“So all those years she lived alone,” Liz said. “And she kept her sanity. She survived.”

They were in the car now, heading back up into the mountains on Foothill Road. “You sound envious,” Hook observed.

She was staring out the windshield as if she saw not beautiful trees in sunlight but a stretch of forever empty sea. “When I think what it would take to survive something like that,” she said, “what should I be but envious?”

“Because you don’t have courage?”

“Not that kind. Remember on the beach—all that drivel about me dying of life. Well, I imagine Juana Maria or whatever her real name was would have been very happy to ‘die’ the way I do. With the same comforts.”

Hook told her she was not being fair to herself.

“You think not? You think when I see a picture of a starving Pakistani child or a napalmed Vietnamese I shouldn’t feel absurd? I shouldn’t feel that my hangups are a little ridiculous? Even pathetic?”

Inside, Hook could only agree with her. But he figured that what she wanted was argument. So he gave it to her. “I think life is pretty much the pursuit of happiness—for starving children, the same as you. Only they’re still stuck down at the bottom of the ladder, without even the necessities of life. But once they got them, I think you’d find them moving on to ‘hangups.’ Even pathetic ones.”

As they drove, Liz gave him directions and after a time he realized they were taking the same route he had traveled with Sergeant Rider three mornings before. They turned onto Mountain Drive and when they came to the curve that plunged steeply through the trees down to the canyon below—the creek and the stone bridge, the barren spot where the minibus had been parked—Hook was not surprised to hear Liz announce that this was it, her canyon.

He pulled in under the trees on the right of the road, where the squadcars had been parked the other morning, and for some reason he decided not to say anything about having been there before or about the dead youth, about Rider and the girl. It had all been in the newspaper. He figured she must have read it. But apparently it had not registered, was not the kind of story that could seize the attention of a native Californian.

After locking the car, Hook followed Liz across the small stone bridge to a dirt path that cut up the canyon. As beautiful as it had seemed the other morning from the road, Hook found it even more so as they walked deeper into it. For the first quarter-mile it was almost level, a worn dirt path winding through the shade of the dense-growing trees, live oak mostly, but also sycamore and alder. And the undergrowth, nourished by the creek waters, was almost Midwestern in its lushness: fern and wild blackberry, nightshade and poison oak. Soon the path doubled back on itself and they began to climb steeply, moving up and away from the canyon floor, the creek bed, which in a short time was a good two hundred feet below them, an almost sheer drop from the narrow path. But it was not a creek as Hook knew them, was more like a gradual waterfall, a steep rocky grade rising as the path rose, so that a few hundred yards farther on they came to the creek again and crossed it, without having walked downhill. And Hook found himself wondering how it all had been formed: slowly by rainfall over the ages, the water chipping and sliding the earth out from under the rocks, or all at once in the same cataclysm that had formed the coast and the mountains themselves, buckling them up out of the earth with such violence that huge pieces had come tumbling down into the sea, carving out such canyons as this and leaving behind a trail of rock, the great white boulders over which the creek waters now bubbled and crashed and pooled, as clear as light.