“I guess he put it in his pocket.”

“So he didn’t put it back in that tray where you found it.”

“Well, not right then. Probably later.”

“Okay,” I said. “But you seem to remember that incident, that confrontation, quite clearly.”

“Pretty much,” he said. “I wasn’t so hammered then.”

“So now tell me about the second time you got in the car.”

“That’s a lot fuzzier,” he said quietly.

“Because?”

“Sian and I went back into the house and snuck out some more to drink. So we . . . well, I was pretty shitfaced the second time I got in the car. But that time, I would have known where to put the key.”

“If the key was there.”

“Well, I guess it fuckin’ had to be,” Jeremy said. He stopped. “Is there a reason why you’re goin’ on about this? And I still don’t get that other stuff you were asking me, about protecting someone?”

“I asked you to bear with me.”

“Fine,” he said, in a voice that suggested it was not fine at all.

“Do you remember Broadhurst reaching over you, before you got out of the car, to put the keys back where you found them?”

“No. But he must have done it after.”

“So between the time that you and Sian got kicked out of the car, and the time you got in it again, what did you do?”

“Like I said, we went in, scored two nearly full bottles of wine that had been opened, and went back outside.”

“Outside where?”

“Uh, like, outside.”

“Front of the house? Back of the house?”

“We wandered up the driveway, toward the main road. There’s kind of a hill there, you know?”

“I don’t. I’ve never been there.”

“Oh, right. So we were drinking straight out of the bottles. One was red, one was white, and we were sharing back and forth. We sat on the bench.”

“What bench?”

“There’s this fancy bench along the side of the driveway, just over the hill. We sat there and drank and looked at stars and shit.”

“When did you come back and get in the car?”

He had to think about that. “Around then, I guess. Sian must have stayed by the bench while I walked back to get the car.”

“You know that?”

He shrugged. “Like I said, that’s when it starts getting awful fuzzy. Somewhere along the line I think I blacked out or something.”

About a hundred yards ahead, a young man was standing with his feet firmly planted in the wet sand, facing out into the bay, looking contemplative. From where we were, his eyes appeared to be closed. Water rushed in around his legs and out again, but he never moved.