I wiggled my toes to keep warm. As the bottom of a run is a precarious place to spend any time just standing around, I worked my way through the snow to get closer to the map. To my right, hooting, calling skiers and snowboarders produced waves of snow as they made sudden hockey stops and stepped out of their bindings. Children, fat as doughboys in their brightly colored down jackets, wheeled this way and that, searching for parents from whom they'd become separated on the hill. Occasionally an out-of-control skier or snowboarder would biff - slang for crash – into one of the kids and send him sprawling. Two ski patrol members standing near the map called warnings, helped the children up, and yanked the tickets of particularly reckless skiers and boarders.

Arch knew where to find me, so I didn't waste time trying to spot him among the hordes descending the last leg of the run. I turned to the map and ran my fingers along Widowmaker and Jitterbug Run. My eyes inexorably turned to Hot-Rodder, where Doug Portman had died. With all the stamping around done by the patrol as they tried to rescue Doug, there couldn't have been much of a crime scene left for the police and Forest Service to investigate.

My eyes wandered over the diagram to Elk Valley, where Nate Bullock had died three years ago. Nate wanted to make extra money. Doing what? I really can't say. . . . Striped red lines indicated both the valley and the ridge above it as out-of-bounds for skiing. Just to the west of Elk Valley lay a green-dotted area labeled Area III Expansion. On the map, I retraced my route this morning along the main road and then to the parking lot by the Elk Ridge Nature Trail. If I had come out the other side of the parking lot the first time, I could have found Arthur's condo without a hitch. Speaking of directions . . .

Near me a ski patroller was carefully buckling yellow straps around a transport sled. I called a greeting down and received an answering smile from the patroller, a young woman with a thin, tanned face.

"I don't want to interrupt you," I began.

"You're not. Have you lost somebody? Do you nee help?"

I told her I was just waiting for my son. "But I do have a couple of questions about the map, if you don't mind." I introduced myself and said that yesterday I'd done a fund-raiser for Nate Bullock up at the bistro.

"Yeah," the patroller said mournfully, "I knew Nat Everybody did." Her genuine sadness seemed a contrast to Rorry's bitter words from yesterday: I'm not sad. .Just puzzled And then there had been Boots's angry comment: Don't get me started on Rorry.

I turned back to the map. "What I can't figure out is why a high-country-wise person like Nate would go in a dangerous area like that."