Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 12

By Air to Des Moines

1

Sam looked at his wristwatch and was astounded to see it was almost 3:00 P.M. Midnight was only nine hours away, and then the tall man with the silver eyes would be back. Or Ardelia Lortz would be back. Or maybe both of them together.

'What do you think I should do, Dave? Go out to the local graveyard and find Ardelia's body and pound a stake through her heart?'

'A good trick if you could do it,' he replied, 'since the lady was cremated.'

'Oh,' Sam said. He settled back into his chair with a little helpless sigh.

Naomi took his hand again. 'In any case, you won't be doing anything alone,' she said firmly. 'Dave says she means to do us as well as you, but that's almost beside the point. Friends stand by when there's trouble. That's the point. What else are they for?'

Sam lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. 'Thank you - but I don't know what you can do. Or me, either. There doesn't seem to be anything to do. Unless . . .' He looked at Dave hopefully. 'Unless I ran?'

Dave shook his head. 'She - or it - sees. I told you that. I guess you could drive most of the way to Denver before midnight if you really put your foot down and the cops didn't catch you, but Ardelia Lortz would be right there to greet you when you got out of your car. Or you'd look over in some dark mile and see the Library Policeman sittin next to you on the seat.'

The thought of that - the white face and silver eyes, illuminated only by the green glow of the dashboard lights - made Sam shiver.

'What, then?'

'I think you both know what has to be done first,' Dave said. He drank the last of his iced tea and then set the glass on the porch. 'Just think a minute, and you'll see.'

Then they all looked out toward the grain elevator for awhile. Sam's mind was a roaring confusion; all he could catch hold of were isolated snatches of Dave Duncan's story and the voice of the Library Policeman, with his strange little lisp, saying I don't want to hear your thick ecthcuses ... You have until midnight ... then I come again.

It was on Naomi's face that light suddenly dawned.

'Of course!' she said. 'How stupid! But . . .'

She asked Dave a question, and Sam's own eyes widened in understanding.

'There's a place in Des Moines, as I recall,' Dave said. 'Pell's. If any place can help, it'll be them. Why don't you make a call, Sarah?'

2

When she was gone, Sam said: 'Even if they can help, I don't think we could get there before the close of business hours. I can try, I suppose . . .'

'I never expected you'd drive,' Dave said. 'No - you and Sarah have to go out to the Proverbia Airport.'

Sam blinked. 'I didn't know there was an airport in Proverbia.'

Dave smiled. 'Well ... I guess that is stretchin it a little. There's a half-mile of packed dirt Stan Soames calls a runway. Stan's front parlor is the office of Western Iowa Air Charter. You and Sarah talk to Stan. He's got a little Navajo. He'll take you to Des Moines and have you back by eight o'clock, nine at the latest.'

'What if he's not there?'

'Then we'll try to figure out somethin else. I think he will be, though. The only thing Stan loves more than flyin is farmin, and come the spring of the year, farmers don't stray far. He'll probably tell you he can't take you because of his garden, come to that - he'll say you shoulda made an appointment a few days in advance so he could get the Carter boy to come over and babysit his back ninety. If he says that, you tell him Dave Duncan sent you, and Dave says it's time to pay for the baseballs. Can you remember that?'

'Yes, but what does it mean?'

'Nothing that concerns this business,' Dave said. 'He'll take you, that's the important thing. And when he lands you again, never mind comin here. You and Sarah drive straight into town.'

Sam felt dread begin to seep into his body. 'To the Library.'

'That's right.'

'Dave, what Naomi said about friends is all very sweet - and maybe even true -but I think I have to take it from here. Neither one of you has to be a part of this. I was the one responsible for stirring her up again -'

Dave reached out and seized Sam's wrist in a grip of surprising strength. 'If you really think that, you haven't heard a word I've said. You're not responsible for anything. I carry the deaths of John Power and two little children on my conscience - not to mention the terrors I don't know how many other children may have suffered - but I'm not responsible, either. Not really. I didn't set out to be Ardelia Lortz's companion any more than I set out to be a thirty-year drunk. Both things just happened. But she bears me a grudge, and she will be back for me, Sam. If I'm not with you when she comes, she'll visit me first. And I won't be the only one she visits. Sarah was right, Sam. She and I don't have to stay close to protect you; the three of us have to stay close to protect each other. Sarah knows about Ardelia, don't you see? If Ardelia don't know that already, she will as soon as she shows up tonight. She plans to go on from Junction City as you, Sam. Do you think she'll leave anybody behind who knows her new identity?'

'But -'

'But nothing,' Dave said. 'In the end it comes down to a real simple choice, one even an old souse like me can understand: we share this together or we're gonna die at her hands.'

He leaned forward.

'If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, Sam, forget about bein a hero and start rememberin who your Library Policeman was. You have to. Because I don't believe Ardelia can take just anyone. There's only one coincidence in this business, but it's a killer: once you had a Library Policeman, too. And you have to get that memory back.'

'I've tried,' Sam said, and knew that was a lie. Because every time he turned his mind toward

(come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman)

that voice, it shied away. He tasted red licorice, which he had never eaten and always hated . . . and that was all.

'You have to try harder,' Dave said, 'or there's no hope.'

Sam drew in a deep breath and let it out. Dave's hand touched the back of his neck, then squeezed it gently.

'It's the key to this,' Dave said. 'You may even find it's the key to everything that has troubled you in your life. To your loneliness and your sadness.'

Sam looked at him, startled. Dave smiled.

'Oh yes,' he said. 'You're lonely, you're sad, and you're closed off from other people. You talk a good game, but you don't walk what you talk. Up until today I wasn't nothing to you but Dirty Dave who comes to get your papers once a month, but a man like me sees a lot, Sam. And it takes one to know one.'

'The key to everything,' Sam mused. He wondered if there really were such conveniences, outside of popular novels and movies-of-the-week populated with Brave Psychiatrists and Troubled Patients.

'It's true,' Dave persisted. 'Such things are dreadful in their power, Sam. I don't blame you for not wantin to search for it. But you can, you know, if You want to. You have that choice.'

'Is that something else you learn in AA, Dave?'

He smiled. 'Well, they teach it there,' he said, 'but that's one I guess I always knew.'

Naomi came out onto the porch again. She was smiling and her eyes were sparkling.

'Ain't she some gorgeous?' Dave asked quietly.

'Yes,' Sam said. 'She sure is.' He was clearly aware of two things: that he was falling in love, and that Dave Duncan knew it.

3

'The man took so long checking that I got worried,' she said, 'but we're in luck.'

'Good,' Dave said. 'You two are goin out to see Stan Soames, then. Does the Library still close at eight durin the school year, Sarah?'

'Yes - I'm pretty sure it does.'

'I'll be payin a visit there around five o'clock, then. I'll meet you in back, where the loadin platform is, between eight and nine. Nearer eight would be better - n safer. For Christ's sake, try not to be late.'

'How will we get in?' Sam asked.

'I'll take care of that, don't worry. You just get goin.'

'Maybe we ought to call this guy Soames from here,' Sam said. 'Make sure he's available.'

Dave shook his head. 'Won't do no good. Stan's wife left him for another man four years ago - claimed he was married to his work, which always makes a good excuse for a woman who's got a yen to make a change. There aren't any kids. He'll be out in his field. Go on, now. Daylight's wastin.'

Naomi bent over and kissed Dave's cheek. 'Thank you for telling us,' she said.

'I'm glad I did it. It's made me feel ever so much better.'

Sam started to offer Dave his hand, then thought better of it. He bent over the old man and hugged him.

4

Stan Soames was a tall, rawboned man with angry eyes burning out of a gentle face, a man who already had his summer sunburn although calendar spring had not yet run its first month. Sam and Naomi found him in the field behind his house, just as Dave had told them they would. Seventy yards north of Soames's idling, mud-splashed Rototiller, Sam could see what looked like a dirt road ... but since there was a small airplane with a tarpaulin thrown over it at one end and a windsock fluttering from a rusty pole at the other, he assumed it was the Proverbia Airport's single runway.

'Can't do it,' Soames said. 'I got fifty acres to turn this week and nobody but me to do it. You should have called a couple-three days ahead.'

'It's an emergency,' Naomi said. 'Really, Mr Soames.'

He sighed and spread his arms, as if to encompass his entire farm. 'You want to know what an emergency is?' he asked. 'What the government's doing to farms like this and people like me. That's a dad-ratted emergency. Look, there's a fellow over in Cedar Rapids who might -'

'We don't have time to go to Cedar Rapids,' Sam said. 'Dave told us you'd probably say -'

'Dave?' Stan Soames turned to him with more interest than he had heretofore shown. 'Dave who?'

'Duncan. He told me to say it's time to pay for the baseballs.'

Soames's brows drew down. His hands rolled themselves up into fists, and for just a moment Sam thought the man was going to slug him. Then, abruptly, he laughed and shook his head.

'After all these years, Dave Duncan pops outta the woodwork with his IOU rolled up in his hand! Goddam!'

He began walking toward the Rototiller. He turned his head to them as he did, yelling to make himself heard over the machine's enthusiastic blatting. 'Walk on over to the airplane while I put this goddam thing away! Mind the boggy patch lust on the edge of the runway, or it'll suck your damned shoes off!'

Soames threw the Rototiller into gear. It was hard to tell with all the noise, but Sam thought he was still laughing. 'I thought that drunk old bastard was gonna die before I could quit evens with him!'

He roared past them toward his barn, leaving Sam and Naomi looking at each other.

'What was that all about?' Naomi asked.

'I don't know - Dave wouldn't tell me.' He offered her his arm. 'Madam, will you walk with me?'

She took it. 'Thank you, sir.'

They did their best to skirt the mucky place Stan Soames had told them about, but didn't entirely make it. Naomi's foot went in to the ankle, and the mud pulled her loafer off when she jerked her foot back. Sam bent down, got it, and then swept Naomi into his arms.

'Sam, no!' she cried, startled into laughter. 'You'll break your back!'

'Nope,' he said. 'You're light.'

She was . . . and his head suddenly felt light, too. He carried her up the graded slope of the runway to the airplane and set her on her feet. Naomi's eyes looked up into his with calmness and a sort of luminous clarity. Without thinking, he bent and kissed her. After a moment, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

When he looked at her again, he was slightly out of breath. Naomi was smiling.

'You can call me Sarah anytime you want to,' she said. Sam laughed and kissed her again.

5

Riding in the Navajo behind Stan Soames was like riding piggyback on a pogo stick. They bounced and jounced on uneasy tides of spring air, and Sam thought once or twice that they might cheat Ardelia in a way not even that strange creature could have foreseen: by spreading themselves all over an Iowa cornfield.

Stan Soames didn't seem to be worried, however; he bawled out such hoary old ballads as 'Sweet Sue' and 'The Sidewalks of New York' at the top of his voice as the Navajo lurched toward Des Moines. Naomi was transfixed, peering out of her window at the roads and fields and houses below with her hands cupped to the sides of her face to cut the glare.

At last Sam tapped her on the shoulder. 'You act like you've never flown before!' he yelled over the mosquito-drone of the engine.

She turned briefly toward him and grinned like an enraptured schoolgirl. 'I haven't!' she said, and returned at once to the view.

'I'll be damned,' Sam said, and then tightened his seatbelt as the plane took another of its gigantic, bucking leaps.

6

It was twenty past four when the Navajo skittered down from the sky and landed at County Airport in Des Moines. Soames taxied to the Civil Air Terminal, killed the engine, then opened the door. Sam was a little amused at the twinge of jealousy he felt as Soames put his hands on Naomi's waist to help her down.

'Thank you!' she gasped. Her cheeks were now deeply flushed and her eyes were dancing. 'That was wonderful!'

Soames smiled, and suddenly he looked forty instead of sixty. 'I've always liked it myself,' he said, 'and it beats spendin an afternoon abusin my kidneys on that Rototiller ... I have to admit that.' He looked from Naomi to Sam. 'Can you tell me what this big emergency is? I'll help if I can - I owe Dave a little more'n a puddle-jump from Proverbia to Des Moines and back again.'

'We need to go into town,' Sam said. 'To a place called Pell's Book Shop. They're holding a couple of books for us.'

Stan Soames looked at them, eyes wide. 'Come again?'

'Pell's -'

'I know Pell's,' he said. 'New books out front, old books in the back. Biggest Selection in the Midwest, the ads say. What I'm tryin to get straight is this: you took me away from my garden and got me to fly you all the way across the state to get a couple of books?'

'They're very important books, Mr Soames,' Naomi said. She touched one of his rough farmer's hands. 'Right now, they're just about the most important things in my life . . . or Sam's.'

'Dave's, too,' Sam said.

'If you told me what was going on,' Soames asked, 'would I be apt to understand it?'

'No,' Sam said.

'No,' Naomi agreed, and smiled a little.

Soames blew a deep sigh out of his wide nostrils and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants. 'Well, I guess it don't matter that much, anyway. I've owed Dave this one for ten years, and there have been times when it's weighed on my mind pretty heavy.' He brightened. 'And I got to give a pretty young lady her first airplane ride. The only thing prettier than a girl after her first plane ride is a girl after her first -'

He stopped abruptly and scuffed at the tar with his shoes. Naomi looked discreetly off toward the horizon. Just then a fuel truck drove up. Soames walked over quickly and fell into deep conversation with the driver. Sam said, 'You had quite an effect on our fearless pilot.'

'Maybe I did, at that,' she said. 'I feel wonderful, Sam. Isn't that crazy?'

He stroked an errant lock of her hair back into place behind her ear. 'It's been a crazy day. The craziest day I can ever remember.'

But the inside voice spoke then - it drifted up from that deep place where great objects were still in motion - and told him that wasn't quite true. There was one other that had been just as crazy. More crazy. The day of The Black Arrow and the red licorice.

That strange, stifled panic rose in him again, and he closed his ears to that voice.

If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, Sam, forget about bein a hero and start rememberin who your Library Policeman was.

I don't! I can't! I ... I mustn't!

You have to get that memory back.

I mustn't! It's not allowed!

You have to try harder or there's no hope.

'I really have to go home now,' Sam Peebles muttered.

Naomi, who had strolled away to look at the Navajo's wing-flaps, heard him and came back.

'Did you say something?'

'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'

'You look very pale.'

'I'm very tense,' he said edgily.

Stan Soames returned. He cocked a thumb at the driver of the fuel truck. 'Dawson says I can borrow his car. I'll run you into town.'

'We could call a cab -' Sam began.

Naomi was shaking her head. 'Time's too short for that,' she said. 'Thank you very much, Mr Soames.'

'Aw, hell,' Soames said, and then flashed her a little-boy grin. 'You go on and call me Stan. Let's go. Dawson says there's low pressure movin in from Colorado. I want to get back to Junction City before the rain starts.'

7

Pell's was a big barnlike structure on the edge of the Des Moines business district - the very antithesis of the mall-bred chain bookstore. Naomi asked for Mike. She was directed to the customer-service desk, a kiosk which stood like a customs booth between the section which sold new books and the larger one which sold old books.

'My name is Naomi Higgins. I talked to you on the telephone earlier?'

'Ah, yes,' Mike said. He rummaged on one of his cluttered shelves and brought out two books. One was Best Loved Poems of the American People; the other was The Speaker's Companion, edited by Kent Adelmen. Sam Peebles had never been so glad to see two books in his life, and he found himself fighting an impulse to snatch them from the clerk's hands and hug them to his chest.

'Best Loved Poems is easy,' Mike said, 'but The Speaker's Companion is out of print. I'd guess Pell's is the only bookshop between here and Denver with a copy as nice as this one ... except for library copies, of course.'

'They both look great to me,' Sam said with deep feeling.

'Is it a gift?'

'Sort of.'

'I can have it gift-wrapped for you, if you like; it would only take a second.'

'That won't be necessary,' Naomi said.

The combined price of the books was twenty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents.

'I can't believe it,' Sam said as they left the store and walked towards the place where Stan Soames had parked the borrowed car. He held the bag tightly in one hand. 'I can't believe it's as simple as just ... just returning the books.'

'Don't worry,' Naomi said. 'It won't be.'

8

As they drove back to the airport, Sam asked Stan Soames if he could tell them about Dave and the baseballs.

'If it's personal, that's okay. I'm just curious.'

Soames glanced at the bag Sam held in his lap. 'I'm sorta curious about those, too,' he said. 'I'll make you a deal. The thing with the baseballs happened ten years ago. I'll tell you about that if you'll tell me about the books ten years from now.'

'Deal,' Naomi said from the back seat, and then added what Sam himself had been thinking. 'If we're all still around, of course.'

Soames laughed. 'Yeah . . . I suppose there's always that possibility, isn't there?'

Sam nodded. 'Lousy things sometimes happen.'

'They sure do. One of em happened to my only boy in 1980. The doctors called it leukemia, but it's really just what you said - one of those lousy things that sometimes happens.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry,' Naomi said.

'Thanks. Every now and then I start to think I'm over it, and then it gets on my blind side and hits me again. I guess some things take a long time to shake out, and some things don't ever shake out.'

Some things don't ever shake out.

Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman.

I really have to go home now ... is my fine paid?

Sam touched the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand.

'Well, hell, I'd known Dave a long time before it ever happened,' Stan Soames said. They passed a sign which read AIRPORT 3 MI. 'We grew up together, went to school together, sowed a mess of wild oats together. The only thing was, I reaped my crop and quit. Dave just went on sowin.'

Soames shook his head.

'Drunk or sober, he was one of the sweetest fellows I ever met. But it got so he was drunk more'n he was sober, and we kinda fell out of touch. It seemed like the worst time for him was in the late fifties. During those years he was drunk all the time. After that he started going to AA, and he seemed to get a little better ... but he'd always fall off the wagon with a crash.

'I got married in '68, and I wanted to ask him to be my best man, but I didn't dare. As it happened, he turned up sober - that time - but you couldn't trust him to turn up sober.'

'I know what you mean,' Naomi said quietly.

Stan Soames laughed. 'Well, I sort of doubt that - a little sweetie like you wouldn't know what miseries a dedicated boozehound can get himself into - but take it from me. If I'd asked Dave to stand up for me at the wedding, Laura - that's my ex - would have shit bricks. But Dave did come, and I saw him a little more frequently after our boy Joe was born in 1970. Dave seemed to have a special feeling for all kids during those years when he was trying to pull himself out of the bottle.

'The thing Joey loved most was baseball. He was nuts for it - he collected sticker books, chewing-gum cards ... he even pestered me to get a satellite dish so we could watch all the Royals games - the Royals were his favorites - and the Cubs, too, on WGN from Chicago. By the time he was eight, he knew the averages of all the Royals starting players, and the won-lost records of damn near every pitcher in the American League. Dave and I took him to games three or four times. It was a lot like taking a kid on a guided tour of heaven. Dave took him alone twice, when I had to work. Laura had a cow about that - said he'd show up drunk as a skunk, with the boy left behind, wandering the streets of KC or sitting in a police station somewhere, waiting for someone to come and get him. But nothing like that ever happened. So far as I know, Dave never took a drink when he was around the boy.

'When Joe got the leukemia, the worst part for him was the doctors telling him he wouldn't be able to go to any games that year at least until June and maybe not at all. He was more depressed about that than he was about having cancer. When Dave came to see him, Joe cried about it. Dave hugged him and said, "If you can't go to the games, Joey, that's okay; I'll bring the Royals to you."

'Joe stared up at him and says, "You mean in person, Uncle Dave?" That's what he called him - Uncle Dave.

"'I can't do that," Dave said, "but I can do somethin almost as good."'

Soames drove up to the Civil Air Terminal gate and blew the horn. The gate rumbled back on its track and he drove out to where the Navajo was parked. He turned off the engine and just sat behind the wheel for a moment, looking down at his hands.

'I always knew Dave was a talented bastard,' he said finally. 'What I don't know is how he did what he did so damned fast. All I can figure is that he must have worked days and nights both, because he was done in ten days ... and those suckers were good.

'He knew he had to go fast, though. The doctors had told me and Laura the truth, you see, and I'd told Dave. Joe didn't have much chance of pulling through. They'd caught onto what was wrong with him too late. It was roaring in his blood like a grassfire.

'About ten days after Dave made that promise, he comes into my son's hospital room with a paper shopping-bag in each arm. "What you got there, Uncle Dave?" Joe asks, sitting up in bed. He had been pretty low all that day - mostly because he was losing his hair, I think; in those days if a kid didn't have hair most of the way down his back, he was considered to be pretty low-class - but when Dave came in, he brightened right up.

'The Royals, a course," Dave says back. "Didn't I tell you?"

'Then he put those two shopping-bags down on the bed and spilled em out. And you never, ever, in your whole life, saw such an expression on a little boy's face. It lit up like a Christmas tree ... and ... and shit, I dunno . . .'

Stan Soames's voice had been growing steadily thicker. Now he leaned forward against the steering wheel of Dawson's Buick so hard that the horn honked. He pulled a large bandanna from his back pocket, wiped his eyes with it. then blew his nose.

Naomi had also leaned forward. She pressed one of her hands against Soames's cheek. 'If this is too hard for you, Mr Soames -'

'No,' he said, and smiled a little. Sam watched as a tear Stan Soames had missed ran its sparkling, unnoticed course down his cheek in the late-afternoon sun. 'It's just that it brings him back so. How he was. That hurts, miss, but it feels good, too. Those two feelings are all wrapped up together.'

'I understand,' she said.

'When Dave tipped over those bags, what spilled out was baseballs - over two dozen of them. But they weren't just baseballs, because there was a face painted on every one, and each one was the face of a player on the 1980 Kansas City Royals baseball team. They weren't those whatdoyoucallums, caricatures, either. They were as good as the faces Norman Rockwell used to paint for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. I've seen Dave's work - the work he did before he got drinking real heavy - and it was good, but none of it was as good as this. There was Willie Aikens and Frank White and U. L. Washington and George Brett ... Willie Wilson and Amos Otis . . . Dan Quisenberry, lookin as fierce as a gunslinger in an old Western movie ... Paul Splittorff and Ken Brett ... I can't remember all the names, but it was the whole damned roster, including Jim Frey, the field manager.

'And sometime between when he finished em and when he gave em to my son, he took em to KC and got all the players but one to sign em. The one who didn't was Darrell Porter, the catcher. He was out with the flu, and he promised to sign the ball with his face on it as soon as he could. He did, too.'

'Wow,' Sam said softly.

'And it was all Dave's doing - the man I hear people in town laugh about and call Dirty Dave. I tell you, sometimes when I hear people say that and I remember what he did for Joe when Joey was dying of the leukemia, I could -'

Soames didn't finish, but his hands curled themselves into fists on his broad thighs. And Sam - who had used the name himself until today, and laughed with Craig Jones and Frank Stephens over the old drunk with his shoppingcart full of newspapers - felt a dull and shameful heat mount into his cheeks.

'That was a wonderful thing to do, wasn't it?' Naomi asked, and touched Stan Soames's cheek again. She was crying.

'You shoulda seen his face,' Soames said dreamily. 'You wouldn't have believed how he looked, sitting up in his bed and looking down at all those faces with their KC baseball caps on their round heads. I can't describe it, but I'll never forget it.

'You shoulda seen his face.

'Joe got pretty sick before the end, but he didn't ever get too sick to watch the Royals on TV - or listen to em on the radio - and he kept those balls all over his room. The windowsill by his bed was the special place of honor, though. That's where he'd line up the nine men who were playing in the game he was watching or listening to on the radio. If Frey took out the pitcher, Joe would take that one down from the windowsill and put up the relief pitcher in his place. And when each man batted, Joe would hold that ball in his hands. So -'

Stan Soames broke off abruptly and hid his face in his bandanna. His chest hitched twice, and Sam could see his throat locked against a sob. Then he wiped his eyes again and stuffed the bandanna briskly into his back pocket.

'So now you know why I took you two to Des Moines today, and why I would have taken you to New York to pick up those two books if that's where you'd needed to go. It wasn't my treat; it was Dave's. He's a special sort of man.'

'I think maybe you are, too,' Sam said.

Soames gave him a smile - a strange, crooked smile - and opened the door of Dawson's Buick. 'Well, thank you,' he said. 'Thank you kindly. And now I think we ought to be rolling along if we want to beat the rain. Don't forget the books, Miss Higgins.'

'I won't,' Naomi said as she got out with the top of the bag wrapped tightly in her hand. 'Believe me, I won't.'