I didn’t say anything.

“ Bern?”

“I’m trying to picture a bottomless abyss,” I said. “What would it look like?”

“ Bern -”

I don’t think Raffles was crazy about the bridge, either, although he didn’t seem that much happier when we were back on solid ground. Plaintive noises issued from his cat carrier. I wondered if he could see his breath. I could see mine.

The path to the house had been recently cleared, and I wondered how Orris had managed it with the plow parked on the other side of the bridge. Then we rounded a bend and the house came into view, a light glowing in every window, a plume of smoke rising from the chimney. Near the front entrance, just to the side of one of a pair of pillars, stood a snow blower, its own top surface already covered with an inch of fresh snow.

“Orris can’t be too slow,” I said, “if he can figure out how to work one of those things.” I lifted our bags onto the porch, set the cat carrier alongside them. “I pick up animals. I brake for yokels. What are we supposed to do with the wagons?”

She pointed, and I saw a whole herd of red wagons, a counterpart to the group on the other side of the bridge. I parked ours with the others. “Now they can catch up on all the gossip,” I told Carolyn. “What stories they’ll have to tell.”

She rolled her eyes. I rang the doorbell, and I was just about to ring it again when the heavy door opened inward, held by a hulking youth with a shock of dark blond hair. He had the look in his eyes that the average person gets by being smacked in the forehead with a two-by-four. He motioned us inside, then reached for the suitcases and dropped them at the front desk, even as a tall gentleman with a well-bred smile was emerging from behind it.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said. “Wretched weather, isn’t it? And I’m afraid we’re in for rather a good deal of it, if the chap on the radio is to be believed. Did you have a horrid time getting here?”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“Ah, that’s the spirit.” You’d have thought I’d kept a stiff upper lip through the Blitz. “But let me welcome you formally to Cuttleford House. I’m your host, actually. Nigel Eglantine. And you would be-?”

“Bernard Rhodenbarr.”

“I rather thought you would be Mr. Rhodenbarr, although you might have been Mr. Littlefield. We’re not really expecting the Littlefields for another hour, and they may be even later the way it’s snowing.” He frowned at the prospect, then brightened and beamed at Carolyn. “And this would be Miss Lettice Runcible,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. “This would be Miss Carolyn Kaiser.”

“Quite,” he said. “Of course it would. Ah, Mr. Rhodenbarr, Miss Kaiser, let me just see where we’ve put you.” He checked the register, snatched up a pencil, used one end of it to rub out Lettice’s name and the other to jot down Carolyn’s, and managed all this while telling us that we must be famished, that dinner had already been served, actually, but that there’d be something for us in the dining room as soon as we’d had a chance to get to our room and freshen up.

“We’ve put you in Aunt Augusta’s Room,” he said. “I think you’ll be quite comfortable there.”

“I’m sure we will,” Carolyn said. “But what about Aunt Augusta? Will she have to sleep in the hall?”

He laughed richly, as if Carolyn had said something wonderfully amusing. “Oh, that’s just our way,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve named all the sleeping rooms for friends and relatives, and of course we’d be delighted to put Aunt Augusta into her room if she were ever to come visit, but it’s not terribly likely. She’s in a nursing home in Harpenden, poor thing.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But I do think she’d like the room if she ever saw it, and I hope you’ll be happy there yourselves. It’s Cissy’s particular favorite.”

“Cissy?”

“My wife. Christened Cecilia, but there’s nothing quite so enduring as a childhood nickname, is there? Your room’s up that staircase and along to the left, and you just keep going until you get to it. Will you want a hand with your luggage?”

“We can manage.”

“If you’re quite certain. I’d send Orris with you, but he seems to have slipped off somewhere.” His eyes narrowed. “I say, is that a cat in there?”

It would have been difficult to deny, the animal in question having just announced himself with a meow like chalk on a blackboard. “He’s a Manx,” I said. “His name is Raffles.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “And of course he’s a perfect gentleman about, ah, bathroom habits and that sort of thing.”

“Of course.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll be quite at home here,” he said smoothly, “and I’m sure we’ll be glad of his company.”

“It’s nice that the rooms all have names,” Carolyn said. “It’s so much cozier than having a room with a number.”

I was at the window, watching it snow. It seemed pretty serious about it.

“More challenging, too,” she went on. “If they’d put us in Room 28, we’d have known to look for it between Room 27 and Room 29. But how would anybody know to look for Aunt Augusta between Uncle Roger and Cousin Beatrice?”

“And directly across the hall from Vicar Andrews.”

“That sounds a little scandalous, if you ask me. Maybe there’s rhyme and reason to it, but you’d need a copy of the family tree to sort it all out. This is a great room, though, Bern. Nice, huh? Beamed ceiling, fireplace, big window looking out at-what does it look out at, Bern?”

“Snow,” I said. “Whatever happened to global warming?”

“You only get that in the summer. Anyway, I don’t care how much it snows now that we’re inside. I’d rather look at snow than a fire escape and a row of garbage cans, which is all you can see from my window on Arbor Court. You know, Bern, all this room needs is one more thing and it would be perfect.”

“What’s that?”

“A second bed.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, this is a real beauty, a four-poster with a chintz canopy and all, and it looks really comfy.” She hopped onto it, kicked her shoes off, stretched out. “It’s even better than it looks,” she reported, “and if you were a beautiful woman I’d like nothing better than to share it with you. They made a mistake, huh? You told them twin beds, didn’t you?”

“I must have.”

“‘I must have.’ That’s a no, right?”

“I meant to, Carolyn.”

“You meant to.”

I sighed. “When I made the reservation,” I said, “it was for me and Lettice, and I specified a double bed. As a matter of fact, I made a special point of specifying a double bed.”

“I bet you did.”

“And when I sent them a deposit, I put that in the note I enclosed along with the check.”

“And then Lettice decided to get married instead.”

“Right.”

“And you brought me in off the bench.”

“To save the game,” I said. “And I realized we would be happier with twin beds, and I started to make the call, and I felt like an idiot. ‘Hi, this is Bernie Rhodenbarr, that’s R-H-O, right, and I’ll be arriving as scheduled a week from Thursday, but I want twin beds instead of a double. Oh, and by the way, Ms. Runcible won’t be coming with me. But Ms. Kaiser will.’”

“I see what you mean.”

“I figured I’d wait until I could think of a graceful way to do it, and I’m still waiting. Look, we’ve been friends a long time, Carolyn. Neither of us is going to turn into a sex maniac in the middle of the night. We can share a bed platonically.”

“I just wonder if we’ll get any sleep. This bed’s comfy, but it sags in the middle. We may keep rolling into each other.”

“We’ll manage,” I insisted. “Anyway, we’ll probably be sleeping in shifts.”

“I brought pajamas.”

“I mean we’ll take turns. The middle of the night’s the best time for me to check out the library shelves.”

“Won’t that be suspicious, Bern?”

“Why? What else do you do when you have insomnia? You look for a good book to read.”

“Preferably a signed first edition. So you figure you’ll be up nights?”