"But from your own place."

"Right. I'd work with Morty, figure out the orders, bake them and deliver them."

"From your own place."

"Right."

Her impulse was to grab her phone, call Ron and scream Rescue me! But he had to finish his goddamn column, didn't he?

She inhaled, exhaled, flexed her fingers in her lap and prayed for serenity. "Is this because of Susie?" she asked.

"Is what because of Susie?"

"Is that why you want to leave?"

"I want my own place," he repeated.

Not exactly an answer. If Susie's breaking up with Casey meant Julia was going to lose the most creative, talented bagel maker in New York City, someone would have to die. Julia wasn't sure who, but she had no doubt that a few minutes of reflection would produce a nice long list of prospects.

"Is there anything I can do to keep you from leaving?" she asked, loathing the querulous undertone in her voice.

"I don't think so. But if we could work out a contract, you'd still have my bagels."

"Right." She could work out a contract. Not right now, though. Right now she needed to figure out whom to kill. "I'm sure we can negotiate something, Casey. Let me think about it, okay? I'd need to talk to Morty, and Dierdre." Dierdre would figure this out. According to Susie's article in the bulletin, Dierdre was a five-star general. She might even know how to kill someone. She probably had the names of a few efficient hit men in her Rolodex.

"Okay." Casey stood and extended his right hand across the desk. Julia belatedly realized she was supposed to shake it. She did, feeling as sad as the shadows that darkened his eyes. He was a good man. Her sister was an idiot. The world was imploding.

She was having a very, very bad day.

She watched him walk out of her office. Her hand instinctively draped around the receiver of her phone. Did she dare to call Ron? Given the way things were going, he might just break off their engagement if she did.

Her phone rang, vibrating against her palm. Maybe Ron had called her! He would tell her he'd felt a strange impulse to hear her voice, an ESP signal whispering to him that she needed him. He'd assure her that he'd finished his damn column and found a rabbi willing to perform their wedding at NYU, and he'd booked a reception room at the campus where Bloom's could do the catering. He'd tell her he had booked their honeymoon, as well-two weeks somewhere exotic, somewhere romantic, somewhere a million miles from her family and inaccessible by phone, fax or e-mail. He'd tell her he forgave her for calling him every time she was having a bad day and didn't know how to cope.

Lifting the receiver, she said, "Hello?"

"Julia?" Grandma Ida's voice squawked through the line. "Nu, so how come you never call me?"

Help, Julia muttered, needing rescue more than ever. "I've been busy, Grandma. How are you?"

"I'm eighty-nine years old. How should I be?"

"You sound good," Julia said, knowing she had to keep up her end of the conversation until Grandma Ida revealed the purpose of her call.

Fortunately, it didn't take her long. "So, you never explained to me how you're going to fit all those musicians in my foyer. How many musicians is it going to be? It's not such a big foyer."

Julia's eyebrows pinched into a frown as she struggled to translate Grandma Ida's words into something meaningful, something she could believe. Why should Grandma Ida be grilling her about the number of musicians? Was she willing to host Julia's wedding in her apartment after all?

The clouds lifted, taking their hail and gloom with them. Rick's movie no longer mattered. Nor did Casey's resignation. Nor did Adam's sex life, or her mother's and Ron's father's, or Susie's anguish, or Ron's column. Nothing mattered but the size of Grandma Ida's foyer.

"Three musicians," Julia told her. "They'll fit."

Fifteen.

"There it is." Rick nudged Susie so hard she winced. He couldn't contain his excitement, though. He wanted to scream, but the cabin looked so dilapidated a sudden loud noise might cause it to collapse. Instead, he whispered the words and did his shouting with his fingers, jabbing them into Susie's arm with enough force to make her slap his hand away.

Apparently, she wasn't quite as excited as he was. She'd driven the final three hours of their six-hour journey today, and she'd spent the last of those hours steering in circles over the hilly, densely forested back roads of the Catskills. Each circle had led them back to Broadway in downtown Monticello, where they'd stop to ask for directions and then cruise another looping route back to the center of Monticello. After their fourth orbit, they'd at last located Pine Haven, the collection of cabins a few miles west of Monticello proper, where their families had once vacationed.

Their fathers had stayed back in the city that summer, but his mother and Aunt Sondra and all the kids had occupied the two-bedroom cabin for an entire glorious month. Surely they could have afforded a larger unit, or even two neighboring cabins. Or they could have booked rooms in one of the glitzy Borscht Belt resort hotels, with their day camps for the children and their Olympic-sized pools, their tennis courts and horseback-riding trails, their nightclubs starring acts no one under the age of thirty had ever heard of, and their abundant, multicourse meals.

Being Blooms, even if only by marriage, his mother and Aunt Sondra had rejected the idea of consuming someone else's roast beef and stuffed derma, cheese blintzes and potato kugel when they wouldn't even eat Bloom's roast beef, stuffed derma, cheese blintzes and potato kugel. His mother and Aunt Sondra were frugal sorts, and those hotels had been expensive. So they'd rented the lakeside shack that stood listing before him and Susie right now, with its sloped roof and log walls and its windows with screens that had been torn the summer the Blooms had stayed there and evidently still hadn't been replaced. The trees surrounding the cabin had seemed bigger to Rick then. Of course, he was a hell of a lot bigger now. He'd been nine that summer, and to a nine-year-old city kid, even a small tree was gigantic.

As he recalled, his mother and Aunt Sondra had occupied one bedroom of the cabin, Susie and her sister, Julia, the other, and the male contingent had camped out in sleeping bags on the hard planks of the living-room floor. They'd loved it, especially Adam, who'd been about five years old and thrilled to hang out with older boys like his cousins Rick and Neil. Rick and Neil had spent much of the month trying to elude Adam. They'd managed to lose him in the woods one morning, but somehow he'd found his way back to the cabin. He'd probably used vectors and angles and elaborate mathematical formulas to trace a path to safety. Even as a kid, he'd been nerdy.

Susie turned off the van's engine and peered through the windshield at the cabin. "Explain to me why we're here again," she said.

"The movie is about Bloom's. This cabin is part of our family's heritage."

"The movie is about Bloom's the store, not Blooms the family."

"You can't separate the two. Trust me, Suze-this is going to be great. What do you think, Linus?" he asked, angling his head over his shoulder toward the humongous plastic lobster in the back.

"Linus thinks your brain needs rewiring," Susie muttered, yanking the key out of the ignition and swinging open her door.

Rick joined her at the front bumper. A packed-dirt road led past their cabin to other, similarly decrepit cabins that teetered along the shoreline of a murky puddle. He'd recalled Pine Haven Lake as being much larger-so large he and Susie hadn't been allowed to take the rowboat out on it without an adult along, even though they were both good swimmers. Julia and Neil had been permitted to go out alone, a fact that had made Rick seethe with envy. He wondered whether Neil had developed his first notions of opening a sailboat charter business that summer while rowing around Pine Haven Lake with Julia, both of them clad in bulbous orange life vests and smelling like coconuts from the sunscreen their mothers had rubbed onto their skin.

He was positive the lake had been bigger. Some of the water must have evaporated.

"Are we allowed to film here?" Susie asked as he tore himself from the cabin and walked to the back of the van to get out his camera and tripod.

"I don't see a problem. I mean, nobody's even going to know. The sign said Closed for the Season."

"This looks like it's been closed for the past ten seasons." Despite her negative words, she approached the cabin. She studied the building, probably debating with herself whether to climb onto the ramshackle porch. Wisely, she refrained. The whole cabin might topple down around her if she put any weight on the splintering porch steps.

Rick dragged his camera and tripod out of the back of the van, along with Linus, although he wasn't exactly certain how a lobster would fit into the scene. He'd purchased more videotape and recharged his battery pack last night at the motel in Revere. He and Susie had discussed the gist of this scene during their long, meandering drive today. Now, with their hours of light limited, he didn't want her wasting precious time throwing a hissy fit.

Why was she in such a foul mood? She'd told him about breaking up with her bagel boy, but as far as Rick was concerned, she didn't have anything to bitch about. At least she'd had enough of a relationship with Casey to be able to break up with him. Even if Rick wanted to break up with Anna he couldn't, because not enough existed between them to break up.

But Susie had been in a particularly grumpy state ever since their first night in Revere. He'd ridden the T into downtown Boston to scrutinize the layout of Haymarket Square, where greengrocers plied their wares early in the morning and left the street littered with shreds of lettuce and carrot greens and the occasional squashed tomato for hours afterward. The area was heavily trafficked, by both pedestrians and cars, but he'd immediately realized that he could get some good shots amid the rotting veggie trash, even if the noise of cars and trucks made it necessary to add a voice-over later. He'd strolled around Quincy Market, inventorying the chichi restaurants and snack stands and generating some ideas for more filming, and he'd wound up in an amusing conversation with two flirty teenage girls with stick-straight blond hair and navel rings while waiting in line to buy some calzones for his and Susie's dinner. If Susie hadn't been waiting back at the motel for him-and if the girls had been maybe a couple of years older-he might have brought them back to his room and had himself an interesting evening.

Actually, he wasn't sure he had the guts for something like that. But it had been nice to pretend Susie was the only reason he hadn't invited Ashley and Kay-lie to spend the evening with him in Revere.

Returning to the hotel, he'd found Susie so sulky he couldn't explain it away as one of those hormonal-cycle things. Despite her funk, however, she'd been a trooper the next day, ad-libbing some great stuff at the various locations he'd scouted in Boston and not even curling her lip when he'd included Linus in one of the downtown shots. Nor had she nagged him about their budget when he'd been forced to pay thirty-something dollars for the privilege of parking the van in a downtown garage, and when he'd insisted that they splurge on a real dinner at a real restaurant since they were already stuck forking over thirty-something for parking.

So she was in a mood. So her mood was in fact entering day three. He'd brought her with him because she was a great writer and even better company, but the longer this mood lasted, the lousier her company became.

At least she was still a great writer. Off the top of her head she could recite soliloquies that made his trigger finger-the index finger that pressed the Record button on the camera-tingle with joy in the knowledge that he was capturing all her words on tape. Some of her monologues would get edited out, of course, and more would be added in voice-overs, but even as she ran her marathon of misery, she was doing a terrific job in the film.

She stared grimly at the old cabin, then at the stagnant brown water of the pond, then at a maple seedling that looked more like a stringy weed than a potential tree. Lacy ferns floated around her bare ankles, and she leaned over to slap a mosquito from her leg. She was still dressed all in black-black shorts, black T-shirt. He didn't mind; black set off the lush, varied greens of all the trees and shrubs and Mother Nature surrounding the cabin.

"Doesn't it smell great here?" he asked, trying to cheer her up as he balanced the legs of his tripod on the uneven ground and locked the camera into place.

"It smells like Pine Sol."

"Pine Sol is supposed to smell like pines," he pointed out. "Which smell like this." He waved his arm toward the trees towering above the cabin.

"Is that a fact? The last time I smelled this smell was in the public ladies' room at the Central Park Zoo." She turned to examine the cabin some more, then nudged the bottom porch step gingerly with her toe. The building didn't disintegrate. "I'm going to try to sit on the bottom step," she said. "If the cabin caves in on top of me and I die, Julia can have my computer. Adam gets my CDs, except for the Indigo Girls because he only pretends to like them. Anna and Caitlin can have whatever I left in the fridge."

"I'll inform Anna the minute you kick," Rick promised, squinting at the camera's monitor and sharpening the focus. "Why does Adam pretend to like the Indigo Girls?"

"Because his girlfriend likes them. Tash, the tree hugger."

Rick nodded, then held his breath while she cautiously lowered herself onto the step. The cabin remained upright and he exhaled in relief. "You remember what you're going to say?" he asked.

She sent him a withering scowl, then shoved her hair back, giving it a nicely tousled look, and stared into the camera. "This was our cabin," she said, all traces of her moodiness gone. She looked solemn but at peace, her gaze remaining on the camera and avoiding Linus, who lay no more than a couple of feet in front of her, his faded pinkish-red shell clashing with the rust-orange carpet of pine needles that covered the ground.

"Seven Blooms in one tiny cabin for a month," she continued. "My mother, my aunt Martha, my cousins, my sister, my brother and me. And not a single crumb of Bloom's food. Of course my mother and Aunt Martha wouldn't bring a few bags of bagels up to the Catskills, freezing them and then thawing as needed. Of course they wouldn't stock up on macaroons and mandelbrod for snacking on. When you're staying in a cabin in the Catskills, I learned that you eat lots of peanut-butter sandwiches on white bread." She shuddered and grimaced. "For a very special treat, one night, Aunt Martha and my mother took us to one of the big Borscht Belt hotels for dinner. There were, like, fifty courses. Fruit juice. Salads. Chicken soup with knedlach and too much salt in the broth. Wine for the grown-ups and Kool-Aid for the kids." She grimaced again. "Chicken with gravy. Mashed potatoes with gravy. Overcooked broccoli with gravy. Corn with gravy. Rolls with gravy. God, what else did they serve us? Lots of desserts, but they refused to give us ice cream because it had been a meat meal. I seem to remember date-nut bread. They didn't serve lobster, of course."

Rick took his cue and panned to a shot of Linus sprawled out on the ground.

"Other city kids might have dreamed of spending a month in the mountains," Susie went on. "I dreamed of spending a month eating Bloom's food. I wanted pastrami on fresh sour rye. I got Jif on white bread. White bread," she emphasized, her nose wrinkling in distaste.

She made it sound as if she'd lived a deprived life-which, of course, she hadn't. Being a member of their generation of Blooms had meant spacious apartments, private schools and never a moment's panic about where your next meal was coming from, even if it rarely came from Bloom's. But Rick didn't mind her self-pitying tone. He was in awe of her ability to spin out a narration without even holding a stack of written note cards in front of her. She was such a natural. She ought to consider making a career for herself in front of the camera, he thought. She already worked as a waitress at Nico's. Didn't being a waitress qualify her to call herself an actress?

"I dream of food," Susie continued. Rick didn't recall her emphasizing her dreams when she'd discussed the scene with him earlier that day. "I dream of food and love. Some people believe food and love are the same thing. Both bring you pleasure. Both can make you sick. You need both to live. They both nourish you.

"I especially dream of chocolate," she said, then fell silent.

Well, that was weird.

He released the Record button and smiled hesitantly. Maybe she had PMS after all. He'd read in a magazine somewhere that when women had PMS they craved chocolate. In his experience, most women craved chocolate all the time. Then again, most women acted as if they had PMS all the time.

Susie said nothing. She just sat on the rickety porch step, her elbows propped on her knees, her chin resting in her palms and her butterfly tattoo barely visible on her ankle. He pulled the camera off the tripod and wandered around the cabin, adding handheld footage to the tripod shots, and then took some film of the lake. Susie remained on the porch, as motionless as a frozen computer screen.

The camera in one hand, he used the other to drag Linus down to the water's edge. The lobster was light; it would float. Rick wasn't sure what he'd do with the scene, but he'd learned the wisdom of filming more than he needed, including scenes he was positive he'd never use. He always wound up surprising himself, discovering an excerpt in his archive of unused shots that was perfect for some other project. A filmmaker had to be a pack rat, because he just never knew.

Linus floated. His antennae snagged in the sand just below the scummy surface of the pond, and he bobbed up and down in the water, looking dead. Maybe Rick would direct a mystery someday, some nasty little noir thing, and he'd be able to blur this bit of video enough to make Linus resemble a murder victim.

"What are you doing?" Susie called to him. Peering over his shoulder, he saw her rise from the porch step and march down the slope to the pond's edge. "He's going to get all wet."

"He's a lobster. He's supposed to be wet."

"Right. And then you're going to put him back in the van, where he'll get everything else wet."

"I'll dry him off," Rick assured her.

"With what?"

"I've got a towel." He was pretty sure he did, anyway.

"Well, don't expect me to help you dry him off." She jammed her fisted hands against her hips, turned and started back up the slope.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Rick yelled at her. He'd had it. Sure, movie stars were allowed to be temperamental, but she wasn't a movie star. She was his cousin.

"I want to go home," she yelled back.

He glanced at the cabin to make sure their shouting hadn't caused it to crumble. "You want to go home? This minute?"

"The sooner the better." Some of her testiness seemed to leave her. She rotated to face him and dug into the thick floor of pine needles with her toe. "I want to grow up."

"Grow up?" His trigger finger twitched and he did something he would probably feel terrible about afterward: he angled the camera toward her and kept filming. "What do you mean, you want to grow up?"

"Maybe I don't want to. Maybe I just have to. Maybe I already have." She sighed, and panic nibbled through his flesh at the possibility that she'd burst into tears. But she remained dry eyed as she said, "I used to think I wanted to drive an eighteen-wheeler across the country to California. I thought that would be cool. Now just imagining it tires me out."

He wasn't sure where she was going with this rant, but he humored her. "Yeah, well, California. That's a lot of driving. What, three thousand miles?"

She ignored him. "Sometimes you just have to stop and figure out what matters. I mean, white picket fences? I hate them. But when you consider it..." She was talking to herself more than to him, and he didn't interrupt. He just kept filming. "What if what matters is waiting for you on the other side of the fence?"

It occurred to him that she might be having a psychotic episode of some sort. If she was, was he supposed to take her to a mental institution and check her in? He'd had his share of interesting experiences with lunatics in his life-you couldn't live in New York City and not encounter plenty of nutcases. Plus, he'd known a guy in college who used to ignite his farts with a butane lighter, and a chick in his dorm who used to speak in tongues after downing a couple of beers. She'd sworn she was the reincarnation of Buster Keaton, who, Rick was pretty sure, had never spoken in tongues.

This was Susie, his beloved cousin. He'd always assumed she was extremely sane.

"So can we go home?" she asked.

"I guess. I mean, sure, why not? I still have to do some filming around the city, but we've probably got enough on-the-road material to work with."

"Can we go home tonight?"

"If we return to the city tonight," he said, walking toward her, still recording, "what'll we do with the van? The rental place won't be open until morning."

"So we'll park it. I'll find a spot."

"On the street? Are you kidding?"

"I'll drive in circles until I find a spot. I'm used to driving in circles."

"What if something happens to it on the street? What if someone vandalizes it?"

She twisted her head to study the vehicle, which looked almost as battered and worn as the cabin. "It obviously wouldn't be the first time."

"I've been wondering-" he drew a little closer, shifting the camera to get the van into the frame "-is that blood on the door?"