Afterwards he lay there holding her, in her still, his lips brushing lightly over her closed eyes, her mouth, her cheeks. She had her arms around him and he could feel her hands lightly tracing the ridge of muscle along his spine.

And it was then she said it:

“Your back is just like his was.”

It was as if a snake had slid between their bodies. For a time neither of them breathed. There was no sound. The creek had stopped running. The distant jay fell silent. Immediately soft, he pulled out of her and knelt above her, looking down as she opened her eyes for the millisecond it took to see the cold rage of knowing in his own eyes and to turn from it.

“You liar,” he got out. “You pitiful liar.”

And then abruptly he had her by the hair and had pulled her down to the pool’s edge.

“The truth,” he said. “All of it. Now.”

11

The threat of being drowned like a kitten had not frightened Liz at all. He had held her by the hair in the pool for what seemed like minutes, with just her face above water, her arrogant eyes unblinkingly meeting his and her mouth parted, teeth bared, as if he were still in her, still giving her pleasure. So he had let go of her finally, had stumbled up onto the dry rock surface and had begun to punch his way back into his clothes. And it was only then, only out of danger, that she had given him anything, in fact gave him all of it.

“It was Jack and Parnelli,” she said. “They did it.”

Driving her back into town, Hook considered that statement and what had followed, and for him it was not simply a more recent version of how Chris had died but the truth itself, the immutable rock of fact. But because this truth was so close to what he had suspected all along, he warned himself to be wary of it now, to hold it in his mind the way he would hold soil from available land, lightly, letting it sift through his fingers.