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is turned. Where the sun happens to be. The same street looks so different if a dog happens to be running across it; the sea so oddly different once it begins to rain. The man knew that. He was a thoughtful man, Sarah decided, very much so to understand these things.
    And she liked his crooked smile.
    ‘All right,’ Donald March said, rising, ‘I’ve made a decision . I’m going to leave you here for a little while. Can I trust you to stay right here while I’m gone?’ He was speaking with extreme care again. Again it caused Sarah to smile. ‘I’m going out to find your mother, OK?’
    He ran a hand over his hair and asked, ‘Listen – I know you can’t, but it would help me if … can you write down your mother’s name? Your address? A phone number?’ With soft exasperation he looked into her eyes. ‘
Anything
? I really want to help, but I haven’t a clue where to begin.’
    She looked helplessly around until Donald, ripping through a drawer, found the stub of a pencil and an oldenvelope to give her. In a small cramped hand she wrote with painful slowness:
    Sarah.
    ‘Yes, I know. That is your name, right? Sarah. I heard your mother call you that.’ And in what long-ago time had someone taken a little girl and taught her to form the letters with such crooked painstakingness? Donald looked into those large brown eyes so bright with inquisitiveness.
    ‘Do you know your mother’s name?’ he asked again. ‘Where she is now? Where do you live, Sarah?’
    Well, of course she did! What funny questions this young man asked.
    ‘Can you write it down?’ Don pleaded.
    Sarah smiled, placed the stubby pencil and the envelope down on the table and returned to studying the photographs on the wall.
    ‘I know that you know,’ Donald said. ‘But they never taught you to write anything but your name, did they?’
    She half-turned, her pointing finger touching a photograph of the dying sun above a tragic sea. The shadow of a lone, distant gull was caught in the upper right hand corner. Donald liked that picture himself. He had caught a last line of brilliant gold, flashing through the somber mauve and deep rose-hues of sunset. It was more luck than skill, but camera art often is.
    The rain continued to drive down, as hard as ever, the wind blowing strong enough to rattle the windowpanes and whine through the gaps between window and frame.
    ‘All right,’ Donald said with a reluctant sigh, ‘I’m going totry to find your mother. You stay here, Sarah, do you understand ?’ It wouldn’t do to have her wandering the streets in the rain, half-dressed and confused.
    Yes
, she nodded. Of course she understood.
    What she did not understand was why Eric had been running down the pier, and why he had been crying and bleeding. And why the naked lady in the picture was looking out of the window. Did she, too, wonder where her daddy had gone?
    ‘I’ll be back, Sarah. You stay put,’ Donald March ordered, shrugging into his green quilted jacket, he put on his baseball cap. Zipping his jacket up, he spared Sarah one last wondering look, tugged his cap low over his eyes and went out to follow the splintered wooden steps down to the rainswept street.

    ‘Well, Edward, what now?’ Sal Dennison asked. The bearded attorney sat tilted back in his huge green-leather swivel chair, fingers steepled before his chest. He had removed his coat. His gray vest was partially unbuttoned. Square gold cufflinks reflected lamplight. He had put on a pair of half-round spectacles worn low on his nose. Outside, the sky was gray and tumultuous. Distant lightning briefly illuminated the darkly-tinted office window overlooking the sea. ‘We have a problem don’t we?’
    ‘Don’t let it worry you, Sal. It can be handled,’ Edward said with barely subdued frustration, ‘I can get my father’s signature. I’ll sign of course, and I will sign for Sarah as conservator.’
    ‘And your aunt will sign?’
    ‘Just try to keep Trish from