Ten mortal minutes and half a mile later, she crawled past the U-Haul truck that had wrapped itself around a pole. The driver was talking to a cop. “Penal Section 502,” she snarled, that being the California section on driving under the influence.

She had to slow down again as cars got onto the San Diego Freeway, but that happened every day. She bore it in resigned annoyance as a proper Angeleno should, but with a thrum of desperation underneath. Late-late-late…

Once she got under the overpass, she made reasonably decent time. Thoughts about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen ran through her mind.

Parts of Van Nuys were ordinary middle-class suburb. Parts were the sort of neighborhood where you wished you could drive with the Club locked on the steering wheel. Josefina’s house was right on the edge between the one and the other.

“Hello, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said in accented English as Nicole led her children into the relative coolness and dimness of the house. It smelled faintly of sour milk and babies, more distinctly of spices Nicole had learned to recognize: cilantro, cumin, chili powder. The children tugged at Nicole’s hands, trying to break free and bolt, first into Josefina’s welcoming arms, then to the playroom where they’d spend most of the day.

Normally, Nicole would have let them go, but Josefina had put herself in the way, and something in her expression made Nicole tighten her grip in spite of the children’s protests.

Josefina was somewhere near Nicole’s age, several inches shorter, a good deal wider, and addicted to lurid colors: today, an electric blue blouse over fluorescent orange pants. Her taste in clothes, fortunately, didn’t extend to the decor of her house; that was a more or less standard Sears amalgam of brown plaid and olive-green slipcovers, with a touch of faded blue and purple and orange in a big terracotta vase of paper flowers that stood by the door. Nicole would remember the flowers later, more clearly than Josefina’s face in the shadow of the foyer, or even the day-glo glare of her clothes.