“Yes, the truth.”

“What truth?”

“Just the truth. I guess the truth that brought me here.” She smiled dreamily and dropped her head, as if she were about to fall asleep.

Hook tried to bring her back. “Where were you, Liz?”

“Where?”

“Yes, where?”

She scowled in a burlesque of concentration. “Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes. I was at the country club, at a party for a friend of Jack’s.”

“And?”

“And I just got up and left. I had to come. Here.”

“To tell me the truth?”

She nodded, and Hook found that he could barely breathe. Suddenly the air in the room was like that before a spring storm on the farm, dry yellow airless air, with the grass and leaves whispering with the knowledge of what was on the way.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She closed her eyes as though she were in pain and her breasts swelled as she sucked in the deep breath of the sufferer. But her voice when it came was almost matter-of-fact. “What I told you on the beach the other day, it was a lie. Chris didn’t leave home because of you. He loved you. And he didn’t kill himself. His death was an accident. I picked him up on that Tuesday, as you figured, and we had two days together. Just two days.”

As she said this last, her voice trickled away and she gazed absently across the room, as if she had come to the end already, had no more truth to tell.

Hook thought otherwise. “What did you do?”

“When?”

“The two days.”

“Oh we talked, that’s all. We just talked.”

“And sex? You didn’t make love?”

Her eyes suddenly filmed with tears and she shook her head. “No, we didn’t make love. But it wasn’t his fault. He wanted me. He tried. I put him off. I didn’t want to spoil it, what we had together. And it would have, for me. I don’t think I’ve ever had sex with someone I didn’t despise in one way or another. And I guess it’s rubbed off on the act itself. In my mind anyway.”

She raised her hands like a little girl and smeared twin ribbons of tears running down her face.

“It wasn’t impotence, then,” Hook said. “He didn’t fail.”

But she did not seem to have heard him. So he repeated the question, almost angrily now, hoping to bring her out of her alcoholic daze.

“No,” she said finally. “That was a lie too.”

With that, Hook sat down in the chair facing the bed, facing her. “Tell me about the second night,” he said. “The night it happened.”

For a long while Liz said nothing, just sat there staring down at her hands and frowning, as if she were trying to get it all straight in her mind. Hook waited. Finally it came.

“I began drinking that afternoon. And I mean drinking a lot, for me anyway. Later I switched to pot and then I tried to keep the high going with wine that night. I locked myself in my room and I got stoned. Why, I don’t know—maybe because I wasn’t eighteen anymore. Because I wasn’t—unused. Because I couldn’t have him, at least not the way I wanted him.”