"I'm fine."

If he noticed she was lying, he didn't show it. "When you're finished with the case, take some time off. Relax. Forget about this place. If you need me, call."

"We've been good together," she said, acknowledging something she'd never admitted before. "You know that, don't you?"

He nodded.

She'd been arguing with him for years, and now, at this moment, she had no idea why. It seemed unimportant-childish, really. She was suddenly extremely glad she'd saved his life, even if it meant getting shot.

"What's with the smile?"

She almost told him, but she knew her present state of mind was fragile, and she didn't want to give him ammunition to use against her later. "I'm wondering how you'll survive without me," she said.

An odd, unreadable expression came over his face. "The same way I survive with you."

He reached into the trunk, and dragged out a heavy bundle of black plastic. Heaving it over his shoulder, his knees sagging under the weight, he carried it to the dilapidated shed.

His interest in horticulture had started when he was a kid. He liked to make things do what they hadn't been designed by nature to do. He'd made tulips bloom in the middle of January. He'd forced crocus to blossom in the fall. From there, he'd moved on to bonsai-the art of restraint. Then he'd discovered grafting. With grafting, he did more than toy with nature. He could make a weak tree strong. He could even create a completely new breed of tree, vine, or shrub. For an artist-and he was an artist-it was the ultimate satisfaction. That's why his foray into finding the right woman had been such a disappointment. He demanded perfection from himself and others, and he hated to admit to failure.

He thought of the girls who hadn't worked out as returned merchandise. If he'd been required to fill out a return form, he would have marked the box that said, "Wasn't what I expected." Everything else would have fit: size, style, quality, price. All of those would have been okay. Because from the outside, they'd appeared to be exactly what he had in mind.

Funny thing was, once they were gone, he'd missed them for a while. When he went in the house, he could still feel their presence, still smell them. They'd been like one of his migraines. He hated the headaches when he was in the middle of one, but rather enjoyed the heaviness that came afterward, rather enjoyed pampering himself.

He wasn't an idiot. He hadn't gone into this blindly. He'd known they'd require modification, but he hadn't realized it would be so hard. When he'd come across the first one at the nature preserve, he thought she was the one, but she hadn't worked out. Number two had come from the mall. In retrospect, he could see that getting a girl from a mall was a bad idea.

He'd never have been able to turn either of them into the woman he'd wanted them to be. No amount of grafting or forcing could have changed them enough.

So he'd returned them. That's all.

Taken them back to where he'd found them.

I'd like a refund, please.

He'd kept them both for almost three weeks. An adequate length of time. To have returned them sooner would have meant playing a much too active role in today's disposable society. So he'd had to start the quest for the perfect mate all over again, because once he got something in his head, he couldn't let it go. And now he was working on breaking in a new one. Third time's the charm, people always said. But was he fooling himself? Looking for something that didn't exist? Everyone had a perfect mate somewhere, didn't they? And you couldn't find her by sitting at home doing nothing. A guy had to make his life happen.

But a disturbing pattern was emerging. Number three-What was her name? Justine? Yeah, that was it. Justine was beginning to get on his nerves. He wasn't sure why. She wasn't anything like number one or two, he'd made certain of that. In fact, the new one had come with him willingly. (Could she be a slut?) At a bar he'd asked, "Wanna come to my place?"

"Sure." Grabbed her purse.

Too easy. Way too easy. Of course, she didn't much like it when he told her she wasn't leaving his house.

He spent the afternoon grafting rosebushes. A dull blade guaranteed failure, so he liked a sharpened grafting knife. He made the cut to the green stem in one slice, starting at the base and moving to the tip in one single motion. So it wouldn't dry out, he stored the sliced scion in his mouth as he went to work on the rootstock. Then he quickly and dexterously attached the cuts of scion and rootstock, wrapping them with budding tape, stretching the tape almost to the breaking point.

Number three didn't much like it when he took her into the basement and stuffed her in the refrigerator, where she was at the moment.

He was quite proud of his new restraining device. It was an old refrigerator that hadn't worked in years. He'd cut a notch for her neck, tucked her in there when she was bad, and left the freezer door hanging open so he could see her face, talk to her if he felt like it.

Put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well.

He could tell her heart wasn't in it. She was just going through the motions, like an actress. (Or a slut?) The little actress was actually what he'd started calling her. And now he spent a large part of his day thinking about killing her, chopping her up, using her for compost. He actually began to dream about cutting off her fingers and grafting grapevines to her stubs. As the vines grew, he tied her to an arbor where her feet shot out roots that dug deeply into the ground. Fruit came on thick and lush, growing between her thighs.

He picked the fruit and ate it, blood dripping down his chin while she smiled lovingly at him from the wooden trellis.

The 757 came in low over the scattered suburbs and blue, reflecting lakes that stretched to the horizon. In the far distance stood the IDS Center. In front of it, the Foshay Tower. As she stared out the window at the beauty of Minneapolis, Mary's stomach clenched. Instead of feeling a glow of sentimental attachment upon seeing the skyline, she experienced something that felt uncomfortably like fear.

She loved her hometown. Whenever someone asked where she was from, she would tell them Minneapolis even though she'd been born in Pennsylvania.

When Mary was seven and Gillian four, they moved to the cozy Minneapolis neighborhood of Lynwood Park, where they quickly fell under the spell of a charming, two-story Tudor. The girls had their own space, upstairs, in tree-shadowed rooms with green-trimmed windows. On hot summer days, they read books their mother recommended, such as Silent Spring and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. In the house, in the yard, the sisters played together for hours.

Then Fiona Portman moved in, across the street and up three houses.

Fiona was someone everybody noticed, especially boys and grown men. Even at ten years old, the beauty she would become stared out from a child's face. She had shiny black hair that fell from a white center part, a perfect contrast to her pale skin and thick-lashed blue eyes. The moving van had hardly pulled away when Mary and Fiona began their friendship, whispering, clinging to each other, and laughing so hard they fell into a tangled heap. From that day on, they were inseparable. People would see them walking down the sidewalk, and even though the girls looked nothing alike, neighbors were apt to say with a chuckle, "Here come the twins. Joined at the hip." Looking back, Mary was always amazed and mystified by the strength of their union, by the power of a youthful friendship that was frightening and inexplicable in its steadfast unity.

Mary would often find her volatile younger sister staring at them from a distance, arms crossed at her chest, acting jealous and abandoned and left out. At the beginning, Mary would ask Gillian to join them, but she always refused, and eventually Mary quit asking.