Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

TYPEWRITER MAN

BY SHARYN MCCRUMB WITH SPENCER AND LAURA MCCRUMB

WORKING AT NORTHFIELD Nursing Home isn’t nearly as boring as you think, even if it is a building full of old people. It’s not like I’m a volunteer or anything, all right? I mean, they pay me. Less than I’m worth, I admit, but it’s enough to keep me in video games and halfway decent sneakers.

Ever since my dad died of cancer last year, money has been a little tight at home. My mom went back to work full-time. She’s a registered nurse, and now she works as the nursing supervisor at Northfield, and when she told me that the home was short on orderlies, and suggested that they might be able to use a responsible twelve-year-old for a few hours a week, I jumped at the chance. It made me feel good to know that I was helping out with expenses, even if they were mostly my expenses. Now I work part-time, late afternoons and weekends, with time off during soccer season. We almost made it to the playoffs last year.

Working at Northfield isn’t exactly taxing labor. I load the dishwashers, and I go down to the basement laundry and gather up the clean sheets and towels and deliver them to the four residential floors for the housekeeping staff. Everybody told me that there was a ghost in the basement, because the morgue is right next to the laundry, but I always turn all the lights on when I go down there, and I don’t waste any time, so frankly I’ve never seen anything weird down there. But Kenny Jeffreys swears he once saw the top half of a guy in a Confederate uniform. Just the top half. Too strange for me, man. The live ones around here are bizarre enough.

I see them every evening when I push the meal trolley around the halls, delivering dinner. It doesn’t take you long to get the residents scoped out: there’s senile ones, who barely notice you; feeble but chatty ones that treat me like a grandson, which is nice; and then there are a few space cadets scattered about. Mrs. Graham in room 239 always has to have two dinner trays taken to her. One for her and one for her husband Lincoln. That’s her late husband Lincoln, you understand. Mr. Graham left the planet in ’85, but he still gets a dinner tray. And, no, he doesn’t eat it. I go back at seven to pick up the trays, and his is never touched. And Mrs. Whitbread in 202 has an evil twin. Yeah, in the mirror. She’s always scolding the mirror twin, telling her what a hag she is, and how she ought to behave herself. I swear I’m not making this up. You can ask Kenny Jeffreys, the orderly who works the same hours I do. He’s in his second year at the community college, majoring in health care, so he’s working for tuition and car insurance money. Plus, of course, the experience he can get in the health care field, which does not seem to excite him too much most of the time. He talks about changing his career to TV anchorman, but as far as I know he’s still in health care.

Northfield has its share of oddities, from ghosts to dotty old folks, but the patient that really got to me was the white-haired guy in 226. He was weirder than all the others put together. Kenny calls him Typewriter Man. The name on his door is Mr. Pierce, and you never see him out of his room, or wearing anything except a robe and pajamas. Every time I go into his room with the meal tray, Mr. Pierce is sitting in front of his nonelectric typewriter, tapping away like mad. He must be doing fifty words a minute. Never stops. Never looks up when you set his food down. Just keeps typing, like it’s some urgent report he’s got to finish.

Only there’s no paper in the typewriter. Ever.

And he just keeps typing away.

“What do you think Mr. Pierce is writing that’s so important?” I asked Kenny one evening, when I had delivered the supper tray through another burst of paperless typing in 226.

Kenny shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“He never looks up. He never stops typing, or even notices that I’m there.”

“Guess you’ll never know then, kid,” said Kenny, wheeling the laundry cart toward the elevator.

But I wasn’t willing to give up. And I had just come up with an idea that might work.

The next afternoon when I showed up for work, I dropped by my mom’s office and took about twenty sheets of typing paper from the bottom drawer of her desk. She wasn’t there at the time, and I knew she’d never miss it. Then I went upstairs to room 226, and tapped on the door before I let myself in. Mr. Pierce was asleep in front of his television, snoring gently, which didn’t surprise me, because not even weird people can type twenty-four hours a day. I tiptoed up to his desk, and stuck a sheet of paper in the empty typewriter.

“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Pierce,” I whispered as I crept away. “I’ll be back to check on you at mealtime.”

Two hours later, I was pushing the dinner trolley from room to room, tingling with excitement. I told the grandmotherly types about my history project, and I asked Mrs. Graham how her invisible husband was doing, but all the time my mind was on Mr. Pierce and his typewriter.

Finally, I reached room 226. I heard the familiar tapping sounds through the door, and I knocked once, and let myself in, calling out, “Suppertime, Mr. Pierce!” just like I always did, despite the fact that Mr. Pierce never, ever answered back.

I set the tray on the empty desk space beside the typewriter, moving as slowly as I could, so that I could see what he was typing. The paper was still in place, and it was covered with words. I didn’t have to take the paper, because I could memorize the whole thing in thirty seconds. It was the same line over and over: Alva, please come back. I’m sorry. Please come back.

I looked over at Mr. Pierce, but he was hunched over his plate, shoveling in food and ignoring me, the way he always did. I wished him a good evening, and went to find Kenny.

“He just keeps typing the same sentence,” I told him. “He’s telling someone named Alva to please come back, and he says he’s sorry.”

“Maybe it’s his wife,” said Kenny. “I wonder if she knows where he is.”

“Somebody had to sign him in here,” I pointed out.

“Maybe it wasn’t her, though. Maybe they got divorced, and his kids put him here. Maybe she misses him now. A list of his relatives would probably be entered on his records folder.” Kenny reads a lot of paperback mysteries while he’s doing the laundry in the basement. He says it keeps his mind off the ghosts. He looked at me slyly. “Of course, I couldn’t look in those folders, but since they’re in your mom’s office…”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered. I felt sorry for Mr. Pierce, typing that same sad sentence day after day with no hope of getting an answer. Maybe there was hope, though.

The next evening I pushed my meal cart up close to Kenny’s trolley full of towels. “So much for your theories, Sherlock,” I told him. “I read Mr. Pierce’s folder while Mom was at the photocopy machine. She almost caught me, too! Anyhow, his wife’s name was Rosalie, and she died the year he was admitted to Northfield. They didn’t have any children, which is probably why he is here. There was no mention of anyone named Alva in his folder.”

“Has he always lived around here?”

“I think so. Why?”

“You could ask one of the local old ladies if she knew Mr. Pierce before he came here, and if there was ever anyone named Alva in his life. It’s not a very common name. Sounds old-fashioned to me.”

I couldn’t think of any better idea, and Mr. Pierce certainly wasn’t talking, so the next evening when I delivered the meals I got into a conversation with all the residents who weren’t gaga. I asked if they’d always lived around here, and then asked about Mr. Pierce. It was Mrs. Graham who knew him from the old days.

“Francis Pierce!” she said, smiling. “Yes, we’ve known him forever, haven’t we, dear?” That last remark was addressed to the invisible (deceased) Mr. Graham, and I am happy to say that he did not reply.

“Well, do you know of anyone called Alva that he once knew?”

“Alva Pierce. I hadn’t thought about her in years. It was front-page news at the time, though.”

She knew! I almost dropped the tray, which wouldn’t have mattered, because it was Mr. Graham’s and he still hadn’t come back from the Hereafter for spaghetti and Jell-O, but still it would have been a mess to clean up, and suddenly I felt I needed every minute of extra time I could manage. “Was Alva his wife, then?” I asked, trying to sound polite and casual about it.

“No, dear, his sister. Such a sad thing. People did wonder if it was murder-” She looked up at me then (or maybe Mr. Graham tipped her off) and she realized that she was about to talk scandal to a twelve-year-old kid. She smiled at me and said, “Well, never mind, dear. It was a long time ago, and I expect you have a good many meals to deliver.”

I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to talk her into finishing the story, so I went back to delivering dinners, but my mind was going ninety miles an hour, trying to figure out another way to find out about Alva.

“You seem preoccupied tonight, young man.” It was Mr. Lagerveld, who was a really nice guy, even if he didn’t care too much for the food. I could tell he was in no hurry to get to his spaghetti. He had been a college professor years ago, and I liked to talk to him anyhow. I was thinking: If I can just word the question right, maybe Mr. L. can help me.

“I have to do some research,” I told him, as I set his tray down on the table, and rustled up his silverware. “It’s for school. It’s about something that happened around here about sixty years ago, and I don’t know how to go about finding the information.”

“Sixty years ago? The Great Depression?”

I shook my head. “A local thing-like a person got kidnapped, or something.” I was guessing about the time and the event, but I thought I had the general idea anyhow.

“Have you tried looking in the newspapers?”

“How would I find a sixty-year-old newspaper? They’d fall apart, wouldn’t they?”

He sighed. “No wonder my students couldn’t do research. What do they teach you these days? How to feed your hamster?”

“We use encyclopedias to look up stuff, but there wouldn’t be anything local in the Britannica.”

“That is correct. So you need newspapers. So you go to a library, and you ask the nice librarian for the microfilm. You see, they put old newspapers on microfilm, so they won’t fall apart when grubby-handed kids use them to do history reports.” He sounded gruff, but he was grinning at me, and I think he suspected that what I wanted to find wasn’t an assignment for school.

“Microfilm. The public library will have papers from sixty years ago?”

“I hope so. Our tax dollars at work, young man. Good luck with your investigation. And if you ever have a question about geology-that I can help with.”

I had to wait until Sunday afternoon to see if Mr. Lagerveld was right about the microfilm. Since I didn’t have a date to go by, I knew I was going to have to scroll through about ten years’ worth of newspapers to see what happened to Alva. I just hoped Mrs. Graham was right about the story being front-page news.

Mom was delighted to take me to the library for a change, instead of to the video store, which is my usual Sunday afternoon destination. I told her I’d be a couple of hours getting material for my report, and she gave me a dollar’s worth of change for the photocopy machine and went off to the grocery store, happy in the knowledge that her kid had suddenly become so studious. I hated to disappoint her. I’d try to score a few A’s on the old report card to bolster her faith in the new me. Meanwhile, I had to find someone named Alva.

While I was waiting for Sunday to roll around so that I could check the microfilm newspapers, I had tried to figure out a way to narrow down the search time to the smallest possible number of years. I looked up Mr. Pierce’s age in his record file. He was seventy-five. That meant that he was born in 1920. But Mrs. Graham remembered the case, and she was only seventy-one. I figured that she had to have been at least seven years old to remember a local tragedy-which meant that 1931 was the first year I planned to search. Mr. Pierce would have been eleven years old. I didn’t know if Alva was his younger sister or an older one.

The librarian was very helpful. She showed me how to use the microfilm machines, and she showed me where the reels were kept, all carefully labeled by month and year. I started with January 1931 and flipped through day by day, reading the headlines of each front-page story. An hour and a half later I was in June of 1932, and there it was: LOCAL GIRL MISSING: BELIEVED LOST IN WOODS. There was a drawing of a pretty girl who looked about eight years old. The story said that Alva Pierce had followed her big brother Francis into the woods, where he was playing with two other boys. They ran off and left the little girl, telling her to go back home. When they came out of the woods at suppertime, they discovered that little Alva had not returned home. The boys, their parents, and the whole neighborhood searched the woods, calling for the little girl, but she was not found. I kept checking the newspapers, day after day, to see what happened to Alva Pierce. One day they brought in dogs. Another day they questioned everybody who had used the nearby road that day. After a week, the stories got smaller and smaller, and they were no longer on the front page. Finally the stories stopped altogether. Alva Pierce had never been found.

“Well, now you know,” said Kenny Jeffreys, when I showed him the articles I photocopied from the microfilm newspapers. “Mr. Pierce was responsible for his sister getting lost in the woods, and he still feels guilty about it after all these years.”

“It’s because they never found her,” I said. “I’ll bet he still wonders what happened to her.”

“Poor old guy,” said Kenny, loading the last of the towels on his trolley. “Well, gotta go now. Too bad we can’t help Mr. Pierce.”

“I’m not ready to give up,” I said. “I looked up the patch of woods that Alva got lost in back in 1932.”

“Dream on, kid,” said Kenny. “If no one has found that little girl after sixty-something years, I don’t think your chances are all that good.”

“I’m not giving up yet. I got a topographical map of the woods-the librarian suggested it. And I have one more person that might be able to help.”

That evening I took Mr. Lagerveld his Salisbury steak, and before he could ask if it was Roy Rogers’s horse, like he always did, I said, “Remember how you said I could come to you if I ever had a geology question?”

“I don’t do term papers,” he warned me.

I pulled out my newspaper articles and my photocopied map of the woods. “Look at this, Mr. L. This was my library project. A little girl got lost in these woods sixty years ago, and they never found her. If you were going to look for her, where would you start?”

He put on his reading glasses and studied the map, and the fine print at the bottom that told where it was, and he muttered to himself some. Finally he said, “Strictly speaking, this is geography, but I think I can help you out. People looked a couple of days in these woods and didn’t find her?”

I nodded.

“Did they try the caves?”

“What caves?” I looked at the article. I didn’t remember anything about caves.

“Look at this analysis of the land. Limestone. Creek nearby. Of course there are caves. But the opening might be too small for an adult to notice. Low to the ground, maybe. A little girl would find it easily enough.” He took off his glasses and glared at me. “Please note that I am not advising you to go caving alone. Remember what happened to that little girl.”

“No problem,” I said. “I know just the person to take with me.”

Saturday morning was sort of cold and drizzly, but Kenny would have been complaining anyhow, because he hated to get up early on Saturday, and he was missing a trip to the movies with his friends, and about a dozen other gripes, but he agreed that I ought not to go alone, and he was curious about the little girl’s disappearance. So, with a lot of grumbling, he picked me up at my house at seven A.M. and told my mother we were going hiking, which was almost true.

The house that had belonged to the Pierce family was in ruins now, but it was still there, so we parked the car in the yard, and set off on foot from its backyard. That’s the way Francis and Alva would have gone. We had knapsacks with food, rope, and flashlights, and Kenny had brought a shovel in case we needed it, but he said I had to take turns with him carrying it.

The woods hadn’t changed much in sixty years. It was still a rural part of the county, thick with underbrush, and easy to get lost in. I stayed close to Kenny, and tried not to think about snakes.

We followed the creek, examining boulders, ridges, and any kind of land formation that might hide an opening to a cave. Since it was early March, I thought we might have a better chance of finding a cave than the searchers would have had in June, when summer plants had covered everything with vines and grasses. We walked around for hours, getting our boots muddy, and snagging our trousers on brambles and old bits of barbed wire.

Finally, I sat down to rest near the stream, wishing I’d packed two more sandwiches in my knapsack. As I leaned back, putting one arm behind me for balance, I slipped and fell flat on my back. My arm had sunk into the ground.

“Kenny! Bring the shovel!” I yelled. “I think I found it!”

After all these years, mud had filled up most of the entrance, but Kenny and I took turns digging like mad, and soon we had an opening big enough for me to fit into.

“I don’t like the idea of you going in alone,” he told me.

“At least you know where I am,” I said. “If I get in trouble, you can go for help.”

I tied the rope around my waist, took the flashlight, and wriggled through the muddy opening, and into the darkness. “It’s okay!” I yelled back to Kenny.

The cave was too low to stand up in, so I inched my way along, keeping the beam of the flashlight trained at my feet, so that I wouldn’t tumble into a pit. I hadn’t gone more than about ten feet before the light showed a flash of white on the ground in front of me. I crept forward, shivering as a trickle of water ran down the neck of my shirt, and I reached out my hand and touched-a bone. I dug a little in the soft mud, and found more bones and a few scraps of cloth. There was a large boulder near the bones, and I think it must have fallen, either killing the person, or pinning them down so that they could not escape. This was Alva. She had found the cave and had been trapped there, without anyone knowing where to look for her.

I made my way back out as quickly as I could. I hadn’t thought about cave-ins until I saw the boulder beside those tiny white bones. “She’s there,” I told Kenny, as I gasped for fresh air. “Now we have to tell the police, I guess.”

A couple of days later, I was back at work, and Mom had finished yelling at me for being a daredevil. As I took the meal tray in to room 226, I saw that Mr. Pierce was asleep, so I stopped at the desk, and set a newspaper down on top of the empty typewriter. It was open to the front page story about Alva Pierce being found after all these years. The search and rescue team had recovered the body, and she was buried now in the little church cemetery next to her parents. I thought Mr. Pierce would be glad to know that his sister had been found.

I did wonder, though, when I got to Mrs. Graham’s room to deliver her two dinners. She took her dinner, and set the other one down in front of her late husband’s empty chair. Then she said, “Young man, I thought children were not allowed in Northfield except at visiting hours.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but I work here. Remember?”

“Not you!” she snapped. “Mr. Graham tells me that he distinctly saw a little blond girl going into room 226 just now. Didn’t you, dear?”

Whatever he said, I didn’t hear it.

How We Wrote “Typewriter Man”

Sharyn McCrumb

Spencer and Laura McCrumb

Laura, who is six years old, came up with the idea for the story by listening to her big sister’s boyfriend talking about his job at a nursing home. Spencer, age seven, figured out how to find out what the man would be typing by putting paper into the typewriter, and Laura decided that the mystery would be that the man’s sister had gone missing as a little girl. Spencer worked out what happened to the little girl, and how to go about finding her after all these years. Sharyn McCrumb, Spencer and Laura’s mom, did most of the wording. She would read drafts of it to Spencer and Laura, and they would suggest changes, and make sure that not too many big words were used. Finally, they came up with a story that everyone was happy with. Laura is especially pleased with the ending.

GERDA’S SENSE OF SNOW

(I NSPIRED BY H ANS C HRISTIAN A NDERSEN’S “THE S NOW Q UEEN ”)

“GERDA! KAY’S GONE!”

“Kay has been gone a long time, Niels,” I said wearily. “And you’re dripping snow on my rug.”

Niels Lausten stood there blocking my fireplace with his shivering body, while his parka rained on my caribou-skin rug. I could tell that he wasn’t going away, despite my apparent lack of interest in his news. I took a sip of my tea and read a few more lines of my book, but the sense of them never quite reached my brain, so I gave it up. I would have to hear him out, and I knew it was going to hurt, because it always did, no matter how many times I told myself that the Kay I once knew, my childhood best friend, was gone forever. I wrote him off every time one of the old gang showed up to tell me the latest about poor Kay-shameful stories about a life going down the drain in a haze of vodka, in a swirl of drunken brawls and petty acts of vandalism that seemed to gain him neither profit nor comfort. It had never made sense to me. I had tried to see him a couple of times, early on, to see if he’d accept my help, but the bleary-eyed lout who leered back at me bore no resemblance to the quiet, handsome boy next door, whose hobby had been growing roses in the window box. In the winter we used to heat copper pennies on our stoves and hold the hot pennies to the glass to melt the ice so that we could look through the peepholes and wave to each other. I thought we’d always be together, our lives as intertwined as our rose trees, but a thicker sheet of ice had grown up between us as we grew older, and nothing seemed capable of melting it. The old Kay that I’d loved was gone. I knew it. I whispered it over and over to myself like a litany. Why couldn’t I believe it? Why couldn’t Niels leave me alone to mourn?

“He’s gone, Gerda. Really.” Niels had peeled off his gloves, and now he was blowing on his fingers to warm them. He was still shaking, though, and his white face went beyond a winter pallor.

It wasn’t that cold outside. About average for a Danish winter. I wondered what else had been going on in town while I was escaping the winter at my fireside, engrossed in a book. Now that I looked at him, Niels seemed more frightened than cold. He was always a follower, always the first one to run when trouble appeared. I wondered what trouble had appeared this time.

“All right.” I sighed. “Tell me about it.”

“We were just horsing around, Gerda. We’d had a few drinks, and somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to swipe some of the kids’ sleds and hitch them to the horse-drawn sleighs?’ That would be a real fast ride-and you wouldn’t have to keep climbing a hill in between rides. So a couple of the lads tried it, but the sleds skidded, and they fell off in a minute or so. Then we saw a different sleigh. We’d never seen it before. It was painted white, so that it blended into the snowdrifts, and the driver was wrapped in rough white fur, with a white fur hood covering the head and hiding the face. The rest of us hung back, because the sleigh was so big and fast-looking, and we couldn’t tell who was driving it. But Kay laughed at us, and said that he wasn’t afraid of a fast ride. Before we could stop him, he’d tied his sled to the runners of the white sleigh, and the thing took off like a thunderbolt. The sled was sliding all over the road behind that sleigh, but he managed to hold on. We yelled for him to roll off. He almost got run over by the horse of an oncoming sleigh. He wouldn’t turn loose. Then the white sleigh got clear of traffic and Kay was gone! We followed the tracks outside town a mile or so beyond the river, until the snow started up again, and then we lost the trail, so we came on back…” He shrugged. “So-he’s gone. I figured you’d want to know, Gerda.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Maybe I’ll ask around.”

“He’s probably dead,” said Niels.

“Yeah. He’s probably dead.” I went back to my book.

I tried to put him out of my mind, and I nearly succeeded for the rest of the winter. I kept thinking that Niels or Hans would turn up with some new story about Kay-that he was back after robbing the rich owner of the sleigh, and wilder, drunker than ever. But the town was silent under the deepening snow. I waited out the silence.

In the spring the thaws came, and the sun coaxed people back out into the streets to pass the time of day with their neighbors. They started asking each other what had become of that wild young man, Kay. Nobody had seen him since midwinter. His friends told their story about the sleigh ride, and how he never came back. “Oh, well, he must have been killed,” people said. When the ice floes broke up on the river outside town, people said that Kay’s body would come floating to the surface any day now. Surely he had drowned while crossing the river ice, trying to make his way back to town after his reckless sleigh ride. A few days later they found the wooden sled buried in a snowbank farther still from town. Kay’s hat was in a clump of melting snow nearby, but there was no sign of his body. But maybe the wolves had got him. They wouldn’t have left anything, not even a bone.

“He’s dead,” I said to the old street singer, who appears on the corner even before the birds come back.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, and went on with a warbling tune about sunshine.

“I’ll ask around,” I said. And this time I meant it.

I didn’t go to the town constable. If Kay had died in an accident, the constable would have discovered it already. If something more sinister had happened to him, the constable would be the last to know. I didn’t waste my time with official inquiries.

I went to the river. My grandmother used to tell me that the river would answer your question if you threw in one of your possessions as a sacrifice. I was tempted to try it, but before I could work myself up to that stage of desperation-or belief-I saw the old man I had come looking for. He lived in a shack downstream from the brewery, and I always wondered how he made it through the winter, dressed in his layers of reeking rags, with skin as translucent as ice under his matted hair. He grinned at me with stumps of teeth that looked like the pilings of the dock. I used to dream about him. I thought he was Kay in thirty years’ time. Maybe dead would be better. But I had to ask.

“You remember Kay? Young blond fellow. Drinking buddy of yours. He’s been gone since midwinter.”

The bloodshot eyes rolled, and the old man gave a grunt that was more smell than sound. I took it to be a yes.

“He hitched a child’s sled onto the back of a white sleigh, and it sped away with him. The word around town is that he drowned-only his body hasn’t turned up. Or maybe the wolves got him.” I could taste salt on my tongue. “Not that it matters,” I whispered.

The old derelict wet his lips, and warmed up his throat with a rheumy cough. I fished a coin out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Get something for that cough,” I muttered, knowing what he would prescribe.

“I know the white sleigh,” he rasped. “I wish it had been me.”

“You know it?”

“Ar-they call her the Snow Queen.” He flashed a gap-toothed smile. “She brings the white powder to town. Ar. Kay would like that. White powder lasts longer than this stuff.” He dug in his overcoat pocket for the nearly empty bottle, and waved it at me. “And it’s the only thing that would take the hurt away. You know about the crack, do you?”

I shook my head. “I knew Kay was in trouble. I never cared what kind of trouble. If I couldn’t help him, what did it matter?”

“The crack. That wasn’t the Snow Queen’s doing. They do say it’s mirror glass from heaven. Trolls built a magic mirror that made everything ugly. Took it up into the clouds so that they could distort the whole world at once. Got to laughing so hard they dropped the mirror. Shattered to earth in a million tiny pieces. Crack of the mirror. They do say.”

“Sounds like my grandmother’s tales,” I said. It was a lot prettier than the truth.

“They say if the mirror crack gets into your eye, then you see everything as ugly and misshapen. Worse if it gets into your heart. Then your heart freezes, and you don’t feel anything ever at all. From the look of him, I’d say that Kay has got a piece in his eye and his heart. And nothing would make the coldness pass, except what the Snow Queen has-that perfect white powder that makes you dream when you’re awake. He won’t be leaving her, not while there’s snow from her to ease his pain.”

I hadn’t realized that it was this bad. But maybe, I told myself, he’s just sick, and then maybe he can be cured. Maybe I can get him past the craving for the white powder. I knew that I was going to try. “Where do I find the Snow Queen?” I asked the old man.

He pointed to a boat tied up at the dock. “Follow the river,” he said. “She could be anywhere that people need dreams or a way to get out of the cold. Give her my love.”

“You’re better off without her,” I told him. “You’re better off than Kay.”

There wasn’t much to keep me in town. I had needed an excuse to get out of there for a long time. Too many memories. Too many people who thought they knew me. It took less than a day to tidy things up so that I could leave, and there wasn’t anybody I wanted to say goodbye to. So I left. Looking for Kay was as good a reason as any.

I spent most of the summer working as a gardener on an estate in the country. The old lady who owned the place was a dear, and she’d wanted me to stay on, but the roses kept reminding me of Kay, and finally one day I told her I had to move on. I had enough money by then to get to the big city, where movies are made. That’s where they sell dreams, I figured. That’s where the Snow Queen would feel at home.

I got into the city in the early autumn, and since I didn’t know anybody and had no place in particular to go, I just started walking around, looking at all the big houses, and all the flowers on the well-tended lawns. A gardener could always get a job here, I thought. It was always summer. I stopped to talk to one guy in shabby work clothes who was busy weeding a rose bed near the sidewalk.

“New in town, huh?” He was dark, and he didn’t speak the language very well, but we managed to communicate, part smiles and gestures, and what words we knew in each other’s tongue.

“I’m looking for a man,” I said.

He grinned. “That-or a job. Aren’t they all?”

I shook my head. “Not any man. One in particular, from back home. I think he’s in trouble. I think he has a problem with… um… with snow. Know what I mean?”

“A lot of that in this town,” said the gardener. By now I was helping him weed the rose bed, so he was more inclined to be chatty. “He hooked on snow-why you bothering?”

I shrugged. “We go back a-ways, I guess. And he’s-well, he was an okay guy once. Tall, blond hair, good features, and a smile that could melt a glacier. Once upon a time.”

The gardener narrowed his eyes and looked up at nothing, the way people do when they’re thinking. After a moment he said, “This guy-does he talk like you?”

“I guess so. We’re Danish. From the same town, even.”

He looked at me closely. “Danish…” Then he snapped his fingers and grinned. “Girl, I know that fellow you’re looking for! But I got some bad news for you-you ain’t gonna get him back.”

I wiped rose dirt on my jeans. “I just want to know that he’s all right,” I mumbled.

“Oh, he’s better than all right. He’s in high cotton. He’s on the road to rich and famous. See, there’s a movie princess in this town, getting ready to shoot the biggest-budget picture anybody’s seen around here in a month of Sundays, and she was looking for a leading man. Not just anybody, mind you. She had to have a fellow who talked as good as he looked. Well, that’s not something easy to find in anybody, male or female. But they had auditions. For days, girl. Every beach bum and pool shark in this town showed up at the gate, ready to take a shot at the part. Most of them talked pretty big to the newspapers. Pretty big to the interviewers. But as soon as they stood beside Miss Movie Princess, and the cameras were rolling, they started sounding like scarecrows. She was about ready to give up, when all of a sudden this guy talks his way past the guards, without even so much as a handwritten résumé. ‘It must be boring to wait in line,’ he told the receptionist, and he smiled at her, and she forgot to call Security. I got a lady friend, works for the Movie Princess, so I get all the news firsthand, you know what I’m saying?”

I nodded. “Most of it,” I said. “Listen-this guy-was he tall and blond? Regular features?”

“Oh, he was a hunk, all right. And he talked just like you do.”

“It’s Kay!” I said. “I know it is. Look, I have to see him.”

“Well, the thing is, he got more than just the part in the movie. He got the girl, too. So now he’s living up in the mansion with Miss Movie Princess, and my lady friend says it looks like it’s going to be permanent.”

“I have to know if it’s him,” I said. “Please-he’s like-he’s like my brother.”

The gardener believed that-more than I did. “All right,” he said. “Let me talk to my lady friend, see what I can do. They’d never let you in the gate, dressed like that, and with no official business to bring you there. But we might be able to get you up the back stairway to see him. I got a key to the servants’ entrance.”

He took me back to the gardener’s office, and fixed me something to eat. Then I helped him with the bedding plants while we waited for dusk. That evening we went up to the mansion in the hills, in through the back garden, and through the unlocked kitchen door. I just want to see that he’s all right, I kept telling myself. Maybe he’s happy now. Maybe he’s settled down, stopped the drinking. Maybe he’s got his smile back, like in the old days, before it became a sneer. If I see that he’s all right, I can go home, I thought.

At least, I’d know for sure.

I didn’t notice much about the house. It was big, and the grounds around it were kept as perfectly as a window box, but it didn’t make me feel anything. I wondered if living in a land without seasons would be as boring as a long dream. I don’t have to stay, I told myself.

“In there.” My new friend had stopped and shined his flashlight at a white-and-gold door. The bedroom. “You’re on your own from here on out, girl,” he whispered, handing me the light. Soundlessly, he faded back into the darkness of the hallway.

I waited until his footsteps died away, and then I twisted the doorknob, slowly, as soundlessly as I could. Another minute passed before I eased inside. I could hear the regular breathing of the sleepers in the room. In the moonlight from the open window I could see two large pillars in the center of the room, and on either side of the pillars were white-and-gold water beds in the shape of lilies. I crept closer to one of the beds. Long blond hair streamed across the pillar, but the bare back and shoulders were muscular. Surely it was Kay. I switched on the flashlight, and let the light play over the features of the sleeping man.

“What the hell!” He sat up, shouting in alarm.

It wasn’t him.

The Movie Princess was screaming, too, now, and she had set off the alarm that would bring her security guards into the room. Suddenly everything was noise and lights, like a very bad dream.

I lost it.

I sat down on the bed and began to cry, for the hopelessness of it all, and because I was so tired of noise and lights and a world without seasons. The Movie Princess, seeing that I wasn’t a crazed admirer, told her guards to wait outside in the hall, and she and the man asked me what I was looking for. When I heard the blond man speak, I realized that he was from Minnesota. “Close but no fjord, my gardener friend,” I thought. I guess we all sound alike to outsiders.

I told them about Kay’s disappearance, and about my need to find the Snow Queen, which appalled them, because they were not into that sort of lifestyle, but they agreed that my purpose was noble, since I was trying to save a friend from the clutches of the powder dreams. They gave me money and jewelry to help me on my trip, and the Movie Lady insisted that I put on one of her dresses, and take her wheels, as she called them, to speed me on my way. They didn’t have any advice for me about where to look, but they told me to stay cool. A funny wish, I thought, from people who choose to live where it is always hotter than copper pennies on a woodstove.

I sped away through the night, not really knowing where I was going, and wondering who to ask about the Snow Queen. I found myself going down streets that were darker and narrower, until I no longer knew which way I was going and which way I had come. I came to a stop to think about what to do next-and then the decision was no longer mine to make.

A shouting, screaming mob of people surrounded me, and hauled me out of the vehicle.

“She’s wearing gold!” one of them shouted.

A dozen hands pawed at my throat and my wrists. I struggled to throw a punch, to kick at my attackers, but I was powerless in the grip of the mob. They pinned my arms behind my back and stuffed a dirty handkerchief in my mouth. I watched them dismantle the wheels of the Movie Princess until it was an unrecognizable hulk in the dark alley. The crowd began fighting among themselves for my money and for the jewelry the Princess had given me. I figured I wasn’t going to live much longer, but nobody would come looking for me.

A large woman ambled over to me and peered into my face. “She like a little fat lamb,” the woman said. I stared at the stubble beneath her chin, hoping to distract myself from her dead eyes. “She look good enough to eat-don’tcha, baby?” She pulled a hunting knife from the folds of her skirt and began running her finger along the blade.

I struggled harder to break free from my captors but it was no use. All I managed to do was spit out the gag. I swore in Danish: “Pis og lort!”

“Iddn’t she cute? She just say ‘Peace, O Lord!’-Never had anybody pray before.”

I didn’t give her a Danish lesson. Let her think I was praying. Maybe it would help. She edged closer to me, the knife wavering at my throat. I had closed my eyes, wondering if I should have chosen prayer, when suddenly the fat woman drew back and screamed.

I opened my eyes and saw that a small brown girl had jumped on the woman’s back and was biting her ear. The woman began to swing around, waving the knife, and swearing. “Get down, you devil of a child! What you want to do that for?”

“Give her to me!” said the girl. “I want her. She can give me her fancy clothes and her rings, and she can sleep with me in my bed!”

The men began to laugh and nudge each other. The fat woman shook her head, but her daughter bit her ear again, and she screamed, and everyone laughed even harder. “She’s playing with her cub!” somebody said.

The small brown girl got her way. They bundled us into her set of wheels, and we took off through a maze of streets, all neon and no stars. The girl was about my height, but stronger, with nut-brown skin, big dark eyes, and white wolf teeth. “She won’t kill you as long as I want you!” she told me. “Are you a movie princess?”

“No. I’m looking for somebody.”

The dark girl cocked her head. “You lookin’ for somebody? Down here? At this time of night? Girl, you were lookin’ for Trouble, and you sure enough found him. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, but at least you’re safe with me. I won’t let nobody hurt you. And if I get mad at you, why I’ll just kill you myself. So you don’t have to worry about none of the rest of them. You want a drink?”

We stopped at the curb in front of a ruined building. Some of the windows were boarded up, and some had the glass smashed from the frames, and birds flew in and out of the dark rooms. A sign on the double front doors said CONDEMNED, which was true enough, I thought. This was the place the gang called home. As they marched me into the building, lean snarling dogs clustered around us, but they did not bark. One looked up at me and growled in his throat.

“You will sleep with me and my little pets tonight,” said the brown girl, patting the snarling dog. We went inside the derelict building. The gang had built a campfire on the marble floor of the entrance hall, and they were cooking their evening meal. I was given something greasy on a sort of pancake, and when I had eaten as much of it as I could, I was led upstairs and through a dark hall to the girl’s room. There was no furniture in the room, only a sleeping bag on the floor, and some straw. Holes had been punched in the walls of the room, and the windows were empty squares looking down on the lights of the city. Pigeons milled around on the floor, occasionally rising to sail out the glassless window, then drifting back in on the next puff of breeze.

“These all belong to me,” said the girl. She reached out and grabbed a waddling pigeon from the floor, and thrust it into my face. “Kiss it.”

I pulled away, and worked on the rope binding my hands.

“The pigeons live in the hole in the wall,” she said, smoothing the bird’s feathers. “They come back at night. But I got to keep old Rudy tied up, or he’d run off for sure, wouldn’t you, Rudy?” She opened the connecting door to another empty room. A frightened boy shied away from her as she approached him, but he couldn’t go far because he was chained to the floor by a copper ring encircling his neck. His face and ragged clothes were caked with dirt. The dark girl drew her knife. “Rudy’s a special pet. I’m saving him. Every night I got to tickle him a little with my blade just to remind him what would happen if he tried to run.” She passed the knife gently across the boy’s throat. He struggled and kicked at her, but she laughed and turned away.

“Are you going to sleep with that knife?” I asked her as she climbed into the sleeping bag.

“I always sleep with the knife,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen-do you, sunshine? Now why don’t you tell me a bedtime story? Tell me what you were doing out here all by yourself with no more protection than a pigeon got?”

“If I tell you, will you untie me then?”

She shook her head. “Make it good, and maybe I’ll untie you tomorrow.”

I started telling her about Kay, and how he had hitched his sled to the sleigh of the Snow Queen. The dark girl laughed, and said in a sleepy voice, “Boy strung out on the powder. Sure is. I heard about buying a one-way ticket on an airline made of snow. Old song. Never heard it called hitching a ride onto a sleigh before. Guess that’s what they mean by cul-tu-ral di-ver-si-ty.” Her voice trailed off into a slur of sounds. Soon her breathing became slow and even, and I knew she was asleep.

“I’ve seen her,” said a soft voice in the darkness.

It was the boy. I heard the rattle of his chain as he edged closer.

“You can talk,” I said. Somehow I had thought he wasn’t quite right in the head, I guess. But he sounded okay-just scared to be talking with his tormentor so near.

“Yeah, I can talk. I been around. After I ran away from home, I lived on the street for a while-until they got me and brought me here-I used to see her-the one you call the Snow Queen. She’d ride by every now and again, and there was always a good supply of that white powder on the street after she’d been around. Oh, yeah, the Snow Queen. I know her, for sure.”

“But do you know where to find her?”

“She got a place up in the hills. Couple of hours from here, where it’s so high up it stays cold. She likes the cold. Big white showplace in the mountains, all by itself. I never been there, but I heard talk. I could find it.”

“I wish I could let you try.” I eased out of the sleeping bag and leaned back against the wall, listening to the pigeons cooing in the darkness, but I didn’t sleep. I thought about Kay.

The next morning the dark girl crawled out of the sleeping bag. “I dreamed about that guy you talked about,” she said. “Dreamed he was sitting on ice somewhere, trying to spell some big word with a bunch of crooked pieces of glass. Kept trying and trying to spell that word, and he couldn’t do it. You believe in message dreams? I do. He’s in a bad way, all right. Yes, he surely is that.”

I nodded. “Rudy says he knows where to find him.”

“What? Chain-boy? He don’t know nothing.” She reached for her knife and scowled at her prisoner, but this time he did not cringe.

“I do know,” he said. “I seen a lot. Seen her on the street. I can find her, too.”

“Maybe that’s what your dream meant,” I told her. “Maybe you’re supposed to send us after the Snow Queen.”

The dark girl looked afraid. “Even us don’t mess with her.”

“She won’t know you’re involved. It’ll just be Rudy and me. We’ll go after her.” I stared at her until she looked away. “You’ve been told to let us go,” I said. “Your dream.”

“Yeah, okay. What do I need you two for? It’s not like you were any fun or anything. Go chase the Snow Queen. Get yourself killed in a cold minute.”

The boy and I waited in silence while she made up her mind. At last she said, “Okay. The men are all out for the day, but Mamacita is downstairs, and she won’t like it if I let you go. So you have to wait a little until she goes to sleep, and then I’ll lead you down the fire escape so she won’t see you.”

The boy and I exchanged smiles of relief.

The dark girl pulled on Rudy’s chain. “I’m gonna miss tickling you with my knife, boy,” she said. “You look so cute when you’re afraid, but never mind. I’m gonna let you go, and I want you to take this lady to the house of the Snow Queen, and you help her get him out of there. And if you run out on her, I’m going to come and find you myself. You got that?”

He nodded. “I’ll take her there.”

“Okay. I’ll get you some food.” She moved behind me with her dagger, and cut the rope that bound my wrists. Then she handed me the key to the boy’s copper neck ring, and nodded for me to unchain him. “Okay,” she hissed at us. “Get over to the fire escape. I’ll come back with the food when it’s safe for you to go. After that-anybody asks, I ain’t seen you.”

Rudy took me back to the part of town where he had been before the dark girl’s gang had captured him. “There’s an old lady here who might help,” he said. “She’s been on the street so long she knows everything.”

He led me down an alley to an old packing crate propped up against the side of a Dumpster. The sides of the crate were decorated with faded bumper stickers, and an earthenware pot of geraniums stood by the opening, which was covered with a ragged quilt. “This is her office. Well, it’s her home, too. We have to knock.”

We got down on our hands and knees to enter the tiny hovel that was home to Rudy’s friend. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw a grizzled old woman cooking fish in a pan on a camping stove. She wore a grimy Hermés scarf wrapped around her head, several layers of cast-off designer clothing, and a pair of men’s Nike running shoes.

Rudy gave the old woman a hug and immediately began to tell her the long tale about his troubles, which he apparently considered much more important than mine. At last, though, he had run out of complaints, and the woman’s sympathetic clucks were becoming more perfunctory. Then Rudy said, “And this is my friend Gerda. She got me away from the gang, but she’s looking for a guy named Kay who went off with the Snow Queen. You know what I’m saying?”

“Poor child!” said the old woman, nodding. “You still have a long way to go! You have a hundred miles to run before you reach the hill country. The Snow Queen lives up there now, and she burns blue lights every night. I will write some words for you on a paper bag, and you can take it to Finnish Mary. She never could get the hang of city life here, so she lit out for the mountains. She lives up there in an old mining ghost town now. She will advise you better than I can.”

She gave us a little of her fish, and some produce from the grocery store Dumpster, and then she scribbled some words on the paper bag, gave Rudy directions to the mining town, and sent us off to the hill country, wishing us luck in our quest.

We walked out to the big highway, and started thumbing for rides. We were able to hitchhike most of the way into the hill country, so we made it by nightfall. The evening light was soft and silvery as we walked the last couple of miles from the highway into the ruins of the old mining town. We found Finnish Mary’s shack by following the trail of wood smoke back to a crumbling hovel that was built over the basement of a demolished house. We crept into the hot dark room. Finnish Mary was huddled next to her stove. She wore an old cotton caftan over a layer of dirt. On a clothesline close to the ceiling hung bunches of dried herbs and crystals suspended from bits of fishing line. Finnish Mary was obviously into New Age arts and holistic medicine.

Rudy explained who had sent us, and handed her the paper bag bearing the message from the packing crate lady in the city. With her lips moving, Finnish Mary read the words on the paper bag three times until she knew the message by heart, and then she opened the door of the woodstove and tossed the bag into the flames. “Paper is fuel,” she grunted. “Never waste anything.”

We nodded politely.

“Talk,” she said.

Rudy told her his story first, and then mine, and Finnish Mary smiled a little but she didn’t interrupt or ask a single question. When Rudy had finished explaining, he said, “This is a dangerous job. Is there some kind of herbal medicine or maybe a crystal that you could give Gerda to help her? Maybe something to make her stronger in case she has to fight her way into the Snow Queen’s estate? I figure she needs to be about as strong as twelve men to get her friend out of there.”

Finnish Mary smiled up at him. “The strength of twelve men. That would not be of much use!” She took a parchment scroll down from a dusty shelf near the door, and read it silently, while beads of sweat ran down her forehead. We edged away from the woodstove, but it wasn’t much cooler anywhere else in the shack. We waited.

Finally she said, “The Snow Queen isn’t home right now. She’s gone south to make another delivery of the white powder. Probably took most of her guards with her. So you won’t have much trouble getting up there, but getting what you want is something else again. Kay is going to stay with the Snow Queen because he’s hooked. He’s got that mirror crack inside him, and as long as he’s into that, then he will never feel like a human being again, and the Snow Queen will always have him in her power.”

“Right. That’s clear enough. What I’m saying to you is, can you give the girl something so that she can cut him loose from the habit? Some kind of potion that will break the spell, you know-”

Finnish Mary shrugged. “I can’t give her any power greater than what she already has. It takes love to break a spell like the Snow Queen’s. And sometimes even that won’t do it. Gerda has to get into that house, and then try to get Kay to see what he’s doing to himself. If that doesn’t work, there’s nothing else that you or I can do to help her. Here’s what you do, boy: walk Gerda down the road until you come to the iron fence. That’s the garden of the Snow Queen’s estate. Leave her by the bush with the red berries on it. You going in with her?”

“Me? No!” Rudy’s voice trembled, and for the first time I could see how afraid he was. It had taken all his courage to get me this far. “The Snow Queen may be gone, but who knows how they’ve booby-trapped that compound! I already lost one fight with a gang like hers. I’m playing it safe for the immediate future.”

“You don’t have to go with me,” I told him. “I’m in this alone.”

“Then leave her at that berry bush, and get back here fast, before anybody sees you. I’ll come outside with you and show you the way.”

It was nearly dark by the time we started on the dirt road that led up into the hills. I could see blue lights up ahead of us, and I knew that we were going in the right direction. I was a bit afraid of the Snow Queen and the guards that she might have around her estate, but I had come so far that I was eager now to reach journey’s end, and to find Kay at last. I didn’t know if I could save him, but I wasn’t going back without trying.

Rudy walked with me as far as the berry bush beside the wrought iron fence. He kissed me on the cheek, but before I could thank him, he turned and began to run back down the hill toward Finnish Mary’s ghost town. I was alone.

As I slipped between the bars of the iron fence and began to creep toward a thicket of shrubs, I noticed that it had begun to snow-a welcome change to me from the hot dusty city down on the plains. Maybe the snow helped me get past the Snow Queen’s guards, too. As the wind picked up, it became darker and colder, not a night to be out patrolling a peaceful compound. I decided that they didn’t get too many visitors in this remote mountain outpost. Or maybe there weren’t any guards. Maybe they all went with her, for I sensed from the silent, dimly lit grounds that Finnish Mary had been telling the truth. The Snow Queen was not at home.

Within a few minutes I was within sight of the house. It looked like a palace made of drifted snow-very white, probably stucco, or adobe, or whatever it is they use to build in these unforested mountains. Spires and turrets spun out of the main building like icicles, and through the glass patio doors I could see soft blue lights illuminating the interior. I still didn’t see any guards around, so I ran from one thicket to another until I reached the side of the house. I edged close to the glass doors and looked inside.

The great room beyond the doors was vast, empty, and icily white. In the center of the room stood a blue-lit ornamental pool that was frozen-the Snow Queen’s signature, I supposed. But I had little time to notice any more of the details of that vast cold room, because by then I had caught sight of Kay, paper thin and blue with cold. He was sitting in shadow at the edge of the frozen pool, hunched on the floor, concentrating intently on some small pieces of ice. He was moving the broken shapes into one position and then another, as if he were trying to put together a pictureless puzzle. He was so absorbed in the complexity of his task that he did not even look up when I slid open the glass door and eased into the room.

As I came closer, I could hear Kay muttering, “I have to spell eternity. She said she’d give me whatever I wanted if I could spell it out with ice.” His hand was shaking as he pushed more ice shards together. I could not make out any shapes at all in the design, but he seemed to think he was making a sensible pattern. This is what the Snow Queen’s powder has done to his mind, I thought, and suddenly I felt so tired, and so sad that it had to end this way, that I began to cry. I thought that nothing could make this shell of a man recover his health and spirits.

I knelt down and put my arms around him. “I’ve found you, Kay!” I said, holding my wet cheek against his cold face. He felt like a sack of bones wrapped in parchment when I hugged him. “It’s going to be all right. I’ve come to take you home.”

He looked up at me then, and at first his stare was cold and emotionless, as if he had trouble remembering who I was, but I got him up and made him walk around, and gradually his eyes cleared a little, and he began to mumble responses to my questions, and before long we were both crying. “Gerda,” he whispered. “Where have you been all this time? And-where have I been?”

He was like somebody waking up from a long nightmare. At one point he looked around the room, and said, “This place is cold and empty. Let’s get out of here!”

“The sooner the better.” The Snow Queen could come back any time now, and, since I wasn’t armed, I wanted to be gone before she returned.

We had a long way to go to get back home, and Kay had an even longer way to go to get the craving for the Snow Queen’s powder out of his system, but we took it slowly. First, out the garden and down the mountain, where Rudy met us and helped us back to the highway. Then back to the city, and finally the long journey home to Denmark, where Kay could get long-term medical care for his condition.

It is spring again now. More than a year has passed since Kay took off on the wild ride with the Snow Queen, but he is almost his old self again. He grows stronger every day, and he’s talking about getting out of therapy soon, and looking for work. Maybe he’ll become a gardener in the country. He’s growing roses again.

I looked at him, tanned and fit in the warm sunshine, with roses in his cheeks as pink as the ones on the tree, and I whispered, “Peace, O Lord.” This time I wasn’t swearing.