In time, headlights appeared in the distance. Chyna watched as they approached, while 
beside her the girl mutely studied the moon.
  From her hospital bed, Chyna gave detailed statements to the police but none to the 
reporters who strove so arduously to reach her. From the cops, in a spirit of 
reciprocity, she learned a great many things about Edgler Vess and the extent of his 
crimes, although none of it explained him.
  Two things were of personal interest to her: First, Paul Templeton, Laura's father, had 
been visiting Oregon on a business trip, weeks before Vess's assault on his family, when 
he had been stopped for speeding. The officer who wrote the citation was the young 
sheriff himself. It must have been on this occasion that the photographs had accidentally 
dropped out of Paul's wallet as he had been hunting for his driver's license, giving Vess 
a chance to see Laura's striking face.
  Second, Ariel's complete name was Ariel Beth Delane. Until one year ago, she had lived 
with her parents and her nine-year-old brother in a quiet suburb of Sacramento, 
California. The mother and father had been shot in their beds. The boy had been tortured 
to death with the tools from a kit that Mrs. Delane had used in her doll-making hobby, 
and there was reason to believe that Ariel had been forced to watch before Vess had taken 
her away.
  Besides policemen, Chyna saw numerous physicians. In addition to the necessary 
treatment for her physical injuries, she was more than once urged to discuss her 
experiences with a psychiatrist. The most persistent of these was a pleasant man named 
Dr. Kevin Lofghm, a boyish fifty-year-old with a musical laugh and a nervous habit of 
pulling on his right earlobe until it was cherry red. 
  “I don't need therapy,” she told him, “because life is therapy.”
  He didn't quite understand this, and he wanted her to tell him about her codependent 
relationship with her mother, though it hadn't been codependent for at least ten years, 
since she had walked out.
  He wanted to help her learn to cope with grief, but she told him, “I don't want to 
learn to cope with it, Doctor. I want tofeel it.”
  When he spoke of post-traumatic stress syndrome, she spoke of hope; when he spoke of 
self-fulfillment, she spoke of responsibility; when he spoke of mechanisms for improving 
self-esteem, she spoke of faith and trust; and after a while he seemed to decide that he 
could do nothing for someone who was speaking a language so different from his own.
  The doctors and nurses were worried that she would be unable to sleep, but she slept 
soundly. They were certain that she would have nightmares, but she only dreamed of a 
cathedral forest where she was never alone and always safe.
  On April eleventh, just twelve days after being admitted to the hospital, she was 
discharged, and when she went out the front doors, there were over a hundred newspaper, 
radio, and television reporters waiting for her, including those from the sleazy tabloid 
shows that had sent her contracts, by Federal Express, offering large sums to tell her 
story. She made her way through them without answering any of their shouted questions but 
without being impolite. As she reached the taxi that was waiting, for her, one of them 
pushed a microphone in her face and said inanely, “Ms. Shepherd, what does it feel like 
to be such a famous hero?”
  She stopped then and turned and said, “I'm no hero. I'm just passing through like all 
of you, wondering why it has to be so hard, hoping I never have to hurt anyone again.”
  Those close enough to hear what she said fell silent, but the others shrieked at her 
again. She got into the taxi and rode away.
  The Delane family had been heavily mortgaged and addicted to easy credit from Visa and 
MasterCard before Edgler Vess had freed them from their debts, so there was no estate to 
which Ariel was heir. Her paternal grandparents were alive but in poor health and with 
only limited financial resources.
  Even if there had been any relatives financially comfortable enough to assume the 
burden of raising a teenage girl with Ariel's singular problems, they would not have felt 
adequate to the task. The girl was made a ward of the court, remanded to the care of a 
psychiatric hospital operated by the State of California.
  No family member objected. Through that summer and autumn, Chyna traveled weekly from 
San Francisco to Sacramento, petitioning the court to be declared Ariel Beth Delane's 
sole legal guardian, visiting the girl, and working patiently-some claimed 
stubbornly-through the byzantine legal and social-services systems. Otherwise, they would 
have condemned the girl to a life in asylums that were called “care facilities."
  Although Chyna truly didn't see herself as a hero, many others did. The admiration with 
which certain influential people regarded her was at last the key that unlocked the 
bureaucratic heart and got her the permanent custody that she wanted. On a morning late 
in January, ten months after she had freed the girl from the doll-guarded cellar, she 
drove out of Sacramento with Ariel beside her.
  They went home to the apartment in San Francisco.
  Chyna never finished her master's degree in psychology, which she had been so close to 
earning. She continued her studies at the University of California at San Francisco, but 
she changed her major to literature. She had always liked to read, and though she didn't 
believe she possessed any writing talent, she thought she might enjoy being a book editor 
one day, working with writers. There was more truth in fiction than in science. She could 
also see herself as a teacher. If she spent the rest of her life waiting tables, that was 
all right as well, because she was good at it and found dignity in the labor.
  The following summer, while Chyna was working the dinner shift, she and Ariel began 
spending many mornings and early afternoons at the beach. The girl liked to stare out at 
the bay from behind dark sunglasses, and sometimes she could be induced to stand at 
water's edge with the surf breaking around her ankles.
  One day in June, not realizing quite what she was doing, Chyna used her index finger to 
write a word in the sand: PEACE. She stared at it for a minute, and to her surprise, she 
said to Ariel, “That's a word that can be made from the letters of my name."
  On the first of July, while Ariel sat on their blanket, gazing out at the sun-spangled 
water, Chyna tried to read a newspaper, but every story distressed her. War, rape, 
murder, robbery, politicians spewing hatred from all ends of the political spectrum. She 
read a movie review full of vicious ipse dixit criticism of the director and 
screenwriter, questioning their very right to create, and then turned to a 
woman columnist's equally vitriolic attack on a novelist, none of it genuine criticism, 
merely venom, and she threw the paper in a trash can. Any more, such little hatreds and 
indirect assaults seemed to her uncomfortably clear reflections of stronger homicidal 
impulses that infected the human spirit; symbolic killings were different only in degree, 
not in kind, from genuine murder, and the sickness in the assailants' hearts was the same.
  There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.
  Also in early July, she noticed a man of about thirty who came to the beach a few 
mornings a week with his eight-year-old son and a laptop computer on which he worked in 
the deep shade of an umbrella. Eventually, they struck up a conversation. The father's 
name was Ned Barnes, and his boy was Jamie. Ned was a widower and, of all things, a 
freelance writer with several modestly successful novels to his credit. Jamie developed a 
crush on Ariel and brought her things that he found special-a handful of wildflowers, an 
interesting seashell, a picture of a comical-looking dog torn from a magazine-and put 
them beside her on the blanket without asking that she be mindful of them.