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when she fell behind and had to summon an extra quotient of concentration.
    Gigi looked out at the dark and for a half-second seemed to stare directly at Roger Shelton where he stood, tense and uncertain, the coarse bark of the pine pressed hard against his left cheek, the smooth stock of his deer rifle flat against the other. He was five yards beyond the halo of the neighborhood security lights, in the shadows of the dense stand of pines that bordered Deepwood Estates, the exclusive community where Arthur Janeway, owner of the largest Cadillac dealership in Florida, resided. Arthur was a corpulent man who held a cold disdain for second-raters of every type, which most certainly included Roger Shelton, a common salesman on one of Janeway’s used car lots.
    Arthur’s wife, Bettina, was from Dusseldorf. Gaunt and thin-lipped, with the cigarette-roughened voice, the white-blonde hair, and the pale icy detachment of Greta Garbo in her prime. Ages ago, while still a bachelor, Roger had stumbled into Bettina during her first week in Sand Hills. New to America and deeply disoriented, she had briefly mistaken Roger for someone with a promising future and had dallied with him for two nights at a morel on the fringe of town. On the third night when she failed to appear, Roger Shelton went searching and located her at the Hotel Flamingo’s wood-paneled bar. On the stool next to her, Arthur Janeway was touching a flame to her cigarette. She turned and saw Roger in the doorway and the lungful of smoke that bloomed from her lips was directed at him with dismissive finality. When she turned back to Arthur, she gave a long, guttural laugh to some sly remark of his. In reply, Arthur reached up and touched a finger to one of herchiseled cheekbones. For several moments Roger stared from the doorway as Bettina pressed her baton, firmly and assuredly, into the hand of the swifter runner.
    As he was turning to go, Molly Weatherstone appeared beside him in the doorway of the Hotel Flamingo bar. She wore a shimmering black cocktail dress and spiky heels. Roger managed a distracted hello but she didn’t reply. Her furious gaze was fixed on the back of Arthur Janeway’s head.
    “You too, huh?” Roger said. “What’d he do, stand you up?”
    After absorbing the scene for a moment more, Molly stalked across the room, bent to Arthur’s ear and spoke a few short, sibilant words then swung around and marched out of the bar.
    Less than a month later Bettina and Arthur Janeway eloped to Las Vegas. It was only days after that when Roger and Molly consummated their own hasty romance with a civil ceremony at the Sand Hills courthouse. And though over the years their marriage had proved sound enough, Roger always wondered if their bond had not been forged on the flimsy foundation of spite.
    Gigi Janeway, the girl in Roger Shelton’s wavering sights, was Arthur and Bettina’s cherished princess. Fourteen years old. A bony girl with pale gray eyes and a world-class two-handed backhand, a good kick serve and a killer instinct around the net. As Roger watched through the telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway drew the brush through her coarse brown hair with the same mindlessly mechanical motion she employed on the court. Every stroke exactly like the last. Not a quiver of difference between the first backhand crosscourt of the afternoon and the five hundredth stroke that came two hours later. Her game was fearsomely robotic. She swung her racquet likea scythe through the golden wheat of other men’s daughters. Harvesting their vulnerabilities, their mind-wandering lapses, their muscular frailties. Gigi moved forward and forward again in an ever-widening swath, mowing down girl after girl with pitiless perfection.
    Roger could see the shelf of trophies on the wall behind her. Not the small runner-up plaques Julie had managed to collect. But the big, gaudy, golden vessels of the triumphant. It was not simply to amass these trophies that drove Roger’s daughter