But of course, you forgot. The years passed and you spent them with the living, and you even created new life yourself, and there was not much reason to think about death. You were like a rabbit in the spring sunshine feasting on soybean sprouts, and then suddenly it was night and the owl was on you and you never even heard his approach.

“Dad, where’s Mom?”

“Alton. At the dentist’s.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“It’s almost six. I’m starved.”

“So make supper.”

“She should’ve been back by now.”

“She’ll be here.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

But he had been wrong.

Hook caught himself now and consciously tried to put all that out of his mind. The dogs, finally tired of roaming the countryside, had fallen in beside him, Marty at his heel and Mickey wisely on the outside. The snow had melted off the blacktop, so Hook had no trouble walking up the steep hill to the cemetery. He did not know he was going to enter it until he had already done so, carefully pulling the old wrought-iron gate closed behind him in order that none of his neighbors driving past might see it open and conclude that he was there. It was one of the things he liked least about himself, that he valued the respect of men he in turn respected hardly at all. He did not care whether they liked him or not, but he would not let himself give them reason to think him careless or lazy or weak, even by their own standards. Whether grief or the show of it would constitute weakness in their eyes, he was not sure. He only knew that he did not want to be seen here in the cemetery at two-thirty in the morning.

The moon, shining through the trees, was so bright he could have read the legends on the gravemarkers. But he already knew most of them by heart, and anyway his eyes had filled with tears again as he approached his son’s grave, a mound of wreaths and sprays, a junkheap of rotting hothouse flowers festooned with gauzy messages of send-off and acceptance, death as simply a part of life, a transition between states of Christian felicity, here today and gone to be with Jesus tomorrow. But not his Chris. No, Chris was lying under all that garbage with his neck broken and his body carved like a holiday turkey in the name of truth, so that he might yield the secret of how he had died.

And suddenly Hook found himself attacking the grave, kicking at the mounded flowers, exploding them up into the air in a rain of wreaths and sprays and plastic buckets that sent the dogs scampering out of the cemetery to safety. Exhausted finally, he sank to his knees and begged himself to let it go now, weep, sob, moan, admit his loss, begin to live with it.

But he could not. All he could do was look ahead to California and his search for the truth of what had happened.