"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.