Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

It was the man who called himself Charlie Silva. A road crew had found him and a companion stranded on Route 22 yesterday and had brought them in.

“No, Charlie, I’m afraid you’re stuck here. Everything is grounded except emergency vehicles.”

“Okay, okay,” he said apologetically. “Just askin’.”

“Don’t worry about your car,” I told him. “It’s safe enough for now.” The car was on a side road off the highway, and it would stay there because a thirty foot oak burdened by a ton of ice had fallen directly in front of it.

Silva was short, mid-twenties, black hair, dressed in sports clothes. He struck me as the type who would spend a lot of time on street corners and know a lot of baseball and football statistics. His girlfriend was named Elaine Hagen. She was younger, medium blonde, with the neat manner and dress of a salesclerk. When I checked them in, Charlie told me they were from Garden City on Long Island and had been visiting in Montreal.

The next day Charlie had another question. “Who can I sue for letting that tree fall on me?”

“Why, nobody. It was an accident. And you didn’t get hurt.”

“We were both scared. That’s mental anguish. Somebody must own that property. Somebody I can sue. I think we got a case here.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Forget it.”

He shook his head and turned away. Clearly I didn’t understand the fine points of big city law.

Elaine Hagen helped out in the kitchen and gave some tired mothers a break by playing with their children. She was an attractive girl, but two things made me suspicious.

When she and Charlie Silva arrived at the shelter, Elaine was carrying a large cardboard box. She kept it with her everywhere she went. And she was on her way home from Canada.

There is a growing market for illegal copies of movie videos, music discs, and other copyrighted items. Most of the pirated merchandise comes across the Pacific and spreads east from California. It’s sold on the street and in bars for a quarter of the legitimate price. Recently some of the blackmarket material has been smuggled down from Canada.

Five dozen knockoffs of an Oscar-winning movie or a chart-topping music single would fit into a large cardboard box.

I’d been watching for a National Guard truck with a load of generators to be delivered to some dairy farms several miles out of town and had a vehicle standing by to show them the way. A young man named Jerry who used to be in my Scout troop would drive me. When the truck arrived, I hobbled out to the car.

I’d been indoors for a day and a half; I wasn’t prepared for what hit me as we drove through the dark and deserted town into the countryside.

Huge trees, their branches gone, standing like grotesque sentinels. Young birch and alders bent double, their top branches ice-locked in the ground. Frozen underbrush shattering like glass as branches fell from trees. The strong smell of pine and cedar in the air like an invisible, cloying fog.

The Guard truck followed closely as we drove around piles of debris, watching for downed power and phone wires. I wanted to go faster; I knew the people on the dairy farms needed those generators desperately.

Without power for the pumps, the cattle couldn’t be watered. Nor could they be milked on schedule as they should be. Without these elementary attentions the cows would sicken and die. The generators would save many animals, but the storm would take a terrible toll.

“Show me where they picked up that city couple,” I said to Jerry on our way back. “I’m just curious.”

Charlie Silva’s car was a late model blue Pontiac sedan. It was on a short lane that led to an old barn, and it was blocked by a large fallen oak tree. “Pull over, Jerry,” I said. “Take a look inside.”

Jerry climbed over the tree and circled the car. “Nothing,” he reported. “Doors locked, trunk locked. Nothing showing inside, not even a road map.”

He got back in the car. “That guy is sure in a hurry to get out of here,” Jerry commented. “He’s going around offering fifty bucks to anyone with a saw to cut up that tree so he can get his car out.”

On the way back I wondered why Silva had pulled off the main road in the first place, and on a lane that led only to an old barn.

By nightfall the phone company had patched a line into the Town Hall, and I used the phone to call a friend of mine at state police headquarters in Ray Brook. I had made a note of the license number of the Silva car, and I asked him to check it for me.

“You don’t think we got enough to do?” he growled. “This storm’s got us out straight, Hank.”

But he did check the number. The blue Pontiac wasn’t stolen. Neither was it registered to a Charles Silva of Garden City, Long Island.

I added the names of two old friends to my shelter roster, Courtney Smith and his wife Gloria. Limbs had blocked Court’s driveway, and he had run out of fuel trying to saw them up. A big tree had fallen across the roof of the kitchen. And with no electricity for the heat tapes, the water pipes in his house and barn were freezing.