A mug of coffee in his hand, Arnold slowly makes his way over to join his father at the kitchen table. He is a big man, but his tiny voice makes him smaller. He keeps pushing his horn-rimmed glasses up and down the bridge of his nose, but they don't seem to serve much purpose: Since an operation in the early summer on his brain stem, Arnold has had double vision, and he keeps his left eye closed for long periods -- the effect is slightly spooky.

Arnold has said that he cannot speak about the night that he found Christa on the advice of his lawyer, who would probably rather that we didn't get into the intricacies of why he drove over to her house to return the flashlight when she lives so close by, and why he didn't have a flashlight himself on the Cape in the wintertime, and in any case he doesn't want to relive the experience of telling his father (who had driven over with him) that he thought Christa was "d-e-a-d" so as not to upset Ava, and then walking back through the woods to call 911 from his phone since he couldn't find Worthington's. So I ask him about his relationship with Christa.

"I think Ava's presence had a lot to do with it, in retrospect," says Arnold. "Ava is beautiful. She's so sensitive. She can be very sensitive to what people's agenda is, for good or ill. She can get easily hurt." His eye flicks open. "That's what I can tell you most about Christa -- about her relationship with her daughter."

In recent months, Arnold says, he'd visit Worthington with the sole purpose of seeing Ava. And Worthington? "She was very . . . complicated," Arnold says. "We had lots of quarrels, just low-level quarrels. She could be very caustic, and her comments had a destructive quality to them. Angry. I used to chide her for being a Dorothy Parker wannabe. She'd just laugh."

He sips the coffee. "You know, I just saw Ava yesterday," he says. "And when I left, she really didn't want me to go. It was heartbreaking."

I suggest that maybe he should be the one who takes care of her now.

Arnold's eye snaps closed, and he rubs it with a knuckle. "Well," he says finally, "I can't make that argument to anybody."

Shell-shocked after losing out on one of the best jobs in Paris, Worthington decided to follow her British "painter-slash-librarian" boyfriend to London, where she began to freelance in earnest. Some of her writing seems phoned in -- "The world's top fashion designers make fantastic clothes; for most of us, reality bites painfully at the cash register" -- but the majority of it is well researched and vibrant. Worthington turned her passion for antiques and flea markets into a new specialty, writing on such topics as antique snuffboxes, modern book collectors, and refurbished ship's compasses.

One beau lived with Worthington in her studio apartment for a while, though friends say she eventually got sick of his unpredictability and temper tantrums. When she called it quits, friends say, he smashed in her front door. She talked about getting a restraining order.

Then there was another typical "Christa drama," as one friend describes it: In the summer of 1989, a Con Edison steam pipe blew up outside the apartment she owned on Gramercy Park and was renting out to one of her editors, Deborah Kirk: It killed two workers and a building resident, injured 24 others, and seriously damaged her apartment. Soon Worthington became involved in a suit against Con Ed; when things fizzled out with her man in London, she decided to go back to New York and deal with the legal hassle there. She was surprised at how happy she was to be back in the city, and once she was allowed to move back into the apartment, she made it a real home, decorating it with her mix of funky tapestries and flea-market knickknacks as well as a huge antique mirror that she had shipped over from Paris -- "the only thing of any value Christa ever owned," says a friend.

While Worthington did get steady work at Elle and later Elle Décor during the tenure of friend and confidante Marian McEvoy, she found it hard to establish herself as a writer outside the fashion world, and even there she was seen as someone who was talented but out of the game. Most of her income came from a commission to write copy for three "Chic Simple" books -- on scarves, accessories, and clothes. "Flirtatious or functional, gloves are the hats of the hand," she wrote in the accessories guide's hand-wear chapter. "They dramatize instantly: they can't help it. They're all about movement, so they tend to provoke. The dropped glove is a mating cry; the gauntlet, the call to combat."

Not particularly challenged by writing these haiku, Worthington began an obsessive romance with a quiet, moody, yet handsome guy whom friends remember only as "the magician." Their stormy relationship was par for the course. "There was always this or that drama with this or that guy, and they seemed to reach the soap-opera stage very quickly," says friend and television producer Billy Kimball. "Christa liked to see herself as the heroine of her own nineteenth-century novel."

Worthington herself wrote on the topic. "Pain addicts are perhaps the real fans of Wuthering Heights, preferring the fix of unrequited love. For it is about a love that prefers the bell jar of bliss, the cocoon of torment to the inglorious reality of 'he's just a guy with a mother problem.' "

"The magician" was in fact a magician, who did the occasional children's party and nightclub gig, but mostly he hung out at a Third Avenue dive near Worthington's house, where he would "do his card-floating-in-the-air-level tricks and then sucker people into buying him beers," according to the bar's owner. "Problem was that when he was done, watches and wallets would sometimes be missing." The magician lived with Worthington in her studio apartment for a while, though friends say she eventually got sick of his unpredictability and temper tantrums. When she called it quits, friends say, he smashed in her front door. She talked about getting a restraining order.

Among the locals in the outer Cape, Tony Jackett is a legend. Born and bred in Provincetown, the grandson of a Portuguese harpooner, the 51-year-old Jackett has the looks of an aging George Clooney and the sex appeal to go with them. A fixture at selectmen meetings and weekly art openings, he's fished with Sebastian Junger and is a main character in Peter Manso's upcoming book P-Town: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape. With a wife described as having "the best heart on the Cape," and four grown kids who've always been the most popular in town, Jackett is the local good old boy, everyone's best friend. But he had a secret.

"There I am working a second job cleaning cottages so we can pay the car insurance," says his wife, Susan, an upbeat blonde with luminous blue eyes behind long bangs. "I'm pressing his shirts before he goes up to Pamet, and little do I know what he's doing when he gets there."

It's the week after Worthington was murdered, and the couple are sipping tea at the kitchen counter of their Sunshine home in the less affluent corner of Truro. Every bit of wall space is covered with family photos and oil portraits of their kids when they were young; their Persians, Fang and Emerson, nap at their feet, and three candles burn near the stove. "One is for my Native American adopted son, who died of aids," explains Susan. "Another is for my mother, who also passed away. And this one -- this one is for Christa."