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side entrance, he glimpsed something hurtling towards his head. He ducked and saw a round, white object drop into the soft earth of a newly prepared flower bed. Stooping, he picked it up.
    “A baseball?” he said aloud.
    The oral question was immediately followed by a familiar sound that could be only that of bat meeting ball, and the second missile slashed into a wisteria vine over the portico never to be seen again. When Simon turned about, Hannah, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap, sweatshirt and black leotards, rounded the corner of the house swinging a bat.
    “Oh, it’s only you,” she said calmly. “Chester set up a batting practice machine for me before he went down to the marina. The exercise is wonderful for my back.”
    “It gave mine quite a work-out, too,” Simon said—ducking. Why don’t you stick to your sauna bath?”
    “It’s inside,” Chester remarked. “Nobody down on the new building site can see her if anybody happens to look up.”
    Hannah glared at Chester. “Ignore him,” she ordered. “He’s only trying to overthrow the government. Simon, you look
hoary
! You look—frosted!”
    Simon ran an exploratory hand over his face. He had neglected to shave in Cappy Anderson’s lavishly appointed bathroom and a two day’s growth of beard was encrusted with salt from the rough sea.
    “Nothing that a shower and a shave won’t handle,” he said. “And while I’m doing that, Chester can mix up a jug of fresh martinis and fix me an early dinner. I’m starved.”
    Simon opened the door and allowed Hannah to enter the kitchen before him. Chester was close behind. “You know Chester can’t cook,” Hannah remarked. “He told me that when I hired him. But cook’s are a dime a dozen, and where can one find intelligent conversation any more? How would you like your roast turkey?”
    “Turkey?” Simon echoed.
    “We got tired of eggs benedict, which, as you know, is my speciality, so I called the caterers and ordered the biggest amount of prepared food we could get at one time—which happened to be a roast turkey. You can have it sliced cold, hashed, heated—”
    “There’s about a gallon of giblet gravy,” Chester said.
    Simon crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the giant-sized refrigerator. At least three-quarters of the fowl was still intact on the serving platter. Without comment, he tore off one leg and took a huge bite. When he’d finished chewing and swallowing it he explained: “That’s the first food I’ve had since I boarded the boat this morning. It was really rough out there today.”
    “And yesterday, I’ll bet,” Chester added.
    “And you’d win if you did. Jack Keith went out with me. I was proud of him. He weathered it like an old salt.”
    “We’ve been reading about the crash in the
Times
,” Hannah said, waving one hand towards the dinette table. Informal dining at The Mansion took place on a rosewood table polished to a mirror-like lustre, but at the moment the table was spread with sections of newspaper turned to stories and pictures of the airline tragedy. Simon moved closer and studied the now-familiar shot of Arne Lundberg discovering his fiancée’s cosmetic case.
    “I fished that case out of the sea,” Simon said. “We were standing a few feet away when this shot was taken. That poor devil—”
    “It’s the other face that fascinates me,” Hannah said. “Who is he?”
    “Which face do you mean?”
    Hannah indicated the likeness of the man called Johnny Sands. “I know him from somewhere,” she mused.
    “That’s peculiar. Keith said the same thing.”
    “Really? No, I don’t think he would remember.” Hannah took a pencil from the kitchen telephone desk and proceeded to draw a fine, neatly-shaped moustache on Sands’s photo. “There, that’s the way I remember him—exactly. If only he were in uniform.”
    “What uniform?”
    “Oh, he had hundreds of uniforms. The one I remember was the dress uniform of the Santa Isobel Air