'Think.' He raised his voice.

Janet quietly spoke to Lucy, and for a moment they conversed in murmurs. The narrow road was black, firing ranges unusually still. I had never ridden in Marino's truck, and it struck me as a bold symbol of his male pride.

Lucy started talking. 'I had some letters from Grans, Aunt Kay, and E-mail from Prodigy.'

'From Carrie, you mean,' Marino said.

She hesitated. 'Yes.'

'What else?'

'Birthday cards.'

'From who?' Marino asked.

'The same people.'

'What about your mother?'

'No.'

'What about your dad?'

'I don't have anything from him.'

'Her father died when she was very small,' I reminded Marino.

'When you wrote Lucy did you use a return address?' he asked me.

'Yes. My stationery would have that.'

'A post office box?'

'No. My personal mail is delivered to my house. Everything else goes to the office.' 'What are you trying to find out?' Lucy said with a trace of resentment.

'Okay,' Marino said as he drove through dark countryside, 'let me tell you what your thief knows so far. He knows where you go to school, where your aunt Kay lives in Richmond, where your grandmother in Florida lives. He knows what you look like and when you were born.

'Plus he knows about your friendship with Carrie because of the E-mail thing.' He glanced into the rearview mirror. 'And that's just the minimum of what this toad knows about you. I haven't read the letters and notes to see what else he's found out.'

'She knew most of all that anyway,' Lucy said angrily.

'She?' Marino pointedly asked.

Lucy was silent.

It was Janet who gently spoke. 'Lucy, you've got to get over it. You've got to give it up.'

'What else?' Marino asked my niece. 'Try to remember the smallest thing. What else was in the envelope?'

'A few autographs and a few old coins. Just things from when I was a kid. Things that would have no value to anyone but me. Like a shell from the beach I picked up when I was with Aunt Kay one time when I was little.'

She thought for a moment. 'My passport. And there were a few papers I did in high school.'

The pain in her voice tugged at my heart, and I wanted to hug her. But when Lucy was sad she pushed everyone away. She fought.

'Why did you keep them in the envelope?' Marino was asking.

'I had to keep them somewhere,' she snapped. 'It was my damn stuff, okay? And if I'd left it in Miami my mother probably would have thrown it in the trash.'

'The papers you did in high school,' I said. 'What were they about, Lucy?'

The truck got quiet, filled with no voice but its own. The sound of its engine rose and fell with acceleration and the shifting of gears as Marino drove into the tiny town of Triangle. Roadside diners were lit up, and I suspected many of the cars out were driven by marines.

Lucy said, 'Well, it's sort of ironical now. One of the papers I did back then was a practical tutorial on UNIX security. My focus was basically passwords, you know, what could happen if users chose poor passwords. So I talked about the encryption subroutine in C libraries that-'

'What was the other paper about?' Marino interrupted her. 'Brain surgery?'

'How did you guess?' she said just as snootily.

'What was it on?' I asked.

'Wordsworth,' she said.

We ate at the Globe and Laurel, and as I looked around at Highland plaid, police patches and beer steins hanging over the bar, I thought of my life. Mark and I used to eat here, and then in London a bomb detonated as he walked past.