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in the heavy silence. Chris grabbed the seat back and held it.
    Then, abruptly, he shoved it back into place. Helen looked over at him as he sat down, his back to her.
    “Oh, what’s the use?” he said. He sat there turning the flashlight restlessly in his hands.
    Helen swallowed.
    “Chris, if you’re expecting me to encourage you,” she said, “I can’t.”
    “I don’t want encouragement,” he answered. “I want—to
end
this, to get you out of it.” Abruptly, he drew his legs in and closed the door.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “Going to the police.”
    “Chris,
please
.” Helen closed her hands into rigid fists. “I love you. I don’t want you to go to prison. If you think you can put him here without him being found, then do it.
Do
it! But, for God’s sake, get it over with!”
    “All right, Helen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
    Hastily, he slid out of the car and unlocked the back trunk to get the shovel he always kept inside. Helen wondered why he hadn’t put the man in the trunk too, then remembered that the trunk door wouldn’t open when the garage door was down. Chris would have had to open the garage, but then someone might have seen. He had done the only thing possible.
    The only thing possible
. That was what made it all a nightmare. Everything seemed so inevitable. The phone call, the locking of the house, the man’s violent entrance and death, the placing of his body in the car, the drive along the ocean, the policemen stopping them, the burial now. Nothing could have happened in any other way. Itwas as if they were trapped in some inexorable plan which had determined their past and their present and would also determine their future.
    Still it seemed impossible to accept. Such things did not happen really. Melodrama was confined to bad motion pictures. And now, melodrama had engulfed her so quickly and violently that it seemed beyond belief. If there had been something in the past to signal its coming she might be able to accept. But there had been nothing. She thought about it as carefully as she could. There had been nothing.
    She’d met Chris at a concert—that was the start. The Santa Monica Music Guild sponsored a series of concerts every year to which she and her mother subscribed. That particular night, Helen remembered, Wallenstein had been conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
    During intermission, she walked downstairs with her mother to get a drink of water and stretch her legs. Her mother had gone into the ladies’ room and Helen out onto the porch for some air. Only later did she realize that Chris was out there at the same time. If either of them had stayed outside until the intermission was over, they might never have met. The ironies of coincidence, however, were far from her mind that night and for years of nights to come.
    When she decided that her mother had probably left the ladies’ room and was wondering where she was, Helen went back inside. She didn’t see her mother at first. Then, after several moments, she caught sight of her standing near the center aisle entrance, talking with Mrs. Saxton who owned the Melody Music Shop. She went over and they chatted a few minutes about how wonderfully the orchestra had played the Brahms Third, how marvelously adept Wallenstein was in drawing such a performance from them.
    Then a figure stepped up beside Helen and Chris was in her life.
    “Marjorie, Helen,” said Mrs. Saxton, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Martin.”
    There were the usual amenities, the usual small talk about the concert, about Mrs. Saxton’s shop. Mrs. Saxton told them that Chris was working for her and that the way he was going at it, she’d be working for him before long. The laughter was polite, casual. Then the buzzer sounded and they were all returning to their seats.
    “He seems like a nice young man,” her mother commented as they went up the stairs.
    “Yes, Mrs. Cupid,” Helen answered.
    The concert ended, they left the