Meanwhile, Josefina was off to Mexico tonight, and Kimberley and Justin weren’t going to take care of themselves. There wasn’t any help for it. She had to talk to Frank.

She dialed the UCLA number. She didn’t expect to get him, not right away. Frank had always despised phone calls. They interrupted. They disrupted. They interfered with the thinking of wise thoughts.

Horny thoughts, more likely, Nicole thought sourly. But he wasn’t too bad about answering his voice mail – when he got around to it.

She had the message all ready in her mind, set to give to the machine. But the phone cut off at the first ring, leaving her wondering briefly if she’d dialed a wrong number. Then Frank’s voice said cheerily, “Hi, Dawn, darlin’, how you doin?”

“This isn’t Dawn darlin’,” Nicole said, cold as black ice in a Midwest February. “Sorry to disappoint you. It’s your ex-wife. ‘

“Oh. Nicole.” Frank Perrin’s voice dropped about forty degrees. “I didn’t think it would be you. “

“Obviously. ‘Dawn darlin’.’ “ Nicole imitated his eager tone again, as nastily as she could. Goddamn blond California bimbo, fresh out of college and raring to go after the prof. Dawn – Dawn Soderstrom, how was that for a nice sexy Nordic name? – had been Frank’s editor at the University of California Press. She’d been just wild, like totally jazzed, she said, about his book on industrial espionage and the Internet. In Nicole’s day, busty blondes had got the hots for cuter topics, volumes of deeply angst-ridden poetry, say, or passionate monographs on Derrida or Thomas Pynchon. Dawn’s hots were the wave of the future.

She hadn’t been the only one, either. Frank had got lucky. After he turned in the book but before it saw print, the topic caught fire. To everybody’s surprise – most of all Nicole’s, but obviously not Dawn’s – Spy by Wire took off, and even made a couple of nonfiction bestseller lists. And then, a few weeks later, Frank took off, too – with Dawn.