Then she began to cry, scalding tears that flowed down her cheeks, and she hugged him fiercely, not caring that every muscle in her body seemed to cry out in pain. She hugged him. The future was later. Now the things she needed most were here in this sun-washed room.
The sound of birds came through the open window.
Later she said, "Tell me. How bad is it?"
His face was heavy and sorrowful and unwilling. "Fran..."
"Nick?" she whispered. She swallowed and there was a tiny click in her throat. "I saw an arm, a severed arm - "
"It might be better to wait - "
"No. I have to know. How bad was it?"
"Seven dead," he said in a low, husky voice. "We got off lucky, I figure. It could have been much worse."
"Who, Stuart?"
He held her hands clumsily. "Nick was one of them, honey. There was a pane of glass, I guess - you know, that iodized glass - and it... it..." He stopped for a moment, looked down at his hands, then up at her again. "He... we were able to make identification by... certain scars..." He turned away from her for a moment. Fran made a harsh sighing noise.
When Stu was able to go on he said, "And Sue. Sue Stern. She was still inside when it went off."
"That... just doesn't seem possible, does it?" Fran said. She felt stunned, numbed, bewildered.
"It's true."
"Who else?"
"Chad Norris," he said, and Fran made that harsh sighing noise again. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye; she brushed it away almost absently.
"Those were the only three from inside. It's like a miracle. Brad says there must have been eight, nine sticks of dy***ite hooked up in that closet. And Nick, he almost... when I think he might have had his hands right on that shoebox..."
"Don't," she said. "There was no way to know."
"That doesn't help much," he said.
The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles - Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman's Wollensak tape recorder.
Fran nodded, and it hurt her neck. When she shifted her body, even a little, her entire back seemed to scream with pain.
Twenty had been wounded in the blast and one of them, Teddy Weizak of the Burial Committee, had no chance to recover. Two others were in critical condition. A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand.
"How badly am I hurt?" Fran asked him.
"Why, you have a whiplash and a sprained back and a broken foot," Stu said. "That's what George Richardson told me. The blast threw you all the way across the yard. You got the broken foot and the sprained back when the couch landed on you."
"Couch? "
"Don't you remember?"
"I remember something like a coffin... a padded coffin..."
"That was the couch. I yanked it off you myself. I was raving and... pretty hysterical, I guess. Larry came over to help me and I punched him in the mouth. That's how bad off I was." She touched his cheek and he put his hand over hers. "I thought you had to be dead. I remember thinking that I didn't know what I'd do if you were. Go crazy, I guess."
"I love you," she said.
He hugged her - gently, because of her back - and they remained that way for some time.
"Harold?" she said at last.
"And Nadine Cross," he agreed. "They hurt us. They hurt us bad. But they didn't do anywhere near the damage they wanted to do. And if we catch him before they get too far west..." He held his hands, which were scratched and scabbed over, out in front of him and closed them with a sudden snap that made the joints pop. The hamstrings stood out on the insides of his wrists. A sudden cold grin surfaced on his face that made Fran want to shudder. It was too familiar.
"Don't smile like that," she said. "Ever."
The smile faded. "People have been scouring the hills for them since daybreak," he went on, no longer smiling. "I don't think they'll find them. I told them not to go further than fifty miles west of Boulder no matter what, and I imagine Harold was smart enough to get them further than that. But we know how they did it. They had the explosive hooked up to a walkie-talkie - "
Fran gasped, and Stu looked at her with concern.
"What's wrong, babe? Is it your back?"
"No." She was suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything. Speaking slowly, she told him about the snips of wire and the walkie-talkie box under the air-hockey table. "If we'd searched the whole house instead of just taking his damn b-book, we might have found the bomb," she said, and her voice began to choke and break. "N-Nick and Sue would be a-a-alive and - "
He held her. "Is that why Larry seems so down this morning? I thought it was because I punched him. Frannie, how could you know, huh? How could you possibly know?"