'That one's getting old, Ardelia-baby,' Sam muttered, but he wasn't even speaking to the recording. She had hung up after mentioning the Library Policeman, and the machine switched itself quietly off.
2
Sam used a fresh match to light his smoke. He was still exhaling the first drag when a course of action popped into his mind. It might be a trifle cowardly, but it would close his accounts with Ms Lortz for good. And it also had a certain rough justice to it.
He had given Naomi her just reward, and he would do the same for Ardelia. He sat down at the desk in his study, where he had composed the famous speech, and drew his note-pad to him. Below the heading (From the Desk of SAMUEL PEEBLES), he scrawled the following note:
Dear Ms Lortz,
I apologize for being late returning your books. This is a sincere apology, because the books were extremely helpful in preparing my speech. Please accept this money in payment of the fine on the tardy books. I want you to keep the rest as a token of my thanks.
Sincerely yours,
Sam Peebles
Sam read the note over while he fished a paper clip out of his desk drawer. He considered changing '. . . returning your books' to '. . . returning the library's books' and decided to leave it as it was. Ardelia Lortz had impressed him very much as the sort of woman who subscribed to the philosophy of l'etat c'est moi, even if l'etat in this case was just the local library.
He removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and used the clip to attach it to the note. He hesitated a moment longer, drumming his fingers restlessly on the edge of the desk.
She's going to look at this as a bribe. She'll probably be offended and mad as hell.
That might be true, but Sam didn't care. He knew what was behind the Lortz woman's arch little call this morning - behind both arch little calls, probably. He had pulled her chain a little too hard about the posters in the Children's Library, and she was getting back at him - or trying to. But this wasn't the fourth grade, he wasn't a scurrying, terrified little kid (not anymore, at least), and he wasn't going to be intimidated. Not by the ill-tempered sign in the library foyer, nor by the librarian's you're-one-whole-day-late-you-bad-boy-you nagging.
'Fuck it!' he said out loud. 'If you don't want the goddam money, stick it in the Library Defense Fund, or something.'
He laid the note with the twenty paper-clipped to it on the desk. He had no intention of presenting it in person so she could get shirty on him. He would bind the two volumes together with a couple of rubber bands after laying the note and the money into one of them so it stuck out. Then he would simply dump the whole shebang into the book-drop. He had spent six years in Junction City without making Ardelia Lortz's acquaintance; with any luck, it would be six years before he saw her again.
Now all he had to do was find the books.
They were not on his study desk, that was for sure. Sam went out into the dining room and looked on the table. It was where he usually stacked things which needed to be returned. There were two VHS tapes ready to go back to Bruce's Video Stop, an envelope with Paperboy written across the front, two folders with insurance policies in them ... but no Speaker's Companion. No Best Loved Poems of the American People, either.
'Crap,' Sam said, and scratched his head. 'Where the hell -'
He went out into the kitchen. Nothing on the kitchen table but the morning paper; he'd put it down there when he came in. He tossed it absently in the cardboard carton by the woodstove as he checked the counter. Nothing on the counter but the box from which he had taken last night's frozen dinner.
He went slowly upstairs to check the rooms on the second story, but he was already starting to get a very bad feeling.
3
By three o'clock that afternoon, the bad feeling was a lot worse. Sam Peebles was, in fact, fuming. After going through the house twice from top to bottom (on the second pass he even checked the cellar), he had gone down to the office, even though he was pretty sure he had brought the two books home with him when he left work late last Monday afternoon. Sure enough, he had found nothing there. And here he was, most of a beautiful spring Saturday shot in a fruitless search for two library books, no further ahead.
He kept thinking of her arch tone - remember the Library Policeman, Sam -and how happy she would feel if she knew just how far under his skin she had gotten. If there really were Library Police, Sam had no doubt at all that the woman would be happy to sic one on him. The more he thought about it, the madder he got.
He went back into his study. His note to Ardelia Lortz, with the twenty attached, stared at him blandly from the desk.
'Balls!' he cried, and was almost off on another whirlwind search of the house before he caught himself and stopped. That would accomplish nothing.
Suddenly he heard the voice of his long-dead mother. It was soft and sweetly reasonable. When you can't find a thing. Samuel, tearing around and looking for it usually does no good. Sit down and think things over instead. Use your head and save your feet.
It had been good advice when he was ten; he guessed it was just as good now that he was forty. Sam sat down behind his desk, closed his eyes, and set out to trace the progress of those goddamned library books from the moment Ms Lortz had handed them to him until ... whenever.
From the library he had taken them back to the office, stopping at Sam's House of Pizza on the way for a pepperoni-and-double-mushroom pie, which he had eaten at his desk while he looked through The Speaker's Companion for two things: good jokes and how to use them. He remembered how careful he'd been not to get even the smallest dollop of pizza sauce on the book - which was sort of ironic, considering the fact that he couldn't find either of them now.
He had spent most of the afternoon on the speech, working in the jokes, then rewriting the whole last part so the poem would fit better. When he went home late Friday afternoon, he'd taken the finished speech but not the books. He was sure of that. Craig Jones had picked him up when it was time for the Rotary Club dinner, and Craig had dropped him off later on - just in time for Sam to baptize the WELCOME mat.
Saturday morning had been spent nursing his minor but annoying hangover; for the rest of the weekend he had just stayed around the house, reading, watching TV, and - let's face it, gang - basking in his triumph. He hadn't gone near the office all weekend. He was sure of it.
Okay, he thought. Here comes the hard part. Now concentrate. But he didn't need to concentrate all that hard after all, he discovered.
He had started out of the office around quarter to five on Monday afternoon, and then the phone had rung, calling him back. It had been Stu Youngman, wanting him to write a large homeowner's policy. That had been the start of this week's shower of bucks. While he was talking with Stu, his eye had happened on the two library books, still sitting on the corner of his desk.