BEFORE LEAVING the Williston police station, Dr. Tuttle called the Billingslys. But all this accomplished was to interrupt their Christmas dinner. They’d neither seen nor heard from Tim.
The Williston police had alerted the Burlington police to be on the lookout for a boy of Tim’s description, but even so Dr. and Mrs. Tuttle kept driving around. When the daylight began to fade, they swung by the house and found John Henry’s note, held to the refrigerator by a mountain-shaped magnet advertising THERE’S ALWAYS SNOW AT STOWE!
“Ye gads and little fishes!” Mrs. Tuttle cried. “Now they’re both gone!”
Alarmed as she was, she wondered at herself for using one of Winifred’s old-fashioned expressions, and as they set off in the car again, she glanced out across the Cooleys’ pasture at Winifred’s hill—and noticed a trail of footprints winding across the pasture.
“Trev, pull over!”
He did, and she jumped out of the car and clambered over the plowed snow onto the Cooleys’ snow-covered stone wall. From there you could tell that there were two different sets of tracks. One veered off to the Cooleys’ barn and then remerged with the other as snowshoe tracks.
Dr. Tuttle joined her on the stone wall. “I’ll bet that’s John Henry going after him,” he said.
“They’re heading up Winifred’s hill.”
They scrambled back into the car and drove past Cooley’s Curve and turned up the hill road. But the car couldn’t make it up the first steep incline. Dr. Tuttle backed up far enough to get a head of steam and tried again. Again the tires ended up spinning, even with chains. By the third try, he had to put on the headlights.
“I shouldn’t have been so hard on his painting,” Mrs. Tuttle said suddenly. “He probably just meant it in fun.”
“I was just as bad,” Dr. Tuttle murmured, wiping the fogged-over windshield with a gloved hand.
After a half dozen futile attempts, Mrs. Tuttle said, “What we need is a snowmobile.”
“Cooley sold his. He never used it.”
“Do the police have them?”
They drove back to the Williston police station as fast as the chains would allow. A new sergeant had come on duty for the evening shift, a young man with rosy cheeks and a mustache wispier than the one Mrs. Tuttle had in the double portrait. He was working on a delicious, crispy-skinned turkey drumstick his wife had sent with him, but he stopped eating to listen to the Tuttles.
“Up that big hill in this weather?” he said, nipping a fleck of turkey off his mustache with his tongue. “Gosh, it’s supposed to go down to five below tonight.”
“We couldn’t even get up with chains—and now it’s dark,” Mrs. Tuttle said, trying hard not to sound like a hysterical mother.
“Doesn’t some eccentric old biddy live up there?”
Dr. Tuttle cleared his throat. “My aunt lived up there, but she died in early October.”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” the sergeant said, his face turning rosier. “I didn’t mean—”
“That’s all right. The thing is, I’m not sure they could make it all the way to the house with the snow so deep. And even then, the heat’s not on.”
“Do you have any snowmobiles, officer?” Mrs. Tuttle said. “That’s the only way we’ll get up there.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I’ll have to drive back and walk up,” Dr. Tuttle said grimly. “Do you have a high-powered flashlight I can borrow?”
The young sergeant pressed a button on his intercom. “Jonesy will you take the desk?” he said into it. “I doubt Captain LaGrange is going to check in tonight, but if he does, tell him I’m out on search and rescue.”
“Roger,” said a crackly voice.
The sergeant stood up from his desk. “Come on, folks,” he said, casting a wistful glance at his drumstick.