“But of course you’d never be a part of it—never a voyeur on his knees.”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“All I’m saying is Jack’s not the jealous type. Nor the faithful type. What he is, is the political type. But then it’s all academic anyway, as you’ll find out when you check the names he gave you. He wasn’t at the beach house that night. You’re taking a blind alley.”

“Maybe so. But it’s all I’ve got so far.”

“Not all. There’s still my word. And Dorothy’s.”

“Yes, there’s still that.”

“Only that’s not much, is it?” She tossed him a smile meant to be sardonic, light, but he could see the pain in it.

“I wish it were.”

Her reaction to that was to walk away from him, out into the surf as it slid up the pitch of the beach and then ran out again, trailing intricate lines of force. She went deep enough so that the water rose above her ankles, soaking the bottom of her chinos. And for a hundred yards or so she went on this way, walking alone in the water as if she felt it constituted a barrier against him and any further conversation. Then they came to the reef, whose jagged black rocks appeared to be moving landward, like sculptured surf, waves forever about to fall and crash. And the reef forced her to come back onto the beach, which was narrow at that point under the cliff and strewn with boulders and rock formations. On one of the rocks, which sloped up smoothly from the sand, she lay back in the sun and covered her eyes with her forearm. Hook lit a cigarette and leaned back against another boulder. For a while neither of them said a word. Hook stood there smoking and trying not to look at her, but that proved impossible. Her hair was spread out on the rock like some luxuriant wild sea growth and her mouth was parted, her teeth bared—against the sun probably, against the brightness—but it looked like the beginning of a smile, the smile of a woman making love, and he wondered if she was trying to seduce him, or just tease him, mock him. And he began to wonder if he understood her at all, if that honest suffering human thing he sometimes thought he saw in her eyes reflected anything inside or was just a screen, a mirror reflecting only himself, what he wanted to see in her. From the beginning he had thought of her as somehow a victim too, like Chris, a part of the tragedy. But now the possibility that she could be more, even its perpetrator, began to slip and crawl over the surface of his mind like a worm seeking entrance.

“This whole thing,” she said suddenly. “I know how it is for you. You’ve made that abundantly clear to all of us. But do you ever wonder how it is for me?”

“I’d like to know that very much,” he said.