Might be a lucky break.
He advanced the reel quickly to April 6th, and saw exactly what he had hoped for. Over the Gazette masthead, in red ink, it said:
SPECIAL LIBRARY SUPPLEMENT ENCLOSED!
Sam advanced to the supplement. There were two photos on the first page of the supplement. One was of the Library’s exterior. The other showed Richard Price, the head librarian, standing at the circulation desk and smiling nervously into the camera. He looked exactly as Naomi Higgins had described him – a tall, bespectacled man of about forty with a narrow little mustache. Sam was more interested in the background.
He could see the suspended ceiling which had so shocked him on his second trip to the Library. So the renovations had been done prior to April of 1981.
The stories were exactly the sort of self-congratulatory puff-pieces he expected – he had been reading the Gazette for six years now and was very familiar with its ain’t-we-a-jolly-bunch-of-JayCees editorial slant.
There were informative (and rather breathless) items about National Library Week, the Summer Reading Program, the Junction County Bookmobile, and the new fund drive which had just commenced. Sam glanced over these quickly. On the last page of the supplement he found a much more interesting story, one written by Price himself. It was titled.
THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY
One Hundred Years of History
Sam’s eagerness did not last long. Ardelia’s name wasn’t there. He reached for the power switch to rewind the microfilm and then stopped. He saw a mention of the renovation project – it had happened in 1970 – and there was something else. Something just a little off-key. Sam began to read the last part of Mr Price’s chatty historical note again, this time more carefully.
With the end of the Great Depression, our Council voted $5,000 to repair the extensive water damage the Library sustained during the Flood Of ’32, and Mrs Felicia Culpepper took on the job of Head Librarian, donating her time without recompense. She never lost sight of her goal: a completely renovated Library, serving a Town which was rapidly becoming a City.
Mrs Culpepper stepped down in 1951, giving way to Christopher Lavin, the first Junction City Librarian with a degree in Library Science. Mr Lavin inaugurated the Culpepper Memorial Fund, which raised over $15,000 for the acquisition of new books in its first year, and the Junction City Public Library was on its way into the modern age!
Shortly after I became Head Librarian in 1964, I made major renovations my number one goal. The funds needed to achieve this goal were finally raised by the end of 1969, and while both City and Federal money helped In the construction of the splendid building Junction City ‘bookworms’ enjoy today, this project could not have been completed without the help of all those volunteers who later showed up to swing a hammer or run a bench-saw during ‘Build Your Library Month’ in August Of 1970!
Other notable projects during the 1970’s and 1980’s included …
Sam looked up thoughtfully. He believed there was something missing from Richard Price’s careful, droning history of the town Library. No; on second thought, missing was the wrong word. The essay made Sam decide Price was a fussbudget of the first water – probably a nice man, but a fussbudget just the same –
and such men did not miss things, especially when they were dealing with subjects which were clearly close to their hearts.
So – not missing. Concealed.
It didn’t quite add up, chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking. In 1951, a man named Christopher Lavin had succeeded that saint Felicia Culpepper as head librarian. In 1964, Richard Price had become city librarian.
Had Price succeeded Lavin? Sam didn’t think so. He thought that at some point during those thirteen blank years, a woman named Ardelia Lortz had succeeded Lavin. Price, Sam thought, had succeeded her. She wasn’t in Mr Price’s fussbudgety account of the Library because she had done … something. Sam was no closer to knowing what that something might have been, but he had a better idea of the magnitude.
Whatever it was, it had been bad enough for Price to make her an unperson in spite of his very obvious love of detail and continuity.
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.
3
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 capet 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. Abbot 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.
4
‘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,