Her voice broke and Hook felt it in his own body, like a bone breaking. And this angered him. He wanted to keep his emotional distance from her so he could judge what she was saying, try to separate the truth from the half-truths and the half-truths from the outright lies. But so far everything she said sounded just the same, was uttered with the same perfect pitch of anguish and conviction. Yet he would not let himself believe her, not yet anyway.

“Go on,” he said.

“Where was I?”

“Locked in your room. Stoned.”

Closing her eyes, she nodded. “Yes. So he was alone. I left him alone. And I guess he drank more wine than he should have. He must have gone walking. He must have walked off the cliff in the darkness.”

Hook thought of the cliff, its almost sloping face at the top, with the tough-rooted chaparral clinging densely to it, and he could only wonder how a lean strong nineteen-year-old boy could have plunged helplessly down it, even drunk. But he did not protest. Instead he sat waiting for her to go on, to explain the inexplicable. Finally he brought it up himself.

“And the suicide?”

“What?”

“His death, Liz. Why’d you call it suicide?”

She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I was in shock after it happened. And Dorothy told me not to worry, that she’d handle everything. And the next thing I knew I was sitting there and the police were asking if there was anything I wanted to add to what Dorothy had told them, and I said no, there was nothing, Dorothy had told it all just as it happened. Only I didn’t know what she’d said till later. And then it was too late.”

“Why would she invent such a story?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t know the lady. I’ve lived with her for six months, but I still don’t know her. I guess she owns some stock in Jack’s company. She’s very loyal to him. Very dedicated. Like the others. You’d think he was Jesus Christ. Which kind of makes me his Judas, I guess. His female Judas. I’m destroying all their careful work. They hate me. Especially her.”

“Mrs. Rubin.”

Liz nodded. Her eyes went heavy and distant again and suddenly she stretched out on the bed. Hook resisted an impulse to pull her back up and slap her awake, alert.

“Is she a lesbian?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Rubin.”

“I don’t think so. Never made a pass at me, anyway.”

“Was she jealous of Chris?”

“Could be.”

“Of the way you reacted to him?”

Eyes closed, she nodded dreamily. “Hated him, right off. Maybe because he had so much. And she had so little. So she—she—”

Hook waited, then finished it himself. “So she transformed him.”

“Yes.”

“Made him into a failure, a fag, a suicide.”

Liz nodded again, apparently almost asleep.

“And Douglas? He wasn’t there?”