“Rose,” he said. She turned. “If you ever need anything or just someone to talk to, call me. Let me give you my cell number.”

The term “cell number” always made her think of prison. Her heart leapt nonetheless. He brushed her bare thigh when he opened the glove compartment and reached for a red plastic pen. Then he scrawled his number on the back of an old gas station receipt and unthinkingly handed both pen and paper to her. She took both, pocketing the pen before he could notice.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll see you at class on Monday. If not sooner.” He waved as she got out of the car. What did he mean, if not sooner?

Suddenly, he exclaimed, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“In the window of that big old house.”

“Where?”

“It’s gone now. I thought I saw a naked girl in there looking right at us.”

Rosemary turned to the van der Holt house. Was he putting her on? “It’s unlikely . . . I’m quite positive the guy who lives there doesn’t like girls.”

“Hmm. Then I must’ve imagined it. That’s what I get for watching Dead Ringers with you.”

II.

II.

GIRL ON THE PLANE

—

December 1975

to

April 2006

– 4 –

– 4 –

HOMECOMING

Mary-Sue Ireland’s path to Santa Claus Lane began at her father’s funeral in 1975, in a land that felt completely alien to her, the kind of place she’d never dream of visiting, let alone dying in. She would sooner find common ground with a Hindu mendicant on the streets of Calcutta than with any of the well-fed citizens of this dreaded town.

She had rarely given Des Moines, Iowa, a moment’s thought (except to curse it) since her jailbreak at age eighteen. Since then, she’d visited her father at his retirement home maybe four times, which was four times more than she’d wanted to. Even with the cloud of Alzheimer’s, Bob Ireland always managed to pull himself together for enough time each year to send her an airline ticket from San Francisco. His checks kept Mary-Sue coming back, and she was too proud to make any bones about it. He’d been a distant father to her, spiritually absent even when physically present, and if this was his way of making up for it, she’d take every penny.

Of course, he’d gotten on just fine with her little brother, Bobby—in those days there were no two Ioway men baseball couldn’t bond. Mary-Sue knew she was too old to let such inequities eat at her. She was thirty-three. When Daddy was her age, he’d already built a splendid career and had been for five years the head of a Midwestern rubber company that dealt in condom technology. What had she done?