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

“The least of my problems, Hank,” he said.

I knew what he meant. I helped them get settled and left them alone. They sat by themselves, talking quietly. The Smiths owned a hundred acres of maple trees; their livelihood was sugaring. They’d been counting on the syrup to send their two girls to college.

They had to watch helplessly as the weight of the ice destroyed tree after tree. Eight out of ten of their maples had been ruined, and the relentless storm continued through the night and the next three days.

My contact had said the blue Pontiac was owned by a Frank Gratto in Hempstead, Long Island. Hempstead is not far from Garden City. Casually I asked Elaine if she knew anybody named Frank Gratto.

“Sure,” she answered. “That’s Charlie’s uncle. He gave us this trip to Montreal. He wanted Charlie to bring his car back for him, so we flew up and Uncle Frank paid for the tickets.”

So Charlie was just doing a favor for an uncle who lived on Long Island but left his car in Montreal. An uncle who was suspected of racketeering and had three arrests for unlawful possession of a controlled substance.

Some people who had canned food and bottled water and firewood decided to ride out the storm at home. For a few it was an adventure, for others a tragedy.

In spite of the warnings, people used kerosene heaters in closed rooms; they put gasoline-powered generators in basements or on closed porches. Reports of carbon monoxide poisoning came from all over. The first signs of poisoning, headaches and nausea, were usually ignored until it was too late.

Ted Rosenbaum, another friend of mine, was in charge of our evacuation detail. He had a crew going from door to door, to make sure any people at home were safe and to deliver food supplies. A large room at the rear of the building was operations center. Long tables were covered with raingear, battery radios, ice scrapers. Cigarette smoke layered the high ceiling.

Ted had a table against a wall and a tax list he had scrounged from the clerk’s office. As I walked up, two men had just come in from outside, stamping the slush from their boots, shrugging out of their black raincoats.

“We hit every house on Grove Street,” one of them told Ted. “And Separator Street is clear except for that old man at the end by the river. Want us to try him again?”

Ted shook his head. “You guys get something to eat. There’s some mighty good stew today.” He pointed at his map. “Then circle through the Jersey section in the morning.” The men headed down the hall to the cafeteria. Ted looked at me. “That’s old Caleb McCullen down by the river. You know him, don’t you, Hank?”

“I know him. As stubborn as they come.”

“Lives there alone, doesn’t he?”

“Not quite alone,” I said.

Ted was tracing the river on his map.

“There’s an ice jam downstream here.” He pointed. “The river keeps on coming up, nobody will get in there tomorrow.” He looked up at me. “You want to take a ride?”

I had my cap in a back pocket. I put it on and picked up one of the raincoats. “Let’s go,” I said. I wagged my cane. “You drive.”

Ted had the keys to a four-wheel drive vehicle; we headed out of town toward the river. We passed a power company bucket truck and digger. The crew was installing a new service pole. I had heard that over a thousand utility poles were already down in the northern part of the county. Giant steel transmission towers had toppled over near the Canadian border.

Behind us we could hear chain saws snarling as we inched our way down Separator Street, named before the Civil War when the iron mines on Palmer Hill and the smelters by the river were working. The snap of limbs breaking and crashing on the underbrush sounded like small arms fire. Larger branches, weighted beyond endurance by the ice, broke away with an angry loud crack.

“Sounds like a mortar,” Ted said.

“Yeah.” I wondered where Ted had heard mortar fire. I’d have to ask him sometime.

The air was heavy with the scent of pine and cedar. The ground was thick with needles and twigs and small branches. I hope we don’t have a dry summer, I thought; this will be tinder for a heck of a fire.

Caleb McCullen lived in an old trailer on the bank of the river. To reach it we drove down a dirt lane that dropped down from the paved road. Ted stopped the car, and we looked at the river, already out of its bank and foaming whitely in the dim light.

“That water keeps comin’ up, it’ll take out this road by morning,” Ted said. “You better talk that old man into comin’ out with us now.”

A yellow light shone from a small window. I knocked on the door, heard a voice inside, and walked in, Ted behind me. Caleb stood in the center of the room, a bent old man who looked closer to ninety than seventy. A woodstove in a corner threw some heat, but it was cold in the room. An oil lamp on a table was the only light.

Caleb looked at us in alarm, but his expression softened as he recognized me. “How do, Henry,” he said almost formally.