'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.'
Let the dead stay dead.
In a way it didn't surprise him; everything that had happened (with, perhaps, the exception of the message 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.
4
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 to 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.
He paused, drumming his fingers on the desk.
Where did she call me from? Do they have telephones in limbo?
He stared at the list of crossed-off names for a long moment, then tore the yellow sheet slowly off the pad. He crumpled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket.
You should have left it alone, part of him continued to mourn.
But he hadn't. So now what?
Call one of the guys you trust. Call Russ Frame or Tom Wycliffe. Just pick up the phone and make a call.
But he didn't want to do that. Not tonight, at least. He recognized this as an irrational, half-superstitious feeling - he had given and gotten a lot of unpleasant information over the phone just lately, or so it seemed - but he was too tired to grapple with it tonight. If he could get a good night's sleep (and he thought he could, if he left the bedside lamp on again), maybe something better, something more concrete, would occur to him tomorrow morning, when he was fresh. Further along, he supposed he would have to try and mend his fences with Naomi Higgins and Dave Duncan ... but first he wanted to find out just what kind of fences they were.