St. Anton is both a town and the generic reference to one of those sprawling ski areas that includes several villages. There’re almost ninety lifts, roughly two hundred miles of marked runs, and since there are no rules restricting you to the official routes, endless amounts of off-piste skiing. I lived there once upon a time.

“She’s going tomorrow. He’ll meet her there. They’ll stay for two weeks.” Elizabeth had her gotcha face on. “That’s your second home.”

It was where I lived when my daughter was born. Where I got married.

“Rick’s Laundromat Americaine,” Liz said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

That was my business. It did well, too. And Rick had been my name then. Elizabeth knew a lot about me. New dots, worthy of connecting, had appeared. I looked at Maddie, “You didn’t meet me by chance, did you?”

Liz started to say something. I snapped at her, “Shut up.” Back to Maddie. I had her conditioned to answer my questions, “Tell me.”

“No,” she said.

“How did you pick me?”

“Beinhart,” Maddie said.

“Tell me.”

Maddie looked to Liz. “Go ahead, tell him,” Liz said.

“After Winston died, I…we…we didn’t know what to do…then I saw him…”

“Beinhart?”

“Yes. At a restaurant in Rhinebeck. Cinnamon. It’s Indian, but very good. Right?”

We all agreed, Elizabeth, Madelaine, and I, that Cinnamon was very good. “We were at a table next to them…”

“Who?”

“Him, his wife, and another couple, she’s Indian, sort of exotically beautiful, he’s African American, umm, a musician…”

“David Sancious,” I said. I knew who he was. I’d seen him play and watched genius come out of his fingertips onto the keys of a piano.

“Yes,” she said. “Then I brought up that I’d heard or read that the guy he’d written the screenplay about…I pretended not to remember the name…then he said it, Winston…then I said I just heard that he died…Beinhart knew that…then I asked him, did he know many people who had actually killed anyone. He said, ‘not counting war?’…I said, ‘Right, that’s what I meant.’ He said, ‘maybe a couple.’ ‘Like who,’ I asked. That’s when he mentioned you. ‘Wow,’ I said, then we started talking about…I don’t know…music and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

“That’s all?”

“I think so.”

“Come on, there’s more. There has to be more.”

“I guess. Umm…somewhere in there he said you and Winston knew each other, did business together. You were both part of that time and place, New York in the seventies and eighties, and you’d probably go the funeral. He would go, he said, but there was some other thing he was committed to.”

“So, you knew I’d be going?”

“Yes.”

“How did you work out meeting me on the train?”