Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [227]
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.
When he left the second time, he'd had his briefcase in one hand and the books in the other. He was positive of that much.
He had intended to return them to the Library that evening, but then Frank Stephens had called, wanting him to come out to dinner with him and his wife and their niece, who was visiting from Omaha (when you were a bachelor in a small town, Sam had discovered, even your casual acquaintances became relentless matchmakers). They had gone to Brady's Ribs, had returned late -around eleven, late for a weeknight - and by the time he got home again, he had forgotten all about the library