“No, that’s not why I wanted it. I may have told you that I used the catalog as a checklist. So I brought it downstairs in order to be able to tell whether or not a given stamp was one I needed for my collection.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “I don’t see what’s so pathetic about it.”

“What’s pathetic,” he said, “is I need all the stamps for my collection, everything ever made except for Sweden one through five. Because, outside of those five stamps I had no business buying, I don’t have a collection.”

“Oh.”

“And here’s the best part. There was a point when I realized it was pathetic — or ridiculous, or whatever you want to call it. But that didn’t stop me. I went on working out just what stamps I would buy to help fill in the collection I no longer own.”

He almost missed it.

He worked late the following day, and by the time he got home all he was up for was dinner and an hour of TV before they went up to bed. The day after that he was off, and spent the morning doing a tentative preliminary pruning of the shrubbery, trying to find a line of compromise between the plants’ desire to grow tall and his and Julia’s preference for a little more light and visibility on the front porch. He stopped a little after noon, wondering if he’d lopped off too much or too little.

Late in the afternoon they took her car and drove to a seafood shack on the Gulf just across the state line in Mississippi. Donny and Claudia had enthused over it, and it was all right, but on the way home they agreed it wasn’t worth the time it took to get there and back. They went inside, and she had a couple of loads of wash she’d been meaning to do, and Keller caught sight of Linn’s on the chair in the den and picked it up so he could toss it out. Because he’d read most of the articles, and he didn’t collect stamps anymore, so why keep the thing around?

But instead he sat down with it and found himself leafing through it, and he tried to figure out a way to collect without a collection. One possibility, he thought, was to continue his collection as if he still owned it, buying only stamps he hadn’t already owned, and keeping them not in an album (because he already had albums, or had had them) but in a box or stockbook. The premise would be that they were awaiting eventual placement in his albums when they found their way back to him, which of course would never happen, which meant he’d never have to mount the stamps but could concentrate exclusively upon obtaining them.

In a sense, he’d be collecting stamps the way an ornithologist collected birds. Each new bird, once it had been spotted and identified, would go on the birder’s life list; he didn’t need physical possession of the creature in order to claim it as his own. By the same token, the stamps Keller had owned, the stamps that had been taken from him, were still his. They were on his life list.

He’d still use the Scott catalog as his checklist. When he bought a new stamp, he’d circle its number in his catalog so he wouldn’t make a mistake and buy it again. The new acquisitions, he thought, could be circled in another color, blue or green, so he’d be able to tell at a glance whether his acquisition came before or after the date the collection disappeared, and whether he owned a particular stamp in fact or in theory.

It was deeply weird, he knew, but was it that much stranger than collecting stamps in the first place?

He turned the pages of the newspaper, too much involved in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what passed before his eyes. So he’d probably looked at and looked away from the small ad before it ever registered.

Toward the back of the paper, but before you got to the classifieds, Linn’s gave over the better part of a page to small-space ads, one or two inches tall and a column wide, that amounted essentially to dealer’s announcements. One might proclaim oneself a specialist in France and its colonies, or in the British Empire before 1960. There was one chap who’d had the same ad running for all the years Keller had subscribed, offering AMG issues, the stamps produced by the Allied Military Government for use in occupied Germany and Austria after the end of the Second World War. There he was, Keller noted, still at it, word for precious word, and—

Two columns over, he saw this:

JUST PLAIN KLASSICS

Satisfaction Guaranteed

www.jpktoxicwaste.com

Keller stared at the ad. He blinked several times, but it was still there when he looked at it again. It was impossible, but unless he’d dozed off and was dreaming, the ad was really there, and it couldn’t be, because it was impossible.

There had been times in his life when he’d been dreaming, realized it was a dream, and willed himself out of it — but remained in the dream, even though he thought he’d returned to waking consciousness. Was this like that? He got up, walked around, and sat down again, wondering whether he was really walking around or had just incorporated the walking into his dream. He picked up the paper, and he read some of the other ads, to see if they were the usual thing or the sort of gibberish dreams were apt to produce.

As far as he could tell, they were okay. And the ad from Just Plain Klassics was still there, and still impossible.

Because the only person who could possibly have placed that ad was dead, shot twice in the head and burned up in a fire in White Plains.

31

It took him a few blocks out of his way, but Keller drove along Magazine Street to get a look at the stamp shop. He spotted it, but only because he knew where to look for it. The signage was minimal, and that explained why he’d never noticed it before.

He thought of stopping in, to see if they had any other issues of Linn’s around. That way he could find out if the ad had run before, but why bother? What difference did it make?

Ten minutes later he was parked across the street from an Internet café, where a kid who looked more like a college wrestler than your prototypical geek pointed him to a computer. He hadn’t sat in front of one since he was bidding for stamps on eBay, back before the flight to Iowa. His laptop had been gone by the time he returned to his New York apartment, and he’d never even considered replacing it. What for?

Julia, who’d sold her own computer before moving back from Wichita, had talked about getting another, but with about the same sense of urgency as she talked about cleaning out the attic. It might happen, possibly even in their lifetime, but you couldn’t call it a high-priority item.

Even if she’d had a computer, he wouldn’t have used it for this. A public machine in a public setting, far from his own neighborhood, was what the situation called for.

He settled in, booted up Explorer, and typed in www.jpktoxicwaste.com. And clicked on Go.

The headline could have been a coincidence. A dealer specializing in the classic issues from philately’s first century, 1840 to 1940, might chance upon Just Plain Classics as a name for his business venture, and might decide to distort the spelling as an homage, say, to Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

If so, he’d managed to hit on a name that resonated with Keller. Not so much because those were the stamps Keller collected, since he was hardly unique in this respect, but because the initials were his. JPK = John Paul Keller — or, as Dot was apt to point out, Just Plain Keller.

The owner of Just Plain Klassics hadn’t troubled to include his name, but he wasn’t unique in that respect. He hadn’t included a postal address, either, or a phone or fax number, but limited himself to the URL of his website. A lot of philatelic business was conducted on the Web these days, and plenty of classified ads limited their contact information to an email address, but this was unusual in a display ad.