Four Past Midnight (68 page)

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.

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 bright-orange 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 smite—it felt like a mask.

“Or else I'll have to send the Library Policeman after you,” she said.

For a moment their gazes locked, and Sam thought he saw the
real
Ardelia Lortz, and there was nothing charming or
soft
or spinster-librarian 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

or

but just offered that one inarguable imperative:

“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 self-righteous, 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 pick-up duty ... or people like you, Sam, who are looking for me.”

People in a pinch,
her cool blue-gray 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 good-naturedly. He didn't feel good-natured, all of a sudden he didn't feel good-natured 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 reads. 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 runner-up 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.

“Runner-up 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 high-school students, three middle-school students, and two grammar-school 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 ill-tempered 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.”

Then he got hold of himself. He didn't know exactly what she meant by “a 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 good-natured 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.