Four Past Midnight (67 page)

He jumped and turned around, ready to do battle with the library dragon, now that it had finally disclosed itself.

No dragon presented itself. There was only a plump, white-haired woman of about fifty-five, pushing a trolley of books on silent rubber tires. Her white hair fell around her pleasant, unlined face in neat beauty-shop curls.

“I suppose you were looking for me,” she said. “Did Mr. Peckham direct you in here?”

“I didn't see anybody at all.”

“No? Then he's gone along home,” she said. “I'm not really surprised, since it's Friday. Mr. Peckham comes in to dust and read the paper every morning around eleven. He's the janitor—only part-time, of course. Sometimes he stays until one-one-thirty on most Mondays, because that's the day when both the dust and the paper are thickest—but you know how thin Friday's paper is.”

Sam smiled. “I take it you're the librarian?”

“I am she,” Mrs. Lortz said, and smiled at him. But Sam didn't think her eyes were smiling; her eyes seemed to be watching him carefully, almost coldly. “And you are ... ?”

“Sam Peebles.”

“Oh yes! Real estate and insurance! That's
your
game!”

“Guilty as charged.”

“I'm sorry you found the main section of the library deserted—you must have thought we were closed and someone left the door open by mistake.”

“Actually,” he said, “the idea did cross my mind.”

“From two until seven there are three of us on duty,” said Mrs. Lortz. “Two is when the schools begin to let out, you know—the grammar school at two, the middle school at two-thirty, the high school at two-forty-five. The children are our most faithful clients, and the most welcome, as far as I am concerned. I love the little ones. I used to have an all-day assistant, but last year the Town Council cut our budget by eight hundred dollars and ...” Mrs. Lortz put her hands together and mimed a bird flying away. It was an amusing charming gesture.

So why,
Sam wondered,
aren't I charmed or amused?

The posters, he supposed. He was still trying to make Red Riding Hood, the screaming child in the car, and the grim-eyed Library Policeman jibe with this smiling small-town librarian.

She put her left hand out—a small hand, as plump and round as the rest of her—with perfect unstudied confidence. He looked at the third finger and saw it was ringless; she wasn't Mrs. Lortz after all. The fact of her spinsterhood struck him as utterly typical, utterly small-town. Almost a caricature, really. Sam shook it.

“You haven't been to our library before, have you, Mr. Peebles?”

“No, I'm afraid not. And please make it Sam.” He did not know if he really wanted to be Sam to this woman or not, but he was a businessman in a small town—a salesman, when you got right down to it—and the offer of his first name was automatic.

“Why, thank you, Sam.”

He waited for her to respond by offering her own first name, but she only looked at him expectantly.

“I've gotten myself into a bit of a bind,” he said. “Our scheduled speaker tonight at Rotary Club had an accident, and—”

“Oh, that's too bad!”

“For me as well as him. I got drafted to take his place.”

“Oh-oh!” Ms. Lortz said. Her tone was alarmed, but her eyes crinkled with amusement. And still Sam did not find himself warming to her, although he was a person who warmed up to other people quickly (if superficially) as a rule; the kind of man who had few close friends but felt compelled nonetheless to start conversations with strangers in elevators.

“I wrote a speech last night and this morning I read it to the young woman who takes dictation and types up my correspondence—”

“Naomi Higgins, I'll bet.”

“Yes—how did you know that?”

“Naomi is a regular. She borrows a great many romance novels—Jennifer Blake, Rosemary Rogers, Paul Sheldon, people like that.” She lowered her voice and said, “She says they're for her mother, but actually I think she reads them herself.”

Sam laughed. Naomi
did
have the dreamy eyes of a closet romance reader.

“Anyway, I know she's what would be called an office temporary in a big city. I imagine that here in Junction City she's the whole secretarial pool. It seemed reasonable that she was the young woman of whom you spoke.”

“Yes. She liked my speech—or so she said—but she thought it was a bit dry. She suggested—”

“The Speaker's Companion,
I'll bet!”

“Well, she couldn't remember the exact title, but that sure
sounds
right.” He paused, then asked a little anxiously: “Does it have jokes?”

“Only three hundred pages of them,” she said. She reached out her right hand—it was as innocent of rings as her left—and tugged at his sleeve with it. “Right this way.” She led him toward the door by the sleeve. “I am going to solve all your problems, Sam. I only hope it won't take a crisis to bring you back to our library. It's small, but it's very fine. I think so, anyway, although of course I'm prejudiced.”

They passed through the door into the frowning shadows of the Library's main room. Ms. Lortz flicked three switches by the door, and the hanging globes lit up, casting a soft yellow glow that warmed and cheered the room considerably.

“It gets so
gloomy
in here when it's overcast,” she said in a confidential we‘re-in-the-real-Library-now voice. She was still tugging firmly on Sam's sleeve. “But of course you know how the Town Council complains about the electricity bill in a place like this ... or perhaps you don't, but I'll bet you can
guess.
”

“I can,” Sam agreed, also dropping his voice to a near-whisper.

“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 hit-men 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 side-trip 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 seven-day 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 fourth-grader ... like a fourth-grader 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 small-town 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.

He didn't know, and doubted very much that she had, but the fact that he was questioning the honesty of a sweet-faced 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.

He shifted on the bench, looked up, and saw a motto on the wall:

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 cheerfully. “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 old-fashioned,” she said. “Especially nowadays, when self-help 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 sixty-five, 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 well-chosen 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 bunting-draped hall. Small groups of men in old-fashioned 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 after-dinner 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 after-dinner 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 dust-bowl farms, little girls in flour-sack dresses, and rusty, thrown-together 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 unheard-of, 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?”