“They’re on their way home,” Annie reassured her. Usually it was Ted who had fallen out of a tree or off a ladder or bumped his head. He was an active boy and accident prone. The girls were a lot more sedate. Lizzie was almost a teenager, and Katie was a fireball, but she was more verbal than athletic and had never gotten hurt. “I talked to Jane two hours ago,” Annie said calmly. “They should be home any minute.”

With that, Magdalena exploded in another torrent of Spanish. She sounded as though she was crying, and the only word Annie understood was la policia. The police.

“What about the police? Are the kids okay?” Maybe one of them really had gotten seriously injured. So far it had only been small stuff, except for Ted’s broken leg when he fell out of a tree at the Vineyard and his parents were there. “Tell me in English,” Annie insisted. “What happened? Who got hurt?”

“Your sister… the police call… the plane… ” Annie felt as though she had been shot out of a cannon and was spinning in midair. Everything was in slow motion, and she could feel herself reeling at the words.

“What did they say?” Annie managed to grind out the words through the shards of glass in her throat. Every word she formed was a physical pain. “What happened? What did the police SAY?” She was shouting at Magdalena and didn’t know it. And all Magdalena could do was sob. “TELL ME, DAMMIT!” Annie shouted at her, as Magdalena tried to tell her in English.

“I don’t know… something happen… I call her cell phone and she not answer… they say… they say… the plane catch fire. It was the police in New London.”

“I’ll call you back,” Annie said, and hung up on her. She finally got a police emergency number in New London, that referred her to another number. A voice asked her who she was, and after she told them, there was an interminable silence on the other end of the phone.