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up to reality is too frightening to contemplate. And reality is what they have to face if they read the book with an iota of comprehension.” He swung his legs over the side of the chair and replenished his own glass of tea. “Have you been following the McCrutchen case?”
    â€œHard to avoid it,” she said. “Anything else in the news these days? Our own homegrown saint, getting more virtuous day by day from all accounts.” She glanced swiftly at the book, and the author’s name. “Ah,” she said, making the connection. “Etheridge. He seems to be in rather a spot, doesn’t he?”
    â€œHe does. He’s getting the bum’s rush toward an accusation. And apparently for no reason other than what he’s written and said. Ideas. Half the world’s trying to kill the other half over ideas,” Frank said.
    In his voice there was a quiet fury that she seldom heard, and she was surprised at its intensity. “Maybe there’s more evidence than what’s been handed out to the media,” she said.
    â€œMaybe, but I doubt it. All we keep hearing about is what he’s written, and he’s damned and doubly damned for it each and every time.”

    Lucy McCrutchen felt adrift that afternoon. The shock of Robert’s death had subsided, leaving a residue of despondency she could not shake. She felt strangely out of place in the house she had lived in for forty years, until Mac’s sudden death two years before. Now she was a guest in the guest room, trying to make sense of her son’s death, of what she had to do about the house, of how she felt about Chloe…She could not follow any one thought to a conclusion, but veered from one to another, back, in a hopeless loop.
    She was sixty-seven, slightly built, with dark hair shot through with silver. When it all turned, she would be like a silver fox, Mac had said once. Theirs had been a good marriage, passionate for many years, and later one of comfortable companionship. But he had put in far too many hours in surgery, with patients, at the office. Little golf or vacation time had been allowed for, and it had caught up with him in the form of a fatal heart attack two years earlier. After forty-four years of marriage, it had been hard for Lucy to adjust to a new life, and she had found that she had to get out of this house, away from everything familiar for a time. She had gone to her sister in Palm Springs. Robert and Chloe had given up their town house to live here during her absence, and she had become the outsider.
    She had never breathed a word about the scene she had witnessed on the deck the night of Robert’s party and had managed to put it out of mind, most of the time at any rate. But he had brought it back from quiescent memory to active nightmare by having that police file in his possession when he was killed. Why? It seemed that the only explanation for having that file was connected to David’s arrival.
    The night of the party, had David driven that girl home, as he had offered? No one had seemed to know when anyone else left that night. Should she have told what she witnessed? The question had tormented her then, and now it was back.
    The fear for her son had been overwhelming. Had Robert gone to his room, fallen asleep as he claimed? Chloe said she followed him to his room and took off his shoes. Lucy had never believed that. Chloe was not one to show that kind of consideration. But why would she have thought it necessary to lie?
    Lucy was haunted by the fear that Robert had gone out after the girl, and that Chloe knew or suspected as much. Now the fear had returned with as much force and dread as before. She had accepted, seized on, she corrected herself, she had seized on the police conclusion that a transient, probably one on drugs, had committed the murder.
    She and Mac had known Robert was promiscuous as a boy, and a womanizer as an adult, but they had never discussed it. She