From the top of the quad lift, at eighty-three hundred feet above sea level, they took another lift. On a clear day the lake would be shining below. Today, she could barely see Jim. The snow sped past lightly, stinging her face, small dry flakes that meant great weekend skiing.
‘‘Maybe we should come back,’’ she finally said as he helped her up after she spilled off the lift, losing a ski. ‘‘I’m not an expert—the weather makes it hard to take pictures and—’’
‘‘Let’s get it over with. You’re with an expert. I won’t let anything happen to you. You have to see them
—the rocks and the cliff. We’re suited up now. I don’t care if we can’t get any pictures.’’
‘‘I don’t know.’’
‘‘I’ll carry you on my back if I have to. Just take it easy. The fresh snow will give us more traction—otherwise it might be too icy for you to manage.’’
She followed him carefully along a ridge which took them above a misty ridge and canyon, skiing glumly behind him on the narrow trail, her wool hat pulled low.
They went over the mountain, like the proverbial bear, but all that they could see was near whiteout. The tourists no doubt were down in the warm casinos, drinking Bloody Marys and watching their money disappear like magic.
‘‘Wait a minute,’’ Nina said. ‘‘I don’t remember seeing this run on my map.’’
‘‘It’s not. We’re off-piste.’’
‘‘Off what?’’ She was pissed off all right, pissed that she’d agreed to do this, pissed to be so cold, pissed at the snow melting between her bibs and gloves, pissed at her mood, so unlike her, so apprehensive.
‘‘Off-trail. Out of bounds,’’ Jim said.
Nina remembered. Marianne had used the same term.
‘‘Alex always liked to say he owned this mountain. We ski wherever we want, and this is where we skied that day. C’mon,’’ he said. ‘‘The first part’s easy.’’ He disappeared over the edge.
‘‘Oh, sure.’’ Inching toward the edge, she saw a treeless slope and no trail, but not much of an angle. She bit her lip and stopped briefly to give herself a mental pep talk. Pushing off, she made her way cautiously down to the ledge where Jim was waiting. Now the slope was becoming much steeper.
‘‘I’d love to show you how I really ski this, another time,’’ Jim said. ‘‘But for now—see that tree off to the right about a hundred yards? Go there, as slowly as you can. I’ll be right beside you.’’ He stayed with her and she managed it, thrashing about like a small clumsy elephant next to his elegant antelope.
‘‘Your turns need work,’’ Jim said as she came to a stop, breathless with anxiety.
‘‘No kidding.’’
‘‘So. Now follow me very carefully down this snowfield. At the bottom is the cliff. You don’t want to go off like—’’
‘‘Okay, okay. Just go slow.’’
‘‘I’ve got you.’’ He went ahead, walking sideways on the mountain in a herringbone pattern, in perfect control.
Go slow, she ordered herself. With exquisite caution she inched out onto the snowfield. Unexpectedly, the skis pushed down into the snow just enough to hold her, but not enough to trip her, which gave her the courage to continue. Down she went, imagining herself, a tiny dark speck in the white scheme of things.
When they were about twenty feet from the edge, Jim motioned to her to turn toward the right, where she could see that the slope resumed. Unfortunately, just as she turned, the skis chose to turn a slightly different way.
And she was off, sliding toward the cliff.
‘‘Sit down!’’ Jim yelled, but the movement had its own life, and it was taking her along with it. Flashes of panic alternated with exhilaration—she had never skied so smoothly, so fast, sliding down this glassy slope into oblivion. She tried to turn toward the trees, but she was going to go off Alex’s cliff, join him—
A hard body bowled her over backwards, falling onto her.
‘‘Don’t move,’’ Jim said. She lay on her back, panting, looking up into his goggles. Her hat had fallen off. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. She lay there, panting, his weight still on her.
She became aware that he wasn’t moving, and made a tentative motion with her body, which only dug her deeper into the snow.
‘‘Nina?’’ Jim said. ‘‘You feel good. Under me like this.’’
‘‘What?’’ she said. ‘‘What did you say?’’ She started to push him off, but he didn’t move.
‘‘Don’t worry. You weren’t in any danger. There was plenty of time to take you down.’’
‘‘I’m going back up. I’ve had enough.’’ She pushed at him again, succeeding only in digging herself farther into the snow.
‘‘Too steep,’’ Jim said. ‘‘Better to traverse this stretch and go down the side. It gets easier from here.’’
‘‘Get off me!’’
He rolled away and she tried to get up, but she couldn’t. ‘‘Here,’’ he said, and held out a hand. He kept holding her arm as they moved carefully to the right side. As he had said, the slope became more gentle. ‘‘Here’s the tree I nearly hit,’’ he said. He pointed to a small fir with low-hanging branches. ‘‘Would have impaled me,’’ he went on.
He seemed unaware that he’d just acted like a complete asshole. For a moment, he had made her feel helpless and frightened. She kept well away from him now. Had he really said what she thought she’d heard?
He had also quite possibly saved her life. Should she thank him or verbally lambaste him?
She really, really wanted this to be over soon.
‘‘I don’t appreciate the way you spoke to me just now,’’ she said.
‘‘Yeah, I was way out of line. Sorry. It just popped out. Stress, you know?’’
‘‘Don’t do it again.’’
‘‘Right.’’
A pause, and then Nina said, ‘‘But thanks for stopping me.’’
‘‘Least I could do. Are we okay, then?’’
‘‘I guess so,’’ Nina said, but her uneasiness lingered.
She took her camera out and took a few pictures of Jim standing against the tree, showing where he had nearly hit it, at the same moment he heard Alex strike the rocks below. They were probably going to be useless because she couldn’t get any perspective into the scene.
‘‘Did Marianne snowboard this run or is it too steep?’’
‘‘Looking for suspects? Nothing’s too steep for Marianne. I don’t know about that day. She could have been on either side. I just don’t know.’’
Nina remembered Marianne denying that she ever skied the Cliff. ‘‘Heidi?’’
‘‘She’s fantastic on skis. A ballerina of the slopes.’’
‘‘Did she know about this run?’’
‘‘Come on. Heidi kill Alex? Why?’’
‘‘And your father?’’
‘‘Ah, yes. My father. He was here within five minutes after I got down and told Jerry, the guy who runs the Ogre lift, to radio the lodge. So he was close by.’’
‘‘Somebody must have seen something,’’ Nina said.
Jim said nothing.
In spite of everything, she knew that she had been right to make the effort to come here. She could almost see Alex now, flying toward the cliff, the two of them laughing madly, see Jim pivot away just in time to hit that tree, see Alex gone in an instant and hear the sickening thud. She had needed to see this place, inaccessible as it was.
‘‘Ready for the last bit?’’ Jim said.
‘‘As I’ll ever be.’’ They picked their way cautiously down the side slope to the rocks below the cliff. It took at least twenty minutes.
They were in an almost flat place. The rocks on the left stuck up as much as five feet from the snow cover, but most of the rest consisted of a sort of sloping shelf with a variation of only two or three inches from place to place, swept clear of snow by wind. She looked up. The cliff above this island of granite couldn’t be more than twenty feet high. It was a rock wall, practically vertical, with a snowy unstable-looking overhang at the top. At the bottom of the wall ice and piles of snow were evidence that bits of the cornice must shear off from time to time.
She had narrowly avoided going over that thing. Alex hadn’t been so lucky.
The wind was coming up. Sitting down on the broad granite shelf, Nina removed her skis, plunging them into the snow at the foot of the rocks so they couldn’t slide away.
Torn police tape still fluttered here and there. Off in the bushes an empty Pepsi can lay crushed. The island of upthrust rocks was about thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep. On either side, clean snow had already covered the tracks of the emergency personnel and the police.
‘‘Show me,’’ she said. Jim skied up and stopped a few feet away. He took his skis and goggles off, too, and sat down beside her on the rocky ledge. She began taking photos.
‘‘We’re here. The visibility was better, and the wind stayed down that day,’’ he said. ‘‘I found him right here.’’ His hand caressed a flat area next to the sharp upthrust. ‘‘There was blood on these sharp rocks. I don’t see it now. That’s where he must have fallen first, then slipped to here. He was on his back, his leg twisted under him when I found him.’’ In the absolute stillness, his voice sounded amplified.
‘‘Did you see any other tracks? Before the rescue people arrived?’’
‘‘No. I was trying to help Alex. I wasn’t looking.’’ She felt that if they shouted they would be heard miles away. ‘‘Were his eyes open?’’
‘‘No! But he was—moaning. I hate to think about it. I told you, he was still alive.’’
‘‘How far is it to the bottom?’’
‘‘A few hundred feet. The paramedics climbed up. Harder that way, if you ask me. The Ski Patrol had no trouble skiing down like we did.’’
‘‘So he was lying there, face up, moaning.’’
‘‘He was bleeding. Here, now I can see it.’’ Brownish stains—she saw them now. ‘‘Where were the skis?’’
‘‘One still on. The other farther down the hill. I carried them down for him as we left. And the poles.’’
‘‘What was the first thing you did?’’
‘‘I said, ‘Hey, buddy . . .’ He didn’t answer. He was in shock. I—I was afraid to move him. You have to worry about a broken neck. I’ve had ski emergency training. I should have left him just like that and skied down the rest of the hill for help, but when I was actually in the situation, I couldn’t just leave him. I was talking to him the whole time.’’
‘‘Were his clothes torn?’’
‘‘I don’t remember—let me think—I think his parka was open. Yeah, it was.’’
‘‘He wouldn’t wear it unzipped, would he?’’
‘‘Oh, he might’ve. Alex spent half the winter in T-shirts. He had a metabolism like a volcano—never needed a blanket at night.’’
‘‘Well, give it your best shot. Zipped or unzipped?’’
‘‘The sun was out. It wasn’t especially cold. He was wearing a medium-weight parka—I’d say it was open.’’
‘‘So you could see the bibs? Alex’s bibs?’’ she said, rubbing her mitten against the rough rock she sat on. She took off the mitten and cleaned off a small area of granite.
‘‘The bibs? I suppose they had blood on them. I wasn’t thinking too straight. I couldn’t decide whether to stay and hope someone would come, or get going down the mountain. I sat beside him and I lifted his head, tried to brush off the blood. He was losing consciousness. I freaked and I was yelling, ‘I’m going for help, I’ll be right back . . .’
‘‘I was patting his hand and yelling for help when his body gave a sort of jerk. His eyes went half closed, not moving. He seemed to stop breathing and I gave him mouth-to-mouth but it wasn’t working.
‘‘After some time I gave up. I skied down the hill and found Jerry. I was shouting, limping from my fall, raising the alarm.’’
‘‘Did you listen to his chest?’’ She had to keep at it, get Jim’s story, the one he was going to stick to . . . She scanned the rocks, cleared a tiny pocket of snow, listening with painful concentration because she really wanted to know, had to form a judgment before the prelim as to whether he was telling the truth.
If he was lying, his pretense of grief was diabolical as he described Alex’s last moments in this voice full of stops and starts, full of pain.
He had to be innocent, had to be. But the agonized words that fell from his tongue were contradicted by an ever-increasing amount of evidence. A mountain of evidence, with slippery slopes . . .
Knowing that her face would betray how critically she weighed his words, she didn’t want to look at Jim. Instead, she looked down at the rock, rubbing angrily on it with her bare hand.
And cut her hand. ‘‘Ow!’’ she said. ‘‘What was that?’’ She bent and pushed up her goggles. Without that rimy layer obscuring her vision, she could see that the rock was not really gray, it was bicolored—dark, then light, then dark.
The light parts stuck out. ‘‘Wait,’’ she said, holding up her hand to stop him from talking. ‘‘Look at this.’’
He got down on his knees in the snow so that his eyes were level with the rock and said, ‘‘What?’’
‘‘The rock. It’s sort of striped in dark and light.’’
‘‘Uh huh. Looks like thin veins of quartz in the granite. Not so unusual.’’
‘‘But they’re at a different height from the granite.’’
‘‘Striations. They’re a different hardness, so they don’t erode at the same rate.’’
‘‘Climb up there on the sharp rocks and see if the tops have the same kind of markings,’’ she commanded. He stared at her for a moment, then jumped up and ran lightly along the rock shelf and leaned over the outcropping, tearing off his goggles and ski gloves as he went.
‘‘It’s the same up here!’’ he yelled. ‘‘Come on. I’ll help you up!’’ In about two seconds they were both running their bare fingers up and down the irregular rocks and straining their eyes, looking for bloodstains.
‘‘Here! And here!’’ Jim said. Within a few inches of an area with the staining, she could see it—striated rock, the quartz running in slender veins.
‘‘It’s all over,’’ Nina said. ‘‘Everywhere! All you need to do is look.’’ She thought of Doc Clauson’s Coke-bottle glasses behind a pair of tinted goggles. All that magnification hadn’t helped. He had missed it.
Jim was waiting for her to say something. He had bitten his lower lip so violently in his excitement, a drop of blood began to form and roll down. Breathing hard herself, she ran her fingers and her eyes over the raised striated areas. They were both kneeling on the rock now, their noses two inches away, like a pair of raccoons at a full garbage can.