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stoutly resisted.
    "I guess I should show up, then," Nina said. "I wonder if Collier will be there. He hasn’t called back, has he?"
    "No. But your dental malpractice did. Ed Mills. He wants to know if you got a response to our settlement offer yet."
    "Did we?" Nina said.
    "And that right there says it all. You haven’t paid a lick of attention to your cases so far this week. Maybe you should go home if all you’re going to do is mope."
    "I’m not moping, I’m brooding," Nina said. "There’s a big difference. Moping is an unfocused sort of thing. But brooding, that’s productive. I don’t quite understand what went on up there, and I can’t stand not understanding."
    "You don’t have time to brood," Sandy said. "You’re a lawyer, not a poet, and that’s how you get your money to pay your secretary, so please, call Ed back. And Mrs. Bindhari’s husband refused to bring the kids back Friday night. She’s getting frantic. She wants to see you right away. And you have a Settlement Conference Statement due out today on the Texaco case. Also, you asked me to order a lemon cake from the bakery, but didn’t you tell me you were planning to bake one yourself?"
    "I know what I told you. I know what I promised. The truth is, I don’t have time. I’ll write a nice card to go with it...."
    "They don’t have lemon. You’ll have to order something else."
    "All right already," Nina said. She sat down at her desk and opened Ed Mills’s file. A loose pile of dental X rays fell out, reminding her of the state of her unfortunate client’s teeth. "Try Collier’s office again, will you?"
    "In due course," Sandy said, but she stood there. Nina remembered that line. Sandy’s former boss, a local attorney named Jeff Riesner, used it all the time. She smiled, thinking that Sandy would be disgusted if she realized she had appropriated anything from him.
    "Well?" Nina asked.
    "How was it?"
    "What?"
    "Up there on the mountain."
    "Awful."
    "But you had to get to the top, didn’t you? Did Collier Hallowell want to go to the top with you or did you badger him into it?"
    "What are you getting at, Sandy?"
    "It’s always good to have influence with the county district attorney."
    "He’s not the county DA yet. He still has to win the election in November. Do you think I’m seeing Collier only so I’ll have a good connection in the DA’s office?"
    "It wouldn’t hurt."
    "I’m only interested in his body, Sandy." It was hard to tell if Sandy enjoyed the joke. She left in a flurry of parrot greens and hot pinks, and Nina returned to the daily drudgery of small-town lawyering.
    At two o’clock sharp Nina walked into the coroner’s office, located just off Al Tahoe Boulevard in the familiar County Office Building, across the patio from the courthouse and jail.
    In these two buildings she spent much of her working life. Modern, unassuming structures, the woody brown of their exteriors minimized their impact on the parkland in which they were located. Tall firs shot through with sunlight bordered the buildings. Working in Tahoe had its positive aspects—a splendid, almost spiritual setting, a remove from frenetic city life, the chance to live where many worked hard just to visit. But sometimes just these qualities made it hard to work there. Sitting indoors all day looking out at the beaming tourists at play could be a kind of torture.
    Inside the waiting room, the dead man’s family had already assembled. "Hi," Nina said inadequately to the solemn faces. "Mrs. de Beers, how are you?" She shook Sarah de Beers’s hand.
    Hardly recognizable as the tired woman Nina had seen on the mountain, Sarah de Beers sat in the chair nearest the door. She had clipped her dark curls at the nape of her neck. Her skin was still reddened from the wind and weather on the mountain, but her eyes weren’t red or swollen, and the thought came unbidden to Nina that she hadn’t cried for her husband. She had chosen a sober navy blue jacket and skirt with a