“How can it do that?” Viveca wondered. “Nobody could drive up that road tonight.”
“It’s a snowplow,” Hughie informed them, from his years of experience as a New York City policeman. Rising from the table with a certain evident pleasure to have done with Uno even before his final deal, he went over to one of the windows—not the yellow-paned one—and said, “It’s a snowplow coming up to the house.”
“But they don’t do that,” Viveca said, standing and walking over to also stare out the window at the approaching lights. “That looks like some kind of big highway department thing. Jerry from the gas station plows us out, tomorrow, when the storm’s over.”
“Well, here he is,” Hughie said. “I better go see what it’s all about.”
“We’ll all go,” Vanessa said, dropping her cards on the table and getting to her feet.
“Definitely not,” Viveca told her. “You girls are not going out into that storm.”
“Oh, Mom, yes,” Virginia said.
“We’re just going outside the door,” Victoria said.
“Absolutely not,” Viveca said.
42
I’d like a cab like this,” Murch’s Mom said.
“Be tough for the customers to get in,” Murch suggested.
“I wasn’t thinking about the customers,” Murch’s Mom said.
The two of them were warm and cosy in the cab of Cleveland’s top sand spreader, plowing the twisty, steep road up to Thurstead. Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny were undergoing who knows what agonies behind them in the open bed of the truck, but that was them, and anyway, they’d be making a bunch of money out of this trip.
The snow was heavy and wet, which, from their point of view, was good. The sand spreader didn’t care how heavy anything was, but a lot of ice on this steep road might have given it pause.
There was nothing out there so far on this mountain but the snow-piled road, the snow-laden wind, and the snow-burdened trees all around them; beyond the multicolored lights of the truck, there was only darkness. But then, far upslope, Murch’s Mom saw a faint glow, like a dim light left on in an empty attic, seen up the long and creaky stairs. “I guess that’s it,” she said.
Her son was concentrating on the road; mostly on finding it, under all this snow. “You guess what’s what?” he asked, turning the big wheel this way, then turning it that way, goosing the gas, easing up, goosing the gas.
“There’s a light up there,” Murch’s Mom said. “What you call your ghostly little light.”
“Good,” Murch said. “I’m glad they got a light, because that’s what we’re gonna say we saw.”
The trio in the back of the sand spreader couldn’t see anything at all, and they weren’t even trying. They’d all huddled as close as possible to the cab of the truck, to be in its lee, where the wind was maybe one mile an hour less vicious and the snowflakes maybe seven per minute less frequent. They’d brought hotel blankets to wrap precious items in, but they had started by wrapping themselves inside the blankets, so that they now looked like snow-covered bags of laundry that the driver from the cleaners had forgotten. Every time the truck jolted, which it did all the time, it made them bump into one another and the metal cab wall behind them.
“Dortmunder,” Tiny growled through his blanket, “when this is all over, we’re gonna have a little discussion about this plan of yours.”
Fortunately, given the wind and all, Dortmunder didn’t hear that.
“The light’s moving,” said Murch, who had also spotted it by now.
“That is spooky,” his Mom said.
They could almost make out the house now, as they neared it, though mostly they were remembering what they’d seen on the Thurstead Web page. Up there on the second floor of the house, that one spot of light had started to move, shifting past windows, some of which had panes of glass of all different colors, as though the light were semaphoring to some ship long since lost at sea. During a storm like this.
“They saw us is what it is,” Murch said. “They’re coming down.”
“Good.”
Their study of the Thurstead Web page had showed them that a door at the right side of the building, toward the rear, led to a kind of foyer and then the stairs going up to the family’s living quarters. Farther forward in that wall was an entrance to the lower floor; not the main entrance, but a secondary one, to the old original kitchen. Now Murch drove and plowed and steered his way up to the house and along the right side, losing sight of that illumination up above, and stopped with the cab near the family’s entrance and the rear of the vehicle near that other entrance.
No sooner had Murch shifted the big floor-mounted gear lever into Park than the family’s door over there opened, and out came a guy in a big dark wool hat and a bulky dark pea jacket, pointing a flashlight ahead of himself in the general direction of the truck. Somebody behind him, still in the house, had a lantern of some kind, in which the guy could be more or less seen, and to Murch, he looked like a cop. Ex-cop. Retired cop.
His Mom said, “They got a cop.”
“I see that,” Murch said. “Well, here goes nothing,” he said, and opened his door.
Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny came out from inside their blankets, slowly, cautiously, something like butterflies emerging from their cocoons, but not a lot like that. They shook themselves, and kept the blankets around their shoulders, and duck-walked back to the rear of the truck, where the hinges on the doors had been recently drenched in the lubricant called WD-40.
Dortmunder cautiously opened the left-hand door, which would open away from the house and would not be seen by anybody standing over by the family entrance. Stiff, aching all over, he let himself down onto the blacktop, which was already covered with snow, even though Murch had just this minute plowed it. Then he waited to hear conversation.
Murch climbed down out of the cab and waved at the ex-cop.
“Harya,” he yelled.
“Come on in here,” the ex-cop yelled back, more order than invitation, and led Murch through the doorway into the warm foyer, where the other people stood. As he crossed the threshold, Murch took a quick look to his left, where he saw the dark figure of Dortmunder hobble stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster, toward that other door, whose lock he would now pick.
There was a mother in the foyer, carrying a Coleman lantern, and there were three girl children. There was supposed to be a father, too, which couldn’t possibly be the ex-cop, who was obviously the guy from the security company. Maybe the father was stuck in town or something. “Evening,” Murch said to everybody.
The mother looked bewildered, maybe even anxious. She said, “I don’t understand. You highway people never plow this road.”
“And I go along with us,” Murch assured her. “But I got this lady in the truck,” he explained, “and I saw your light.”
The truck cab’s windows were opaque at the moment, but everybody stared in that direction anyway as the ex-cop said, “You got a lady in the cab?”
“Her car went off the road,” Murch explained, “and I come across her, and she’s gonna die in there, you know? So I took her along, but I still got another hour out here before my shift is over, and that truck is no place for this lady. I wondered, you know, you look like you got things okay here, could I leave her with you for an hour?”
The ex-cop said, “You want to leave her with us?”
“Yeah, just for an hour, then I’ll come back up and get her and drive her to Port Jervis. But I can’t do that now, I got my route I gotta do. And everything else is dark, it’s cold, there’s nothing around here but you people.”
The mother said, “Of course she can stay here. That was wonderful of you, to rescue her.”