Missy gave her a quick hug.
Pam stood up. "Let's get going."
Missy stopped, her boots squeaking on the packed snow. "There are people in there!"
"There can't be. Why would anyone be there?"
"I don't know. But there are. Lots of them. Well, four or five, at least. One of them has a handcart out in the driveway and they're loading things into it." Missy braced one hand on Veda Mae's back fence.
"Blake did say that his father stores stuff there, for the Garbage Guys. Is it Gary?"
"I can't tell from here. We're going to have to get a little closer."
"Why don't I go out and walk on the street? That way, I can look down the driveway with a curious expression on my face. Sneaking closer from an alley is the kind of thing that's suspicious by definition, but walking down the street is something that anyone can do." Pam turned back the way they had come.
Missy stood there, wishing that she wasn't by herself. She thought of sitting down on one of the piles of snow, but the sun was warm enough that it was starting to melt on top. Ugh.
The men were still loading the cart.
* * *
It seemed to be taking an awfully long time for Pam to walk around the block. The blocks in this part of town weren't all that big. She looked at her watch. After a while, she looked again. It was taking way too long for Pam to walk around the block.
Jacques-Pierre Dumais was feeling a certain amount of distress.
It was very unfortunate that Mademoiselle Pam, the daughter of that appalling Madame Hardesty, had come along just as Léon Boucher dropped an armload of the placards prepared for use at the demonstration against the hospital. She had paused, looked at the slogans, and said, "What on earth?"
Luckily she had not seen him, he thought. He had still been well within the garage. Compared to the sunlight on the snow, it was dark there. It was particularly fortunate since Boucher had panicked, run to the end of the driveway, and grabbed her, pulling the navy blue knit hat she was wearing down over her face. She had tried to jerk away, but her feet had slipped on the wet snow. Fortunately, she had not screamed. She had opened her mouth, but Léon, an experienced street fighter if not very bright, had jammed part of the knit hat into it with his fist as he dragged her into the garage.
Dumais dropped into the Rochellais patois of their childhood. No one else in this town would understand a word of it. "Fool. Idiot," he mouthed under his breath. "Her mother is a friend of the woman who owns this house. What did you think you were doing? You could have ignored her. Or said something casual and she would have gone on. You will be out of town by this afternoon. It wouldn't have mattered that she saw you."
"I do not believe in coincidences," Boucher answered.
"That is because you make them impossible. What could she have done? Now we must gag her and leave her here, because we have brought attention to ourselves." He gestured impatiently to the other three men. Turpin and a couple of the hired Germans. They had picked up the signs that Boucher had dropped and put them on the cart, but since then had been standing there like fish with their mouths open. Common day laborers, men with no initiative. "Finish loading the placards. I will be with you in a moment."
"We can start without you. At the end of the street, which way should we turn?"
"Toward the right."
He bound Mademoiselle Hardesty's hands firmly, placed an additional blindfold over her eyes on top of the ski mask, and pushed a rag into her mouth, leaving the knit hat in place over her mouth first. Then he dropped her on a pile of lumber and tied her feet. She would be secure enough until the day's activities were over.
Releasing her without either harming her or having her identify him would be . . . more complex. He would deal with that problem when the time came. If all was to go smoothly today, the demonstration planned for Leahy Medical Center needed to start very soon. He pulled the garage door shut and put the padlock back on as Boucher turned to follow the men with the handcart.
Missy looked at her watch again. The men were gone. She had seen the handcart and some men cross the far end of the alley, headed toward Route 250. Pam hadn't come back. Missy hoped that she hadn't slipped and fallen. The thin layer of melt that was developing on top of the packed snow was pretty treacherous.
She had better go around and see. Pam was more important than crawling into Veda Mae's garage in pursuit of some probably imaginary espionage papers. If she'd sprained her ankle or something, they'd have to get help. She started back up the alley, the way Pam had gone.