She had stopped again, turned to face him with cool inscrutable eyes. “You what? Are you saying you love me?”

He shook his head. “Only that I don’t want to walk away from you. I want you in my life.”

“How much? Enough to give up this vendetta of yours? Enough to let me—and the others—go free?”

He did not answer her, just stood there looking up at her searching, beautiful eyes until she shook her head finally, almost imperceptibly, in pity, he assumed. Then she turned again and went on to the top of the cliff, moving through great pools of sunshine now as the fog thinned.

When they reached the beach-house deck she turned to him, almost formally, and he had the feeling she was going to reach out and shake his hand. Instead she smiled, a cold social smile, a smile forged in the foundries of hatred. She told him not to worry about his little speech back there on the cliff.

“You don’t want me,” she said. “And I don’t want you. I never could. For me, it’s always been the soft and easy things. The warm things. Like this coast. I don’t want any part of your cold winters, Mister Hook. Your cold righteousness. And that’s what it is, isn’t it—a kind of God-playing. Like Jack and Bo played God with Chris’s life, you are with theirs. Only you’re sober, aren’t you? Cold sober.”

Hook was still shocked by the look of her, this new and sudden carapace of hatred she had grown. Yet he heard her words. He weighed them. Finally he repeated them.

“Cold sober. You’re right, Liz.” He did not add that he considered the judgment a fair one, that cold sober was not an insult but a compliment, the proper state and attitude and philosophy of a man, if he would live as a man.

That afternoon Hook could see no reason to go on waiting through the entire day and put in a call to Sergeant Rider to learn if Douglas or any of the others had contacted the police. But Rider was not in, the switchboard operator said. Would Hook want to talk with someone else? No, he would not. He would call later.

He was downtown at the time, in a parking garage across from the courthouse. He considered walking a few doors up the street to El Cielito and taking a sidewalk table there, sitting alone and drinking slowly through the afternoon in the hope that Rider might pass by or stop in to eat. But he decided against it, mostly because he did not want to drink—just the thought of more liquor made him feel almost ill—but also because he knew he would not be able to sit alone in public for very long without feeling uncomfortable and wanting to leave. So he walked around the downtown area for a time. And again he was impressed by Santa Barbara’s old-world elegance and solidity—buildings and fountains and benches and even bus stops that appeared to have been designed with a view to beauty as well as function, all of which proved to him only that Americans could build a decent city to live in—if enough of them were millionaires. But handsome as the place was, Hook found his patience fraying, found that sunshine and flowering hibiscus and picturesque curio and art shops were not strong enough distractions during these long hours of tension and waiting. So he tried a movie, in an ornate old theater with twinkling stars in its ceiling and walls simulating the perimeters of a Spanish courtyard.