"I don't blame you," Heggener said. "Are you staying at the hotel?"

"I'm not staying anywhere at the moment."

"Oh."

"If you want me to hang around and ski with you, I'll check in at the Monadnock."

Heggener considered this for a long time. "Yes, I believe that would be better," he said quietly. "The less Eva sees of you after what's happened the better for all concerned. And I do want you to hang around and ski with me. I want it very much. I'm going to say thank you now and then not say it again." His voice trembled as he talked and Michael made a point of keeping his eyes steadily on the road.

When they reached Green Hollow, Heggener surprised Michael by saying, "Why don't we have dinner at The Chimney Corner to celebrate our homecoming? Do you know-I've never been there-in all the time I've been in this town-and I'd like to hear Rita sing."

"She only sings on weekends."

"Even so," Heggener said. "I'll call the house and tell Eva that we stopped at a roadside restaurant somewhere and I'll be home around ten. I'd like to enjoy a little quiet dinner with you, and since Eva doesn't know I'm coming, there won't be anything to eat in the house."

"Whatever you say. I'm starving," Michael said and drove up to The Chimney Corner and parked. He did not relish the idea of a surprise confrontation with Eva Heggener and postponement, although he felt it was cowardly, had undeniable merits.

It was early and the restaurant was almost empty and Antoine had not yet come in. Davis, the headwaiter told Michael, was out of town for the day, but it had been a banner weekend, with full houses to hear Rita sing. "That kid isn't going to stay in Green Hollow for long," the headwaiter said. "You mark my words. She'll be in New York or Hollywood before the season is over. That is, if her old man doesn't chain her to the front porch." He grinned. He was a young man and obviously his career hadn't included the joys of parenthood.

Michael had a drink at the bar while Heggener went to telephone. The telephone was on the balcony, up the stairs down which Antoine had made his historic descent. Michael remembered how Tracy had rebuked him for thinking up the plot of the faked fall. It was the first time in more than a week that he had thought of her and he wished he hadn't.

When Heggener came back to the bar, he looked grave.

"Anything wrong?" Michael asked.

"Not really," Heggener said. He ordered a whiskey. "I talked to the maid. Miraculously, she heard the ring of the telephone. Trouble must have improved her hearing."

"What trouble?"

Heggener sipped at his whiskey before answering. "Eva's gone," he said quietly.

"What do you mean-gone?"

"Packed and gone. With Bruno. Well, it's her dog. A gift from me.

"Gone where?"

"Hulda doesn't know. She says there's an envelope for me."

"Well, then, the hell with dinner." Michael got off the bar stool he was sitting on. "I'll drive you . . ."

Heggener put a restraining hand on his arm. "No hurry," he said. "I invited you to dinner and I was looking forward to it. I insist. Sit down, Michael. You know this place. What is the best dish they have? And if you can prevail upon the headwaiter to bring the wine list, I'd like to order the best bottle of Bordeaux they have in their cellar."

The dinner was good and Heggener pronounced the wine excellent and said, "I must come here more often. It's a welcome change from Hulda's cooking-which bears the full weight of centuries of Mit-teleuropa on every dish. And our cook at the Alpina, I'm afraid, has exhausted his repertoire." He ate slowly and everything on his plate and then ordered coffee and brandy for both of them and a cigar for himself. He dawdled over the brandy and lit the cigar with loving care. Looking at Andreas, sniffing his brandy and lolling comfortably back in his chair, no one, Michael thought, could possibly think that here was a man who knew he had a message waiting for him just fifteen minutes away that might, conceivably, alter the entire course of his life.

When he finally paid the bill, Andreas said to the headwaiter, who was helping him on with his coat, "Thank you very much for a fine dinner. Will you tell Mr. Davis for me that his success here is fully deserved."

"Thank you, Mr. Heggener," the headwaiter said, pocketing the five dollar bill that Heggener had slipped into his hand, "I'm sure Mr. Davis will be pleased to have your opinion of his restaurant. And he'll be sorry that he wasn't here to welcome you himself."

"Now that I've found the way," Heggener said, "tell him I'll be back often."

Outside, he looked up at the starry sky, where a high moon made pale outlines of the crests of the hills. He breathed deeply. "Ah," he said, "it's good to be back in the mountains."

They drove in silence, which held as they swung through the gate and past the dark cottage and up to the big house, its pillars gleaming ghostly in the moonlight. Before Heggener could get out his key to open the door, the door opened and the stooped, bulky figure of the maid, sobbing convulsively, stood in the glow of the hallway chandelier.

"There's no need for you to come in, Michael," Heggener said, taking his overnight bag from Michael's hand. "I'll have to spend at least fifteen minutes comforting Hulda. In German. Unless," he said, smiling slightly, "you are in the mood for a lesson in that lovely language. And I enjoyed the day." He spoke soothingly to Hulda, saying, "Aber, aber, Hulda, weinen hilft auch nicht "

"Call me if you want anything," Michael said. "I'll be at the Monadnock."

"It looks as though it's going to be a fine day tomorrow," Heggener said. "I would like to get back on skis."

"At whatever time you say."

"I'll call you in the morning." Heggener went into the house, closing the door behind him, stifling the sound of Hulda's sobs.

He called the Monadnock at nine in the morning. "Michael," he said, his voice calm, "it is a fine day, as I thought it would be. The skiing should be perfect. Is ten o'clock too early for you?"

"I'll come and get you."

"No need. The Ford is in the garage. I'll meet you at the lift at ten."

Michael was there ahead of time. Promptly on the hour, he saw the Ford drive up to the parking lot. Heggener got out and took his skis off the rack and carried them over his shoulder, swinging his poles jauntily as he came to the bottom of the lift. He looked fit and straight, and as if he had spent a peaceful and comfortable night. "Punctuality is the courtesy of princes," he said, "or is it kings? I never can remember. I've never known a king, but I've known some very unpunctual princes, though. One of the things I found immediately endearing about America was the absence of both kings and princes."

On the chair lift going up, Heggener breathed deeply, with evident relish. "I am finally getting the hospital smell out of my lungs," he said. "Oh, Eva's Mercedes arrived this morning. She kindly arranged to have it driven by a chauffeur from Kennedy."

"Kennedy?" Michael said.

"Yes, she has flown to Austria." Heggener spoke offhandedly as though reporting that his wife had gone to Saks Fifth Avenue on a shopping expedition. "In the note she left me, she said she is not coming back here. If I want to see her I must come to Austria."

"Are you going?"

Heggener shrugged. "Perhaps when the season is over. Wives endure, snow melts."

But much later in the day, when after hours of hard skiing they were sitting in the lodge having tea, he said, "If I go back to Austria I am sure I will die. I know that it must sound foolish to you, but I'm a superstitious man and when I am dying in my dreams it is always somewhere in Austria."

oooo It was the last thing he said on the subject. They continued to ski every day when the weather was good and they played backgammon in the evenings, for small stakes, with first one of them and then the other winning a little. Hulda had stopped crying and they dined together in the house two or three evenings a week, where Michael found Hulda's cooking most satisfying, and other nights went to The Chimney Comer, where Heggener expressed great admiration for Rita's singing and Antoine's playing.

Antoine looked sallower than ever and was in a dour mood because the doctor had told him it would be at least another month before the cast could come off his leg and he was sure Jimmy Davis had bribed the doctor so that Antoine would have to stay on playing the piano in this accursed backwater, unchic village for what Antoine described as a meager crust of bread. Gratitude was not high on Antoine's list of virtues and Michael decided that he was not as fond of the Frenchman as he had once been. Also, late one night, just before closing, when Antoine and Michael were alone at the bar, Antoine said accusingly, "So. When you were in New York, you saw Susan." "How do you know?"

"I called her and she told me. And you did more than see her. The doorman at her apartment house is a friend of mine and I called him. He remembered you when I described you. You stayed almost a whole night. I hope you had a good time."

"I had a very good time," Michael said angrily. "And it's none of your business."

"You are a disloyal friend and dangerous to introduce to anyone," said Antoine and got up from the bar and hobbled out.

After that, whenever Michael came into the bar, he and Antoine merely nodded coldly to each other.

The weeks passed and the end of the season approached and Heg-gener's face turned a skier's deep tan and he seemed to glory, to Michael's profound relief, in his regained health. It was a good time, Michael felt, for himself as well as Heggener, peaceful and relaxed, with all problems held in abeyance and neither of them asking any questions about the future, not even the question of whether or not Michael would accept the manager's job at the hotel. If Heggener was grieving about his wife's absence, he made a perfect show of hiding it.

Michael's feeling that he was entering a halcyon season was increased considerably when his lawyer, old Mr. Lancaster, called him into his office to say that Barlow's suit against him had been dropped. Barlow, Lancaster told him through a cloud of cigar smoke, had been caught by two undercover federal agents posing as dealers, who had bought some heroin from Barlow and had arrested him, and found a switchblade knife on him and two guns in his home. After due consideration of all the facts, the law firm with four names in Montpelier had closed the case.

"That will be one hundred dollars for my trouble, Mr. Storrs," Lancaster said and Michael happily wrote out the check, saying, "I guess it's worth it, saving forty-nine thousand and nine hundred dollars."

He got drunk with Jimmy Davis that night and in the morning awoke clearheaded, with no flicker of a hangover. Automatically, as soon as he got out of bed, he looked to see what the weather was. It was snowing hard, the snow driven in sheets by a northwest wind. He telephoned Heggener and said, "No skiing today. Build a big fire and sit near it and read a good book. I'll do the same." He had borrowed a copy of The Pickwick Papers from Heggener's library and it was just the sort of weather for The Pickwick Papers.

When he went down for breakfast, Jerry Williams was in the lobby. "Hi, Jerry," Michael said. "You come over here to tell me what a great day it is for hang-gliding?"

Jerry grinned. "If I said yes, you'd be just damn fool enough to believe me. No, it's something else this time. There's a guy I know, over at Newburg, does some free-falling. He's organizing a jump for Saturday afternoon. It's for some advertising concern that's got an account for sports watches. He wants to get five guys and do a star.

He'll jump and he's got a friend. He wants five bodies altogether. I already have Swanson and myself and you'd be the fifth. I get a three-hundred-buck watch if we do it."

"What do I get?" Michael asked.

Williams grinned again, his long drooping blond moustache giving him an evil appearance. "You get a free airplane ride and the thanks of the Green Hollow Hang-Gliding School."

"I'd do anything for the Green Hollow Hang-Gliding School, you know that," Michael said.

"You damn near did," Williams said.

Michael thought for a moment. He felt the familiar electric tingle, even just thinking about it. "What time Saturday?"

"Noon," Williams said. "High noon. At the Newbury airfield. If it ever stops snowing."

"I'll see you there," Michael said.

"Don't get drunk on Friday night," Williams said and slouched out of the hotel front door, hunching into his coat and pushing up his collar against the whip of the snow.

After breakfast, Michael read all morning, lying on his bed and feeling deliciously lazy, chuckling from time to time. He had two drinks before lunch and a half bottle of wine as he ate, with the book propped up on the table in front of him. He had read The Pickwick Papers in English class at preparatory school, but it had just been another assignment then. Now he read with great enjoyment, marveling at how alive and vigorous the book remained after so many years.

The drinks and the wine and the food made him sleepy and he gave himself the luxury of a nap after lunch. When he awoke it was dark and still snowing. He turned on the light and picked up the book and was about to begin reading when the phone rang. It was Dave Cully. "Mike," Cully said, "is Mr. Heggener with you?"

"No," Michael said. "Why?" "

"Harold Jones just called me. Heggener's Ford is still in the parking lot. And Jones saw him go up at three-thirty this afternoon."

"Holy God! Alone?"

"Alone. I'm organizing a search party," Cully said. "Flashlights, a sled, two guys from the patrol, Dr. Baines. I imagine you'll want to come along."

"Of course. Wait for me. I'll go out to his house. Maybe he got a lift home and forgot his car."

"I already called his house," Cully said. "There was no answer."

"The maid's deaf. She probably didn't hear the phone. I won't be long. See you at the lift."

He got into his ski clothes and boots swiftly and put on his heaviest anarac over a thick sweater, cursing under his breath. He hurried downstairs and got the Porsche out from the shed where it was parked to keep it out of the snow. He sped out of town, the snow hitting like thick white flour at the windshield, making it almost impossible to see the curves in the road. He skidded through the gate past the cottage and up to the house. He left the motor running and ran to the front door. It was locked and he knew it would be useless to ring. He ran around to the back of the house and saw that the kitchen was brightly lit. Through the window, he saw Hulda bending over the stove. He knocked on the windowpane and finally got her attention. She looked frightened until she recognized him and hurried to the back door and fumbled for what seemed minutes at the lock. Finally, she opened it. "Herr Heggener?" Michael shouted.

She shook her head. "Nicht hier" she said. "Skifahren "

Michael turned and ran back to the Porsche and jumped in and wrenched it around and gunned the motor. He nearly hit a car as he sped out of the gate, but it wasn't the Ford.

When he got to the lift, Cully and the others were there waiting for him. Harold Jones went into the control room and started the lift. The chairs swung dizzyingly in the wind as they went up in the darkness.

"The damn fool," Michael said to Cully, who was riding with him. "It'd just about stopped snowing at three o'clock," Cully said. "I guess he thought the storm was over."

"Did anybody see what run he took?"

Cully shook his head. "There was hardly anybody else on the mountain. Jones closed down the lift at four because it began to really come down again and the wind was beginning to blow up hard." At the top they divided up, the two boys of the ski patrol with the sled going down one run, and Cully, Michael and Dr. Baines going down another. They skied slowly, their big flashlights searching the storm. It took them an hour and a half to get down the first run and the ski patrol boys reached the bottom of the lift the same time they did. Neither party had seen any sign of Heggener. They went up again and again divided up, this time going down two different runs, stopping every minute or two to call out Heggener's name. From the other run, Michael could hear the voices of the ski patrol boys, faint through the trees. The shouts echoed in the darkness, but there were no answering cries.

More than an hour later, they were all down at the bottom of the lift again. The storm was getting worse, the wind rising, and Jones told them that he'd have to slow the lift down to a crawl and even then he wasn't sure a cable might not swing off a tower wheel.

It was torture, bitterly cold, going up now, inch by slow inch, and Cully and Michael sat hunched in grim silence, their gloved hands under their armpits to keep them from freezing. There was only one more slope they had not covered and when they got to the top, Cully asked Michael, "Did he ever do the Black Knight with you?"

"Never," Michael said. "But this might just be the time he . . ." He didn't finish the sentence. A man who admitted he had killed a friend might be mad enough to do anything.

Now they all went down the Black Knight together, painfully slowly. Michael pitied Dr. Baines, who was a portly man of fifty and not all that good a skier. Baines was tiring badly now and fell twice on the steep slope and had to be helped back to his feet and brushed off. The snow had frozen on his cheeks and the others took turns rubbing them to keep them from being frostbitten.

They worked their way down to the turn in the forest and followed the trail past the boulder and then all the way down to the lift. Jones had a big pot of coffee on a hot plate in the lift house and to keep Baines from collapsing they had to go in and pour the coffee into him and sit him down in front of the wood stove that Jones had piled high with split logs. It was fifteen minutes before Baines could get on his feet again and Michael said, "Listen, Doctor, I don't think you ought to go up on this one."

Baines didn't say anything, but merely looked icily at him, then put on his gloves and went out and started putting on his skis.

Harold Jones went out of the lift house with them, scowling, looking uphill as the wind howled through the cables. "I'm sorry, fellas," he said. "You can't go up again. I can't run the goddamn chairs in this wind. Either a chair'd hit a tower or the cable would fly off a wheel and you'd just drop off and like as not somebody'd be killed." "Harold," Michael said, "there's a man up there somewhere . . ." "I'm sorry, Mike," Jones said.

"Don't argue with him, Mike," Cully said. "He's right. We just have to sit inside and wait until the wind dies down."

Silently, they watched Baines take off his skis and carefully stand them up against the side of the lift house. Then they went in and took off their gloves and parkas and boots and sat on the floor in the steamy warmth, because there was only one chair and they had a hard time getting Baines to take it. Nobody said anything and the only sound was the loud ticking of a battered alarm clock. Michael stared at it wearily. It was ten past one in the morning and Heggener had been out in the cold since four o'clock the afternoon before.

Outside the wind rose higher and higher, shaking the windows in their frames.

Baines fell asleep sitting in the chair and his snores were added to the ticking of the clock.

The wind began falling at dawn, the light the color of steel coming in through the lift house windows. "Okay, boys," Jones said. "You can go up now. But it's still going to be slow."

They woke Baines, who groaned and stood up stiffly, and they all put on their boots, which had been warming in front of the stove. They put on their parkas and gloves and went out into the suddenly still, steel-cold air, where they stepped into their skis, none of them saying anything, their faces grave. There was a thermometer on the outside wall of the lift house, but Michael refused to look at it.

Jones started the lift and Michael and Cully took the first chair up. It had stopped snowing and the trees of the forest below them made a cemetery of pale symmetrical monuments.

"My guess," Michael said to Cully, "is that our best bet is to try the Black Knight again. I skied all the other runs with him and he never had any trouble with them. But I kept him off the Knight because I didn't want him to get hurt . . ." He left the sentence unfinished.

"Okay," Cully said. "If you have a hunch, it's as good as anything else. Though if we do find anything I'm afraid it's going to be dead."

Cully was the one who saw the handle of the ski pole, just barely sticking out of the piled snow and moving in a little circle. It was about ten yards into the forest, on a line with the big boulder in the middle of the trail.

"This way," Cully shouted, and traversed swiftly between the trees and knelt beside the snow drift above which the pole was making its slow little circles. He was digging frantically with his hands as the others came up to him. In a moment he had uncovered a gloved hand gripping the pole and moving. Michael was digging, too, and felt something hard under the snow. Carefully, he removed handfuls of snow from whatever it was. It was the top of Heggener's head, the blue wool balaclava helmet frozen stiff. A second later, as through a thin white veil, Heggener's face appeared. His lips moved, but there was no sound.

"That's all right, Andreas," Michael kept saying as he held Heggener's head while the others cleared the piled snow off the stiff body, "everything's all right, all right."

Now the others had the snow off him and Cully was feeding him little sips of hot coffee from the thermos bottle he had in his pack and Michael could see by the position of Heggener's right foot that the leg was broken. Somehow Heggener had managed to get his skis off and to dig himself a hole in the snow.