LEXI TEMPLETON WAS NOT LIKE OTHER LITTLE GIRLS.

When she was five years old, her father received a phone call at the office.

"I'm afraid you're going to have to come and pick Lexi up right away."

It was Mrs. Thackeray, the principal of Lexi's kindergarten. She sounded distressed.

"Has something happened? Is Lexi okay?"

"Your daughter is fine, Mr. Templeton. It's the other children I'm worried about."

When Peter arrived at the Little Cherubs Preschool, a tearful Lexi hurtled into his arms. "I didn't do anything, Daddy! It wasn't my fault."

Mrs. Thackeray pulled Peter to one side.

"I've had to send two children to the emergency room this morning. Your daughter attacked them with scissors. One little boy was lucky not to lose an eye."

"But that's ridiculous." Peter looked at Lexi. Clinging to his legs in a yellow cotton sundress with matching yellow ribbons in her hair, she looked the picture of innocence. "Why would she do a thing like that?"

"I have no idea. My staff assures me that the attack was entirely unprovoked. I'm afraid we won't be able to have Lexi back at Little Cherubs. You must make alternative arrangements."

In the back of the limousine, Peter asked his daughter what had happened.

"It was nothing." Lexi swung her legs merrily, entirely unrepentant. "I don't know why they all made such a fuss. I was doing my collage. It was a picture of Kruger-Brent. You know, your big tower where you go to work?"

Peter nodded.

"It was really pretty and silvery and I did all tinfoil on it. But then Timmy Willard said my picture was 'damn stupid.' And Malcolm Malloy laughed at me."

"That was mean of them, honey. So what did you do?"

Lexi looked at him pityingly, as if to say, What sort of a question is that?

"I stuck up for myself, like you told me. I stabbed Timmy in his head. Don't worry, Daddy," she added, seeing Peter's stricken face. "He didn't get dead. Can we go to McDonald's for lunch?"

The child psychologists were all in agreement.

Lexi was highly intelligent and highly sensitive. Her behavioral problems all stemmed from the loss of her mother.

Peter asked: "But what about this vengeful streak? Her lack of moral boundaries?"

The answer was always the same.

She'll grow out of it.

"Don't let me hear your excuses! You have poisoned the queen. You will have your head chopped off straight away."

Lexi grappled with her limited-edition Little Mermaid Barbie doll.

"That'll teach you, you fishy-tailed crin-i-mal." She grinned triumphantly as the head came free. "Now you are absolutely DEAD!"

"Lexi!"

Mrs. Grainger, the new nanny, walked into the bedroom. A sea of decapitated dolls littered the floor. She sighed.

Again? Whatever happened to tea parties and teddy bear's picnics?

Eight-year-old girls had sure changed since her day.

In her midfifties, widowed, with no children of her own, Mrs. Grainger had been hired as a replacement to the infamous Mrs. Carter. (The Templetons' former housekeeper had made the most of her blood money, divorcing her grumpy husband, Mike, and running off to Hawaii. She was last seen on a beach in Maui having coconut oil massaged into her ample backside by a half-naked twenty-year-old called Keanu. Mrs. Grainger had never gotten along with coconut oil.)

Mrs. Grainger was fond of Lexi, but she was no pushover. Those Barbie dolls cost money. She'd scolded Lexi more times than she could remember about taking better care of them.

"What's going on?"

Lexi's mind began to whir: Mrs. Grainger is mad. What will stop her being mad? What does she want to hear?

"Don't worry, Mrs. G. I was just playing a game. I can easily fix them again. Look."

Retrieving Ariel's head from the far side of the room, Lexi struggled vainly to reattach it to the body. It wasn't as easy as it looked. The stump of the neck was too fat for the hole above the shoulders that seemed to have magically shrunk since she ripped the head off. Strands of red nylon hair kept getting tangled around Lexi's fingers. Sweat began to bead on her forehead.

"Honestly, I can do it. I've done it before."

"That's not the point, Lexi. You shouldn't have pulled her head off in the first place. This carpet looks like The Night of the Living Dead."

"It's not my fault. Ariel was trying to kill the queen."

Lexi gestured toward one of the few Barbie dolls still sporting a full complement of limbs. Dressed in regal red velvet, with a string of tinsel wrapped around her head, the blond effigy lay prostrate on the extortionately overpriced "Barbie's Four-Poster" that Robbie had bought his sister last week.

Just what Lexi needed. More toys.

"She's been poisoned. See? That's why she's gone a funny color."

With a groan, Mrs. Grainger noticed that the doll's cheeks had been defaced in what could only be described as a frenzied attack with a green felt-tip pen. She prayed that Lexi hadn't gotten green ink all over her clothes and bedding as well. That stuff was murder to get out.

Lexi said solemnly: "If you poison someone, you do get your head chopped off. That is a real, true fact, Mrs. G. I learned it in history."

Her expression was so adorably earnest, it was a struggle not to laugh.

"Yes, well. I'd prefer it if history didn't repeat itself quite so often all over the bedroom floor."

The nanny's tone was stern. But Lexi knew she had won. There was mad and there was pretend mad, and she was smart enough to know the difference.

Raised adult voices drifted up from downstairs. Lexi's face clouded with anxiety.

"Daddy's shouting. You think Robbie's in trouble again?"

"I have no idea." Mrs. Grainger shut the bedroom door firmly. "If he is, it's nothing for you to worry about. Your brother's big and ugly enough to take care of himself."

Lexi looked furious. "Robbie isn't ugly. He's the handsomest brother in the entire universe in space. Everyone says so."

Mrs. Grainger sighed. She wished Lexi wouldn't take everything quite so literally. She also wished Mr. Templeton would learn to keep his voice down. He had no idea how sensitive his daughter was, or how bright. Lexi was like a tiny satellite receiver, picking up all the tension in the house and translating it into a view of the world that was becoming increasingly skewed.

Today she was chopping the heads off her dollies.

But what about tomorrow?

Pervert!...Preying on innocent children...Sickos like him should be castrated.

Peter Templeton tried to focus on his breathing. He must keep calm. He must not lose his temper with the dreadful woman standing in his drawing room, screaming obscenities at him like a crack whore.

Ludo and I could go to the police, you know.

The woman might sound like a crack whore. In fact, her name was Angelica Dellal, wife of prominent JPMorgan banker Ludo Dellal and mother of sixteen-year-old Dominic Dellal: football star, head boy at Andover and (if Peter had interpreted her potty-mouthed ranting correctly) his son Robert's homosexual lover.

Homo! Freak!

The abuse washed in and out of Peter's consciousness like a toxic tide of effluence spewing from a sewer.

In her early forties, with handsome, aristocratic features and the sort of immaculately blow-dried, highlighted hair that immediately stamped her a rich man's wife, Angelica Dellal must once have been a great beauty. But any sex appeal she might once have possessed had long since been groomed to death, buffed and manicured and Botoxed into oblivion. At this moment she looked positively ugly, mouth stretched wide, face contorted with rage, diamond-encrusted hands flailing wildly.

"So...?"

With a jolt, Peter realized that she had finally exhausted herself.

"I'm sorry. What was the question?"

Angelica Dellal looked as if she might spontaneously combust with indignation.

"The question is what are you going to do to ensure your disgusting, perverted son stays the hell away from my boy?"

"I'll talk to Robert."

"Talk? Is that it? My husband caught them in the back of a car together, okay? Your kid was sucking my kid's dick. Are you hearing this? Am I getting through?"

She jabbed a French-polished talon at Peter. He instinctively stepped back, clutching the couch for support. Had Robbie really? He shuddered. It didn't bear thinking about.

"Perhaps your husband was mistaken."

His voice was a whisper. Peter knew Ludo Dellal had not been mistaken. And yet he couldn't admit it, not even to himself.

Despite years of psychiatric training and decades of practice, Peter Templeton could not accept that his son was gay. How many closet homosexuals had he counseled over the years? Scores, probably. With those poor desperate men, those tortured strangers, compassion had come easily. But with his own son, it was a different matter. He wanted, desperately, to believe that it was this horrible woman's son who had led Robert astray, and not the other way around. That it was his, Peter's, child who was going through a phase. His child who would grow out of it, his child who would go on to be a football star at Harvard and have a wife and kids, and look back at these teenage indiscretions as nothing more than a blip. As sexual teething pains.

He clung to hope like a bare-knuckle climber clutching at a rock face. Robbie wasn't remotely effeminate. Girls hung around him like fleas on a rat, pestering him for dates. Perhaps he was just shy? A late bloomer? It was possible.

Your kid was sucking my kid's dick.

Mrs. Dellal was leaving, sweeping up her fur coat and Chanel quilted purse like Cruella de Vil.

"I mean it. If I see your homo son within ten miles of our house, or Dom's school, I will call the police. And you better pray the cops find your boy before my husband does."

The front door slammed shut.

Silence.

"Daddy?"

Lexi stood in the doorway wearing a white muslin dress with butterflies embroidered on the sleeves and a blue bow in her buttermilk hair.

Peter thought: Look how innocent she is.

"What's a pervert?"

To his great embarrassment, Peter felt himself blushing. "Gee, honey, it's, erm...it's a bad word."

"Yes, but what does it mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything, sweetie."

"Oh. Well, what's a homo, then?"

For God's sake. How much had she heard?

"Why don't you go on upstairs and play, Lexi. I'll come up in a few minutes and join you."

"I'm bored of playing." Lexi dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Does pervert mean S-E-X?"

"Go and watch The Jungle Book. Tell Mrs. Grainger I said yes to TV just this once."

Lexi skipped off to the playroom with squeals of delight. Peter sank wearily onto the couch. Oh, Alex. Why aren't you here? Why is it still so hard? He knew he had to talk to Robbie about the Dellal boy. He just didn't know where to start.

As it turned out, he didn't have to. Robbie broached the subject himself. Rolling home at eleven o'clock, drunk as a lord, he found his dad in the kitchen.

"You'll be pleashed to hear I'm gunnaway," he slurred. "Meanmy-frendom."

"You're drunk, Robert. I can't understand you."

"My friend." The word rolled cruelly off Robbie's tongue. "Me and my friend Dom are going away. To New Orleans. I'll be out of your hair for good. Break out the champagne!"

Raising his hand, as if making a toast, he lost his balance, gashing his head against the kitchen table as he slid to the floor.

"Oops." Tears of laughter coursed down his cheeks.

"Your drinking isn't funny, Robert."

"It's not? Jeez, that's strange. Yours was always hilarious." Contempt blazed in Robbie's eyes. "Maybe I should pull a gun on you? Liven things up a bit. Would that be funny, Dad?"

Peter felt like crying. When had the word dad become an insult?

"Dominic's mother was here this afternoon. Making threats. She says if you go near her son again, she'll report you to the police for proselytizing."

"Prozshele...what-le-tizing? Man, that's a new one on me. We'll have to try that some time. Dom loves to try new things."

Peter snapped. "You're revolting! Do you think this is a game? That boy is barely sixteen years old."

Robbie shrugged. "He knows what he's doing. As a matter of fact, he's damn good at it."

"His parents will prosecute. You could go to jail, Robert, you do realize that?"

"Not if they can't find us."

Robbie's head was heavy. After he left Lionel Neuman's office this afternoon he'd wandered from bar to bar, slowly drinking his way into the numbed, half-conscious state that had become a way of life for him recently. Holding a conversation was like trying to swim through thick, warm soup.

The truth was he didn't even care that much about Dom Dellal. It wasn't like they were in love or anything. But his father's disgust made him want to lash out. It reminded Robbie of all his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

Just my luck to be the world's first gay homophobe.

"I went to see Old Man Neuman today."

"Really."

"Yeah. Took myself outta the will." Robbie dissolved into drunken giggles. "I told him. I said, 'You can stick your money. I don' wan' Kru-gerfugginbren.'"

Peter sighed. "You can't simply write yourself out of the will, Robert. There are trusts...it's complicated."

"Not anymore it ain't. I gave it all to Lexi."

Robbie stood up. The room spun like a clothes dryer. Putting a hand to his forehead, he felt the sticky warmth of blood on his fingers.

Peter thought: Has he really repudiated Kate's will? Can he do that?

Out loud he said, "You're too drunk to talk sense now. We'll talk in the morning."

"I won't be here in the morning."

Robbie took an unsteady step forward, squaring up to his father. His eyes glinted with drunken, reckless rage.

Peter's stomach lurched. Robbie was so close, he could smell the stale alcohol on his breath. I'm afraid of him. I'm afraid of my own son.

"I'm going to New Orleans. With Dom."

"If you leave this house tonight, don't bother coming back."

The words were out of Peter's mouth before he knew they were in his head. "Don't worry. I won't. Good-bye, Dad."

"Good-bye, Robert."

Peter watched his son stagger out of the room, blood still flowing from the gash on his head. Seconds later, he heard the front door slam.

He waited for the guilt to hit him. This is the part where I run after him. Tell him I didn't mean it. Seconds passed. Then minutes. Peter realized that the feeling swelling inside his chest was not guilt at all.

It was relief.

Switching off the downstairs lights, he tiptoed up to Lexi's bedroom.

It'll be just the two of us now, darling. You don't need your brother. Daddy'll take care of you.

He wouldn't wake her. He'd just kneel next to the bed for a moment. Breathe in her sweet child's smell. Take comfort from her warm, sleeping, innocent body.

He pushed the bedroom door open slowly. The room was pitch-dark. Picking his way toward the bed from memory, gingerly stepping past the toy box and over the discarded clothes, Peter knelt down next to the bed and reached out a loving arm.

A gust of wind in the face caught him by surprise.

He glanced up. The bedroom window was open.

Beneath it, in the dim glow of the moonlight, he stared at the empty bed.

Lexi was gone.