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thrown back in their faces.
    He hadn’t meant to do this, hadn’t meant to make this turn, hadn’t made a conscious decision to follow this old route. But now that he had, he kept going. He kept going, remembering the day his mother had been so furious with him because he’d slipped away from old Mrs. Brooks, who watched him during the day, and had gone down to meet her at the bus stop. The bus stop he’d just driven past. It had only been three blocks from their apartment, but she’d been alarmed when she’d seen him there. He’d been very proud of himself, until he realized that he’d somehow badly frightened her. Or something had.
    And she’d been frightened from then on.
    He wasn’t sure how he knew that; he’d been too young to really understand, but he didn’t doubt it. It made too much sense. It must have been her fear he’d been feeding on; at barely five, he hadn’t known enough to be afraid of anything except Monty. And the nights when he heard his mother crying in the dark.
    The hardware store was still there, and a dog that could be Monty’s twin, and probably was a descendant, raced along the fence line, barking at him warningly as the gray coupe he’d rented at the airport slowed to make the turn onto Simpson Avenue. He suppressed an instinctive shiver that made his lip curl in self-disgust, and kept going. He pulled to a halt in front of the small, four-unit apartment building on the corner, and for a time just sat there, staring. The building was obviously old, the yellowing stucco that had once been pristine white was laced with cracks like meandering lines on a road map, and the narrow walkway that led around the corner to the tiny back unit where they’d lived was broken and overgrown with weeds.
    It had been shortly after the day he’d sneaked out to the bus stop that they had left Sunridge. It had been a rushed episode, carried out in the night, when he was too sleepy to even respond to his mother’s attempts to make a game out of it. But even then he had sensed her fear, her desperation as she told him he had to be very quiet, because no one must know they were leaving. And her fear had transmitted itself to him, scaring him as only a child realizing an all-powerful parent is frightened can be scared.
    He had his hand on the door lever, in his mind already out of the car and walking up to the building, before he realized what he was doing and slumped back in the seat.
    “Jesus, West, you’ve really lost it,” he muttered under his breath.
    Going to indulge in a little sentimental nostalgia after thirty years? Maybe go knock on the door and do one of those emotional little displays human interest reporters loved?
    “Hi, I used to live here, do you mind if I look around?”
    Hell, anybody who opened their door to that line deserved what they got, which was more often than not a burglary later on.
    Shaking his head in disgust at this unusual bout of reminiscence, he made himself look at the dreary little building clearly. It was dreary, old and run-down. It hadn’t been new when he’d lived here; now it was a ramshackle structure that looked on the verge of collapse. And his mother had worked herself ragged to pay the rent for this place.
    While his father had lived in the huge, expensive house on the hill, with the big circular driveway, servants to cater to his every whim, a fancy car to drive . . . and Alice Hawk to come home to.
    Jason chuckled in savage satisfaction. Perhaps the old man had paid after all, he thought, remembering the furious, embittered woman who had confronted him at the cemetery. She was a forceful old broad, he admitted. She had to be—what—seventy something? Aaron had been sixty-eight, the newspaper had said, and he knew she was older. But she was as arrogant as her husband had been. More, even, judging from the imperious way she had ordered him thrown out. He hoped the old bitch had made Aaron Hawk miserable every day of his life.
    And he wished he