A hundred years earlier, Susannah Faulconer would have been considered a great beauty, but her finely chiseled, elongated features were too subtle to compete with the bold cover-girl faces of the seventies. Her nose was thin and long but exquisitely straight; her lips narrow but beautifully arched. Only her eyes had a modern look about them. Wide-set and well-shaped, they were a light gray. They were also unfathomable, so that occasionally during a conversation, the person with whom she was speaking had the uncomfortable sense that Susannah simply wasn't there, that she had withdrawn to a place no one else was permitted to see.

For the past hour, the cream of California society had been arriving for the wedding. Limousines swept up the tree-lined drive and into the cobbled motor court that formed a crescent in front of Falcon Hill, the Faulconer family estate. Falcon Hill looked very much as if it had been part of the hills south of San Francisco for centuries, but it was barely twenty years old-built in the posh community of Atherton by Susannah's father, Joel Faulconer, not long after he had taken over control of Faulconer Business Technologies from his own father.

Despite differences of age and sex, there was a sameness about the guests who sat in the carefully laid-out rows of lacy white wrought-iron chairs. They all looked prosperous and conservative, very much like people accustomed to giving orders instead of taking them-all except the beautiful young woman who sat toward the back. In a sea of Halston and Saint Laurent, Paige Faulconer, the bride's younger sister, was conspicuous in a maroon thrift-store dress from the thirties draped at the shoulders with a funky, pink marabou boa.