They might have come to blows—they should have; get it all out in the open for once, Joanie, Fanchon, Zihuatanejo and the lifeguard tower—but they didn’t. Ken just squared his shoulders and went up the stairs and into the house while he sat there in the car to try to calm himself. He couldn’t face anybody just then because Ken was right. He knew it, knew he was risking everything, but that didn’t change a thing. After a while—and here came two of the dogs charging out the door to tumble across the grass in an explosion of pure animal joy, which in that moment was as depressing as anything he could imagine—he got out of the car, walked all the way around to the back of the house and slipped up the stairs to his room, just for a little privacy. A minute, a minute to himself, that was all.

He hadn’t been there five minutes when there was a knock at the door. “Go away,” he called, but Fanchon’s voice came back at him, muted by the slab of the door, but sharp-edged and insistent all the same. “It is the telephone. For you.”

He said nothing.

“Fitz?”

“Tell them I’m dead. Tell them the funeral’s on Wednesday.”

She knocked again, more emphatically this time, and he got up from the bed with a curse, not even bothering to hide the bottle of brandy he’d wrapped his hand around at some point and couldn’t seem to let go of now. He crossed the room to the door and jerked it open, trying all the while to fight down something in his chest that felt perilously close to panic.

Fanchon took a step back, as if he’d startled her—he had startled her, but before he could sort out his feelings on that score (what was he doing? what was wrong with him?), she locked her eyes on his, announced, “It is Joanie,” turned and walked away.