Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [225]
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