“She just… left?” Frannie asked, frowning.

“Yes. Of course she’ll be back,” Shirley added confidently. “The note said so.”

“ ‘If it is God’s will?’”

“That’s just a manner of speaking, I’m sure,” Shirley said, and looked at Fran with a touch of coldness.

“Well… I hope so. Thanks for telling me, Shirley. Are you still having headaches?”

“Oh no. They’re all gone now. I’ll be voting for you, Fran.”

“Hmmm?” Her mind was far away, chasing this new information, and for a moment she hadn’t the slightest idea what Shirley could be talking about.

“For the permanent committee!”

“Oh. Well, thanks. I’m not even sure I want the job.”

“You’ll do fine. You and Susy both. Got to get going, Fran. See you.”

They parted. Fran hurried toward the apartment, wanting to see if Stu knew anything else. Coming so soon after their meeting last night, the old woman’s disappearance struck her around her heart with a kind of superstitious dread. She didn’t like not being able to pass on their major decisions—like the one to send people west—to Mother Abagail for judgment. With her gone, Fran felt too much of the responsibility on her own shoulders.

When she got home the apartment was empty. She had missed Stu by about fifteen minutes. The note under the sugarbowl said simply: “Back by 9:30. I’m with Ralph and Harold. No worry. Stu.”

Ralph and Harold? she thought, and felt a sudden twinge of dread that had nothing to do with Mother Abagail. Now why should I be afraid for Stu? My God, if Harold tried to do something… well, something funny… Stu would tear him apart. Unless… unless Harold sneaked up behind him or something and…

She clutched at her elbows, feeling cold, wondering what Stu could be doing with Ralph and Harold.

Back by 9:30.

God, that seemed a long time away.

She stood in the kitchen a moment longer, frowning down at her knapsack, which she had put on the counter.

I’m with Ralph and Harold.

So Harold’s little house on outer Arapahoe would be deserted until nine-thirty tonight. Unless, of course, they were there, and if they were, she could join them and satisfy her curiosity. She could bike out there in no time. If no one was there, she might find something that would set her mind at rest… or… but she wouldn’t let herself think about that.

Set your mind at rest? the interior voice nagged. Or just make it crazier? Suppose you DO find something funny? What then? What will you do about it?

She didn’t know. She didn’t, in fact, have the least tiny smidgen of an idea.

No worry. Stu.

But there was worry. That thumbprint in her diary meant there was worry. Because a man who would steal your diary and pilfer your thoughts was a man without much principle or scruple. A man like that might creep up behind someone he hated and give a push off a high place. Or use a rock. Or a knife. Or a gun.

No worry. Stu.

But if Harold did a thing like that, he would be through in Boulder. What could he do then?

But Fran knew what then. She didn’t know if Harold was the sort of man she had hypothesized—not yet, not for sure—but she knew in her heart that there was a place for people like that now. Oh yes indeedy.

She put her knapsack back on with quick little jerks and went out the door. Three minutes later she was biking up Broadway toward Arapahoe in the bright afternoon sunshine, thinking: They’ll be right in Harold’s living room, drinking coffee and talking about Mother Abagail and everybody will be fine. Just fine.

But Harold’s small house was dark, deserted… and locked.

That in itself was something of a freak in Boulder. In the old days you locked up when you went out so no one would steal your TV, stereo, your wife’s jewels. But now the stereos and TVs were free, much good they would do you with no juice to run them, and as for jewels, you could go to Denver and pick up a sackful any old time.

Why do you lock your door, Harold, when everything’s free? Because nobody is as afraid of robbery as a thief? Could that be it?

She was no lockpicker. She had resigned herself to leaving when it occurred to her to try the cellar windows. They were set just above ground level, opaque with dirt. The first one she tried slid open sideways on its track, giving way grudgingly and sifting dirt down onto the basement floor.

Fran looked around, but the world was quiet. No one except Harold had settled in this far out on Arapahoe as yet. That was odd, too. Harold could grin until his face cracked and slap people on the back and pass the time of day with folks, he could and did gladly offer his help whenever it was asked for and sometimes when it wasn’t, he could and did make people like him—and it was a fact that he was highly regarded in Boulder. But where he had chosen to live… that was something else, now wasn’t it? That displayed a slightly different aspect of Harold’s view of society and his place in it… maybe. Or maybe he just liked the quiet.

She wriggled in the window, getting her blouse dirty, and dropped to the floor. Now the cellar window was on a level with her eyes. She was no more a gymnast than she was a lockpicker, and she would have to stand on something to get back out.

Fran looked around. The basement had been finished off into a playroom/rumpus room. The kind of thing her own dad had always talked about but never quite got around to doing, she thought with a little pang of sadness. The walls were knotty pine with quadraphonic speakers embedded in them, there was an Armstrong suspended ceiling overhead, a large case filled with jigsaw puzzles and books, an electric train set, a slotcar racing set. There was also an air-hockey game on which Harold had indifferently set a case of Coke. It had been the kids’ room, and posters dotted the walls—the biggest, now old and frayed, showed George Bush coming out of a church in Harlem, hands raised high, a big grin on his face. The caption, in huge red letters, said: YOU DON’T WANT TO LAY NO BOOGIE-WOOGIE ON THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL!

She suddenly felt sadder than she had since… well, since she couldn’t remember, to tell the truth. She had been through shocks, and fear, and outright terror, and a perfect numbing savagery of grief, but this deep and aching sadness was something new. With it came a sudden wave of homesickness for Ogunquit, for the ocean, for the good Maine hills and pines. For no reason at all she suddenly thought of Gus, the parking lot attendant at the Ogunquit public beach, and for a moment she thought her heart would break with loss and sorrow. What was she doing here, poised between the plains and the mountains that broke the country in two? It wasn’t her place. She didn’t belong here.

One sob escaped her and it sounded so terrified and lonely that she clapped both hands over her mouth for the second time that day. No more, Frannie old kid old sock. You don’t get over anything this big so quickly. A little at a time. If you have to have a cry, have it later, not here in Harold Lauder’s basement. Business first.

She walked past the poster on her way to the stairs, and a bitter little smile crossed her face as she passed George Bush’s grinning and tirelessly cheerful face. They sure laid some boogie-woogie on you, she thought. Someone did, anyhow.

As she got to the top of the cellar stairs, she became certain that the door would be locked, but it opened easily. The kitchen was neat and shipshape, the luncheon dishes done up and drying in the drainer, the little Coleman gas stove washed off and sparkling… but a greasy smell of frying still hung in the air, like a ghost of Harold’s old self, the Harold who had introduced himself into this part of her life by motoring up to her house behind the wheel of Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac as she was burying her father.