sewer, which she had done once before, much to the delight of the other kids and to her own mortification. (Dear God, please remember that I made myself say the Rosary as penance for that boner, just to prove I didn't mean anything by it, it was only a mistake.) When the dismissal bell rang, she was the first out of her seat and the first out of the classroom door, even though most of the kids at St. Thomas's School did not come from St. Thomas's Home and were not disabled in any way.
All the way to her locker and all the way from her locker to the front exit, she wondered if Mr. Harrison would really be waiting for her, as he had promised. She imagined herself standing on the sidewalk with kids swarming around her, unable to spot his car, the crowd gradually diminishing until she stood alone, and still no sign of his car, and her waiting as the sun set and the moon rose and her wristwatch ticked toward midnight, and in the morning when the kids returned for another day of school, she'd just go back inside with them and not tell anyone the Harrisons didn't want her any more.
He was there. In the red car. In a line of cars driven by other kids' parents. He leaned across the seat to open the door for her as she approached.
When she got in with her book bag and closed the door, he said, “Hard day?”
“Yeah,” she said, suddenly shy when shyness had never been one of her major problems. She was having trouble getting the hang of this family thing. She was afraid maybe she'd never get it.
He said, “Those nuns.”
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“They're tough.”
“Tough.”
“Tough as nails, those nuns.”
“Nails,” she said, nodding agreement, wondering if she would ever be able to speak more than one-word sentences again.
As he pulled away from the curb, he said, “I'll bet you could put any nun in the ring with any heavyweight champion in the whole history of boxing — I don't care if it was even Muhammad Ali — and she'd knock him out in the first round.”
Regina couldn't help grinning at him.
“Sure,” he said. “Only Superman could survive a fight with a real hardcase nun. Batman? Fooie! Even your
“They mean well,” she said, which was three words, at least, but sounded goofy. She might be better off not talking at all; she just didn't have any experience at this father-kid stuff.
“Nuns?” he said. “Well, of course, they mean well. If they didn't mean well, they wouldn't be nuns. They'd be maybe Mafia hitmen, international terrorists, United States Congressmen.”
He did not speed home like a busy man with lots to do, but like somebody out for a leisurely drive. She had not been in a car with him enough to know if that was how he always drove, but she suspected maybe he was loafing along a little slower than he usually did, so they could have more time together, just the two of them. That was sweet. It made her throat a little tight and her eyes watery. Oh, terrific. A pile of cow flop could've carried on a better conversation than she was managing, so now she was going to burst into tears, which would really cement the relationship. Surely every adoptive parent desperately hoped to receive a mute, emotionally unstable girl with physical problems — right? It was all the rage, don't you know. Well, if she did cry, her treacherous sinuses would kick in, and the old snot-faucet would start gushing, which would surely make her even
They chatted about this and that. Actually, for a while he chatted and she pretty much just grunted like she was a subhuman out on a pass from the zoo. But eventually she realized, to her surprise, that she was talking in complete sentences, had been doing so for a couple of miles, and was at ease with him.
He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just about bent his ear clear off explaining that some people actually made a living writing the kinds of books she liked to read and that she had been composing her own stories for a year or two. Lame stuff, she admitted, but she would get better at it. She was very bright for ten, older than her years, but she couldn't expect actually to have a career going until she was eighteen, maybe sixteen if she was lucky. When had Mr. Christopher Pike started publishing? Seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe he'd been as old as twenty, but certainly no older, so that's what she would shoot for — being the next Mr. Christopher Pike by the time she was twenty. She had an entire notebook full of story ideas. Quite a few of those ideas were good even when you crossed out the embarrassingly childish ones like the story about the intelligent pig from space that she had been so hot about for a while but now saw was hopelessly dumb. She was still talking about writing books when they pulled into the driveway of the house in Laguna Niguel, and he actually seemed interested.
She figured she might get the hang of this family thing yet.
Vassago dreamed of fire. The click of the cigarette-lighter cover being flipped open in the dark. The dry rasp of the striker wheel scraping against the flint. A spark. A young girl's white summer dress flowering into flames. The Haunted House ablaze. Screams as the calculatedly spooky darkness dissolved under licking tongues of orange light. Tod Ledderbeck was dead in the cavern of the Millipede, and now the house of plastic skeletons and rubber ghouls was abruptly filled with real terror and pungent death.
He had dreamed of that fire previously, countless times since the night of Tod's twelfth birthday. It always provided the most beautiful of all the chimeras and phantasms that passed behind his eyes in sleep.
But on this occasion, strange faces and images appeared in the flames. The red car again. A solemnly beautiful, auburn-haired child with large gray eyes that seemed too old for her face. A small hand, cruelly bent, with fingers missing. A name, which had come to him once before, echoed through the leaping flames and melting shadows in the Haunted House.
The visit to Dr. Nyebern's office had depressed Hatch, both because the tests had revealed nothing that shed any light on his strange experiences and because of the glimpse he had gotten into the physician's own troubled life. But Regina was a medicine for melancholy if ever there had been one. She had all the enthusiasm of a child her age; life had not beaten her down one inch.
On the way from the car to the front door of the house, she moved more swiftly and easily than when she had entered Salvatore Gujilio's office, but the leg brace did give her a measured and solemn gate. A bright yellow and blue butterfly accompanied her every step, fluttering gaily a few inches from her head, as if it knew that her spirit was very like itself, beautiful and buoyant.
She said solemnly, “Thank you for picking me up, Mr. Harrison.”
“You're welcome, I'm sure,” he said with equal gravity.
They would have to do something about this “Mr. Harrison” business before the day was out. He sensed that her formality was partly a fear of getting too close — and then being rejected as she had been during the trial phase of her first adoption. But it was also a fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and unwittingly destroying her own prospects for happiness.
At the front door, he said, “Either Lindsey or I will be at the school for you every day — unless you've got a driver's license and would just rather come and go on your own.”
She looked up at Hatch. The butterfly was describing circles in the air above her head, as if it were a living crown or halo. She said, “You're teasing me, aren't you?”
“Well, yes, I'm afraid I am.”
She blushed and looked away from him, as if she was not sure if being teased was a good or bad thing. He could almost hear her inner thoughts:
Throughout the drive home from school, Hatch had seen that Regina suffered from her share of self-doubt, which she thought she concealed but which, when it struck, was evident in her lovely, wonderfully expressive face. Each time he sensed a crack in the kid's self-confidence, he wanted to put his arms around her, hug her tight, and
