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memory, something about a scandal or an epic. But he’d been out of the clannish, larger-than-life climbing scene too long.
    Augustine cut to the chase. “You’re the last one who saw her,” he said to Hugh. There was no question about the “her.” Obviously they were still searching for the body. His tone held accusation.
    “I told them everything I knew,” Hugh said. “But ask me again. Pull up a seat.” He gestured at the bartender and pointed at Augustine for that beer.
    “I’m not staying,” Augustine said. “I just want to hear it straight from you.”
    “Sit, damnit.”
    Augustine eased onto the stool, but stayed distant, hands to himself, not propping his elbows on their table, not leaning into their society. He kept his gunslinger vigilance. But Hugh saw when his eyes recognized their photo. “Anasazi,” Augustine said. They became less strange to him.
    The beer arrived, and along with it two more tonic waters, though no one had asked for them. The bartender gripped the back of Augustine’s neck, nothing sloppy, then released him and left. A minute later, the golf joke flickered dead. The TVs went blank. They had their privacy.
    “How can I help?” Hugh said. He hoped Augustine was not here to recruit them. He was tired. It was an aberration that he had become part of her mystery. He had nothing to add.
    “You said she had beads in her hair.”
    “Little stone beads.” Hugh sized them with his fingers. “Some turquoise and jade and agate. Very pretty.”
    “But you said her hair was brown.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Not blond? Maybe with the blood in it?” Augustine’s back was rigid, but something in his tone loosened. Hope, thought Hugh. The man wants hope.
    “Brown. Light brown,” Hugh said. “I don’t know, dirty blond maybe.”
    Augustine hardened himself. He put away his hope. “What color were her eyes?”
    “I didn’t look. I didn’t want to.”
    “How tall was she?”
    “She was flat on her back.” Flat.
    “What kind of shoes was she wearing?”
    “You mean a brand name? I can’t tell the difference anymore. They were these modern climbing shoes, you know, these slippers.” One turned upside down. Hugh emptied the image from his mind.
    Augustine’s frustration showed. “She had earrings?”
    “Silver rings, five or so. Up here along the edge of her ear. They stood out. I guess it’s the fashion.”
    “Both ears?”
    Hugh reached in his mind to the far side of her. “I don’t know about that,” he said.
    Augustine pressed it. “You saw them in the one ear.”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “But you said they stood out. You would have seen them.”
    “To tell the truth, I’m trying to remember if she had another ear. She came down through the trees, and the other side of her, it was unpleasant.”
    Augustine stared at him.
    “Look,” said Hugh, “it’s obvious you know these girls.” No surprises there. The Valley was cloistered and tight-knit, especially the climbing community, like tribal settlements in every mountain valley he’d been through, from the Solu Khumbu to the Appalachians.
    Augustine’s jaw tightened.
    “Tell me how to help you name her,” Hugh said. “Keep asking me questions. Maybe something will come clear.”
    “Just tell me, was it her?” Augustine opened his wallet. He showed a photo of a young woman drenched with sunshine. Her hair was white with light. Augustine was in the photo, too, practically transparent in the radiance. He had his arm around her.
    Hugh might have guessed. The woman—or one of the women on the wall—was his lover. “No,” Hugh said. “It wasn’t her.”
    “Forget the hair,” Augustine said. He was plaintive and skeptical. He was afraid Hugh might be wrong. “Look at her face. You saw her face.”
    The more Hugh examined the face in the photo, the less certain he became. There were resemblances, but maybe he was imagining them. He tried to remember the face he’d covered with the tarp, but its