rs. Beachwood, I'm moving out and I'll tell you why.
"In the last four months, I have discovered you to be a drug dealer, an unfit mother and an unforgiveable snob. If only collagen could do for your morals and manners what it's done for your lips."
                As she dismounts her scooter outside the cottage, Delia practices the speech she plans to give her landlady.
                For the first time in months, she feels in charge of her destiny. Sure, she'll miss her window box, and the cute stone pathway to her door. And she hates giving up her job, the first real gallery work her art history degree has earned her.
                But Santa Barbara has proven a mirage, full of beautiful things you can't have, fabulous events you can't attend and gorgeous people you can't really like no matter how hard you try.
                She drops her helmet and purse inside, and begins marching toward the Beachwoods' French country-style mansion.
                She's still amazed that only three people live there. What do they do with all those rooms? She once read that Aaron Spelling's wife devotes an entire chamber of her palatial Beverly Hills residence to gift-wrapping. Delia imagines cute little hand-painted signs on the interior doors of the Beachwood home reading, "Tennis skirt nook" and "Crack pipe conservatory."
                She takes a deep breath and clunks the knocker on the ostentatious front door.
                No one answers.
                Damn it, she didn't twist up all her courage just to go sulking back to her cottage without saying her piece. She'll try the side door.
                She pokes her head into Winston's doggie door and calls out tentatively.
                "Hello? Anyone home?"
                Fine. She'll leave them a note. She reaches up inside, unlocks the door and lets herself in, ducking through the service porch into the kitchen.
                She inhales something noxious - a sharp smell with sweet overtones and repellent, unfamiliar undertones.
                "Great," Delia whispers, rummaging through the kitchen drawers. "I'll pass out from crack fumes before I find a notepad and pen."
                Opening a junk drawer near the phone, her fingers and eyes push past the usual household detritus: spare keys, batteries, to-go menus, matchbooks.
                When she comes upon Mrs. Beachwood's Day-Timer, Delia can't help herself. She opens it up and thumbs through the calendar, full of charity balls and manicure appointments. She flips through the address book, scanning private cell phone numbers for a florist, weight trainer and several celebrities.
                But when she comes across a wad of scrap papers shoved at the back of the book, her stomach clenches like a fist.
                Were it not wartime, Delia might have dismissed what she saw as unrelated tidbits of an uninteresting life. In the current climate, however, they amount to much more.
                And they leave Delia pining for the good old days when she thought her landlords were merely drug lords.
                The first is a prescription for Cipro.
                The second, written in Mrs. Beachwood's jagged scrawl, reads, "Screens three inches below surface. KEEP DRY to prevent explosion."
                The third is a To Do list with several tasks: "Choose untraceable alias, find weak spots in security, target police route!"
                The fourth is a folded-up map of the County Courthouse.
                The fifth bears the address and business hours of the Westwood federal building.
                It's the last one, though, that causes Delia to hyperventilate: "Bombs to Eastside, 6 a.m. Sunday, 3/30."
                Her brain is trying to make sense of all this, scrambling back through her memories for some logical explanation. Was that Mr. Beachwood who made all those anti-American comments on "Entertainment Tonight" during the first Gulf War? Didn't he make a movie where terrorists blow up the White House? Wasn't his grandfather blacklisted by the communist-fearing Hollywood of the 1940s?
                It takes her approximately four seconds to realize the slamming sound she hears is not the blood pounding through her ears, but the doors of the Beachwoods' Range Rover, which has just pulled up outside.
                She drops the organizer back in the drawer and, with nowhere else to go, ducks into a broom closet just as Mrs. Beachwood and Jackson burst through the side door.

Sunday: The shocking conclusion

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