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night long. She sat in her living room with a bottle of brandy at her feet, staring into the log fire. She hadn't liked Janice, and the guilt she felt was oppressive. She and Janice were two opposing forces, but once there had been little difference between them. This partially explained Cathy's well-concealed animosity. Elements of the girl she had been six years ago, when she was nineteen, were reflected in Janice, and Cathy despised the vision of herself that Janice represented.
    Cathy had messed around when she was younger in a series of painful affairs. Now she had little respect for men, since most of them were in search of an easy piece, mothering, or both simultaneously. Her job demanded the front of glibness, friendliness, and she fell into the role rather than expose her vulnerability. She had mastered the shades of public relations, which she understood as civilization's method of counterfeiting reality.
    When at last she dragged herself to bed, she resorted to the lapsed Catholic's final appeal. She dutifully kneeled on the floor and prayed for Janice. Hypocrisy had the slender virtue of shielding a troubled conscience.

Chapter Four
    The morning had a biting frost along with a clear sunny sky. Plaques of ice hung outside Cathy's bedroom window, then dropped onto the sill. She was startled from her sleep by the voices of men outside. She got out of bed, shuddering from the drafts that came through the sloppily caulked wails.
    A party of ski instructors led by Barry and Erich were carrying their equipment to the gondola shed. Monte was maneuvering a snowmobile up the slope, which had hardened overnight and now shone like glass. The rainbows flashing off the belly of the slope were hauntingly beautiful.
    Cathy dresseed quickly, swallowed a cup of instant coffee, and pulled her skis out of the rack by the front door.
    When she reached the gondola, Pat Garson, the town sheriff, looked quizzically at her. His connection with crime was limited to examining hunting and fishing licenses and giving offenders citations; he wrote out the occasional traffic ticket and rescued lost hunters. He somehow managed to keep in the public eye.
    "You going up, Cathy?"
    "I thought I would."
    "Think she was lost in the storm?"
    "It looks that way, doesn't it?"
    He put an OUT OF ORDER sign outside the gondola and joined her inside. The car moved slowly on the cable. The wind had subsided. At the ten-thousand-foot level towering Lodgepole Pines by the side of the runs made a frieze; they seemed placed there for decoration. The rock needle above the advanced slopes with its overlay of ice and its darker sedimentary border was stark white and suggested a massive ivory horn jutting out from the mountain.
    They got off at the upper slopes. Monte had set up a communications post outside the control booth at the gondola get-off point. Static cracked over the radio as he listened to Chuck reporting from the helicopter. Above them the chopper was being buffeted in the winds.
    "This is Northern One. Anything, Chuck?"
    "Not a thing."
    "Can you drop your ceiling?'
    "I'm catching crosswinds. Any lower and I'll lose stability."
    "Over and out," Monte said.
    Cathy spotted Ashby talking to the instructors. Wherever Garson went, reporter-publisher Ashby was sure to be around. He had endorsed the sheriffs last four election campaigns, writing editorials for him and functioning as his campaign manager. He felt there was nothing tangibly dishonest about his spirited partisan attitude, since it encompassed the boundary of friendship. Besides, he knew the townspeople seldom believed what they read about the sheriff. So Ashby would make Garson sound like Wyatt Earp when he discovered a stolen car, Sherlock Holmes if he uncovered stolen property, and on the few occasions when prostitutes wandered into the town from neighboring lumber camps he would proclaim, SHERIFF GARSON CRACKS VICE RING, thus enabling Sierra to doze peacefully under its blanket of morality and