Chyna laughed and looked at Laura as if to say, “Were it the Infamous Look?
  Laura understood. “In your honor, Chyna, all wire coat hangers and equivalent devices 
have been put away.”
  “Whatever are you talking about?” Sarah asked. “You know me, Mom-a babbling ditz. 
Sometimes not even I know what I'm talking about."
  Paul Templeton, Laura's father, was in the big kitchen, taking a potato-and-cheese 
casserole out of the oven. He was a neat, compact man, five feet ten, with thick dark 
hair and a ruddy complexion. He set the steaming dish aside, stripped off a pair of oven 
mitts, and greeted Laura as warmly as Sarah had done. After being introduced to Chyna, he 
took one of her hands in both of his, which were rough and work worn, and with feigned 
solemnity he said, “We prayed you'd make the trip in one piece. Does my little girl still 
handle that Mustang as if she thinks it's the Batmobile?”
  “Hey, Dad,” Laura said, “I guess you've forgotten who taught me to drive.”
  “I was instructing you in the basic techniques,” Paul said. “I didn't expect you to 
acquire my style."
  Sarah said, “I refuse to think about Laura's driving. I'd just be worried sick all the 
time.”
  “Face it, Mom, there's an Indianapolis 500 gene on Dad's side of the family, and he 
passed it to me.”
  “She's an excellent driver,” Chyna said. “I always feel safe with Laura.
  Laura grinned at her and gave a thumbs-up sign. Dinner was a long, leisurely affair 
because the Templetons liked to talk to one another, thrived on talking to one another. 
They were careful to include Chyna and seemed genuinely interested in what she had to 
say, but even when the conversation wandered to family matters of which Chyna had little 
knowledge, she somehow felt a part of it, as though she was, by a magical osmosis, 
actually being absorbed into the Templeton clan.
  Laura's thirtyish brother, Jack, and his wife, Nina, lived in the caretaker's bungalow 
elsewhere in the vineyard, but a previous obligation had prevented them from joining the 
family for dinner. Chyna was assured that she would see them in the morning, and she felt 
no trepidation about meeting them, as she'd felt before she'd met Sarahand Paul. 
Throughout her troubled life, there had been no place'-where she had truly felt at home; 
while she might never fe 61 entirely at home in this place either, at least she felt 
welcome here.
  After dinner, Chyna and Laura went for a walk in the moonlit vineyards, between the 
rows of low pruned vines that had not yet begun to sprout either leafy trailers or fruit. 
The cool air was redolent with the ‘47. pleasant fecund smell of freshly plowed earth, 
and there was a sense of mystery in the dark fields that she found intriguing, 
enchanting-but at times disconcerting, as if they were among unseen presences, ancient 
spirits that were not all benign.
  When they had strolled deep into the vines and then turned back toward the house, Chyna 
said, “You're the best friend I've ever had.”
  “Me too,” Laura said.
  “More than that...” Chyna's voice trembled. She had been about to say, ‘You're the only 
friend I've ever had, but that made her seem so lame and, besides, was still an 
inadequate expression of what she felt for this girl. They were, indeed, in one sense 
sisters’.
  Laura linked arms with her and merely said, “I know.”
  “When you have babies, I want them to call me Aunt Chyna.”
  “Listen, Shepherd, don't you think I should find a guy and get married before I start 
pumping out the babies?”
  “Whoever he is, he better be the best husband in the world to you, or I promise I'll 
cut his cock off.”
  “Do me a favor, okay?” Laura said. “Don't tell him about this promise until after the 
wedding. Some guys might be put off by it.”
  From elsewhere in the vineyards came a disquieting sound that stopped Chyna. A 
protracted creaking. 
  “It's just the breeze working at a loose bam door, rusty hinges,” Laura said.
  But it sounded as if someone were opening a giant door in the wall of night itself and 
stepping in from another world.
  
  Chyna Shepherd could not sleep comfortably in strange houses. Throughout her childhood 
and adolescence, her mother had dragged her from one end of the country to the other, 
staying nowhere longer than a month or two. So many terrible things had happened to them 
'in so many places that Chyna eventually learned to view each new house not as a new 
beginning, not with hope for stability and happiness, but with suspicion and quiet dread.
  Now she was long rid of her troubled mother and free to stay only where she wished. 
These days, her life was almost as stable as that of a cloistered nun, as meticulously 
planned as any bomb squad's proceIdures for disarming an explosive device, and without 
any of the turmoil on which her mother had thrived. I Nevertheless, this first night in 
the Templetons' house, Chyna was reluctant to undress and go to bed. She sat in the 
darkness in a medallion-back armchair at one of the two windows in the guest room, gazing 
out at the moonlit vineyards, fields, and hills of the Napa Valley.
  Laura was in another room, at the far end of the second-floor hall, no doubt sound 
asleep, at peace because this house was not at all strange to her.
  From the guest-room window, the early-spring vineyards were barely visible. Vague 
geometric patterns.
  Beyond the cultivated rows were gentle hills mantled in long dry grass, silver in the 
moonlight. An inconstant breeze stirred through the valley, and sometimes the wild grass 
seemed to roll like ocean waves across the slopes, softly aglimmer with lambent lunar 
light.
  Above the hills was the Coast Range, and above those peaks were cascades of stars and a 
full white moon. Storm clouds coming across the mountains from the northwest would soon 
darken the night, taming the silver hills first to pewter and then to blackest iron.
  When she heard the first scream, Chyna was gazing at the stars, drawn by their cold 
light as she had been since childhood, fascinated by the thought of distant worlds that 
might be barren and clean, free of pestilence. At first the muffled cry seemed to be only 
a memory, a fragment of a shrill argument from another strange house in the past, echoing 
across time. Often, as a child, eager to hide from her mother and her mother's friends 
when they were drunk or high, she climbed onto porch roofs or into backyard trees, 
slipped through windows onto fire escapes, away to secret places far from the fray, where 
she could study the stars and where voices raised in argument or sexual excitement or 
shrill drug-induced giddiness came to her as though from out of a radio, from faraway 
places and people who had no connection whatsoever with her life.
  The second cry, though also brief and only slightly louder than the first, was 
indisputably of the moment, not a memory, and Chyna sat forward on her chair. Tense. Head 
cocked. Listening.
  She wanted to believe that the voice had come from outside, so she continued to stare 
into the night, surveying the vineyards and the hills beyond. Breeze-driven waves swelled 
through the dry grass on the moon-washed slopes: a water mirage like the ghost tides of 
an ancient sea.