The cold that came down on Butte that week came down on half of America, though nobody in Butte would have cared. It came out of the Yukon and over the Continental Divide in a long slow avalanche of air so dense and dry it seemed to have weight, and it sat down in the bowl of the Summit Valley like something that meant to stay. By six o'clock on Tuesday morning, the twentieth of December, the sky over the Hill had gone the color of a knife blade. There was no wind. That was the strange thing, the thing people talked about afterward. At thirty below with no wind, the town went perfectly still. Smoke stood straight up out of the chimneys in white columns, hundreds of them, all over the Flat and up the face of the Hill, and the headframes stood among them black and motionless, as if the whole city were a photograph of itself.
Gordie's truck would not start. He had plugged in the block heater at nine the night before, the way he always did, the orange cord running out the kitchen window and across the snow to the grille, but the extension had cracked somewhere in the cold and the engine had been sitting dead since midnight. In the end he went down the block and got Mr. Ostojich, who had a Scout with chains and jumper cables, and the starter ground and ground and caught, and the old Ford shook itself and coughed blue smoke into the white air, and Gordie stood beside it beating his gloved hands together and looking up at Lauren in the kitchen window with his face red and furious and alive, and she loved him so much in that second that it frightened her.
He drove her uptown. The Gallus Frame was warm and full of steam, the windows gone white to the top with frost so that the street outside was only a gray glow, and Stevo had every burner going and the oven door open for the heat. There were nine men at the counter by seven. It was too cold to sit home. People came uptown in a cold like that not because they had anywhere to be but because a cafe was warm and the coffee was forty cents and there was somebody to say "Jesus, it's cold" to, and to hear it said back.
Twenty past seven came, and Johanna did not.
Lauren noticed. She kept looking up at the door. Every time the door hissed open she looked up, and it was a man from the courthouse, or the boys from the Texaco, or the priest from St. Patrick's with a scarf wrapped up to his eyes like a bandit. At seven-forty Lauren scraped a hole in the frost of the front window with her thumbnail and looked out at Park Street, empty and silver in both directions.
"She'll be along," said Shirl. "Or she's smart and she's staying in."
"In where?" said Lauren.
Shirl looked at her.
"I don't know where she stays," Lauren said. "I never asked her. Isn't that something? Two weeks."