"What's this?" she said, picking up a piece of it. "This wasn't here before."
He shrugged. "Maybe Harold's building a better mousetrap."
There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.
"Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps," Fran said.
"No, this wasn't a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?"
She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.
Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Let's go."
They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. "We've come this far, right?"
Fran nodded.
Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. "I can put this back on and he'll never know the difference. That is, if there's a screwdriver handy."
"Why bother? He's going to see the broken window."
"That's true. But if the bolt's back on the door, he'll... what are you smiling about?"
"Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?"
He thought about it and said, "Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything." He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. "Let's go look under that hearthstone."
They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn't had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu's first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.
"That's it, isn't it?" Larry asked, pointing.
"Yes. Be as quick as you can."
"There's a good chance he's moved it, anyway." And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker.
"Well," Larry said, "are we going to admire it or read it?"
"You," Fran said. "I don't even want to touch it."
Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script - the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.
"It'd take me three days to read all this," Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book.
"Hold it," Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:
To follow one's star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.
HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
"Sorry," Larry said. "It's by me. You get it?"
Fran shook her head slowly. "I guess it's Harold's way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don't think it's going to put 'Waste not, want not' out of business."
Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.
"Whoo," Larry said. "Look at this one, Frannie!"
It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.
HAROLD EMERY LAUDER