Sitting in the back of a history class, oblivious to the teacher’s words, she slipped Interview with the Vampire out of her purse and checked the copyright: 1976. No, that couldn’t be right. If her uncle had been a grown man by that time, well, now he’d be nearly sixty. No way was Uncle Lestan that old. That was positively ridiculous. But then … how old was he? How old had he been when he’d rescued her from that island earthquake? Hmmm … this wasn’t adding up. Maybe he’d been just a boy, then, when he’d rescued her and he’d looked like a grown man to her—a boy of what, sixteen or seventeen, and now he was what, forty? Well, that was possible. But hardly likely. No, this did not add up, and overshadowing it all was her vivid conviction of his demeanor, his charm.

Class was over. Time to shuffle on, and go through the motions someplace else, to drift until she saw Murray waiting for her on some curb somewhere.… But surely there was a logical explanation.

Murray drove her away from the campus to a restaurant she particularly liked where Marge was to meet her for an early dinner.

It was getting dark. They had a regular table and she was glad that she had a little while to sit there alone, enjoy a badly needed cup of black coffee, and just think to herself.

She was looking out the window, paying very little attention to much of anything, when she realized someone had sat down opposite her.

It was Gardner.

She was badly startled.

“Rose, do you realize what you’ve done to me?” he asked. His voice was deep and tremulous.

“Look, I want you to leave,” she started. He reached across the table and tried to take hold of her hand.

Drawing it back, she stood up and stumbled away from the table, running towards the back of the restaurant. She hoped and prayed the one small ladies’ room would be empty.

Gardner came pounding after her, and when she realized her mistake, it was too late. He’d grabbed hold of her wrist and was dragging her out of the back exit into an alleyway. Murray was all the way around front, parked at the curb.

“Let go of me!” she said. “I mean it, I’ll scream,” she said. She was as angry as she had been when the book had struck her.

Without a word, he dragged her right off her feet and down the alleyway towards his car, and threw her in the passenger side, slamming the door and locking it with his remote.

When he went to open the driver’s side, he unlocked only that door. She beat on the windows. She screamed. “Let me go!” she said. “How dare you do this to me?”