The cabinet opened easily. Seth slid the bottom drawer out and immediately spotted the pile of mail and parcels Karen had promised.

He snatched it from the drawer.

Oblivious to the screams, Seth sorted frantically through the mail. His hands quickly found what they were looking for: a parcel the size of a shirt box wrapped in brown paper with the Eden au Lac’s return address. The wrapping yielded easily to Seth’s determined fingers. He discarded the hardboard protector and bubbled plastic foam and found himself looking at a painting of an alpine meadow. The Home of the Lady Our Redeemer was printed on the back of the frame. He rewrapped the painting in its protective coverings, took it and the rest of the mail back to his office, then tucked the whole lot into his briefcase and headed for the door.

As he stepped into the corridor, Seth heard footsteps on the stairway and the sounds of the boy trying to comfort the girl whose steel-reinforced composure had finally shattered. Seth tucked the briefcase under his arm and ran from the building.

Zoe wresded with the temptation to pray as she stood in the middle of her room and imagined a way out

Before they had locked her in here, she hadn’t believed in a god who listened to people’s prayers. To begin praying now would be just the sort of hypocrisy she despised so intensely.

Her mother had tried to raise her as a strict fundamentalist Protestant. Every Sunday they went to a small brick church in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. The creed held dancing as a sin and considered most elected officials to the left of Ronald Reagan as the Antichrist They knew that the world was created in 4004 B.C. because the Bible said that and no one disputed it because every word in the Bible was personally written by the hand of a wrathful, Zeus-like God who would send you straight to an awful eternal Hell if you didn’t believe in his only begotten Son.

Her father never did attend the church and that, along with what to do about the mystery of her hearing colors, provided grist for endless argument and acrimony. In a quiet moment when Zoe was in her teens, he explained that, “with all the churches in the world and all the different ways to believe, it just seems awfidly arrogant for each one to think they are the only right ones and that everybody else is going to hell. Perhaps we should sift through all religions and try to find their bits of truth.”

The church had been an easy creed to rebel against. She turned her father’s credo around and where he conceded that most religions probably had their own seeds of truth, Zoe decided that the vicious conflicts among them meant that they held no truth at all. When Zoe refused to attend church, her mother became even more fanatical. One Sunday after a particularly heated breakfast argument, her mother went to church and never came home. Neither, apparently, did one of the baritones in the men’s choir. Zoe never heard from her mother again.