With Child

see if I can set the ball rolling. Okay?'

'Thank you.' She practically whispered it, overcome by the relief of a burden handed over. For a moment, she looked very young.

'I want you to remember two things, Jules. First of all, Dio seems to be pretty resourceful at taking care of himself. Most kids end up living in boxes under an overpass and falling in with some real shit - with some really rotten characters. Your Dio sounds fairly clever, and I'd say that if he manages to avoid drugs, he has a good chance of staying on his feet.'

'He hates drugs. He told me once they make him sick, and they killed his mother. It's the only time he said anything about her, when he was telling me where his name came from, and I think he meant it. Both parts of it.'

Jules did not seem to have faced the implication that if the boy knew that drugs made him ill, he at least had to have tried something, but Kate was not about to point this out, either.

'I hope so. The other thing to remember is, even if he has taken off, even if, God forbid, he's dead, he had a friend - you. A lot of runaways never do make friends, not normal friends. It's something to be proud of, Jules.' To Kate's horror, the child's lips began to twitch and her eyes fill. Jesus, after the last few days, all she needed was another scene. She moved to cut it off. 'However, I also agree with Senora Hidalgo. Befriending some stranger in a park is a damn fool thing to do, and if I were your mother, I'd turn you over my knee.'

As the words left her mouth, Kate wondered why on earth conversing with a child invariably turned her into a cliche-mouthing maiden aunt, alternately hearty and judgmental. Don't interrupt, child. It's not polite to point. Wash your mouth out with soap. However, in this case it did the trick: Jules's eyes went instantly dry, her chin rose.

'My mother never hits me. She says it's a shameful abuse of superior strength.'

'So it is. But I'd still do it. However,' she said, rising, 'I'm not your mother, and I don't want you riding the bus home. Let me put on some shoes and I'll drive you back.'

'But you have to be at work today. They told me.'

'Only on call, and then not until tonight. There's loads of time.'

'You should go back to sleep, then.'

'I'll sleep later. Nobody dies on a Tuesday night.'

'But —'

'Look, Jules, do you have some reason you don't want me to drive you home? Hiding something, maybe?'

'Of course not.'

'Fine. I'll go and put on my shoes. Be back in a minute.'

'Okay. And Kate? Thank you.'

In the basement garage, Jules paused between the two cars. She looked at the gleaming white Saab convertible up on its blocks, and then she took in Kate's dented, scruffy Japanese model, covered with road dirt and smeared with engine grease from the recent repairs, strewn inside with debris and rubbish. She said nothing, just took an empty pretzel box from the floor and with fastidious fingernails gathered up the apple cores and grape stems and dropped them into the box along with the Styrofoam cups, empty wrappers, grease-stained paper bags, and generic garbage. She ran out of room in the pretzel box and used a McDonald's sack for the remainder, then neatly placed both box and bag on the cement floor of the garage just under the driver's door of Lee's car. She carefully gathered up all the cassette tapes from the seat before getting in, then set about matching nineteen scattered tapes to their boxes while Kate backed out of the garage and headed toward the nearest freeway entrance. By the time they had negotiated the most recent route complications, inserted themselves into the flow of determined truckers, and dodged the inevitable panic-stricken station wagons with midwestern plates that decided at the last moment that they needed to get off right now, Jules had the tapes securely boxed and arranged in their zippered pouch, the titles up and facing the same way. She placed the zip bag on the floor under her knees, put her hands in her lap, narrowed her eyes at the truck in front of them, and spoke.

'Where's Lee?'

Kate took a deep breath and flexed her hands on the wheel.

'Lee is visiting an aunt, up in Washington.'

'The state?'

'Yes.'

'We used to live in Seattle, when I was really small. I don't remember it. She must be feeling better, then.'

'She must be.' Kate felt the child's eyes on her.

'How long has she been away?'

'I just got back this morning from taking her.'

'You drove her? That's a long way, isn't it? Is she phobic about flying?'

'She just finds it difficult, with her legs,' said Kate evenly, giving absolutely no indication in her voice of the previous two weeks, of the nasty surprises and the queasy blend of loneliness, abandonment, sheer rage, and the dregs of the worst hangover she'd had for many years.

'I suppose she would,' said Jules thoughtfully. 'Planes are so crowded anyway; with crutches, they'd be awful. Or does she still use the wheelchair?'

'Sometimes, but mostly she uses arm braces.'

'And didn't you have a man living in the house, too? Lee's caretaker. I met him. Jon, without the h.'

'He's away for a while, too.'

'So you're all alone. Do you like being alone in the house?' When Kate did not answer immediately, she continued. 'I do. I like coming home to a house - or to an apartment, in my case - when you know nobody's there and nobody will be there for a while. I can't wait until Mom thinks I'm old enough to stay by myself. It's a real pain, having Trini the airhead there all the time. She's all right, but she takes up so much space, somehow, and she always has music going. I like being alone, for a while anyway. I don't know how I'd like it all the time. I guess I'd get lonely, at night especially. How long will Lee be gone?'

'I don't know.' Now Kate's control was slipping, and she heard the edge in her voice. Jules looked at her again.

'How are her legs, anyway? Al said she could get around pretty well, compared with what they were expecting —'

'Let's not talk about Lee anymore,' Kate said, her voice friendly but the warning signs clear. 'I'm totally pissed off at her right now. Okay? Tell me, what's that say on your shirt?'

Jules dropped her chin to look at the foreign writing. 'It says, 'Panta hellenike estin emoi.' That means, 'It's all Greek to me.' This guy in my programming class puts himself through college by selling T-shirts. I thought this one was kinda neat.'

Kinda neat, Kate thought with a smile, and the psychological interpretations of statistical probabilities. 'Tell me about your class,' she suggested. The topic lasted Jules until Palo Alto, when Kate left the freeway and asked for directions to the park.

TWO

Kate satisfied herself with a slow drive-by and a pause in the parking lot, although Jules was anxious to show her around.

'No, I just wanted to see,' she said firmly. 'And you used to meet him under that tree? What direction did he usually come from? No, just to get an idea. Now, show me where you live. No, Jules, I'm not just going to drop you off.'

Ignoring the girl's protests, Kate parked in a visitor's slot behind the large brick building and walked up the stairs behind her, feeling like a truant officer. The apartment turned out to be larger than the one Kate had seen in San Jose, where Jani and her daughter had lived two floors above a particularly vicious psychopath, but it retained the old one's personality as the lair of a distracted academic and her serious and equally intellectual daughter. The high ceilings seemed to be held up by bookshelves - no neatly arranged storage spaces, either, but depositories laden with volumes in the disarray of constant use. Some improvements had been made over the last place: the ghastly motel furniture had been left behind, the plastic and chrome dinette set traded for a wooden dining table