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girls, only a year or so older than Melissa, glanced at each other. It was Cyndi who finally spoke. “You shouldn’t have been in there listening to us,” she said.
    Melissa felt her self-control slipping away. She hadn’t done anything to them, hadn’t tried to hear what they were saying. But they’d just stood there, talking about her. Why was it her fault? And then she saw her mother coming down the stairs, stopping to look at her.
    “Is something wrong?” Phyllis asked.
    Melissa started to shake her head but was too late.
    “I think we’d better go home, Mrs. Holloway,” Ellen Stevens said as if she were trying to find a nice way to handle the situation. “Melissa just told us she didn’t want us here.”
    Seeing the look of cold anger that flashed into her mother’s eyes, Melissa fled up the stairs to her room. Sheflopped onto the bed, her body wracked with sobs, her fists pounding the pillow with frustration.
    But soon her sobs subsided and her anger toward Cyndi and Ellen and the rest of the kids died away.
    After all, it wasn’t their fault—they hadn’t wanted to come any more than she had wanted them to. And they wouldn’t have, if her mother hadn’t called their mothers and begged.
    So the anger dissipated, only to be replaced by fear. For after what had happened this afternoon, she was certain that sometime tonight, sometime after Cora had gone to bed for the night, her mother would come into her room.
    Come into her room, for one of her little “talks.”

CHAPTER 3
    Charles Holloway had the same feeling of vague disorientation that always came over him when he arrived in Los Angeles. Part of his confusion was caused by the fact that all the freeways seemed to run north and south, even when they crossed at right angles. But at last he’d worked his way out into the vast suburban morass of the San Fernando Valley, turning onto the block where the MacIvers lived only a little more than an hour and a half after leaving the airport in his rented car. It was the first time he’d ever seen this part of the valley, and he knew immediately why it had attracted Polly.
    The houses in this area all had a feeling of permanence to them, their yards dotted with large shade trees, their gardens having the look of being carefully tended for decades. Nowhere here did he see the too-bright green of freshly laid sod or the patches of “beauty bark” with which the newer subdivisions were littered. No, this particular area had a look of stability to it, a certain middle-class solidity that would have appealed to Polly.
    To himself, of course, it simply looked dull, like aCalifornia version of all the small towns in the East that he had always found unutterably boring, but to which Polly had always been drawn like an iron filing to a magnet. “At least they’re real,” she’d said over and over again in those first few months of their marriage, when he’d still hoped it was going to work out. “I just can’t stand the idea of raising children in Manhattan and Secret Cove—it’s so horribly insular!”
    In a way, of course, Charles had understood what she meant. Certainly, both of them had grown up with a lifestyle greatly different from that of the vast majority of people. Charles had always simply accepted it, and when he’d married Polly, he’d assumed that she had, too. But the truth, he’d soon found out, was that Polly had resented both the wealth and position of her birth. Not that the Porters were as wealthy as the Holloways. They weren’t, and never had been. Nor had they thought the same way as the Holloways and most of the rest of the “Secret Cove Crowd”—as they tended to think of themselves, complete with quotation marks—though Charles hadn’t really been aware of it when he’d married Polly. Oh, he’d known Polly had gone off to Berkeley when the rest of them had headed for Harvard, Yale, Bennington, and Vassar, but he hadn’t realized how much she’d been affected by the