After she came home from camp Paula wanted me to write letters for her to a boy she'd met there. I did my best to express Paula's devotion to him; he wrote back complimenting her on her beautiful handwriting.

Paula insisted she was going to marry her Utah sweetheart. But first they had to get through high school, and then there was college and his missionary service. That left a lot of time to kill, and Paula could hardly be expected to sit around waiting while other people were having fun. So she went on bringing boys home after school while her parents were out. Sometimes she would let me hang around with them, especially if I could contribute refreshments from my parents' liquor cabinet. But as time went on she was more inclined to leave me inside watching TV while she and her admirers sought the privacy of the underbrush behind the house.

The year after our visit to hell, around Christmastime, Miranda went out to feed her pet rabbit in its backyard hutch, and came upon her big sister entertaining someone down by the stream. While the visitor quietly made his exit via the creekbed, Miranda followed Paula into the house, gleefully chanting her familiar refrain: "I'm telling... I'm telling!"

A few weeks earlier, while we were searching the house for hidden Christmas presents, Paula and I had found a gun on the top shelf of her parents' bedroom closet. Paula had been saving the knowledge of the concealed weapon for just this kind of occasion.

I'd seen a gun up close once before, in Hope Ranch. It belonged to the Tims sisters, Traci and Trudi, who boarded their horses at a stable where I worked briefly when we first arrived in Santa Barbara. They invited me over one afternoon, and I was helping them count the quarters they had accumulated in an old Sparkletts bottle when the doorbell rang. They insisted that this intruder had evil intent, possibly related to their fortune, and refused to answer the door without the protection of their father's shotgun. I remember hearing an explosion, and watching the drizzle of plaster dust that settled gently on Trudi's hair, making her look prematurely old.

Now I watched Paula, gun in hand, herding her sister into the kitchen. Soon Miranda was jammed up in the corner next to the refrigerator, the barrel of the gun resting lightly against her forehead. Around her silhouette I could see the edges of the Punishment Board, a big magnetized chart tracking the three sisters' merits and crimes. A jar of jelly beans stood proudly atop the refrigerator -- just like the one at the White House, Paula's mother always said.

We all stood there for what seemed like a long time, while the automatic icemaker crunched and groaned and Paula delivered a stern lecture about the importance of respecting other people's privacy. To drive her point home, she pressed the gun harder against Miranda's forehead and dramatically fondled the trigger, telling her sister to pray for forgiveness. Only when Miranda sank to her knees in tears was Paula convinced of her repentance: at last, Paula let her sister go.

When Miranda had fled to the safety of the family room, Paula decided to inspect the gun; in all the excitement she'd never had a chance to see how the thing worked. Somehow she managed to open the revolver. There was a bullet in every chamber. "Jesus Christ," Paula whispered. For once I actually wanted to go home.

The following summer my parents decided we should leave Santa Barbara. "It's so awful they're doing this to you," Paula declared. "Now, when you're at the height of your popularity!" I heard from her once or twice after we moved away, but Paula never was one for writing letters.