicely as well. Her longtime stoic maturity had degenerated to a childlike wonder with every growl of her stomach. Janice, having gone through this twice before, had finally made her peace with the attention her sister was getting and offered to guide Jenny though the changes that were happening to her.

This was the first year since our first one wintering on Long Island and we had never seen a Christmas celebration apart from the parties thrown for the ranch hands by our parents. Jenny had ended the Cold War with her mother's parents but still it struck a note of sadness with us watching Gloria and Philip unload packages from their car on Christmas Eve and knowing the times Jenny refused their offerings over the last dozen years or so. Jenny was all tears when we gave her the three glass snails we'd bought in Corning. It wasn't anything we'd planned on, but one of them was somewhat smaller than the other two and taken together they looked like a little snailie family.

With her other grandfather back from Brazil, it was time to finalize plans for the nest she was building in California. Cheryl was summoned from Chicago to make good that promise of architectural services - not that you had to twist her arm, she liked Jenny's work and was thrilled with the idea of turning a bridge into a house. Since it was New Years Eve, there was pleasure mixed with business and with Ashleigh's pad as an advanced base, we got to ring in Nineteen Sixty five with the madding crowd of Times Square.

"My god... that's Barbara!"

We had taken our camera with us but once the party was over we weren't having any luck finding worthy subjects until we happened to glance up at the old Astor Hotel. Gazing down from a window was this stark fortress of a woman. We took a snap, which got Jenny's interest so we let her look through the lens to see what we'd photographed. Leading our party to the front desk, she asked if there was a couple by the name Waczinski staying there. This being New York, there were three and they all checked in as Mister and Mis'ess so Jenny had to narrow it down to the window we'd seen her in.

"Jennifer... You've really let yourself go!"

At least Jenny didn't say that she looked like someone who'd been shot in the face at a May Day riot in Berlin when they were a kid. We would have, just to see if she got the reference.

"It's good to see you too... but... well you were so thin..."

"Yeah... well you know how mayonnaise can get so fattening... a couple drops in the wrong place... You remember Cheryl don't you?"

"No... not a bit. They did a lot of cutting up there. I'm surprised I remember you. You were going with Wesley weren't you?"

"No... he ended up with my sister Janice."

"Janice? Sister? What's a... 'sister'?"

We sensed that she was making a joke at her expense but that Buster Keaton face of hers wasn't giving us any clues. Her husband, sitting in a wheelchair by the window, called her out

"Now honey... they only cut away dead tissue... If you don't remember something it was because you're stupid... just like everybody else. Now let these people in so we can get down to some serious drinkin'! I've got a bad liver and it needs to be punished."

Drinks were poured, cigarettes were lit and livers had discipline meted out to them. Not knowing the guidelines for a four month old's liver, Jenny opted for a suspended sentence and called down for a some sodies. Naturally, we would be serving ours concurrently. After the usual catching up with everyone's lives the Waczinskis got down to the business of why they were in New York. Even after all they'd gone through, they still had money left over - Barbara had been well taken care of by her late parents - to commission an architectural 'showpiece'.

"You sure came to the right person... I'm pretty sure I can talk old N'eddie into sponsoring an architectural competition..."

"Well we were thinking of asking you Jen..."

"Oh, I don't know... everybody hated my work. Besides... I already got something on the back burner... and in the oven for that matter."

Cheryl begged to differ. Well not 'begged'...

"I'm under one of those exclusivity restrictions from that company I was working for. I couldn't do anything with my name on it till June and I'll be out of the business by then..."

It's tempting to think Jenny says she doesn't want something to make make people want her to want it all the more and as a negotiation tactic it works pretty well for her but she really was looking forward to motherhood and especially so when the first announcement of a Worlds Fair for New York came out four or five years ago. She had hoped things would work out somehow that at least one of her children would be born on the grounds and 'complete a circle'. Still, Jenny listened to their plans for a vacation retreat on some land they were looking at in the mountains of West Virginia. They were hoping for a rival to Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Fallingwater'.

What they got was something like the bones of a fish wrapped in Perspex jutting out from the hillside. Since the property was close to where the Hartzfeld clan lived and since Wesley offered to pony up a considerable amount of dough for its construction in exchange for use of the place, Jenny designed it to accommodate her sister's brood as well as the Waczinskis. If it looked like a fish it also looked like a rocket ship or a wingless Flying Fortress. Jenny usually called it the 'Glass Hat Project' from its valley view profile of two hats joined at their brims on stilts.

There had been plenty of flat ground on the property to build an ordinary cabin but Jenny opted to used that space as a lawn for entertaining with only the 'tail fin' of the house touching land. With the rest of the house being transparent the fin section in addition to the car port housed the stuff you didn't want people looking at like the furnace and bathroom. The middle section held a one and a half storey tall 'great room' for entertaining on the main floor. The 'head' of the fish was two storeys tall and housed the bedrooms, three below and a master suite above with a stair landing big enough for a musical family to give concerts from. Since the Waczinskis and Hartzfelds were practicing nudists, Jenny included a rooftop terrace over the great room with 'spines' to hold privacy screens.

From the letter and calls we'd gotten during her time in California, Jenny had been most intrigued with their habit of building on near vertical cliff sides. The thing that bothered her the most is that they'd just pound in stilts and build an 'ordinary' house on top, letting the extra bottom space 'go to waste'. At the Glass Hat she installed an indoor wading pool in an elongated 'chin turret' below the great room so you could go swimming in the middle of winter.

She had planned to use opaque fiberglass panels in sections but such was everyone's enthusiasm for the concept of a 'see-through' house that translucent etched glass panels were used instead and calling for transparent furniture - even the TV was done in Perspex.

Cheryl spend most of her time in LA supervising the installation of Jenny's bridge and its conversion to a house. Jenny had put that earthquake study of her to good use and the house featured shock absorbing stilts and motion damping joints where they met the building. As we'd mentioned the bridge had been turned upside down so what used to be the floor beams could support suspender cables. The internal layout was similar to the Glass Hat in that there was a great room in the center, a garage foyer and stairs and the kitchen on the land side but there was only a single guest bedroom on the cliff side of the main floor. The bedrooms were located upstairs at the two ends of the house with a suspended catwalk between. Jenny placed the children's rooms on the land side adding a studio for herself. She included a sofabed so she could come and go from a job without disturbing Eddie, who had the cliffside loft and his own work room to himself.

Jenny was no slugabed herself making the commute by Amphicar to Platt Island to supervise the 'pick' of the house by crane and in supervising the restoration efforts. Because they were going to lay an electrical conduit over to Gilgo Island, the temporary canal idea had been ditched in favor of just driving a crane on top of the trench they were going to dig out and filled with gravel. She also cooked meals for the boys camping out in the clubhouse. Amazingly enough, she made a lot of those mid-winter trips with the top and windows down on account of the extra layer of insulation she'd been growing. The house was cleaned out and enclosed from the weather by the end of April when Jenny curtailed her site visits to get ready for childbirth.

In the meantime the Ryersons, Eddie and Lori, kept their hand in as best as they could. On college breaks Lori would drive over from Philly to look in on Jenny. Eddie had managed to convince the Italian producers that having an 'edited in Hollywood' credit would boost prestige for the project and get some post-production work moved stateside. At least he was on the same continent now and would be only six hours away when the 'blessed event' occurs.

All was getting ready, even names were picked out. If it was a boy, he'd be an Eddie junior, if a girl she'd be called Arianna, a combination of our names. Speaking of names, the two of them decided to keep their own last names but change their middle ones adding a hyphen in between and use the same convention for their children. Know her due date wasn't for a month Jenny did make one 'symbolic' visit to the Worlds Fair on her birthday and another to Bitsey's house on her birthday, but both times the little bambino was a no-show. No closing of circles this time around.

On the Twentieth of May the first of twin superliners, the Michelangelo, was scheduled to make her maiden arrival and just about every Italian from Brooklyn to Bayonne had staked out a spot on the Verrezano Bridge to watch her pass underneath, Avi's girl Lisa and the entire Semintelli family were no exception. Knowing that they'd try to pass the ship under the highest point of the bridge we camped out with our equipment as close to the middle as we could get. Jenny, riding with Doug Montelli and his sister's little girl, joined the flotilla of pleasure boat gathered at the narrows.

We had the advantage of height but Jenny had a marine radio and an 'in' with a couple members of the crew so she got the first squawk of warning as they picked up their pilot for the turn into the Ambrose channel. Getting our first glimpse through binoculars - or should we say conjoined monoculars - the Michelangelo had a look only a marine engineer could love. Her two funnels were set so far back it looked like she was missing a third and unlike the billboard we'd seen last yea,r they were done up like the old 'cage masts' they used to put on battleships. So wrong on paper yet actually not bad looking for real. None of our fellow railbirds seemed to mind. As we predicted they lined her up for a pass under the high point and we got some excellent shots of the mast disappearing under our feet and reappearing at the other side of the bridge. We let them get as far as where Jenny had 'parked' before dashing for that scooter of hers for the ride to midtown.

We made our way through the Jersey side and were so well enough ahead that we could stop and take pictures as she passed the Statue of Liberty and we were right there with cups of coffee when she swung her nose into her berth and so was Jenny. She had tagged along with the welcoming flotilla as far as Ellis Island before making landfall somewhere near Jersey City. With 'Douglie' and Lilla in tow we threaded our way through the crowd with Jenny and her press pass leading the way. Along the way Doug stopped Jenny short to introduce her to someone he knew from his days in welding class.

"This is Mike Briganté... he used to bring banged up cars for shop class to work on. Used to get 'em from his dad's dealership. We'd fix 'em and you sell like nothing's wrong with 'em right?"

He went into that mock 'how could you say such a thing' act before they exchanged the standard Brooklyn punch and jab greeting of old friends. Seeing Jenny, Mike gave an all-knowing look to Doug who responded with a 'Not mine... nooo...'. When asked who she was he replied that she was the girl whose car his sister landed on. She had a press pass and he was tagging along. Mike was about to introduce the rest of the people with him, a lady and three kid of descending age but she spoke up first.

"I remember you two... you're those Brillstein twins... I'd seen you girls last year... at the Worlds Fair, remember? You signed pictures for the kids."

When said her name was Louise, we did recall that 'fancy as' line Jenny uttered last year which got a chortle before she corrected us by saying she was a DeFeo now. As the bow of the Michelangelo drew closer to the dock we excused ourselves to get pictures of the lines being tossed down the side. With that reminder that we were on supposed to be covering this arrival Jenny suggested that Doug's friends come along with her on the press tour. Typical Brooklyn Italian family tours masterpiece of the home country. It's a natural. After waiting for a shot of the gangplanks being set up our party headed for the press corral.

"Don't go anywhere Douglie," Jenny commanded as she scanned the crowd coming down the gangplank, "There's somebody I've been positively dying for you to meet... Oh here she is... Hey Angie! Hoo-ooh!"

Angelina Pizzoli was a long-haired girl with a pouty face made for the wide brimmed hat she was wearing - a classic Italian bird if there ever was one. Well behind the line getting off, she raised her arm in acknowledgment.

"See that gorgeous woman behind her? That's her grandmother... You're welcome Doug..."

The stunned look on 'Douglie's' face was all the thanks Jenny needed. The usual greetings and introduction were exchanged. Angelina had transferred to the New York offices of The Line and her grandmother felt like seeing the states and who's the delicous looking hunk of man-candy you brought with you?

"Oh you remember that welder fellow I was telling you about last year? The one who helped me with that earthquake study I was doing?"

"I recall you saying something about 'cutting from the herd'... that his brand?"

"Nope... some fool maverick got in the way... Yours to lasso if you can. I'll just keep falling behind on the tour... Twins'll bring me up to speed."

Jenny did a fairly good job at keeping up with the tour, needing only a pillow to lean against when they stopped to take in a public room but we did end up blending in with the travel agents and tour operators on their run through the ship. Bitsey and Brenda were in this crowd. They were interested in the of cabins on 'A' deck on account of the way five or six cabins would be grouped around a private hallway that branched off from the main corridor. These were ideal party cabins for the college tours they planned for the summer especially since the majority of them were off 'J' and 'T' shaped hallways. With the party cabin at the far end there were fewer neighbors to wake up.

Things worked out better than we'd hoped. The nurse was still cleaning off bits of the caul before giving Arianna to Jenny when we heard congratulatory shouts of 'Itsa bambina signore!' from the hallway. We had all assumed that it would be a good seven or eight hours before Eddie would get to Jenny's bedside.

"I'd left LA early hoping to surprise you at home," he panted. "Airline intercepted me as I got off the plane... took a chopper into town... taxi... booked it the last block... couldn't make out whether he said 'bamina' or bambin... oh..."

The picture of mother, dressed in gray and still wearing that 'newsboy' cap of hers, and daughter, freshly swaddled in pink, couldn'tve look more darling. In a wordless exchange, Eddie nodded a few times as Jenny smiled, and turning to face us with a beaming pride, took a step or two before passing out like a real man should.

They let us stay on board to wait for Jenny's parents to arrive. In the meantime Eddie brought out a gift from the production crew, a picture frame made from one of those movie clapper boards with 'A Ryerson - Platt production' painted on it. Once her parents arrived, she and child were transferred by private ambulance to Brunswick Hospital for the usual post-natal observation and were home by Monday afternoon.

You ever hear stories about people so wiped out on account of depression, they can barely get out of bed? Well Jenny was so wiped out with this pure bliss, that it was an effort for her just to keep little Arianna propped against her breast. Luckily she had a deep bench of girlfriends lined up in the bullpen to help her out - another thing for poor Janice to seethe about. With the exception of some help from Wesley's sister, she had been on her own for both kids. Taking that first week off from work, EsmÈralda got the freshest whiffs of ovary-twinging 'new baby smell'.

Folding freshly laundered diapers she ventured, "So, uh... how's the pain with that?"

"They say you forget it... but 'they' are damned dirty liars... still... nowhere near as bed when I tore up my leg... oh god that was some deep hurting. What's Laszlo been keeping himself up to?"

"Wait'll it's time to start decorating... That's when Ashleigh's gonna show up with those 'theater' friends of hers."

"Y'know... Never woulda figured her for a fag hag..."

"Man... I didn't even know what queers were yet but even in fourth grade I had some idea.... You shoulda seen that 'sewing circle' of hers. I mean she was never one of the tomboys like we used to be... but... We've all suckered some guy into playing 'makeup' one time or another... leave it to Ashleigh to find guys to play makeup on her."

"You think there's anything going on between Bitsey and Brenda?"

"No kids... I know Bitsey, and knowing Bitsey... she either be squeaking about how neat it was to have a big-boned gal like Brenda under her thumb... or wondering what kind of sick and disturbed mind you've got for even thinking such a thing... which we all know is as good as a signed confession. Just not seein' it... and I've seen it so..."

We pressed her for names but she said it was nobody we'd know. We pressed further and sure enough, it was nobody we or EsmÈralda knew.

"So," EsmÈralda ventured, "who do you think'd 'wear the pants' in that family?"

"Brenda obviously... at least till she made the first move. After that it'd be Bitsey holding the leash on the bull and loving every minute of it... but... I think she was telling me about getting an introduction to her brother back in Memphis. Sorta like with dad and Oliver. That's how he met mother... through him introducing 'em... now... there's a relationship... Of course if we want to see couples where there aren't any... don't get me started with mother and Avi. Y'know there was a summer I was almost positive I was gonna accidentally walk in on them..."

"Aagh... We're not hearing this! We're not hearing this! No... No... No... No..."

"Y'know kids... that's something I always wondered... when you're comin' out of the water... how do you do this with your 'inboard' ears?"

Jenny did that thing where you finger shake the water out of your ear. Finally a question we've never heard before! Tilting our head away from our better half's, we reached around to that inside ear and showed her. It's not that long a reach.

We were showing Jenny the installed system when the foyer door swung open and Janice stormed down the row of pews.

"Dad says you're getting the attic in the new place."

"Yeah... house in LA won't be done 'til fall. Gotta live somewhere in the meantime."

"Y'kow... I might have wanted a studio space for myself... seein' as you never did come through on the one you promised..."

"You know... I've been a little busy for the last few months..."

"You weren't too busy to do something for Barbara... and... and you weren't even friends with her! I don't have a lotta friends as it is... ya gotta go poaching the few I have left... I mean god dammit Jenny..."

"Hey, no cussin' in a church will ya? Bad enough you gotta bring a fight into his house."

"Like He's gonna care about five feet in the parking lot... You always gotta have your way don'tcha Jenny? It's always been that way... and you always gotta get everything too!"

"You've done all right for yourself... lot better than most people have a right to expect. You gotta house you don't hafta pay for... you gotta husband makin' enough bread so you don't hafta get a job... and you're gettin' a vacation home in the mountains for for next to nuthin'..."

"Yeah? Well you know I wanted your house seein' as you didn't want anything to do with mom's parents but they wouldn't let me have it. Made me pick another one... like I was second best."

"They're the same house!"

"I'm guessing it was supposed to be a surprise... but Wesley chipped in so you guys could use it too. Barbara's old man isn't long for this world so they wanted you guys to have when he's gone."

"Just great... You get to put your stink on it and I get to be the bad guy... again! Everything hasta go your way doesn't it?"

"I just can't win with you. I fill in for you on those damned tours and even if I put a separate name on the billing, I'm still taking over your band. Not that you minded those royalty checks coming in... I supposed when I'd told people I was okay with you bein' with Wesley, you're gonna say I was making a martyr out of myself so nobody'd like you."

"It sure worked out that way... it's like no matter what happens, you always get your way in the end and nobody can say anything about it."

"You wanna trade places?"

That shut her up. She huffed and puffed and tried to say something, gave up and stormed out of the church muttering, 'she always gets her way'.

Looking at her watch Jenny mused, "I think... it's that time of the month for her..."

"She probably wants to guilt you up for some of that inheritance money. Say when are you gonna take care of that?"

"We decided to hold off until Eddie's old man makes his next move... Anyway I still have one last royalty check to go. Record company structured it so Uncle Sam doesn't take it all. Real nice of them considering we weren't that big an act... though I think they rooked us big time on 'cleans'..."

"Cleans?"

"Yeah 'cleans'... those are the records that 'fell off the back of a truck' somewhere in Brooklyn. It's a wonder anyone can make a buck in the music business the way everyone keeps trying to rip each other off."

In the middle of all this Jenny also had the task of cleaning up and showing the house to potential buyers. We can't imagine anything more galling than having total strangers troop though you house, passing judgment on you and your private possessions unless you're holding an estate sale for your late grandparents. Then they paw everything and try to haggle with you. No thanks.

The DeFeo family's bid wasn't the highest but it was close enough and even though they made no impression one way or another on anyone else in the family, Jenny liked the idea of a big family taking over the place and wouldn't their kids be better going to school here instead of back in Brooklyn? So Jenny has her way one more time. The closing date was for the Twenty-eighth which gave the Jenny a couple of weeks to sort everything that was going over to the family estate and things that would be packed away for California.

And none too incidentally, to get ready for her wedding.

Janice was still on the rag when Jenny started making up the bridesmaid pecking order and refused the maid of honor slot on account of it being 'too late to do her any good now', suggesting maybe one of her many single friends which meant she didn't want it to go to Bitsey. One of Panorama's staff photographers would be working the wedding so we were free but Jenny needed a flower girl and someone to mind the baby so we offered to carry the baby around in a basket and since Jenny was still allergic to flowers, we filled our pockets with confetti and threw that instead. So it was between Ashleigh, Ezzie and Stacey. Ashleigh couldn't make it at all and Ezzie used up her vacation days and could only show up if she used a sick day so Stacey it was. This set Janice off again what with Stacey being one of her former friends and 'you picked her out of spite didn't you, Jenny'. She did cool down by the big day.

Doug Montelli was invited but when asked if he could bring a date, meaning Angelina, Jenny warned him that bringing a girl to a wedding so soon in a relationship is bound to send the wrong signals to a girl. Angelina was on the invite list and it's a million times better meeting her at a wedding anyhow. Eddie had the sparest guest list with just Lori and Doris showing - his real mom was 'unavailable' as in drunk out of her gourd and dad flat out refused to show. It was left to Sheriff Misener to climb into a monkey suit and walk him down the aisle.

The reception was held at Jenny's paternal grandparents. They lived the 'lake district' of Amityville in one of those 'rambler' houses that looked a lot like the schoolhouse on our our ranch but with a full attic storey. We have a fond memories of tagging along with Jenny on visits there. Her grandmother Dorothea had those giant-sized hershey bars and would break off a row each for us.

"That mother of yours has the most absent-present personality I've ever run into. Is she strung out on something?"

"Oh she's just not very good with social situations," explained Lori. "My friends were always razzing me about her."

"Can't imagine why dad threw mother over for her... I suppose she makes a good lutefisk..."

Raising her glass, Ezzie shuddered before muttering, "Reason we fled Norway..."

"Fish marinated in industrial solvents," trilled Lori "Why it's a Christmas holiday treat!"

We knew the next joke from Ezzie would be a variant on the Nazis sending a trainload of the stuff to Dachau and either the Jews sending it back, or the guards quitting their job or either, or both, of them diving into the ovens rather than face the fishy substance so we wandered over to the game room to see what Jenny and Emily were talking about - probably something about never playing pool with an engineer on account of them knowing all the angles.

"Just so you know... I'm not trying to use you as a go-between... it's just that I can't talk to them directly or it'd be insider trading... Van De Lays have a lot of shares in Electric Valve company they need to keep an eye on. Can't say exactly when but there's going to be a pump and dump... Eddie's dad's got some funny business ideas... We're looking to make our move when the stock craters and we're pretty sure it's going to crater... but we don't have a say on when that happens or how... so they better be ready to jump... I know your pretty good at getting people to sign off on important documents without reading them..."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Means what it means... Means, maybe you can use your powers for good this time..."

"...and maybe... maybe you should never let a steel company engineer sweet talk you into signing off on design changes without getting a real engineer to look 'em over first. Last time you did that... you nearly had a building drop into the streets... Not good for employee morale..."

Jenny handed a puzzled-looking Emily the pool cue so she could go feed little Arianna. With barely a month on this earth, the kid's already learned to enjoy the family gatherings she'll be toted around to for most of the next few months. Completely unfazed by a noisy crowd and she's already learned to puke into the sink like her dear old mother. Some people get the kids they deserve. After her feed Jenny decided it was time for she and Eddie to retire for the evening and announced they were heading back to the estate. Maybe an half hour later she calls the house to thank whoever it was that arranged to have little candles in paper sacks line the length of Ocean Avenue for that drive down to the boat landing. That was Janice's contribution for the evening.

Any squalling between the Platt sisters was ancient history as they gave One-twelve Ocean a final cleaning before turning her over to her new charges. To sweeten the deal and because the Platts had an 'in' with local contractors, the cellar was done over with paneling and new carpet as was the wet bar in the sun room. To be able to take their cars to and from their island, the Platt obtained a small ferry boat from the Del Porto yard - basically a floating dock with a motor and a pilothouse. There was a can of marine anti-fouling paint left over from the job so being the thrifty lot, Paul and Stacey used it to paint over some of the burgundy-colored area under the cellar stairs. That had been turned into a walk-in closet for the crap you didn't want people looking at on their way to the rumpus room and burgundy was too dark a color anyway.

By the last sabbath of June, you wouldn't know the Platts had ever lived there. We were up in Jenny's former office taking in a final view of our room while Emily busied herself in sweeping around the front steps. Sweeping around Jenny's car she noticed a cap-like object by the tires. She picked it up and looked for where it might go before tossing it in the back seat and going about her business. Jenny'll know what it was for. She was going through the house to check all the lights for dead bulbs. It was one less thing for the new people to worry about and she'd found a couple of her snail tchotchkes.

"M'kay kids... I think we're done here. how 'bout spending the rest of the day at the beach, hmm?"

Jenny deposited her set of the house keys in an envelope marked 'to the estate agent' and left it on the kitchen counter. We deposited ourselves in the back seat of her car while she went to soak a rag so she could clean a little 'present' left on the front seat by one of Amityville's beloved waterfowl. She was in the shotgun seat about to wipe it up when someone planted their seat next to hers.

"Guess that's the price I'll have to pay to get two words out of you."

"Well, you got twenty... not counting the twelve I just said now... but I take it you didn't come here to listen to someone who can count the words, eighteen, they've just said, twenty-two."

After trying to count what she'd just said, Mister Drake regained his composure.

"I found Emily the other day going, through the files in a panic. Seems you told her she'd signed off on defective plans or something like that..."

"Actually... she didn't sign off on them, she'd gotten you to... nasty habit of hers. Now where did she go off to?"

"I take it then... that 'earthquake study' was a cover for..."

"Yeah... Hey look... if we don't get out of here... the new owners are gonna do us for trespassing. You wanna start the motor hon? We're going south on Ocean..."

""Not that I'm not grateful... but couldn't you have said something?"

"No! Not until I figured out who knew what and when. There was a lot on the line. At least if nobody seemed to like... or care about me, I wouldn't feel so bad..."

"Well everyone thought you were a bit on the standoffish side... I know Emily tried to... Just how bad was it?"

"Numbers kept saying 'catastrophic failure'... You and Emily would've survived... probably... At least... you wouldn't have blocked the tunnel. New Yorkers will forgive just about anything as long as it doesn't block traffic. Keep going..."

"I take it then you definitely don't want to come back to..."

"Oh goodness no... I couldn't spend another minute in that building if you paid me. Anyway I'm married now... Turn left here..."

"No law says a married woman can't have a job. If not with me than with somebody else. I've seen your work..."

That look of panic on the uninitiated never gets old. We were turning out towards Platt Island when something rolled against our feet. It was that cap thing. We showed it to Jenny.

"Oh shit! That's the bilge plug! We gotta go back! Full reverse!"

We were inline with the end of the municipal pier when we got clipped by a cabin cruiser. Already down by the stern, we were finally flipped to the side by it's wake and went down for good. The water wasn't all that deep and Jenny could just stand on the bottom side door and poke her head up for air. She'd brought up the swim mask she kept in the glove box and was trying to put it on. We tried to help Mister Drake out of his heavy suit coat as we clung to the convertible top that had deployed itself as we sank.

"I think," Jenny speculated, "if we can flip her back onto the wheels, we can just roll her back to shore... You guys wanna see if you can get on top?"

We and Walter gamely struggled to the top edge of the car and tried to use our weight to move it, not an easy task when your body still wants to avoid hitting the ground. We were starting to draw a crowd amongst our fellow boaties looking to follow the ancient code of the sea. And then the animals with their ancient code drew nearer.

"Uh, Jennifer... Jenny... shark... coming up behind you!"

"Uh Jen... that ain't 'Slappy' either," we added.

That fish looked like it meant business so Jenny pulled the convertible top around her for protection, as if roof canvas would do any good. With a good head of steam in back of him, his bump against the roof nearly sent us back into the drink but the wheels were too much of an obstacle. He made a second lunge at Jenny and she ducked down under the water to escape being pinned between the roof and the door. We saw him dive after her but the water had clouded up on account of the struggle and we thought the worst when a blackish cloud of water floated up. After a million years, the fish swam away like someone who got what they came for and after another million years Jenny finally popped up to the surface like someone who'd been...

"The fag! You see what he did? Little fag... he just... crapped on me! Was gonna rip his lungs out but I thought I'd be nice for once... No more... What the... Ah... man... I knew that li'l fellow..."

Picking a duck bill from her hair, she turned on Walter fuming, "You sir... are bad luck!"

Jenny did indeed spend the summer on 'family obligations', the first of which was the final assemblage of the Glass Hat project and shepherding it through the Long Island and Pennsylvania railroad systems with a voyage by train ferry across the New York harbor in the process. Enough interest had been generated on the West Virginia end that a local television news crew showed up to interview Jenny as it was being put together. The better questions focused on the fish shape and its symbolic meaning in Christianity. The concept had crossed her mind. They also asked her thoughts about the area and Jenny said something about being a lover of the sea and how perfect this area must be for lovers of the mountains.

Sometime after it was finished the Waczinskis threw an all-day 'nekkid party' in celebration. The only friends of theirs to show were this one couple they'd 'swap partners' with when Barbara got tired of doing all the 'work' in bed. Jenny was able to fill the Platt family plane with her party including Wesley, Janice and their kids, us, her husband and baby with Bitsey, Cheryl, N'eddie and Lori who we had to make a stop in Philadelphia to pick up. Wesley's sister Sarah and some cousins drove over from their places nearby. Brenda and her brother 'LB' met us at the landing strip having touched down a few minutes beforehand.

Sarah had taken care of the landscaping but outside of the front lawn, you wouldn't know a human hand had touched anything from the perfection of her job. It was a thickly wooded lot and she had cleared pathways in an artistically haphazard fashion, laying flagstones to look like natural outcroppings that carried the illusion even in the steps that led down to the base of a waterfall on the lot. With those cousins of hers, she had built a small dam downstream from the falls make a deep swimmin' hole with the clearest mountain water we'd ever seen. Deeply imprinted in our minds is the tableau formed by Jenny and little Arianna, a world unto themselves, sitting in a grotto under the falls as everyone else frolicked about.

Sunning ourselves on the rooftop, the impeccable logic of Jenny's design was made a little clearer when it turned out what we thought were privacy screens proved equally well suited for holding our backs while we were catching our tan. With everyone else doing the same, you didn't have to step on any toes on the way to and from the stairs.

As Eloise described it, everybody closed their eyes and swam around in a circle while brushing over, under and against each other. The boy 'tadpoles' swam one way while the girl 'pollywogs' swam the other. If a passing 'pole' or 'wog' struck your fancy you plucked him or her aside for a look-see and you liked each other, 'swam together' for a while. There was penetration in this game, but not the sexual 'run' you needed to get real tadpoles in you. It was a good clean swirling swim with the married couples surprisingly good at finding each other in the maelstrom. We even felt a few tadpoles and pollywogs swim by together from time to time.

The visit to the Ryerson-Platt house in sunny southern California wasn't nearly as fun. Like the Glass Hat it was a hillside home, but the hills were crowded with other homes so no all-day nekkid parties here. The air wasn't nearly as clean, trees weren't as tall or plentiful and lots of luck finding a clear mountain stream. Still there was a dynamite view of the city though the smog and the marina was in sight. Cheryl had decorated the place with classic Bauhaus pieces that fit well with Jenny's glass block desk now in her room and her streamlined bed which was now in Eddie's room. Cheryl was especially proud of the fact that she was able to get fiberglass insulation custom dyed to match the blue-green vinyl wall panels.

The pool was unfinished and it didn't look like it'd be much good for water sports. However Cheryl mentioned that she had an offer for a lot up the street that was a subdivision of a Spanish style estate from the silent movie days. It was a skimpy lot and there was a one storey above ground height restriction, but use of their pool was included in the deal. Trooping us up the hill for a look, Cheryl mentioned a forgotten design of Jenny's as ideal for the above ground part of the design.

"I gave most of that school stuff to the kids. I kinda hate asking for it back..."

"Hey, we're just holding that stuff for the museum of your life's work Miss DaVinci. Just let us know what you need."

Jenny probably could've used her desk back in Amityville because as fate would have it, she and Eddie would end up staying in New York through most of the rest of the year. The Jederman Brethren were interested in financing a screen version of that Resurrection Machine story but they didn't have a lot of money so the filming would have to be done in and around The City.

In the meantime Jenny had relocated her architectural 'working office' to a desk at the J P & C Building in the Village. The company Xerox machine had broken down and she was the only one there that Sunday when the repairman was scheduled to show. He saw her hyphenated name on his work order and asked her if she was any relation to the Philadelphia Ryersons because he'd been on a big job over there. It seems they had rush ordered a couple dozen photocopiers to use for the weekend which was the reason why he had to come around on a Sunday. It took her maybe five or ten minutes of wondering before she came to the conclusion that they expected their records to be seized at any moment and were making backup copies.

A phone call to Lori confirmed her suspicions and that Monday Jenny was in the offices of her grandfather's brokerage firm with a representative from the SEC to report her findings and to suggest that with Electric Valve company expecting to be raided, it would be reasonable to presume that their plans hinged on such a raid. She also served notice that if their plans did involve a 'pump and dump' scheme, she intended to buy a majority stake as soon as their shares hit the market. He reminded her that she would have to file notice of her intentions with the SEC. Drawing papers from her bag, she replied that she already had that covered.

As Jenny predicted, the morning business reports had glowing stories about the Electric Valve company having secured a 'big defense contract' that according to Lori, had been drawn up by the company but not yet signed by the DOD. By pure coincidence, someone on the wire services, perhaps thinking they could make a buck off Electric Valve stories today, had dug up Jenny's old story about the company's extra pension fund and put it back into circulation. It wouldn't be till the afternoon that anyone outside of Wall Street would see her article but enough people on the inside saw it. By the morning bell the word was out and you could've heard crickets chirping whenever the Electric Valve name came over the ticker.

"Why don't we let Olaf chew on his lutefisk a little," Jenny mused as she pointed out the sights from the Ver der Plaat Company windows. "See that building at Number One Wall? Used to be an eighteen story building on a forty by thirty part of the lot. That's like your house in the village..."
We were still chewing our lunch when one of those 'and on a lighter note' stories came over the radio about a pension fund with no pensioners. It was time for Jenny to make her move. There's a lag between the time a buy or sell order is placed and when the sale is actually made. We had just enough time to walk the block and a half over to the Stock Exchange's visitor's gallery to watch as Jenny's order in action on the floor itself. Being who we are, we were able to get a helpful guide to point out the person we needed to watch as he made his rounds to all the different concession stands looking for blocks of Electric Valve stock as they were being poured into the market. Having baited the waters he drifted over to a quiet corner to let the other piranhas come to him with offerings. We walked back to the Van der Plaat offices to watch as Jenny tallied the haul. There were two hundred and fifty thousand shares of the Electric Valve company on the market and even though she'd spent her inheritance, she got them all. When the stock hit two-fifty near closing, she let go of sixty thousand shares and essentially got control of a twenty million dollar company for next to nothing.

Well, she did have to cut a fifteen hundred dollar check to balance the account.

She made herself scarce for the week, holing up in EsmÈralda's lair while she planned her next evil move. We'd stuck around Eddie and his cinematographer to try and learn some of the business but we do know that Jenny had set up some clandestine business meetings over at The Fair. It really wasn't necessary to do so on account of the reporting of her business 'coup' died down when reporters found her last name on some documentation and assumed it was all some sort of property transfer to an heir or something, and not the 'girl wonder takes over a multimillion dollar company' story they'd been hoping for. Sometime on Friday Eddie got a call from Doris asking to bring himself the wife and the grandchild up to the house this weekend.

It was Lady Desdemona with a portfolio full of contracts and a basket full of baby that rode with him on this trip. Naturally we came along too.

"Gee... if I'da known how easy it was to feed a kid in this dress I would've made a couple more just like it. Willya look at that... In 'n out just like she was at a burger joint!"

"There's no 'off' switch on that beautiful mind of yours is there honey?"

The Lawson clan had gathered in the drawing room like they were waiting for Philo Vance to reveal the one whodunit. Jenny had been telling us about an silent movie actress in one of his films that had our style of hair. She had left the studio over a contract dispute but they wanted her back on account of them wanting to turn her last film into a talkie and needed her to dub in all her lines. She refused and they used someone else's voice and put it out that she didn't record well.

"If we ever see her around Hollywood, maybe I can tell her I did this for all the girls like her..."

"I asked you to come over here Yennifer... because I vanted to gif you a chance to explain yourself before I reported you to the Securities and the Exchange Commission... Y'know... dat sort of insider trading dat you done there is what they call illegal."

Can't say the man doesn't have stones. Even his own side was taken aback by his chutzpah. Jenny just said an 'Oh really' and suggested that if he wanted to tender evidence against her that maybe he should talk to her 'legal advisor' and could she use his telephone for a collect call? Not waiting for a reply, Jenny call the Company exchange and asked Madeline to put her through to 'that Washington number' she left with her and to stay on the line in case it couldn't go through. It didn't so she asked her to put her through to 'that Massachusetts number'. That got through.

"Robert? Hiya... this is Jennifer... I really hate to bother you with this... but Mis'ess K said it was all right... They still remember? That's sweet of them... as I was saying I hate to bother you with this... but somebody threw down a challenge coin... and I really can't let that just sit on the table..."

She briefly outlined her 'predicament' and gave her side of the story before handing over to Olaf who asked to whom he was speaking. In an imagined and pretty awful Boston accent we mentally replied, 'Ah this is ah Senatah Robert F. Kennedy' as Olaf choked on his figurative lutefisk. He was visibly shaken when he hung up the phone.

"So... you have my company. What are your intentions with it?"

"I had some ideas..."

The first thing she wanted to do was take the Electric Valve company private which meant she wanted them to kick in with the outstanding shares and since Eddie decided that he wanted the shares owed to him after all that would effectively settle the issue. For her troubles, she would take the unfinished California plant as her expansion plans for the company had no need for it.

"We have a large population of Puerto Ricans in New York and as I was discussing with my uhm... advisor... we figured that we ought to do something for them, seeing as they were a big constituency... Well obviously moving New York wouldn't make any more sense than staying here so we'll be opening a branch plant in San Juan or somewhere abouts... haven't worked that out. No income taxes over there and Uncle Sam'll float us the loans we need so maybe we can think about making a profit for this company."

One of the Lawson boys that looks like he was called 'Chip' or 'Lance' asked that one. Jenny drew what looked like a large transistor radio from her portfolio in reply.

"Tape recorders..."

"Gee... Don't they make enough of those already?"

"Not cartridge recorders... friend of mine runs an electronics shop out on Long Island... we had a big debut of these last year... This is fixing to be the next big thing..."

"Well we've done a little research of our own... with a real firm. They told us eight tracks are the way to go..."

"Yeah... but you can't record with an eight track. I mean not easily... Where mom works, they use cartridges for sound effects and promos... and they hafta record on a reel to reel and load the tape with a special machine before they can use them. With a cassette recorder you can go back and forth like nothin'. Anyway eight tracks are kinda bulky. These... you can fit in a shirt pocket. Best of all, there's no license fee to make 'em."

"I've seen the specs on these," said another Lawson spawn, "Sound's not so great... and it's mono too... Everybody's going stereo nowadays."

"Yeah but kids today want control over their entertainment. With this you can put all the songs you like on a tape in whatever order you want 'em. Now look at this... With this you can record songs off the radio at home or if you're at the beach and you hear a song you like, you can record it there... There's hookups on the side so you can record off a record player..."

"People are still going to want stereo..."

"And we'll give it to them. And we'll give 'em decent sound too. Phillips has a stereo recorder in the pipeline and there's a company in England working on improving the sound as we speak. I've had some talks with the people at Sony and they're interested in a joint venture with us. It seems they don't like to make house brand items and I was thinking we could buy subassemblies from them and build for the department stores ourselves. They get to save face and they'll have a foothold in this country if there's ever a trade war down the road."

"That's all fine and well... but what's going to happen to the plant we have here?"

"And what," demanded Olaf, "do you intend to do about me, hmm?"

"Plant's gonna need a company representative," Eddie replied. "All you'd hafta do is send back reports and relay instructions from the head office... It'd be like a government job..."

"More like a sinecure... Is this how you're going to treat the father who brung you into this world Eddie? I never thought I'd have a son who'd let a woman run him around..."

"You're just lucky it wasn't Lori sitting next to me. She wanted to leave you flat... It's a better deal than you deserve."

Muttering 'Well I think I have something to say about that', Olaf stormed out of the room. Moments later a shot rang out followed by a grunt. Nobody heard the sound of a body falling to the floor as we'd all rushed out of the room to look for him. We found him on the floor of the study with blood streaming from the top of his eye socket, a head wound Jenny forgot to test for.

Hearing a low groan from Olaf, Lori was livid.

"You stupid shit! You don't even have the brains to kill yourself..."

"Lori," admonished Jenny, "now is not the time for that sort of thing. he's still your father."

Jenny kept pulling a sobbing Doris off of Olaf so she could administer first aid. Doris wanted to try and get the bullet out and Jenny kept telling her to leave it in because it might be stopping up an artery or lodged against some undamaged brain. Olaf was blubbering something about 'that devil woman' having 'a curse around her' as Jenny tried to assess the damage he'd done to himself.

"You're lucky you didn't put an eye out," she admonished as she blotted his face. "Looks like the bullet went straight up into that thick skull of yours. Must hurt something awful... Well let that be a lesson to ya... life isn't yours to take."

As he was being carted off to the hospital a police detective held us briefly for questioning. He didn't like the looks of the wound and and sat at Olaf's desk trying to work out for himself what had gone on.

Holding a figurative gun in his hand, he aimed the barrel for the ceiling.

"I'm thinking he was getting out of his seat when the gun went off on him... I think... he was fixing to use this on somebody."

"That's an awful long reach," Jenny replied. "You think you could walk into a court with that?"

"I could give it a try... Way I look at it... It just seems to me that if you're gonna blow your brains out, you'd point the gun like this..."

He pressed the figurative gun into his right eye so that the bullet would go deep into brain tissue.

"He must've leaned back to get himself out of the chair and when the gun tapped his face... maybe a bad reflex made him pull the trigger. Was there some sort of reason for him to..."

"There was some discussion about the family business..."

"Well there you go... Lemme guess, the old man was running the company into the ground and you kids wanted him out of the way so you could save the family fortune and he got sore. Am I right?"

"Close enough... You see, I'd bought out the company out from under him... I had it set up so we could start making money again..."

"A pretty girl like you? Hey didn't you used to be a singer? Lady Somethin-amona. I'd taken the wife and kids over to that Freedomland park..."

"Yeah... Well I think he's suffered enough for one day... is there really any point..."

"Well, you know you just can't go around playing with guns... We'd at least hafta charge him with attempting suicide. We could put him in the bughouse but if he ain't loco he's just gonna be mad as hell when he gets out."

"....and if you try to charge him with attempted murder and he gets off, it's my ass he'll be gunning for. I got a kid to worry about..."

Sadly the problem worked out for itself when the hospital called to report that he'd gone into an anaphylactic shock and died suddenly while the bullet wound was being stitched up.
"How do ya like that," mused the detective,"the poor fellow literally died of lead poisoning..."

Figuring Jenny was not the most welcome person in the Lawson household right now he offered to escort her to her car but it was Doris muttering, 'He had a choice', that extended a hand to her. Chip and Lance chimed in with, 'You gave him an even break' and 'If that copper's right, then he got what he had coming to him'. Jenny had to remind them that he was still a human being. Lori, ever so practical, asked if maybe one of us ought to go down to the hospital to claim the body.

After the funeral disposed of his corporeal remains there was nothing more to do but read the will for the disposition of his worldly remains. Most of the nothing he had in the end was left to Doris with only a few token crumbs of nothing for Lori and Eddie. There was a yawl moored down in Atlantic City he'd just bought for himself and the only person interested in that was Jenny and she wasn't in the will.

Not having the spleen to run an electronics company anymore and assured by Chip and Lance that they'd try to make a go of it with her plans, she offered the Electric Valve company, minus its stock shares and the Los Angeles property in trade for the vessel and a bargain was struck. She was a beaut of a vessel that had yet to be named so with a bottle of Rheingold from a nearby store, Jenny christened her the Amis Reunis. With 'Cynthia' tagging along behind us, we returned to Amityville with a wind at our back and the sea rising to greet us, a little chastened, but with no regrets.