relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph's insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m. By the tenth of September rrested again, this time along with the day when Ed Deepneau was a fifteen others-Ralph's average night's sleep had shrunk to roughly ad begun to feel quite a little bit like something three hours and he had just a lonely little protozoa, that's me, on a slide under a microscope. J g-back chair, staring out at Harris he thought as he sat in the win Avenue, and wished he could laugh. es continued to grow, His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies.
It had occurred to him more than once that he could write an and if, that was, he ever got enough amusing little book on the subjec g possible again.
This late summer sleep to make organized thinking matching socks each day, and his he was doing well to slide into mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup and Helen had been beaten.
There had in the kitchen cabinet on the d e had managed at least been no return to that level since, because hight, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive some sleep every n didn't ' there again-and perhaps places beyond there-if things improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at morning) when he swore he could actually feel his four-thirty in the brains draining. from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best The remedies ranged from full-color brochure advertising the wonexample of the former was a Studies in St. Paul. A fair ders of The Minnesota Institute for Sleep amulet sold example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose and Inside through supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer no el these ewSue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought o vi a presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the an. g up at him from the medallion (which badly painted blue eye starin rted life as a poker-chip) and felt wild he believed had probably sta how managed to suppress laughter bubbling up inside him.
He some regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment it until he had y grateful. The gravity with across the street, and for that he was ver c)oking gold which Sue had given it to him-and the expensive chain she had threaded through the eyelet on top-suggested it had cost her a fair amount of money. She had regarded Ralph with something close to awe since the day the two of them had rescued Helen.
This made Ralph uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to do about it. In the meantime, he supposed it didn't hurt to wear the medallion so she could see the shape of it under his shirt. It didn't help him sleep, though.
After taking his statement on Ralph's part in the Deepneaus' domestic problems, Detective John Leydecker had pushed back his desk chair, laced his fingers together behind his not inconsiderable breadth of neck, and said that McGovern had told him Ralph suffered from insomnia.
Ralph allowed that he did. Leydecker nodded, rolled his chair forward again, clasped his hands atop the litter of paperwork beneath which the surface of his desk was mostly buried, and looked at Ralph seriously.
"Honeycomb, he said. His tone of voice reminded Ralph of McGovern's tone when he had suggested that whiskey was the answer, and his reply now was exactly the same.
"I beg your pardon?"
"My grandfather swore by it," Leydecker said. "Little piece of honeycomb just before bedtime. Suck the honey out of the comb, chew the wax a little-like you would a wad of gum-then spit it out. Bees secrete some sort of natural sedative when they make honey. Put you right out."
"No kidding," Ralph said, simultaneously believing it was utter crap and believing every word. "Where would a person get honeycomb, do you think"
"Nutra-the health food store out at the mall. Try it. By next week this time, your troubles are going to be over."
Ralph enjoyed the experiment-the comb honey was so sweetly powerful it seemed to surprise his whole being-but he still woke at 3:10 a.m. after the first dosage, at 3:08 after the second, and at 3:07 after the third. By then the small piece of honeycomb he'd purchased was gone, and he went out to Nutra right away for another one. Its value as a sedative might be nil, but it made