"Which means," Angie concluded in the concise way she had of going straight to the heart of the matter, "that we'll never know for sure whether she accidentally passed out at the wheel or deliberately sat there until she lost consciousness."

Paige was bewildered. al didn't even know she took the stuff. And I was supposed to be her closest friend."

"None of us knew she took it," Angie argued.

"She was vehemently against drug taking. Of the four of us, she issued the fewest prescriptions. I can't begin to count the number of discussions we've had on the subject, right here in this room."

From the start of their association ten years before, Paige's office had been the site of the weekly meetings at which they discussed new or problem patients, developments in the field, and office policy. Hers was no different from any of the other three offices, with the same light oak furniture, mauveand-moss decor, and soft artwork on the walls, but Paige had been the one to put the group together and was their anchor. The others simply and naturally gravitated to her office.

She was feeling like a pretty poor anchor just then. Valium. She still couldn't believe it.

"People take Valium when they are extremely nervous or upset. I had no idea Mara was either. She has always been passionate about things, but passionate doesn't mean nervous or upset. When I saw her last, she was racing off to fight the lab for having messed up the tests on the Fiske boy." She tried to remember the details of that encounter, but they had seemed insignificant at the time. "I could have stopped her. I could have talked with her, maybe calmed her down some, but I didn't try. I saw how tired she was." She looked quickly up at the others.

"That could have been the Valium. It didn't occur to me that it was anything but too much work and a lack of sleep. At the time, I didn't want to say anything that might get her going more than she already was. Cowardly of me, huh?"

"That was early in the morning," Angie consoled. "She may have been fine then."

"And reached overload in a matter of hours?"

Paige shook her head. "If she was popping pills, things must have been wrong for a while. Why didn't I see it? Where was my mind?"

"It was on your own practice," Peter said, "where it had to be."

"But she was in need."

"Mara was always in need," he argued. "She was always going on about one thing or another. You weren't her keeper." "I was her friend. So were you." Paige recalled dozens of times he and Mara had been together. Not only were they avid cross-country skiers, but they shared a fascination with photography. "Aren't you asking yourself these same questions?" If so, he was remarkably calm.

"You said that you saw her late in the day and that she was distracted.

Was she tired then, too?"

"She looked like hell. I told her so."

"Peter."

"That was the kind of relationship we had, and she did look like hell, like she couldn't be bothered putting on makeup or anything. But what I said didn't bother her. I told you, her mind was somewhere else. I didn't know where."

"Did you ask?" Angie prodded.

He grew defensive. "It wasn't my business.

She was in a hurry. When did you see her last?"

"Midday." She turned to Paige. "I stopped her in the hall to ask about the Barnes case.

She's been fighting to clear coverage of an MRI with the insurance company, and they've been giving her a hard time. How was she?

Tired, but not necessarily distracted. She knew just what I was talking about and gave me a perfectly good answer, and there was spirit in it, just not as much as usual. It was like she was running on fumes."

"Great analogy, Angie," Peter said.

Paige pictured Mara's garage, willed down the sick feeling that came with the image, and forced her mind on. She had a desperate need to reconstruct Mara's last day on the chance that might offer a clue.

"Okay. Each of us saw her at different times. When I saw her in the morning she was fired up, when Angie saw her midday she was tired, when Peter saw her late in the afternoon she was distracted." She paused.

"Did either of you sense depression?"

"Not me," said Peter.

Angie grappled with that one. "No. Not depression I'm sure it was fatigue." She looked at Paige sadly "When she turned away and went into her office, i let her go. There were patients to see. We were booked solid for the afternoon."

She was rationalizing. Paige knew they were all doing it, making excuses for their lack of insight, and it was fine up to a point. If Mara's death was accidental, they were in the clear. If not, well, that was something else.

The bitch of it was they would never know.

While Peter and Angie picked up the slack at the office, Paige worked out the details of the funeral. She gave intent thought to every choice, desperate to do the things Mara would have wanted for reasons that went beyond love and respect. The extra effort she gave was by way of apology for not having been a better friend.

She talked with the priest about what he would say. She arranged for a local a cappella group to sing. She picked out a simple casket.

She wrote an eloquent obituary.

She also chose the clothes in which Mara would be buried. In that this entailed going through Mara's things, it was a more painful task than the others. Mara's house was Mara through and through. Being there was to feel her presence and doubt once again that she was gone. Paige found herself searching for cluesa farewell note Mara might have left on the mantel, a cry for help tacked to the cluttered kitchen chalk board, a plea for salvation scrawled on the bathroom mirrorbut the only things that could be remotely interpreted to reflect undue upset were the Valium in the medicine chest and the messiness of the house.

And it was messy. If Paige had been the paranoid type, she might have suspected that someone had rifled the place.

Then again, of Mara's strengths, housekeeping had never been one.

Paige neatened as she went, on the chancein the hopethat Mara's family might want to see her home.

The oNeills arrived on Thursday. Paige had met l them only once before, in their home in Eugene, at the tail end of a trip that had taken Paige and Mara so close to Eugene that Mara hadn't been able to find a good reason not to stopnot that she hadn't tried. Her family was unpleasant, she said. Her family was parochial, she said. Her family was large and opinionated and xenophobic, she said.

Paige hadn't found them to be half-bad, though granted, her perspective was different from Mara's. Having been an only child, she liked the idea of having six brothers, their wives, and a slew of nieces and nephews, and compared with her own parents, who never stayed put for long, the fierce rootedness of the O'Neills was rather nice. Paige decided that they were simply old-fashioned, hardworking devoutly religious people who couldn't, for the life of them, understand what Mara was doing.

That had been true when Mara was a child with an insatiable curiosity, a soft spot for the wounded and a fascination with social causes.

It was true when she decided to go to college and, faced with her parents' refusal to pay, raised every cent herself, and it was true again with medical school It was still true. The O'Neills never understood why Mara had settled in Vermont.

Even now, viewing their surroundings from the security of Paige's car during the drive from the airport, one would have thought they were in a foreign country, and a hostile one at that.

Only five of them had come, Mara's parents and three of her brothers.

Paige told herself that financial constraints kept the others at home.

She hoped Mara believed it.

They pulled up to the funeral home in the same silence with which they'd made most of the drive. After guiding them inside, Paige left them alone to say their good-byes. Back on the front steps, she tried to remember the last time Mara had mentioned her family, but she couldn't. It was painfully sad. True, Paige didn't see her own parents often, but she regularly saw her grandmother, who lived in West Winter, a mere forty minutes away. Nonny was spritely and independent.

She had been mother and father rolled into one when Paige had been young and was more than enough family for Paige now.