Sometime later he opens his eyes and realizes the car isn’t moving. The Caddy has, in fact, been parked for a while. He has no idea how he can know this, only that he does.

The light is different. It isn’t morning yet, but the night is in retreat, has already scooped up most of its stars and put them away. Fat, pale, mountainous clouds, the shreds of last night’s thunderstorm, drift vividly against a backdrop of darkness. Terry has a good view of the sky, staring up through one of the side windows. He can smell dawn, a fragrance of rain-saturated grass and warming earth. When he sits up, he sees that Lee has left the driver’s-side door ajar.

He reaches on the floor for his sport coat. It must be down there somewhere; he assumes it slipped off his lap while he was asleep. There’s the toolbox, but no coat. The driver’s-side seat is folded forward, and Terry climbs out.

His spine cracks as he puts his arms out to his sides and stretches his back, and then he goes still-arms reaching out into the night like a man nailed to an invisible cross.

Lee sits smoking on the steps of his mother’s house. His house now, Terry remembers, Lee’s mother six weeks in the ground. Terry can’t see Lee’s face, only the orange coal of his Winston. For no reason Terry can put his finger on, the sight of Lee waiting for him there on the porch steps unsettles him.

“Some night,” Terry says.

“It isn’t over yet.” Lee inhales, and the coal brightens, and for a moment Terry can see part of Lee’s face, the bad part, the part with the dead eye in it. In the morning gloom, that eye is white and blind, a glass sphere filled with smoke. “How’s your head?”

Terry reaches up to touch the scrape on his temple, then drops his hand. “Fine. No big deal.”

“I had an accident, too.”

“What accident? You okay?”

“I am. But Merrin isn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Abruptly, Terry is aware of the clammy-sick hangover sweat on his body, a kind of unpleasant dewy sensation. He looks down at himself and sees black finger smears on his shirt, mud or something, has only a vague memory of wiping his hand on himself. When he looks back at Lee, he is suddenly afraid to hear what he has to say.

“It really was an accident,” Lee said. “I didn’t know how serious it was until it was too late to help her.”

Terry stares, waiting on the punch line. “You’re moving too fast, buddy. What happened?”

“That’s what we have to figure out. You and me. That’s what I want to talk about. We need to have our story straight, before they find her.”

Terry does the reasonable thing and laughs. Lee has a famously dry, flat sense of humor, and if the sun was up and Terry wasn’t so dreadfully sick, he might appreciate it. Terry’s right hand, however, doesn’t think Lee is funny. Terry’s right hand has, all on its own, begun to pat Terry’s pockets, feeling for his cell phone.

Lee says softly, “Terry. I know this is terrible. But I’m not kidding. We’re in a real mess here. Neither of us is to blame-this is no one’s fault-but we’re in about the most awful trouble two people can be in. It was an accident, but they’ll say we killed her.”

Terry wants to laugh again. Instead he says, “Stop it.”

“I can’t. You need to hear this.”

“She is not dead.”

Lee sucks at his cigarette, and the coal brightens, and the eye of pale smoke stares at Terry. “She was drunk, and she came on to me. I guess it was her way of getting even with Ig. She had her clothes off, and she was all over me, and when I pushed her away-I didn’t mean to. She fell over a root or something and landed on a rock. I walked away from her, and when I came back-just awful. I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but I’d rather take out my other eye than have ever caused her pain.”

Terry’s next breath is a lungful not of oxygen but of terror; he inhales a chestful of it, as if it were a gas, an airborne toxin. There is a churning feeling in both stomach and head. There is a feeling of the ground tilting underfoot. He has to call someone. He has to find his phone. He has to get help; this is a situation that calls for calm authorities with experience handling emergencies. He turns to the car, leans into the backseat looking for his sport coat. His cell phone must be in his coat. But the coat isn’t on the floor where he thought it would be. It isn’t in the front seat either.

Lee’s hand on the nape of his neck causes Terry to jump upright, crying out, a soft sobbing shout, and to pull away from him.

“Terry,” Lee says. “We need to figure out what we’re going to say.”

“There’s nothing to figure out. I need my phone.”

“You can use the one in the house if you want.”

Terry stiff-arms Lee, pushing him aside, and marches toward the porch. Lee pitches his cigarette and follows, in no particular hurry.

“You want to call the cops, I won’t stop you. I’ll go with you to meet them at the foundry,” Lee says, “show them where to find her. But you better know what I’m going to tell them before you pick up the phone, Terry.”

Terry takes the steps in two bounding leaps, crosses the porch, jerks open the screen door, and pushes the front door in. He takes a stumbling step into a dark front hall. If there’s a phone here, he can’t see it in all the shadows. The kitchen is through to the left.

“We were all so drunk,” Lee says. “We were drunk, and you were high. She was the worst, though. That’s what I’ll tell them first. She was coming on to the both of us from the moment she got in the car. Ig called her a whore, and she was determined to prove him right.”

Terry is only half listening. He moves swiftly through a small formal dining room, barking his knee on a straight-backed chair, stumbling, then going on, into the kitchen. Lee comes after him, his voice unbearably calm.

“She told us to pull over so she could change out of her wet clothes, and then she put on a show, standing in the headlights. The whole time you didn’t say anything, just watching her, listening to her talk about how Iggy had a few things coming to him for the way he treated her. She made out with me a while, and then she went to work on you. She was so drunk she couldn’t see how angry you were. In the middle of giving you her little lap dance, she started talking about all the money she could get, selling the story of Terry Perrish’s private gang bang to the tabloids. That it would be worth doing to get even with Ig, just to see his face. That was when you hit her. You hit her before I knew what was happening.”

Terry is in the kitchen, at the counter, his hand on the beige phone, but he doesn’t pick it up. For the first time, he turns his head and looks back at tall, wiry Lee with his crown of golden-white hair, and his terrible, mysterious white eye. Terry puts a hand in the center of Lee’s chest and shoves him hard enough to slam him back into the wall. The windows rattle. Lee doesn’t look too upset.

“No one’s going to believe that horseshit.”

“Who knows what they’ll believe?” Lee Tourneau says. “It’s your fingerprints on the rock.”

Terry pulls Lee by the shirt, away from the wall, and smashes him into it again, pins him there with his right hand. A spoon falls from the counter, strikes the floor, rings like a chime. Lee regards him, unperturbed.

“You dropped that big fat joint you were smoking right next to the body. And she’s the one gave you that scrape,” Lee says. “Fighting you. After she was dead, you cleaned yourself off with her underwear. It’s your blood all over her panties.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Terry asks. The word “panties” also seems to ring in the air, just like the spoon.

“The scrape on your temple. I cleaned it with her underwear, while you were passed out. I need you to understand the situation, Terry. You’re in this thing as much as me. Maybe more.”

Terry brings the left hand back, squeezing his fingers into a fist, then catches himself. There is a kind of eagerness in Lee’s face, a bright-eyed anticipation, his breathing shallow and fast. Terry doesn’t hit him.