Well, that certainly fits; this was the first time Dinah had ever flown in anything, let alone coast to coast in a huge transcontinental jetliner.

Try to reason it out.

Well, she had awakened in a strange place to find her Sighted Person gone. Of course that was scary, even if you knew the absence was only temporary — after all, your Sighted Person couldn’t very well decide to pop off to the nearest Taco Bell because she had the munchies when she was shut up in an airplane flying at 37,000 feet. As for the strange silence in the cabin... well, this was the red-eye, after all. The other passengers were probably sleeping.

All of them? the worried part of her mind asked doubtfully. ALL of them are sleeping? Can that be?

Then the answer came to her: the movie. The ones who were awake were watching the in-flight movie. Of course.

A sense of almost palpable relief swept over her. Aunt Vicky had told her the movie was Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, and said she planned to watch it herself... if she could stay awake, that was.

Dinah ran her hand lightly over her aunt’s seat, feeling for her headphones, but they weren’t there. Her fingers touched a paperback book instead. One of the romance novels Aunt Vicky liked to read, no doubt — tales of the days when men were men and women weren’t, she called them.

Dinah’s fingers went a little further and happened on something else — smooth, fine-grained leather. A moment later she felt a zipper, and a moment after that she felt the strap.

It was Aunt Vicky’s purse.

Dinah’s disquiet returned. The earphones weren’t on Aunt Vicky’s seat, but her purse was. All the traveller’s checks, except for a twenty tucked deep into Dinah’s own purse, were in there — Dinah knew, because she had heard Mom and Aunt Vicky discussing them before they left the house in Pasadena.