It turned into her driveway, headlights brightening the family room.
Callie rushed into the attached garage, hitting the button and hurrying to the rising door. It opened on bright, flashing headlights and blowing snow.
Two officers were out of the car, closing their doors, coming forward. Callie hugged herself inside her sweater, one hand shading her eyes. “Yes?”
“Yes,” they said, advancing through the flashing lights.
Callie was already backing away in confusion. Neither man wore a police uniform.
A half-mile closer to the center of town, Fred Burnglass awoke to the sound of voices in his yard. He crawled out of bed in threadbare long Johns and felt around for his eyeglasses, only mildly aware of a rare, halfhearted erection. He pulled his specs behind his ears and squinted out his bedroom window. There were shadows prowling around the lumber mill. Those tractor thieves he had been hearing about.
He padded downstairs, barefoot in the dark. He froze near the bottom as a shadow passed his window. They were up on his front porch now. They were near the door.
Fred Burnglass was seventy-one years old. He lived alone, never having married for the simple reason that he had never gotten around to it. He owned six working radios, including the first one his grandfather ever brought home, but no television set — again, simply because he had never gotten around to buying one. He owned a telephone, hanging below his medicine shelf on the kitchen wall in the back of the house. Except for two years in the Army Signal Corps when he was stationed in New Jersey, Fred had never traveled any farther outside Gilchrist than Hardwick, fifteen minutes to the south, and then only for tractor parts. Everyone in the Northeast Kingdom knew to come to Fred Burnglass for good quality-milled wood at a fair price.
He heard more voices, whispering and near. He crept down the rest of the way to his hand axe on the straw mat next to his rubber boots. A flashlight shone through one of his side windows, splitting the darkness. As Fred’s hand closed around the smoothly worn handle of the axe, he heard a single pane of glass pop out, busted.
The crack and tinkle in the rear of his house echoed in Fred’s head. He was seeing shadows everywhere as he fought his way to the kitchen. He reached the cold linoleum of the dark room, fearful of broken glass. Voices outside, quiet and plain, but he was too rattled to make sense of them. He stopped beside the back door and felt the cold air spilling through the broken pane. The tractor thieves were right on the other side of the wall.
One hand came through the busted window, tattooed knuckles and fingernails pointed like saw teeth. It reached for the inside knob as Fred stood mutely, unable to raise his axe blade at a human hand, the trusted tool growing heavy in his grip. He spun it so that the flat edge was facing down, and with both hands steadying his aim he hammered at it once, crushing the tattooed knuckles against the door frame. Fred ran back to the front of the house, away from the howling and the angry voices.
Someone was trying his front doorknob. The door wasn’t locked, but it tended to stick in winter. Fred watched the twisting knob and the entire door seemed to be moving. He stood before it, long Johns sagging off his behind, axe halfheartedly raised.
“Get away,” he said, not sounding like his voice at all, the words ran together as though choked.
There was a rattle outside and he could see his ten-foot ladder now up against the house, legs were running up past the window to the second floor. An engine started up outside — his Ford. Then something hard kicked at his back door, and kicked again. Fred spun to each noise like a man taking arrows from all directions. He backed to the railing at the bottom of the stairs. Footsteps crunched glass on the kitchen linoleum and a chair fell over. Fred backed along the side of the staircase to the angled closet door. He fumbled with the latch and backed inside.
Raincoats, his father’s bagged suits, his old army jacket, all brushing against him like ghosts. He backed in deep and spun the axe again in his trembling hand, blade facing down now, Fred crazy with fear. He raised the axe over his head, and he lashed out at the first thing that appeared when he saw the door open a crack. There was a shriek of pain and an arm pulled back as the door was thrown wide open. Fred came out of the coats yelling and swinging at the shadows, but they immediately wrested the axe away from him. There were two men, each with their own hand tools. They were upon him.
Tom Duggan’s Ship had run aground. The long, black Fleetwood hit a frozen patch of road and the steering wheel turned uselessly in his hands as the funeral limousine slid off the shoulder and beached on a bed of densely packed snow. In frustration he threw it into reverse and gunned the engine and did everything he wasn’t supposed to do, and the car sank and stuck there.
He threw open the door and hobbled through the deep snowfall to the road. From the downstairs window of his funeral parlor in the town common, he had watched the armed men load the Gilchrist police onto a truck. He left immediately after they did, his usual evening commute turned nightmarish by roaming prisoners and snow. But he was alone on this dark road, and less than a mile from his mother’s house.
Tom Duggan ran through the trees. Branches tore at his undertaker’s coat, grabbing after him like fingers. Snow and time obscured the landmarks he had known since a boy, but he pressed on, falling through the woods as much as running through them.
He emerged into a clearing and found himself right around the corner from her driveway. The house was dark when he reached it, the lamp timers switched off around ten. The side door was locked. Tom Duggan’s mother never locked the door. His house key was hanging on the ring in the Fleetwood’s ignition. He rang the doorbell impatiently, then without waiting he pulled his hand into his coat sleeve and punched through the windowpane nearest the knob.
He fumbled the door open without cutting himself and rushed through the kitchen and then upstairs to her bedroom. It was still made from the morning. The bathroom was also empty. He heard voices downstairs and ran to the dim parlor but her chair was empty. It was the radio playing, and he switched it off and called her name. He checked the floors in every room in case she had fallen. Then he saw that the front hallway door was open.
They never used the front door. The storm door was closed, but the threshold was sprinkled with snow.
He ran out onto the front walk. There were footsteps in the snow, one set, a short stride, already fading with the wind. He followed them around to the side of the house.
Tom Duggan found his mother lying in a drift a few steps behind the old woodpile. He rushed to her, stumbling, finding her curled up on her side, her hands pressed to her chest, her eyes closed. He rolled her over and let out a wail. Her mouth was shut in a grimace, her neck muscles clenched, her jaw set. He groped for a pulse even as he knew that she was gone.
He stepped back. The rest of the snow was undisturbed except for his own footsteps. What had possessed her to open the front door and wander outside with only a housecoat on? Was it the news on the radio? Was she disoriented and trying to walk for help? He knew only that his mother had died afraid and alone.
He knelt, weeping, and got her up into his arms. His impulse was to carry her back inside the house, but with the prisoners loose and the snowstorm, it could be days before he could get her to the funeral home. He would not allow her to decay inside the warm house. Tom Duggan cursed the prison then, cursed the uprising, standing with his dead mother in his arms. Slowly and regrettably he lowered her back into her cradle of snow. He would see to a proper and respectful end as he had always promised. With bare, shivering hands he heaped snow over her body, snow that would preserve her until his return.