A bar stood by their path. He led her inside, to a booth. The drab routine of checking Corinna's age seemed to help calm her. She asked for straight Irish whisky, he took beer. Only then did she challenge him: "How do you know?" "It's a long story," he said, "and frankly, I'm not certain how much of it you should hear. So suppose you begin by telling me why you think they did it." "The police--" "Uh-huh. They paid a little more attention to your ideas than you thought. They checked and found Gene had dropped out of sight over the weekend. He and his father refused to cooperate, doubtless being very surly about it, so now they're in the calaboose. But what could their motive have been in the first place?" Her fingers twisted together. "Oh, all that business years ago, when their boat rammed Dad's." "What more? It's something to do with you, isn't it?" "Yes. Nothing disgraceful, I suppose. But ugly. A million people sniggering over this new revelation about our family--isn't there going to be end to it, ever?" The drinks came. She tossed hers off recklessly and asked for another. While she waited, and he worked on his beer, she looked squarely across the table at him and said: "Gene came back from the Navy last summer. He looked up Bruce in Berkeley. Bruce took him home to our parents for dinner; I happened to be there too. Gene gave me quite a play. He could be very charming. We had a number of dates." The color crept into her face, but she went on: "Yes, he did his best to seduce me. When that didn't work, he asked me to marry him. Every time we went out, it would end up with a proposal--and a wrestling match. I liked him, though. And he'd moved back to San Francisco from the Eastbay, taken a different job, just to be near me. Who wouldn't be flattered, and touched? But I finally had to lay down the law. It was a fight, physically, to make him behave. I caught a taxi home." The waitress came back. Corinna picked up her second glass and sipped slowly. "He apologized the next day," she said, "but I told him I couldn't go out with him any more. He seemed to take it pretty well, said he would go back to Chicago--he'd spent a lot of time there once--but he asked for some kind of send-off. I--I spoke to Bruce. Gene had always been an admirer of Bruce. Odd, that big, husky, world-tramping fellow, admiring Bruce. We couldn't just drop him like that. We arranged a double date for a weekend early in December, a trip down to Carmel. I knew Bruce was in love, he couldn't hide that, but I asked him to take a friend of mine from the theater. It would make the atmosphere different. Safer, I thought."