Molly had more to show me, not about my mother. The old patroller didn’t need me to come ahead of dinner time to help her with the cooking. Molly was roasting a chicken in the oven; the potatoes and onions and carrots were already in the oven, too. She’d prepared our dinner before we arrived; Molly knew Matthew would be entertained “helping” Em try on my mother’s clothes. The old ski patroller wanted to be alone with me in the kitchen. Perhaps ski patrollers are a family; they pay attention to what happens to other people on ski patrol. Or maybe Molly was unique among patrollers—she kept a close eye on the news, not only the news about bootpacking and running sleds.

“Those two patrollers were killed with your friend Monika—if you haven’t heard, Kid,” Molly said, showing me a news clipping. “Monika was driving—they make cars with hand controls for paraplegic drivers.”

The headline was objective and succinct.

HWY 82 CRASH KILLS THREE

They had hit a snowplow head-on. The three women were coming from Woody Creek in a winter storm. They were driving back to Aspen on Highway 82—nighttime driving, whiteout conditions. Monika had just passed the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport when her car strayed into the oncoming lane. The driver of the snowplow wasn’t seriously injured. The state police said the three women weren’t wearing seat belts. Monika was described as “the Austrian downhill racer and an Aspen resident”; Nan and Beth, longtime ski patrollers at Aspen Highlands, were referred to as “Aspen natives.” It was a local newspaper; the three friends were treated respectfully. “Perhaps alcohol was a factor”—this was as much as the reporter ventured to say about the women’s well-known drinking habits. There was a photo of the crumpled car; in the one of Monika Behr with Nan and Beth, the three friends were younger than they were when I met them.

The sports television networks would not be kind to Monika Behr. With hindsight, the seeds of Monika’s reckless driving could be seen in her crash on the women’s downhill course at Cortina—the ceaseless replay of her career-ending, slow-motion fall. The video footage of Monika’s lifeless-looking body being airlifted from the piste would be perceived as a harbinger of her dead body being taken from the wreck in the whiteout on Highway 82.

“When I die,” Monika had told me, “I want to lie in the sheets at the Hotel Jerome—I won’t care if the sheets are clean.”

“I wonder if there are rules for ghosts,” I’d written in the Loge Peak screenplay.

I was remembering what Monika Behr had said about children. “Personally, I hate children,” Monika told me, at her gym in Aspen.

“You mean as skiers,” I replied, because we’d been talking about the skiing at Buttermilk.