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unemotional voice how the storm came up suddenly, how they reached the summit just as it broke, how they saw de Beers’s body flung off the summit, how he went down and found de Beers and tried mouth-to-mouth breathing and other resuscitation efforts for a long time, at least half an hour, and how he quit just before help arrived. He made no mention of his own physical condition or the mental confusion he had experienced. Jason’s foot, resting on his knee, jerked up and down with what appeared to be impatience or boredom while Collier spoke, stopping suddenly as he arrived at the end.
    "A laudable effort," Clauson said. "Electrocution victims often look dead but aren’t. You did the right thing. And you, counselor. What did you see?"
    Before speaking, Nina thought back to right before the lightning strike, recalling vividly that moment when all the passions of the atmosphere gathered themselves, the humming and the bang just before the bolt of lightning rent the skies and the man flew past.
    "You heard a bang? A rock split, maybe," Clauson said. "He wasn’t shot; he was electrocuted. Considerable trauma, naturally, from the fall, but he was dead already."
    "I never thought of a shot," said Nina. "You can’t imagine how wild it was out there. Maybe a tree cracked and fell in the wind."
    "We were above the tree line," Collier said.
    "What about the humming you mentioned?" asked Clauson.
    Nina tried to shape the amorphous thought. "I felt humming more than heard humming. Like tension rising in the air or pressure building up. You know how you tingle just before you touch a live wire, like something invisible connects your finger to the wire before you ever touch it? That’s how it felt. Static? Foreboding? I don’t know anything about lightning—maybe I felt something other people have felt before a strike."
    "Ominous," said Collier, abandoning his aloofness long enough to agree with her description.
    "How many feet you reckon you were below the summit?" Clauson asked.
    "Only about a hundred feet," Collier said, rubbing his forehead. "We were trying to make it to the nearest group of trees another hundred feet down."
    "What made you think de Beers fell from the summit?"
    "The angle and the direction of the ... body," said Collier.
    "Exactly," Nina added. "He was dropping, but also seemed to be blowing sideways. He came from the summit."
    "He made the top," Sarah de Beers said. "He had time and he would never quit until he did."
    "Okay, let’s hear from the rest of you," Clauson said. "Mr. Tarrant. Were you with the rest of this group?"
    "Oh, yes. We went up together. I’m ... I was ... a business partner of Ray’s. Mrs. de Beers invited me to join them."
    Nina remembered the way the group had re-formed as they stepped aside for her and Collier, dropping unconsciously into natural emotional alliances, Sarah with Leo, Molly with Jason, and Ray, all alone. Leo had kept an attentive eye on Sarah throughout the meeting. She seemed oblivious of his interest. Well, that was their business, not hers.
    "After meeting up with Ms. Reilly and Mr. Hallowell we got separated," Leo Tarrant went on. "Or, to be more honest, we all were on the tired side, so we decided to split up."
    How had Ray taken that decision? Or had Leo and Sarah simply dropped behind after agreeing to follow him?
    "Ray went on alone—he was by far the best hiker," Tarrant continued. "I stayed behind to help Mrs. de Beers, who was feeling the effects of the elevation, and Molly and Jason continued up, but more slowly."
    "How far below the summit are we talking here?" Clauson asked. The secretary took no notes but frequently checked a recorder running on the credenza next to her chair.
    "Mmm, less than four hundred feet. We all wanted to try to finish at that point. We were so close. Dumb decision; I see that now. Anyway, Mrs. de Beers and I continued up to a little copse of fir trees. She couldn’t go further and then the storm broke. We spent the worst of the