“Well, she wasn’t gonna make it,” Murch said. “Wait, I’ll get her.”
Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny made their way through the downstairs to the living room, where windows showed them the many lights of the sand spreader. Here they sat down in nice antique chairs and caught their breath a little. There was nothing to do now until the sand spreader went away.
The downstairs heat was on, but not very high, since nobody lived down here. The family kept the temperature in this part of the house at fifty, warm enough so the pipes wouldn’t burst. Normally, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny might have found that a little chilly. After their ride up the mountain in the back of the open truck, this dark living room was toasty. Toasty.
“I really wanna thank you,” Murch’s Mom told the people who gathered her into the house, all clustered together at the foot of these stairs. “And I really wanna thank you, too, young man,” she told her son, who was standing at the closed door, his hand on the knob.
“All in a day’s work, ma’am,” Murch assured her. “Well, I gotta get back on the job.” He waved to everybody and went out to drive the truck back down the mountain, park it just off the road down there, and nap for an hour. Then the alarm on his wristwatch would wake him, for the return trip.
Dortmunder awoke, to see the lights of the sand spreader recede down the mountain. He nodded at it, closed his eyes, then jolted upright. Asleep!
Man, that had been close. He’d no sooner sat down here on this comfortable chair in this comfortable living room in the dark than he’d fallen asleep. What if he’d slept the whole time until Murch came back, and even went on sleeping then? Huh? What if that had happened?
Well, Kelp or Tiny would have woken him. Everything would have been okay.
Tiny snored. It was a low sound, but powerful, a sound you might hear from deep inside the cave where the virgins are sacrificed.
The truck was gone now and the room was very dark. Dortmunder stood and peered around at his companions, as best he could in all this darkness, and they were both asleep, Kelp just a little more quietly.
Dortmunder went to Kelp first, shook his shoulder, and whispered, “Andy! Wake up!”
“Oh, sure,” Kelp said.
Tiny snored.
“No,” Dortmunder said, “I mean really awake.”
“You got it,” Kelp said.
“I mean awake with your eyes open and maybe even standing up,” Dortmunder said.
Tiny snored.
“Absolutely,” Kelp said.
So Dortmunder gave up and went to Tiny and said, “Tiny, we gotta wake up now and steal a lot of stuff.”
Tiny opened his eyes. He looked around and said, “It’s nighttime.”
“In Thurstead,” Dortmunder reminded him. “We’re here to burgle the place.”
“Or rob,” Tiny suggested, and heaved himself to his feet. “When is it, do you happen to know, Dortmunder? When is it you burgle, and when is it you rob?”
“When I get the chance,” Dortmunder said.
Tiny looked around. “I can’t see in here,” he complained. “Hold on.”
A second later, light appeared. They had all brought flashlights along, which they’d adapted for the night’s work by covering most of the lens with black electric tape, so that only a narrow band of light could emerge. Tiny had switched his on, and now he waved it around at all the treasures in the room. He said, “Where’s Kelp?”
“Right there, asleep,” Dortmunder said.
Tiny tapped Kelp on the side of the head. “Up,” he said.
Kelp got up.
“I love Uno,” Murch’s Mom said. She’d told these people her name was Margaret Crabtree, so the mother, Viveca, called her Margaret, and the three children, very polite and well brought up, called her Mrs. Crabtree. Hughie, the ex-cop, hadn’t figured out yet what to call her.
“Margaret,” Viveca said, “it’s so late for the girls.”
“But it’s a special night, isn’t it?” Murch’s Mom said. “With the storm and everything.” She wanted everybody talking and involved in one place together, not off alone and silent in their individual rooms, listening to unusual noises from downstairs.
“Oh, Mom, please,” or variations on “Oh, Mom, please,” said the three girls, and Viveca said, “Well, just for a little while.”
“Yeah,” Hughie the ex-cop said. “Just for a little while.”
Everywhere you go these days, if there’s a group that’s sponsoring where it is you are, the group gives you a tote bag. The tote bag has something written on it that is supposed to make you remember the group and the occasion every time later on that you use the tote bag, but when will you ever use all those tote bags? The only real use for your fourteenth tote bag is to hold the other thirteen tote bags, which is what most people do and why most people say they don’t have enough closet space. However, if you happen to be a burglar by profession—or maybe a robber—tote bags are very handy.
The public rooms of Thurstead were full of many valuable items, both large and small, but, given the circumstances, the three robbers now shining their muted flashlight beams this way and that way in those rooms were interested only in items that were both valuable and small; thus the two tote bags that each of them carried.
The paintings on the walls in here might be worth two or three fortunes in money, but they would never survive a trip down the mountain through this storm in the back of an open truck, so unfortunately they had to be left where they were. But gold would survive, in a tote bag. Jewels would survive, jade would survive, marble would survive, scrimshaw would survive.
Tiny’s left-hand tote bag said National Scrabble Championship 1994 and his right-hand tote bag said, many, many times all over it, Holland America Line. Kelp, somehow a more literary type, carried in his left hand a tote bag that said LARC—Library Association of Rockland County and in his right hand one bearing a stylized giant W and the name Warner Books. And Dortmunder’s two tote bags read Temporis Vitae Libri and Saratoga.
They didn’t rush to fill these bags. They had an hour, and each of them wanted to be carrying only really very valuable items when the job was done. They used their experience from previous dealings with resalable merchandise, they occasionally consulted together over an item such as a dagger with a ruby-encrusted hilt, and slowly they made their way through the treasures of Thurstead, leaving many of them, but not all, behind.
Murch’s Mom said, “Could I, uh, could I be excused?”
“Of course,” Viveca said.
Rising, Murch’s Mom said quietly to Viveca, “Where’s the, uh, you know, facilities?”
“Oh, use my bathroom,” Viveca told her. “It’s just to the left, and then the first door on the right, and through the bedroom.”
“Here, take my flashlight,” Hughie said.
“Thanks,” Murch’s Mom said, and went away, followed directions, and in the bedroom went straight to the hairbrush on the vanity table. From her pocket, she removed a small Ziploc bag, and into it went all the stray hair from the brush. Then back into the pocket went the Ziploc bag and, after a quick visit to the bathroom, back to the Uno game went Murch’s Mom.
The tote bags were full, and lined up in a row near the door. They had time to kill, so they wandered the rooms some more, this time acting like regular visitors, eyeballing the paintings, the furniture, the fur throws. “We oughta come back here sometime,” Tiny said, “with a semi.”
“I think the family would notice,” Dortmunder said.
“Helicopter,” Kelp suggested. “Stan knows how to fly a helicopter, remember?”
Dortmunder said, “I think the family would notice a helicopter even more than a semi.”