The idea that she might have condemned guests to death by putting them in one room over another clawed at Glenda's mind, searching for weak spots to clamber through and take her over completely. "I... I just can't remember..." she was sputtering, unable to recall even what the second half of her sentence was going to be.
Manoj placed a warm hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll keep looking. I'm sure there wasn't anyone in these rooms. I only remember a handful of other people from the restaurant, and the odds that they were..." Even he seemed to realize how unconvincing his argument was, and he turned and pointed down the hall. "Look!" he uttered, changing gears. "Kelly and I are in room 220, and we're still standing." They were standing in front of 214. Doing the math, he quickly said, "There are only two more rooms between this one and ours." His hand went from reassuring weight to tugging her shoulder. "Come and look!"
He pulled her, stumbling, down the hall. Glenda's eyes turned with dread toward 216 and 218 as they passed. What would be behind them, she wondered, if she were to use her manager's skeleton key to open? Would she even be able to, or would the broken furniture and bodies behind them would be piled too thickly for her even to open them?
Manoj gestured through the still-open door of his and Kelly's room, as if the half-snow-filled devastation inside was supposed to make Glenda feel better. "See?" he asked. He pointed to the only source of light in the room, the small ventilation window that was in the corner past the patio doors, farthest away from the massive pile-up of snow that had plowed into the lodge. "It doesn't go all that far." He seemed slightly frantic, as if afraid that Glenda would totally lose it and he wouldn't know what to do about it.
She had gathered herself somewhat, but it wasn't because of him. In fact, she had been thinking of Dale, and how he would react to this situation. Take it easy, he would say to her if he were here, there are only three rooms here that were destroyed. The odds that you put people in there and don't remember doing it is small. You wouldn't have put someone right at the top of the stairs, right? And you wouldn't put people right next door to Manoj and Kelly either, not if you didn't have to, to give everyone some extra privacy. So you're already down to one room that you have to worry about. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his voice reassuring her, and it did more for her than anything the young man could possibly say or do.
"I see," Glenda said, her voice steadier than she had expected it to be. Now that he head was clearing, she was beginning to think that she knew where she had placed some of the other lodgers. Without saying anything to Manoj, she turned away from his extended arm and his half-ruined room, and looked along the other side of the hallway, at the doors of rooms that looked down the mountain toward the town below. This was often where she put the customers who weren't loaded down with ski gear; clearly, they had come for relaxation, and probably didn't want to look up the hill at the peak. The die-hard athletes, though, Glenda could spot coming a mile away and put on the uphill-facing side of the lodge. It was why she had located Manoj and Kelly the way she had.
She headed for room 215, directly across the hall. Now she could remember the couple that she had placed there... the woman had been dark-haired, with straight-cut bangs across her forehead; the man had been tall, with the little round sunglasses that reminded Glenda of John Lennon. They hadn't seemed as ready to go skiing as much as attend an art gallery opening. Glenda remembered being surprised at how warmly they had greeted her while checking in. And she had put them in 215...
She was moving to the door and digging in her pocket for the master key before Manoj could follow. With practiced ease, she slid the key into the old-fashioned keyhole and twisted it, hearing the tumblers turn inside the antique lockplate. She swung the door open.
Glenda was ready with questions to go along with her apologies for the intrusion: were they hurt, and had they realized what had happened? But she needed no falsely-cheery words. Inside, the room was dark and unoccupied. She moved into the space with increasing puzzlement. The room had been used, she could tell that much; the sheets were slightly rumpled, there was an open suitcase lying across the plush reclining chair in the corner.
Manoj had taken a few moments to overcome his resistance to following her into someone else's room. "Was there someone in this room?" he asked.
Glenda nodded, her head swiveling around, trying to take in the room in its totality. "A couple. Their stuff is here, but they aren't." She was staring at the bed again, as Manoj moved past her. He was looking out the balcony doors, which were the first ones they had come across that looked down toward the town below.
Glenda didn't say anything, but the arrangement of the sheets seemed strange to her. They didn't look particularly disturbed, but they were lumpy in a strange way. It took a few moments before she realized what was strange about them. The lumps still bore the vague shapes of people, as if they had both been asleep side by side, then lithely slipped across their pillows and walked away.
Manoj seemed to be entranced by something outside the windows, but she didn't notice until he spoke. "Look at the hillside," he breathed. He was standing close enough to the balcony doors for his breath to cause a bloom of fog to spread out there. Forgetting about the oddly-placed bedcovers, Glenda moved over to him. His exhalation was just starting to fade from the glass, and as it did, the altered world before her was revealed.
She had never known how much more of the valley could be seen without standing trees. They could still be seen here and there, dark slashes lying almost flat along the ground, more or less covered up by the thick blanket of new snow, but they no longer obstructed the view. For the first time, she could take in the whole vista of the town below, could see its grid of lights in the center spreading out to become sinuous radiating lines as the terrain at its outskirts rose into rolling foothills. It was beautifully lit.
"Why are all the lights still on?" Manoj wondered aloud. "And why can't we see anything going on down at the foot of the service drive?"
Glenda followed his gaze and saw that, not only was the service road itself totally covered, but there was no sign of activity down at the base. There were no gathered emergency vehicles, and in fact there didn't seem to be any traffic at all. The town should have been a shifting maze of headlights, even at this late hour, but there was no motion. Only the faint wavering of distance seemed to hang over the town.
Glenda's brow furrowed, and when she added the mystery of the jumbled sheets behind her, she ended up asking, "Where did everybody else go?"
-6.4-
Kelly was having a hard time breaking the wood in half. She had finally decided to lay one end of it against one of the lobby's upholstered chairs, and setting the other end on the floor. She then tried stomping on as close to the center of it as she could, hoping that it would snap the piece near the middle. But she must not have been bringing her weight down on it enough, possibly because she was wary of how flimsy the hotel slippers were, but she wasn't getting anywhere with it. She hoped Bruce would have more luck with it when he came back from searching the offices, because even though he had the same slippers on, he had more bulk to put behind his stomp.
She tried not to think too much about what Kerren had been whispering. It was probably just the kind of nonsense a woman starting to come back from pain-induced unconsciousness was likely to say. Kelly hoped she had enough time to strap the wooden pieces on the injured woman's legs before she totally came around.
She took a look up the stairs, wondering how Manoj was doing up there. She hadn't minded his going off with Glenda; in fact, she felt better knowing that the desk clerk and the security guard were on separated agendas right now. There was clearly some romantic drama going on there that didn't need to be played out now, or in front of everyone. Her boyfriend would keep Glenda on track, focused on what they were trying to do. They had agreed on a clear plan, and they all needed to stick to it.
"Success!" Bruce suddenly called as he emerged from the dark doorway, startling her. He held up a shoebox-sized object in his hand, white with a red cross on it.
"Great!" Kelly called back. "I've just got to break this wood, and we can get her set up. Let's act quickly, though; she's starting to come around and it'll be easier if she's still out when we do it."
Bruce didn't stop looking down at Kerren as he came around the end of the desk and walked over. "She's coming out of it?" he asked, urgency evident in his voice. When Kelly didn't respond right away, his attitude changed. He turned and looked directly at her. "I felt so badly that my moving her hurt so much. How can you tell she's coming back?"
She'd never heard it referred to that way. "She was just muttering. I was over there by the desk, I didn't hear what." She was going to have to find out why he was so incredibly interested before she told him what was said. Something in his manner didn't quite have her convinced about his reason.
He nodded, disappointed. "Well, let's get her set up before she does." His gaze flicked to the unbroken plank. "Sturdy little bastard, is it?"
Kelly laughed a little at this. "Yeah. If I had my boots, I could break right through it. Maybe Manoj will bring them down for me."
Bruce quickly stepped up, and without a word of explanation, did exactly what Kelly had done, bringing his foot down hard on the middle of the angled wood. And, just as it had for Kelly, it refused to break. Bruce hopped back, wincing. "Ah, Christ!" he hissed through his teeth, and it was hard for Kelly not to smile. He certainly thought he was going to walk up and do what the young woman couldn't. He was quick to explain it away, though: "Must have really bruised my foot trying to kick down Sheryl's door."
Kelly nodded, but was already thinking on how to escalate the war of woman against wood. While Bruce leaned against Kerren's couch, nursing his foot, she walked over behind the other overstuffed chair and pushed it over so that it faced the one she had braced the wood against. If she and Bruce had sat down in them, their knees would have been touching. Stepping between the two chairs, she managed to slide the front of the relocated one partway up the angled piece of wood, so that the chair was tipped backward a little, its front edge resting on the wood. Then she climbed up into the angled chair, hopped up and down a little on its cushion, and heard the muffled but satisfying snap of the wood breaking in half. The chair she stood on suddenly dropped back into its regular upright position, and she managed not to be thrown off.
"And it's just as easy as that," she said.
"Well, that was impressive," Bruce said, amused.
"Can you pass me the gauze now?" she asked, climbing down and pushing the chair back enough that she could pull out the roughly equal-length pieces of wood. By the time she was done, Bruce had opened up the first aid kit and was handing her a roll of self-adhesive bandage. She took it and moved toward Kerren's legs.
"Now," she said as she knelt by the couch and laid everything out, "I'm going to need to remove this pillow propping up her knees, so her legs can straighten out while I splint them. I don't know if she's going to wake up, but can you... soothe her if she does?"
Bruce was already kneeling next to her, with a genuine look of concern on his face. "I'll do whatever I can."
"Good," Kelly said. "Here we go..." She gingerly slid the pillow out from underneath the crooked legs, sliding her hand in to replace it so the knee joints settled slowly into their new position. Kerren didn't exactly wake up, but her brow furrowed and she made a barely audible moaning sound. Kelly obliquely noted that her voice didn't sound anything like she thought it would, based on the few phrases she had uttered a few minutes ago. It was lighter, slightly higher pitched.
"It's okay," Bruce was already cooing, pressing his hand to Kerren's forehead. "She's helping you."
Kelly brought the pieces of wood up and laid them along the outsides of Kerren's legs, after a moment's consideration placing the jagged, broken edges down by her ankles. Then she began to loop the long roll of bandage around her legs. Each time around, she had to lift Kerren's leg a little bit to pass the roll underneath, and both she and Bruce flinched a little every time they did, afraid that the movement would cause enough pain to wake Kerren up. It didn't, but she still knitted her eyebrows and released another whispery groan each time.
By the time Kelly was starting to work on the leg closest to the back of the couch, Bruce seemed quietly flustered. He seemed not quite to know what to do for the patient, or whether he should stop the proceedings altogether. To distract him, Kelly tried to engage him in conversation. "So, I hear you're an author, is that right?"
A moment of stunned silence passed, and then they both laughed. It was a sound she hadn't heard him make yet.
"I've been called that," he responded. "It's the term I most prefer."
"I think I read one of your books," she said as she worked. "Was it the one about the aging rock star and the young producer?"
He chuckled. "Yep, that was me. That one's an oldie but goodie. Came out fifteen years ago. You couldn't have been in middle school then, could you?"
She shrugged, paused to lift one of Kerren's legs to pass the bandage roll underneath. "Just barely. Some of the kids in my class were passing around a paperback copy with the edges of the dirty pages marked. We thought we were really clever about it."
"Oh," he said. "Did you read anything other than the dirty pages? Although I seem to recall there were more than usual in that one."
"I did," she said. "I tried to game it so I was the last one of us to have it Friday afternoon. So I could take it home and read the whole thing."
He seemed to be totally distracted from the operation going on by this ego stroking. "And here I was, not knowing I was a YA writer."
The second leg was finished. Kelly sat back on her heels, exhaled, and looked directly at him. "What I actually liked was the non-YA-ness of it."
He nodded. "Well, thank you. That means a lot, that there was something in it for you. Other than the dirty pages, although writers secretly want their audience to like those parts too."
She was about to turn back to Kerren, ready to take a look at her completed handiwork, when Bruce's hand clutched her shoulder. She stopped, and realized why. Kerren had opened her eyes.
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