In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again.
Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he'd had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head. O sole mio... CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles.
A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: "Hey, you... you on the balcony... psssst! "
"Pssst," Frannie whispered to herself. "Pssst, oh great."
She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial - and demure - wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights cackling wildly.
The man - a young man, she saw now - had picked him self up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy-red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile.
"What did you knock over?" he asked. "It sounded like a piano."
"It was a vase," she said. "It... it..." But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "You really looked funny... I know that's a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met but... oh, my! You did!"
"If this was the old days," he said, grinning, "my next move would be to sue you for at least a quarter of a million. Whiplash. Judge, I looked up and this young woman was peering down at me. Yes, I believe she was making a face. Her face was on, at any rate. We find for the plaintiff, this poor boy. Also for the bailiff. There will be a ten-minute recess."
They laughed together a little. The young man was wearing clean faded jeans and a dark blue shirt. The summer night was warm and kind, and Frannie was beginning to be glad she had come out.
"Your name wouldn't happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?"
"It so happens. But I don't know you."
"Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people."
That dried her giggles up. "Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He's on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions."
"I'd appreciate that. But I'll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I'm not risking this action again."
"Do you know Harold?"
"I do and I don't - the same way I do and don't know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don't look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie-type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a .45 on each hip. But I'm pleased to meet you any way." He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile.
"I'm afraid I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about."
"Sit down on the curb a minute and I'll tell you."
She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down.
"I've got some stuff for Harold Lauder," Larry said. "But it's supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum's the word and all that."
"Okay, sure," Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever.
He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn't a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print - BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947.
"The best vintage Bordeaux in this century," he said. "At least that's what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul."
"But 1947... that's forty-three years ago. Won't it be... well, gone over?"
"Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I've carried it all the way from Ohio. If it's bad wine, it'll be well-traveled bad wine."
"And that's for Harold?"
"That and a bunch of these." He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn't have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. "A Payday candy bar!" she exclaimed. "Harold's favorite... but how could you know that?"
"That's the story."