First there was the tone of the letter, which Hook was confident Sergeant Rider and even Mrs. Rubin would have to admit was not that of a boy with “nothing to live for.” But just as important, Hook thought, was the fact that the letter put Chris on the highway hitchhiking out of Santa Barbara a full day before Elizabeth Madera claimed to have picked him up. According to the sergeant, the death occurred December 11 at one in the morning, some fifteen hours after Miss Madera supposedly picked Chris up on 101 around nine-thirty the previous morning—the tenth. But the letter was dated December 8 and was finished the next morning—December 9—just minutes before Chris intended to be out on the highway thumbing for a ride. Further, the letter was postmarked in Santa Barbara December 9, A.M. So the ladies’ statements to Rider left an entire day unaccounted for, and Hook believed Chris had spent that day—and the next—at Mrs. Rubin’s beach house with Elizabeth Madera. That meant the two of them had been together almost forty hours, which was a long time for a young man to remain at the scene of his sexual humiliation, and an even longer time for a pair of busy unsympathetic women to tolerate his presence. No, Hook figured that Chris had spent those hours just about as he himself had whiled away his time with Mrs. Cunningham a quarter-century before, and that Elizabeth Madera’s initial objective—to give the boy lunch, to have someone to talk to—had grown into something more once she had gotten to know Chris. At any rate, she had asked him to stay. And his staying had led to trouble, possibly with Mrs. Rubin or young Ferguson. An accident had occurred, some stupid and unexpected calamity that, known, would have led to unwanted consequences for someone. So they had tried to cover it up. But what Hook could not begin to understand was why they had chosen to cover it up the way they had. Certainly they must have known that the boy had a history, a family, a background that could be checked, and that once it was, everything in that background might point in any direction except that of suicide. So why had they not done the simple, logical thing and called it an accident? The autopsy had put Chris’s blood alcohol level high enough for him to have been drunk. It was conceivable that in the darkness he could have stumbled off the cliff, just as it was conceivable that seven years before a tired half-drunk salesman could have fallen asleep at the wheel of his Pontiac and crashed head-on into another car outside Alton, Illinois. One learned to live with what was conceivable. But suicide, for Chris, was not. So why had the women insisted on it? Hook did not know. But he would find out.

When he reached the gate to his farm and started walking up the drive through the woods he was surprised at the shortness of his breath. Only four days had passed since Chief Janson delivered his message of death, yet in that time Hook felt as if he had aged twenty years, and not so much from grief, he believed, as from its denial, his refusal to face anything for the present except what lay ahead of him when he returned to California.