The Stand (Original Edition) (71 page)

“Yeah,” Stu said. “I can’t believe it. There’s an old woman wandering around out there and everyone says ho-hum, I wonder if she’ll bring back the Ten Commandments on stone tablets in time for the meeting.”

“Maybe she will,” Glen said somberly. “Anyway, not everyone is saying ho-hum. Ralph Brentner is practically tearing his hair out by the roots.”

“Good for Ralph.” He looked at Glen closely. “What about you, baldy? Where are you at in all of this?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It’s not at all dignified. But I’ll tell you . . . it’s a little bit funny. Ole East Texas turns out to be a lot more immune from the Godspell she’s cast over this community than the agnostic old bear sociologist. I think she’ll be back. Somehow I just do. What does Frannie think of all this?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her at all this morning. For all I know she’s out there eating locusts and wild honey with Mother Abagail.” He stared at the Flatirons, rising high in the blue haze of early afternoon. “Jesus, Glen, I hope that old lady is all right.”

Fran didn’t even know Mother Abagail was gone. She had spent the morning at the library, which was by no means empty; she saw two or three people with books on farming, a bespectacled young man of about twenty-five poring over a book called
Seven Independent Power Sources for Your Home,
and a pretty blonde girl of about fourteen with a battered paperback titled
600 Simple Recipes.

She left the library around noon and strolled down to Walnut Street. She was halfway home when she met Shirley Hammett, the older woman that had been traveling with Dayna, Susan, and Patty Kroger. Shirley had improved strikingly since then. Now she looked like a brisk and pretty matron-about-town.

She stopped and greeted Fran. “When do you think she’ll be back? I’ve been asking everybody. If this town had a newspaper, I’d write it up for the People Poll. Like, ‘What do you think of Senator Bunghole’s stand on oil depletion?’ That sort of thing.”

“When who will be back?”

“Mother
Abagail,
of course. Where have you been, girl, cold storage?”

“What is all this?” Frannie asked, alarmed.

So Shirley told Fran what had been going on while Fran had been at the library. Shirley was on her way downtown and 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 the 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, she 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 it came to that, 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. Nine-thirty was
hours
away. She frowned down at her knapsack, which she had put on the counter and thought that, unless Stu and Ralph were at Harold’s house, the place would be deserted until nine-thirty tonight. And of course, if they were there, 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.

Then what?
the interior voice nagged. She didn’t know.

No worry. Stu.

But there
was
worry. That thumbprint 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?

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 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 showed President Carter coming out of the Plains Baptist Church, hands raised high, a big grin on his face, revealing all 860 teeth. 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. 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 Jimmy Carter’s grinning CinemaScope face. They sure laid some boogie-woogie on you, she thought. Someone did.

The door giving on the kitchen at the top of the cellar stairs was unlocked. 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. Nothing here. She went into the living room.

It was dark, so dark it made her uneasy. Harold not only kept his doors locked, he kept his shades pulled. That was more than strange; it was weird.

The living room, like the kitchen, was astringently neat, but the furniture was stodgy and a little seedy-looking. The room’s nicest feature was the fireplace, a huge stone job with a hearth wide enough to sit on. She did sit down for a moment, looking around thoughtfully. As she shifted, she felt a loose hearthstone under her fanny, and she was about to get up and look at it when someone knocked on the door.

Fear drifted down on her like a smothering weight of feathers. She was paralyzed with sudden terror. Her breath stopped, and she would not be aware until later that she had wet herself a little.

The knock came again, half a dozen quick, firm raps.

My God,
she thought.
The shades are down at least, thank Heaven for that.

That thought was followed by a sudden cold certainty that she had left her bike out where anyone could see it. Had she? She tried desperately to think, but for a long moment she could summon nothing to mind except a babble of gibberish that was unsettlingly familiar:
Before removing the mote from thy neighbor's eye, remove the pie from thine own
—

The knock came again, and a woman’s voice: “Anybody home?”

Fran sat stockstill. She suddenly remembered that she had parked her bike around back, under Harold’s clothesline. Not visible from the front of the house. But if Harold’s visitor decided to try the back door—

The knob of the front door—Frannie could see it down the short length of hall—began to turn back and forth in half-circles.
Whoever she is, I hope she’s no better at locks than I am,
Frannie thought, and then had to squeeze both hands over her mouth to stop an insane bray of laughter. That was when she looked down at her cotton slacks and saw how badly she had been frightened.
At least she didn’t scare the shit out of me,
Fran thought, and the laughter bubbled again, hysterical and frightened, just below the surface.

Then, with an indescribable sense of relief, she heard footfalls clicking away from the door and down Harold’s concrete path.

Fran ran quietly down the hall to the front door and put her eye to the small crack between the shade and the edge of the window. She saw a woman with long dark hair that was streaked with white. She climbed onto a small Vespa motorscooter that was parked at the curb. As the motor burped into life, she tossed her hair back and clipped it.

Its the Cross woman—the one who came over with Larry Underwood! Does she know Harold?

Nadine started off with a little jerk and was soon out of sight. Fran uttered a huge sigh, and her legs turned to water. She opened her mouth to let out the laugh that had been bubbling below the surface, knowing already how it would sound—shaky and relieved. Instead, she burst into tears.

Five minutes later, too nervous now to search any further, she was boosting herself back through the cellar window from the seat of a wicker chair she had pulled over. Once out, she was able to push the chair far enough so that it wouldn’t be obvious someone had used it to climb out. It was still out of position, but people rarely noticed things like that . . . and it didn’t even look as if Harold used the basement, except to store his Coca-Cola.

She reclosed the window and got her bike. She still felt weak and stunned from her scare. At least my pants are drying, she thought. Next time you go housebreaking, Frances Rebecca, remember to wear your continence pants.

She pedaled out of Harold’s yard and left Arapahoe as soon as she could, coming back into the downtown area on Canyon Boulevard. She was back in her own apartment fifteen minutes later.

The place was utterly silent.

She opened her diary and looked down at the muddy chocolate fingerprint and wondered where Stu was.

She wondered if Harold was with him.

Oh Stu please come home. I need you.

After lunch, Stu had left Glen and had come home. He had been sitting blankly in the living room, wondering where Mother Abagail was and also wondering if Nick and Glen could possibly be right about just letting it be, when there was a knock.

“Stu?” Ralph Brentner called. “Hello, Stu, you home?”

Harold Lauder was with him. Harold’s smile was muted today but not entirely gone; he looked like a jolly mourner trying to be serious for the graveside service.

Ralph, heartsick over Mother Abagail’s disappearance, had met Harold half an hour ago, Harold being on his way home after helping with a water-hauling party at Boulder Creek. Ralph liked Harold, who always seemed to have time to listen and commiserate with whoever had a sad tale to tell. . . and Harold never seemed to want anything in return. Ralph had poured out the whole story of Mother Abagail’s disappearance, including his fears that she might suffer a heart attack or break one of her brittle bones or die of exposure if she stayed out overnight.

“And you know it showers just about every damn afternoon,” Ralph finished as Stu poured coffee. “If she gets soaked, she’d be sure to take a cold. Then what? Pneumonia, I guess.”

“What can we do about it?” Stu asked them. “We can’t force her to come back if she doesn’t want to.”

“Well, no,” Ralph conceded. “But Harold had a real good idea.” Stu’s eyes shifted. “How you doing, Harold?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“Fine.”

“And Fran? You watching out for her?” Harold’s eyes didn’t waver from Stu’s, and they kept their slightly humorous, pleasant light, but Stu had a momentary feeling that Harold’s smiling eyes were like sunshine on the water of Breekman’s Quarry back home—the water looked so pleasant, but it went down and down to black depths where the sun had never reached, and four boys had lost their lives in pleasant-looking Breekman’s Quarry over the years.