Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 4

The Missing Books

1

Sam wasn't much of a breakfast-eater through the week - a glass of orange juice and an oat-bran muffin did him just fine - but on Saturday mornings (at least on Saturday mornings when he wasn't dealing with a Rotary-inspired 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 tongue-lashing 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 dunce-cap 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, Ardelia-baby,' 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 note-pad 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 twenty-dollar 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 ill-tempered sign in the library foyer, nor by the librarian's you're-one-whole-day-late-you-bad-boy-you 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 paper-clipped 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 book-drop. 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 long-dead 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 pepperoni-and-double-mushroom 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 fair-sized 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 hold-alls. 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't-I-hip 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 half-believe 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 doom-fated 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 hair-dryer 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 machine-gun 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 twelve-year-old 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.