with six matching wooden chairs, the flowered sofa replaced by a suite of comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs and sofa in corduroy the shade of cappuccino. Even the heaps of books seemed less precarious here; a few surfaces were actually free of them.

Jules picked up two mugs, one with a spoon in it, and carried them into the kitchen. Kate followed her.

'Nice place.'

'I like it better than the other one. Nobody lived in that building but Yuppies, and then after… I kept thinking I saw him in the hallways.' She turned away, furiously embarrassed by this admission, to thrust the mugs and a couple of other things into the dishwasher.

'Spooky,' Kate agreed. 'Where does Mrs Hidalgo live?'

'Oh, she won't be expecting me for hours yet. I don't get home 'til two sometimes.' It had been 'three or four' earlier; Jules, among her many accomplishments, was not a practiced liar.

'I suppose you could forge a note for school,' Kate said easily, looking out the window at a desk-sized balcony and a postage stamp-sized swimming pool below, 'but Mrs Hidalgo would probably find out, and your mother would blow up. Best defuse the bomb before it starts spluttering.'

Jules was silent; then Kate heard her sigh. 'You're as bad as Al,' she complained. 'Okay, just let me just dump these books. You want to see my room?'

'Sure,' said Kate. Jules caught up her backpack and led Kate to the other end of the very ordinary apartment. The room, as Kate had suspected, was not ordinary. It was, in fact, like no other teenage bedroom she'd ever seen, and in the course of her professional life she had seen quite a few.

To begin with, it was tidy. Not compulsively so, but beneath a minor accumulation of papers, books, and Coke cans, things were obviously in their assigned and logical places. The shelves were free of dust, and the bed had even been made.

The room was very Jules. The top end of the bed was buried under an arrangement of stuffed animals; on the foot of the bed were two books, each of them weighing at least five pounds. The one on the top was a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. A high shelf, running around three sides of the room, was solid with more toys, teddy bears in the full gamut of pastels, a grouping of stuffed cows and another of elephants, and so on through the bestiary. The shelves below that held books - paperback novels on the higher shelves, solid books lower down; tomes such as few adults had even held were down at waist level. This was a logical-enough arrangement in earthquake country - some of those books would kill a person if they fell from a height of eight feet - but she was amused to see a collection of old and obviously much loved picture books shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of glossy coffee table art books. The cross between childhood naivete and adult sophistication extended to the walls as well: Three framed prints from the pages of Goodnight Moon were arranged on one wall, facing a poster of a Renaissance woman's face on the other, an ethereal blond portrait with the name of a German museum underneath.

Jules had dropped her backpack on the desk and gone across to open the door of a wire cage. A black-and- white rat came blinking out onto his mistress's hand, but Kate was distracted by a piece of paper that had been pinned up to the corkboard over the desk, on which was printed the word sesquipedalian.

'What's that?' she asked, pointing.

'That's my word for the day,' Jules told her matter-of-factly. She had been cuddling the rat to her chin, and she now kissed his pointy nose and allowed him to scramble onto her shoulder. 'It means long words. Literally, it refers to something a foot and a half long.' She took a peanut from a jar and held it up to her shoulder. Kate watched the rat manipulate the nut between his delicate paws and nibble it down to nothing, and she wondered briefly how to respond to the word of the day before deciding that she didn't actually have to.

'What's his name?' she asked instead.

'Ratty.'

'I loved The Wind in the Willows when I was a kid,' Kate agreed.

'Actually, his full name is Ratiocinate,' said Jules, putting him back in the cage with another nut. 'But I call him Ratty.'

Kate laughed aloud and followed Jules back to the kitchen. The girl looked into the refrigerator. 'Would you like a Coke?' she offered. 'Or I could make you some coffee. Mrs Hidalgo never has anything but juices to drink; she believes in healthy living.' It sounded like a quote, as did many of Jules's remarks. Kate was not actually thirsty, and she didn't much like Coke either, but without knowing why, she found herself accepting the offer. She and Jules stood in the kitchen for a while, talking about the apartment and drinking from the cans, until eventually Kate suggested they should be going downstairs.

Then, on their way out of the apartment, an odd thing happened, one that would have made little impression on Kate had it not been for Jules's reaction. The telephone rang as they walked toward it, and without hesitating, almost without breaking stride, Jules simply picked up the receiver and let it drop immediately back onto the base. No, not drop: Jules slammed it down in a small burst of fury and continued on out of the apartment. Kate followed, waited while Jules dug the key from her shorts pocket and locked the door, and then spoke to the back that she was following down the hallway.

'Get a lot of wrong numbers, do you?' She was totally unprepared for the girl's reaction: Jules whipped around, long braids flying and her face frozen, as if daring Kate to push an inquiry, and then she started down the stairs at a pace so fast, it was almost running. Kate caught up with her at the downstairs neighbor's door, putting out a hand to touch the girl's arm.

'Jules, are you getting a lot of crank phone calls?'

The girl stared at the doorbell, and then the rigidity in her shoulders gave way and she exhaled.

'No, not a lot. I just had one a while back that was really weird, and I guess I'm still jumpy when the phone rings if I'm alone. Stupid to just hang up like that, isn't it? I mean, what if it was Mom?'

'Or Dio?'

She turned to stare at Kate. 'God, I didn't think about that. He's never phoned me,' she said doubtfully. 'But he could.'

'If you're having a problem, Jules, you can always have your phone number changed. Or you can arrange with the phone company —'

'No!' she said fiercely. 'I don't want to change the number, and I don't want to bring the phone company into it.'

'Use the answering machine, then, to screen your calls.'

'I do, sometimes.'

'Have you told your mom, or Al?'

'It only happened once!' Jules nearly shouted. 'It's not a problem.'

'It sounds to me like it is.'

'Really, Kate, it's not. It's just all the stuff about Dio - it's getting to me. But if whoever it is starts up again, I promise I'll ask Mom to change the number.' Jules reached for the doorbell again, and this time Kate let her ring it.

The matriarch of the Hidalgo clan did not quite match the short, squat, big-bosomed surrogate-grandmother- to-the-neighborhood image Kate had formed. True, her skin was the color of an old penny, and true, the smell of something magnificent on the stove filled the stairwell; there was even the clear indication that half the children on the block had moved in. However, the good seniora had a waist slimmer than Kate's, and the jeans and scoop- necked pink T-shirt she wore covered a body taut with aerobic muscles. She also wore a small microphone clipped to the front of her shirt, like a newscaster's mike, only pointing down. She looked at her two visitors with concern.

'Julia, you are home early. Was there a problem at the school?' She gave the name a Spanish pronunciation, but her accent was mild.

'Buenos dias, Senora,' said Jules carefully. 'No hay problema. Este es mi amiga Kate Martinelli. Yo tengo… tiene… yo tenia una problema, y ella va a ayudarme con, er . . .'

'That was very good, Julia; you're coming along rapidly. I'm pleased to meet you, Ms Martinelli. Rosa Hidalgo.' She put out her hand, which was as firm as the rest of her. 'Come in. I was just finishing here. Fieldwork for my thesis in child psychology,' she added, looking over her shoulder.

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