“Perhaps I was stoned at the time. Unconscious.”

He took her by the arm and spun her roughly around, making her face him. “And were you?” he asked. “Is this what did happen?”

But if he was excited, she was not. Casually, even contemptuously, she stared down at his hand on her arm until he finally relaxed his grip. “I said it was theoretical, and it is,” she said. “I just wondered what you’d do, that’s all. If you’d be able to accept it and go home. Or would you still want vengeance? Blood?”

Hook could barely speak. “All I want is the truth.”

She laughed at him. “The truth! Well, I can’t tell you the truth. You ought to know that by now. I don’t even know what it looks like. Or sounds like. It’s a foreign language here. Nous ne le parlons pas.”

Hook was almost shaking with rage. His fists hung like mallets at his sides. “If you were a man,” he said, “I think I’d beat you to death.”

“Now you’re making sense.”

Hook heard the remark, but in his anger it did not register. “My son is dead,” he got out. “You make him a suicide, and when I try to talk to you about it you get fashionable and cute. You play-act. You talk about dying and truth as if they were private little concepts all your own. But they’re not, Miss Madera. There’s real truth, and real death. And if you don’t know it now, someday you will.”

There was something honest back in her eyes now—pain or perhaps simply fear, a woman’s fear of a man—but she did not give in to it. Her mouth, her beautiful lips and teeth, held their shape of scorn. “Real truth,” she laughed. “Real death. How right that sounds coming from you. You don’t ever doubt, do you? You know. In your world everything is neatly black and white, isn’t it? No grays. No maybes. No either-ors.”

Hook had had enough of her. He told her he was sorry for having wasted her time as well as his own, and that she could do what she wanted now, he was going on by himself, alone. But as he started to move away from her she came after him and took him by the arm.

“You better not,” she said. “Let’s turn around and go back. I don’t like their looks.”

Hook had not even noticed them until now—three young male hippies sprawled out in the sand between some rocks about fifty yards up the beach. They had an almost empty gallon jug of red wine, and as Hook observed them now one dragged deeply on a cigarette and passed it to the next. All three were watching him and Liz.

“Come on,” she said. “You don’t know. There are some real freaks around here. And those three are probably stoned.”

Giving in to the pressure of her hand, Hook turned with her and headed back, but he was not mollified. He was not going to waste another word on her, he decided, even if she walked at his side all the way back to the beach house.