Four Past Midnight

could squash his rising business aspirations flat if they chose to do so.

Sam decided to leave as quickly and quietly as he could. To his credit, this decision was not based on personal considerations. The people sitting out there on the back lawn of Angle Street shared a serious problem. He had discovered this by accident; he had no intention of staying -and eavesdropping - on purpose.

As he went back down the hallway again, he saw a pile of cut-up paper resting on top of the pay phone. A stub of pencil had been tacked to the wall on a short length of string beside the phone. On impulse he took a sheet of the paper and printed a quick note on it.

Dave,

I stopped by this morning to see you, but nobody was around. I want to talk to you about a woman named Ardelia Lortz. I've got an idea you know who she is, and I'm anxious to find out about her. Will you give me a call this afternoon or this evening, if you get a chance? The number is 555-8699. Thanks very much.

He signed his name at the bottom, folded the sheet in half, and printed Dave's name on the fold. He thought briefly about taking it back down to the kitchen and putting it on the counter, but he didn't want any of them - Naomi most of all -worrying that he might have seen them at their odd but perhaps helpful devotions. He propped it on top of the TV in the common room instead, with Dave's name facing out. He thought about placing a quarter for the telephone beside the note and then didn't. Dave might take that wrong.

He left then, glad to be out in the sun again undiscovered. As he got back into his car, he saw the bumper sticker on Naomi's Datsun.

LET GO AND LET GOD,

it said.

'Better God than Ardelia,' Sam muttered, and backed out the driveway to the road.

3

By late afternoon, Sam's broken rest of the night before had begun to tell, and a vast sleepiness stole over him. He turned on the TV, found a Cincinnati-Boston exhibition baseball game wending its slow way into the eighth inning, lay down on the sofa to watch it, and almost immediately dozed off. The telephone rang before the doze had a chance to spiral down into real sleep, and Sam got up to answer it, feeling woozy and disoriented.

'Hello?'

'You don't want to be talking about that woman,' Dirty Dave said with no preamble whatsoever. His voice was trembling at the far edge of control. 'You don't even want to be thinking about her.'

How long are you Godless heathens going to go on throwing that woman in our faces? Do you think it's funny? Do you think it's clever?

All of Sam's drowsiness was gone in an instant. 'Dave, what is it about that woman? Either people react as though she were the devil or they don't know anything about her. Who is she? What in the hell did she do to freak you out this way?'

There was a long period of silence. Sam waited through it, his heart beating heavily in his chest and throat. He would have thought the connection had been broken if not for the sound of Dave's broken breathing in his ear.

'Mr Peebles,' he said at last, 'you've been a real good help to me over the years. You and some others helped me stay alive when I wasn't even sure I wanted to myself. But I can't talk about that bitch. I can't. And if you know what's good for you, you won't talk to anybody else about her, neither.'

'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