Four Past Midnight (76 page)

The kitchen, also empty, was at the far end of the hall. It was a big, sunny room with faded linoleum covering the floor in uneven dunes and valleys. A gigantic stove, combination wood and gas, filled an alcove. The sink was old and deep, its enamel discolored with rust stains. The faucets were equipped with old-fashioned propeller handles. An ancient Maytag washing machine and a gas-fired Kenmore drier stood next to the pantry. The air smelled faintly of last night's baked beans. Sam liked the room. It spoke to him of pennies which had been pinched until they screamed, but it also spoke of love and care and some hard-won happiness. It reminded him of his grandmother's kitchen, and that had been a good place. A safe place.

On the old restaurant-sized Amana refrigerator was a magnetized plaque which read:

Sam heard faint voices outside. He crossed the kitchen and looked through one of the windows, which had been raised to admit as much of the warm spring day as the mild breeze could coax in.

The back lawn of Angle Street was showing the first touches of green; at the rear of the property, by a thin belt of just-budding trees, an idle vegetable garden waited for warmer days. To the left, a volleyball net sagged in a gentle arc. To the right were two horseshoe pits, just beginning to sprout a few weeds. It was not a prepossessing back yard—at this time of year, few country yards were—but Sam saw it had been raked at least once since the snow had released its winter grip, and there were no cinders, although he could see the steely shine of the railroad tracks less than fifty feet from the garden. The residents of Angle Street might not have a lot to take care of, he thought, but they were taking care of what they did have.

About a dozen people were sitting on folding camp chairs in a rough circle between the volleyball net and the horseshoe pits. Sam recognized Naomi, Dave, Lukey, and Rudolph. A moment later he realized he also recognized Burt Iverson, Junction City's most prosperous lawyer, and Elmer Baskin, the banker who hadn't gotten to his Rotary speech but who had called later to congratulate him just the same. The breeze gusted, blowing back the homely checked curtains which hung at the sides of the window through which Sam was looking. It also ruffled Elmer's silver hair. Elmer turned his face up to the sun and smiled. Sam was struck by the simple pleasure he saw, not on Elmer's face but
in
it. At that moment he was both more and less than a small city's richest banker; he was every man who ever greeted spring after a long, cold winter, happy to still be alive, whole, and free of pain.

Sam felt struck with unreality. It was weird enough that Naomi Higgins should be out here consorting with the un-homed winos of Junction City—and under another name, at that. To find that the town's most respected banker and one of its sharpest legal eagles were also here was a bit of a mind-blower.

A man in ragged green pants and a Cincinnati Bengals sweatshirt raised his hand. Rudolph pointed at him. “My name's John, and I'm an alcoholic,” the man in the Bengals sweatshirt said.

Sam backed away from the window quickly. His face felt hot. Now he felt not only like an intruder but a spy. He supposed they usually held their Sunday-noon AA meeting in the common room—the coffeepot suggested it, anyway—but today the weather had been so nice that they had taken their chairs outside. He bet it had been Naomi's idea.

We'll be in church tomorrow morning,
Mrs. Higgins had said,
and the first Baptist Youth Picnic of the season is tomorrow afternoon. Naomi has promised to help.
He wondered if Mrs. Higgins knew her daughter was spending the afternoon with the alkies instead of the Baptists and supposed she did. He thought he also understood why Naomi had abruptly decided two dates with Sam Peebles was enough. He had thought it was the religion thing at the time, and Naomi hadn't ever tried to suggest it was anything else. But after the first date, which had been a movie, she had agreed to go out with him again. After the
second
date, any romantic interest she'd had in him ceased. Or seemed to. The second date had been dinner. And he had ordered wine.

The answer, of course, was he
couldn't
have known ... but his face felt hotter, just the same.

He also found himself wondering what would happen if Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin, both powerful men, found out that he knew they belonged to the world's largest secret society. Maybe nothing; he didn't know enough about AA to be sure. He
did
know two things, however: that the second A stood for Anonymous, and that these were men who could squash his rising business aspirations flat if they chose to do so.

 

Sam decided to leave as quickly and quietly as he could. To his credit, this decision was not based on personal considerations. The people sitting out there on the back lawn of Angle Street shared a serious problem. He had discovered this by accident; he had no intention of staying—and eavesdropping—on purpose.

As he went back down the hallway again, he saw a pile of cut-up paper resting on top of the pay phone. A stub of pencil had been tacked to the wall on a short length of string beside the phone. On impulse he took a sheet of paper and printed a quick note on it.

He signed his name at the bottom, folded the sheet in half, and printed Dave's name on the fold. He thought briefly about taking it back down to the kitchen and putting it on the counter, but he didn't want any of them—Naomi most of all—worrying that he might have seen them at their odd but perhaps helpful devotions. He propped it on top of the TV in the common room instead, with Dave's name facing out. He thought about placing a quarter for the telephone beside the note and then didn't. Dave might take that wrong.

He left then, glad to be out in the sun again undiscovered. As he got back into his car, he saw the bumper sticker on Naomi's Datsun.

it said.

“Better God than Ardelia,” Sam muttered, and backed out the driveway to the road.

By late afternoon, Sam's broken rest of the night before had begun to tell, and a vast sleepiness stole over him. He turned on the TV, found a Cincinnati-Boston exhibition baseball game wending its slow way into the eighth inning, lay down on the sofa to watch it, and almost immediately dozed off. The telephone rang before the doze had a chance to spiral down into real sleep, and Sam got up to answer it, feeling woozy and disoriented.

“Hello?”

“You don't want to be talking about that woman,” Dirty Dave said with no preamble whatsoever. His voice was trembling at the far edge of control. “You don't even want to be
thinking
about her.”

All of Sam's drowsiness was gone in an instant. “Dave, what is it about that woman? Either people react as though she were the devil or they don't know anything about her. Who is she? What in the hell did she do to freak you out this way?”

There was a long period of silence. Sam waited through it, his heart beating heavily in his chest and throat. He would have thought the connection had been broken if not for the sound of Dave's broken breathing in his ear.

“Mr. Peebles,” he said at last, “you've been a real good help to me over the years. You and some others helped me stay alive when I wasn't even sure I wanted to myself. But I can't talk about that bitch. I can't. And if you know what's good for you, you won't talk to anybody else about her, neither.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“No!” Dave said. He sounded more than surprised; he sounded shocked. “No—I'm just warnin you, Mr. Peebles, same as I'd do if I saw you wanderin around an old well where the weeds were all grown up so you couldn't see the hole. Don't talk about her and don't think about her. Let the dead stay dead.”

In a way it didn't surprise him; everything that had happened (with, perhaps, the exception of the messages left on his answering machine) pointed to the same conclusion: that Ardelia Lortz was no longer among the living. He—Sam Peebles, small-town realtor and insurance agent—had been speaking to a ghost without even knowing it. Spoken to her? Hell! Had done
business
with her! He had given her two bucks and she had given him a library card.

So he was not exactly surprised . . . but a deep chill began to radiate out along the white highways of his skeleton just the same. He looked down and saw pale knobs of gooseflesh standing out on his arms.

You should have left it alone,
part of his mind mourned.
Didn't I tell you so?

“When did she die?” Sam asked. His voice sounded dull and listless to his own ears.

“I don't want to talk about it, Mr. Peebles!” Dave sounded nearly frantic now. His voice trembled, skipped into a higher register which was almost falsetto, and splintered there.
“Please!”

Leave him alone,
Sam cried angrily at himself.
Doesn't he have enough problems without this crap to worry about?

Yes. And he could leave Dave alone—there must be other people in town who would talk to him about Ardelia Lortz ... if he could find a way to approach them that wouldn't make them want to call for the men with the butterfly nets, that was. But there was one other thing, a thing perhaps only Dirty Dave Duncan could tell him for sure.

“You drew some posters for the Library once, didn't you? I think I recognized your style from the poster you were doing yesterday on the porch. In fact, I'm almost sure. There was one showing a little boy in a black car. And a man in a trenchcoat—the Library Policeman. Did you—”

Before he could finish, Dave burst out with such a shriek of shame and grief and fear that Sam was silenced.

“Dave? I—”

“Leave it alone!”
Dave wept.
“I couldn't help myself, so can't you just please leave
—”

His cries abruptly diminished and there was a rattle as someone took the phone from him.

“Stop it,” Naomi said. She sounded near tears herself, but she also sounded furious. “Can't you just stop it, you horrible man?”

“Naomi—”

“My name is Sarah when I'm here,” she said slowly, “but I hate you equally under both names, Sam Peebles. I'm never going to set foot in your office again.” Her voice began to rise. “Why couldn't you leave him alone? Why did you have to rake up all this old
shit? Why?”

Unnerved, hardly in control of himself, Sam said: “Why did you send me to the Library? If you didn't want me to meet her, Naomi, why did you send me to the goddam Library in the first place?”

There was a gasp on the other end of the line.

“Naomi? Can we—”

There was a click as she hung up the telephone.

Connection broken.

Sam sat in his study until almost nine-thirty, eating Tums and writing one name after another on the same legal pad he had used when composing the first draft of his speech. He would look at each name for a little while, then cross it off. Six years had seemed like a long time to spend in one place . . . at least until tonight. Tonight it seemed like a much shorter period of time—a weekend, say.

Craig
Jones,
he wrote.

He stared at the name and thought,
Craig might know about Ardelia . . . but he'd want to know why I was interested.

Did he know Craig well enough to answer that question truthfully? The answer to that question was a firm no. Craig was one of Junction City's younger lawyers, a real wannabe. They'd had a few business lunches . . . and there was Rotary Club, of course—and Craig had invited him to his house for dinner once. When they happened to meet on the street they spoke cordially, sometimes about business, more often about the weather. None of that added up to friendship, though, and if Sam meant to spill this nutty business to someone, he wanted it to be a friend, not an associate that called him ole buddy after the second sloe-gin fizz.

He scratched Craig's name off the list.

He'd made two fairly close friends since coming to Junction City, one a physician's assistant with Dr. Melden's practice, the other a city cop. Russ Frame, his PA friend, had jumped to a better-paying family practice in Grand Rapids early in 1989. And since the first of January, Tom Wycliffe had been overseeing the Iowa State Patrol's new Traffic Control Board. He had fallen out of touch with both men since—he was slow making friends, and not good at keeping them, either.

Which left him just where?

Sam didn't know. He
did
know that Ardelia Lortz's name affected some people in Junction City like a satchel charge. He knew—or believed he knew—that he had met her even though she was dead. He couldn't even tell himself that he had met a relative, or some nutty woman calling herself Ardelia Lortz. Because—

I think I met a ghost. In fact, I think I met a ghost inside of
a
ghost. I think that the library I entered was the Junction City Library as it was when Ardelia Lortz was alive and in charge of the place. I think that's why it felt so weird and off-kilter. It wasn't like time-travel, or the way I imagine time-travel would be. It was more like stepping into limbo for a little while. And it was real. I'm sure it was real.