Part 4
Jonah called Gus before he crossed the yard. A phone rang inside the workshop.
The side door stood several inches open, snow curling across the floor. Mica reached it first, then stopped so abruptly that the long line snapped taut in Jonah’s hand. She would not cross the threshold.
“Gus!”
No answer. Jonah aimed his flashlight through the gap. Gus lay just inside, one hand beneath the workbench and his boots near the door. A wall-mounted heater was running. Its small exhaust pipe disappeared through the rear wall, where wind had piled snow nearly to the window.
Jonah did not know whether the heater was the cause. He knew an unconscious man in a closed workshop with combustion equipment was enough.
He called 911, pulled the side door wide without stepping through it, and reached for Gus’s boots. Gus was too far inside. Jonah lay flat in the snow, caught one ankle, and dragged until he could grasp both legs. The first pull moved Gus only inches. The second brought his hips over the threshold.
Jonah kept his own head outside and worked backward. Mica circled behind him, whining but no longer trying to enter. Once Gus was in clean air, Jonah rolled him onto his back, checked breathing, and followed the dispatcher’s instructions while the storm filled the open workshop. Gus breathed, but he did not wake.
The volunteer fire crew arrived with a utility truck behind a county plow. Captain Luis Ortega sent two firefighters to Gus and another toward the workshop with a portable meter. Its alarm sounded before the firefighter reached the workbench.
“Good call staying out,” Ortega said.
Jonah looked at the red glove on the snow. “Wasn’t mine.”
The paramedics put Gus on oxygen. His eyes opened while they were loading him onto a stretcher, unfocused at first, then irritated.
“You shut off my heater?”
“Next time I’ll let you finish dying before I touch your settings.”
“Blue notebook.” Gus coughed against the mask. “Bench.”
Ortega would not allow anyone inside until the space had been ventilated and checked. When a firefighter finally brought the notebook out in a clear plastic bag, Gus lifted two fingers toward it.
“Beth needs that.”
“You need a hospital,” Jonah said.
“Both can be true.”
The ambulance doors closed on the rest of his argument. Mica stood pressed against Jonah’s thigh, snow packed between her toes. He checked the harness fit, tightened both shoulder straps, and lifted her into his mudroom. She paced from the door to the kitchen while he waited on the porch with Deputy Tessa Ward and Captain Ortega.
Tessa knew Gus through the winter outreach network. She opened the notebook beneath the porch light and found six names on the final page. Four had question marks beside their supposed Northstar visits. Across the top Gus had written: VERIFY BEFORE STORM.
The first two residents answered their phones. One was staying with a son in Duluth. The other had gone to the high-school warming center before dark.
Ruth Danner did not answer. Neither did Frank Leary, who used an oxygen concentrator at night. Beth Corcoran joined the call from the county’s emergency operations room and compared Gus’s notes with Northstar’s electronic status board.
“Both visits show complete,” she said.
Tessa held the phone closer. “Completed when?”
“Ruth at four-ten. Frank at four-forty.”
Jonah looked across the yard at Gus’s open workshop, where firefighters were now digging snow away from the blocked exhaust outlet. Northstar’s screen showed two green boxes. Gus’s notebook showed two doors no one could verify.
That proved nothing about why the records were wrong. It was enough to stop trusting them for the night.
Ortega divided the two addresses between available crews. Ruth’s road was already too deep for the ambulance, and the county plow had been redirected to a downed tree near the warming center.
“My tracked rig is in the shed,” Jonah said.
Ortega looked at him. “The side-by-side?”
“Fueled. Winch, tow strap, rear sled.”
“And you?”
Jonah knew what he was asking. Old Jonah would have offered the least information possible and let competence answer the rest.
“Multiple myeloma,” he said. “I’ve been off schedule with oncology. I fatigue sooner than I used to.”
Tessa’s eyes shifted toward him but she did not interrupt. Ortega considered the road, the rig, and Jonah in that order. “You drive. You do not enter a structure. You tell me the first time your body changes the plan.”
“Understood.”
“Not the second time.”
Jonah held his gaze. “The first.”
He put Mica in the enclosed rear cabin, clipped her harness to the short safety tether, and laid Gus’s red glove beside her. She nosed it once, then looked toward the ambulance tracks disappearing down the road.
Ruth’s yellow house had no porch light. Snow covered the steps and pressed halfway up the storm door. Jonah kept the rig running while Ortega and a firefighter forced a path to the porch. They knocked, called, and heard nothing.
Mica remained tethered in the cabin. She stood with her front paws on the seat, watching the men disappear around the side of the house, but Jonah did not unclip her. She had brought him to Gus. From here, human beings had addresses, equipment, and responsibility.
The firefighter found Ruth through a rear window, awake on the kitchen floor. She had slipped while carrying kindling and could not reach her phone. Her thermostat was low to conserve fuel, and the room had cooled quickly after sunset.
When they brought her out on an evacuation chair, she squinted at Jonah through the snow.
“Did your dog take my scarf again?”
“Not tonight.”
“Then why are you here?”
Jonah looked at the blanket tucked around her. “Gus wrote your name down.”
Ruth’s face changed. She turned toward the ambulance crew and stopped arguing long enough to let them examine her.
By the time Jonah reached the warming center, the second team had brought in Frank Leary. His power failure had shut down the oxygen concentrator, but his portable cylinder had held through transport. Jonah helped secure the concentrator beneath a folding table. His hands had begun to tremble. He told Ortega before the captain noticed.
“Water, five minutes,” Ortega said.
Jonah sat. The obedience scraped at him more than the cold. Mica leaned against his knee while volunteers moved cots and plugged medical equipment into the backup circuit. Beth called again before the five minutes were over.
The Northstar scheduling coordinator, Maya Sloan, had reached two aides assigned to Harbor House, a converted lakeside lodge where six older residents were staying through the cold snap. One aide said her shift had been canceled by management because the company could not authorize overtime. The other had been unable to leave her road and had reported that before dusk. Northstar’s status board showed both aides on site.
“Who’s actually there?” Ortega asked.
“A resident named Nora Ames called former caregiver Lila Park when nobody arrived,” Beth said. “That was two hours ago. We can’t reach either of them. Lila may have gone there on her own.”
Jonah looked at the snow melting from Mica’s coat onto the floor. Six residents. Perhaps one unassigned caregiver. A dark road along the lake. Ortega was already gathering his gear…
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