The table was crowded. Alice was sitting on one side of her, two people he didn’t recognize on the other. There was a low murmur of conversation, everything muted now, and he stood there a moment feeling foolish, wondering how much she knew of what had happened the night before. Had he really been ready to call the police? Or was that just another hallucination? And what about her? Whether she’d meant to or not she’d lured him into the water and they both could have drowned, in which case this wouldn’t have been a relaxed communal breakfast but a wake. So he didn’t go directly up to her, but got himself a cup of coffee and stood by the door chatting with Rick Roberts and Royce Eggers and waited until she’d finished, until she put her spoon down and lifted her cup to her lips and let her eyes rove round the room. He gave her a little two-fingered wave and she waved back and in the next moment he was tapping Alice on the shoulder and then drawing up a chair to squeeze in between her and Lori. Alice turned her face to him, smiling. “Quite a party, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, conscious of Lori’s eyes on him.

Alice was having waffles, the breakfast du jour (Diana Westfall and Susannah were out in the kitchen, mass-producing them) and she took a moment to broadcast syrup over her plate with a flamboyant swirl of one elbow. “Too bad about Flo’s monkey, though. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

He answered in the affirmative, though it was for form’s sake only: he wasn’t sorry to see it go, far from it. “Did you hear about it?” he asked, turning to Lori, who just shook her head.

“We think he must’ve got into the punch,” Alice said, pausing to cut into a waffle, raise a glistening morsel of it to her lips, then put it down again. “I mean, all he had to do was snatch up somebody’s cup, right? And I must have seen him ransacking the table a thousand times—”

“Something happened to the monkey?” Lori ran a hand through her hair and let it fall across her face so that each strand of it stood out electrified under the glow of the ceiling fixtures. He saw that there were flecks of weed in it, pond weed, dried now and so pale as to be almost translucent. A voice across the room said, “Badminton—anybody up for some badminton?”

“It drowned,” he said. “We—Ken and I—went down to the lake, looking for you, actually”—he stared into her eyes but her eyes didn’t register a thing—“and there it was, right there by the dock, floating facedown.”

“I thought monkeys could swim.”

“Not this one. Or maybe he was so far gone—”

“What,” Lori said, “monkey suicide?”