She had already decided where they were going. There was only one place in uptown Butte at eleven o'clock that night where she knew there was heat and a door she could knock on.
Stevo Radovich lived above the Gallus Frame. He came down in a plaid bathrobe with a baseball bat in his hand, and saw her face through the glass, and Gordie behind her in the fog carrying an old man in a quilt, and he put down the bat and unlocked the door without a word. He turned on every light. He lit every burner on the grill and all four ovens and left the oven doors hanging open, so that the heat came rolling out across the counter. He carried down the mattress from his own bed and his mother's quilts, and he made coffee and then, when Lauren said that was wrong, that they mustn't have coffee, they needed something warm but not too hot, he heated milk in a saucepan and stood over it stirring with a wooden spoon as if it were the most important thing he had ever cooked.
At eleven-thirty Lauren went to the pay phone by the register and called the fire department, because Arvo's fingers and ears were white and Tomo's lips were blue, and she knew that she had come to the end of what she could do. Then she sat down in the first booth, the one where Johanna had lain that morning, and put her face in her hands.
Gordie sat down across from her. After a while she felt him put something on the table between them. She looked. It was the iron key, on its string, with the little tag. It must have fallen out of her coat on the stairs.
"BOILER," Gordie said, reading the tag. He turned it over. "J.T. 1946." He was quiet a moment. "Thirty-seven years. She kept that thing lit thirty-seven years."
"She kept them lit," said Lauren.
The ambulance took Tomo and Arvo to St. James a little after midnight. Mossy refused to go. He slept on Stevo's mattress on the floor behind the counter with his crutches beside him and the coffee can of grape jelly under his arm, and Lauren slept sitting up in the first booth, and Gordie drove home to Mandy and came back at six with a thermos and the news that the radio said it was forty-one below at the airport and that he had called Stu Brennock at home and told him everything.
"He asked me straight," Gordie said. "I told you I wouldn't lie if he asked me straight. He asked why I sounded funny. So." He set the thermos down. "He's calling Carrigan."
Tiernan Carrigan came into the Gallus Frame at a quarter to eight. He was a tall, stooped man in his middle fifties in a camel overcoat and a gray fedora, with a long, tired, intelligent face, and Lauren knew him the way you know everybody in a town that size: the insurance office on Broadway, the man who read the second lesson at St. Patrick's. He took off his hat and stood inside the door holding it in both hands and looked at Mossy Mahaffey on the mattress behind the counter.