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Neal?”
    “Senator Chase, how old do I have to be to find her? How old did you have to be to lose her?”
    Chase smiled with all the joy of a dog eating grass. “Rich, get Mr. Kitteredge on the phone. This isn’t going to work out.”
    Neal finished off his scotch and stood up. “Yeah, Rich, get Mr. Kitteredge on the phone. Tell him the Senator wants Strom Thurmond or somebody.”
    “Let’s just everybody sit down, shall we?”
    Neal looked at the woman who had just spoken, and couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed her standing in the doorway. She was a lovely woman and she stood framed in the doorway just a second longer than necessary to let Neal realize that she was a lovely woman. She’s made such entrances into this room before, Neal thought. She used the door frame like Bacall used a movie screen, but she was small. Her long blond hair was pulled tightly back, almost prim. Brown eyes flecked with green smiled at him. She wore a black jersey and jeans. She was barefoot. She walked over to her husband, took a sip of his drink, made a face, and moved behind the bar, where she poured grapefruit juice over crushed ice. Then she sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from Neal and pulled her legs up under her. Nobody said a word during all this. Nobody was expected to.
    “Neal Carey is twenty-three,” she said to the room at large in a voice that whistled “Dixie.”
    “How do you know?” Chase asked.
    “I inquired.”
    “And you don’t think he’s too young?”
    “Of course I do, John. I think they’re all too young. But what you and I think hasn’t worked out all that well, has it?”
    She fixed her husband with those brown eyes. The issue was settled.
    Then she turned them on Neal. “I’ll bet you have some questions for us.”
    It was all pretty much as Rich Lombardi had described. Alison Chase was a brat of the first order, a spoiled baby turned spoiled kid, turned spoiled teenager, and on the fast track toward turning ruined adult. Bored by age ten, jaded by thirteen, hopeless by the time she celebrated sweet sixteen, Alison was the classic case of too much too soon and too little too late.
    Child Allie had garnered all kinds of attention from the doting parents who hauled her out to perform for dinner guests and hauled her back in when the evening’s supply of cute had been played out. She made the usual adolescent progression from ballet to horses to tennis, and had littered New England and Washington with the tattered detritus of dance teachers, horse masters, and court coaches. The proud parents made all the recitals, most of the field trials, and quite a few of the tennis matches until Allie started losing and the fun went out of it.
    As Allie grew up, John Chase’s political career thrived and the demands of the young congressman’s time increased, especially when he made the giant step to Senator. Likewise, the politician’s wife made her obeisance to the Junior League and the torturous committees of Washington wives who devoted their afternoons and evenings to worthy causes such as saving other people’s children.
    Nothing was too good for Allie, however, so off she went to the very best schools, first to day schools in D.C., and later to those New England boarding schools whose role it is to prepare young women for the next generation of committees. And as Allie had learned young that she had to perform to get attention, perform she did—badly. Because while nothing was too good for Allie, Allie was never good enough for Mom and Dad. Not the tentative jeté, the imperfect seat, the lazy backhand that sliced out, certainly not the grades that started with B’s and made a steady slide to F’s as desperate but futile stabs at perfection gave way to sullen indifference and then determined screwups. If she could not be the perfect success, she would be the perfect failure. If she could not be the ideal princess, she would be the ideal dragon. She would turn her beauty around to be the