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she mixed drinks for them this afternoon.
    She climbs six flights and emerges, winded, in an empty but brightly lit corridor on Deck 10. She makes a left; oops; backtracks, makes a right. Moments later, she’s unlocking the door marked 10533. Before crossing the threshold, she hangs the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob.
    The inside cabin is tiny, as she had expected it to be, and she leaves the light off, taking refuge in the darkness at last. Without a porthole, she won’t have a cabin view of the island home she’s leaving behind forever, but that’s okay. Maybe she’ll venture out to one of the decks as they set sail. Not for sentimental reasons, but because the timer inside the box she left in the storage room is set for five-fifteen. She’ll be able to watch Jimmy’s Big Iguana—and everyone in it—go up in an explosion of flames and smoke.
    Flames and smoke . . . just like the scene she left behind on another island over ten years ago, where the landscape was concrete and steel, not fronds and foliage.
    There shouldn’t be too many casualties here, relatively speaking. With the exception of a few stragglers, the passengers should all be back on board by the time the bomb goes off at the Big Iguana. The Disney ship is always the last to leave, at five-thirty, but that isn’t a bar crowd anyway.
    Of course the investigation will reveal the explosive device planted in the bar’s storage room. But with all Jimmy’s enemies, it won’t be a stretch, by any means, for the authorities to conclude that someone might have reason to blow up the place. Certainly someone other than one of the victims, who will include a handful of locals, a couple of employees, and of course, poor Jane the bartender, who will have been killed in her apartment upstairs.
    As for Molly Temple: Carrie wonders who’s waiting back at home for her in . . . where, Ohio? Yes, according to the driver’s license in her wallet, and last Friday’s paycheck stub for an accounting firm in Cleveland. Also among her things: a room reservation for three nights at the Miami Marriott, and a plane ticket to fly home on Monday morning.
    Well, whoever is waiting for her back in Ohio will just have to wonder why she never caught her flight. The ship’s records will show that she disembarked on Friday morning, checked into her hotel—and then vanished into thin air.
    As for Carrie . . .
    All she has to do, once she’s back in the States, is rent a car and drive away.
    She can be in New York before the weekend is over . . . if that’s what she wants.
    Or she can take it slowly, savor the journey.
    That’s the beauty of it. She has all the time in the world to catch up with her past. At least this time, she knows right where to find Allison.
    That wasn’t such an easy task twelve years ago. All she knew back then, when she arrived in New York City, was that Allison Taylor was somewhere in Manhattan, the proverbial needle in a haystack in those days before it was possible to locate just about anyone in a matter of seconds via the Internet.
    I found her, though, eventually.
    Found her, and moved in right across the hall from her. She never suspected a thing . . .
    Nor did Mack.
    He honestly thought they were moving to Hudson Street because Carrie’s commute to the World Trade Center would be shorter if they lived downtown. He also believed the apartment’s previous tenant, an elderly woman named Mrs. Ogden, had died in an accidental fall—as did Mrs. Ogden’s family, and the landlord who listed her newly vacated apartment as available for rent on June first.
    And when Carrie and Mack introduced themselves to their pretty blond neighbor across the hall, it never occurred to Mack—or, apparently, to Allison—that Carrie wasn’t meeting her for the first time.
    That was how it went, throughout that long, hot city