On the third day of the kidnapping, the FBI received an anonymous tip that led them to the shack on the edge of the Mojave Desert. The agents found Susannah chained to the wall. She was curled on the floor in her soiled yellow sundress, too weak to lift her head or to realize that these men were friends instead of enemies. Her arms and legs were raw with scrapes, and the strings of a dozen broken balloons were wrapped through her dirty fingers.

Susannah was so severely dehydrated that there was some concern among her doctors about brain damage. "She's a fighter," Joel said over and over again, as if repetition would make it true. "She'll make it. She's a fighter." Holding her hand, he willed his strength to pass into her small body.

The men who had kidnapped Susannah were betrayed by a former cellmate, and less than a week after Susannah's rescue, they were caught at a roadblock. The balloon man pulled a gun and was killed instantly. The other man hung himself in his cell with a length of twisted bed sheet.

To Joel's joy and Kay's relief, Susannah's body gradually grew stronger. But her spirit didn't heal as quickly. There had been too much evil in her young life, too many battles to fight. Weeks passed before she would speak, another month before Joel coaxed a smile from her. If she had been kidnapped when she had been living with her grandmother, the effect might not have been as devastating. But kidnapping a child who had finally begun to feel secure enough to behave like a child left permanent scars.

Every school morning for the next ten years, she was driven in a securely locked limousine from Falcon Hill to the portals of one of San Francisco's most exclusive girls' academies. She grew tall and coltish. The other girls respected her because she was always willing to help them out of whatever scrape they might have gotten themselves into, and she never spoke badly of anyone. But she was too reserved to make easy friendships, and so serious that she sometimes reminded them uncomfortably of their mothers.