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"I've done some work for Alexandra Waring too, in the past."

"And how do you know Slim?"

"He used to work in my mother's courthouse," Wendy said.

"My mom's a D.A. in Delaware, Slim used to be a courthouse sheriff."

"Ah. I see. Happy hands at home. You hunt the people down. Slim stomps 'em and Mama throws them in the slammer."

"In a more perfect world, yes." Wendy laughed.

"When I came up to New York and I met Dirk, I gave Slim's name to him."

"Ouch!" Jessica said, looking under her desk.

"Oh, rats. If either one of you happen to run into my stalker," she said, straightening up, "tell him I need new panty hose, will you? I keep getting holes in these." She reached ahead to grab her in-box and pull it near so she could start stuffing the papers in it into her big leather bag.

"I'm going away for the weekend," she told Wendy.

"Yes, I know," Wendy said.

"To Alexandra's farm. I did some surveillance there last year. When she had that photographer problem."

"Charming business we're in, isn't it?" Jessica muttered. She looked at Wendy.

"So you're coming with me?"

She nodded.

Jessica looked at Slim.

"And you?"

"Yes," he said.

"But I'm outside. Wendy's inside. She rides with you.

I ride behind in another car. "

"Oh, I see, upstairs downstairs, you're still indentured and she's like a nanny, elevated to the family quarters."

"Kind of."

Jessica finished stowing stuff in her bag and stood up.

"Okay, I'm the Pied Piper, follow me."

Jessica led her entourage home to her apartment, Slim riding in the front seat with Abdul, and Wendy in the seat beside her. Upstairs in her apartment she read the menu from an Indian restaurant on Columbus Avenue and took orders. Then she called in the order, showered, changed, packed, and the three of them sat down in the kitchen to eat.

"It's awfully nice of you to give us dinner," Wendy said.

"Yeah, well, just catch the spy and get rid of my stalker." Truth was, she'd sooner die than admit it to Dirk, but this stalker was starting to get on her nerves.

Slim carried Jessica's weekend bag downstairs and Abdul drove them back to West End, but not before Jessica's daily neighborhood harasser came over to lean near the car window and let out a stream of vile language. Wendy tapped Slim on the shoulder, said some thing, and simultaneously they jumped out of the car. Jessica watched in astonishment as the two pushed their faces into her harasser's face, saying something Jessica couldn't hear. They didn't touch him, just surrounded him, talking at him, crowding him, and as he backed off, they got louder and more aggressive, picking up their pace. Now the creep was half running down the block and yet Wendy and Slim kept at him,

invading his space, yelling. And then suddenly they stopped, trotted back and jumped in the car.

Jessica smiled.

"Hey, I like that. Are you guys going to do that every time you see him?"

"You bet we will," Wendy promised.

"You're my kind of guys," Jessica said happily. At West End, Jessica had Slim put her bag in her dressing room while she and Wendy took seats in the control room of Studio A to watch the newscast. She smiled at Will on her way in. He was sitting next to the director at the console, headset on, talking to someone in his mouthpiece. Still, he spotted her and waved.

Out in the darkened studio, the newscasters were at their respective desks, bright lights glaring down on them. In the control room, rows of monitors were ablaze with cued film clips, video feeds, graphics and commercials, but Jessica focused on the "out" monitor, which showed what was actually going out over the air. For a moment the screen was utterly black. And then a blue dot appeared, growing brighter, which then started to move as a line, quickly outlining the continental United States, Hawaii and Alaska. Two hundred and six red dots then appeared within the shapes and then suddenly each red dot sent a white line streaking toward New York where they met in a flash of white light, clearing to show the full-color "DBS News America Tonight" lettering and logo. The glow of letters grew bright and the screen flashed out in a blaze of blue light, clearing again to show "With Alexandra Waring."

"Ten, nine, eight..." the assistant director called. The screen blazed white again and then faded to the original map of the United States, outlined in blue upon black, red affiliate points twinkling, white lines leading to New York.

"Ready to take camera two," the director said.

"Fade out video, fade up on camera two. Bring up sound. Cue Alexandra."

In the studio, the red light on top of camera two came on and the floor manager's right hand came down to point at Alexandra.

In the monitor, Alexandra's eyes were sparkling.

"This is " DBS News America Tonight' in New York City, I'm Alexandra Waring, and this is the news. "

The format of the newscast had changed little over the years: headline hard news by Alexandra at the top of the hour and the half hour, national and local weather updates at quarter after and quarter to, the rest of the hour filled with regular reports from the science, politics, money, health, sports and entertainment editors and special correspondents.

Alexandra was looking great, as usual. While she was a striking woman in person, she was positively blessed by the slight distortion of the camera. Even when, at times, in real life she could look tired and thin and slightly haggard, on camera she always looked vi brant and beautiful. Her keen intelligence, however, never faltered, on or off the air. Though she was still only thirty-eight years old, few in the news-gathering industry begrudged Alexandra's extraordinary success anymore. She had paid her dues. More than that, she was one of the few who had stayed in hard news and had a growing audience when everyone else's was slip ping away.

In the course of the hour. Will jumped up from the console and ran off somewhere three times standard procedure for a news producer. His job was essentially to make sure everyone had everything they needed including an audience for the broadcast--or he was history. Thus far, he had done very well. From a local news production assistant, to field producer, producer and then executive producer, his career had risen side by side with Alexandra's.

"And from everyone at DBS News, here and around the world," Alexandra told the camera at the end of the hour, "we wish you a very good night--and an even better tomorrow."

A few moments later, the floor manager called, "All clear!"

"And we're out of here!" Alexandra declared, jumping up from the anchor desk.

A year ago a comment like "We're out of here!" from Alexandra would have been unheard of. But the wear and tear of nightly television had even gotten to Alexandra these days. She and Jessica and people like them in television were extremely well paid not only for their talent and audience appeal, but also for their ability to fight the boredom and sense of imprisonment that a never-altering schedule produced. Day in, day out, feeling good or bad, it made no difference as they had to show up for a routine that never changed, unless to accommodate an emergency, which only doubled the workload.

Day in, day out, week in, week out, year after year. Alexandra claimed that in recent months she could actually feel herself aging in front of the camera.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, another week gone, another week older in another year passing too quickly. Did Jessica remember when they were in their twenties? Alexandra would ask. How exhilarated they had been by their climb, knowing but not caring that everybody else their age was out there creating a life for themselves, establishing homes and families, while they were channeling their all into creating ratings? Then came their thirties, mid-thirties, and now, for Alexandra, her late thirties, when she had to start looking back over her shoulder at the younger people who were determined to have her job. She had begun to wonder aloud that if it was this bad at thirty-eight, how would it be at forty-eight, fifty-eight? And just when was it she was supposed to have a life outside of DBS News?

What was it that Jane Smiley had called it in her first book of short stories? The Age of Grief? When lifelong dreams crashed with startling velocity as the realities of reasonable expectations came so dreadfully into focus.

Jessica understood what Alexandra was feeling. She was just four years behind her in the intensity of it.

She wanted to say something to Will before leaving, but there was a problem in the satellite room and he had run off, unlikely to return anytime soon. And Alexandra was itching to get out of there. So Jessica left the control room, knowing that she would see Will to morrow, and on her way out, she saw the opening of her show rolling on the out-going monitor. News at nine with Alexandra Waring, Jessica at ten with heaven only knew what. That was the linchpin of DBS programming Monday through Friday. A whole different prime-time programming approach that, thankfully, still worked.

"One good thing about my hours," Alexandra said to Wendy in the limousine as they flew out the Holland Tunnel toward New Jersey, "is that I get to miss the traffic. We leave the city around ten-thirty or eleven on Friday nights and come in at noon on Monday." She was leaning into a portable mirror, wiping the worst of her studio makeup off with specially treated towelettes.

"Where's Slim, do you suppose?" Jessica asked, looking out the back window.

"Over there," Wendy said from the front seat, pointing to the lane next to them.

Sure enough, there was Slim in a dark Ford Crown Victoria about half a car length behind them.

"Who wants something to drink?" Alexandra asked, still bending into the mirror. She glanced over.

"Do you mind playing bartender?"

Just because Jessica was a recovering alcoholic didn't mean she had stopped drinking more than everybody else. Only it wasn't booze anymore. While some people reached for food or tobacco or alcohol in times of stress or in search of relaxation, Jessica reached for water or juice, or, if she had a craving for a real drink, something loaded with sugar like a Coke or tonic water.

So as they drove along, Jessica took orders and played bartender, although there really wasn't much to bar tend since Alexandra only kept Perrier, orange juice and Diet Pepsi in her limo bar.

They drove west across New Jersey on 78, listening to Jewel's new album that Jessica had just received from the singer's publicist, took exit 18 and headed north on 206, then west on 512 toward Pottersville.

By now Alexandra was unwinding as an anchorwoman and winding back up as a born-and-raised farm girl who was excited to be nearing home.

Bonner Farm was small by Kansas standards (her family's farm was some fifteen times the size), but huge by suburban New Jersey's. It was a gorgeous property, one that Alexandra had added parcels to as adjacent land had come up for sale. It was now nearly one hundred twenty-six acres and, because it bordered on Hacklebamey State Park, seemed to stretch on forever.

Alexandra did not farm the land herself, but allowed two local families to farm sixty-eight acres of it. One family also kept livestock there. The state and town, in gratitude to Alexandra and people like her who could afford to protect the land from real estate developers gave her a significant tax break on those acres dedicated to maintaining the state's agricultural heritage. On the house and immediate grounds, however, they taxed the hell out of Alexandra in the way only the tri state area could.

The families who worked the fields of Bonner Farm kept the proceeds for themselves, but in return gave daily care feeding, exercising, grooming, cleaning the stalls to the three horses in Alexandra's stable. They also maintained the access road and riding trails, plowed the driveway in the winter, in summer allowed Alexandra to pick fresh vegetables and fruits and gave her a year-round pass to the dairy down the road where she could pick up dairy products made from the milk of the cows and goats that grazed on her land.

Still, as a financial investment, the farm was a fiasco. Fortunately for the community, Alexandra was in a financial position that meant she could afford the losses. The area was swarming with developers dying to get their hands on any part of her land, but Alexandra was going to do her best, at least in her lifetime, to preserve the tract.

It wasn't a case of not wanting people to have a nice place to live, it was a case of her wanting northern New Jersey to rehab the masses of existing housing they had already abandoned for easier schemes. The state, too, was not particularly thrilled with the prospect of seeing Bonner Farm falling anytime soon; they didn't want to see condos thrown up there, with sewage leakage spilling into the park reserve and bulldozers tearing down the trees and eroding the banks of an already fragile flood zone.

No, the developers were going to have to take Alexandra off Bonner Farm feet first and until that time, she seemed quite content to spend whatever fortune it would take to preserve this little part of God's green earth in the New York City metropolitan area.

Jessica had been at the farm since day one. In fact, she had seen it before Alexandra had, doing her friend a favor by scouting it out while Alexandra had been covering a presidential visit to Helsinki.

And then there had been all the time she'd spent there, helping Alexandra paint and wallpaper in the earliest days (which happened to be, not coincidentally, the days when Jessica had desperately needed something to do on weekends to keep her out of trouble).

Jessica had spent so much time there, in fact, that when Alexandra renovated the house, the anchorwoman had added a one-bedroom suite on the far side expressly for Jessica. It had a full bath, kitchenette and a small sitting room. In return, Jessica had insisted on paying the bill for a gorgeously large and beautifully landscaped pool in the back. If the truth be known, Alexandra was not much of a swimmer, and so it was not a big surprise who used the pool the most.