Mistress of Justice

Hampshire. I just called the weather number. Four inches of new powder. I don’t know what that means but even the recorded voice sounded excited so I assume it’s good.”
    “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 whatto 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 good teacher.” He smiled. “And maybe you’re not.”

CHAPTER THIRTY
     
    The helmet wasn’t a bad idea. Reece had been on the bunny slope at the Cannon ski resort in New Hampshire for only fifteen minutes when he fell and jammed his thumb.
    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 inn.
    “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?”
    “Cannon’s got the coldest, windiest runs in New England, dear,” she said, pulling his head against her neck. “People have frozen to death not far from here.”
    “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 beginner slopes or worry about him on the intermediates.
    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 teethdried 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 Reece’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