'Does a bear - ' Sam began, and then retraced his steps. 'Yes. I do. Things work that way sometimes. It's funny, but it's true. The old sales graph has really spiked this week. It'll drop back, of course, but I don't think it'll drop back all the way. If the new folks like the way I do business - and I like to think they will - there'll be a carry-over.'
Sam leaned back in his chair, laced his hands together behind his neck, and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
'When Craig Jones called up and put me on the spot, I was ready to shoot him. No joke, Naomi.'
'Yes,' she said. 'You looked like a man coming down with a bad case of poison ivy.'
'Did I?' He laughed. 'Yeah, I suppose so. It's funny how things work out sometimes - purest luck. If there is a God, it makes you wonder sometimes if He tightened all the screws in the big machine before He set it going.'
He expected Naomi to scold him for his irreverence (it wouldn't be the first time), but she didn't take the gambit today. Instead she said, 'You're luckier than you know, if the books you got at the Library really did help You out. It usually doesn't open until five o'clock on Fridays. I meant to tell you that, but then I forgot.'
'Oh?'
'You must have found Mr Price catching up on his paperwork or something.'
'Price?' Sam asked. 'Don't you mean Mr Peckham? The newspaper-reading janitor?'
Naomi shook her head. 'The only Peckham I ever heard of around here was old Eddie Peckham, and he died years ago. I'm talking about Mr Price. The librarian.' She was looking at Sam as though he were the thickest man on earth ... or at least in Junction City, Iowa. 'Tall man? Thin? About fifty?'
'Nope,' Sam said. 'I got a lady named Lortz. Short, plump, somewhere around the age when women form lasting attachments to bright-green polyester.'
A rather strange mix of expressions crossed Naomi's face - surprise was followed by suspicion; suspicion was followed by a species of faintly exasperated amusement. That particular sequence of expressions almost always indicates the same thing: someone is coming to realize that his or her leg is being shaken vigorously. Under more ordinary circumstances Sam might have wondered about that, but he had done a land-office business all week long, and as a result he had a great deal of his own paperwork to catch up on. Half of his mind had already wandered off to examine it.
'Oh,' Naomi said and laughed. 'Miss Lortz, was it? That must have been fun.'
'She's peculiar, all right,' Sam said.
'You bet,' Naomi agreed. 'In fact she's absolutely-'
If she had finished what she had started to say she probably would have startled Sam Peebles a great deal, but luck - as he had just pointed out - plays an absurdly important part in human affairs, and luck now intervened.
The telephone rang.
It was Burt Iverson, the spiritual chief of Junction City's small legal tribe. He wanted to talk about a really huge insurance deal - the new medical center, comp-group coverage, still in the planning stages but you know how big this could be, Sam - and by the time Sam got back to Naomi, thoughts of Lortz had gone entirely out of his mind. He knew how big it could be, all right; it could land him behind the wheel of that Mercedes-Benz after all. And he really didn't like to think just how much of all this good fortune he might be able to trace back to that stupid little speech, if he really wanted to.
Naomi did think her leg was being pulled; she knew perfectly well who Ardelia Lortz was, and thought Sam must, too. After all, the woman had been at the center of the nastiest piece of business to occur in Junction City in the last twenty years ... maybe since World War II, when the Moggins boy had come home from the Pacific all funny in the head and had killed his whole family before sticking the barrel of his service pistol in his right ear and taking care of himself as well. Ira Moggins had done that before Naomi's time; it did not occur to her that l'affaire Ardelia had occurred long before Sam had come to Junction City.
At any rate, she had dismissed the whole thing from her mind and was trying to decide between Stouffer's lasagna and something from Lean Cuisine for supper by the time Sam put the telephone down. He dictated letters steadily until twelve o'clock, then asked Naomi if she would like to step down to McKenna's with him for a spot of lunch. Naomi declined, saying she had to get back to her mother, who had Failed Greatly over the course of the winter. No more was said about Ardelia Lortz.
That day.
CHAPTER 4
The Missing Books
1
Sam wasn't much of a breakfast-eater through the week - a glass of orange juice and an oat-bran muffin did him just fine - but on Saturday mornings (at least on Saturday mornings when he wasn't dealing with a Rotary-inspired hangover) he liked to rise a little late, stroll down to McKenna's on the square, and work his way slowly through an order of steak and eggs while he really read the paper instead of just scanning it between appointments.
He followed this routine the next morning, the seventh of April. The previous day's rain was gone, and the sky was a pale, perfect blue - the very image of early spring. Sam took the long way home following his breakfast, pausing to check out whose tulips and crocuses were in good order and whose were a little late. He arrived back at his own house at ten minutes past ten.
The PLAY MESSAGES lamp on his answering machine was lit. He pushed the button, got out a cigarette, and struck a match.
'Hello, Sam,' Ardelia Lortz's soft and utterly unmistakable voice said, and the match paused six inches shy of Sam's cigarette. 'I'm very disappointed in you. Your books are overdue.'
'Ah, shit!' Sam exclaimed.
Something had been nagging at him all week long, the way a word you want will use the tip of your tongue for a trampoline, bouncing just out of reach. The books. The goddam books. The woman would undoubtedly regard him as exactly the sort of Philistine she wanted him to be - him with his gratuitous judgments of which posters belonged in the Children's Library and which ones didn't. The only real question was whether she had put her tongue-lashing on the answering machine or was saving it until she saw him in person.
He shook out the match and dropped it in the ashtray beside the telephone.
'I explained to you, I believe,' she was going on in her soft and just a little too reasonable voice, 'that The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People are from the Library's Special Reference section, and cannot be kept out for longer than one week. I expected better things of you, Sam. I really did.'
Sam, to his great exasperation, found he was standing here in his own house with an unlit cigarette between his lips and a guilty flush climbing up his neck and beginning to overrun his cheeks. Once more he had been deposited firmly back in the fourth grade - this time sitting on a stool facing into the corner with a pointed dunce-cap perched firmly on his head.
Speaking as one who is conferring a great favor, Ardelia Lortz went on: 'I have decided to give you an extension, however; you have until Monday afternoon to return your borrowed books. Please help me avoid any unpleasantness.' There was a pause. 'Remember the Library Policeman, Sam.'