She hummed a little, reached out, and turned on the radio. Classical music filled the car, replaced by country and then eighties rock before she turned it off.

“My father’s enemies used me against him. They stole me away and chained me in the mining tunnels.” Her restless fingers played with the fabric of her slacks. “The mining tunnels in Butte were five thousand feet below the earth and more, a mile deep. My father and I, our power comes from the sun.”

Silence stretched.

“Which is ironic, given that you love a vampire,” I said, trying to help her.

“Not . . . not as ironic as you might think.” She played a little more with her slacks.

“So you were trapped there for decades?”

She shook her head, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her narrative. “Not that time. For a couple of days only. But it gave my father’s enemies the idea for what they did to me later. It was still dark and frightening. I was hungry and alone, and I heard a sound.”

She swallowed. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “Except for Thomas. I don’t quite know how to go about this.”

She didn’t know me, and it was hard to tell someone you don’t know about private things. “My foster parents both died when I was fourteen,” I told her, breaking the awkward silence. Then I realized that was the wrong part of the story to start with. “Let me backtrack. My mother was a buckle bunny when she was sixteen.”

“Buckle bunny?”

I nodded. “That means she followed the rodeo and slept with rodeo cowboys. I guess her parents were a real freak show. She left home when she was fifteen or sixteen. She took the truck and horse trailer she’d paid for and her quarter-horse mare and hit the road. Traveled wherever there was a rodeo and barrel raced. She was good enough she made money at it. But she was lonely, so she chased after the cowboys.” I paused. “Rodeo cowboys aren’t universally horrible, but they are macho, and some of them, usually not the more successful, are brutal with their animals and with women. She had hooked up with this bronc rider in Wyoming, and he got drunk and pretty rough one night. They’d been sleeping in his horse trailer—”

“In a horse trailer?” Margaret asked.

“Some of them have campers in the front,” I said. “I guess his did. Anyway, the fight spilled to the outside and attracted attention. My mother is a lot shorter than me. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-eight and big for a bronc rider. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. He was snake mean when he was drunk, and the other rodeo riders were afraid of him.”