Even before he was finished she had begun to shake her head in a kind of wonderment, disbelief. “You are so pitiful, you know that?” she said now. “So pitifully square. Don’t you think I could look you in the eye—and lie, and lie, and lie?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Her look of amused incredulity withered and in its place there was only pain and anger now. She got up and strode swiftly on ahead of him, through the rocks and around the tip of the headland, a cliff jutting out into the sea like an overturned ocean liner. Following her, Hook saw ahead of them another great sweep of beach running all the way to Arroyo Burro, where in the light of a driftwood fire Mrs. Cunningham had introduced him to the pleasures of fellatio so many years before. Far in the distance he saw a few surfers braving the fifty-degree water. He came abreast of Liz, and together they walked along in silence, moving past the last of the rocks. And then Hook saw that one was not a rock at all but a dead sea lion lying in the sand, its body moving slightly as the last few feet of surf would wash in around it and recede, as if the sea were trying to reclaim it. The creature’s eyes were open, a pair of milky gray orbs that appeared to see both everything and nothing.

“The beach patrol will pick him up,” Liz said, as they moved around it. “It’s not unusual. You see one every now and then. I think when they feel they’re dying they come to land to die—to die like an animal, not a fish.”

Hook asked her if that was fact or theory.

“My kind of fact,” she replied.

It was obvious to Hook that he was not going to get anything from her, not if he stayed with her throughout the afternoon. So it made him feel ridiculous to still be walking along with her, like some overly friendly stray dog. His pride begged him to turn and walk away, but he could not. He told himself there was still the possibility that something might be learned.

And suddenly she sounded as if she were about to give him everything.

“Mr. Hook, let me ask you this. And this is just theoretical. If I could tell you what you wanted to hear—that Chris wasn’t queer, and he didn’t say he had nothing to live for, that he didn’t take his own life—could you just accept it and go home? Could you let it go at that?”

Hook tried to keep his voice even. “Maybe. But I’d want to know what did happen.”

“What if I said it was just an accident?”

“I’d want to know why you call it a suicide.”

“And if I said that was a stupid accident too?”

“I’d want to know how. In what way.”

“And if I couldn’t tell you?”

Hook looked at her. Her gaze was level, calm, fixed on the distant surfers. “Why couldn’t you?” he asked.