“Don’t be obtuse,” said Mira, looking up from her homework. “He hated traveling. He hated, like, airport security asking him perfectly normal questions. He even hated being on the freeway, away from the two gas stations he ever used. Can you just imagine him, like, on a Greyhound bus, with all those winos and child molesters?”

“Remember how he played Vice City, though?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Maybe he just wanted to be someone else. You know?”

“Blond dude in a Hawaiian shirt?”

“Maybe he did.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .”

The girls felt a certain nostalgia for how simple life had been just a month before, when their father was alive. There was a time for everything then. They were home from school at 3:40, ramen boiled at 3:45, homework was pulled out at 4:00 and at 4:02, the Mystery Boom Box started blasting its infernal melodies.

Like clockwork each day, Christina Aguilera’s voice bounced off their house, their garage, the brick floor of their patio, as well as the walls, garages, and patios of the five other houses with yards that backed onto theirs.

The sisters could never figure out where the boom box was; echoes made pinpointing impossible. But it had to be one of the houses visible to them from their den, or that their den was visible to. The music always began just as the girls laid out their books, as if some diabolical imp with birding binoculars had been watching and waiting by his stereo.

“I freakin’ hate that album!” Mira got up and slammed the windows shut. “Someone should go out and just shoot whoever’s doing this to us!”

“I vote for Dad,” said Rosemary. They both giggled.

Their father, Mr. Park, was sixty years old and a man of the old school. He hailed from the South Korean port city of Pusan, where even his degree in electrical engineering could not guarantee him work. Apparently, there had been a glut of engineering grads in his province and many of his classmates wound up working in fisheries or as stevedores. After fifteen years as a security officer at the port, he emigrated to America and found work at a second cousin’s tofu restaurant in LA’s Koreatown, becoming its oldest busboy at forty-two. It was in that lively, compact enclave that he met and married the girls’ mother, Joon, a woman then half his age and the only daughter of an embittered pastor. When Joon’s father died a year later, dutiful Mr. Park, whose conversion to Christianity was as new as his marriage, left the restaurant and took over his father-in-law’s ministry.

He believed in hard work, family and, incrementally, the values of the Korean evangelical church. After the ’92 riots destroyed much of Koreatown, he and his young wife took their two-year-old, Rosemary, and retreated to Santa Claus Lane in Alta Vista, a family-centered community crouching in the benevolent shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, twelve miles north of LA.