And it lessened his pain and anguish no more than the version in the Santa Barbara County News, which had been printed after Douglas’s suicide and addressed itself almost wholly to that event, but with a restraint and decorum that would have better fitted the peaceful passing of some elder local statesman. Parnelli’s death, Hook’s presence at the scene, the nephew’s arrest and confession—it was all reported, and that was all. None of it was connected into a meaningful whole. If any inferences were to be drawn, the reader would have to do the drawing himself; the paper obviously was not about to.

Yet as the jet plunged across the continent, Hook found himself reading the Santa Barbara news story just as avidly as the one in the Los Angeles paper. But no matter how carefully he combed them, he was unable to find anything to counteract his growing suspicion that he was bringing home not some precious hard-won prize of war but rather its opposite, a curse, a disease of war. He felt infected, a bearer of plague.

It was bright sunshine when the jet touched down in St. Louis and taxied toward the Saarinen-designed terminal building, which looked to Hook as if it had melted in the steamy Missouri summers, the way its great roof sagged in some areas and ballooned up in others, like unevenly corrugated tin. Within minutes he would be inside the building, he told himself. He would be with them. So he tried to prepare himself, tried to will the pain and exhaustion and dread out of his spirit and out of his face. He did not want them to see how it was with him, not yet anyway.

Then suddenly he was there, inside, walking with his fellow passengers toward a crowd of day-before-Christmas travelers and welcomers milling beyond the gates. When he finally picked them out, Bobby, Jenny, and Aunt Marian pressed against a railing, he thought his heart would burst with the joy of seeing them again. Jenny looked beautiful, tall and golden in a new Laplander coat, while Marian looked only herself, splendidly herself, wearing one of her silly Sunday hats and the venerable dark brown cloth coat with the squirrel collar. Both she and Jenny were smiling and crying at the same time. Bobby, however, was all stiffness, all pain and pride and jailed emotion. And perhaps because of this, he was the one Hook wanted the most to embrace and yet he knew the boy could not have accepted it any more than he himself could have given it, not there, in front of half the world. So all he did was lay his hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeeze him slightly. The women, though, he hugged and kissed, especially Jenny, who would not let go of him. Bobby immediately asked him what had happened in California, but Hook told him that it was too noisy there in the terminal, he would explain it all in the car on the way home.