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warmth and comfort of Alicia Bianchi.
    Her neat, cedar-shingled ranch house was at the end of a winding gravel drive which led from the roadway past two other houses, then kept on to a grove of immense elm trees. Alicia’s home was tucked there, two hundred feet from her nearest neighbor. For all her sociability, the woman valued her privacy.
    Alicia had seen my car approach, and was waiting for me just inside the door. She kissed me decisively, holding my face in her hands. “You got fish?” she said.
    “I had two blues, but they spoiled. I had to dump them.”
    “Good,” she said. I followed her into the kitchen. The table was already set for dinner. “Enough of bluefish. Enough of all fish. I give my love to a fisherman, I got to eat fish all week long. We make pasta, instead, OK?” Before I could answer, she was into the refrigerator, pulling out raw materials and putting them on the kitchen island’s butcher-block top. “Ritchie at the market made that good sausage today.  Look how nice. And I got broccoli rabe. Bright green. Good. We make a sauce to go with fettuccini. You know, with garlic and wine and broth and the sausage, with the greens. You like that one? Anyway, that’s what I want. I got a taste for it all day, you know?”
    “Sounds fine,” I said. Alicia is a complex person with so many facets to her, it’s hard to pick and choose among them. Quick, clever, unerringly accurate in sizing up people. Open, yet mysterious. Black eyes and flawless olive skin from the Mediterranean. All that. The whole package of her astonishes me every day. But most of all I delight in listening to her talk. That husky voice, the delicious accent, the funny stories about her family back in Calabria, that way she has of saying things that make me believe I’ll live forever.
    “More enthusiasm about the fettuccini would be good,” she said. She undid two big bunches of broccoli rabe, stripped away the coarse stems and put the leafy parts in the sink, which she began filling with water. “Full of grit sometimes, the greens. Best to soak them completely.” She stood barefoot on the rough brown tile of the kitchen floor. Alicia was always barefoot at home, even in winter. She claimed that what she most looked forward to at night after retuning from her art gallery in Southampton was kicking her shoes into a corner. “Look, you want fresh pasta, the real thing? Instead of dried from the box? Much better for this dish,” she said. “Takes a few minutes only. But you make it. By the time I finish the sauce, you can have it all done.”
    “I’m your man,” I said.
    Campy and seductive, “I know that.” She took her shiny pasta machine from a drawer in the island and clamped it to the butcher block.
    “I mean, yes, I’ll make the fettuccini,” I said. “In a minute. I have to talk to Wally Prager.”
    Using the wall phone in the kitchen, I dialed Wally at home. “I don’t mind you calling in the middle of my dinner,” he said. “Just choking down some dried-out pot roast I made last Tuesday, is all.”
    “Only take a minute,” I said. “Do you know of a beat-up old commercial fishing boat around here, maybe 28, 30 feet, called the Lulu?”
    “No boat I know,” Wally said.
    “Could you ask around? It’s important.”
    “I could. You want me to?”
    “Please. And another thing. There’s a hole in the port engine gas-line on my boat. And there’s a hole in the windshield, too.”
    “What kind of holes?” Wally said
    “Bullet holes,” I told him.
    As I spoke on the phone, I watched Alicia listening to my end of the conversation. With the mention of bullet holes she stopped washing the broccoli rabe, and stood there quietly, with her dark eyes boring into me.
    “Well, now, muchacho,” Wally said on the phone, “you really had yourself a happy old time on Shelter Island.”
    “I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Have your guys fix up the boat, will you? Go eat the pot-roast.” I replaced