They walked rapidly, Hook keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead, but Liz turned every few steps to look back and see if they were being followed. They were not.

After they passed the dead sea lion and made it around the point, Liz said, “I begin to understand your son now.”

Hook asked her what she meant.

“What he did. Why he did it.”

Hook felt a sudden weakness. “Go on,” he said.

“I didn’t want to hurt you before. I wanted to leave you with something. But that back there—what you did—it proves what Chris said about you. That you don’t bend. That in your mind you are always right. That’s what he said about you, that you are very fair and very strong and always, always, right. And he was freezing to death in your cold shadow, Mr. Hook. That’s why he left home, he said. Why he had to get away from you.”

Hook looked at her as they walked, but she was staring straight ahead and her look was unreadable. “That’s not true,” he said.

“In order to breathe—that’s why Chris had to get away from you. That’s what he told me.”

He took her roughly by the shoulders and again told her that what she said was not true. But she just stood there, draped there in his hands coolly looking up at him.

“And all across the country,” she said, “all he found was more coldness and misery and unhappiness. So he was dying too, Mr. Hook. Just like me. Only he hurried up the process a little, that’s all.”

“His letter,” Hook said. “You read his letter.”

“We all play roles. Especially with our parents. They expect it. They don’t like their little ones to change.”

“You lie. You’re a lying bitch.”

“Why don’t you knock me down, then? Isn’t it my turn now?”

For a few moments longer Hook stood there holding onto her, hating the cold assurance in her half-closed eyes. Then he let go of her, shoved her away from him like some foul drunk. She walked on for a short distance, and then set out running and kept on until she was well ahead of him, and walked for a hundred yards or so and then ran on again, growing smaller and smaller as she headed for the beach house.

7

At six that evening Hook telephoned home and spoke with Aunt Marian and Jennifer and Bobby, telling them that things were going along all right but not very rapidly and that the family should not expect him back home very soon. They all said they were doing fine and told him not to worry about them, but their voices belonged to strangers, a family he had not heard before.

After hanging up, he then tried to call Icarus, twice, five minutes apart. But each time no one answered. On a vagrant impulse then he looked up Jack Douglas’s home address in the phone book and found a Douglas, John D. at 300 Sutton Lane in Montecito. He wondered if he ought to drive by and have a look, though he had no idea what he could learn by doing so. But it was still early in the evening and there was not much else to do, so he decided to go ahead.