“We’ll tell her together, Molly,” the snowshoer said. I watched them go down the mountain; even holding hands, those two knew how to walk on snow.

“You should go skiing with your mom, Kid,” Molly had told me, before she and Elliot left me at the avalanche site with the two policemen. The cops wanted to double-check their EINTRITT VERBOTEN business, the KEEP OUT signs and the battery-powered lights in the area of the accident the police had cordoned off.

In my bad German, I tried to tell Werner and Möglich my thoughts. If the pretty Mr. Barlow had been skiing with her parents, she might have prevented them from climbing the embankment to get a better look at the avalanche. On the other hand, childhood was the truest teacher. As a child, the snowshoer had been taught to herringbone uphill; she might have herringboned up the embankment after them, or she would have led the way.

Werner didn’t express his opinion. “Was denkst du?” Werner asked Möglich, as we were starting down the mountain—as if there was any doubt about what Möglich thought.

I imagined it was a fait accompli what Möglich would say. On matters of mayhem, whether they were man-made or elements of nature, the one-word policeman was a man of experience. “Möglich,” Möglich said, after a thoughtful pause—pretending he had to think about it. Of course, everything was possible. Wasn’t that usually the safest thing to say? And more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was thinking, when I looked back—up the nighttime mountain—at the wrecked train, lying in the snow.

In the garish brightness of the battery-operated lights, the derailed train cars had a sepulchral glow. In the enveloping dark, there was no evidence of a railroad or the railway embankment—only the ascending ski slope, rising into a vast darkness. To someone seeing the avalanche site from this perspective, and for the first time, the derailed cars looked like a train that fell from heaven. The derailed train looked like a tomb, a holy shrine—not only because the little Barlows lay dead and buried under it. That frigid night, the wrecked train struck me as a sepulcher to all souls lost or killed in transit—as one day we all would be, I thought.

“Okay, I’ll ski with her—I’ll ask her to ski with me, I promise!” I shouted down the mountain, to those two contrasting figures. The seeming giantess, who was Molly, had her arm wrapped around the shoulders of the apparent child, who was the pretty Mr. Barlow. I could hear their voices, but they didn’t hear me; those two were talking up a storm. For the moment, I’d forgotten I was going down the piste with the Swiss policemen.