The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,14
there’s something about walking upon a surface that moves beneath your feet that can put one, well, off-stride.
Carolyn wanted to know how deep the gorge was. I asked her what difference it made. “Either way,” I said, “it’s the same rickety bridge. Either way we have to cross it.”
“I guess I just want to know how far we’re gonna fall, Bern.”
“We’re not going to fall.”
“I know,” she said. “But if we do, are we looking at bruises or broken bones or a grease spot? When you can’t see, you wind up picturing a bottomless abyss, but maybe it’s more like five or six feet.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Bern?”
“I’m trying to picture a bottomless abyss,” I said. “What would it look like?”
“Bern—”
I don’t think Raffles was crazy about the bridge, either, although he didn’t seem that much happier when we were back on solid ground. Plaintive noises issued from his cat carrier. I wondered if he could see his breath. I could see mine.
The path to the house had been recently cleared, and I wondered how Orris had managed it with the plow parked on the other side of the bridge. Then we rounded a bend and the house came into view, a light glowing in every window, a plume of smoke rising from the chimney. Near the front entrance, just to the side of one of a pair of pillars, stood a snow blower, its own top surface already covered with an inch of fresh snow.
“Orris can’t be too slow,” I said, “if he can figure out how to work one of those things.” I lifted our bags onto the porch, set the cat carrier alongside them. “I pick up animals. I brake for yokels. What are we supposed to do with the wagons?”
She pointed, and I saw a whole herd of red wagons, a counterpart to the group on the other side of the bridge. I parked ours with the others. “Now they can catch up on all the gossip,” I told Carolyn. “What stories they’ll have to tell.”
She rolled her eyes. I rang the doorbell, and I was just about to ring it again when the heavy door opened inward, held by a hulking youth with a shock of dark blond hair. He had the look in his eyes that the average person gets by being smacked in the forehead with a two-by-four. He motioned us inside, then reached for the suitcases and dropped them at the front desk, even as a tall gentleman with a well-bred smile was emerging from behind it.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said. “Wretched weather, isn’t it? And I’m afraid we’re in for rather a good deal of it, if the chap on the radio is to be believed. Did you have a horrid time getting here?”
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“Ah, that’s the spirit.” You’d have thought I’d kept a stiff upper lip through the Blitz. “But let me welcome you formally to Cuttleford House. I’m your host, actually. Nigel Eglantine. And you would be—?”
“Bernard Rhodenbarr.”
“I rather thought you would be Mr. Rhodenbarr, although you might have been Mr. Littlefield. We’re not really expecting the Littlefields for another hour, and they may be even later the way it’s snowing.” He frowned at the prospect, then brightened and beamed at Carolyn. “And this would be Miss Lettice Runcible,” he said.
“Uh, no,” I said. “This would be Miss Carolyn Kaiser.”
“Quite,” he said. “Of course it would. Ah, Mr. Rhodenbarr, Miss Kaiser, let me just see where we’ve put you.” He checked the register, snatched up a pencil, used one end of it to rub out Lettice’s name and the other to jot down Carolyn’s, and managed all this while telling us that we must be famished, that dinner had already been served, actually, but that there’d be something for us in the dining room as soon as we’d had a chance to get to our room and freshen up.
“We’ve put you in Aunt Augusta’s Room,” he said. “I think you’ll be quite comfortable there.”
“I’m sure we will,” Carolyn said. “But what about Aunt Augusta? Will she have to sleep in the hall?”
He laughed richly, as if Carolyn had said something wonderfully amusing. “Oh, that’s just our way,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve named all the sleeping rooms for friends and relatives, and of course we’d be delighted to put Aunt Augusta into her room if she were ever to come visit, but it’s not terribly likely. She’s in a nursing home in Harpenden, poor thing.”