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familiar seat. She glanced around the room. It felt different somehow, but she didn’t know why. Maybe it was just because she’d been gone so long, over two weeks. Or maybe it was because she was jet-lagged and a little on edge. Though the flight hadn’t been that long, she’d spent too many hours without sleep in the past few days, and the trip had been emotionally draining.
    Ever since touching down in Mexico two weeks earlier, things had started to go awry. Not only had she and David had the same old fight about her giving up her job and moving back to Houston, but there had also been the boating “accident” that had dumped both her and her purse into the shallows of the Pacific. She’d ended up with a sprained ankle and no ID—the purse had never been located. It had been a nightmare trying to get out of the country, and when she’d finally persuaded the authorities to let her back into the USA, she’d been sporting this god-awful, bulky cast.
    “These things happen,” David had said with a shrug, as they’d finally boarded the 737. He’d offered her a smile and a lift of his eyebrows as if to say, Hey, there’s nothing we can do about it now. We’re in a foreign country. He’d been right, of course, but it didn’t help her bad mood and suspicion that the fishing-boat captain had been drunk or under the influence of some other drug and that somehow her purse, along with a couple of others in the tour group, had been found by local divers, the credit cards, cash and other items of value now being used or pawned up and down the west coast of Mexico. According to the captain, the tiny fishing boat had lurched, avoiding a rock—for God’s sake. It seemed implausible. A stupid mistake from a captain who daily patrolled the waters off Mazatlán. Samantha hadn’t bought it and had wanted some kind of compensation, at the very least an apology for crying out loud. Instead she’d landed in a tiny hospital with an elderly doctor, an expatriate American who looked as if he should have retired in the seventies. He probably had, or been run out of the States for malpractice.
    “Sour grapes, Dr. Sam,” she chastised herself, as Charon settled into his favorite spot on the window ledge. He stared through the watery glass, his eyes following something in the darkness. Probably a squirrel. Samantha looked through the panes and saw nothing but the dark shadows of the night.
    She pushed the play button on her answering machine while grabbing her letter opener and slicing through the first envelope—a bill. No doubt the first of many. The recorder went through a series of beeps and clicks before playing.
    The first call was a hangup.
    Great.
    She tossed the bill onto the table.
    The second was a solicitor asking if she needed auto-glass repair.
    Better yet. She thought of her red Mustang convertible, couldn’t wait to get it on the road again. But she didn’t need a new windshield. “No thanks,” she said tearing into several letters—offers of credit cards, requests for contributions to worthy causes, the sewer bill.
    Finally a voice.
    “Hey, Sam, it’s Dad.” Sam smiled. “I forgot you were out of town…You give me a call when you get back home, okay?”
    “Will do,” Sam said as she scanned her most recent Visa bill and was grateful that she’d called Melanie who had assured her that she would cancel all her credit cards immediately.
    Two more hangups and then she heard her boss’s voice boom from the recorder. “Sam, I know you’re probably not home yet,” Eleanor said, “but call me the minute, the minute you get in. And don’t give me any crap about you not going to work because of your leg, that’s just not cutting it with me. I got your message from the hospital, but unless you’re hooked to an IV and a heart monitor and strapped to a hospital bed, I want you back at the station pronto. You got that? Melanie’s doing a decent enough job, I mean it, but since you’ve been gone, ratings