Christa was like that, layered. "She was such an odd combination of personality traits," says a friend. "She never drank and had long ago quit smoking, wasn't a party girl at all, and was so protective of her daughter you almost wanted to tell her to back off. Yet she would do things to hurt herself. She could really fly to the flame."

If there was one aspect of Worthington's character that commanded the respect of her peers and in which she herself took the most pride, it was that she was brave enough to take the road less traveled.

She'd moved to Truro to live a simpler life, but from the beginning, Christa being Christa, there was plenty of drama.

By moving to Truro, Worthington chose solidity, family, and rootedness over the glitz and excitement of Manhattan. In addition to tracing her roots to the one of the most prominent old families in the Hamptons, the Halseys, Christa Halsey Worthington was granddaughter to perhaps the most respected couple in Truro history: John Worthington and his wife, Elizabeth "Tiny" Worthington, so named because she stood nearly six feet and wore a size 10 combat shoe when driving ambulances in World War I, are credited with saving the area from the ravages of the Depression. John employed the male half of the town at his fish-processing plant, and Tiny the female at her fishnet-making business; in fact, she invented the fashion of fishnet.

"Christa was very connected to Truro," says a friend. "In a good -- and bad -- way."

Though Worthington cultivated a deep connection with the stark beachscape -- "However fancy the Hamptons become, there is still God in this country, a Puritan God of straight and narrow instincts who demands a degree of awe," she wrote in Hamptons Country magazine in 1998 -- there was much about Truro that upset her. She had long had a difficult relationship with Toppy, a former Massachusetts assistant D.A., who later practiced private law. He, in turn, had problems with the rest of the family, a land-poor clan that lived in Worthington ancestral homes in Truro. There were arguments about whose land was whose; most recently, Worthington felt slighted by an aunt in Florida who sold two parcels she believed to be half hers. In a drastic move, Worthington had even hired a private investigator to look into the situation.

There were other issues, less financial in nature. Toppy had a girlfriend. He was 72. She was 29. Toppy said he was in love, but let it slip at some point that the woman had been in jail. Worthington hit the roof. She told friends she thought her dad had been "hypnotized."

"Toppy's girlfriend was Christa's obsession of the moment," says a friend. "We told her to forget it: Write a book. Go to Paris. Do anything but sit in Truro and bite your nails over this woman."

She'd moved to Truro to live a simpler life, but from the beginning, Christa being Christa, there was plenty of drama. The first year, she lived in Tiny's unheated, two-room cottage on Truro's town harbor -- which the family called "Tiny's hut." She met a guy, Tony Jackett, a married commercial fisherman who now holds the job of local "shellfish constable" -- people sometimes joke that he has the last job in the fishing business on the famously over-fished Cape these days. Back then, Jackett had been fishing for flounder every day on his 45-foot dragger, Josephine, which he anchored in Provincetown. But he'd taken refuge in Truro's Pamet Harbor during a storm and Jo had sunk. He'd raised her, but it was going to take some time to get her back into fighting shape, so the harbormaster had helped him out with part-time work.

Jackett and Worthington began a torrid two-summer-long affair. She told him she was unable to have a child. They didn't use protection. She got pregnant. She informed him that she was definitely having the baby, but he didn't need to be part of the family unit.

"Let's put it this way: Christa had me by the nuts," Jackett says in his thick Massachusetts accent. He pantomimes grabbing something the size of a nectarine. "But she didn't squeeze hard."

As dramatic as Worthington's personal life could be, she was realistic about her career, which had started off promising but turned sour. "Christa would have laughed at the headline about her death in the Times: A MURDER IN CAPE COD jolts the fashion world," says a friend. "She had no illusions that the fashion world would be jolted by anything she did at this point." Adds her best friend, Melik Kaylan: "She was . . . disgusted over the feral New York media scene and its interest in trashy culture and celebrity and so on. She was trying to point her life in a more serious intellectual direction in a personal and professional way."

After graduating from Vassar in 1977, Worthington worked briefly as a paralegal before rising through the magazine ranks at Cosmopolitan and then Fairchild Publishing, where she landed a job as Women's Wear Daily's accessories editor -- "getting showered with invitations to the best parties and, of course, free fancy sunglasses," recalls a friend. "She was doing a lot better than the rest of us from Vassar at that time," says Brides managing editor Sally Kilbridge, who remembers brown-bagging with Worthington at the World Trade Center fountain during their pre-magazine days. "I could tell she was proud of herself, and we all thought it was incredibly cool -- and were incredibly jealous."

In 1983, Worthington made her friends more jealous when she was sent to Paris by Fairchild at the age of 26. "Working at the Paris W bureau was a kind of baptism by fire, a sort of graduate school for fashion," says Kate Betts, former editor of Harper's Bazaar. "In writing, you learn by mimicking others, and even before I met Christa I knew her byline. She was the perfect Joan Buck-style writer that I tried to emulate."

Worthington interviewed legends like Yves Saint Laurent and Thierry Mugler and went to her share of polo matches and grand balls, though she felt the glamour factor was overrated. She was once assigned to a party given by Baroness Helene de Rothschild for the engagement of her son to a Belgian princess; Worthington wasn't allowed into the party itself -- only the W photographer was invited -- but was summoned to the baroness's home afterward for photo captions. She described it to a friend who wrote a profile of her for the Cape Cod Times: "There she is, in bed with lace-embroidered pillows around her tapestry-draped bed overlooking the Seine with her dachshund at her feet and a pink ribbon in her hair matching her pink-and-white nightie. It's 3 in the afternoon and she's still in bed; and she works very, very hard at giving me the right names, and she's eating champagne truffles. . . . "

"Christa had this great, wry bemusement about that whole world, a kind of 'Isn't it odd that all these people find fashion and money so important?' " says author and friend Jay Mulvaney, who visited her often at her tiny "but fabulous" apartment on the Left Bank and remembers, not without some glee, that she had a discount at Chanel. "But she wasn't taken in by that world -- she had that Waspy disconnect: She was already there, so she didn't understand why people had to try so hard."

"When it comes down to it, I know that none of this matters," Worthington remarked in the Cape Cod Times interview. "[The] Yankee no-nonsense approach to life is in my blood. The idea of fashion to most Bostonians is very silly, and they're quick to assess what is silly and what is important, especially in my family."

In 1988, Worthington, who by that point had worked her way up to the prominent position of W's acting bureau chief, was passed over for the job in favor of Dennis Thim, a promotions executive at Fairchild's now-defunct men's magazine M. "Christa was devastated, but that was just the way it was at W," says a colleague. "It's always been a boys' club." Counters Fairchild chairman and editorial director Patrick McCarthy: "Christa didn't like being bureau chief -- there were too many administrative duties. She just didn't want anyone else to be bureau chief." Though it's unclear exactly how Worthington came to leave the company, it is part of Fairchild lore that she was fired by John Fairchild most unceremoniously: In the elevator on the way to lunch with Worthington and Thim, Fairchild simply remarked, "Christa, you know Dennis, right? He's replacing you."

January in Truro holds a special kind of cold. There's nothing to stop the wind blowing off the ocean, and the memory of summer somehow sharpens the chill. The population, 20,000 in August, shrinks to less than 1,600, and with that the taffy shops close down and restaurants with names like Terra Luna cover their windows with plywood. At the local deli, the only customers are handymen renovating summer cottages for their seasonal owners, which gives the blonde behind the counter more time to read. Today she's immersed in Leo Damore's In His Garden, a chronicle of the last murder to occur in Truro, back in 1968, when carpenter Tony "Chop Chop" Costa killed four young vacationing women and buried their dismembered remains in graves only three feet deep, in a patch of the Truro woods where he used to grow marijuana. The graves were found less than a mile from Worthington's house.