The Stand

“You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?” he said at last. “You really think it’s that deep?”

“Yes,” she said. “I really think that’s a possibility. Maybe the whole committee. But I don’t know what—”

His hand fell on her shoulder and gripped it hard, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundlessly.

“Larry? What—”

“When he went downstairs,” Larry muttered. “He went down to get a corkscrew or something.”

“What? ”

He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. “You know,” he said, “there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don’t guarantee it, because I didn’t look in the book, but… it makes such beautiful sense… Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea. Hell, he might have even been jealous that you thought of it first. Didn’t all the best writers keep journals?”

“Are you saying Harold’s got a diary?”

“When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth—”

“YES! ” she yelled, so loudly that he jumped. “The day I snuck in… and Nadine Cross came… I sat on the hearth… I remember that loose stone.” She looked at Larry again. “There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it…”

“Coincidence,” he said, but he sounded uneasy.

“Is it? We were both in Harold’s house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we’re both here now. Is it coincidence?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was under that stone?”

“A ledger,” he said slowly. “At least, that was the word stamped on the cover. I didn’t look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn’t Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let’s say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets—the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don’t know what all—those secrets wouldn’t have been Harold’s secrets. Do you see that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you giddy slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren’t Harold’s secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Because they were his secrets. That was Harold’s journal.”

“Do you think it’s still there?”

“Maybe. I think we’d better look and see.”

“Now?”

“Tomorrow. He’ll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been helping out at the power station afternoons.”

“All right,” she said. “Do you think I should tell Stu about this?”

“Why don’t we wait? There’s no sense stirring things up unless we’re sure it’s something important. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or Harold’s master political plan. Or it might be in code.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. What will we do if there is… something important?”

“Then I guess we’ll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We’re meeting on the second. The committee will handle it.”

“Will it?”

“Yes, I think so,” Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee.

She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. “I feel better. Thanks for being here, Larry.”

“Where should we meet?”

“The little park across from Harold’s. What about there, at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Fine,” Larry said. “I’ll see you then.”

Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. But if it proved otherwise…

Well, if it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick and Ralph’s place, out near the end of Baseline Road.

When she got home, Stu was sitting in the bedroom, a felt-tip marker in one hand and a weighty leather- bound volume in the other. The title, stamped in gold leaf on the cover, was An Introduction to the Colorado Code of Criminal Justice.

“Heavy reading,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth.

“Arg.” He tossed the book across the room and it landed on the dresser with a thump. “Al Bundell brought it over. He and his Law Committee are really up and in the doins, Fran. He wants to talk to the Free Zone Committee when we meet day after tomorrow. What have you been up to, pretty lady?”

“Talking with Larry Underwood.”

He looked at her closely for a long moment. “Fran—have you been crying?”

“Yes,” she said, meeting his gaze steadily, “but I feel better now. Much better.”

“Is it the baby?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow night. I’ll tell you everything that’s been on what passes for my mind. Until then, no questions. Kay?”

“Is it serious?”

“Stu, I don’t know.”

He looked at her for a long, long time.

“All right, Frannie,” he said. “I love you.”

“I know. And I love you, too.”

“Bed?”

She smiled. “Race you.”

The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day—but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder… briefly, at least.

At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, “Hail Mary, fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race.”

He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wall-to-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad’s order.

“If we did something wrong, I’d rather blow two than fifty-two,” Brad had told them earlier.

The generators began to whine more loudly.

Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling, Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and frayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour.

The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now.

For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out in Shoyo— not one of entombment now, but of resurrection.

The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn’t known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them.