“If there’s no baby, you don’t officially have to have any idea why he flew the coop.”
“Maybe.” Colin sounded dubious, and proceeded to explain why: “Way it looks to me is, there’ll be a baby. Teo wanted her to get rid of it. Teo got rid of himself when she didn’t go okey-doke fast enough to suit him. She’d have the kid now just to spite him, even if she wasn’t looking for any other reasons.”
That made a crazy kind of sense to Kelly: just enough to worry her. It wasn’t something she would do herself, but it was something she could see somebody else doing. “If Louise thinks that way, let her tell your children,” she said again.
“I won’t spill the beans right away,” Colin said. “If I did, that might look like I was gloating about it. But if she decides-chooses: that’s the word they always use these days, isn’t it? — if she chooses to have the baby, the kids will need to know.”
“I guess so,” Kelly said unwillingly.
“And what have you been up to?” he asked. “I hope like anything you had a better day than I did.”
“I’m working on a paper about increased geyser activity as a warning sign of a supervolcano eruption,” she said. “Whoever’s in charge of Yellowstone three-quarters of a million years from now can dig it out of the archives if their geyser basins start getting frisky.”
“For a second there, I thought you meant that,” Colin remarked.
“You never can tell, but I won’t hold my breath,” Kelly said. “This lets me use some of the photos I took at the end of my first hike to Coffee Pot Springs after things started heating up.” Her eyes welled with tears. “All that stuff is gone forever. No one will see Yellowstone again.”
“I’m glad I got the chance. I’d be glad even if I hadn’t met you there, but I’m especially glad now,” Colin said.
“Good,” Kelly answered. “Me, too.”
By the time Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got to Greenville, going there had lost its point. The local promoter wasn’t wrong to say that nobody in that part of Maine could have got to their show. People in Maine understood snow, and they understood how to keep roads passable. But even they weren’t used to dealing with weather like this.
If they weren’t up for it, the guys from California who were stranded in Guilford were, not to put too fine a point on it, freaking out. “Doesn’t the Iditarod start somewhere around here?” Rob asked Dick Barber.
Before the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn could answer, Justin started doing background vocals: “Rod, rod, ditarod, I ditarod! Ditarodrodrod, I ditarod!” It was as if the Beach Boys had met a denizen of the State Home for the Terminally Loopy.
“Would you please stick that in the deep freeze?” Rob asked him, in lieu of suggesting that he stick it up his ass. He amplified the request: “Go outside, in other words.”
“Cold out there,” Justin observed accurately.
“Cold in here, too,” Rob said, which was also accurate, if to a lesser degree. He quickly turned back to Barber. “We’re not looking a gift horse in the mouth, believe me.”
“I know it’s cold. That’s why God made long underwear,” Barber answered. “I’ve been running the furnace as little as I thought I could get away with, trying to stretch the fuel oil as far as I could. It’ll run dry in the next few days no matter what I do, though.”
“When does more fuel oil get to Guilford?” Rob asked. He was used to gas or electric heat. As far as he knew, nobody in California used fuel oil.
“Good question!” Barber said. “The way things are, I have no idea. I have no idea if any fuel oil is getting into the state. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Quite a few people in town are already out.”
Rob believed that. Barber was one of the more stringently efficient people he’d met. His military background might have had something to do with it. Dad was the same way, only not quite so much.
He tried a different question: “What if no more fuel oil gets here?”
Dick Barber clicked his tongue between his teeth. “In that case, things do get more… interesting, don’t they? The way it looks to me is, we have two choices in that case. Either we freeze to death or we start cutting down trees.”
“That doesn’t sound like two choices to me. More like one,” Justin said.
“Oh, I agree with you,” Barber replied. “But I promise, there will be folks who don’t. Some people in this state-influential people, too-feel it’s not just wrong but evil to harm a tree for any reason. They feel that way very strongly, and they’re not shy about saying so.”
“There are people like that in California, too,” Rob said.
The proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn let one eyebrow climb toward his shock of graying hair. “Why am I not surprised?”
“I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” Rob had a crooked grin of his own. “I’m kind of a tree-hugger myself, but-”
“That but suggests you’re young enough to get over it,” Barber said.
Rob shrugged. “Whenever you can take care of trees without hurting people, that’s a good thing to do, I think. But if people are going to freeze to death unless they’ve got logs in the fireplace, that’s the time to break out the axes and the chainsaws.”
“Sounds reasonable. Are you sure you’re from California?” Barber said. “The other thing is, all the questions about fuel oil apply to gasoline, too. The Shell station’s closed, in case you hadn’t noticed. So the chainsaws won’t keep working forever, or even through the winter… assuming the winter does eventually end.”
“I’ve checked out the Year without a Summer online,” Rob said. “Snow in June! That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”
“No. And the Yellowstone supervolcano is a bigger, nastier beast than the one in the nineteenth century,” Barber agreed. “So it may come down to men working up a sweat even in our lovely winter weather chopping down pines the old-fashioned way. But chances are they won’t be leveling old-growth forest. There’s still quite a bit of that farther north, but not around here. A lot of the woods in these parts have grown up since the war. People stopped trying to farm. They gave up the land and moved to the cities-or else they pulled up stakes and headed for the Sun Belt. There are more people in Maine now than there were in 1950, but there aren’t three times as many or six times as many, the way there are some places.”
“I believe that,” Justin said. “You’re more settled here than we are on the other coast.”
“And nobody moves here on account of the weather,” Rob added. “Nobody moved here on account of the weathr even before the supervolcano.”
“You forget the summer people,” Barber reminded him. “I can’t afford to do that, no matter how tempting it is. I make my living off them. They come to Maine to get away from Boston and New York City and Philadelphia. If there’s no summer next year, there won’t be any summer people. I don’t know what I’ll do then.”
Rob wondered how many times he’d heard that since the supervolcano erupted. More often than in all the years before then, he suspected. It was too big to plan around. You just had to wait and see what happened next and try to roll with it as best you could.
“Suppose there isn’t just a year without a summer,” Justin said. “Suppose there are five or six or ten years like that all in a row. What does Maine look like by the end of that time?”
“Hell,” Barber answered promptly. “Dante’s hell, I mean. The book is called The Inferno, but Satan’s buried in ice. At the end of ten years like that, we’d probably have enough ice to keep Old Scratch from getting loose for quite a while.”
A cat wandered in, a cat almost big enough to be a bobcat. The Barber family semiprofessionally bred Maine Coons. They handled the weather in these parts as well as a critter was likely to. And they were also uncommonly good-natured. Vanessa would go gaga over them, at least at first. Rob suspected she’d get bored with them, though; they weren’t contrary enough to suit her.
This beast rubbed his leg. It made motorboat noises when he bent down and stroked it. “I ought to keep one or two in the bedding, the way the Australian Aborigines did with their dogs,” he said. “They’re like hot-water bottles with ears, you know?”
Justin nodded. “A three-dog night was really cold. That’s how that turkey of a band got its name.”
“Once upon a time, I liked them,” Barber said. “I got over it.”
Thinking about warmth made Rob think about electricity. He rather wished he hadn’t. “How long will the
