He evidently had gone for the big athlete’s groin, and Parnelli, twisting to avoid the blow, had his legs kicked out from under him. That left Douglas alone against Chris for a few moments, but then Parnelli was back on his feet and finally it was impossible to see what was happening. The three of them kept working closer to the cliff edge—Liz could remember screaming at them from the deck to watch out, to stop their fighting—and then suddenly there were only the two of them standing there, Douglas and Parnelli. She still did not know precisely how it had happened, which of them had actually thrown Chris over or whether it was both of them who had done it or simply something that had happened without anyone knowing how, but she did recall their shock and panic immediately afterwards. “It had to have been an accident,” Liz said. “They both just came unglued. It was Ferguson and Dorothy who kept Jack from calling the police. And I think Parnelli wanted to too—he was crying like a baby. As I was. I broke down completely. I don’t remember running down the cliff at all, but I got down there somehow. I remember touching his body, trying to turn him over. But he was so limp, like foam rubber. Dorothy and Ferguson finally got me back up to the top and I found Jack and Bo already gone—Ferguson and Dorothy had already done their job on them, I guess, convinced them to get out of there and go home and shut up and let them, Rich and Dorothy, handle everything. And they did. They gave me a couple of sleeping pills to calm me down, and then I guess Ferguson helped Dorothy clean up and told her what she was supposed to tell the police, and then he left too.”

From that point on, the story was essentially the same as in Liz’s earlier version. Instead of telling the police that the thing was an unfortunate accident, as Ferguson had instructed her to do, Mrs. Rubin concocted the suicide fable, for what twisted personal needs Liz could only guess at, and the rest of them had finally had to go along with her, for the same reasons Liz had already explained to Hook.

So that was that. He had it finally. The truth.

Throughout the drive back to town, Hook was almost oblivious of Liz sitting next to him in the car. Most of the time she kept her face averted, looking out the window at the dry sundrenched day as the car plunged down out of the foothills, squealing around curve after curve, with Hook holding his foot on the brake most of the time. In the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to reach the downtown, she said nothing, did not even ask where they were going, probably because she already knew.

After he had pulled into the lot behind the tan U-shaped building and parked, Hook could not rid himself of an intense feeling of unreality, as if somehow he had stepped out of this moment in time and space and had become his own spectator, an indifferent deity observing this spare unstylish man squint uncomfortably in the sunshine as he looked first at the archway that led to the building’s front courtyard, and then, stooping, glanced back into the car, at the young woman still sitting inside it.