said, sorry that she'd brought up the subject of casting. She stood up. "We don't have to sit out here in the heat any longer, do we?"

"I just dragged you out here to air a few opinions. Since we agree, we can wait inside." Shelley glanced at her watch. "The caterer will be parking the van in the back alley any minute now."

Four

while Shelley was letting the caterers in through the back of the theater and showing them where to prepare and serve the snack supper, Jane took out the canvas bag she'd brought along and removed her needlepoint project. She'd been working on it all day. Looking at the patterns in the book she'd been given, she realized quickly that most of them, except the bargellos, were in sets of four or six stitches. She'd roughed out a basic pattern that could accommodate either multiples of four or multiples of six.

She'd only done two patterns so far. One was a square block of jacquard in light and dark blue in the upper left corner. The pattern beneath it was a cashmere diagonal in a long strip down the left side in a dark pink and dark purple. She was contemplating which colors and patterns to do next when Gloria Bunting, who had no dialogue in the scene they were reading through, walked over and sat down beside Jane.

"That's lovely," she said. "I was a friend of the actress Sylvia Sidney and she was always needle-pointing on the set. She did lovely work. I envied the skill. She showed me the basic stitches, but I didn't follow through."

Jane smiled. "You know she did at least one instructional book about needlepoint, don't you? I have a copy at home. I bought it when I tried this years ago and failed. Now Shelley and I are taking lessons."