Lauren was really getting into it. Me? I was losing interest, fast.

“She signed your yearbook ‘Alan, you’re the best!’ or ‘What a great friend!’ or something like that, I bet. Yes? The ‘XXX’ was the closest you ever came to kissing her. Am I right?”

I sighed once more.

Lauren asked, “So what does all this have to do with Diane?”

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Diane. She’s teasing me about an old conjoint case we did together.”

I watched Lauren make connections, all the wrong ones.

“No, we didn’t treat Teri Reginelli and her significant other. I don’t even know where she’s living, and I don’t have a clue what guy is stuck with her. Teri Reginelli is just a metaphor for a point Diane was trying to make. Can we talk about something else? Please.”

“Of course,” she said.

Lauren leaned over to check something in the oven. I inhaled deeply but couldn’t figure out what she was cooking in there. I was thinking chicken. I thought I captured the aroma of balsamic vinegar, too.

Her willingness to change the subject concerned me. It didn’t take long for me to discover that I had good reason to be concerned.

She said, “There was an interesting thing at work today. Mitchell got called to oversee the execution of a search warrant on the home of a guy in town who’s apparently become a fresh suspect in an old murder in southern California. A couple of detectives flew in from Laguna Beach and requested our assistance. The Boulder detective thought it would be better if somebody from our office was involved as an observer to the search.”

I don’t know whether I said “shit”-if I did, it certainly qualified as a mumbled profanity-or whether I merely thoughtshit.

Lauren said, “The whole case-a husband suspected of murder in another state, a loving wife who knows a little something-it reminded me of that question you asked me earlier in the week. Do you remember? The one about exclusions to the spousal privilege statute? Felony exceptions? Even as they might apply in some other state? Like California?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

She left the oven, walked over, and kissed me full on the mouth, tracing the outline of my lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

“Sometimes I love to watch you squirm. Mitchell saw you over at the house where they served the warrant today. So I think I know what spouse might be trying to exclude what testimony, and I think I know who the reincarnation of Teri Reginelli is, too.”

She kissed me again. No tongue the second time.

There were days I had doubts that Boulder, Colorado, was still a small town.

Well, that day I had no doubts.

Saturday broke from the gates like a day that was intent on setting a new standard for late November. The morning was glorious. The air was crisp, clear, and dry, and the sunrise lit up the eastern horizon in shades of vaporizing gold.

I knew all about the beauty of the sunrise because I was heading east at the moment when the sun completed cresting the earth, my head up, my jersey zipped all the way to my Adam’s apple, my spin well above a hundred, my padded butt barely on the saddle, my bike weightless between my legs. The back roads in Boulder County belonged to me alone.

I covered fifty miles of asphalt at a brisk pace and was back home sipping juice on my deck by nine o’clock.

The phone rang. Sam.

“You been outside yet?” he asked.

“I’ve done fifty miles already.”

“Me, too,” he countered. “Actually more like fifty yards. I walked out to get the paper. Who am I kidding? Given the size of my lot, that’s more like fifty feet, isn’t it? Astonishing day, huh?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“We’re going to get blasted, you know.”

My living room deck faced the mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in sight between my house and the Continental Divide, or from Pikes Peak down south to whatever peak that was past Longs Peak way up north. “Really? You think?” I said.

“It always happens. You get a run of unseasonably good weather like we’ve had lately, and then you get a day that’s like, I don’t know… perfect-like this one-and then five minutes later you’re walking someplace and the wind is blowing hard enough to send you to Nebraska, and then five minutes after that you’ve got snow in your flip-flops.”

He was right. That’s just the way it usually happened. While I considered the image of Sam in flip-flops I took another glance toward the Divide.

Not a cloud. Not today-maybe tomorrow we’d get blasted.

I said, “How are you doing, Sam?”

He didn’t exactly respond. He said, “There’s somebody I have to talk to in Gold Hill. Want to come with? Bet it’s pretty up there.”

Lauren and Grace were at some weekly mother-child yoga event that Adrienne thought was the greatest thing going. I was tempted to go some Saturday morning just to watch. Grace had the not-so-svelte physique of a well-fed, chunky baby. My daughter could no more do yoga than I could fly. I left them a note about my plans and headed to Sam’s house.

Depending on the weather, on a typical weekend before Thanksgiving the ten-mile drive from Sam’s house on the west side of Boulder up the Front Range to Gold Hill can take as little as twenty-five minutes or as long as-well, a long, long time. The road that curls up Sunshine Canyon into the mountains was paved for a while and then it isn’t paved for a much longer while. In some places the dirt and gravel portion of the track is particularly steep and curvy, and in winter, with the sun low in the sky, some of the canyon stretches don’t see the direct rays of the sun for months at a time. After a heavy snow and a deep cold snap, ice on the road can freeze as hard as a traffic cop’s eyes.

The final descent into the valley that was home to the pioneer mining enclave of Gold Hill is a particularly spectacular section of trail. The road drops a few hundred feet in altitude-and about 150 years in time and attitude-in less than a minute.

Very few villages in the Rocky Mountains have managed to check the natural progression that leads from Old West town to Old West ghost town. Some of the ones that have managed to freeze themselves in time have become polished tourist magnets like Telluride and Georgetown, but only a precious few of the surviving nineteenth-century burgs have managed to remain invisible to the hordes of annual visitors who show up clutching tour books. Gold Hill was one of those few. Gold Hill was hard to get to, its fewer than two hundred full-time residents didn’t exactly lay out a welcome mat for guests, and any attempt to find a location for a Golden Arches or Starbucks within the range of a.30-06 from town would likely be met by a crowd of passionate locals prone to carelessness with torches.

The Gold Hill Inn, the town’s enduring fine dining destination, was open only during the summer months because too few Front Range residents could be counted on to make the drive up to nearly nine thousand feet in the inevitable springtime slush or the usually predictable autumn ice. Winter? For most people, casual travel to Gold Hill was too risky during an average snow year. I’ve always had the impression that four or five months of regular visits by curious flatlanders were about the maximum the residents of Gold Hill could tolerate anyway.

I hadn’t asked Sam about his business in Gold Hill. The mountain enclave was in Boulder County, and Sam was a city cop, not a sheriff’s deputy, so I suspected that his business was personal, not professional. But I also knew Sam well enough to know that if during the course of an investigation he wanted to talk with somebody who happened to reside a few steps outside the city limits, he would usually find a way to do so. The solution might be by-the-book legal, or it might be less-than-by-the-book creative. But the job would get done.