Allie knew peeling out of the woman wouldn’t be easy, having been in her for more than three hours, but she didn’t want to linger inside her either. She peeled out while the woman was distracted, tending to the cats—but after three whole hours, this wasn’t like peeling off a wet suit, it was more like ripping off a Band-Aid. It was sharp and shocking. The woman gasped and fell back into a chair, her hand on her chest. Then, when the woman caught her breath, she went around the house checking that all the locks were secure, as if she sensed an intruder. So much for not raising suspicion.

Now Allie was back in the wind—not strong enough to knock her off her feet, but disorienting nonetheless. She skinjacked someone driving through the neighborhood, then when she got to a more crowded street, she soul-surfed from car to car, until she was far enough away from the river that the wind was bearable. She spent the night knees-to-chest on a roadside deadspot the size of a basketball, considering what her next move should be.

It was somewhere around midnight that it struck Allie how amazingly stupid she had been! Her investigative technique was stuck in “Nancy Drew” mode, which might have been fine when the cat woman was her age, but not in this day and age. Allie should have been much more forward-thinking. This, after all, was the age of information. Why would anyone need a phone book when you had e-mail addresses?

Allie returned the following day to discover that the cat woman was cutting-edge. In her spare room, she had a laptop that picked up a neighbor’s wireless network. Of course her Internet favorites list contained things like the Crocheting Club of America, but it was good to know that even the hopelessly old-fashioned and questionably batty could still be Web-savvy.

Now Allie had a plan. She waited until the woman took her afternoon nap, jacked her the instant the woman’s head hit the pillow, and went straight for the laptop.

First Allie created a new e-mail address: [email protected]. The question was, why would the cat woman have a reason to e-mail Allie’s parents? Allie had the perfect solution. The cat woman bore a slight resemblance to Mrs. Wintuck, one of Allie’s old teachers. Of course the hair was the wrong color and a little too straight, but that could be dealt with. Allie felt confident that this woman could pass for Mrs. Wintuck—at least when it came to her parents. So she composed an e-mail using both of her parents’ e-mail addresses as recipients, marking it “urgent.”