Excerpt

Elspeth had already closed the library and was hunkered down in her rambling Russell Street house. As we hugged good-bye at the Ice Pick, she explained that her plan was to ring in the New Year in an oxygen chamber that a professor friend of hers ran near U.C. Berkeley. Carlos, his partner, Larry, and their pugs (Victoria and Albert, how cute is that!) were heading to their cabin in the mountains up by the Stanislaus National Park, near the scene of my ill-fated fence post incident, though I didn’t elect to point that out. Sydney was filling in for a French teacher who suddenly “had to” get home to Paris a day early so I had no opportunity to download to her about our latest Goth encounter. And Melanie slipped out before anyone, leaving word through Elspeth that her daughters had surprised her with a plane ticket to Boston.

In fact, an unsettling number of the B-C families had flown the coop as much as a week early, explaining in emails to Sydney that the only flights they could get to the Hana-Maui airport left last Friday. I felt their pain, really I did.