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done battle with the school of a wealthy town, and apparently considered much of her effort wasted.

Henry's plan had been to evaluate the gravity of the situation for the first day or two, allaying his sister's usual fear that he'd jumped to conclusions, and then raise the subject of her moving on Saturday evening, think it through with her on Sunday, and, if all went well, perhaps even look at a few places early in the week, before the Fourth of July party at the Hollands'.

Instead, at breakfast on Saturday - which consisted of Orangina and stale bread - she blindsided him with the news that she had sued the town without the aid of a lawyer, claiming that Finden had violated their grandfather's bequest of the land.

Slipping into the backyard, Henry phoned Cott Jr. to find out what in hell was going on. The man's father had been the lawyer for the small Graves family foundation that gave to local causes, and he had inherited the job.

"I assumed you knew," Cott Jr. said. "Norberton over at the hall told me she'd filed pro se. Quite a piece of rhetoric apparently. But she managed to use a few of the necessary phrases so they couldn't toss it out."

"Why wasn't I told of this?"

"By whom?"

"By you."

"Ah," he said. "I'm guessing she never mentioned firing me. The truth is, Henry, the Graves Society hasn't been a client of mine for three or four years at least. We'd always sent the check over to the Audubon but Charlotte got into some kind of policy dispute with them - beaver habitats I think it was. In any case, she instructed me to cancel the donation. I reminded her that she had to give away five percent a year to someone. And that's when she removed my name from the checking account. She hasn't spoken to me since."

Thus was Saturday morning lost to a rear-guard action of intelligence gathering. Charlotte would hear nothing of withdrawing the suit and couldn't understand why he would want to. The hearing before the judge was scheduled for Monday and she would be delighted, she said, for him to join her.

"I know these sorts of legal matters have always been your end of things. But there's no reason to let that upset you. It's all well in hand."

After a lunch of cottage cheese and grapes, Henry's phone started lighting up and soon enough he'd been dragged into a conference call with his senior staff and someone over at the State Department, who had been getting reports all morning of a possible coup in Uzbekistan. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching his sister prepare a saute of sirloin and carrots for the dogs, he listened to his deputy describe getting a call an hour earlier from the Uzbek foreign minister, who had phoned the New York Fed to request that ninety percent of his country's sovereign asset deposits be wired to a bank in Tashkent. The problems being that (1) no one was quite sure which side of the coup the foreign minster was on; (2) the Uzbek president was proving somewhat hard to reach; and (3) the State Department, unable to determine if this was an Islamist revolution or a pro-Western military putsch, hadn't decided yet whether to stand by the current dictator or throw him overboard. Eighty million dollars was an unremarkable sum for a foreign-country transfer but enough to fund a small civil war and thus endanger U.S. basing rights, necessary for the resupply of forces in Afghanistan. During a pause in the proceedings, Henry's chief counsel, Phillip Bretts, noted drolly that the man at State had been appointed only last week to the Central Asian Desk from a job at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

"Any chance of getting a bit of that meat?" Henry whispered, holding his hand over the phone just as Charlotte emptied the frying pan into the dogs' stainless-steel bowls.

"It's Sam who insists on the finer grade," she observed. "Wilkie was perfectly happy with the ground chuck."

By the end of the call, Henry was ready for a drink.

He took his Bloody Mary out onto the back terrace and tried to ignore the weeds coming up through the mortar of the brick. Despite his anger at Charlotte's loony behavior, he had to confess that he hadn't seen her so animated in years. Perhaps even since they were kids, now that he thought about it. Back when she'd been queen of the realm in which he'd