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she said, happy to share her stories of youthful deception with another
    recovered liar. Maybe lying is a phase to which imaginative introverts who are particularly desperate to connect with reality are prone. I remembered that Jim’s friend David Eckley said that part of him hoped that Jim would get away. I wondered what is so attractive about a
    grown-up person who can’t stop lying.

    “I can’t imagine how it would feel anything but lonely,” she said. She and her husband
    moved to Telluride because it was the most beautiful place they had ever seen.

    “I guess I’m just one of those shallow people that needs a really beautiful place to live,”
    she said. The part of Iowa where she grew up was dead flat. “I am addicted to beauty,” she
    sighed. “I can’t help it. I could never live out on the plains.”

    Jim’s goal was not to become rich, or to become better educated. Those goals were only
    secondary to his true purpose, which was spookier and more unsettling, and more universal. He turned his life into a story in order to escape from reality.

    “It’s why I love to read fiction,” she said. To become a fictional character is a scary,
    high-altitude thought, she agreed, especially for people who spend a lot of time inside their own heads. It would take an incredible amount of dedication and endurance to pull off a stunt like that.

    1. The arrival of the drug dealers came after a coterie of West Coast hippies took over the town from the unemployed miners who were busy drinking themselves to death in the local bars.
    The smarter hippies soon got tired of gazing at the mountains and signed on with some
    out-of-state ski moguls to build a resort. The drug of choice in Telluride in the seventies was the white powder memorialized in the eighties coke ballad “Smugglers Blues” by ex-Eagle Glenn
    Frey: “They move it through Miami, sell it in L.A./They hide it up in Telluride, I mean it’s here to stay.”

    II. An Extraordinary Young Man

    Floating one thousand feet above Telluride is a snow-capped and pleasantly artificial
    version of an Alpine village done up in winterized hues of the tan and stucco palette popular in wealthy subdivisions and shopping malls throughout the Southwest. Connected to the old mining town below by a spectacular gondola, Mountain Village is a gated community with no visible
    need for gates. Protected against intruders by its high property values, an active police force, and the general inaccessibility of a planned vacation area at nine thousand feet above sea level, with one road in and one road out, Mountain Village is a man-made paradise for doctors and dentists, Texas oilmen, California property hunters, and other wealthy types who love to ski but can’t afford their own mountain, a likely setting for a skewed postmodern version of F. Scott
    Fitzgerald’s short story “The Ice Palace.” Skiers can ride black diamond trials from early
    morning to late afternoon in relative isolation, and then head down from the slopes to the sliding doors of their condos. Those in the mood for after-ski nourishment can gulp down teriyaki bowls while listening to stoner tracks by Bob Marley and the Wailers, whose eyes would have likely bugged out of their heads at the sight of so much perfect white snow.

    Jim Hogue was planning to make his home in Mountain Village, in a condo provided by
    Dr. Louis Alaia. A skier and local real estate developer, Dr. Alaia is a pleasant, grandfatherly man with thick white hair and olive-tan Mediterranean features that look out of place in the winter landscape. When I met him for lunch at his home, he was wearing a thick navy cashmere sweater. His gentle, absentminded manner betrays a singular degree of involvement in his own thoughts and a corresponding lack of attention to large clues that other people may not be exactly what they seem: he is a mark, a living, walking, breathing study in the self-delusion that afflicts the victims of a con.

    Dr.