looked at it. Celia hated death. She was terrified by it. Yet she’d taken her own life and the lives of her two best friends. She loved them and she killed them and she killed herself. What they were fighting about didn’t explain a thing.
Across the room, a jingle. Kate was trying to give them a room key.
“No,” he said. “I told you—we’re going to the Adelaide.”
“Oh, but I want to stay here,” Emma said. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost.”
Kate handed her the key. Emma turned to him, grinning, dangling the key chain over her thumb.
“Why did you buy this place?” he said. “What was the point?”
Kate sat back, light from the computer washing over her face.
“I don’t know, Julian. I guess I just couldn’t let it go.”
He held his face impassive, but his throat was tight with grief and something akin to fear. He picked up their bags. They seemed much lighter now than they had ten minutes ago; he could barely feel them.
As they reached the foot of the winding staircase, Emma paused to look back.
“What were they like?” she said.
“Oh,” Kate said, as if this was something she’d never considered. “They were...”
Silence crept into the room. From far away, Julian could hear the echo of laughter, the bright crackle of the fire, a murmur of music and voices.
Dead. All dead, and they had taken him with them.
Kate turned her head toward the kitchen, the half-open door. Her answer came just as Emma started up the stairs, leaving only Julian to hear.
“They were really young.”
* * *
Kate stayed at her desk as Julian and his girlfriend disappeared into the upstairs hallway. She could hear the girl’s voice, still chattering, exclaiming over the old hotel, and Julian’s grumbled responses. A door opened and closed, leaving Kate alone in the silence.
For a few minutes she sat where she was, staring out the window. A blue jay hopped along the gnarled branch of a spruce tree, tipping its head to get a look at her. She imagined herself from the bird’s point of view, framed by the windowpanes, alone at her desk, how she’d still be here when the bird looked down from high above.
I’m lonely, she thought, surprised.
She opened the right-hand drawer of the desk. Under some folders and a stack of bills, she found a photograph, still in its heart-shaped frame. Eric had taken that picture. She remembered looking back at him, with the whole snowy mountain laid out at their feet and Julian’s arm snug around her shoulders. Both of them grinning so hard at some joke of Eric’s, Celia and Rory flanking the camera, doubled over with laughter. She wished she could remember what they all had found so funny, two months before the laughter died.
She had hardly recognized Julian today, he’d changed so much. Even his voice, once smooth and self-assured, now had climbed in pitch and developed a petulant whine like a child’s. And his face, though still tanned as it was in the photograph, seemed sallow and pinched, with a furrow between his brows and a strange new habit of dragging his gaze around the room as if the sight of it exhausted him.
She wondered what Julian had been doing over the past five years. The last time she saw him was the night of the murders, when he had taken her home with some vague promise to check on her the next day. But he never did that. Like the others, he was simply gone.
She had heard about him from time to time: Julian was in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. Hot places, sunny and flat. An odd itinerary for a skier.
She had nearly forgotten him until last winter, when she’d run into Zig Campanelli at a bar in Telluride. Zig was Julian’s best friend—if Julian had one of those. They had known each other since they were teenagers. It would have seemed strange not to ask after him, and after a few minutes she did. But even Zig seemed puzzled by the changes in Julian.
“He’s not skiing anymore,” Zig said. “Hasn’t for years. I don’t know whether he busted something important or got bored or what. Last time I heard from him, he was in Bali, said he was sick of the snow. That’s all I could get out of him. He sounded...”
“What?”
But Zig only shook his head.
* * *
“This is it,” Emma said. She shut the door behind them and leaned back with an ecstatic sigh. “This is where she died. I can feel it.”
The buzz in Julian’s ears had built to a dull roar. Who was this girl to say she felt something from Celia? As if she knew anything at all about what had happened, had even a sliver of an idea what it was all about. He ground his teeth in anger.
Shut up. Stupid girl.
What had he been thinking to bring her here? Here, of all places. She was nobody special, a friend of a friend, the tail end of a long chain of acquaintances that had started, as far as he could remember, with his buddy Zig Campanelli. The two of them had worked together for a time at ESPN and maintained a sporadic friendship over the years, which was built more on a mutual need for points of contact than true affection.
Zig had a way of introducing Julian that set them both up for admirers.
“This is my good friend Julian Moss,” he’d say. “Used to make a living carving up the ski slopes, kicking my ass most of the time. Swept the championships more than once, went to the Games and came home with a bronze in downhill. Then somebody noticed he’s not all that bad-looking, under the helmet.” Here he’d give Julian a friendly little clap on the shoulder. “My boss gave him a job anchoring the championships at ESPN. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
And he’d saunter off, drink in hand, leaving Julian with another chance to parlay that biography into something truly worthwhile.
Julian hadn’t seen Zig in years, but, like the Olympic medal, he was the gift that kept on giving. When Julian had surfaced again in Colorado three weeks before, there wasn’t a scene in which he wouldn’t have known someone who knew someone else.
In fact it was Emma, her girlfriends giggling and clutching at each other in the background, who had approached him. They must have talked at some point, to some end, but if so the conversation had been so perfunctory that he couldn’t remember a word of it. She was in his bed the next morning. He had fucked her and she was willing to be fucked again and was not inclined to complain about the fact that his head was not with her for a moment. He was a status lay for her. The thrill, if there was one, was in his name.
It was a fair trade. When he asked her later that day to come up here with him, she agreed happily, possibly imagining herself as Julian Moss’s girlfriend, a further bump in status. She could write about it on Facebook, or send a Tweet, or whatever was the latest venue for the humblebrag: Driving up to Telluride with Julian. First time in an F-Type, OMG!!!
She was entitled to that. It was his end of the trade. He was aware that the ache in his jaw was not Emma’s fault. She couldn’t help the nasal drone of her voice or the fact that it bored into his ear like a hungry beetle. It was irrational to blame her when she was clearly doing her best. But every time he looked at her vapid face—features so like Celia’s but put together all wrong—he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until something came loose.
He set down the suitcases and walked slowly back to her. Emma gazed up with a fatuous smile as if she thought she was too goddamned irresistible for words. He unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing some sort of push-up bra, with a hard lace-encrusted pad that scratched his palm.
Celia had never worn anything under her shirt. The shallow swell of her breast made barely a ripple in her clothing, so he supposed she didn’t need one. But he’d once caught a peek through the armhole of a loose-fitting blouse, where her ribs laddered up the side of her bare chest, and he’d