The cable news was showing live video of elderly residents being evacuated from condominiums and apartment buildings on Miami Beach. Many of the old folks carried cats or poodles in their arms.

"So," said Bonnie Lamb, "we're still doing Epcot tomorrow?"

Her husband didn't answer.

"Honey?" she said. "Epcot?"

Max Lamb's attention was rooted to the hurricane news. "Oh sure," he said absently.

"You remembered the umbrellas?"

"Yes, Bonnie, in the car."

She asked him to turn off the television and come to bed. When he got beneath the covers, she moved closer, nipped his earlobes, played her fingers through the silky sprout of hair on his bony chest.

"Guess what I'm not wearing," she whispered.

"Ssshhh," said Max Lamb. "Listen to that rain."

Edie Marsh headed to Dade County from Palm Beach, where she'd spent six months trying to sleep with a Kennedy. She'd had the plan all worked out, how she'd seduce a young Kennedy and then threaten to run to the 'cops with a lurid tale of perversion, rape and torture. She'd hatched the scheme while watching the William Kennedy Smith trial on Court TV and noticing the breathless relief with which the famous clan had received the acquittal; all of them with those fantastic teeth, beaming at the cameras but wearing an expression that Edie Marsh had seen more than a few times in her twenty-nine action-packed years-the look of those who'd dodged a bullet. They'd have no stomach for another scandal, not right away. Next time there'd be a mad stampede for the Kennedy family checkbook, in order to make the problem go away. Edie had it all figured out.

She cleaned out her boyfriend's bank account and grabbed the Amtrak to West Palm, where she found a cheap duplex apartment.