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.
If he could.
CHAPTER 9
The Library Policeman (I)
He did sleep well. There were no dreams, and an idea came to him naturally and easily in the shower the next morning, the way ideas sometimes did when your body was rested and your mind hadn’t been awake long enough to get cluttered up with a load of shit. The Public Library was not the only place where information was available, and when it was local history – recent local history -you were interested in, it wasn’t even the best place.
‘The Gazette!’ he cried, and stuck his head under the shower nozzle to rinse the soap out of it.
Twenty minutes later he was downstairs, dressed except for his coat and tie, and drinking coffee in his study. The legal pad was once more in front of him, and on it was the start of another list.
1. Ardelia Lortz – who is she? Or who was she?
2. Ardelia Lortz – what did she do?
3. Junction City Public Library – renovated? When? Pictures?
At this point the doorbell rang. Sam glanced at the clock as he got up to answer it. It was going on eight-thirty, time to get to work. He could shoot over to the Gazette office at ten, the time he usually took his coffee break, and check some back issues. Which ones? He was still mulling this over – some would undoubtedly bear fruit quicker than others – as he dug in his pocket for the paperboy’s money. The doorbell rang again.
‘I’m coming as fast as I can, Keith!’ he called, stepping into the kitchen entryway and grabbing the doorknob. ‘Don’t punch a hole in the damn d -‘
At that moment he looked up and saw a shape much larger than Keith Jordan’s bulking behind the sheer curtain hung across the window in the door. His mind had been preoccupied, more concerned with the day ahead than this Monday-morning ritual of paying the newsboy, but in that instant an icepick of pure terror stabbed its way through his scattered thoughts. He did not have to see the face; even through the sheer he recognized the shape, the set of the body . . . and the trenchcoat, of course.
The taste of red licorice, high, sweet, and sickening, flooded his mouth.
He let go of the doorknob, but an instant too late. The latch had clicked back, and the moment it did, the figure standing on the back porch rammed the door open. Sam was thrown backward into the kitchen. He flailed his arms to keep his balance and managed to knock all three coats hanging from the rod in the entryway to the floor.
The Library Policeman stepped in, wrapped in his own pocket of cold air. He stepped in slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and closed the door behind him. In one hand he held Sam’s copy of the Gazette, neatly rolled and folded. He raised it like a baton.
‘I brought you your paper,’ the Library Policeman said. His voice was strangely distant, as if it was coming to Sam through a heavy pane of glass. ‘I was going to pay the boy as well, but he theemed in a hurry to get away. I wonder why.’
He advanced toward the kitchen – toward Sam, who was cowering against the counter and staring at the intruder with the huge, shocked eyes of a terrified child, of some poor fourth-grade Simple Simon.
I am imagining this, Sam thought, or I’m having a nightmare – a nightmare so horrible it makes the one I had two nights ago look like a sweet dream.
But it was no nightmare. It was terrifying, but it was no nightmare. Sam had time to hope he had gone crazy after all. Insanity was no day at the beach, but nothing could be as awful as this man-shaped thing which had come into his house, this thing which walked in its own wedge of winter.
Sam’s house was old and the ceilings were high, but the Library Policeman had to duck his head in the entry, and even in the kitchen the crown of his gray felt hat almost brushed the ceiling. That meant he was over seven feet tall.
His body was wrapped in a trenchcoat the leaden color of fog at twilight. His skin was paper white. His face was dead, as if he could understand neither kindness nor love nor mercy. His mouth was set in lines of ultimate, passionless authority and Sam thought for one confused moment of how the closed library door had looked, like the slotted mouth in the face of a granite robot. The Library Policeman’s eyes appeared to be silver circles which had been punctured by tiny shotgun pellets. They were rimmed with pinkish-red flesh that looked ready to bleed. They were lashless. And the worst thing of all was this: it was a face Sam knew. He did not think this was the first time he had cringed in terror beneath that black gaze, and far back in his mind, Sam heard a voice with the slightest trace of a lisp say: Come with me, son … I’m a poleethman.