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machine to send telemetry down to a Denver hospital. A doctor had confirmed that Philip Miller was dead. Somebody from the coroner’s office was on the way.
    Now a new policeman, a state patrolman, asked my name, the location of my vehicle, and if I was the one who had witnessed the accident from the other direction. When I made my answers he handed me a notebook and said to write down all I had seen. I wrote and passed it to him. While he was reading, someone rapped on the window of the patrol car. The patrolman, whose name tag said only Lowry, stepped out of the car. When he got back in he was grumbling.
    My head throbbed. “May I go now?” I asked. I was seized with a surge of panic, as I had been when one of Arch’s classmates was killed in a school-bus accident two years before. I needed to see Arch, to be with him, to make sure he was okay. I said, “I need to get home. To my son.”
    Where exactly was he, Lowry wanted to know, where was home? I dived into the muddle of my brain. Where was Arch now? At the school. He needed to get to the Farquhars. Yes, Lowry said, the police would phone and have Arch call home.
    Home. The word brought tears, finally, as if by mentioning one loss there could be grief for all others.
    Elizabeth, Elizabeth Miller, my voice was saying, someone needs to find Elizabeth, someone needs to tell her. And through my blubbering Lowry again extracted information and promised follow-up.
    I took a deep breath.
    Lowry said, “A friend of yours was up in this area and answered the call about the accident. He’s from the Sheriff’s Department, an investigator by the name of Tom Schulz. . . . He wanted to know if you were all right.”
    “He answered the call?”
    “Didn’t know you were in it till he got here. You want to see him or not?”
    “Yes,” I said as tears stung my eyes again. “Please, I’d like to see Schulz.”
    “Soon. About this accident. . .” said Lowry.
    I looked out the window, but could not see Tom Schulz through the crowd. The snow was coming down now in a slanted rush to the mountain meadow, like millions of tiny arrows shooting to earth.
    “Exactly how fast was the victim going,” Lowry wanted to know.
    “It’s on there,” I said, and motioned to the pad. “About forty.” The speed limit was thirty on that road, but you could do forty on most of the straight stretches if you were careful. Which was not, of course, what Philip Miller had been.
    “You see,” I said, “it was more the way he was driving.”
    “And the way he was driving was . . .”
    “Zigzag. As if he didn’t have control of the car.”
    Lowry narrowed his eyes at me. “So what did you think?”
    I shook my head and mumbled something about not knowing. “Maybe car trouble,” I said.
    “Why didn’t he pull over?”
    “I don’t know. That’s what I can’t figure out.”
    Then we had to go back to the beginning, how I had been catering the brunch where Philip had been a guest who had arrived late.
    Officer Lowry said, “Why was he late, do you know?”
    “He’d just had an appointment. Medical, I think.”
    “Something wrong with him?”
    I shrugged.
    “Did he mention his car?”
    “No.”
    “Did he smell like anything?”
    I squinted at Lowry.
    “Like alcohol, for instance,” he said.
    “No.”
    “Did he act at all strange?”
    “Well, he . . .” I reflected and moved uncomfortably in the vinyl seat. Had he acted strange? I said, “He hadn’t had breakfast. . . he was hungry. And he wanted to see me, that’s why I was following him. We were going to have coffee over by his office.”
    “At this brunch, what did he eat?”
    I told him. “Do you know if they reached his sister—”
    Lowry said, “The chief deputy coroner’s already on the way to the school to find the sister. This won’t take too much longer.”
    I was aware of the policeman’s after-shave, of the camphor-scented blanket around my shoulders, of the squeaking noise the front seat made when