Dr. Chuck answered my call. My car was back where I’d left it, and the cops had gone home; my home, probably. I took another cab to Detroit and came back in my heap. After checking on Laurie I retired to my room to rest up for what Mother Nature might bring. The battery-operated radio I’d brought contained a weather band, and I tuned to it to track the storm. The NOAA announcer could barely keep awake: Cold fronts, dew points, and chill factors were a job to him, not a stepping-stone to the glamour game of network television. For once the forecasters seemed to have nailed it, as wind and snow scraped their way across the Midwestern states like a cake knife, icing lakes, laminating roads, and heaping snow up against fences, barns, and stuck cars.
It was all music to me—if we didn’t end up stuck in a snowbank with a killer on our heels.
Outside my little snuggery, the lit streets were still bare, but the wind had begun to whistle and whump up against the west wall, making the old house sway. Carpenters knew how to build them then, like poplars that gave a little before the blast and went back to vertical after it left, while stubborn oaks broke like pencils. That was before they found out that replacing roofs and siding paid more in dividends after the digging-out.
I save Dickens for nights like that. When the sun’s bright and the grass is green he’s just depressing; but in high weather Bleak House wraps you in steamer robes with a coal fire blazing in the iron hearth, and oil lamps smell as good as roasting meat. I stretched out on top of the sleeping bag with my head propped against my frayed overnighter and cracked open the cover. The snarled case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, spanning generations of litigants, attorneys, and magistrates, and page after thick, cream-colored page of handset type, kept me busy looking up words in the dictionary I’d brought. But most of them had been crowded out of the last edition by “heart-healthy,” “politically correct,” and “ginormous.” I flung the dictionary at the wall where the storm was hitting, set aside Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock, William Guppy, and the rest and lit a cigarette, blowing insolent smoke at the disabled detector hanging from its wires like a giant glaring eyeball.
I thought about the fifth of Old Smuggler I’d brought, nestled on its two-by-four crosspiece; decided against it. If Roger Macklin made up his mind to launch another assault, he’d do it before heavy blowing snow got in the way of his aim, and I needed those reflexes that age and a fairly battered life had left me. I got up, popped the top off a can of tuna packed in water, and ate it with the spoon attached to my Boy Scout knife, washing it down with evaporated milk; I felt like a cat. Fish is brain food. If that wasn’t advantage enough, I’d breathe in the enemy’s face.
There’s something about being holed up, bracing for a gale, that sharpens the senses and makes the gray cells stand on end, like tire-shredders. I put them to work on what made Laurie Macklin tick. I didn’t buy into the old wheeze that today’s youngsters were cosseted against the ugliness of the world and unprepared to deal with it. People come in all flavors regardless of the time and circumstances of their birth. Still, she didn’t fit any sort of mold. Either she’d done a lot of growing up in the short time she’d been with her husband—anyone would, if she survived at all—or that pioneer strain you still sometimes found in children bred in the country had tempered her like the head of a good hammer. A lot of women, and just as many men, would have come apart just like her window when a bullet passed through it, but after the shock had worn off, it was as if a tree branch had broken loose and taken out the pane. A natural disaster, and not so big a one at that; nothing that couldn’t be fixed in minutes with a Band-Aid and a piece of plywood.
Me, I was still spooked. But then I’d lived long enough to know everything always looks worse in the morning.
* * *
It came, when it came, with a brass band.
The wind screamed like fabric ripping, blowing snow in towering billows that turned second stories into ground floors and built patio tables into nine-tiered wedding cakes. It played jump rope with the electric lines, whipping them and twisting the wooden poles until they snapped. When it was over and the copters were cleared to fly, half the state was as dark as North Korea.
We always blame Canada for these monsters, but she’s not in the same weight class as the Rockies, the Badlands, and the plains states; or for that matter little Milford, which by morning would be a tabletop village in a Christmas window display, heaped to its steeples with drifts thick as fresh-poured mortar. But by then we were long gone.
I was chasing Frosty the Snowman through an Arctic storm, waving his hat, when the first wave of snow smacked the side of the house, waking me. The luminous dial on my watch said the sun was up, but the sky lay on the ground like a fat lady with a broken ankle. She was hurling fistfuls of ice at the window to get my attention.
I flicked up the wall switch. The ceiling fixture didn’t think much of that because it didn’t respond. I’d packed what I’d needed before going to sleep, so I groped in the dark for my overnighter and the foul weather gear.
Laurie was up when I knocked, but just barely. She came to the door barefoot in blue flannel pajamas, no makeup, her hair matted on one side and sticking up on the other. That made her as homely as one of Degas’ ballerinas.
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” I said. “Pack what you need while I warm up the buggy.”
“Power’s out.” She sounded muzzy.
I fished the pencil flashlight out of my coat pocket and gave it to her. “Just grab what you’ll need for a couple of days. We can pick up anything else. It goes on the expense account.”
“I’d rather pay for it myself. Letting Peter dress me would be like—”
“Going backward. Lady, I don’t care. Snap it up. When it blows like this there’s no telling when it will blow past.”
“Can you drive in this?”
“No one can drive in this. That’s why we waited for it.”
“That doesn’t—”
I never found out what it didn’t. I pulled her door shut and sprinted downstairs.
“What’s the matter, neighbor, roof blow in?”
A man around my age, wearing the kind of pajamas you save for when everything else is in the wash, stood inside the open door of a ground-floor apartment, scratching a wild patch of gray hair with a pipestem. His toes looked indecent sticking out of flip-flops, as men’s do.
I muttered something about getting my car off the street to make room for the plow. To leave him curious would be to cut Roger’s reaction time when he came to find out why he hadn’t seen us around.
The nose of the Cutlass stuck out of a quay of snow that was already up to my shins. The motor didn’t want to start. I pumped the pedal, tried again, and it made a noise like a sick hippo. I serenaded it with lyrics from a filthy sea chantey and it fired a couple of times and caught. Then the wipers wouldn’t budge, so I got out, shoving my feet into the only mud puddle in southeastern Michigan that wasn’t completely frozen, and broke them free of the ice. Of course, I’d left them turned on, so I got slapped in the snoot for my trouble.
Winter Wonderland, they used to call our state: Put it on the license plates.
I went back up, and here was one woman who could put herself together in less time than it takes to watch an opera. She’d run a brush through her hair, applied paint and powder, and managed to make a bulky polar coat look like a Dior sheath. The turtleneck of what looked like the sweater she’d worn in her most recent candid photograph tickled the soft flesh under her jawbone. Quickly but with precision she scooped her hair into a red knitted beret, pulled the sides down over her ears, and picked up a small suitcase made of molded fiberglass by the handle.
She caught me staring. “What?”
“Just wondering why Macklin let you go.”
She smiled then, wide as the world.