By the time I unlocked my front door, it was almost eleven. The message light was blinking on my answering machine. I pressed the playback button. "Kinsey? This is your cousin Tasha, up in Lompoc. Could you give me a call?" She left a phone number, which I duly noted. The call had come through five minutes before.

This was not good, I thought.

At the age of eighteen, my mother had been estranged from her well-to-do family when she rebelled against my grandmother's wishes and ran off with a mailman. She and my father were married by a Santa Teresa judge with my aunt Gin in attendance, the only one of her sisters who dared to side with her. Both my mother and Aunt Gin had been banned from the family, an exile that continued until I was born some fifteen years later. My parents had given up any hope of offspring, but with my arrival tentative contact was made with the remaining sisters, who kept the renewed conversations a secret. When my grandparents left on a cruise to celebrate their anniversary, my parents drove up to Lompoc to visit. I was four at the time and remember nothing of the occasion. A year later, while we were driving north to another furtive reunion, a boulder rolled down the mountain and crashed through the car windshield, killing my father on impact. The car went off the road and my mother was critically injured. She died a short time later while the paramedics were still working to extract us from the wreckage.

After that, I was brought up by Aunt Gin, and to my knowledge, there was no further communication with the family. Aunt Gin had never married, and I was raised in accordance with her peculiar notions of what a girl-child should be. As a consequence, I turned out to be a somewhat odd human being, though not nearly as "bent" as some people might think. Since my aunt's death some ten years ago, I'd made my peace with my solitary state.

I'd learned about my "long-lost" relatives in the course of an investigation the year before, and so far, I'd managed to keep them at arm's length. Just because they wanted a relationship didn't obligate me. I'll admit I might have been a little crabby on the subject, but I couldn't help myself. I'm thirty-five years old and my orphanhood suits me. Besides, when you're "adopted" at my age, how do you know they won't become disillusioned and reject you again?