She seemed to lose track of time and space, and stared absently at the dark wooden walls.

"He took you to his place," I prompted.

"For five weeks he nursed me. He brought doctors, bought medicine. Fed me, bathed me, sat at my bedside reading comic books - I loved American comic books because my father had always brought them home to me from his travels. Little Orphan Annie. Terry and the Pirates. Dagwood. Blondie. He read them all to me, in a soft, gentle voice. He was different from any man I'd ever met. Thin, quiet, like a teacher, with those eyeglasses that made his eyes look so big, like a big bird.

"By the sixth week I was well. He came into bed and made love to me. I know now it was part of the sickness - he must have thought I was a child, that must have excited him. But I felt like a woman. Over the years as I became a woman, when I was clearly no longer a child, he lost interest in me. He used to like to dress me up in little girls' things - I'm small, I could fit into them. But when I grew up, saw the world outside, I would have nothing to do with that. I asserted myself and he withdrew. Maybe that was when he started to act out his sickness. Maybe," she said in a wounded voice, "it was my fault. For not satisfying him."

"No. He was a troubled man. You don't have to bear that responsibility," I said, not with total sincerity. I didn't want it all to deteriorate into a wet session of self - recrimination.

"I don't know. Even now it seems so unreal. The papers, the stories about him. About us. He was such a kind man, gentle, quiet."

I'd heard similar pictures painted of other child molesters. Often they were exceptionally mild mannered men, with a natural ability to gain rapport with their young victims. But of course it had to be that way: kids won't flock to an unshaven ogre in a soiled trenchcoat. They will be drawn to Uncle Wally who's so much nicer than mean old Mom and Dad and all the other grownups who don't understand. To Uncle Wally with his magic tricks and neat collection of baseball cards and really terrific toys at his house and mopeds and video recorders, and cameras and neat, weird books… "You must understand how much I loved him," she was saying. "He saved my life. He was American. He was rich. He said he loved me too. "My little geisha' he called me. I'd laugh and tell him "No, I'm Korean, you silly. The Japanese are pigs!" He'd smile and call me his little geisha again.

"We lived together in Seoul for four months. I waited for him to get off - base on leave, cooked for him, cleaned, brought him his slippers. Was his wife. When his discharge papers came, he told me he was taking me back to the States. I was in heaven. Of course his family - there was only a mother and some elderly aunts - would have nothing to do with me. Stuart didn't care. He had money of his own, trust funds from his father. We traveled together to Los Angeles. He said he'd gone to school there - he did go to medical school, but flunked out. He took a job as a medical technician. He didn't need to work, it was a job that didn't pay much, but he liked it, said it kept him busy. He liked the machines - the meters and the test tubes - he was always a tinkerer. Gave me his entire paycheck, as if it was petty cash, told me to spend it on myself.

"We lived together that way for three years. I wanted marriage, but couldn't ask. It took me a while to get used to American ways, to women not being just property, to having rights. I pushed it when I wanted children. Stuart was indifferent to the idea, but he went along with it. We married. I tried to get pregnant but couldn't. I saw doctors, at UCLA, Stanford, Mayo. They all said there was too much scarring. I'd been so sick in Korea, it shouldn't have surprised me, but I didn't want to believe it. Looking back now, I know it was a good thing we did not have any little ones. At the time, after I finally accepted it, I became depressed. Very withdrawn, not eating. Eventually Stuart couldn't ignore it any longer. He suggested I go to school. If I loved children I could work with them, become a teacher. He may have had his own motives, but he seemed concerned for me - whenever I was sick or low he was at his best.

"I enrolled in junior college, then college, and learned so much. I was a good student," she recalled, smiling. "Very motivated. For the first time I was out in the world, with other people - until then I'd been Stuart's little geisha. Now I began to think for myself. At the same time he drifted away from me. There was no anger, no resentment that he put into words. He simply spent more time with his camera and his bird books - he used to like to read books and magazines on nature, though he never hiked or walked. An armchair bird lover. An armchair man.

"We became two distant cousins living in the same house. Neither of us cared, we were busy. I studied every spare moment, by now I knew I wanted to go beyond the bachelor's and get a credential in early childhood. We went our own ways. There were weeks when we never saw each other. There was no communication, no marriage. But no divorce either - what would have been the point? There were no fights. It was live and let live. My new friends, my college friends, told me I was liberated, I should be happy to have a husband who didn't bother me. When I became lonely I went deeper into my studies.

"I finished the credential and they gave me field placements at local preschools. I liked working with the little ones but I thought I could run a better school than those I had seen. I told Stuart, he said sure, anything to keep me happy, out of his way. We bought a big house in Brentwood - there always seemed to be money for anything - and I started Kim's Korner. It was a wonderful place, a wonderful time. I finally stopped mourning not having children of my own. Then he - "

She stopped, covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth.

I got up and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Please don't do that. It's not right. I tried to have Otto kill you." She lifted her face, dry and unlined. "Do you understand that? I wanted him to kill you. Now you are being kind and understanding. It makes me feel worse."

I removed the hand and sat back down.

"Why the need for Otto, why the fear?"

"I thought you were sent by the ones who killed Stuart."

"The official verdict was that he killed himself."

She shook her head.

"No. He didn't commit suicide. They said he was depressed. It was a lie. Of course when he was first arrested, he was very low. Humiliated and guilty. But he bounced out of it. That was Stuart's way. He could block out reality as easily as exposing a roll of film. Poof, and the image is gone. The day before he was arraigned we spoke on the phone. He was in high spirits. To hear him talk, the arrest was the best thing that ever happened - to him - to us. He'd been Til, now he would get help. We'd start all over again, as soon as he got out of the hospital. I could even get another school, in another city. He suggested Seattle and talked of our reclaiming the family mansion - that was how I got the idea to come here. /

"I knew it would never happen. By then I'd decided to leave him. But I went along with the fantasies, saying, yes, dear, certainly, Stuart. Later we had other conversations and it was the same thing. Life was going to be better than ever. He was not talking like a man about to blow his brains out."

"It's not that simple. People often kill themselves right after an upswing in mood. The suicide season is spring, you know."

"Perhaps. But I know Stuart and I know he didn't kill himself. He was too shallow to let something like the arrest bother him for a long time. He could deny anything. He denied me for all those years, denied our marriage - that's why he could do those things without my knowing about them. We were strangers."