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of Karen Galvin's clothes, her own size, but a bit on the athletic side. A few pieces of okay jewelry — her husband's taste?
    Later that week, Susan caught a snippet of her memorial service on
Entertainment Tonight
, with Chris Thraice, flown in from Germany to lead well-wishers at the Westwood Memorial Chapel in a painful, rockified version of «Amazing Grace» that sounded like a Live Aid hugging anthem. She was ashamed of the shallow, pathetic tribute arranged by God only knows whose people — Chris's probably — but then realized that it would have been the PR people for her action-adventure movie, masterminding some contorted variation of a pity fuck to get people into the theaters and pump up the third weekend's gross.
    Her mother and stepfather, interviewed again after the service, had become key figures in the class-action suit being launched against the airline. «We'd sacrifice anything we might gain from this suit just to have our precious Suzie back in our fold.» Suzie? Marilyn had called Susan many things before, but Suzie had never been one of them.
    In more local crash news, the airline had paid the sorghum farmer for three years' worth of crops and, using sifting devices borrowed from a local mine, had already sanitized the site of all fragments. The county coroner admitted that many passengers had been too badly charred to be identified, and any fears Susan might have had that authorities had noticed her absence were scotched by an interview with a teary-eyed gate attendant who recounted how thrilled she'd been showing Susan into the jet ramp («So real! And in coach class, too»). The gate attendant's testimony was the one moment of sincere warmth during the whole memorial charade.
    At any rate, Susan was taking a risk that the Galvins, as a thrifty, bulk-purchasing family, would remain in Orlando for the fully-paid-for extent of their holiday, regardless of having one of North America's largest civil aviation disasters a short walk from their back door. The fridge calendar indicated an arrival in Columbus the next day at 6:10P .M., in Seneca by 8:00.
    On the morning of the Galvins' scheduled return, she went around the house with rags and Windex to wipe clean any surface that might conceivably bear her fingerprints. She washed sheets and towels and restored them to their original positions. She rearranged the remaining foods in the cupboards and deep freeze so that they appeared undepleted.
    She then selected items stuffed in the back of Karen Galvin's wardrobe, and from boxes where evidence indicated garments that looked rarely if ever used. Also at the back, buried behind shoes and a stack of energy-rich athletic candy bars, she found ash blond wigs in a style she associated with women connected in some way to second- and third-generation entertainment money. She placed some of the wigs and a selection of clothes into a disused athletic bag from a shelf beside the washer and dryer, along with a box of energy bars, some older cosmetics, and a pair of Karen's almost touchingly practical shoes. She improvised a look for the day to come, and then nodded to the mirror.
    Done.
    Now she had one more job to do. She went into Mr. Galvin's liquor cabinet and selected what she thought would appeal most to teenagers — Jack Daniels — and poured three-quarters of the bottle down the sink. She took the partially filled bottle as well as some emptied beer cans and arranged them in a semicircle around the TV set. Then, with a thick-pointed Sharpie in what she hoped was teenage boy-looking handwriting, she scribbled on the TV screen, «Metallica rocks on.» She also put out six drinking glasses tinged with Jack Daniels, two of them with lipstick traces. She mussed up the couch and a few pieces of bric-a-brac. The returning family would find evidence only of a low-threat minor occupation by teens.
    Bewigged and sporting Karen's clothes, Susan was feeling good as she walked out the unlocked patio door, onto a back