Commotion on the roadway accompanied the arrival of two ambulances. Panicked, I asked if others had been in the accident. The officers looked at each other, then told me not to worry.

One fellow gently probed my neck. A lump of fear squeezed my throat shut as I peered down the hill. There was a smashed white pickup truck below my van. Its skewed, crushed cab was buried in snow. I couldn't see if anyone was in the front. The slope was strewn with debris and snow chunks churned up by the collision.

A horrific worry sprang into my consciousness: Had it been the pickup truck, and not a boulder, that had cushioned my van's landing? I said a silent prayer for the truck driver.

Two newly arrived paramedics checked my bones. In the swiftly falling snow, it was hard to get bearings, but from what the people around me were saying, it seemed the van and the pickup had landed on an outcropping that formed a cliff in the steep bank. Below us, the slope was precipitous, at least forty degrees, and formed a ravine with the high forested ridge running into the Divide. At the bottom of the deep gulch between the two hills, who knew how deep the snow was? Ten, fifteen, twenty feet? I shuddered.

Foul-smelling exhaust and the roar of the snowmobile engine announced we were about to go uphill. The snow was coming down so hard it seemed impossible to breathe. .Glancing back at my wreck of a van, I thanked God that Arch had not been with me.

Crap, I thought crazily as the snowmobile hauled me up the hill, Tom's damn skis are still in the van. Leave them, I thought just as quickly. They've caused enough trouble already.

Paramedics bustled me into the ambulance. One tended to me and monitored all my signs, while the other asked how I was doing.

"Not very well," I said. "Not very well at all."

Once we arrived at the clinic, my doctor checked for internal injuries and put a butterfly bandage on my arm. She told the ambulance driver to take me home. I should call her that night if I felt worse. I either thought or said, Welcome to Aspen Meadow, an old-fashioned kind of town.

This, then, was the scene that Marla told me she witnessed from the front seat of her Mercedes, parked in front of our house: an ambulance driving up - she knew I'd be in it, she said drily - followed by two handsome paramedics coaching me down onto our sidewalk. Me hollering that I was fine, to quit touching my arm. According to Marla, the hunky paramedics wisely declined to comment.

Beneath her fur coat, Marla's bulky body featured one of her pre-Christmas outfits, a forest-green silk shift highlighted with silver and gold threads, plus matching suede boots. She clucked, fussed, tossed her brown curls, and asked how I'd hurt myself this time. She shook her head when I said I'd been fine when I left Killdeer, but then there'd been this pileup. . . .