Four Past Midnight (79 page)

Murder,
Sam thought.
It must have been murder. It's really the only thing bad enough to f—

At that second a hand dropped on Sam's shoulder.

If he had screamed, he would undoubtedly have terrified the hand's owner almost as much as she had already terrorized him, but Sam was unable to scream. Instead, all the air whooshed out of him and the world went gray again. His chest felt like an accordion being slowly crushed under an elephant's foot. All of his muscles seemed to have turned to macaroni. He did not wet his pants again. That was perhaps the only saving grace.

“Sam?” he heard a voice ask. It seemed to come from quite a distance—somewhere in Kansas, say. “Is that you?”

He swung around, almost falling out of his chair in front of the microfilm reader, and saw Naomi. He tried to get his breath back so he could say something. Nothing but a tired wheeze came out. The room seemed to waver in front of his eyes. The grayness came and went.

Then he saw Naomi take a stumble-step backward, her eyes widening in alarm, her hand going to her mouth. She struck one of the microfilm shelves almost hard enough to knock it over. It rocked, two or three of the boxes tumbled to the carpet with soft thumps, and then it settled back again.

“Omes,” he managed at last. His voice came out in a whispery squeak. He remembered once, as a boy in St. Louis, trapping a mouse under his baseball cap. It had made a sound like that as it scurried about, looking for an escape hatch.

“Sam, what's
happened
to you?” She also sounded like someone who would have been screaming if shock hadn't whipped the breath out of her. We make quite a pair, Sam thought, Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “You scared the living shit out of me!”

There,
he thought.
I went and used the s-word again. Called you Omes again, too. Sorry about that.
He felt a little better, and thought of getting up, but decided against it. No sense pressing his luck. He was still not entirely sure his heart wasn't going to vapor-lock.

“I went to the office to see you,” she said. “Cammy Harrington said she thought she saw you come in here. I wanted to apologize. Maybe. I thought at first you must have played some cruel trick on Dave. He said you'd never do a thing like that, and I started to think that it
didn't
seem like you. You've always been so nice . . .”

“Thanks,” Sam said. “I guess.”

“... and you seemed so ... so bewildered on the telephone. I asked Dave what it was about, but he wouldn't tell me anything else. All I know is what I heard . . . and how he looked when he was talking to you. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.”

No,
Sam thought of telling her.
I was the one who saw the ghost. And this morning I saw something even worse.

“Sam, you have to understand something about Dave . . . and about me. Well, I guess you already know about Dave, but I'm—”

“I guess I know,” Sam told her. “I said in my note to Dave that I didn't see anyone at Angle Street, but that wasn't the truth. I didn't see anyone at first, but I walked through the downstairs, looking for Dave. I saw you guys out back. So . . . I know. But I don't know on purpose, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” she said. “It's all right. But . . . Sam . . . dear God, what's happened? Your hair . . .”

“What about my hair?” he asked her sharply.

She fumbled her purse open with hands that shook slightly and brought out a compact. “Look,” she said.

He did, but he already knew what he was going to see.

Since eight-thirty this morning, his hair had gone almost completely white.

“I see you found your friend,” Doreen McGill said to Naomi as they climbed back up the stairs. She put a nail to the corner of her mouth and smiled her cute-little-me smile.

“Yes.”

“Did you remember to sign out?”

“Yes,” Naomi said again. Sam hadn't, but she had done it for both of them.

“And did you return any microfilms you might have used?”

This time Sam said yes. He couldn't remember if either he or Naomi had returned the one spool of microfilm he had mounted, and he didn't care. All he wanted was to get out of here.

Doreen was still being coy. Finger tapping the edge of her lower lip, she cocked her head and said to Sam, “You did look different in the newspaper picture. I just can't put my finger on what it is.”

As they went out the door, Naomi said: “He finally got smart and quit dyeing his hair.”

On the steps outside, Sam exploded with laughter. The force of his bellows doubled him over. It was hysterical laughter, its sound only half a step removed from the sound of screams, but he didn't care. It felt good. It felt enormously cleansing.

Naomi stood beside him, seeming to be bothered neither by Sam's laughing fit nor the curious glances they were drawing from passersby on the street. She even lifted one hand and waved to someone she knew. Sam propped his hands on his upper thighs, still caught in his helpless gale of laughter, and yet there was a part of him sober enough to think:
She has seen this sort of reaction before. I wonder where?
But he knew the answer even before his mind had finished articulating the question. Naomi was an alcoholic, and she had made working with other alcoholics, helping them, part of her own therapy. She had probably seen a good deal more than a hysterical laughing fit during her time at Angle Street.

She'll slap me,
he thought, still howling helplessly at the image of himself at his bathroom mirror, patiently combing Grecian Formula into his locks.
She'll slap me, because that's what you do with hysterical people.

Naomi apparently knew better. She only stood patiently beside him in the sunshine, waiting for him to regain control. At last his laughter began to taper off to wild snorts and runaway snickers. His stomach muscles ached and his vision was water-wavery and his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Feel better?” she asked.

“Oh, Naomi—” he began, and then another hee-haw bray of laughter escaped him and galloped off into the sunshiny morning. “You don't know how much better.”

“Sure I do,” she said. “Come on—we'll take my car.”

“Where ...” He hiccupped. “Where are we going?”

“Angel Street,” she said, pronouncing it the way the sign-painter had intended it to be pronounced. “I'm very worried about Dave. I went there first this morning, but he wasn't there. I'm afraid he may be out drinking.”

“That's nothing new, is it?” he asked, walking beside her down the steps. Her Datsun was parked at the curb, behind Sam's own car.

She glanced at him. It was a brief glance, but a complex one: irritation, resignation, compassion. Sam thought that if you boiled that glance down it would say
You don't know what you're talking about, but it's not your fault.

“Dave's been sober almost a year this time, but his general health isn't good. As you say, falling off the wagon isn't anything new for him, but another fall may kill him.”

“And that would be my fault.” The last of his laughter dried up.

She looked at him, a little surprised. “No,” she said. “That would be nobody's fault . . . but that doesn't mean I want it to happen. Or that it has to. Come on. We'll take my car. We can talk on the way.”

“Tell me what happened to you,” she said as they headed toward the edge of town. “Tell me everything. It isn't just your hair, Sam; you look ten years older.”

“Bullshit,” Sam said. He had seen more than his hair in Naomi's compact mirror; he had gotten a better look at himself than he wanted. “More like twenty. And it feels like a hundred.”

“What happened? What was it?”

Sam opened his mouth to tell her, thought of how it would sound, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “not yet. You're going to tell me something first. You're going to tell me about Ardelia Lortz. You thought I was joking the other day. I didn't realize that then, but I do now. So tell me all about her. Tell me who she was and what she did.”

Naomi pulled over to the curb beyond Junction City's old granite firehouse and looked at Sam. Her skin was very pale beneath her light make-up, and her eyes were wide. “You
weren't?
Sam, are you trying to tell me you
weren't
joking?”

“That's right.”

“But Sam ...” She stopped, and for a moment she seemed not to know how she should go on. At last she spoke very softly, as though to a child who has done something he doesn't know is wrong. “But Sam, Ardelia Lortz is dead. She has been dead for thirty years.”

“I know she's dead. I mean, I know it
now.
What I want to know is the rest.”

“Sam, whoever you think you saw—”

“I know who I saw.”

“Tell me what makes you think—”

“First, you tell me.”

She put her car back in gear, checked her rear-view mirror, and began to drive toward Angle Street again. “I don't know very much,” she said. “I was only five when she died, you see. Most of what I
do
know comes from overheard gossip. She belonged to The First Baptist Church of Proverbia—she went there, at least—but my mother doesn't talk about her. Neither do any of the older parishioners. To them it's like she never existed.”

Sam nodded. “That's just how Mr. Price treated her in the article he wrote about the Library. The one I was reading when you put your hand on my shoulder and took about twelve more years off my life. It also explains why your mother was so mad at me when I mentioned her name Saturday night.”

Naomi glanced at him, startled.
“That's
what you called about?”

Sam nodded.

“Oh, Sam—if you weren't on Mom's s-list before, you are now.”

“Oh, I was on before, but I've got an idea she's moved me up.” Sam laughed, then winced. His stomach still hurt from his fit on the steps of the newspaper office, but he was very glad he had had that fit—an hour ago he never would have believed he could have gotten so much of his equilibrium back. In fact, an hour ago he had been quite sure that Sam Peebles and equilibrium were going to remain mutually exclusive concepts for the rest of his life. “Go ahead, Naomi.”

“Most of what I've heard I picked up at what AA people call ‘the real meeting,' ” she said. “That's when people stand around drinking coffee before and then after, talking about everything under the sun.”

He looked at her curiously. “How long have you been in AA, Naomi?”

“Nine years,” Naomi said evenly. “And it's been six since I had to take a drink. But I've been an alcoholic forever. Drunks aren't made, Sam. They're born.”

“Oh,” he said lamely. And then: “Was
she
in the program? Ardelia Lortz?”

“God, no—but that doesn't mean there aren't people in AA who remember her. She showed up in Junction City in 1956 o‘57, I think. She went to work for Mr. Lavin in the Public Library. A year or two later, he died very suddenly—it was a heart attack or a stroke, I think—and the town gave the job to the Lortz woman. I've heard she was very good at it, but judging by what happened, I'd say the thing she was best at was fooling people.”

“What did she do, Naomi?”

“She killed two children and then herself,” Naomi said simply. “In the summer of 1960. There was a search for the kids. No one thought of looking for them in the Library, because it was supposed to be closed that day. They were found the next day, when the Library was supposed to be open but wasn't. There are skylights in the Library roof—”

“I know.”

“—but these days you can only see them from the outside, because they changed the Library inside. Lowered the ceiling to conserve heat, or something. Anyway, those skylights had big brass catches on them. You grabbed the catches with a long pole to open the skylights and let in fresh air, I guess. She tied a rope to one of the catches—she must have used one of the track-ladders that ran along the bookcases to do it—and hanged herself from it. She did that after she killed the children.”

“I see.” Sam's voice was calm, but his heart was beating slowly and very hard. “And how did she . . . how did she kill the children?”

“I don't know. No one's ever said, and I've never asked. I suppose it was horrible.”

“Yes. I suppose it was.”

“Now tell me what happened to you.”

“First I want to see if Dave's at the shelter.”

Naomi tightened up at once.
“I'll
see if Dave's at the shelter,” she said. “You're going to sit tight in the car. I'm sorry for you, Sam, and I'm sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion last night. But you won't upset Dave anymore. I'll see to that.”

“Naomi, he's a
part
of this!”

“That's impossible,” she said in a brisk this-closes-the-discussion tone of voice.

“Dammit, the whole thing is impossible!”

They were nearing Angle Street now. Ahead of them was a pick-up truck rattling toward the Recycling Center, its bed full of cardboard cartons filled with bottles and cans.

“I don't think you understand what I told you,” she said. “It doesn't surprise me; Earth People rarely do. So open your ears, Sam. I'm going to say it in words of one syllable. If
Dave drinks, Dave dies.
Do you follow that? Does it get through?”

She tossed another glance Sam's way. This one was so furious it was still smoking around the edges, and even in the depths of his own distress, Sam realized something. Before, even on the two occasions when he had taken Naomi out, he had thought she was pretty. Now he saw she was beautiful.