The house wasn't showy in any sense of the word, but buying it had been a triumph.

Now it was empty, and Mara was buried on the hillside overlooking town.

Paige felt a chill.

Mara had been a vital part of her life for twenty years. Now she was gone.

Paige closed her eyes. She held Sami closer, then closer still. The child was warm, silent but alive, and, in that, a comfortbut only until Paige began to think forward rather than back. Then, slowly, with dawning awareness, she opened her eyes and looked at the child, and in that instant, with the house locked, the agency representative gone, and Mara's baby in her care, the reality of what she had done hit home. On as sorrowful a day as ever there was, it wasn't sorrow she felt. It was a sheer and profound terror.

three l Paige WASN'T ONE TO PANIC, BUT SHE CAME close to it during the drive from Mara's house to hers. She kept thinking of all the things she didn't knowlike what the child ate, if she had allergies whether she slept through the night. The answers along with detailed medical records, were in the pack of papers she had brought from Mara's, but Mara had had weeks to peruse them. Paige did not.

Anxiously she pictured her house. It had three bedrooms, the one on the first floor that she used herself and two upstairs. The larger of the two was stuffed with furniture that Nonny hadn't been able to keep when she had sold her house several years before, the smaller of the two was cluttered with sewing goods, knitting goods, and all manner of medical journals that Paige had glanced through and stacked for later reading.

The smaller room would be easier to clear out but the larger one would be better for a child. Then again, Paige didn't like the idea of Sami being alone on the second floor. For the time being, she could sleep in Paige's room.

Between Paige, Sami, and the kitten the bedroom was filling up fast.

What have I done? she wondered, and, gripping the steering wheel, tried to stay calm, which meant absolutely, positively, not thinking about what she was going to do come morning, when she had to be at work. She darted quick looks at Sami, who was sitting in the brand-new car seat Mara had bought, sending that long, soulful stare right back at her.

"We'll work everything out," she assured the child and herself in what she thought was a very mommy voice. "You're flexible. All children are flexible." It was what she had told many a parent on the verge of panic over a new baby. Well, I'm flexible, too, so we'll be fine.

What you need most is love, and I can give you that, yes I can. Beyond that, you'll just have to let me know what you like and what you don't."

Sami didn't make a sound, simply stared at her with those huge eyes that had seen too much in too short a time.

It struck Paige that maybe the child couldn't make a sound, that maybe she had been punished for crying or had simply given up when crying had gotten her nowhere, in which case Paige was going to have to teach her that crying was healthy and, indeed, one of the few ways babies had of making their wants and needs known. The teaching would involve lots of cuddling and attention, even some spoiling. It might take time.

Time. Oh, Lord. She couldn't think far ahead.

Not yet. "I really can do this," she told the child as she pulled into her driveway and sprang from the car. "I'm level-headed. I'm easygoing. I'm a whiz with children." She ran to the passenger's side and tugged at Sami's seat belt. "Women have instincts," she quoted her own advice to new mothers, tugging haroler when the seat belt wouldn't come free.

"They do things with and for their children that they never imagined they could do." She put both hands to the task, pushing, tugging, twisting. "It comes from deep inside. A primordial nurturing."

She was about to go for scissors when the buckle came free with a uvhoosh. "See?" she breathed in relief. "We'll do just fine."

For the next few minutes, while Sami watched from the safety of her car seat on the front porch Paige ran back and forth carting baby goods into the house. When she was done, she brought Sami inside, set baby and car seat on the floor, and scooped up the kitten, which had been scampering around underfoot.

"Sami, meet kitty."

The two stared at one another unblinkingly.{ Paige rubbed the kitten's cheek to hers, then offered the tiny creature to Sami. "Kitty's even younger than you are. She's alone, too"the vet had declared it a female"so we'll take care of her until we can find her a home. Isn't she soft?" She touched the kitten to Sami's hand. The little girl pulled it back. Her chin began to tremble.

Paige immediately set the kitten down and took Sami in her arms. "It's okay, sweetie. She won't hurt you. She's probably as frightened of you as you are of her." While she talked, she sorted through the food she had brought from Mara's. Assuming that Mara had stocked only what Sami could eat, she put a nipple on one of the bottles of formula.

Her own hunger had faded. There didn't seem room for food in her stomach, what with all the nervous jangles there.

Sami drank every drop of the milk, looking up at her all the while.

Buoyed by that, Paige mixed up a dish of cereal, sweetened it with peaches, and spooned it up, and again, Sami ate. Given how small and thin she was, Paige might have given her more had she not known the danger of pushing too much food into an untried stomach. So, after changing into a T-shirt and jeans, she bathed her, rubbed Mara's baby lotion over her, diapered her, and dressed her in a pair of stretchy pink pajamas that Mara had bought.

Then she held her up.

"You look so pretty, sweetie." Pretty and soft and sleepy. "Mara would be loving you to bits."

But Mara was no more. Paige felt a sharp pang of grief, followed by a sudden fierce fatigue.

She drew Sami close and closed her eyes, but she had no sooner tucked her head against the baby's dark hair when the phone rang.

It was Deirdre Frechette, one of Paige's Mount Court runners. "We need help," she said in a broken voice. "We spent the whole of dinner talking about Dr. O'Neill. One of the guys says she OD'd on heroine.

Is it true?"

Paige's fatigue faded. "Definitely not."

"Another one says she was done in by the Devil Brothers."

"Not Devil," Paige corrected. "DeVille."

George and Harold DeVille had been the butt of local tales for years.

Huge and menacing, they were mentally slow and harmless. "The DeVilles wouldn't hurt a fly."

Julie Engel says she killed herself. Julie's mother did that three years ago, and now she's going into all the details. She's getting slightly hysterical. We all are."

Paige could picture it. Teenage minds were fertile, all the more so in a group. She shuddered to think of where, if unguided, the conversation would lead. Suicide had the potential for being a contagious disease when the proper preventive measures weren't taken.

i If ever there was a time these teenagers needed their parents, it was now. But their parents weren't around.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"In MacKenzie Lounge."

"Stay there. I'll be over in fifteen minutes."

It wasn't until she hung up the phone that she remembered Sami, and for a split second she didn't know what to do. But the second passed. The little girl was curled in her arms, fast asleep.

One-handedly she sifted through the piles of baby paraphernalia and retrieved the baby carrier. A short time later she had the sleeping child strapped snugly to her chest.

One of the most important pieces of equipment you can buy, she heard herself instructing parents at .

prenatal meetings, is a car seat The baby should be secured in the seat and the seat secured in the car.

"This is definitely not smart," she hummed softly l as she slid in behind the wheel with Sami hugging r her chest, "but you're tiny, and I drive safely, and I .

just think it's more important that you snuggle up to a body you know than sit in that hard baby seat, which I doubt I could strap back in here again tonight anyway. So I won't tell anyone if you don't." The baby slept through the drive. S MacKenzie was the largest of the girls' dorms.

Like the others, it was three floors' worth of red brick, over which ivy had climbed unchecked for so long that large patches of the brick were obscured.

Tall, multipaned windows were open in deference to the September warmth, electric fans whirred in many of them.