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"I just flew up from Hilleanderville," she said, referring to her husband's hometown in Georgia.

"Jackson's still there. His brother's ill. He'll come up as soon as he can."

"Cassy," Alexandra said, drawing a chair to Cassy's desk, "tell me what you know."

"No can do, sorry. I gave my word. No press statements."

"Cassy" -Alexandra waited for the network president to meet her eyes.

"I swear I won't use any of it. Not until you tell me I can."

"And if I don't believe you?"

The question hung in the air a moment.

"If you don't believe in me, Cassy, frankly I don't know who you can."

Cassy nodded, biting her lower lip.

"She was electrocuted over the telephone in property room three."

Alexandra closed her eyes.

"How she got in there or why she was there, we don't know. But we do know that someone diverted over a thousand volts from a main power cable into that phone line to kill her instantly."

"At least that's something," Alexandra said, reopening her eyes.

"She didn't know it was going to happen and she didn't suffer."

Cassy looked miserable.

"The body was horrible, Alexandra. I didn't even know it was Bea at first, she was so badly burnt."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." Cassy shoved a photocopy across her desk.

"And look at this. They found it upstairs in Jessica's office."

Alexandra picked up the sheet of paper.

Dearest Jessica, She won't hurt you anymore. I'll see that no one else does, either.

All my love, Leopold The first black limousine to turn into the church parking lot in Huntington, Long Island, carried Jessica Wright, Denny Ladler, Alicia Washington, Langley Peterson his wife, Belinda Darenbrook Peterson, and Jessica's bodyguard, Wendy Mitchell. The second limousine carried Cassy Cochran, her husband, Jackson Darenbrook, Alexandra Waring and Will Rafferty. The next six limos carried the rest of the production staff and crew for "The Jessica Wright Show."

When Jessica emerged from her limo she felt very shaky. She hadn't known Bea at all well, but she did know that the twenty-three-year-old woman should not be dead, and that she was dead only because Jessica had hired her.

DBS was taking care of everything on behalf of Bea's parents. The Blakelys had divorced several years ago, Bea's mother moving to Florida and her father to Los Angeles, and the funeral was being held here in Huntington because it was where Bea had spent her early childhood--the happy years, as her mother called them--and because the grandmother Bea had been close to was buried in a cemetery here. Bea's mothers had been Jewish, but later converted to some sort of New Age discipline, and her father was a lapsed Catholic, and so the parents had compromised and chosen a

Congregational church that, Mrs. Blakely said, would take anybody.

Jessica led the way up the stairs into the church. When a reporter shoved forward to ask, "Jessica, do you blame yourself for Bea Blakely's murder?" Jessica only looked at him, tears springing to her eyes.

"No," she finally whispered. And she pushed past him into the church.

Back several yards, just outside her limousine, Cassy was saying a forceful, "No," to Alexandra.

"But" -the anchorwoman started.

"No," Cassy repeated.

"Will cannot take a leave, you cannot" -- "Fine, I'll finance it myself," Alexandra declared.

"Alexandra," Jackson Darenbrook urged, "just let her finish, will you?"

"I've already made a deal with the NYPD and the feds," Cassy said under her breath, looking around to make sure no one could hear. She looked at Alexandra.

"The deal is, you work with them--and we get the scoop, hands down. They owe me, and they'll do it. All right?"

The church was very nearly empty. The organ was playing softly. The gleaming coffin was on the altar, closed, with a blanket of roses over it. Jessica walked down the aisle and took a seat in a pew on the left, in the fifth row, so she would not be confused with family, but would be close enough to let others know that everyone around her had known Bea. She was joined by Denny, Alicia, Langley and Belinda. Wendy sat directly behind her and Slim stood in the very back of the church.

Cassy led the way into the pew directly across the aisle, with Jackson, Alexandra and Will. The rest of the DBS employees scattered behind them on either side.

At noon, a door to the side of the altar opened and a woman was led out, leaning heavily on the arm of a solemn-faced man. The woman was older, in her sixties perhaps, and she appeared slightly unsteady on her feet. She looked at Jessica and nodded slightly, and then was seated in the first row, the man easing down beside her.

Bea's mother.

An older man, in his sixties, too, surely, came striding quickly down the aisle and threw himself down in the front row on the other side.

Alone. In contrast to the mother, however, he was deeply tanned and had a scraggly ponytail below the back of his balding head.

Bea's father.

Jessica turned around. Other than the DBS crew, maybe five other people had come. She turned quickly back around and bowed her head, tears squeezing out from under her lids as she prayed and prayed and prayed that God watch over Bea and her parents. Please, God, take care of her and tell her we'll miss her. We didn't know her very well yet, but she counted and she mattered and that's why we're all here today.

Bea, we'll miss you. I'll miss you. I miss you now. Through her tears, head still bowed, Jessica smiled. I miss your hair.

As Jessica wept, she blindly accepted the handkerchief Denny was pressing into her hand and held it against her mouth. It kept crossing her mind that Bea ] had betrayed her, sold information and pictures to the tabloids but whatever anger she felt was far out1 weighed by the fact that Bea had died while working I for her, and it had clearly been Jessica's stalker who had ;

killed her. Although death would have been instantaneous, being electrocuted was too horrible (for Alexandra had told her how Bea had died). The sick son of a bitch. Dirk had explained, somehow knew that Bea was selling Jessica out to the tabloids and had executed her at eleven thirty-five on Saturday night. What exactly Bea had been doing at West End was still a mystery. Probably, Dirk said, she had been looking for more stuff to pass along to The Inquiring Eye. In the property room? Jessica wondered.

The service was perfectly adequate except the minister kept calling Bea "Beatrice," a slip that only Jessica and Bea's parents would catch, since they were the only ones who knew her full name was Bea.

In the minister's defense, not knowing the deceased or her family, he had simply, Jessica assumed, elongated her name to add more dignity to the proceedings.

At the conclusion of the service Bea's mother was hustled out the front again. Jessica slipped out the far side of the pew and went after her.

"Mrs. Blakely," she called softly, closing the door be hind her.

The woman stopped and turned around, and the man with her looked angrily at Jessica. It was only when Jessica had reached Bea's mother and had taken her hand that she realized that Mrs. Blakely was slightly drunk.

"I wanted to tell you that your daughter was a very special young woman. And that she did a wonderful job and I was extremely fond of her. There are no words that can express how terrible I feel." Tears sprang into her eyes again.

"All I can do is pray for Bea and for you " And then Jessica threw her arms around the woman and hugged her, because she had lost her daughter, be cause she was drunk, Jessica didn't know, but it was all so awful and lonely and terrible and she knew this woman desperately needed love and warmth from somewhere.

Bea's mother remained dry-eyed, though.

"Thank you," she said.

Jessica turned around and went back out to the church. It was empty.

Everyone was out front, on the steps now, the DBS group milling around, some of the crew chatting to the press standing behind the ropes. Jessica was looking for Bea's father when Cassy and Belinda Darenbrook Peterson approached.

"Did you see where the father went?"

she asked them.

"Oh," Cassy said, "he's already left."

"Apparently," Belinda said to Jessica in her lilting southern drawl, putting a hand on her shoulder, "Bea had been estranged from her parents for quite some time."

"She's still their daughter," Jessica said.

"Aren't they going to the cemetery? Isn't anybody going to be there to bury her?"

"The minister's going over," Belinda said.

"Langley and Cassy and Jackson and the rest need to get back to Manhattan. But I'll be happy to go with you, Jessica, if you'd like to go."

"I don't want Bea to be buried all by herself," Jessica said, starting to cry again.

"We can't just leave her."

"Jess, we'll go to the cemetery," Denny said quickly, moving next to her and putting his arm around her.

"You and me and Alicia" -- "We're coming too," Alexandra called, standing nearby with Will.

And so, when the coffin of Bea Blakely, age twenty- three, was lowered into the grave next to her grandmother's, Jessica and Denny and Alicia and Alexandra and Belinda and Will each dropped a rose on her coffin and said a prayer with the minister.

Afterward, Jessica felt a little bit better.

"What are you going to do now?" Will asked, walking alongside her back to the limo.

"Oh, I don't know, go to an AA meeting, I guess," she sighed.

"If it's an open meeting, maybe I could go with you."

She took his hand and kept walking, looking at the blue sky, the rolling green hills of the cemetery and thanking God that Bea's spot next to her grandmother was so pretty, and that they were nestled together in the shade of a big old maple.

They reached the limo, but she pulled Will on a little ways so they could talk in private.

"What is it?" Will asked softly.

"I don't know," she said, brushing a piece of hair back off his face.

"I guess I'm feeling incredibly grateful. Grateful that you're here, that they're here" -She nodded to the gang.

"It's funny, isn't it?

How family is what you make of it. I mean," she said, turning back to look into his eyes, " this is my family in so many ways. And I am so grateful to feel so loved, so cared for. "

He raised her hand to kiss it.

A twitch of a smile.

"Would you really like to come with me to a meeting?" She checked her watch.

"There's one on the Upper West Side at four-thirty I think we could make."

He held his arm out to her.

The meeting had been canceled for room-renovation reasons, the note on the church door said, which probably was just as well since reporters from the cemetery had followed them there. And so Jessica, Will and

Wendy climbed back into the limo and Slim jumped back into the Crown Victoria and they all drove to Central Park West to Alexandra's building. The Roehamp- ton.

"You must be exhausted," Jessica said to Wendy as the woman unlocked the door for her.

"Not yet."

"Well, I am," Jessica said.

"Actually," Wendy said, preceding Jessica into the apartment to turn off the alarm system and look around, "if you're going to stay here a while, I would like to put in an hour on Alexandra's Stair Master

"Be my guest," Jessica said, poking her head back out the front door.

"Come on. Slim, we're going to order in from a great coffee shop I know. I'll buy you a cheeseburger."

While they had been in Long Island, Alexandra's housekeeper, the infamous Mrs. Roberts, had visited, for all the suitcases and clothes that had been strewn all over the guest room and in Alexandra's study had been carefully unpacked and organized.

"I have got to get these shoes off," Jessica said, slipping off the black high heels she had never worn before. She had dressed respectfully for Bea: a simple black dress, a single strand of pearls, pearl earrings, black stockings. No one wore black to funerals anymore, her mother always told her, but Jessica didn't care. To wear this getup was paying the highest compliment she could. ;

"Okay, who wants what?" she asked, picking up the pad and pen on the telephone table and throwing her;

self down on the couch. They had all missed lunch in;

order to get out to Long Island in time for the funeral. | "What are you having?" Slim asked. ^

"Park Burger, well done--that's got bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo, catsup and mustard, and pickles, too, I think--and, let's see... onion rings. And a Pepsi." She looked at Wendy.

"What about you?"

"Plain hamburger--no bun--with lettuce, tomato and onion, cottage cheese and fruit salad, if they have it."

"What to drink?"

"Water's fine," Wendy said, going into the guest room.

"The woman's sick," Jessica said, looking to Slim.

"You like Park Burgers," she reminded him.

"Yeah. That would be good."

"Okay, three Park Burgers for Slim," Jessica said, marking this down, "an order of fries and onion rings, and a manhandler Pepsi." She looked to Will.

"One Park Burger and I'll share your onion rings," he said.

Jessica frowned.

"Who said I wanted to share?" She winked.

"To drink?"

"I'll have water, too."

Jessica studied the list and then sighed.

"Okay, I guess I'll have water, too. Not that grease is water soluble."

The food came and was eaten and soon they were all yawning. Wendy ended up passing on the Stair Master and went into the guest room to take a nap. Slim stretched out on the couch in the living room, and Jessica and Will went into Alexandra's bedroom ostensibly to watch

TV.

As soon as she closed the door behind them, however, Jessica knew dam well what she wanted to do. And judging from Will's expression, she knew he did, too.

Without a word they went to each other and started kissing. The kissing gave way to moving onto the bed, lying across it, kissing each other's faces and eyes and ears, necks and throats. In very short time they had taken Jessica's stockings off, and her dress, and Will's shirt and pants--for the first time there was contact of skin that left Jessica breathless.