“In summer,” Liz told him, “hippies swim nude in the pools. Pot smoke drifts down the canyon. And their canteens are filled with dago red.”

“That part sounds all right,” Hook allowed.

“But not the skinny-dipping? Or the pot?”

“Not the pot anyway. Not for me.”

“The skinny-dipping, though.”

“I’ll watch.”

“You may have to. This place I told you about, it has its own little pool. My pool. And I’ve brought grass. It’s part of the ritual. I warned you not to come.”

Hook watched her as she walked ahead of him, her black hair moving against the yellow sweater, the corduroys stretched tight over her splendid buttocks, and he found it difficult to believe that it all had been his last night, that he had embraced it and kissed it and filled it with his semen. It—she—seemed irremediably remote now, as much a stranger as on the first moment he had seen her, through the glass door on the beach-house deck.

As they kept on, the path kept crossing the creek. Occasionally they would reach a spot from which they could see all the way back down the canyon and out over the foothills and the city to the ocean, and even to the islands, a distance of at least fifty miles, Hook estimated. But they did not pause very long to look at anything. Liz doggedly kept on, heading for her “place.” And finally they seemed to have reached it. Ahead of him she left the path, moving through the brush and trees up over a hillock next to the creek and then down again, to a barrier of rocks, some as huge as railroad cars. He followed her into a narrow corridor between two of the rocks and then came out into the open, onto the almost level top of a boulder in which the creek pooled at one end before spilling over, falling some twenty feet to the rocky bed below. Part of the rock’s surface lay in sunshine and part in shade, shielded by the boulders towering behind it. This was it then, Liz’s “special place,” a beautifully isolated sundeck with its own private pool, water as cold as it was clear, Hook discovered, scooping some up to drink. Liz spread out her suede jacket and lay down in the sun.

“You like it?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s great.”

“Trouble is, it’s not really mine. Others know about it too.”

“Who?”

“A lot of people, I suppose. Like one time last summer I was lying here in the buff, and in comes this young couple. Just kids they were, seventeen or eighteen.”

“Did they stay?”

She smiled. “They stayed.”

“You enjoy playing the scarlet woman,” Hook said.

“Not really. If I smiled it was because they were nice, that’s all. We got along.”

Hook had already sat down and now he took off his jacket. It was warm in the canyon, warm and quiet. All he could hear was a single jay squalling somewhere below. “Did you come here with Chris?” he asked.