The snow started at four in the afternoon, which Ray Vecchio would say later was a perfectly reasonable time for snow to start, if it had any plans to stop.

By six the windows of the Canadian Consulate were white to the sills. By seven the radio said Lake Shore Drive was closed, the Kennedy was a parking lot, and anybody with sense should stay put. Ray had decided, after a long look out the front door at the Riv, which was now a white hump at the curb, that he was a person with sense. So he was sitting on the floor of Constable Benton Fraser's office with his shoes off and a cardboard box between his knees, explaining to a deaf half-wolf that the crackers were not for him.

"He can't hear you, Ray," Fraser said from the desk.

"He reads lips. You told me he reads lips."

"He does. At the moment he's choosing not to."

Diefenbaker turned his head and looked at the wall, which meant he had understood every word.

The box had come up from the evidence room that morning. The lieutenant had dropped it on Ray's desk with the look of a man handing off a dead fish. Seven burglaries in three weeks, all on the North Side, all hardware stores, all on the night before a snow. The cash drawers hadn't been touched. Neither had the power drills, the space heaters, or a nice set of socket wrenches that Ray had personally checked twice. What was gone, every time, was snow shovels. Snow shovels and rock salt.

"The lieutenant thinks it's a ring," Ray said. "A shovel ring. He says it with a straight face, Benny. He thinks they're selling them out of a truck."

"It's possible," Fraser said. "In the Yukon in nineteen fifty-two, according to my father, a man cornered the market on stove bolts for an entire winter."

"This isn't the Yukon."

"No," Fraser agreed, and held out his hand for the box.

There wasn't much in it. Seven Polaroids of seven back doors, each with the lock popped the same neat way, with a screwdriver. Seven lists of what was taken, in Ray's handwriting, which got worse as the lists went on. A city map with seven red X's on it. And one mitten, blue, hand-knit, in a plastic bag, found in a snowbank behind the third store.

Fraser opened the bag.

"Don't," said Ray.

Fraser held the mitten to his nose, and then, before Ray could get up off the floor, touched the cuff to the tip of his tongue.

"Every time," Ray said to the ceiling. "Every single time."

"Wool," Fraser said. "Hand-spun, I'd think, or very old. Rock salt in the fibers, which we expected. And a little cocoa." He turned it over. "It's a child's mitten, Ray. A boy of twelve or thirteen, if I'm any judge of hands. The thumb has been darned twice, by someone who knows how. And look here." He held it under the lamp. On the inside of the palm, the wool was worn thin in a long, slanting line.

"So he's got a hole in his mitten. Call the FBI."

"It's worn the way a mitten wears from gripping a handle," Fraser said. "Over and over. A long handle, held low."

Ray looked at the mitten. Then he looked at the box. "You're telling me the kid's using the shovels."

"I'm telling you he's using one of them a great deal."

At eight-fifteen the lights went out. Fraser produced a kerosene lantern from a closet as if he had been waiting all year for the chance, and a small camp stove, and a kettle, and two tin cups. Ray said he wasn't going to ask. Fraser said that was probably wise. The tea was strong enough to stand a spoon in, and it was the best thing Ray had drunk all week.

Outside, the wind came straight off the lake and threw the snow against the glass in handfuls. Inside, it was quiet the way a building only gets quiet when the furnace stops. Dief lay across Ray's feet, which Ray pretended not to like, and which kept his feet warm.

Fraser told a story about a storm near the Mackenzie when he was a boy, three days in a snow house with his grandmother, who read the whole of a very long Russian novel aloud by the light of a seal-oil lamp, doing all the voices. Ray told a story about the big blizzard of '67, when he was seven and the snow came up past the front windows on the whole block, and his father handed him a shovel and told him to start at one end of the street and not come back until he got to the other.

"Did you?" Fraser asked.

"Did I what?"

"Get to the other end."

Ray was quiet for a while. "Mrs. Delph gave me a dollar," he said finally. "And hot chocolate. And Mr. Zirkle across the street, he was on a cane, he cried. I didn't know grown men did that. I was seven. I thought I'd done something wrong." He drank his tea. "I did the whole block, Benny."

Fraser didn't say anything. He picked up the map and held it close to the lantern.

"Ray," he said. "Have you noticed the shape?"

Seven red X's. Ray had looked at them a hundred times. He looked again, and this time he saw it: they made a ring. A rough one, like a kid's drawing of a clock, but a ring, and in the middle of it, about six blocks across, was nothing. No hardware stores, no X's. Just houses. Two-flats and bungalows, and a little church, and an old folks' apartment building with a long front walk.

"He doesn't steal near home," Ray said slowly. "So nobody knows him."

"And he goes the night before the snow," said Fraser, "because he wants to be ready in the morning."

Ray fell asleep around midnight in the Inspector's good chair, which he would deny. Fraser sat up with the lantern turned low. At some hour past three, his father came out of the supply closet, brushing snow off his shoulders that had no business being on him, and looked at the window and said that this was a dusting, that in the winter of 'forty-nine he had once walked from one end of a lake to the other on top of a drift and never once touched ice. Fraser said he didn't doubt it. His father looked at the map on the desk for a long moment.

"The old ones go to early Mass," he said. "Always did. Walk's got to be clear by six." And he went back into the closet and closed the door behind him, as though there were a hallway in there.

At a quarter to five, Fraser woke Ray up.

It took the two of them forty minutes to dig out the Riv, and Ray said things about the city of Chicago during those forty minutes that Fraser chose to take as poetry. The plows had been down the side streets by then, and the sky was going gray when they turned onto a block in the middle of the ring and Ray cut the engine.

Halfway down the block, in front of the old folks' building, a boy was shoveling.

He was thirteen, maybe. He had a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows, a blue mitten on his left hand, and a brown work glove on his right, and he was moving snow the way you only learn to move it if somebody showed you once and you've been doing it every winter since. Behind him, the long front walk was clean to the concrete, and salted. So were the walks of the next six houses. Leaning against each porch rail was a brand-new snow shovel with the price tag still on it.

Ray got out of the car. The boy saw the badge and froze. Dief went straight past them both and lay down in a snowbank, upside down, in bliss.

Ray held up the plastic bag with the blue mitten in it.

"I think this is yours," he said.

His name was Joseph. His grandmother lived on the third floor of the old folks' building. Last winter a lady on the first floor had slipped on the front walk and broken her hip, because the landlord's man didn't come until noon, and the people on the block were all too old to shovel and too proud to ask. Joseph didn't have money for shovels. He did have a screwdriver.

"You can't steal, kid," Ray said. "I don't care what it's for. You know that, right?"

Joseph looked at his boots and said he knew.

Ray looked down the block at seven clean walks, and the old lady in a housecoat watching from a first-floor window, and the shovels by the porch rails. He took a long breath.

That afternoon he drove Joseph around to seven hardware stores. It turned out that most hardware store owners on the North Side had once been thirteen and had once shoveled somebody's walk. Joseph would work it off on Saturdays, sweeping up and stacking bags of salt, until spring. One owner said he'd throw in a new pair of mittens.

Fraser, meanwhile, shoveled the rest of the block. When Ray came back, he'd gone around the corner and started on the next one.

"Benny," Ray said, leaning on the hood of the Riv, "I've been a cop a long time. This is the first time I ever closed a case with a shovel."

Fraser straightened up and looked down the street, white and quiet and clean, with the sun just coming over the roofs.

"It's a very good shovel, Ray," he said, and handed it to him.

~ the end ~

Author's note: The blizzard of '67 was real. My mother still talks about it. The shovel ring is not, as far as I know, though I did once take a call from a man reporting that somebody had stolen the snow off his car. I asked him to describe the suspect. He couldn't.

Did you like it? Hate it? Spot a typo? Write and tell me. Next: Stay on the Line, Part 1.

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