“Yeah, he’s a nice guy.”

That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Anna maybe knew things I wasn’t aware she knew.

“You know Hinch?”

“I knew someone who worked for him,” she said.

“Who?”

“John.”

“John who? John Wren? You knew John Wren?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why? We’ve had one dinner. I haven’t told you my middle name, either. By the way, it’s Alicia.”

“So you were friends or something?”

“Kind of. What’s so remarkable about that?”

“Nothing. Just kind of funny that you know two reporters who lived in the same house.”

“He lived in your house, huh? Of course, it’s a small town. Not that many houses.”

“Right.” I gulped down some wine, desperately trying to recapture a suddenly elusive high. “Do you keep in touch with him?” I asked.

“I’m not sure he keeps in touch with anyone. I came to visit my dad one time, and he was just gone. That’s where we’d met. At the home. He was interviewing people about that… flood… the one back in the fifties. You know about that, right? Horrible-a whole town went under. I think he went to the retirement home to try to scare up some memories.”

Scare. Good word, I thought.

“I don’t think he was very successful at it,” I said. “The story never ran.”

“Really?” Anna said. “He seemed pretty excited about it. He e-mailed me once after he left Littleton-my impression was he’d holed himself up somewhere to work on it.”

“That’s strange, considering he was no longer employed,” I said. “Anyway, word was he was pretty excitable in general around then. He went a little bonkers.”

“Bonkers? Is that a psychiatric term?”

“He locked himself in the newspaper offices one night and had to be forcibly removed. I think that constitutes bonkers. I ought to know.”

“Was that what they said you were? Bonkers?”

“Only the nice ones. Everyone else said I was the devil.”

“You don’t look like the devil.”

“Thanks.” I blushed, took another sip of wine. “Was your father living here? Back when the flood happened?”

“Yes. He wouldn’t be able to tell you much about it, of course. Not now.”

Silence.

“I just tried to call him,” I said. “Wren.”

“Oh? What for?”

“I want to ask him about something I’m working on.”

“I thought you said he’d lost his mind?”

“Maybe he got it back.”

I was tempted to tell Anna that the something I was working on was the same thing Wren had been working on. The aforementioned nut job Wren.

It might sound paranoid to her. It might sound like a desperate reporter trying to get his mojo back.

Not that it really mattered.

Dinner had become uncomfortably awkward. It was as if the stopper had been pulled out of the bottle labeled Anna and Tom’s Dinner Conversation; the contents had poured out onto the floor, leaving nothing but a few paltry drops.

I felt less than whole in her eyes, an ethical cripple. The whole mood had soured. She made a halfhearted effort to resuscitate things, but she seemed to be going through the motions.

When I paid the bill, when we walked outside and I escorted her to her car, I didn’t know whether to say good night or good-bye.

We lingered in front of her red Beetle-more maroon in the moonlight-and it was like that moment in front of a girl’s apartment door when you’re either going to get shot down or rescued and you don’t for the life of you know which.

She leaned forward and kissed me.

On the cheek.

“I’ll call you sometime,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”

I wanted to say that’s it?

I wanted to take that butterfly that had begun flitting about my chest the day she fixed my car and never really stopped-I wanted to pin it down. To display it somewhere where I could hold it up to the light and stare at it.

She’d call me sometime. Then what? She’d call me as a friend or an acquaintance or something more? She’d call me because she wanted to, or because she had to, or she was never going to call at all?

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

TWENTY-ONE

The ride back was a journey into self-pity.

I was familiar with the terrain, having visited it on a number of previous occasions-mostly in that one-year period I spent holed up in my NoHo apartment like a prisoner in isolation. I journeyed frequently to Self-Pity then, sampling the local tequila and scribbling postcards to Dr. Payne: having no fun, wish you were here.

I’d mostly refrained from giving Anna the psychobabble, but Dr. Payne had shown no such restraint.

Why did this liar lie?

You really want to know, Anna?

Are you sure?

Because I woke up hours late one morning, and needed to.

Because the Ward Cleaver of editors patted me on the head and said good job.

Not good enough?

You want more?

Because I lied to my 9-year-old self, lied that my dad wasn’t sleeping with that waitress, that he’d be home any minute, that my mom was not a sadistic drunk, that the men trooping upstairs with her really liked me when they didn’t even like her.

That Jimmy was clumsy.

Children of alcoholics tend to see what they want to and not see what they don’t, Dr. Payne said.

You have no idea.

He slipped on the ice and he hurt his head.

He slipped.

On the ice.

Lying as defense mechanism, Dr. Payne said. Don’t knock it.

Lying as palliative, an elixir, a quicker-fixer-upper.

Lying like a cheap rug and a thousand-dollar hooker.

Lying as my MO.

Lying to caseworkers from Children’s Protective Services. To the police. To everyone.

What happened, Tommy?

He slipped.

On the ice.

He hurt his head.

When I saw a black figure sauntering up the front walk of my house, it didn’t register at first.

Even when I noticed he was carrying some kind of bag in his left hand, even then it took me a few seconds to organize that thought into anything resembling coherence. That’s interesting, I said, and took my foot off the gas pedal.

He stopped. Halfway to my front door. Where his face was momentarily lit up by the bug zapper attached to the half-dead elm on my lawn, those repulsive features illuminated in a sickly flash of purple.

You’re it.

Our friendly neighborhood plumber. Back for another service call.

He knew he had company.

My Miata had stopped dead in the middle of the street, as if that finicky coil wire had popped loose again.

He ran back into his pickup truck and zoomed off, quickly accelerating past the legal speed limit, assuming you weren’t allowed to do ninety on a residential street.

I gunned the engine, followed his taillights.

They dodged and darted and weaved and blew past the aluminum-sided homes on Redondo Lane, past the hacienda-style stucco ranch houses on West Road, past 7-Eleven, Shakey’s, and IHOP, past San Pedro High School and the motorcycle bar out in the flats. They ignored five stop signs and two lights and a bunch of rowdy teenagers on Warrow Road, who were chug-a-lugging beer from brown paper bags in the middle of the street and had to literally dive for cover.

I’m not sure if I’d ever driven that fast before.

Maybe in a video game.

I hadn’t realized how drunk I was-not until I clipped my first car on a wide turn around the high school ball field, a slight jolt accompanied by the awful sound of shearing metal, sound slightly behind sensation, as if the sound waves needed a while to catch up.

I clipped my second car somewhere by Littleton’s nine-hole golf course. This time not even seeing what I hit-just knowing I hit something, because my Miata rocked violently to the right and its victim cried out in pain, a car alarm bursting into full-throated fury.