Yet Hook felt that despite everything that had happened, everything he had learned today, he still was not any closer to knowing what actually had occurred at the beach house that night and early morning. About all he could do was try to imagine what had happened, take his small cast of characters and move them this way and that, much as the Pentagon’s think-tankers sat around dreaming up “scenarios” of apocalypse. When he considered just Chris and the two women alone he could only imagine Chris’s death as having been an accident, that the boy might have smoked marijuana on top of the alcohol he had drunk and which had shown in his blood level, and thus stoned, happy, flying, had walked off the cliff in darkness. To Hook, any other interpretation involving just Chris and the women would not wash. For the boy was an inch taller than Hook’s own six feet one and he weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, all of it hard as bone. He could have picked up the ladies, one in each hand, and dropped them over the cliff. So if it was true that just the three of them had been there, Hook felt he had to rule out violence as a possibility. And yet that interpretation still left the problem of Chris’s “suicide,” why the women had lied about that.

On the other hand, when Hook considered the possibility that the boy’s death might not have been an accident, then a man or men automatically came into the picture—but who, how, or why Hook could not be sure.

Perhaps tomorrow on the boat he might find some answers, and if not then maybe the next day or the day after that. Ultimately he was not worried, for if he continued to get nowhere he would simply go out to the beach house alone some night and drag the enigmatic Mrs. Rubin to the cliff edge and there discuss the matter with her. She might press charges against him afterward, but that prospect did not worry him half so much as the fear of never finding out, never knowing what had happened to his son.

As he continued down the beach it occurred to him that the same stars shining on him now, all except those low in the west, were shining on the farm as well, giving to the snow cover there a cold blue light that would be luminous in the darkness, and against which the cattle as they moved and stirred would appear as flattened silhouettes, black holes torn in the canvas of the night. In his mind Hook could hear them, hear the ice crackling as they moved, see their breath rising in the brittle air, and it made him feel very far from home.

9

Hook awoke at five in the morning and by six had already had breakfast, so he decided to walk to the yacht harbor, which was only a half-mile up the road from his motel. Rain had fallen during the night and the air was fresh and salt-free, clear except for a few ragged storm clouds prowling around the peaks of the Santa Ynez. By the time he reached the harbor the sun still was not visible above the mountains running down the coast, but the light that preceded its rising—a dark mauve nimbus—had already given way to blue, the blue of day, another drearily beautiful Santa Barbara day.