“You don’t even like cross-country skiing, Ray—you’re a downhill girl,” the snowshoer said.

“I would ski on Mars or the moon, if I could ski with my honeys,” my mom said. She was hurt by it. Maybe that was why she snuck the gun into Mr. Barlow’s backpack. On an earlier weekend, she’d tried to slip the same .357 Magnum into my suitcase, but I was wise to my mother’s not taking no for an answer, and I knew that it was one of the handguns Nora had her eye on—a six-shooter Em had been blazing away with, out at the quarry. It was nowhere near Valentine’s Day, but my mom had included a Valentine’s card with the gun she snuck into the snowshoer’s backpack. There was a big heart on the card, where Little Ray had written: “To keep my darling snowshoer safe, and to protect my sweetie!”

To my surprise, Elliot Barlow said she thought it was “a pretty little gun,” and she liked “the feel of it.” I pointed out that we could bring the gun back to Vermont the next time we went there for a weekend, or maybe Nora and Em would want it. Em had liked shooting the .357 Magnum. It had a short barrel, but it wasn’t a little gun—not from a shooter’s perspective.

“That sucker packs a wallop,” was all Molly said about it.

I wasn’t that surprised the snowshoer wanted to keep the gun, but I thought she was funny about it. “I don’t want to know where it is, but I also don’t want it to surprise me if I just happen on it,” she told me. When the little Barlows were around, I was instructed to “take pains” to keep the gun hidden from them, too.

“Your parents don’t like guns?” I asked the snowshoer.

“My parents love guns, but they’re thriller writers—they’re drawn to disasters,” the little English teacher told me.

We should have hidden our cross-country skis from the little Barlows. They were hurt to see the skis in the front-hall closet of their Upper East Side apartment. Like my mother, the writing team was angry that we went skiing on Park Avenue when we wouldn’t ski with them—in the Alps.

The pains I took to hide the gun were not very creative. I wrapped it in a pair of underpants I didn’t like, in the bottom of my underwear-and-socks drawer. I put the bullets in a pair of athletic socks; they were big bullets for such a small-looking gun. Of course I concealed the socks with the ammo under other pairs. This was not a novel idea. It was what my mom did with the bullets she’d snuck into the snowshoer’s backpack—she put them in a pair of socks.