Carrie stops me as her face turns murderous and at the same time pleased. I pull back the graceful long pole and snap it forward with just the right flick of my wrist, I hope, and the rubber sinker sails up in an arc toward the top of the magnolia tree. Sunlight catches the graceful monofilament line as it rises high and bends, falling over the whirling dervish, and I wait for the spinning blades to cut the line.

But they don’t, and the drone jerks. At least one of the blades has stopped, and the sudden tugging cues me to start reeling as Carrie yells obscenities, the flight controller unable to override the lowest technology of modern time, a simple fishing pole.

“Run! Run!” Desi is yelling, and Janet is on her feet.

The drone careens like a wounded bird, and I reel and reel as Carrie’s furious strides close in on me. Reeling furiously, and the drone is no more than ten feet away, loud like a whirling fan, the conductors dangling not far over her head.

I tug down hard on the fishing pole at the same moment Carrie pulls out a big stiletto and the long blade hisses out. Then blood is flying everywhere. I hear someone screaming and what sounds like a transformer blowing, and then I’m on the ground. I smell burned flesh.

CHAPTER 46

TWO DAYS LATER, SATURDAY MORNING

FOR AN INSTANT I was Elisa Vandersteel sailing through empty space and landing on my back, remembering nothing. Except I came to in the emergency room. I’m not dead, not even close, and I sit up in bed to the sound of heavy rain.

It dully beats the slate roof and spatters the windows when the wind blasts, and Sock and Tesla are wedged warmly on either side of me. I hear their breathing, and then it’s drowned out by howling gusts that just now whistled and moaned, and water thrashes and drums in different intensities and tempos. The early morning sounds moody and wounded. Or maybe it’s me who feels like that.

The event at the Kennedy School night before last wasn’t canceled but postponed, and that not only was wise but unavoidable. One speaker was dead, the other in the hospital. Whatever the drone’s conductors came in contact with in addition to Carrie Grethen and her stiletto caused me to be thrown and knocked unconscious. I spent the next day and a half being tested, prodded, probed and scanned, finally coming home last night.