Unlike Jim Hillyer, with his luxurious trip to London on the Concorde, Bernadette was flying coach on a twenty-two seater out of Great Falls to Salt Lake City, where she was to catch a connection to Newark. A quick $60 cab fare from there, and she'd be back in Manhattan . . . where, she thought to herself, she belonged.

The clear-air turbulence on the flight was frightening; meal and drink service had been halted, and the 14 passengers on the plane, herself included, were thinking, in unison, that if they got to Salt Lake alive they'd stay the night -- connections be damned.

Ironically, it was the choppiness of the flight that finally took Bernadette's mind off Hollis Burns, but only momentarily. The "money trouble" that Hollis had confessed to, earlier in the day, had led to a request to borrow some serious money from Bernadette. A hundred thousand dollars. It was what Bernadette had feared . . . only worse.

A hundred thousand dollars, she kept saying to herself, under her breath, staring out the window of the wildly bouncing aircraft into the storm clouds through which the plane was flying. Who had that kind of money available? she wondered. No matter how successful she'd become in business -- even when she'd been made a full partner at Hillyer, Jones -- she'd never managed to salt away those kinds of funds. At heart, she would also be the daughter of a fruit vendor from the Bronx, she supposed. You either knew how to be rich or you didn't. And she didn't. Or at least she didn't know how to save.

Calling Karen Black ... Suddenly, Bernadette is in a bad remake of an "Airport" movie ("There's no one left to fly the plane!!!"). Only this isn't funny. Guess there's nothing to take your mind off a troublesome romance than the possibility of ditching into the Rockies in flaming pieces. Sort of puts things in perspective.

More important to Bernadette than the question of whether she had the money or not was her relationship with Hollis. From the start of their "affair" -- she hated to call it that, it was so "Peyton Place" -- she had, in the back of her mind, questioned Hollis's motives. There was no doubt about it, Bernadette admitted to herself in her cynical moments -- Hollis was an operator. Nobody achieved the kind of success Hollis did without knowing how to manipulate people.

But in her more charitable frames of mind, Bernadette thought of Hollis as a genuinely spiritual person. A kind, gentle, giving man. And someone with whom -- she had to admit -- she had fallen hopelessly in love. Would he honestly have struck up an involvement with her merely with the intention of asking her for money? That would be so . . . premeditated. So . . . evil. She couldn't stand the thought, and decided that she'd rather believe his story of simply having gotten over-extended, of having invested too much of his book-royalty money in real estate, of having mortgaged his property once too often . . .

As for lending him the money, Bernadette knew that if she refused him, it would mar -- or perhaps even destroy -- the relationship they'd built. At the age of 42, Bernadette wasn't out solely to please any man . . . but she knew her chances of meeting someone like Hollis again soon were, well, slim.

Bernadette put the copy of Newsweek that she'd been reading -- or pretending to read -- into the seat-pocket in front of her, and rubbed her eyes with her hands. If the turbulence didn't stop soon, she was going to lose her breakfast. At just that moment, the plane took a violent dip, and, though Bernadette had been wearing her seat belt loosely, she actually bounced off the seat. When she came back down, it felt as though she'd left her stomach 3,000 feet up. The flight was turning from merely annoying to genuinely frightening.

"Sorry about that, folks," the reassuring Midwestern voice of the pilot assured over the PA system. I'm afraid that's what we're in for the rest of the way into Salt --"

The PA system suddenly went dead, and the pilot didn't get to finish his sentence. The 14 passengers looked at one another, and Bernadette turned to the woman with the beehive hairdo across the aisle who, earlier in the flight, had told Bernadette she was going to a cake-decorating seminar, whatever that was, in Ogden, Utah. The woman looked terrified, as the plane pitched and rocked with a violence that Bernadette, in 20 years of business travel around the world, had never experienced.

The PA system came back on, and suddenly, the pilot's voice filled the cabin again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for this. I'd like to say we'll be out of it in a minute, but I'm afraid we've got a problem."

Bernadette and the beehive woman looked at each other in disbelief and dread, and suddenly -- for the first time that day -- Bernadette stopped thinking about Hollis Burns.

"What do you mean the creative department is on strike?" Agnes said to Sydney. Sydney was standing at Agnes desk in the reception area.

"Just what I said," responded Sydney. "Lucien's had everyone working on the Cummings Footwear pitch for four solid weeks. They've done 209 logo designs, more than 75 proposed print ads, and re-edited the video presentation from scratch seven times. They're all bored to screams and can't take it anymore."

"You know what I'm thinking, don't you?" Agnes asked Sydney, shaking her head.

"Yes. I'm thinking the same thing," Sydney answered. This would never have happened if Cy were here."

Early evening, around sunset, the middle of the Pacific.

It had been a couple of days since Cy Lefkowitz had had the encounter on the beach on Kauai with the little boy Ano, and he wondered where the child had disappeared to. But, frankly, Cy had enough on his plate, psychologically speaking, reorienting himself to life in the tropics.

In the week he'd been on Kauai, he'd driven his rented car around the island a couple of times, but he spent most of his days on the beach -- underneath a canvas beach-umbrella he'd bought at the Big-Save in Kukui Grove, near Poipu.

He'd been planning to visit a local real estate agent and inquire about a year's rental near the beach in one of the more populated areas, but, to his surprise, Cy found the remoteness of the small, run-down, and extremely seedy Pau Hana Inn perfectly adequate. The fact was, he only used the motel as a place to shower and change -- otherwise, he was out on the beach.

Walking the several-mile stretch of almost-always deserted beach from Barking Sands all the way to Mana, Cy had made a habit of collecting driftwood, of which there was a surprising amount washed up each day. After three days, he had a substantial pile, and had begun building a tiny hut on the sand, between two enormous banyan trees. It was a bizarre but satisfying exercise in self-reliance -- Cy pretended, as he built the rickety structure, that he'd been washed up on a deserted island, and was pleased at his resourcefulness. His "beach house" was about eight feet by ten, with a roof of coconut-palm fronds. Cy knew it was silly.

This particular evening, Cy had walked east on the beach, a hike that seemed to take him almost as far as Waimea Town, and back. As he approached his little hut, he entertained the idea of bringing his sleeping bag down from the motel and spending the night on the beach, but he decided that was a little too weird -- and risky.

Little Orphan Ano ... Or IS he? Either way, Cy's got himself a problem here. Co- dependence is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Where is this kid's MOTHER?

He walked along the beach at the water's edge until he got to his "spot" then headed up the sand to where he'd erected the hut. He leaned down to step inside and get out the glare of the setting sun, and jumped with a start, until he realized that the visitor inside his hut was only Ano -- curled up on Cy's beach-towel, asleep.