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of a television newswoman raised in dramatic recitation of the day's events. She shoved the door closed behind her and started across to the stairs.
     
    "Tracy?" her aunt's voice called from the living room. "Is that you?"
     
    "Yes," Tracy responded. "I'm going upstairs to bed."
     
    "Tracy, will you come in here, please?"
     
    It was her uncle's voice this time.
     
    Turning back from the stairs, Tracy recrossed the hall to the doorway leading into the living room. Her aunt and uncle were seated in twin easy chairs in identical positions in front of the television set, looking like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking-Glass.
     
    "What is it, Uncle Gory?" she asked.
     
    "Your aunt has been worried about you," said her uncle. "You told her you'd be back by nine thirty. In case you haven't noticed, this is the ten o'clock news we're watching."
     
    "I'm sorry," said Tracy. "Brad and I got talking and lost track of time."
     
    "That's not a good enough excuse," said her uncle. "When you make us a promise, we expect you to keep it. We've taken on the responsibility for raising you. You're going to have to respect that and live by the rules of our home."
     
    "I'm sorry," Tracy repeated. "It won't happen again. If it's all right with you, I'm going to go upstairs now. It's a school night, and Aunt Rene wants me alert in class."
     
    Turning away from the doorway, she went back into the hall and ascended the stairway to the second floor. At the top of the stairs she turned and went down the hallway, past the blue and lavender master bedroom, past the bathroom, with its lilac deodorizer fumes, past a second small bedroom, which her aunt used as her home office, and stopped at the last door on the right.
     
    She opened it and reached in to flick on the overhead light. The room that leapt into being was as fluffy and flowered as though it had sprung full-blown from the pages of Seventeen. Until the previous September, it had served her aunt and uncle as a combination guest and storage room, but when it had been decided that Tracy would be coming to live with them Aunt Rene had hurriedly redecorated it in a style she thought more appropriate for a teenage girl. When she had spent her first night there, Tracy, whose walls at home had been plastered with Picasso reproductions and whose bed had been covered with an Indian tapestry, had felt as though she was masquerading as Little Bo Peep.
     
    Tonight, however, she did not notice the frills and flounces. Stepping into the room, she closed the door and locked it and went over to the window facing out onto South Cotton Road. The glow of the streetlight in front of the house illuminated the street, and she could see that Brad's Chevy was no longer parked by the curb.
     
    I don't ride with people I don't trust, she had said that evening. She had not trusted him then, and she was not sure she did now. Even so, she had promised to help him locate his sister. She did not know why, but it was something she felt compelled to do.
     
    The lighted windows of the house across the street stared out from beneath their half lowered blinds like heavy-lidded owl eyes. A breeze stirred the filmy curtains at the sides of the window, and the oak tree in the Stevensons' front yard rustled softly, as though its leaves were whispering secrets to each other. A renegade branch scraped the roof with a rasping sound, like fingernails searching for a clawhold on the rainspout.
     
    Tracy stepped back from the window and pulled down the blind. A lamp with a rose-colored shade stood on the table next to the bed. She switched it on and turned off the glaring overhead. In the gentler light, the room's assorted shades of pink became suddenly softer, the various patterns blending in a way they had not done previously.
     
    She took her pajamas out of the top drawer of the bureau and put them on. Then she went over to the neatly made bed and turned back the spread, exposing pink flowered sheets.
     
    Her