It wasn’t that the snowshoer didn’t want Molly to come with us, but Elliot didn’t like my mother to be left alone—my mom would worry more, alone, the little English teacher thought. “This isn’t a rescue, Ray—I’m not hopeful of saving them. I think this is a done deal,” the snowshoer said.

“I’ve seen some done deals, Elliot—the done deals are the worst ones,” the night groomer tried to tell her. At first, Elliot wouldn’t listen, but I kept begging her to take Molly with us.

By the time the two policemen got to the lobby, my mom and Molly—not to mention the German family—had finished their dinner and were waiting in the lobby with us. The ski patroller had already changed into her ski clothes. “I asked the police to bring only two extra flashlights,” Elliot told Molly, who just patted her backpack. The snowcat operator was used to carrying her own flashlight. “I guess the ski patroller is coming with us, Adam,” the snowshoer said. My mother didn’t stop hugging the pretty Mr. Barlow until the cops came. The cop who did the talking told us to call him Werner. The silent policeman didn’t tell us his name.

It was cold; the hard-packed snow on the piste was dry and made a squeaky sound under our boots. We couldn’t keep up with the ski patroller; even in her sixties, Molly got to the derailed cars first. She knew the little Barlows were under the middle car; she’d climbed the car and lowered herself inside before we arrived at the wreck. On our trudge uphill, the snowshoer reiterated to the policemen the plot of his parents’ death. The logic of the doomed thriller writers, when it came to avalanches, was clearly contrary to common sense, the little English teacher was telling the cops as we climbed. Werner, who’d seen the movie of The Kiss in Düsseldorf, deferred to the snowshoer. The little Barlows were experienced skiers; they should have been wary of avalanches, not drawn to take a closer look. Yet Elliot’s parents were also experienced thriller writers; I thought I heard Elliot say to Werner that her parents were done in by their disaster genes, which I took to mean their writer genes (or words to that effect).

“Was denkst du?” I heard Werner ask his silent partner. (“What do you think?” he’d asked the nonspeaking cop.)

“Möglich,” the one-word policeman replied. (“Possible,” the minimalist cop had answered.)

We saw only the ski patroller’s head and shoulders in the open door of the middle car. From the look on Molly’s face, she’d found what she was looking for; the snowshoer had imagined everything truly. “You shouldn’t see them, Elliot,” Molly told her.