Near the end of January, Hook received a brief letter from Sergeant Rider informing him that the case had been closed. Liz Madera and Richard Ferguson each had been given suspended sentences of eighteen months. Ferguson had taken a job in Sacramento, and the last Rider had heard of Liz she had “joined some of her jet-set friends on a yacht cruise down to Acapulco or some other spic spa.” Dorothy Rubin finally had pled guilty herself and had been sentenced to a year in prison. As for Douglas and Parnelli, the town had swept the whole mess under the rug, the sergeant wrote, and he hoped Hook would do the same, “or better yet, sweep it out of your mind.”

Hook did not bother to try. Instead he settled for keeping his body so exhausted he did not have the will or energy to think. Normally the winter months were the easiest because there was no field work, but Hook had no trouble filling his days—and Arnie’s—cleaning the feedlot and bull barn and repairing equipment and buildings and fencing. In the evening he found that he could not relax enough to read or watch television, so he would go out again and work alone or with Bobby until he could feel his exhaustion like logs lashed to his back, and only then would he go to bed, to fall asleep immediately and remain asleep until his dreams would wake him finally in the middle of the night and he would lie there sweat-drenched in his great-grandfather’s antique fourposter, which Kate had reclaimed from under generations of paint and varnish. He would lie there and give himself over to his mind, as if he were surrendering a criminal suspect to the law. And then the grilling would begin, the unanswerable questions and accusations coming at him like fists and boots through all the long hours till morning light, when he would rise and begin pre-breakfast chores, already dead on his feet.

As the weeks passed, his digestion became poor and he began to lose his appetite, and then weight, until finally Aunt Marian was always pestering him about it, saying he looked like a scarecrow and that if he knew what was good for him he would have a checkup. Instead it was the old woman herself who began going to the doctor, almost as faithfully as she attended church. Suddenly she had all sorts of complaints, rheumatism and kidney trouble and nervous exhaustion. She napped excessively, and often Hook would come upon her crying alone. Jenny too was different, had become moody and quiet. She developed a great passion for music and now spent whole evenings alone in her room listening to country and rock records as if they were rites in some esoteric teen religion destined to sweep the world.

But of all of them, Bobby had changed the most. There seemed almost nothing left of the boy he had been as Chris’s brother. The muscular body and strong-boned face now had taken on a character to match, hard and dedicated, especially in his work on the farm, which he performed with grim efficiency. At school, he became a loner, shunning the company of friends he had known all his life. And he told Hook that he did not plan to go on to college, that all he wanted to do was raise cattle and the best place to learn the business and practice it was right there at home. Hook suggested that he could study something else, languages or history, but the boy said no, he was not interested.