"Huh? Oh, sure, it's under the stairs there."
"I remember."
Kate, detective that she was, had caught the one relevant fact as it shot past her, that she had six hours to return this short person back to her proper place. She began to shovel the breakfast things in the musty-smelling dishwasher, pausing first to pour the last of the coffee into her cup. Not that caffeine would enable her to keep up with Jules Cameron. Cocaine, maybe. Although, come to think of it, Jules had changed in the last year. Physically, of course: She was nearly as tall as Kate now, and she wore a bra between her T-shirt and the nubs on her chest. More than that, though, was her attitude: At eleven, she had brazened out her turmoil - braces, brains, no father, and a long-distance move could not have been easy - with an almost comic maturity, even pomposity, to her speech. That seemed to have been toned down, either by design or because she'd grown out of the need. Kate hoped the latter - it would be a pity to have this little gem shove her light under a basket because of the lesser minds around her. Particularly, Kate reflected, those inhabiting male bodies. Jules must be getting to the age where these things mattered.
She finished loading the dishwasher, turned it on, and went out into the living room, where she found Jules looking out into the fog, where the neighbor's garden was beginning to materialize.
"Was it this window?" Jules asked. It took an instant to click.
"The one above you." She watched Jules step back to peer up, then retreat farther until she could see the branches that had held the SWAT marksman on a night eighteen months earlier.
"From that tree?"
"Yes."
"It wasn't Al, was it? Who shot… that man."
"Of course not."
"I didn't think so. I mean, I was young then, and I sort of imagined it was Al up in the tree, even though I knew it wasn't."
"Al doesn't climb trees. It's in his contract. So," she said sharply before Jules could inquire about contract clauses or ask to see the bloodstains that lay, all but invisible to any eyes but Kate's, three inches to the right of her foot, hidden beneath the new Tibetan carpet, "what is it you want me to do for you? 'Professionally.' "
It was a long and convoluted tale, filled with extraneous detail and looping into unnecessary excursions, speculations, and a pre-teenager's philosophical reflections, mature and mawkish by turns, but Kate was an experienced interrogator, and if she lacked Al Hawkin's natural ability to read and lead the person being questioned, she had at least learned how to keep things on track.
Jules went to a private school. To the parent of a public school child, the idea of private school evokes high academic standards and close discipline, a broad education for already bright children balanced with encouraging each student to develop his or her own interests and abilities to the fullest. This paradisaical image loses some of its solidity once inside the walls of the ivory tower ("I mean," commented Jules, "two of the high school girls got pregnant last year, how's that for brains?"), but it can be said that the teaching is no worse than that of a public school, and classes are certainly smaller. Too, a privately funded school is safe from the state's fiscal blackmailers, who had turned most of the schools in the area where Jules lived into year-round schools, with students popping in and out of one another's desks for twelve months of the year. Where parents pay the bills, parents choose the calendar, and it was no accident that many of the parents whose children went to school with Jules taught on nine-month schedules at colleges and universities. The date for the school's winter music program was always chosen with an eye to the university's exam schedule. With this groundwork out of the way, and reduced to an adult perspective, Jules's narrative amounted to the following.
Immediately after university grades had been posted the previous June, Jani Cameron had picked up her bags and her daughter and flown to Germany to examine certain manuscripts in Köln, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. Jani spent the two weeks in quiet ecstasy and filled two notebooks with references and addenda to the manuscript she was hoping to finish before October.
Her daughter was less than ecstatic. Jani had never gotten around to teaching Jules German, for one thing, and then she arbitrarily ruled that Jules could not go beyond hotel, park, or library without her mother - that is, she could not go. Kate had the strong impression that some dark unpleasantness had taken place, and her detective instincts stirred, but she was not sure how much of that impression was from Jules's dramatization of a mere argument, so she decided not to allow herself to be distracted. At the end of the two weeks, as mother and daughter packed to leave for San Francisco, Jani was brought out of her academic dream to the harsh realization that her remarkable but normally reasonable little girl was deeply entrenched in a case of the adolescent sulks.
No, Jules had not had a good time. She did not like to play in parks with children; she did not care for libraries filled with books she could not read; she did not think it unreasonable that she hadn't learned German in fourteen days. Furthermore, she did not like having been taken from her friends and from a summer school offering in computer programming that interested her, just to tag along behind her mother.
The two Cameron women fought with polite implacability all the way across the Atlantic, interrupted only by meals and the movie, which Jules watched while her mother pretended to sleep, trying desperately to absorb this radical change in her daughter. By the time the plane touched down in San Francisco, they had come to an agreement. The next morning, Jani sat down at her desk while Jules went off to talk her way into a late registration at the computer course. As they nodded off over their respective keyboards, both felt a sense of uneasy victory beneath the heavy fog of their jet lag, and a vague awareness of business unfinished.
All of which was to say that, while Jani wrote her book and edged further into her relationship with Inspector Alonzo Hawkin of the San Francisco Police Department, Jules had a great deal of time on her own. She went to school four mornings a week to fill the crevices of her voracious mind with the intricacies of RAMs and ROMs, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, but the afternoons and weekends, which normally she might have spent at home reading or floating in their apartment house's minuscule pool, she spent on her own, pointedly away from her mother's presence. Friends were thin on the ground in July and August, sprinkled across the globe from Yosemite to Tashkent, but there were enough left to keep Jules from boredom, and there was her computer partner, and there were the library and the bilingual books her mother had ordered so that she could start on German, and there was the larger swimming pool in the park, and the park itself to read in.
Which was where she had met Dio.
"It must be a nickname," said Jules. "I mean, who would name their kid God, except maybe a rock star or something? He said it was his real name, but another time he said his mother was secretly in love with some piano player named Claudio and named Dio after him. He never told me his last name."
Dio lived in the park. It was both an indication of Jules's naïveté and the unlikely surroundings that she had not believed him. She'd seen him before, a few times in early July and then more often. Finally, in the last week of July, he came and sat next to her and asked what she was reading. He seemed baffled that she would want to learn German, he was more interested in one of her other books, a novel by Anne McCaffrey, and settled down at a distance from her for the rest of the afternoon, reading. He read slowly, and asked her what a couple of words meant, but he was possessed by the book. When it was time for Jules to go home, Dio asked hesitantly if she would mind if he borrowed it. It was a paperback and belonged to her, so she let him take it, said she'd be in the park again the following afternoon. She then went home to dinner.