At twenty to ten she put on her father's old sheepskin coat and two pairs of socks and her Sorels and Stevo's onion scarf, and Gordie, without turning around from the sink, said, "Take the truck. I plugged it in. New cord." She stood in the kitchen door. "Go on," he said. "Before I change my mind."
The cold at ten o'clock that night was not like the cold that morning. That morning it had been clear. Now the town had made its own weather. Every chimney and tailpipe in Butte had been breathing out all day into air too cold to hold it, and the whole Summit Valley had filled up with ice fog, a fine glittering white haze that made halos the size of houses around the streetlights and swallowed the truck's headlights twenty feet out. Lauren drove up Montana Street in second gear at ten miles an hour with her face nearly against the windshield. The heater roared and did nothing.
She parked in the alley behind the Carrigan with the engine running and went down the concrete steps, and the iron door was standing open six inches.
Mossy Mahaffey was at the bottom of the stairs. He was sitting on the third step from the bottom with his crutches across his knees, where he had come down, she understood later, on the seat of his trousers, one step at a time, in the dark. His face in the flashlight was wet.
"He's gone," he said. "Arvo. At nine. He said he'd heard enough of me and Tomo, and he was going to St. James to see her, and nobody was to stop him. Said he knew the way by counting. Counting! I couldn't catch him on these." He hit the crutches. "I got down to shut the door behind him and I saw the glass. Miss, look at the glass. I didn't touch it. I swear to God I didn't touch anything."
She looked at the glass. First the glass.
It was empty.
She put the flashlight on it to be sure. The tube was dry from top to bottom, clear glass with a faint brown stain where the water had been, and the pencil line on the white card behind it marked nothing. The roasting pan under the boiler had overflowed and there was water across the floor, a black spreading sheet of it with steam coming up off the edges, and from the crack between the sections, under the rag, there was no longer a drip but a thin hissing feather of steam. Through the little mica window in the fire door the coals were not orange anymore but a hard bright yellow. She could feel the heat of the iron on her face from four feet away.
The valve was right there by her boot. The wheel with the white stripe. A quarter turn. Everything in her that had grown up around furnaces and men who fixed things wanted to reach down and turn it. The boiler was out of water. Put water in it.