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.
Sure would be in a fix if Harold picked right now to come back, she thought. The idea made her look suddenly over her shoulder. She half expected to see Harold standing by the door which led into the living room, grinning at her. There was no one there, but her heart had begun to knock unpleasantly against her ribcage.
There was nothing in the kitchen, so 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. Again she felt as if she were witnessing an unconscious outward manifestation of Harold's personality. Why would anyone keep their shades pulled down in a small city where that was the way the living came to know and mark the houses of the dead?
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 -