Tough Cookie

bad fall. At least he hadn’t had to be carried off the slope. Speaking of which.

“The other patroller said you were on the team that actually brought out Nate’s body,” I said to Gail.

Gail flipped her glossy hair back and scowled at the mountain. “There was a report, all public record, if you want to look it up. I read about you in the paper, wanting to do your own investigations.”

I shook my head. “I want to know what’s bothering Rorry. I just don’t want to say something to her that would hurt her feelings—”

Gail’s voice softened. “We believe there was a human trigger for the avalanche. So you might not even want to mention the slide to Rorry.”

“What?”

She looked away. “It’s all public record,” she repeated. “There were three sets of tracks at the Elk Ridge trailhead that day. It’s a well-marked hiking area in the summertime, but this was winter, with seven inches of new snow. We saw two sets of boot prints going up, one Nate’s, one somebody else’s. Snow-depth was almost identical, so there’s reason to believe Nate went up with somebody. Still, it’s not impossible that the other person came up later. It’s just unlikely—”

I stopped her. “Why is it unlikely?”

“If you follow someone else, you usually step in their tracks. It makes it easier to walk. Nate’s and this other person’s tracks were side by side.”

“Somebody else was hit by the avalanche that day, but didn’t get killed? Or was killed and never found?”

“No,” Gail corrected patiently, holding me with her dark eyes. Arch and Todd were twenty feet away. “Somebody went partway up the path with Nate. Then his companion or whoever split off and went up the ridge. Nate descended to the valley. We don’t know why he went there. His footprints led into the slide. We didn’t find him for five hours. By then, he’d suffocated.”

“And the third set of tracks?”

Again I got the dark eyes. “Nate’s companion came back down. Running, from the look of the tracks. We never found out who he was. Or she. I don’t know if anyone ever told Rorry about the second person on the slope that day. Probably she knows anyway. So as I say, you might not want to talk to her about it.” She strode away to admonish a skier who’d slammed into an entire family.

Openmouthed, I struggled to process what I’d just been told. Two sets of tracks up? One down? Did Rorry indeed know about Nate’s companion? And who could it have been? Why hadn’t that person ever shown up?

“Mom!” Arch was panting. His flushed cheeks were wet with melted snow. “Todd got hit by a lady skier. She bounced off him and crashed into me. Major yard sale and I’m not kidding. Then she yelled at us for getting in her way. I told her, ‘Y’ever heard of Yield to the downhill skier?’ and she shouted, ‘You’re not a skier!’”

I consoled him while he brushed clumps of snow from his shoulders and complained of prejudice against snowboarders. Poor Todd shuffled up and I asked if he was all right. His ambiguous I guess was followed by a request to take him back to his condo, which I did.

Arch fell asleep in the Range Rover within five minutes of our leaving Killdeer. By the time I pulled into High Country Towing in Dillon, he was snoring. A man in oil-splashed coveralls unlocked the gates to a lot crammed with vehicles, all of which had seen better days. When I caught sight of my ruined van, an unexpected lump rose in my throat. My trustworthy vehicle, its Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! now crumpled and illegible, had been my companion through years of catering. The van’s sorry state seemed an omen of the loss of my business. I patted the bumper and bid it a silent farewell. Then, before the overall-guy could call the local mental health center, I scooped up Tom’s skis—miraculously unharmed—as well as my own ski gear and my backpack, and roared toward home.

Arch woke up as we pulled into our driveway. I needed to talk to Tom about all I’d learned, about Barton Reed, the cancer-suffering convict; Jack Gilkey, the paroled chef; Arthur Wakefield, the wine-loving antiparole activist; and Boots Faraday, the savagely unfriendly artist who’d hated the town’s art critic. But visiting time at the jail was almost over, and Tom had promised Arch he’d take him down to see his father. Before they left, Tom added that he wanted to help me make dinner, so I should wait until he returned to start.

I thanked him and hauled the precious skis upstairs, where I screamed bloody murder when I tripped over what turned out to be Arch’s physics experiment. Once I’d stored the still miraculously unbroken skis, I stomped back to the hallway, seething. A god-awful mess awaited me. According to the skewed label, Arch had meticulously dropped bleach on black fabric to demonstrate the random spatter patterns of quantum mechanics. I, unfortunately, had kicked the bucket of bleach down the carpeted hallway and taken out not only our gold shag rug but a pile of blue jeans waiting to go into the laundry. With rags, I blotted what bleach I could from the ruined rug. Then I threw the jeans into the wash—they’d be okay for painting and gardening—and hung the grossly spotted and experiment- ruined black fabric in the bathroom.

I tried desperately to be a good mother in the teach-your-kids-and-support-their-interests department, but every now and then my failure quotient became awfully high. Regardless of American sentimentality toward motherhood, I longed to create a Mother’s Day card that told the truth: You can’t win.

In the kitchen, I typed Arthur’s wine list and suggested foods into my computer. Then I contemplated my next few culinary events. I checked the number of cookies I had made for the following day’s library reception. I decided that in addition to the wrapped platters of almond Christmas cookies and Chocolate Coma cookies, I should make Jack’s delicious marmalade muffins and more of the gingersnaps I’d muffed on television. When you fall off a horse, you should get right back on, right?

I took out unsalted butter to soften and made sure I had whole nutmeg, then hunted for my molasses and cider vinegar. By the time Tom came in, loaded with bags containing chilled cans of pasteurized crab and a dozen different sauce ingredients, I was loading scoops of buttery, spicy cookie dough onto baking sheets.

“Aha!” he said expansively as he pulled me in for a hug. “The Queen of Cream tackles gingersnaps again!”

“You read the article in the Killdeer paper?”

“Yeah, somebody faxed it to me,” he replied absent-mindedly. “How’re you doing? You’re not corpulent, by the way.”

“Thanks.” I sighed. “How was The Jerk?”

“His usual self. I felt sorry for Arch, so I bought some lean ground beef and—don’t kill me—Velveeta and picante to make him some Chile Con Queso. We can have it with chips and vegetables. He always orders it in restaurants, so I figured I’d give it a go for him.”

I laughed. “Great. So much for corpulence. I’ll thaw some halibut steaks for us, too. The queso will be good. I need some comfort food myself, since I had to say good-bye to my van today. It was awful.”

“We will buy you another van.”

“You don’t understand. It was so sad.”

His green eyes searched mine. “Hey, Miss G., y’know how many prowlers I’ve wrecked?” The slight scent of his aftershave made me shiver…. Whose idea was it to have dinner before you went to bed?

I said, “Is this a statistic that’s going to upset me?”

“Six wrecked. Four totaled.”

“Ah.”

“What are you making there, Queen of Cream?”

“Marmalade Mogul Muffins,” I said happily. That was the thing about Tom: You never could stay in a sad mood for very long when he was determined to cheer you up. I removed halibut steaks from our freezer while Tom sauteed the ground beef for his Mexican appetizer. Then I pulled my zester over plump oranges, whirred the fragrant strands of zest in a small electric grinder, and measured out thick, best-quality marmalade.

“Mind if we invite Marla over?” I asked. “All this back and forth to the ski area, I haven’t seen or talked to her. She loves halibut.”

“Okay,” he said as he stirred picante sauce into the lake of melted cheese and browned beef. “Only tell her not to come until six, I need to talk to you first.”

“Sounds sexy. I need to talk to you, too. Suppose we could do it somewhere else?”