his fifties-and sixties-era paperbacks, you won’t find it there. How could you? The Hunger Games was published in 2008. By then Fred Mueller had been dead for almost half a century. He dropped dead in January of 1965, suffered a fatal heart attack while shoveling his sister’s walkway—as you have almost certainly guessed by now, I read about it on my phone that evening, the phone he couldn’t see. He’d won the Distinguished Service Medal in the Surigao Strait, during some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific war. He was survived by a son, who, according to the obituary, was a math student in Cambridge, England.
Fred put his Heinlein on the table, took his vintage copy of The Hunger Games, and moved toward the exit, a door in the side of the library car. He had his hand on the latch when he hesitated and glanced back at me. He smiled uneasily. I thought he looked a little waxy, and there was a bead of sweat crawling from his left temple.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I ask you a funny question?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Anyone ever ask you if you’re a ghost?” he said, and laughed, and touched his forehead as if he were feeling a touch woozy again.
“I was wondering the same thing about you,” I said, and laughed with him.
NO SOONER HAD HE STEPPED out and closed the door than a fist rapped against it. I came around the desk and threw it open and stared down at a knot of mothers and small children with snot-crusted upper lips. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it. In the time I was talking to Fred Mueller, borrower number 1919 of Gilead Road, West Fever, that low, filthy, cold mist had dried out and burned off entirely.
I craned my neck, peering over the small crowd, looking across the vast parking lot of gravel and potholes, but there was no sight of Mr. Mueller and his hat with the giant earflaps.
I couldn’t say I was surprised.
IT WAS ONLY FOUR IN the afternoon when I returned the Bookmobile to the lot between the library and Parks & Rec, but it was already dark and smelled like snow. I walked half a block to a local coffee chain, got a coffee, and sat with my phone, reading about Fred Mueller and then Fred Mueller’s son. His kid, who’d been in his early twenties when his father died, was in his seventies now, had retired to Hawaii. In the 1970s he had come up with a protocol allowing computers to talk to each other over phone lines. He was one of about a dozen guys who could claim to be the father of the Internet. His virtuosity with electronics had made him a minor celebrity in geek circles. He’d done a cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation, been name-checked in a William Gibson novel, was the basis for a scientist character in one of the James Cameron flicks. I visited his Web page and broke into a nasty sweat. The bio photo showed a stringy old man with a patchy beard standing with a surfboard under a palm tree. He wore board shorts . . . and a Hunger Games T-shirt. In a FAQ it was listed as a favorite book. He’d even been a consultant on the film. He’d been a consultant on a lot of sci-fi films.
I wondered if he’d read it before it was published. I wondered if he’d read it before the author, Suzanne Collins, had been born. That thought made me clammy. My next thought gave me an outright chill. What, I wondered, would’ve happened if I’d given Mr. Mueller a book about 9/11 instead? Could he have stopped it?
I did not wonder if it had happened. I did not need to wonder. I had his late return in the pocket of my coat: that scuffed cranberry-colored hardcover of Tunnel in the Sky. Fred Mueller’s name was the last entry on the borrower card in the back. The return-by stamp said 1/13/65, and he had dropped dead on January 17 of that year, just four days later.
Did he finish reading The Hunger Games before his heart gave out? I hoped so. For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.
“If I sit down with you, will I be derailing an important train of thought?” Ralph Tanner asked from over my