“And there’s no change in them?”

“How could there be? We can’t very well change what happened, can we?”

Hook looked at Miss Madera, who immediately turned away and went over to the fireplace. “Is there anything you can tell me?” he asked.

Still not looking at him, she shook her head. Hook waited a few moments to see if she would change her mind, but she continued to stand there staring down at the fire, with her back to him. Hook turned to Ferguson.

“I’d like to see where it happened,” he said.

“The cliff, you mean?”

“The cliff.”

Glancing nervously at Mrs. Rubin, the young man nodded. “All right. Sure. But I’ll have to get a flashlight. It’s in the kitchen, Dorothy?”

She was lighting another cigarette. “Top right-hand drawer.”

As Ferguson hurried up the stairs to the kitchenette, Hook moved closer to the fireplace, so that Miss Madera had no choice but to meet his eyes or turn away again and admit that she could not face him.

“Did he—did my son also say it to you? That he had nothing to live for?”

Again she shook her head. “I had gone to bed.”

It was the first time he had heard her voice, and it held no surprises for him, was both soft and strong, with the unmistakable timbre of old money, authority.

“That was after he had ‘failed’ with you.” Hook threw it at her without warning, a sucker punch, and suddenly her dark eyes shone with tears. Again she turned away from him.

But Mrs. Rubin came charging to the rescue, jumping up from the davenport. “Can’t you see she’s had it, for Christ sake! Just because you don’t have any feelings, buster—coming here like this—”

“Shut up, Dorothy.” Miss Madera said it quietly, easily, and when the big woman promptly lapsed into silence Hook was again at a loss to understand the relationship the three of them had with each other.

Now Miss Madera faced him squarely. “I just can’t talk about it now, Mr. Hook. I’m sorry.”

She swept past him then, heading for the back of the house. At the same time, Ferguson came down the stairs from the kitchen, carrying the flashlight. Watching him walk, the almost female hips swishing toward him, Hook wondered if the young man’s effeminacy might not be just skin-deep, a covering for something weasel-tough and cunning underneath. Now Ferguson flipped on the deck lights outside.

“When Mrs. Rubin went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, your boy was right there, drinking,” he said, indicating a chair close to the bar. “And when she came out he was gone. She turned on the light. This door was open.” He slid open the glass deck door, and Hook followed him outside, onto the deck. “So she came out here to see where he was. As you can see, with the light on you can see to the edge of the cliff. He was standing—”

“I know all that,” Hook cut in, heading for the end of the deck, where he went down the stairs. Ferguson followed him across the lawn, which became scraggly and rough as they neared the cliff edge. There, Hook took the flashlight from him and played it along the cliff face and the beach below, a dark-gray strip against which the surf came rolling in white and frothy and then turned coal-black as it slipped back into the sea. The cliff itself was not sheer; even leaping outwards, pushing off, a man would have struck it on the way down.