'But that's a holiday compared to what they have to say about the heating expenses in the winter.' She rolled her eyes. 'Oil is so dear. It's the fault of those Arabs ... and now look what they are up to  hiring religious hitmen to try and kill writers.' 'It does seem a little harsh,' Sam said, and for some reason he found himself thinking of the poster of the tall man again  the one with the odd star pinned to his ID case, the one whose shadow was falling so ominously over the upturned faces of the children. Falling over them like a stain. 'And of course, I've been fussing in the Children's Library. I lose all track of time when I'm in there.' 'That's an interesting place,' Sam said. He meant to go on, to ask her about the posters, but Ms Lortz forestalled him. It was clear to Sam exactly who was in charge of this peculiar little sidetrip in an otherwise ordinary day. 'You bet it is! Now, you just give me one minute.' She reached up and put her hands on his shoulders  she had to stand on tiptoe to do it  and for one moment Sam had the absurd idea that she meant to kiss him. Instead she pressed him down onto a wooden bench which ran along the far side of the sevenday bookshelf. 'I know right where to find the books you need, Sam. I don't even have to check the card catalogue.' 'I could get them myself  ' 'I'm sure,' she said, 'but they're in the Special Reference section, and I don't like to let people in there if I can help it. I'm very bossy about that, but I always know where to put my hand right on the things I need ... back there, anyway. People are so messy, they have so little regard for order, you know. Children are the worst, but even adults get up to didos if you let them. Don't worry about a thing. I'll be back in two shakes.' Sam had no intention of protesting further, but he wouldn't have had time even if he had wanted to. She was gone. He sat on the bench, once more feeling like a fourthgrader ... like a fourthgrader who had done something wrong this time, who had gotten up to didos and so couldn't go out and play with the other children at recess. He could hear Ms Lortz moving about in the room behind the checkout desk, and he looked around thoughtfully. There was nothing to see except books there was not even one old pensioner reading the paper or leafing through a magazine. It seemed odd. He wouldn't have expected a smalltown library like this to be doing a booming business on a weekday afternoon, but no one at all? Well, there was Mr Peckham, he thought, but he finished the paper and went home. Dreadfully thin paper on Friday, you know. Thin dust, too. And then he realized he only had the word of Ms Lortz that a Mr Peckham had ever been here at all. True enough  but why would she lie? He didn't know, and doubted very much that she had, but the fact that he was questioning the honesty of a sweetfaced woman he had just met highlighted the central puzzling fact of this meeting he didn't like her. Sweet face or not, he didn't like her one bit. It's the posters. You were prepared not to like ANYBODY that would put up posters like that in a children's reading room. But it doesn't matter, because a sidetrip is all it is. Get the books and get out. He shifted on the bench, looked up, and saw a motto on the wall If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books. Ralph Waldo Emerson Sam didn't care much for that little homily, either. He didn't know exactly why . . . except that maybe he thought a man, even a bookworm, might be expected to treat his family a little better than his reading matter. The motto, painted in gold leaf on a length of varnished oak, glared down at him nevertheless, seeming to suggest he better think again. Before he could, Ms Lortz returned, lifting a gate in the checkout desk, stepping through it, and lowering it neatly behind her again. 'I think I've got what you need,' she said cheerfuly. 'I hope you'll agree.' She handed him two books. One was The Speaker's Companion, edited by Kent Adelmen, and the other was Best Loved Poems of the American People. The contents of this latter book, according to the jacket (which was, in its turn, protected by a tough plastic overjacket), had not been edited, exactly, but selected by one Hazel Felleman. 'Poems of life!' the jacket promised. 'Poems of home and mother! Poems of laughter and whimsey! The poems most frequently asked for by the readers of the New York Times Book Review!' It further advised that Hazel Felleman 'has been able to keep her finger on the poetry pulse of the American people.' Sam looked at her with some doubt, and she read his mind effortlessly. 'Yes, I know, they look oldfashioned,' she said. 'Especially nowadays, when selfhelp books are all the rage. I imagine if you went to one of the chain bookstores in the Cedar Rapids mall, you could find a dozen books designed to help the beginning public speaker. But none of them would be as good as these, Sam. I really believe these are the best helps there are for men and women who are new to the art of public speaking.' 'Amateurs, in other words,' Sam said, grinning. 'Well, yes. Take Best Loved Poems, for instance. The second section of the book  it begins on page sixtyfive, if memory serves  is called "Inspiration". You can almost surely find something there which will make a suitable climax to your little talk, Sam. And you're apt to find that your listeners will remember a wellchosen verse even if they forget everything else. Especially if they're a little' 'Drunk,' he said. 'Tight was the word I would have used,' she said with gentle reproof, 'although I suppose you know them better than I do.' But the gaze she shot at him suggested that she was only saying this because she was polite. She held up The Speaker's Companion. The jacket was a cartoonist's drawing of a buntingdraped hall. Small groups of men in oldfashioned evening dress were seated at tables with drinks in front of them. They were all yucking it up. The man behind the podium  also in evening dress and clearly the afterdinner speaker  was grinning triumphantly down at them. It was clear he was a roaring success. 'There's a section at the beginning on the theory of afterdinner speeches,' said Ms Lortz, 'but since you don't strike me as the sort of man who wants to make a career out of this  ' 'You've got that right,' Sam agreed fervently. ' I suggest you go directly to the middle section, which is called "Lively Speaking." There you will find jokes and stories divided into three categories "Easing Them In," "Softening Them Up," and "Finishing Them Off." Sounds like a manual for gigolos, Sam thought but did not say. She read his mind again. 'A little suggestive, I suppose  but these books were published in a simpler, more innocent time. The late thirties, to be exact.' 'Much more innocent, right,' Sam said, thinking of deserted dustbowl farms, little girls in floursack dresses, and rusty, throwntogether Hoovervilles surrounded by police wielding truncheons. 'But both books still work,' she said, tapping them for emphasis, 'and that's the important thing in business, isn't it, Sam? Results?' 'Yes ... I guess it is.' He looked at her thoughtfully, and Ms Lortz raised her eyebrows  a trifle defensively, perhaps. 'A penny for your thoughts,' she said. 'I was thinking that this has been a fairly rare occurrence in my adult life,' he said. 'Not unheardof, nothing like that, but rare. I came in here to get a couple of books to liven up my speech, and you seem to have given me exactly what I came for. How often does something like that happen in a world where you usually can't even get a couple of good lambchops at the grocery store when you've got your face fixed for them?' She smiled. It appeared to be a smile of genuine pleasure . . . except Sam noticed once again that her eyes did not smile. He didn't think they had changed expression since he had first come upon her  or she upon him  in the Children's Library. They just went on watching. 'I think I've just been paid a compliment!' 'Yes, ma'am. You have.' 'I thank you, Sam. I thank you very kindly. They say flattery will get you everywhere, but I'm afraid I'm still going to have to ask you for two dollars.' 'You are?' 'That's the charge for issuing an adult library card,' she said, 'but it's good for three years, and renewal is only fifty cents. Now, is that a deal, or what?' 'It sounds fine to me.' 'Then step right this way,' she said, and Sam followed her to the checkout desk. 3 She gave him a card to fill out  on it he wrote his name, address, telephone numbers, and place of business. 'I see you live on Kelton Avenue. Nice!' 'Well, I like it.' 'The houses are lovely and big  you should be married.' He started a little. 'How did you know I wasn't married?' 'The same way you knew I wasn't,' she said. Her smile had become a trifle sly, a trifle catlike. 'Nothing on the third left.' 'Oh,' he said lamely, and smiled. He didn't think it was his usual sparkly smile, and his cheeks felt warm. 'Two dollars, please.' He gave her two singles. She went over to a small desk where an aged, skeletal typewriter stood, and typed briefly on a brightorange card. She brought it back to the checkout desk, signed her name at the bottom with a flourish, and then pushed it across to him. 'Check and make sure all the information's correct, please.' Sam did so. 'It's all fine.' Her first name, he noted, was Ardelia. A pretty name, and rather unusual. She took his new library card back  the first one he'd owned since college, now that he thought about it, and he had used that one precious little  and placed it under the microfilm recorder beside a card she took from the pocket of each book. 'You can only keep these out for a week, because they're from Special Reference. That's a category I invented myself for books which are in great demand.' 'Helps for the beginning speaker are in great demand?' 'Those, and books on things like plumbing repair, simple magic tricks, social etiquette ... you'd be surprised what books people call for in a pinch. But I know.' 'I'll bet you do.' 'I've been in the business a long, long time, Sam. And they're not renewable, so be sure to get them back by April sixth.' She raised her head, and the light caught in her eyes. Sam almost dismissed what he saw there as a twinkle . . . but that wasn't what it was. It was a shine. A flat, hard shine. For just a moment Ardelia Lortz looked as if she had a nickel in each eye. 'Or?' he asked, and his smile suddenly didn't feel like a smile  it felt like a mask. 'Or else I'll have to send the Library Policeman after you,' she said. 4 For a moment their gazes locked, and Sam thought he saw the real Ardelia Lortz, and there was nothing charming or soft or spinsterlibrarian about that woman at all. This woman might actually be dangerous, he thought, and then dismissed it, a little embarrassed. The gloomy day  and perhaps the pressure of the impending speech  was getting to him. She's about as dangerous as a canned peach . . . and It isn't the gloomy day or the Rotarians tonight, either. It's those goddam posters. He had The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People under his arm and they were almost to the door before he realized she was showing him out. He planted his feet firmly and stopped. She looked at him, surprised. 'Can I ask you something, Ms Lortz?' 'Of course, Sam. That's what I'm here for  to answer questions.' 'It's about the Children's Library,' he said, 'and the posters. Some of them surprised me. Shocked me, almost.' He expected that to come out sounding like something a Baptist preacher might say about an issue of Playboy glimpsed beneath the other magazines on a parishioner's coffee table, but it didn't come out that way at all. Because, he thought, it's not just a conventional sentiment. I really was shocked. No almost about it. 'Posters?' she asked, frowning, and then her brow cleared. She laughed. 'Oh! You must mean the Library Policeman ... and Simple Simon, of course.' 'Simple Simon?' 'You know the poster that says NEVER TAKE RIDES FROM STRANGERS? That's what the kids call the little boy in the picture. The one who is yelling. They call him Simple Simon  I suppose they feel contempt for him because he did such a foolish thing. I think that's very healthy, don't you?' 'He's not yelling,' Sam said slowly. 'He's screaming.' She shrugged. 'Yelling, screaming, what's the difference? We don't hear much of either in here. The children are very good  very respectful.' 'I'll bet,' Sam said. They were back in the foyer again now, and he glanced at the sign on the easel, the sign which didn't say SILENCE IS GOLDEN or PLEASE TRY TO BE QUIET but just offered that one inarguable imperative SILENCE! 'Besides  it's all a matter of interpretation, isn't it?' 'I suppose,' Sam said. He felt that he was being maneuvered  and very efficiently  into a place where he would not have a moral leg to stand on, and the field of dialectic would belong to Ardelia Lortz. She gave him the impression that she was used to doing this, and that made him feel stubborn. 'But they struck me as extreme, those posters.' 'Did they?' she asked politely. They had halted by the outer door now. 'Yes. Scary.' He gathered himself and said what he really believed. 'Not appropriate to a place where small children gather.' He found he still did not sound prissy or selfrighteous, at least to himself, and this was a relief. She was smiling, and the smile irritated him. 'You're not the first person who ever expressed that opinion, Sam. Childless adults aren't frequent visitors to the Children's Library, but they do come in from time to time  uncles, aunts, some single mother's boyfriend who got stuck with pickup duty . . . or people like you, Sam, who are looking for me.' People in a pinch, her cool bluegray eyes said. People who come for help and then, once they HAVE been helped, stay to criticize the way we run things here at the Junction City Public Library. The way I run things at the Junction City Public Library. 'I guess you think I was wrong to put my two cents in,' Sam said goodnaturedly. He didn't feel goodnatured, all of a sudden he didn't feel goodnatured at all, but it was another trick of the trade, one he now wrapped around himself like a protective cloak. 'Not at all. It's just that you don't understand. We had a poll last summer, Sam it was part of the annual Summer Reading Program. We call our program Junction City's Summer Sizzlers, and each child gets one vote for every book he or she read. It's one of the strategies we've developed over the years to encourage children to read. That is one of our most important responsibilities, you see.' We know what we're doing, her steady gaze told him. And I'm being very polite, aren't I? Considering that you, who have never been here in your life before, have presumed to poke your head in once and start shotgunning criticisms. Sam began to feel very much in the wrong. That dialectical battlefield did not belong to the Lortz woman yet  at least not entirely  but he recognized the fact that he was in retreat. 'According to the poll, last summer's favorite movie among the children was A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5. Their favorite rock group is called Guns n Roses  the runnerup was something named Ozzy Osbourne, who, I understand, has a reputation for biting the heads off live animals during his concerts. Their favorite novel was a paperback original called Swan Song. It's a horror novel by a man named Robert McCammon. We can't keep it in stock, Sam. They read each new copy to rags in weeks. I had a copy put in Vinabind, but of course it was stolen. By one of the bad children.' Her lips pursed in a thin line. 'Runnerup was a horror novel about incest and infanticide called Flowers in the Attic. That one was the champ for five years running. Several of them even mentioned Peyton Place!' She looked at him sternly. 'I myself have never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I have never heard an Ozzy Osbourne record and have no desire to do so, nor to read a novel by Robert McCammon, Stephen King, or V. C. Andrews. Do you see what I'm getting at, Sam?' 'I suppose. You're saying it wouldn't be fair to . He needed a word, groped for it, and found it. ' . . . to usurp the children's tastes.' She smiled radiantly  everything but the eyes, which seemed to have nickels in them again. 'That's part of it, but that's not all of it. The posters in the Children's Library both the nice, uncontroversial ones and the ones which put you off  came to us from the Iowa Library Association. The ILA is a member of the Midwest Library Association, and that is, in turn, a member of The National Library Association, which gets the majority of its funding from tax money. From John Q. Public which is to say from me. And you.' Sam shifted from one foot to the other. He didn't want to spend the afternoon listening to a lecture on How Your Library Works for You, but hadn't he invited it? He supposed so. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was liking Ardelia Lortz less and less all the time. 'The Iowa Library Association sends us a sheet every other month, with reproductions of about forty posters,' Ms Lortz continued relentlessly. 'We can pick any five free; extras cost three dollars each. I see you're getting restless, Sam, but you do deserve an explanation, and we are finally reaching the nub of the matter.' 'Me? I'm not restless,' Sam said restlessly. She smiled at him, revealing teeth too even to be anything but dentures. 'We have a Children's Library Committee,' she said. 'Who is on it? Why, children, of course! Nine of them. Four highschool students, three middleschool students, and two grammarschool students. Each child has to have an overall B average in his schoolwork to qualify. They pick some of the new books we order, they picked the new drapes and tables when we redecorated last fall ... and, of course, they pick the posters. That is, as one of our younger Committeemen once put it, "the funnest part." Now do you understand?' 'Yes,' Sam said. 'The kids picked out Little Red Riding Hood, and Simple Simon, and the Library Policeman. They like them because they're scary.' 'Correct!' she beamed. Suddenly he'd had enough. It was something about the Library. Not the posters, not the librarian, exactly, but the Library itself. Suddenly the Library was like an aggravating, infuriating splinter jammed deep in one buttock. Whatever it was, it was ... enough. 'Ms Lortz, do you keep a videotape of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 in the Children's Library? Or a selection of albums by Guns n Roses and Ozzy Osbourne?' 'Sam, you miss the point,' she began patiently. 'What about Peyton Place? Do you keep a copy of that in the Children's Library just because some of the kids have read it?' Even as he was speaking, he thought, Does ANYBODY still read that old thing? 'No,' she said, and he saw that an illtempered flush was rising in her cheeks. This was not a woman who was used to having her judgments called into question. 'But we do keep stories about housebreaking, parental abuse, and burglary. I am speaking, of course, of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," "Hansel and Gretel", and "Jack and the Beanstalk." I expected a man such as yourself to be a little more understanding, Sam.' A man you helped out in a pinch is what you mean, Sam thought, but what the hell, lady  isn't that what the town pays you to do? Then he got hold of himself. He didn't know exactly what she meant by la man such as himself,' wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he did understand that this discussion was on the edge of getting out of hand  of becoming an argument. He had come in here to find a little tenderizer to sprinkle over his speech, not to get in a hassle about the Children's Library with the head librarian. 'I apologize if I've said anything to offend you,' he said, 'and I really ought to be going.' 'Yes,' she said. 'I think you ought.' Your apology is not accepted, her eyes telegraphed. It is not accepted at all. 'I suppose,' he said, 'that I'm a little nervous about my speaking debut. And I was up late last night working on this.' He smiled his old goodnatured Sam Peebles smile and hoisted the briefcase. She stood down  a little  but her eyes were still snapping. 'That's understandable. We are here to serve, and, of course, we're always interested in constructive criticism from the taxpayers.' She accented the word constructive ever so slightly, to let him know, he supposed, that his had been anything but. Now that it was over, he had an urge  almost a need  to make it all over, to smooth it down like the coverlet on a wellmade bed. And this was also part of the businessman's habit, he supposed . . . or the businessman's protective coloration. An odd thought occurred to him  that what he should really talk about tonight was his encounter with Ardelia Lortz. It said more about the smalltown heart and spirit than his whole written speech. Not all of it was flattering, but it surely wasn't dry. And it would offer a sound rarely heard during Fridaynight Rotary speeches the unmistakable ring of truth. 'Well, we got a little feisty there for a second or two,' he heard himself saying, and saw his hand go out. 'I expect I overstepped my bounds. I hope there are no hard feelings.' She touched his hand. It was a brief, token touch. Cool, smooth flesh. Unpleasant, somehow. Like shaking hands with an umbrella stand. 'None at all,' she said, but her eyes continued to tell a different story. 'Well then . . . I'll be getting along.' 'Yes. Remember  one week on those, Sam.' She lifted a finger. Pointed a wellmanicured nail at the books he was holding. And smiled. Sam found something extremely disturbing about that smile, but he could not for the life of him have said exactly what it was. 'I wouldn't want to have to send the Library Cop after you.' 'No,' Sam agreed. 'I wouldn't want that, either.' 'That's right,' said Ardelia Lortz, still smiling. 'You wouldn't.' 5 Halfway down the walk, the face of that screaming child (Simple Simon, the kids call him Simple Simon I think that's very healthy, don't you) recurred to him, and with it came a thought  one simple enough and practical enough to stop him in his tracks. It was this given a chance to pick such a poster, a jury of kids might very well do so ... but would any Library Association, whether from Iowa, the Midwest, or the country as a whole, actually send one out? Sam Peebles thought of the pleading hands plastered against the obdurate, imprisoning glass, the screaming, agonized mouth, and suddenly found that more than difficult to believe. He found it impossible to believe. And Peyton Place. What about that? He guessed that most of the adults who used the Library had forgotten about it. Did he really believe that some of their children  the ones young enough to use the Children's Library  had rediscovered that old relic? I don't believe that one, either. He had no wish to incur a second dose of Ardelia Lortz's anger  the first had been enough, and he'd had a feeling her dial hadn't been turned up to anything near full volume  but these thoughts were strong enough to cause him to turn around. She was gone. The library doors stood shut, a vertical slot of mouth in that brooding granite face. Sam stood where he was a moment longer, then hurried down to where his car was parked at the curb. CHAPTER 3 Sam's Speech It was a rousing success. He began with his own adaptations of two anecdotes from the 'Easing Them In' section of The Speaker's Companion  one was about a farmer who tried to wholesale his own produce and the other was about selling frozen dinners to Eskimos  and used a third in the middle (which really was pretty arid). He found another good one in the subsection titled 'Finishing Them Off,' started to pencil it in, then remembered Ardelia Lortz and Best Loved Poems of the American People. You're apt to find your listeners will remember a wellchosen verse even if they forget everything else, she had said, and Sam found a good short poem in the 'Inspiration' section, just as she had told him he might. He looked down on the upturned faces of his fellow Rotarians and said 'I've tried to give you some of the reasons why I live and work in a small town like Junction City, and I hope they make at least some sense. If they don't, I'm in a lot of trouble.' A rumble of goodnatured laughter (and a whiff of mixed Scotch and bourbon) greeted this. Sam was sweating freely, but he actually felt pretty good, and he had begun to believe he was going to get out of this unscathed. The microphone had produced feedback whine only once, no one had walked out, no one had thrown food, and there had only been a few catcalls  goodnatured ones, at that. 'I think a poet named Spencer Michael Free summed up the things I've been trying to say better than I ever could. You see, almost everything we have to sell in our smalltown businesses can be sold cheaper in bigcity shopping centers and suburban malls. Those places like to boast that you can get just about all the goods and services you'd ever need right there, and park for free in the bargain. And I guess they're almost right. But there is still one thing the smalltown business has to offer that the malls and shopping centers don't, and that's the thing Mr Free talks about in his poem. It isn't a very long one, but it says a lot. It goes like this. ''Tis the human touch in this world that counts. The touch of your hand and mine, Which means far more to the fainting heart Than shelter and bread and wine; For shelter is gone when the night is o'er, And bread lasts only a day, But the touch of the hand and the sound of a voice Sing on in the soul always.' Sam looked up at them from his text, and for the second time that day was surprised to find that he meant every word he had just said. He found that his heart was suddenly full of happiness and simple gratitude. It was good just to find out you still had a heart, that the ordinary routine of ordinary days hadn't worn it away, but it was even better to find it could still speak through your mouth. 'We smalltown businessmen and businesswomen offer that human touch. On the one hand, it isn't much ... but on the other, it's just about everything. I know that it keeps me coming back for more. I want to wish our originally scheduled speaker, The Amazing Joe, a speedy recovery; I want to thank Craig Jones for asking me to sub for him; and I want to thank all of you for listening so patiently to my boring little talk. So ... thanks very much.' The applause started even before he finished his last sentence; it swelled while he gathered up the few pages of text which Naomi had typed and which he had spent the afternoon amending; it rose to a crescendo as he sat down, bemused by the reaction. Well, it's just the booze, he told himself. They would have applauded you if you'd told them about how you managed to quit smoking after you found Jesus at a Tupperware party. Then they started to rise to their feet and he thought he must have spoken too long if they were that anxious to get out. But they went on applauding, and then he saw Craig Jones was flapping his hands at him. After a moment Sam understood. Craig wanted him to stand up and take a bow. He twirled a forefinger around his ear You're nuts! Craig shook his head emphatically and began elevating his hands so energetically that he looked like a revival preacher encouraging the faithful to sing louder. So Sam stood up and was amazed when they actually cheered him. After a few moments, Craig approached the lectern. The cheers at last died down when he tapped the microphone a few times, producing a sound like a giant fist wrapped in cotton knocking on a coffin. 'I think we'll all agree,' he said, 'that Sam's speech more than made up for the price of the rubber chicken.' This brought another hearty burst of applause. Craig turned toward Sam and said, 'If I'd known you had that in you, Sammy, I would have booked you in the first place!' This produced more clapping and whistling. Before it died out, Craig Jones had seized Sam's hand and began pumping it briskly up and down. 'That was great!' Craig said. 'Where'd you copy it from, Sam?' 'I didn't,' Sam said. His cheeks felt warm, and although he'd only had one gin and tonic  a weak one  before getting up to speak, he felt a little drunk. 'It's mine. I got a couple of books from the Library, and they helped.' Other Rotarians were crowding around now; Sam's hand was shaken again and again. He started to feel like the town pump during a summer drought. 'Great!' someone shouted in his ear. Sam turned toward the voice and saw it belonged to Frank Stephens, who had filled in when the truckingunion official was indicted for malfeasance. 'We shoulda had it on tape, we coulda sold it to the goddam JayCees! Damn, that was a good talk, Sam!' 'Oughtta take it on the road!' Rudy Pearlman said. His round face was red and sweating. 'I dam near cried! Honest to God! Where'd you find that pome?' 'At the Library,' Sam said. He still felt dazed ... but his relief at having actually finished in one piece was being supplanted by a kind of cautious delight. He thought he would have to give Naomi a bonus. 'It was in a book called ' But before he could tell Rudy what the book had been called, Bruce Engalls had grasped him by the elbow and was guiding him toward the bar. 'Best damned speech I've heard at this foolish club in two years!' Bruce was exclaiming. 'Maybe five! Who needs a goddam acrobat, anyway? Let me buy you a drink, Sam. Hell, let me buy you two!' 2 Before he was able to get away, Sam consumed a total of six drinks, all of them free, and ended his triumphant evening by puking on his own WELCOME mat shortly after Craig Jones let him out in front of his house on Kelton Avenue. When his stomach vaporlocked, Sam had been trying to get his housekey in the lock of his front door  it was a job, because there appeared to be three locks and four keys  and there was just no time to get rid of it in the bushes at the side of the stoop. So when he finally succeeded in getting the door open, he simply picked the WELCOME mat up (carefully, holding it by the sides so the gunk would pool in the middle) and tossed it over the side. He got a cup of coffee to stay down, but the phone rang twice while he was drinking it. More congratulations. The second call was from Elmer Baskin, who hadn't even been there. He felt a little like Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, but it was hard to enjoy the feeling while his stomach was still treading water and his head was beginning to punish him for his overindulgence. Sam put on the answering machine in the living room to field any further calls, then went upstairs to his bedroom, unplugged the phone by the bed, took two aspirin, stripped, and lay down. Consciousness began to fade fast  he was tired as well as bombed  but before sleep took him, he had time to think I owe most of it to Naomi ... and to that unpleasant woman at the Library. Horst. Borscht. Whatever her name was. Maybe I ought to give her a bonus, too. He heard the telephone start to ring downstairs, and then the answering machine cut in. Good boy, Sam thought sleepily. Do your duty  I mean, after all, isn't that what I pay you to do? Then he was in blackness, and knew no more until ten o'clock Saturday morning. 3 He returned to the land of the living with a sour stomach and a slight headache, but it could have been a lot worse. He was sorry about the WELCOME mat, but glad he'd offloaded at least some of the booze before it could swell his head any worse than it already was. He stood in the shower for ten minutes, making only token washing motions, then dried off, dressed, and went downstairs with a towel draped over his head.


The red message light on the telephone answering machine was blinking. The tape only rewound a short way when he pushed the PLAY MESSAGES button; apparently the call he'd heard just as he was drifting off had been the last. Beep! 'Hello, Sam.' Sam paused in the act of removing the towel, frowning. It was a woman's voice, and he knew it. Whose? 'I heard your speech was a great success. I'm so glad for you.' It was the Lortz woman, he realized. Now how did she get my number? But that was what the telephone book was for, of course ... and he had written it on his librarycard application as well, hadn't he? Yes. For no reason he could rightly tell, a small shiver shook its way up his back. 'Be sure to get your borrowed books back by the sixth of April,' she continued, and then, archly 'Remember the Library Policeman.' There was the click of the connection being broken. On Sam's answering machine, the ALL MESSAGES PLAYED lamp lit Up. 'You're a bit of a bitch, aren't you, lady?' Sam said to the empty house, and then went into the kitchen to make himself some toast. 4 When Naomi came in at ten o'clock on the Friday morning a week after Sam's triumphant debut as an afterdinner speaker, Sam handed her a long white envelope with her name written on the front. 'What's this?' Naomi asked suspiciously, taking off her cloak. It was raining hard outside, a driving, dismal earlyspring rain. 'Open it and see.' She did. It was a thankyou card. Taped inside was a portrait of Andrew Jackson. 'Twenty dollars!' She looked at him more suspiciously than ever. 'Why?' 'Because you saved my bacon when you sent me to the Library,' Sam said. 'The speech went over very well, Naomi. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to say I was a big hit. I would have put in fifty, if I'd thought you would take it.' Now she understood, and was clearly pleased, but she tried to give the money back just the same. 'I'm really glad it worked, Sam, but I can't take th  ' 'Yes you can,' he said, 'and you will. You'd take a commission if you worked for me as a salesperson, wouldn't you?' 'I don't, though. I could never sell anything. When I was in the Girl Scouts, my mother was the only person who ever bought cookies from me.' 'Naomi. My dear girl. No  don't start looking all nervous and cornered. I'm not going to make a pass at you. We went through all of that two years ago.' 'We certainly did.' Naomi agreed, but she still looked nervous and checked to make sure that she had a clear line of retreat to the door, should she need one. 'Do you realize I've sold two houses and written almost two hundred thousand dollars' worth of insurance since that damn speech? Most of it was common group coverage with a high topoff and a low commission rate, true, but it still adds up to the price of a new car. If you don't take that twenty, I'm going to feel like shit.' 'Sam, please!' she said, looking shocked. Naomi was a dedicated Baptist. She and her mother went to a little church in Proverbia which was almost as ramshackle as the house they lived in. He knew; he had been there once. But he was happy to see that she also looked pleased ... and a little more relaxed. In the summer of 1988, Sam had dated Naomi twice. On the second date, he made a pass. It was as well behaved as a pass can be and still remain a pass, but a pass it was. Much good it had done him; Naomi, it turned out, was a good enough pass deflector to play in the Denver Broncos' defensive backfield. It wasn't that she didn't like him, she explained; it was just that she had decided the two of them could never get along 'that way.' Sam, bewildered, had asked her why not. Naomi only shook her head. Some things are hard to explain, Sam, but that doesn't make them less true. It could never work. Believe me, it just couldn't. And that had been all he could get out of her. 'I'm sorry I said the sword, Naomi,' he told her now. He spoke humbly, although he doubted somehow that Naomi was even half as priggish as she liked to sound. 'What I mean to say is that if you don't take that twenty, I'll feel like cacapoopie.' She tucked the bill into her purse and then endeavored to look at him with an expression of dignified primness. She almost made it ... but the corners of her lips quivered slightly. 'There. Satisfied?' 'Short of giving you fifty,' he said. 'Would you take fifty, Omes?' 'No,' she said. 'And please don't call me Omes. You know I don't like it.' 'I'm sorry.' 'Apology accepted. Now why don't we just drop the subject?' 'Okay,' Sam said agreeably. 'I heard several people say your speech was good. Craig Jones just raved about it. Do you really think that's the reason you've done more business?' 'Does a bear  ' Sam began, and then retraced his steps. 'Yes. I do. Things work that way sometimes. It's funny, but it's true. The old sales graph has really spiked this week. It'll drop back, of course, but I don't think it'll drop back all the way. If the new folks like the way I do business  and I like to think they will  there'll be a carryover.' Sam leaned back in his chair, laced his hands together behind his neck, and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. 'When Craig Jones called up and put me on the spot, I was ready to shoot him. No joke, Naomi.' 'Yes,' she said. 'You looked like a man coming down with a bad case of poison ivy.' 'Did I?' He laughed. 'Yeah, I suppose so. It's funny how things work out sometimes  purest luck. If there is a God, it makes you wonder sometimes if He tightened all the screws in the big machine before He set it going.' He expected Naomi to scold him for his irreverence (it wouldn't be the first time), but she didn't take the gambit today. Instead she said, 'You're luckier than you know, if the books you got at the Library really did help You out. It usually doesn't open until five o'clock on Fridays. I meant to tell you that, but then I forgot.' 'Oh?' 'You must have found Mr Price catching up on his paperwork or something.' 'Price?' Sam asked. 'Don't you mean Mr Peckham? The newspaperreading janitor?' Naomi shook her head. 'The only Peckham I ever heard of around here was old Eddie Peckham, and he died years ago. I'm talking about Mr Price. The librarian.' She was looking at Sam as though he were the thickest man on earth ... or at least in Junction City, Iowa. 'Tall man? Thin? About fifty?' 'Nope,' Sam said. 'I got a lady named Lortz. Short, plump, somewhere around the age when women form lasting attachments to brightgreen polyester.' A rather strange mix of expressions crossed Naomi's face  surprise was followed by suspicion; suspicion was followed by a species of faintly exasperated amusement. That particular sequence of expressions almost always indicates the same thing someone is coming to realize that his or her leg is being shaken vigorously. Under more ordinary circumstances Sam might have wondered about that, but he had done a landoffice business all week long, and as a result he had a great deal of his own paperwork to catch up on. Half of his mind had already wandered off to examine it. 'Oh,' Naomi said and laughed. 'Miss Lortz, was it? That must have been fun.' 'She's peculiar, all right,' Sam said. 'You bet,' Naomi agreed. 'In fact she's absolutely' If she had finished what she had started to say she probably would have startled Sam Peebles a great deal, but luck  as he had just pointed out  plays an absurdly important part in human affairs, and luck now intervened. The telephone rang. It was Burt Iverson, the spiritual chief of Junction City's small legal tribe. He wanted to talk about a really huge insurance deal  the new medical center, compgroup coverage, still in the planning stages but you know how big this could be, Sam  and by the time Sam got back to Naomi, thoughts of Lortz had gone entirely out of his mind. He knew how big it could be, all right; it could land him behind the wheel of that MercedesBenz after all. And he really didn't like to think just how much of all this good fortune he might be able to trace back to that stupid little speech, if he really wanted to. Naomi did think her leg was being pulled; she knew perfectly well who Ardelia Lortz was, and thought Sam must, too. After all, the woman had been at the center of the nastiest piece of business to occur in Junction City in the last twenty years ... maybe since World War II, when the Moggins boy had come home from the Pacific all funny in the head and had killed his whole family before sticking the barrel of his service pistol in his right ear and taking care of himself as well. Ira Moggins had done that before Naomi's time; it did not occur to her that l'affaire Ardelia had occurred long before Sam had come to Junction City. At any rate, she had dismissed the whole thing from her mind and was trying to decide between Stouffer's lasagna and something from Lean Cuisine for supper by the time Sam put the telephone down. He dictated letters steadily until twelve o'clock, then asked Naomi if she would like to step down to McKenna's with him for a spot of lunch. Naomi declined, saying she had to get back to her mother, who had Failed Greatly over the course of the winter. No more was said about Ardelia Lortz. That day. CHAPTER 4 The Missing Books 1 Sam wasn't much of a breakfasteater through the week  a glass of orange juice and an oatbran muffin did him just fine  but on Saturday mornings (at least on Saturday mornings when he wasn't dealing with a Rotaryinspired hangover) he liked to rise a little late, stroll down to McKenna's on the square, and work his way slowly through an order of steak and eggs while he really read the paper instead of just scanning it between appointments. He followed this routine the next morning, the seventh of April. The previous day's rain was gone, and the sky was a pale, perfect blue  the very image of early spring. Sam took the long way home following his breakfast, pausing to check out whose tulips and crocuses were in good order and whose were a little late. He arrived back at his own house at ten minutes past ten. The PLAY MESSAGES lamp on his answering machine was lit. He pushed the button, got out a cigarette, and struck a match. 'Hello, Sam,' Ardelia Lortz's soft and utterly unmistakable voice said, and the match paused six inches shy of Sam's cigarette. 'I'm very disappointed in you. Your books are overdue.' 'Ah, shit!' Sam exclaimed. Something had been nagging at him all week long, the way a word you want will use the tip of your tongue for a trampoline, bouncing just out of reach. The books. The goddam books. The woman would undoubtedly regard him as exactly the sort of Philistine she wanted him to be  him with his gratuitous judgments of which posters belonged in the Children's Library and which ones didn't. The only real question was whether she had put her tonguelashing on the answering machine or was saving it until she saw him in person. He shook out the match and dropped it in the ashtray beside the telephone. 'I explained to you, I believe,' she was going on in her soft and just a little too reasonable voice, 'that The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People are from the Library's Special Reference section, and cannot be kept out for longer than one week. I expected better things of you, Sam. I really did.' Sam, to his great exasperation, found he was standing here in his own house with an unlit cigarette between his lips and a guilty flush climbing up his neck and beginning to overrun his cheeks. Once more he had been deposited firmly back in the fourth grade  this time sitting on a stool facing into the corner with a pointed duncecap perched firmly on his head. Speaking as one who is conferring a great favor, Ardelia Lortz went on 'I have decided to give you an extension, however; you have until Monday afternoon to return your borrowed books. Please help me avoid any unpleasantness.' There was a pause. 'Remember the Library Policeman, Sam.' 'That one's getting old, Ardeliababy,' Sam muttered, but he wasn't even speaking to the recording. She had hung up after mentioning the Library Policeman, and the machine switched itself quietly off. 2 Sam used a fresh match to light his smoke. He was still exhaling the first drag when a course of action popped into his mind. It might be a trifle cowardly, but it would close his accounts with Ms Lortz for good. And it also had a certain rough justice to it. He had given Naomi her just reward, and he would do the same for Ardelia. He sat down at the desk in his study, where he had composed the famous speech, and drew his notepad to him. Below the heading (From the Desk of SAMUEL PEEBLES), he scrawled the following note Dear Ms Lortz, I apologize for being late returning your books. This is a sincere apology, because the books were extremely helpful in preparing my speech. Please accept this money in payment of the fine on the tardy books. I want you to keep the rest as a token of my thanks. Sincerely yours, Sam Peebles Sam read the note over while he fished a paper clip out of his desk drawer. He considered changing '. . . returning your books' to '. . . returning the library's books' and decided to leave it as it was. Ardelia Lortz had impressed him very much as the sort of woman who subscribed to the philosophy of l'etat c'est moi, even if l'etat in this case was just the local library. He removed a twentydollar bill from his wallet and used the clip to attach it to the note. He hesitated a moment longer, drumming his fingers restlessly on the edge of the desk. She's going to look at this as a bribe. She'll probably be offended and mad as hell. That might be true, but Sam didn't care. He knew what was behind the Lortz woman's arch little call this morning  behind both arch little calls, probably. He had pulled her chain a little too hard about the posters in the Children's Library, and she was getting back at him  or trying to. But this wasn't the fourth grade, he wasn't a scurrying, terrified little kid (not anymore, at least), and he wasn't going to be intimidated. Not by the illtempered sign in the library foyer, nor by the librarian's you'reonewholedaylateyoubadboyyou nagging. 'Fuck it!' he said out loud. 'If you don't want the goddam money, stick it in the Library Defense Fund, or something.' He laid the note with the twenty paperclipped to it on the desk. He had no intention of presenting it in person so she could get shirty on him. He would bind the two volumes together with a couple of rubber bands after laying the note and the money into one of them so it stuck out. Then he would simply dump the whole shebang into the bookdrop. He had spent six years in Junction City without making Ardelia Lortz's acquaintance; with any luck, it would be six years before he saw her again. Now all he had to do was find the books. They were not on his study desk, that was for sure. Sam went out into the dining room and looked on the table. It was where he usually stacked things which needed to be returned. There were two VHS tapes ready to go back to Bruce's Video Stop, an envelope with Paperboy written across the front, two folders with insurance policies in them ... but no Speaker's Companion. No Best Loved Poems of the American People, either. 'Crap,' Sam said, and scratched his head. 'Where the hell ' He went out into the kitchen. Nothing on the kitchen table but the morning paper; he'd put it down there when he came in. He tossed it absently in the cardboard carton by the woodstove as he checked the counter. Nothing on the counter but the box from which he had taken last night's frozen dinner. He went slowly upstairs to check the rooms on the second story, but he was already starting to get a very bad feeling. 3 By three o'clock that afternoon, the bad feeling was a lot worse. Sam Peebles was, in fact, fuming. After going through the house twice from top to bottom (on the second pass he even checked the cellar), he had gone down to the office, even though he was pretty sure he had brought the two books home with him when he left work late last Monday afternoon. Sure enough, he had found nothing there. And here he was, most of a beautiful spring Saturday shot in a fruitless search for two library books, no further ahead. He kept thinking of her arch tone  remember the Library Policeman, Sam and how happy she would feel if she knew just how far under his skin she had gotten. If there really were Library Police, Sam had no doubt at all that the woman would be happy to sic one on him. The more he thought about it, the madder he got. He went back into his study. His note to Ardelia Lortz, with the twenty attached, stared at him blandly from the desk. 'Balls!' he cried, and was almost off on another whirlwind search of the house before he caught himself and stopped. That would accomplish nothing. Suddenly he heard the voice of his longdead mother. It was soft and sweetly reasonable. When you can't find a thing. Samuel, tearing around and looking for it usually does no good. Sit down and think things over instead. Use your head and save your feet. It had been good advice when he was ten; he guessed it was just as good now that he was forty. Sam sat down behind his desk, closed his eyes, and set out to trace the progress of those goddamned library books from the moment Ms Lortz had handed them to him until ... whenever. From the library he had taken them back to the office, stopping at Sam's House of Pizza on the way for a pepperonianddoublemushroom pie, which he had eaten at his desk while he looked through The Speaker's Companion for two things good jokes and how to use them. He remembered how careful he'd been not to get even the smallest dollop of pizza sauce on the book  which was sort of ironic, considering the fact that he couldn't find either of them now. He had spent most of the afternoon on the speech, working in the jokes, then rewriting the whole last part so the poem would fit better. When he went home late Friday afternoon, he'd taken the finished speech but not the books. He was sure of that. Craig Jones had picked him up when it was time for the Rotary Club dinner, and Craig had dropped him off later on  just in time for Sam to baptize the WELCOME mat. Saturday morning had been spent nursing his minor but annoying hangover; for the rest of the weekend he had just stayed around the house, reading, watching TV, and  let's face it, gang  basking in his triumph. He hadn't gone near the office all weekend. He was sure of it. Okay, he thought. Here comes the hard part. Now concentrate. But he didn't need to concentrate all that hard after all, he discovered. He had started out of the office around quarter to five on Monday afternoon, and then the phone had rung, calling him back. It had been Stu Youngman, wanting him to write a large homeowner's policy. That had been the start of this week's shower of bucks. While he was talking with Stu, his eye had happened on the two library books, still sitting on the corner of his desk. When he left the second time, he'd had his briefcase in one hand and the books in the other. He was positive of that much. He had intended to return them to the Library that evening, but then Frank Stephens had called, wanting him to come out to dinner with him and his wife and their niece, who was visiting from Omaha (when you were a bachelor in a small town, Sam had discovered, even your casual acquaintances became relentless matchmakers). They had gone to Brady's Ribs, had returned late around eleven, late for a weeknight  and by the time he got home again, he had forgotten all about the library books. After that, he lost sight of them completely. He hadn't thought of returning them  his unexpectedly brisk business had taken up most of his thinking time until the Lortz woman's call. Okay  I probably haven't moved them since then. They must be right where I left them when I got home late Monday afternoon. For a moment he felt a burst of hope  maybe they were still in the car! Then, just as he was getting up to check, he remembered how he'd shifted his briefcase to the hand holding the books when he'd arrived home on Monday. He'd done that so he could get his housekey out of his right front pocket. He hadn't left them in the car at all. So what did you do when you got in? He saw himself unlocking the kitchen door, stepping in, putting his briefcase on a kitchen chair, turning with the books in his hand 'Oh no,' Sam muttered. The bad feeling returned in a rush. There was a fairsized cardboard carton sitting on the shelf by his little kitchen woodstove, the kind of carton you could pick up at the liquor store. It had been there for a couple of years now. People sometimes packed their smaller belongings into such cartons when they were moving house, but the cartons also made great holdalls. Sam used the one by the stove for newspaper storage. He put each day's paper into the box after he had finished reading it; he had tossed today's paper in only a short time before. And, once every month or so 'Dirty Dave!' Sam muttered. He got up from behind his desk and hurried into the kitchen. 4 The box, with Johnnie Walker's monocled ain'tIhip image on the side, was almost empty. Sam thumbed through the thin sheaf of newspapers, knowing he would find nothing but looking anyway, the way people do when they are so exasperated they halfbelieve that just wanting a thing badly enough will make it be there. He found the Saturday Gazette  the one he had so recently disposed of  and the Friday paper. No books between or beneath them, of course. Sam stood there for a moment, thinking black thoughts, then went to the telephone to call Mary Vasser, who cleaned house for him every Thursday morning. 'Hello?' a faintly worried voice answered. 'Hi, Mary. This is Sam Peebles.' 'Sam?' The worry deepened. 'Is something wrong?' Yes! By Monday afternoon the bitch who runs the local Library is going to be after me! Probably with a cross and a number of very long nails! But of course he couldn't say anything like that, not to Mary; she was one of those unfortunate human beings who have been born under a bad sign and live in their own dark cloud of doomish premonition. The Mary Vassers of the world believe that there are a great many large black safes dangling three stories above a great many sidewalks, held by fraying cables, waiting for destiny to carry the doomfated into the drop zone. If not a safe, then a drunk driver; if not a drunk driver, a tidal wave (in Iowa? yes, in Iowa); if not a tidal wave, a meteorite. Mary Vasser was one of those afflicted folks who always want to know if something is wrong when you call them on the phone. 'Nothing,' Sam said. 'Nothing wrong at all. I just wondered if you saw Dave on Thursday.' The question wasn't much more than a formality; the papers, after all, were gone, and Dirty Dave was the only Newspaper Fairy in Junction City. 'Yes,' Mary agreed. Sam's hearty assurance that nothing was wrong seemed to have put her wind up even higher. Now barely concealed terror positively vibrated in her voice. 'He came to get the papers. Was I wrong to let him? He's been coming for years, and I thought  ' 'Not at all,' Sam said with insane cheerfulness. 'I just saw they were gone and thought I'd check that  ' 'You never checked before.' Her voice caught. 'Is he all right? Has something happened to Dave?' 'No,' Sam said. 'I mean, I don't know. I just  ' An idea flashed into his mind. 'The coupons!' he cried wildly. 'I forgot to clip the coupons on Thursday, so  ' 'Oh!' she said. 'You can have mine, if you want.' 'No, I couldn't do th  ' 'I'll bring them next Thursday,' she overrode him. 'I have thousands.' So many I'll never get a chance to use them all, her voice implied. After all, somewhere out there a safe is waiting for me to walk under it, or a tree is waiting to fall over in a windstorm and squash me, or in some North Dakota motel a hairdryer is waiting to fall off the shelf and into the bathtub. I'm living on borrowed time, so what do I need a bunch of fucking Folger's Crystals coupons for? 'All right,' Sam said. 'That would be great. Thanks, Mary, you're a peach.' 'And you're sure nothing else is wrong?' 'Not a thing,' Sam replied, speaking more heartily than ever. To himself he sounded like a lunatic topsergeant urging his few remaining men to mount a final fruitless frontal assault on a fortified machinegun nest. Come on, men, I think they might be asleep! 'All right,' Mary said doubtfully, and Sam was finally permitted to escape. He sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and regarded the almost empty Johnnie Walker box with a bitter eye. Dirty Dave had come to collect the newspapers, as he did during the first week of every month, but this time he had unknowingly taken along a little bonus The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People. And Sam had a very good idea of what they were now. Pulp. Recycled pulp. Dirty Dave was one of Junction City's functioning alcoholics. Unable to hold down a steady job, he eked out a living on the discards of others, and in that way he was a fairly useful citizen. He collected returnable bottles, and, like twelveyearold Keith Jordan, he had a paper route. The only difference was that Keith delivered the Junction City Gazette every day, and Dirty Dave Duncan collected it  from Sam and God knew how many other homeowners in the Kelton Avenue section of town  once a month. Sam had seen him many times, trundling his shopping cart full of green plastic garbage bags across town toward the Recycling Center which stood between the old train depot and the small homeless shelter where Dirty Dave and a dozen or so of his compadres spent most of their nights. He sat where he was for a moment longer, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, then got up, pulled on a jacket, and went out to the car. CHAPTER 5 Angle Street (I) 1 The intentions of the signmaker had undoubtedly been the best, but his spelling had been poor. The sign was nailed to one of the porch uprights of the old house by the railroad tracks, and it read ANGLE STREET Since there were no angles on Railroad Avenue that Sam could see  like most Iowa streets and roads, it was as straight as a string  he reckoned the signmaker had meant Angel Street. Well, so what? Sam thought that, while the road of good intentions might end in hell, the people who tried to fill the potholes along the way deserved at least some credit. Angle Street was a big building which, Sam guessed, had housed railroad company offices back in the days when Junction City really had been a railway Junction point. Now there were just two sets of working tracks, both going eastwest. All the others were rusty and overgrown with weeds. Most of the crossties were gone, appropriated for fires by the same homeless people Angle Street was here to serve. Sam arrived at quarter to five. The sun cast a mournful, failing light over the empty fields which took over here at the edge of town. A seemingly endless freight was rumbling by behind the few buildings which stood out here. A breeze had sprung up, and as he stopped his car and got out, he could hear the rusty squeak of the old JUNCTION CITY sign swinging back and forth above the deserted platform where people had once boarded passenger trains for St Louis and Chicago  even the old Sunnyland Express, which had made its only Iowa stop in Junction City on its way to the fabulous kingdoms of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The homeless shelter had once been white; now it was a paintless gray. The curtains in the windows were clean but tired and limp. Weeds were trying to grow in the cindery yard. Sam thought they might gain a foothold by June, but right now they were making a bad job of it. A rusty barrel had been placed by the splintery steps leading up to the porch. Opposite the Angle Street sign, nailed to another porch support post, was this message NO DRINKING ALLOWED AT THIS SHELTER! IF YOU HAVE A BOTTLE, IT MUST GO HERE BEFORE YOU ENTER! His luck was in. Although Saturday night had almost arrived and the ginmills and beerjoints of Junction City awaited, Dirty Dave was here, and he was sober. He was, in fact, sitting on the porch with two other winos. They were engaged in making posters on large rectangles of white cardboard, and enjoying varying degrees of success. The fellow sitting on the floor at the far end of the porch was holding his right wrist with his left hand in an effort to offset a bad case of the shakes. The one in the middle worked with his tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, and looked like a very old nursery child trying his level best to draw a tree which would earn him a gold star to show Mommy. Dirty Dave, sitting in a splintered rocking chair near the porch steps, was easily in the best shape, but all three of them looked folded, stapled, and mutilated. 'Hello, Dave,' Sam said, mounting the steps. Dave looked up, squinted, and then offered a tentative smile. All of his remaining teeth were in front. The smile revealed all five of them. 'Mr Peebles?' 'Yes,' he said. 'How you doing, Dave?' 'Oh, purty fair, I guess. Purty fair.' He looked around. 'Say, you guys! Say hello to Mr Peebles! He's a lawyer!' The fellow with the tip of his tongue sticking out looked up, nodded briefly, and went back to his poster. A long runner of snot depended from his left nostril. 'Actually,' Sam said, 'real estate's my game, Dave. Real estate and insur' 'You got me my Slim Jim?' the man with the shakes asked abruptly. He did not look up at all, but his frown of concentration deepened. Sam could see his poster from where he stood; it was covered with long orange squiggles which vaguely resembled words. 'Pardon?' Sam asked. 'That's Lukey,' Dave said in a low voice. 'He ain't havin one of his better days, Mr Peebles.' 'Got me my Slim Jim, got me my Slim Jim, got me my Slim Fuckin Slim Jim?' Lukey chanted without looking up. 'Uh, I'm sorry  ' Sam began. 'He ain't got no Slim Jims!' Dirty Dave yelled. 'Shut up and do your poster, Lukey! Sarah wants em by six! She's comin out special!' 'I'll get me a fuckin Slim Jim,' Luckey said in a low intense voice. 'If I don't, I guess I'll eat ratturds.' 'Don't mind him, Mr Peebles,' Dave said. 'What's up?' 'Well, I was just wondering if you might have found a couple of books when you picked up the newspapers last Thursday. I've misplaced them, and I thought I'd check. They're overdue at the Library.' 'You got a quarter?' the man with the tip of his tongue sticking out asked abruptly. 'What's the word? Thunderbird!' Sam reached automatically into his pocket. Dave reached out and touched his wrist, almost apologetically. 'Don't give him any money, Mr Peebles,' he said. 'That's Rudolph. He don't need no Thunderbird. Him and the Bird don't agree no more. He just needs a night's sleep.' 'I'm sorry,' Sam said. 'I'm tapped, Rudolph.' 'Yeah, you and everybody else,' Rudolph said. As he went back to his poster he muttered 'What's the price? Fifty twice.' 'I didn't see any books,' Dirty Dave said. 'I'm sorry. I just got the papers, like usual. Missus V. was there, and she can tell you. I didn't do nothing wrong.' But his rheumy, unhappy eyes said he did not expect Sam to believe this. Unlike Mary, Dirty Dave Duncan did not live in a world where doom lay just up the road or around the corner; his surrounded him. He lived in it with what little dignity he could muster. 'I believe you.' Sam laid a hand on Dave's shoulder. 'I just dumped your box of papers into one of my bags, like always,' Dave said. 'If I had a thousand Slim Jims, I'd eat them all,' Lukey said abruptly. 'I would snark those suckers right down! That's chow! That's chow! That's chowdedow!' 'I believe you,' Sam repeated, and patted Dave's horribly bony shoulder. He found himself wondering, God help him, if Dave had fleas.


On the heels of this uncharitable thought came another he wondered if any of the other Rotarians, those hale and hearty fellows with whom he had made such a hit a week ago, had been down to this end of town lately. He wondered if they even knew about Angle Street. And he wondered if Spencer Michael Free had been thinking about such men as Lukey and Rudolph and Dirty Dave when he wrote that it was the human touch in this world that counted  the touch of your hand and mine. Sam felt a sudden burst of shame at the recollection of his speech, so full of innocent boosterism. and approval for the simple pleasures of smalltown life. 'That's good,' Dave said. 'Then I can come back next month?' 'Sure. You took the papers to the Recycling Center, right?' 'Uhhuh.' Dirty Dave pointed with a finger which ended in a yellow, ragged nail. 'Right over there. But they're closed.' Sam nodded. 'What are you doing?' he asked. 'Aw, just passin the time,' Dave said, and turned the poster around so Sam could see it. It showed a picture of a smiling woman holding a platter of fried chicken, and the first thing that struck Sam was that it was good  really good. Wino or not, Dirty Dave had a natural touch. Above the picture, the following was neatly printed CHICKEN DINNER AT THE 1 ST METHODIST CHURCH TO BENEFIT 'ANGEL STREET' HOMELESS SHELTER APRIL 15TH 600 To 800 P.M. COME ONE COME ALL 'It's before the AA meeting,' Dave said, 'but you can't put nothing on the poster about AA. That's because it's sort of secret.' 'I know,' Sam said. He paused, then asked 'Do you go to AA? You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I know it's really none of my business.' 'I go,' Dave said, 'but it's hard, Mr Peebles. I got more white chips than Carter has got liver pills. I'm good for a month, sometimes two, and once I went sober almost a whole year. But it's hard.' He shook his head. 'Some people can't never get with the program, they say. I must be one of those. But I keep trying.' Sam's eyes were drawn back to the woman with her platter of chicken. The picture was too detailed to be a cartoon or a sketch, but it wasn't a painting, either. It was clear that Dirty Dave had done it in a hurry, but he had caught a kindness about the eyes and a faint slant of humor, like one last sunbeam at the close of day, in the mouth. And the oddest thing was that the woman looked familiar to Sam. 'Is that a real person?' he asked Dave. Dave's smile widened. He nodded. 'That's Sarah. She's a great gal, Mr Peebles. This place would have closed down five years ago except for her. She finds people to give money just when it seems the taxes will be too much or we won't be able to fix the place up enough to satisfy the building inspectors when they come. She calls the people who give the money angels, but she's the angel. We named the place for Sarah. Of course, Tommy St John spelled part of it wrong when he made the sign, but he meant well.' Dirty Dave fell silent for a moment, looking at his poster. Without looking up, he added 'Tommy's dead now, a course. Died this last winter. His liver busted.' 'Oh,' Sam said, and then he added lamely, 'I'm sorry.' 'Don't be. He's well out of it.' 'Chowdedow!' Lukey exclaimed, getting up. 'Chowdedow! Ain't that some fuckin chowdedow!' He brought his poster over to Dave. Below the orange squiggles he had drawn a monster woman whose legs ended in sharkfins Sam thought were meant to be shoes. Balanced on one hand was a misshapen plate which appeared to be loaded with blue snakes. Clutched in the other was a cylindrical brown object. Dave took the poster from Lukey and examined it. 'This is good, Lukey.' Lukey's lips peeled back in a gleeful smile. He pointed at the brown thing. 'Look, Dave! She got her a Slim Fuckin Slim Jim!' 'She sure does. Purty good. Go on inside and turn on the TV, if you want. Star Trek's on right away. How you doin, Dolph?' 'I draw better when I'm stewed,' Rudolph said, and gave his poster to Dave. On it was a gigantic chicken leg with stick men and women standing around and looking up at it. 'It's the fantasy approach,' Rudolph said to Sam. He spoke with some truculence. 'I like it,' Sam said. He did, actually. Rudolph's poster reminded him of a New Yorker cartoon, one of the ones he sometimes couldn't understand because they were so surreal. 'Good.' Rudolph studied him closely. 'You sure you ain't got a quarter?' 'No,' Sam said. Rudolph nodded. 'In a way, that's good,' he said. 'But in another way, it really shits the bed.' He followed Lukey inside, and soon the Star Trek theme drifted out through the open door. William Shatner told the winos and burnouts of Angle Street that their mission was to boldly go where no man had gone before. Sam guessed that several members of this audience were already there. 'Nobody much comes to the dinners but us guys and some of the AA's from town,' Dave said, 'but it gives us something to do. Lukey hardly talks at all anymore, 'less he's drawing.' 'You're awfully good,' Sam told him. 'You really are, Dave. Why don't you  ' He stopped. 'Why don't I what, Mr Peebles?' Dave asked gently. 'Why don't I use my right hand to turn a buck? The same reason I don't get myself a regular job. The day got late while I was doin other things.' Sam couldn't think of a thing to say. 'I had a shot at it, though. Do you know I went to the Lorillard School in Des Moines on full scholarship? The best art school in the Midwest. I flunked out my first semester. Booze. It don't matter. Do you want to come in and have a cup of coffee, Mr Peebles? Wait around? You could meet Sarah.' 'No, I better get back. I've got an errand to run.' He did, too. 'All right. Are you sure you're not mad at me?' 'Not a bit.' Dave stood up. 'I guess I'll go in awhile, then,' he said. 'It was a beautiful day, but it's gettin nippy now. You have a nice night, Mr Peebles.' 'Okay,' Sam said, although he doubted that he was going to enjoy himself very much this Saturday evening. But his mother had had another saying the way to make the best of bad medicine is to swallow it just as fast as you can. And that was what he intended to do. He walked back down the steps of Angle Street, and Dirty Dave Duncan went on inside. 2 Sam got almost all the way back to his car, then detoured in the direction of the Recycling Center. He walked across the weedy, cindery ground slowly, watching the long freight disappear in the direction of Camden and Omaha. The red lamps on the caboose twinkled like dying stars. Freight trains always made him feel lonely for some reason, and now, following his conversation with Dirty Dave, he felt lonelier than ever. On the few occasions when he had met Dave while Dave was collecting his papers, he had seemed a jolly, almost clownish man. Tonight Sam thought he had seen behind the makeup, and what he had seen made him feel unhappy and helpless. Dave was a lost man, calm but totally lost, using what was clearly a talent of some size to make posters for a church supper. One approached the Recycling Center through zones of litter  first the yellowing ad supplements which had escaped old copies of the Gazette, then the torn plastic garbage bags, finally an asteroid belt of busted bottles and squashed cans. The shades of the small clapboard building were drawn. The sign hanging in the door simply read CLOSED. Sam lit a cigarette and started back to his car. He had gone only half a dozen steps when he saw something familiar lying on the ground. He picked it up. It was the bookjacket of Best Loved Poems of the American People. The words PROPERTY OF THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY were stamped across it. So now he knew for sure. He had set the books on top of the papers in the Johnnie Walker box and then forgotten them. He had put other papers Tuesday's, Wednesday's, and Thursday's  on top of the books. Then Dirty Dave had come along late Thursday morning and had dumped the whole shebang into his plastic collection bag. The bag had gone into his shoppingcart, the shoppingcart had come here, and this was all that was left  a bookjacket with a muddy sneakerprint tattooed on it. Sam let the bookjacket flutter out of his fingers and walked slowly back to his car. He had an errand to run, and it was fitting that he should run it at the dinner hour. It seemed he had some crow to eat. CHAPTER 6 The Library (II) 1 Halfway to the Library, an idea suddenly struck him  it was so obvious he could hardly believe it hadn't occurred to him already. He had lost a couple of library books; he had since discovered they had been destroyed; he would have to pay for them. And that was all. It occurred to him that Ardelia Lortz had been more successful in getting him to think like a fourthgrader than he had realized. When a kid lost a book, it was the end of the world; powerless, he cringed beneath the shadow of bureaucracy and waited for the Library Policeman to show up. But there were no Library Police, and Sam, as an adult, knew that perfectly well. There were only town employees like Ms Lortz, who sometimes got overinflated ideas of their place in the scheme of things, and taxpayers like him, who sometimes forgot they were the dog which wagged the tail, and not the other way around. I'm going to go in, I'm going to apologize, and then I'm going to ask her to send me a bill for the replacement copies, Sam thought. And that's all. That's the end. It was so simple it was amazing. Still feeling a little nervous and a little embarrassed (but much more in control of this teapot tempest), Sam parked across the street from the Library. The carriage lamps which flanked the main entrance were on, casting soft white radiance down the steps and across the building's granite facade. Evening lent the building a kindness and a welcoming air it had definitely been lacking on his first visit  or maybe it was just that spring was clearly on the rise now, something which had not been the case on the overcast March day when he had first met the resident dragon. The forbidding face of the stone robot was gone. It was just the public library again. Sam started to get out of the car and then stopped. He had been granted one revelation; now he was suddenly afforded another. The face of the woman in Dirty Dave's poster came back to him, the woman with the platter of fried chicken. The one Dave had called Sarah. That woman had looked familiar to Sam, and all at once some obscure circuit fired off in his brain and he knew why. It had been Naomi Higgins. 2 He passed two kids in JCHS jackets on the steps and caught the door before it could swing all the way closed. He stepped into the foyer. The first thing that struck him was the sound. The reading room beyond the marble steps was by no means rowdy, but neither was it the smooth pit of silence which had greeted Sam on Friday noon just over a week ago. Well, but it's Saturday evening now, he thought. There are kids here, maybe studying for their midterm exams. But would Ardelia Lortz condone such chatter, muted as it was? The answer seemed to be yes, judging from the sound, but it surely didn't seem in character. The second thing had to do with that single mute adjuration which had been mounted on the easel. SILENCE! was gone. In its place was a picture of Thomas Jefferson. Below it was this quotation 'I cannot live without books.'  Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to John Adams) June 10th, 1815 Sam studied this for a moment, thinking that it changed the whole flavor in one's mouth as one prepared to enter the library. SILENCE! induced feelings of trepidation and disquiet (what if one's belly was rumbling, for instance, or if one felt an attack of not necessarily silent flatulence might be imminent?). 'I cannot live without books,' on the other hand, induced feelings of pleasure and anticipation  it made one feel as hungry men and women feel when the food is finally arriving. Puzzling over how such a small thing could make such an essential difference, Sam entered the Library ... and stopped dead. 3 It was much brighter in the main room than it had been on his first visit, but that was only one of the changes. The ladders which had stretched up to the dim reaches of the upper shelves were gone. There was no need of them, because the ceiling was now only eight or nine feet above the floor instead of thirty or forty. If you wanted to take a book from one of the higher shelves, all you needed was one of the stools which were scattered about. The magazines were placed in an inviting fan on a wide table by the circulation desk. The oak rack from which they had hung like the skins of dead animals was gone. So was the sign reading RETURN ALL MAGAZINES TO THEIR PROPER PLACES! The shelf of new novels was still there, but the 7DAY RENTALS sign had been replaced with one which said READ A BESTSELLER  JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT! People  mostly young people  came and went, talking in low tones. Someone chuckled. It was an easy, unselfconscious sound. Sam looked up at the ceiling, trying desperately to understand what in hell had happened here. The slanted skylights were gone. The upper reaches of the room had been hidden by a modem suspended ceiling. The oldfashioned hanging globes had been replaced by panelled fluorescent lighting set into the new ceiling. A woman on her way up to the main desk with a handful of mystery novels followed Sam's gaze up to the ceiling, saw nothing unusual there, and looked curiously at Sam instead. One of the boys sitting at a long desk to the right of the magazine table nudged his fellows and pointed Sam out. Another tapped his temple and they all snickered. Sam noticed neither the stares nor the snickers. He was unaware that he was simply standing in the entrance to the main reading room, gawking up at the ceiling with his mouth open. He was trying to get this major change straight in his mind. Well, they've put in a suspended ceiling since you were here last. So what? It's probably more heatefficient. Yes, but the Lortz woman never said anything about changes. No, but why would she say anything to him? Sam was hardly a library regular, was he? She should have been upset, though. She struck me as a rockribbed traditionalist. She wouldn't like this. Not at all. That was true, but there was something else, something even more troubling. Putting in a suspended ceiling was a major renovation. Sam didn't see how it could have been accomplished in just a week. And what about the high shelves, and all the books which had been on them? Where had the shelves gone? Where had the books gone? Other people were looking at Sam now; even one of the library assistants was staring at him from the other side of the circulation desk. Most of the lively, hushed chatter in the big room had stilled. Sam rubbed his eyes  actually rubbed his eyes  and looked up at the suspended ceiling with its inset fluorescent squares again. It was still there. I'm in the wrong library! he thought wildly. That's what it is! His confused mind first jumped at this idea and then backed away again, like a kitten that has been tricked into pouncing on a shadow. Junction City was fairly large by central Iowa standards, with a population of thirtyfive thousand or so, but it was ridiculous to think it could support two libraries. Besides, the location of the building and the configuration of the room were right ... it was just everything else that was wrong. Sam wondered for just a moment if he might be going insane, and then dismissed the thought. He looked around and noticed for the first time that everyone had stopped what they were doing. They were all looking at him. He felt a momentary, mad urge to say, 'Go back to what you were doing  I was just noticing that the whole library is different this week.' Instead, he sauntered over to the magazine table and picked up a copy of US News  World Report. He began leafing through it with a show of great interest, and watched out of the corners of his eyes as the people in the room went back to what they had been doing. When he felt that he could move without attracting undue attention, Sam replaced the magazine on the table and sauntered toward the Children's Library. He felt a little like a spy crossing enemy territory. The sign over the door was exactly the same, gold letters on warm dark oak, but the poster was different. Little Red Riding Hood at the moment of her terrible realization had been replaced by Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They were wearing bathing trunks and diving into a swimming pool filled with books. The tagline beneath read COME ON IN! THE READINGS FINE! 'What's going on here?' Sam muttered. His heart had begun to beat too fast; he could feel a fine sweat breaking out on his arms and back. If it had been just the poster, he could have assumed that La Lortz had been fired ... but it wasn't just the poster. It was everything. He opened the door of the Children's Library and peeked inside. He saw the same agreeable small world with its low tables and chairs, the same brightblue curtains, the same water fountain mounted on the wall. Only now the suspended ceiling in here matched the suspended ceiling in the main reading room, and all the posters had been changed. The screaming child in the black sedan (Simple Simon  they call him Simple Simon they feel contempt for him I think that's very healthy, don't you) was gone, and so was the Library Policeman with his trenchcoat and his strange star of many points. Sam drew back, turned around, and walked slowly to the main circulation desk. He felt as if his whole body had turned to glass. Two library assistants  a collegeage boy and girl  watched him approach. Sam was not too upset himself to see that they looked a trifle nervous. Be careful. No ... be NORMAL. They already think you're halfway to being nuts. He suddenly thought of Lukey and a horrible, destructive impulse tried to seize him. He could see himself opening his mouth and yelling at these two nervous young people, demanding at the top of his voice that they give him a few Slim Fucking Slim Jims, because that was chow, that was chow, that was chowdedow. He spoke in a calm, low voice instead. 'Perhaps you could help me. I need to speak to the librarian.' 'Gee, I'm sorry,' the girl said. 'Mr Price doesn't come in on Saturday nights.' Sam glanced down at the desk. As on his previous trip to the library, there was a small nameplaque standing next to the microfilm recorder, but it no longer said A. LORTZ. Now it said MR PRICE. In his mind he heard Naomi say, Tall man? Thin? About fifty? 'No,' he said. 'Not Mr Price. Not Mr Peckham, either. The other one. Ardelia Lortz.' The boy and girl exchanged a puzzled glace. 'No one named Ardelia Lord works here,' the boy said. 'You must be thinking of some other library.' 'Not Lord,' Sam told them. His voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. 'Lortz.' 'No,' the girl said. 'You really must be mistaken, sir.' They were starting to look cautious again, and although Sam felt like insisting, telling them of course Ardelia Lortz worked here, he had met her only eight days ago, he made himself pull back. And in a way, it all made perfect sense, didn't it? It was perfect sense within a framework of utter lunacy, granted, but that didn't change the fact that the interior logic was intact. Like the posters, the skylights, and the magazine rack, Ardelia Lortz had simply ceased to exist. Naomi spoke up again inside his head. Oh! Miss Lortz, was it? That must have been fun. 'Naomi recognized the name,' he muttered. Now the library assistants were looking at him with identical expressions of consternation. 'Pardon me,' Sam said, and tried a smile. It felt crooked on his face. I'm having one of those days.' 'Yes,' the boy said. 'You bet,' the girl said. They think I'm crazy, Sam thought, and do you know what? I don't blame them a bit. 'Was there anything else?' the boy asked. Sam opened his mouth to say no  after which he would beat a hasty retreat and then changed his mind. He was in for a penny; he might as well go in for a pound. 'How long has Mr Price been the head librarian?' The two assistants exchanged another glance. The girl shrugged. 'Since we've been here,' she said, 'but that's not very long, Mr  ?' 'Peebles,' Sam said, offering his hand. 'Sam Peebles. I'm sorry. My manners seem to have flown away with the rest of my mind.' They both relaxed a little  it was an indefinable thing, but it was there, and it helped Sam do the same. Upset or not, he had managed to hold onto at least some of his not inconsiderable ability to put people at ease. A realestateandinsurance salesman who couldn't do that was a fellow who ought to be looking for a new line of work. 'I'm Cynthia Berrigan,' she said, giving his hand a tentative shake. 'This is Tom Stanford.' 'Pleased to meet you,' Tom Stanford said. He didn't look entirely sure of this, but he also gave Sam's hand a quick shake. 'Pardon me?' the woman with the mystery novels asked. 'Could someone help me, please? I'll be late for my bridge game.' 'I'll do it,' Tom told Cynthia, and walked down the desk to check out the woman's books. She said, 'Tom and I go to Chapelton junior College, Mr Peebles. This is a workstudy job. I've been here three semesters now  Mr Price hired me last spring. Tom came during the summer.' 'Mr Price is the only fulltime employee?' 'Uhhuh.' She had lovely brown eyes and now he could see a touch of concern in them. 'Is something wrong?' 'I don't know.' Sam looked up again. He couldn't help it. 'Has this suspended ceiling been here since you came to work?' She followed his glance. 'Well,' she said, 'I didn't know that was what it's called, but yes, it's been this way since I've been here.' 'I had an idea there were skylights, you see.' Cynthia smiled. 'Well, sure. I mean, you can see them from the outside, if you go around to the side of the building. And, of course, you can see them from the stacks, but they're boarded over. The skylights, I mean  not the stacks. I think they've been that way for years.' For years. 'And you've never heard of Ardelia Lortz.' She shook her head. 'Uhuh. Sorry.' 'What about the Library Police?' Sam asked impulsively. She laughed. 'Only from my old aunt. She used to tell me the Library Police would get me if I didn't bring my books back on time. But that was back in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was a little girl. A long time ago.' Sure, Sam thought. Maybe as long as ten, twelve years ago. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth. 'Well,' he said, 'thanks for the information. I didn't mean to freak you out.' 'You didn't.' 'I think I did, a little. I was just confused for a second.' 'Who is this Ardelia Lortz?' Tom Stanford asked, coming back. 'That name rings a bell, but I'll be darned if I know why.' 'That's just it. I don't really know,' Sam said. 'Well, we're closed tomorrow, but Mr Price will be in Monday afternoon and Monday evening,' he said. 'Maybe he can tell you what you want to know.' Sam nodded. 'I think I'll come and see him. Meantime, thanks again.' 'We're here to help if we can,' Tom said. 'I only wish we could have helped you more, Mr Peebles.' 'Me too,' Sam said. 4 He was okay until he got back to the car, and then, as he was unlocking the driver'sside door, all the muscles in his belly and legs seemed to drop dead. He had to support himself with a hand on the roof of his car to keep from falling down while he swung the door open. He did not really get in; he simply collapsed behind the wheel and then sat there, breathing hard and wondering with some alarm if he was going to faint. What's going on here? I feel like a character in Rod Serling's old show. 'Submitted for your examination, one Samuel Peebles, exresident of Junction City, now selling real estate and whole life in ... the Twilight Zone.' Yes, that was what it was like. Only watching people cope with inexplicable happenings on TV was sort of fun. Sam was discovering that the inexplicable lost a lot of its charm when you were the one who had to struggle with it. He looked across the street at the Library, where people came and went beneath the soft glow of the carriage lamps. The old lady with the mystery novels was headed off down the street, presumably bound for her bridge game. A couple of girls were coming down the steps, talking and laughing together, books held to their blooming chests. Everything looked perfectly normal ... and of course it was. The abnormal Library had been the one he had entered a week ago. The only reason the oddities hadn't struck him more forcibly, he supposed, was because his mind had been on that damned speech of his. Don't think about it, he instructed himself, although he was afraid that this was going to be one of those times when his mind simply wouldn't take instruction. Do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow. Once the sun is up, all this will make a lot more sense. He put the car in gear and thought about it all the way home. CHAPTER 7 Night Terrors 1 The first thing he did after letting himself in was to check the answering machine. His heartbeat cranked up a notch when he saw the MESSAGE WAITING lamp was lit. It'll be her. I don't know who she really is, but I'm beginning to think she won't be happy until she's driven me completely crackers. Don't listen to it, then, another part of his mind spoke up, and Sam was now so confused he couldn't tell if that was a reasonable idea or not. It seemed reasonable, but it also seemed a little cowardly. In fact, he realized that he was standing here in a sweat, gnawing his fingernails, and suddenly grunted  a soft, exasperated noise. From the fourth grade to the mental ward, he thought. Well, I'll be damned if it's going to work that way, hon. He pushed the button. 'Hi!' a man's whiskeyroughened voice said. 'This is Joseph Randowski, Mr Peebles. My stage name is The Amazing Joe. I just called to thank you for filling in for me at that Kiwanis meeting or whatever it was. I wanted to tell you that I'm feeling a lot better  my neck was only sprained, not broke like they thought at first. I'm sending you a whole bunch of free tickets to the show. Pass em out to your friends. Take care of yourself. Thanks again. Bye.' The tape stopped. The ALL MESSAGES PLAYED lamp came on. Sam snorted at his case of nerves  if Ardelia Lortz wanted him jumping at shadows, she was getting exactly what she wanted. He pushed the REWIND button, and a new thought struck him. Rewinding the tape that took his messages was a habit with him, but it meant that the old messages disappeared under the new ones. The Amazing Joe's message would have erased Ardelia's earlier message. His only evidence that the woman actually existed was gone. But that wasn't true, was it? There was his library card. He had stood in front of that goddamned circulation desk and watched her sign her name on it in large, flourishing letters. Sam pulled out his wallet and went through it three times before admitting to himself that the library card was gone, too. And he thought he knew why. He vaguely remembered tucking it into the inside pocket of Best Loved Poems of the American People. For safekeeping. So he wouldn't lose it. Great. Just great. Sam sat down on the couch and put his forehead in his hand. His head was starting to ache. 2 He was heating a can of soup on the stove fifteen minutes later, hoping a little hot food would do something for his head, when he thought of Naomi again  Naomi, who looked so much like the woman in Dirty Dave's poster. The question of whether or not Naomi was leading a secret life of some sort under the name of Sarah had taken a back seat to something that seemed a lot more important, at least right now Naomi had known who Ardelia Lortz was. But her reaction to the name ... it had been a little odd, hadn't it? It had startled her for a moment or two, and she'd started to make a joke, and then the phone had rung and it had been Burt Iverson, and Sam tried to replay the conversation in his mind and was chagrined at how little he remembered. Naomi had said Ardelia was peculiar, all right; he was sure of that, but not much else. It hadn't seemed important then. The important thing then was that his career seemed to have taken a quantum leap forward. And that was still important, but this other thing seemed to dwarf it. In truth, it seemed to dwarf everything. His mind kept going back to that modern nononsense suspended ceiling and the short bookcases. He didn't believe he was crazy, not at all, but he was beginning to feel that if he didn't get this thing sorted out, he might go crazy. It was as if he had uncovered a hole in the middle of his head, one so deep you could throw things into it and not hear a splash no matter how big the things you threw were or how long you waited with your ear cocked for the sound. He supposed the feeling would pass  maybe  but in the meantime it was horrible. He turned the burner under the soup to LO, went into the study, and found Naomi's telephone number. It rang three times and then a cracked, elderly voice said, 'Who is it, please?' Sam recognized the voice at once, although he hadn't seen its owner in person for almost two years. It was Naomi's ramshackle mother. 'Hello, Mrs Higgins,' he said. 'It's Sam Peebles.' He stopped, waited for her to say Oh, hello, Sam or maybe How are you? but there was only Mrs Higgins's heavy, emphysemic breathing. Sam had never been one of her favorite people, and it seemed that absence had not made her heart grow fonder. Since she wasn't going to ask it, Sam decided he might as well. 'How are you, Mrs Higgins?' 'I have my good days and my bad ones.' For a moment Sam was nonplussed. It seemed to be one of those remarks to which there was no adequate reply. Pm sorry to hear that didn't fit, but That's great, Mrs Higgins! would sound even worse. He settled for asking if he could speak to Naomi. 'She's out this evening. I don't know when she'll be back.' 'Could you ask her to call me?' 'I'm going to bed. And don't ask me to leave her a note, either. My arthritis is very bad.' Sam sighed. 'I'll call tomorrow.' 'We'll be in church tomorrow morning,' Mrs Higgins stated in the same flat, unhelpful voice, 'and the first Baptist Youth Picnic of the season is tomorrow afternoon. Naomi has promised to help.' Sam decided to call it off. It was clear that Mrs Higgins was sticking as close to name, rank, and serial number as she possibly could. He started to say goodbye, then changed his mind. 'Mrs Higgins, does the name Lortz mean anything to you? Ardelia Lortz?' The heavy wheeze of her respiration stopped in raidsnuffle. For a moment there was total silence on the line and then Mrs Higgins spoke in a low, vicious voice. 'How long are you Godless heathens going to go on throwing that woman in our faces? Do you think it's funny? Do you think it's clever?' 'Mrs Higgins, you don't understand. I just want to know  ' There was a sharp little click in his ear. It sounded as if Mrs Higgins had broken a small dry stick over her knee. And then the line went dead. 3 Sam ate his soup, then spent half an hour trying to watch TV. It was no good. His mind kept wandering away. It might start with the woman in Dirty Dave's poster, or with the muddy footprint on the cover of Best Loved Poems of the American People, or with the missing poster of Little Red Riding Hood. But no matter where it started, it always ended up in the same place that completely different ceiling above the main reading room of the Junction City Public Library. Finally he gave it up and crawled into bed. It had been one of the worst Saturdays he could remember, and might well have been the worst Saturday of his life. The only thing he wanted now was a quick trip into the land of dreamless unconsciousness. But sleep didn't come. The horrors came instead. Chief among them was the idea that he was losing his mind.