Four Past Midnight

think about it. The guy is fairly tall, about six feet, and I'd guess he's in his midforties. His face looked older, but he moved like a man in his forties. He has a country kind of face. Lots of color, lots of sun- wrinkles. When I saw him, I thought he looked like a character out of Faulk - '

'What's this all about, Mort?'

Now he felt all the way back; now he could understand again why, as hurt and confused as he had been, he had rejected the urges he felt - mostly at night - to ask her if they couldn't at least try to reconcile their differences. He supposed he knew that, if he asked long enough and hard enough, she would agree. But facts were facts; there had been a lot more wrong with their marriage than Amy's real-estate salesman. The drilling quality her voice had taken on now - that was another symptom of what had killed them. What have you done now? the tone under the words asked ... no, demanded. What kind of a mess have you gotten yourself into now? Explain yourself.

He closed his eyes and hissed breath through his closed teeth again before answering. Then he told her about John Shooter, and Shooter's manuscript, and his own short story. Amy clearly remembered 'Sowing Season,' but said she had never heard of a man named John Shooter - it wasn't the kind of name you forget, she said, and Mort was inclined to agree - in her life. And she certainly hadn't seen him.

'You're sure?' Mort pressed.

'Yes, I am,' Amy said. She sounded faintly resentful of Mort's continued questioning. 'I haven't seen anyone like that since you left. And before you tell me again not to say no right off the bat, let me assure you that I have a very clear memory of almost everything that's happened since then.'

She paused, and he realized she was speaking with an effort now, quite possibly with real pain. That small, mean part of him rejoiced. Most of him did not; most of him was disgusted to find even a small part of him happy about any of this. That had no effect on the interior celebrant, however. That guy might be outvoted, but he also seemed impervious to Mort's - the larger Mort's - attempts to root him out.

'Maybe Ted saw him,' he said. Ted Milner was the real-estate agent. He still found it hard to believe she had tossed him over for a real-estate agent, and he supposed that was part of the problem, part of the conceit which had allowed things to progress to this point in the first place. He certainly wasn't going to claim, especially to himself, that he had been as innocent as Mary's little lamb, was he?

'Is that supposed to be funny?' Amy sounded angry, ashamed, sorrowful, and defiant all at the same time.

'No,' he said. He was beginning to feel tired again.

'Ted isn't here,' she said. 'Ted hardly ever comes here. I ... I go to his place.'

Thank you for sharing that with me, Amy, he almost said, and choked it off. It would be nice to get out of at least one conversation without a swap of accusations. So he didn't say thanks for sharing and he didn't say that'll change and most of all he didn't ask what in the hell's the matter with you, Amy?

Mostly because she might then have asked the same thing of him.

8

She had suggested he call Dave Newsome, the Tashmore constable - after all, the man might be dangerous. Mort told her he didn't think that would be necessary, at least not yet, but if 'John Shooter' called by again, he would probably give Dave a jingle. After a few more stilted amenities, they hung up. He could tell she was still smarting over his oblique suggestion that Ted might currently be sitting in Mortybear's chair and sleeping in Mortybear's bed, but he honestly didn't know how he could have avoided mentioning Ted Milner sooner or later. The man had become a part of Amy's life, after all. And she had called him, that was the thing. She had gotten one of her funny feelings and called him.

Mort reached the place where the lakeside path forked, the righthand branch climbing the steep bank back up to Lake Drive. He took that branch, walking slowly and savoring the fall color. As he came around the final curve in the path and into sight of the narrow ribbon of blacktop, he was somehow not surprised to see the dusty blue station wagon with the Mississippi plates parked there like an oft- whipped dog chained to a tree, nor the lean figure of John Shooter propped against the right front mudguard with his arms folded across his chest.

Mort waited for his heartbeat to speed up, for the surge of adrenaline into his body, but his heart went on maintaining its normal beat, and his glands kept their own counsel - which, for the time being, seemed to be to remain quiet.

The sun, which had gone behind a cloud, came out again, and fall colors which had already been bright now seemed to burst into flame. His own shadow reappeared, dark and long and clearcut. Shooter's round black hat looked blacker, his blue shirt bluer, and the air was so clear the man seemed scissored from a swatch of reality that was brighter and more vital than the one Mort knew as a rule. And he understood that he had been wrong about his reasons for not calling Dave Newsome - wrong, or practicing a little deception - on himself as well as on Amy. The truth was that he wanted to deal with this matter himself. Maybe just to prove to myself that there are things I still deal with, he thought, and started up the hill again toward where John Shooter was leaning against his car and waiting for him.

9

His walk along the lake path had been both long and slow, and Amy's call hadn't been the only thing Mort had thought about as he picked his way over or around the occasional downed tree or paused to skip the occasional flat stone across the water (as a boy he had been able to get a really good one - what they called 'a flattie' - to skip as many as nine times, but today four was the most he'd been able to manage). He had also thought about how to deal with Shooter, when and if Shooter turned up again.

It was true he had felt a transient - or maybe not-so-transient - guilt when he saw how close to identical the two stories were, but he had worked that one out; it was only the generalized guilt he guessed all writers of fiction felt from time to time. As for Shooter himself, the only feelings he had were annoyance, anger . . . and a kind of relief. He was full of an unfocussed rage; had been for months. It was good to finally have a donkey to pin this rotten, stinking tail on.

Mort had heard the old saw about how, if four hundred monkeys banged away on four hundred typewriters for four million years, one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He didn't believe it. Even if it were true, John Shooter was no monkey and he hadn't been alive anywhere near that long, no matter how lined his face was.

So Shooter had copied his story. Why he had picked 'Sowing Season' was beyond Mort Rainey's powers of conjecture, but he knew that was what had happened because he had ruled out coincidence, and he knew damned well that, while he might have stolen that story, like all his others, from The Great Idea Bank of the Universe, he most certainly had not stolen it from Mr John Shooter of the Great State of Mississippi.

Where, then, had Shooter copied it from? Mort thought that was the most important question; his chance to expose Shooter as a fake and a cheat might lie buried within the answer to it.

There were only two possible answers, because 'Sowing Season' had only been published twice - first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and then in his collection, Everybody Drops the Dime. The dates of publication for the short stories in a collection are usually listed on the copyright page at the front of the book, and this format had been followed in Everybody Drops the Dime. He had looked up the

acknowledgement for 'Sowing Season' and found that it had been originally published in the June, 1980, issue of EQMM. The collection, Everybody Drops the Dime, had been issued by St Martin's Press in 1983. There had been subsequent printings since then - all but one of them in paperback - but that didn't matter. All he really had to work with were those two dates 1980 and 1983 ... and his own hopeful belief that, aside from agents and publishing-company lawyers, no one paid much attention to those lines of fine print on the copyright page.

Hoping that this would prove true to John Shooter, hoping that Shooter would simply assume - as most general readers did - that a story he had read for the first time in a collection had no prior existence, Mort approached the