8

"That's Mada in the middle," Mrs. Bieber said.

The photograph showed three little girls sitting on the running board of a twenties-style touring car in front of a house that looked like this one minus an addition and part of the porch. The description Mrs. Armour had given of the photograph in Lane's bookcase made it sound like a copy of this one.

"The other two are my daughter Mary Ellen, who's a year younger than Mada, and their cousin Victoria. Mada and Victoria were about seven then." She cocked her head, smiling at him. "Are you sure you don't have anything more exciting to do with your evenings off than visit an old woman who isn't even a relative?"

Not when he needed to learn everything possible about his quarry. It meant using this friendly old woman, though, which filled him with guilt even as he smiled at her. "You're a friend, aren't you?" He bent over the photo album. "She's about the same size as the others."

"She didn't start growing so tall until later. Here's a picture of her at ten."

There was no mistaking her now, towering over her younger siblings. With the October night chilly and windy outside, Garreth leafed through the album and easily picked Lane out in the subsequent photographs, head and shoulders above any other child she was with.

"She's the brightest of my children. Let me show you something." Mrs. Bieber led him into the dining room and pointed proudly to rows of plaques on one wall, each announcing a First Place in spelling, debate, or archery. "Mada won all those, but she would have given up every one in a moment to be six inches shorter. My heart ached for her so often. She used to come home crying because the other children taunted her about her height. I never knew what to say. Maybe if I'd been older and wiser, but I was barely more than a girl myself, just sixteen when she was born. Later she stopped crying. She developed a terrible temper, flying into a rage at the least remark. She was always fighting someone. That only made matters worse, of course."

Of course. Children, and even adults, turned like animals on someone who looked or acted different. Lane must have made an easy target, too.

Mrs. Bieber said, "'I hate them,' she would sob to me, with such savagery in her voice. 'Someday they'll be sorry. I'll show them they don't own the world.' I tried to teach her to forgive, to be kind to her enemies, but it was many years before she could."

Garreth doubted that Lane ever did. She simply gave up threatening. After all, she had her revenge . . . living off their lifeblood, reducing them to cattle, leaving some of them nothing but dead, dry husks. When she had been bitten by the vampire who made her, whoever it had been, wherever it had happened, how had she felt? Had she cursed, or wept in confusion and dismay, loathing her body for what it had become? Looking at the pictures in the album, imagining the world through the eyes of the tortured child she had been, he thought not. He suspected that she had seen instantly what the change would bring her and embraced hell willingly, even happily, greedily. In her place, perhaps he would, too.

In sudden uncertainty, he snapped the album closed and thrust it back at Mrs. Bieber. Maybe this visit was a mistake. He wanted to know Lane, not sympathize with her, to understand how her mind worked, not feel echoes of her pain in him.

"Is something the matter?" Mrs. Bieber asked in concern.

He gave her a quick smile. "I was just thinking about your daughter's childhood. No wonder she ran away."

She laid her hand on his arm. "It wasn't all that bad. We had happy times here at home. It's still good when everyone gets home together. There's a tenseness and . . . distance in Mada when she first comes that makes me wonder if she's really any happier in all the glitter of those exotic places she goes, but at least she's content and happy here."

He carried the last remark away with him, echoing through his head, chewing at him. She enjoyed coming home. Only this time, instead of a happy family reunion and carefree holiday, she would find a cop waiting, a date with retribution and justice. Mrs. Bieber would be hurt, too, when he arrested Lane.

Unbidden, Lien's quotation from I Ching the day he left San Francisco came back: Acting to recreate order must be done with proper authority. Setting one's self up to alter things according to one's own judgment can end in mistake and failure.

Driving home through the windy night, Garreth felt a nagging doubt and wondered unhappily about the rightness of what he was doing.