Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. "Hi, Mother Abagail," he said. "The name's Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you."
And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clearcut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man's hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know.
The woman is -
-what?
Did it matter? The woman was gone.
"I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time," she said easily to Mark Zellman. "Town named Rouse's Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?"
Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.
"From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn't miss much," she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly.
The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable - she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens - pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn't get there soon she was going to stain her dress.
All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.
He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph's woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000-$500,000 range... and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.
On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different... but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease... but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it... Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.
For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder's citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn't matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.