Mantled with a smooth sheen of snow, decorated with tinsel and giant plastic candy canes and strings of colored lights, the tiny mountain village looked both idyllic and vaguely fraudulent, like a movie set carefully erected for a remake of White Christmas. The dark, winter-afternoon sky was pregnant with more snow, and squares of amber shone warmly in most of the frame and false-fronted buildings; despite the energy crisis, the bulbs strung across Sierra Street burned in steady hues. On the steep valley slopes to the west, south and east, the red fir and lodgepole pine forests were shadowed, white-garbed, and as oddly unreal as the village itself.

A car with its headlamps on came down through the long, cliff-walled pass to the north-County Road 235-A, the only road presently open into or out of the valley-and passed the pine board sign reading: HIDDEN VALLEY. POPULATION 74. ELEVATION 6,033. Just before Garvey’s Shell, where the county road became Sierra Street, the car moved slowly beneath the spanning Christmas decorations, past the Valley Cafe and Hughes’ Mercantile and the Valley Inn and Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop. When it reached the All Faiths Church, at the end of the three-block main street, it turned into the fronting lot and then swung around to the small cottage at the rear: the Reverend Peter Keyes, home from the larger town of Soda Grove, eight miles to the north, where he had relatives.

Diagonally across from the church-beyond the village proper, beyond Alpine Street and the house belonging to retired County Sheriff Lew Coopersmith-was a long, snow-carpeted meadow.