Mistress of Justice

She sighed and threw the newspaper away then washed the ink off her hands as if it were blood.

At five-thirty the doorbell rang.

Who could it be? Neighbors? Thom Sebastian assaulting her to beg for a date?

Ralph Dudley simply assaulting her?

She opened the door.

Mitchell Reece, wearing a windbreaker, walked inside and asked her if she had a cat.

"What?" she asked, bewildered by his quick entrance.

"A cat," he repeated.

"No, why? Are you allergic? What are you doing here?"

"Or fish, or anything you have to feed regularly?"

She was so pleased to see him in a playful mood – so different from the shock in his face after Clayton's death – that she joked back, "Just occasional boyfriends. But none at the moment, as I think you know."

"Come on downstairs I want to show you something."

"But -"

He held his finger to his lips. "Let's go." She followed him out to the street, where a limo awaited, a black Lincoln. He opened the door and pointed inside, where she saw three large bags from Paragon Sporting Goods and two sets of new Rossignol skis propped across the seats.

Taylor laughed. "Mitchell, what are you doing?"

"Time for my lesson. Don't you remember? You were going to teach me to ski."

"Where? Central Park?"

"You know of someplace called Ca

"But when?"

"But now," he said.

"Just like that?"

"The firm's jet's on the ramp at La Guardia. And they bill us by the hour so I suggest you hustle your butt. Go pack."

"This is crazy. What about work?"

"Donald called – he or his wife found out you like to ski so he ordered us to take some time off. He's giving us the trip all-expenses-paid. He called it a Christmas bonus. I've bought everything we need, I think. The store told me what to get. Skis, poles, black stretch pants, boots, bindings, sweaters, goggles. And…" He held up a box.

"What's that?" Taylor asked.

"That? The most important thing of all."

She opened it. "A crash helmet?"

"That's for me." He shrugged. "Maybe you're a teacher." He smiled. "And maybe you're not."

CHAPTER THIRTY

The helmet wasn't a bad idea. Reece had been on the bu

One of the resort doctors, a cheerful Indian, had taped it.

"Is it broken?" Reece had asked.

"No, is no fracture."

"Why does it hurt so much?"

"Lots of nerves in fingers," the doctor said, beaming. "Many, many nerves."

Afterward, they sat in the small lounge in the i

"Oh, Mitchell, I feel so bad," she said. "But you did a very respectable first run."

"My thumb doesn't feel too respectable. Is it always this cold?"

"Ca

"Really? Well, we wouldn't want to have too much fun now, would we?"

Reece actually didn't seem too upset about either the accident or the weather. And she soon learned why. He preferred to sit out the day with what he had smuggled with him – files from the Hanover settlement closing. Taylor too didn't mind, she was eager to get out onto the double-diamond trails and kick some ski butt, not baby-sit him on the begi

She kissed him. "Sit in the lodge and behave yourself."

As she crunched her way toward the lifts, he called, "Good luck. I assume you don't say, 'Break a leg."

She smiled, stomped into her skis and slid down the slight incline to the bottom of the lift.

At the top of the mountain, she eased off the chair and braked to a stop just past the lift house. She bent down and washed her goggles in snow. The White Mountains were, as she'd told him, son-of-a-bitch cold and the wind steadily scraped across her face. She pulled silk hand liners on and replaced her mittens, then poled her way into position and looked down the mountain. Her impression had always been that most runs never look as steep from the top as they do from the bottom but as she gazed down toward the lodge, over a half mile straight below her, she saw a plunge, not a slope. Her pulse picked up and immediately she realized how right Mitchell had been to arrange the trip. How important it was to get away from the city to distance herself from Hubbard, White & Willis, from Wendall Clayton's ghost.

She pushed off the crest of the mountain.

It was the best run of her life.

Suddenly there was nothing in her universe but speed and snow and the rhythm of her turns.

Speed, speed, speed.

Which was all she wanted. Her mouth was open slightly in the ellipse that suggests fear or sexual heights. Her teeth dried and stung in the frigid slipstream but the pain only added to her surge of abandon.

Taylor danced over moguls the way girls skip double-Dutch jump rope on playgrounds. Once, her skis left the ground and she landed as if the snow had risen timidly to stroke the bottom of the fiberglass. Trees, bushes, other skiers were a swift-ratcheting backdrop sweeping past, everyone hushed, it seemed, listening to the cutting hiss of her Rossignol.

She was sure she was hitting sixty or seventy miles an hour. Her hair was whipping her shoulders and back. She wished she'd borrowed Recce's helmet – not for safety, but to cut the wind resistance of the tangled mass of drag.

Then it was over. She brodied to a stop near the base of the run, her thighs in agony but her heart filled with a glorious rush of fear and victory.

She did four runs this way, until on the last one, on a big mogul, she lost control and had to windmill her arms to regain her balance.

It sobered her.

Okay, honey, one suicide a week is enough.

At the bottom of the mountain, she kicked out of her skis and loosened her boot clasps. A tall, thin man came up to her and said in a Germanic accent, "Hey, that was a, you know, pretty okay run. You feel maybe like another one?'

"Uh, no, not really."

"Okay, okay. Hey, how about a drink?"

"Sorry." She picked up her skis and walked toward the cabin. "I'm here with my boyfriend."

And she realized suddenly that, by God, she was.

Taylor returned to find Reece in great spirits, the tiny room cluttered with papers and documents delivered by FedEx or DHL. He was on the phone but he motioned her to him and kissed her hard then resumed his conversation.

She sat on the bed, wincing as she pulled off her sweater and stretch pants, and began massaging her thighs and calves.

It was around that time that Reece hung up the phone and stacked the files away in a corner.

When they awoke in mid-afternoon they went to several antique stores, which weren't the precious collections of cheese dishes and brass surveying instruments you find in Co

None of the shopkeepers seemed to expect them to buy anything and they didn't.

That night they ate in one of the half-dozen interchangeable i

After they made love that night and Reece had fallen asleep, Taylor Lockwood lay under the garden patch quilt of a hundred hexagons of cotton and felt the reassuring pressure of a man's thigh beside her. She smelled the cold air as it streamed through the inch-open window and gathered on the floor. She tried to forget about Wendall Clayton, about Hubbard, White & Willis, about life on the other side of the looking glass.