Bookman's wake

“He’s the one the cops are looking for. They think he took Ellie with him.”

“Had you ever had any contact or dealing with Pruitt before this came up?”

She paused as if groping for words. “I knew who he was.”

“Tell me about it.”

“A crazy man. He seemed to think we had something…”

“A book.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. He wouldn’t go away, though, wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d go to town and see him watching from a car. Then he started bothering us on the telephone. At night he’d call, play music. Just a few notes, but we knew it was him.”

“He was stalking Eleanor too.”

She expelled a shivery breath.

“Listen, did you get a letter from Eleanor in yesterday’s mail? It would’ve probably been on Hilton Hotel stationery.”

“It never came here.”

“It may come tomorrow. What time is your mail delivered?”

“Whenever he gets here. Early afternoon as often as any.”

“I’ll try to call then.”

“What’s in the letter?”

“That’s what I need to find out. It might be her laundry bill. For our purposes, think of it as some dark secret she’d rather not tell the world. Is there anybody else she might send something like that to?”

“Amy Harper,” she said immediately. “Nobody but Amy.”

I remembered the name. “Eleanor mentioned her once. Said she’d gone to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there.”

“Amy moved into Seattle, I coulda told her that. Her life out here’d turned to hell the last six months, especially after her mom died. I worry about that child, don’t know what’s gonna become of her. She’s made some wrong choices in the last few years. But really a sweet kid. She and Ellie were like sisters all through school.”

“I seem to remember there was some kind of rift between them.”

“They had a falling-out over Coleman Willis. That’s the fool Amy let knock her up when she was still at Mt. Si High. Then she made it worse: married the fool and quit school and had a second kid the next year. The trouble between them was simple. Ellie had no use for Coleman Willis, couldn’t be in the same room with the man. Amy was still trying to make it work. You can see what happened.”

“Sure.”

“But Amy’s no fool. There came a time when even she’d had enough of Coleman and his bullshit, and she took her kids and left him. She and Ellie got together once or twice after that. I really think they’d fixed things up between ‘em, I think they were good as new.”

“Is there a phone number for Amy?”

“God, Amy can’t afford a telephone, she’s lucky she’s got a roof over her head. I’ve got an address if you want it…it’s a rooming house on Wall Street. Are you familiar with the section they call Belltown?”

I wasn’t.

“It’s easy, right off downtown. Just a minute, I’ll get it for you.”

34

It was just fifteen blocks from the Hilton, about as far as Oz is from Kansas. It made me remember myself as a kid, bouncing around for a year of my life in places not much better than this. Now I go through these neighborhoods and the memory of rank and scummy beds hits me like a shot of bad whiskey. It’s a chilly reminder of what life hands out to those who slip and can’t climb up again. The young seem unbothered by the lack of elegance: time, they believe, will see them through it, and time when you’re twenty is a thing you’ll never run out of. You can sleep anywhere when you’re running on your rims, and you don’t give too much thought to the dripping tap or the cracked and faded walls or the mice that come tearing across your landscape. The young endure and hope, until suddenly they’re forty and time isn’t what it once was. The old suffer and save their hopes for the real things in life—a high, dry present and a quiet place to die.

On the second floor of this environment, at the end of a long, dim corridor, lived Amy Harper. The floor creaked with every step and the walls were thin. I could hear people talking—in one room shouting— as I walked past the doors and stopped at 218.

Be there, I thought, and I knocked.

She was: I could hear her move inside. Soft footsteps came at me and a soft voice asked who I was. I said I was a friend of Eleanor’s.

She opened the door and looked at me through a narrow crack. I could see a chain looped across the crack, a little piece of false security she had probably bought and installed herself. A man like me could break it with one kick, long before she had time to get the door closed.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

“My name’s Janeway, I’m a friend of Eleanor’s.”

For a moment she didn’t know what to do. I got the feeling she’d have opened the door if she’d been there alone. But I could hear a baby crying and I knew she was thinking about her children.

“Crystal gave me your address,” I said, and at that she decided to let me in.

It was just what I’d expected—a one-room crib with a battered couch that pulled out and became a bed; a table so scarred by old wars and sweating bottles that you couldn’t tell what color it had been; two pallets for the children; a kitchenette with a gas stove and an old refrigerator; a bathroom the size of a telephone booth. There was one good chair: she had been sitting in it, reading a paperback. Stephen King, the grand entertainer of his time. God bless Stephen King when you couldn’t afford a TV.

She had been nursing the baby: she still held it in the crook of her arm. Her left breast had soaked through the faded blouse she wore. She covered it, draping a towel over her shoulder, excusing herself to put the child in the pallet next to the other one. “So, hi,” she said with a cheery smile as she stood and brushed back a wisp of red hair. Crystal had called her a sweet kid and the adjective seemed just right. Amy Harper had.the sweetest face I’d ever seen on a girl. You looked at her and saw a young woman who wanted to love you.

She couldn’t offer much—a cup of instant decaf or a diet Coke maybe—but her manners were alive and well. I let her fix me some coffee, mainly because she seemed to want to. She went into the kitchenette, stand-up room for only one, and turned on the gas. “So how is Eleanor?” she called back across the room. Apparently they had not been in touch.

“Actually she’s not so good,” I said, sitting on the chair where she had been. “She seems to’ve disappeared on us.”

She looked out of the kitchen, her face drawn and suddenly pale.

“I’m trying to find her.”

“What’re you, some kind of detective?”

“Some kind of one. Crystal hoped you could help us.”

“If I could, God, you know I would. I haven’t got a clue where she might be. Just a minute, this water’s boiling.”

I heard the sounds of water pouring and the tinkle of a spoon stirring in the coffee crystals. She came out with two steaming cups, insisting that I stay in the chair. She sat on the floor against the wall and looked at me through the steam rising from her cup.

“I haven’t got a clue,” she said again.

“When was the last time you saw her, or heard from her?”

“Haven’t seen her in…must be more than a month ago.”

“Any mail from her…cards, letters…anything?”

“No, nothing.”

“I’m looking for one letter in particular. I’m not sure if it’s had time to be delivered yet. She may’ve mailed it Friday night.”

“To me, you mean?”

“We don’t know. Crystal thinks that’s a possibility.”

“Probably come tomorrow then.”

“If it does, would you let me see it?”

“Yeah, sure, if it’ll help; I’ll do anything I can.”

We sipped our coffee: I could see her running it all through her mind.

“If she mailed something to me, it probably wouldn’t come here. I haven’t seen her since I moved into town. She’d send it out to my mamma’s place in Snoqualmie.”

“Could we ride out there and see?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll have to take off from work…my boss is a little touchy about that…I’ll just tell him I’m taking off. If he fires me, he fires me.”

“I don’t want you to get fired. Maybe I could go check the mail for you.”

She shook her head. “No, I want to go too. You’ve got me worried. Jesus, I hope she didn’t hurt herself again.”

“Crystal said you were special friends.”

I saw a tremor of feeling ripple through her. “Oh, yeah. She’s like my soul mate. I don’t mean…”

I knew what she didn’t mean. She said, “We were just great together, all through grade school, then high school. We were inseparable. If I wasn’t sleeping over there, she was over with my mamma and me. We’d sit in our rooms and talk about boys, and the drudgery of life at Mount Success.”

She gave a sad little laugh. “That’s what we used to call Mt. Si High—Mount Success—because so many of the people who went there seemed to go nowhere afterward. They just stayed in that little town forever. I never understood that, but now I do. Here I am in the big city and all I want is to get back home.”

“Why don’t you? It’s only twenty-five miles.”

“It’s a lot farther than that.” She shrugged. “I had to get out of there. My ex lives there and he’s bad news. If I went back, he’d just hassle me.”

“Crystal said you and Eleanor had drifted apart, then got together again.”

“The drifting was my fault. I married a guy who was a jerk. Want some more coffee?”

“Sure.”

She got up, poured, came back, sat. “That’s the first time I ever said that. My husband was a jerk. There, maybe now I can get rid of it. He was a grade-A heel.” She laughed. “Hey, it feels better all the time. Maybe if I call him what he really was, I’ll be good as new. Wouldn’t be very ladylike, though.”

I let her talk.

“Ellie tried to tell me what he was like, that’s why we almost lost it. I didn’t want to hear that. But the whole time I was married to this fella, and carrying his children, he was trying to make it with my best friend. What do you do with a guy like that?”

“You leave him.”

“Yeah. And here I am, bringing up my children in this palace. Working in a bar and giving most of my money to the day-care people. Wonderful, huh? But I’ll get through it.”

I leaned forward, the coffee cup clasped between my hands, warming them. “Amy, I don’t have any doubt of that at all.”

She smiled that sweet smile. I thought of Rosie Drimeld, the lighthearted heroine of Cakes and Ale . Maugham would’ve loved this one.

“The great thing about Ellie, though,” she said, “is, she never let it bother her. The hard feelings were all on my side.”

“But you got over it.”

“Yes, thank God. Even an ignoramus sees the light if it’s shined right in her face.”

“And Crystal said you two got together again and patched it up.”

“My mamma died. Ellie came to the funeral and we cried and hugged and it was all over, just like that. Then I found that stuff of hers…”

She looked away, as if she’d touched on something she shouldn’t be talking about.

“What stuff?”

“Just some things my mamma had.”

“Things…of Eleanor’s?”

“Not exactly. Just…stuff. Papers in Mamma’s stuff…it really isn’t anything.”

I felt a tingle along my backbone. “Tell me about it.”

“I can’t. I promised.”

I looked straight into her eyes. “Amy, whatever you tell me, I’ll try not to let it out. That’s all I can promise you, but this may be important.”

Her eyes were green: her face radiated hope, her eyes searched for trust. But she was also a child of this planet who had begun to learn that you can’t trust everyone.

“I don’t even know you.”

“Sure you do.”

She laughed at that and I laughed with her.

“You don’t know, do you,” I said, “about the trouble she got in, down in New Mexico.”

Her eyes opened wide. No, she didn’t know.

I told her.

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I knew it, I knew it, I just knew something bad was gonna come of this. This is my fault, I should’ve burned it, I never should’ve shown it to her.”

“Shown her what?”

“When Mamma died she left me some stuff. God, you never saw so much stuff. My mother was a pack rat, that house of hers is just full of stuff, it’s packed to the rafters. You won’t believe it when we go out there. I know I’m gonna have to start going through it, it’s got to be done, but I just can’t face it yet. I’ve got to soon, though…that house just has to be cleared out.”

It seemed she had lost her drift in the maze of problems she had to deal with. She got it back, looked at me, and said, “There were some papers in Mamma’s stuff…things I thought Ellie should see.”

I nodded, urging her with body language.

She got up and went to a little end table half-hidden by the couch. I heard a drawer squeak open and saw her leafing through some papers. She pulled out a manila envelope, came over, and got down on one knee beside my chair. She opened the flap and handed me a photograph.

It was an eight-by-ten black and white. It was Eleanor in jeans and a sleeveless blouse, taken in the summertime in good light. She was leaning against the door of an old frame building, smoking a cigarette and smiling in a sly, sexy way. “Nice picture,” I said.

But I looked again and in fact it wasn’t a nice picture. It was her eyes, I thought, and that killer smile. She looked almost predatory.

“It’s not her,” Amy said.

I turned the picture over. On the bottom, handwritten in fading ink, was an inscription.

Darryl’s printshop, May 1969 .

35

Isn’t that a kick in the head,“ Amy said, looking around my shoulder. ”Imagine looking at a mirror image of yourself, in a picture taken the year you were born. I thought about it for weeks, you know, whether I should show it to her or not. I knew the minute I saw it that nothing good would come of it. I felt all along that I should’ve burned it.“

“Why didn’t you?”

“It didn’t seem like I had the right. It wasn’t my call to make.”

“What did you do?”

“One day I just showed it to her. She had come out to Mamma’s to help me get started on going through things. We putzed around all morning on the first floor—I didn’t even want to go upstairs where all this stuff was—and we were sitting in the kitchen having lunch. It had been on my mind all morning, and I still didn’t know what to do. Then she looked across the table at me and said, ‘You’re like the sister I never had, you’re just so special, and I’m happier than you’ll ever know that we’re okay again.’ I felt tears in my eyes and I knew then that I had to tell her, there was no stopping it, and the best I could do was put a happy face on it.”

“How did she take it?”

“I couldn’t tell at first. I was hoping she’d look up and shrug it off, say something like, ‘Yeah, I never told you, I was adopted,’ and that would be the end of it. Then we could laugh about it and let it blow away and I could rest in peace knowing I’d done right by her. But the longer she sat there, the worse it got, and I came around the table and took her hands, and I knew for sure then that it had just knocked her props out. Her whole world was scrambled, it was like she couldn’t think straight for a long time, like she couldn’t get a grip on what she was seeing. I put my hand on her shoulder and said something stupid about what a coincidence it was, but we both knew better. There’s no way.”

“Then what happened?”

“She said she had to go home, she wasn’t feeling well. And she left.”

“Did you see her again after that?”

“Yeah, she called the next day and asked if she could come out to the house again and look through the stuff in the attic. So we did that. I worked downstairs and she sat all day in that hot attic, going through papers and old letters.”

“Did she tell you if she found anything?”

“All I know is, she didn’t take anything…just the one picture of this woman. I think she made some notes though.”

“Were there other pictures?”

“There was a whole roll taken at this same place. I think Mamma took them; it’s her handwriting on the back and I know she was doing some photography then. There were maybe twenty shots of different people.”

“Do you have the other pictures?”

“They’d still be out at the house, up in the attic.”

“Were they people you knew?”

“Mostly, yeah: there were pictures of Gaston and Crystal and Archie. God, were they young!”

“What about Darryl and Richard Grayson?”

“I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t know them if I saw them. I think they were just friends of Mamma’s, way back then.”

“Do you know if Eleanor ever told Crystal about this?”

“No, and I wasn’t going to. I felt like I’d done enough harm.”

“Then it’s possible they still don’t know.”

“Yeah, sure it is. But we can’t tell them. The last thing Ellie said to me was not to tell anybody, especially not Crystal and Gaston. She made me promise I wouldn’t.”

“It takes courage to break a promise like that. Sometimes you have to, if the person’s welfare is at stake.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what I think. Has anybody else been up in that attic since your mother died?”

“There was a man who came, just after it happened.”

“What man?”

“Just a minute, I’m trying to think, he gave me his name. He said he was an old friend of Mamma’s who saw the item about her funeral in the newspaper.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Old…older than Mamma, even. Kinda frail.”

“What did he want?”

“He said she had promised to help him on something he was writing…some magazine article. She had some information he needed to make it work.”

“Why didn’t he get it from her while she was still alive?”

“He was going to. Her death was pretty sudden. She was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for supper, when her heart gave out.”

“So what did you do?”

“About this man, you mean?…I let him look through the attic. I didn’t think there was anything special or valuable up there.”

“This was even before Eleanor got up there, then?”

“Yes, at least two, three weeks before.”

“And you don’t remember this man’s name?”

“It’s right on my tongue, I’ll think of it in a minute.”

“Did he take anything out of there?”

“Not that I remember. He did have a big canvas briefcase with him. I suppose he could’ve put something in that. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t trust people so much. Do you think he took something?”

“If you remember his name, I’ll see if I can find him and ask him.”

She shrugged.

“You said your mother may have shot the picture herself. Did you ever ask her about her life when she was young—who her friends were, what they did, stuff like that?”

“I was a kid. You know how it is, all I ever thought about then was kid stuff. Now I wish I’d taken more time with her, but then we were all into boys and music and makeup. When you’re a kid, your parents are probably the least exciting people in the universe. And you never want to learn too much about them, you’re always afraid they’ll just be human, have the same failings and hang-ups you’ve got.”

“You said there was other stuff in the attic…besides the pictures?”

“Tons of stuff…boxes and boxes of records and papers and letters. It just fills up that attic.”

“What was the purpose of it? Did she ever tell you?”

“She always said she was going to write a book about Mr. Grayson, who had been her friend for years.”

“Did she tell you how they met?”

“No.”

“What about your father?”

Her brow furrowed: dark clouds gathered behind her eyes. “What about him?”

“Who was he?”

“Just a man Mamma knew. He wasn’t around long.”

“Was his name Harper?”

“What’s that got to do with Eleanor? My father’s been nothing in my life.”

“It’s probably got nothing to do with anything. It’s just a question a cop asks.”

“My father’s name was Paul Ricketts. I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.”

“Was he there then?”

“When?”

“The year we’re talking about…1969.”

“He must’ve been, at least for twenty minutes.” She blushed a little. “I was born that year.”

“Where’d the name Harper come from?”

“It was Mamma’s family name. She never married this man. I really don’t see why you’re asking me this.”

I backed off. I didn’t want to lose her. “I’m just trying to find out who was there, who’s still around, and what they might know. What about this book your mother was writing?”

“She never wrote a word, never had the time. It was always tomorrow. ‘Tomorrow I’ll get started.’ But tomorrow came and guess what?…She didn’t have the time. She always had to work two jobs to keep me in shoes and have good food for us to eat. And then that other Grayson book came out, you know, by that woman at the Times , and that put the kibosh on it. Mamma knew she’d never write anything after that.”

“But she did keep the material?”

“She never threw away anything in her life.”

The thought that had been building in my mind now occurred to her. “Are you thinking maybe Eleanor found something up there in Mamma’s stuff that caused her to go to New Mexico and break into that house?”

“There’s a fair chance of it. That does seem to be where everything started coming apart for her.”

“Damn. Makes you want to go out there now and start looking through it, doesn’t it?”

“If that’s an invitation, I’d love it.”

She shook her head. “The house is dark, there’s no power, they turned off the lights three weeks ago. And I’ll feel a lot better tomorrow without the kids. I can drop ‘em in day care at seven-thirty and we can head out then.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I’m as anxious as you are. I’m just not crazy about having my kids spend the night in a dark house in the country…you know what I mean?”

“In the morning then.”

But she was my one real link to the past and I hated to leave her there.

Then I realized I didn’t have to.

36

I talked her into my room at the Hilton with little effort. I explained it away as a room I had rented but couldn’t use, and she wasn’t inclined to ask questions. To her it was a Wheel of Fortune vacation: two nights in Oz, with a color TV, a king-size bed, and room service. I told her to order whatever she wanted, it was already paid for; then I left another hundred on deposit at the desk to cover it. It was after nine when I got over to Mercer Island, a wooded, hilly residential neighborhood just across the bridge from the city. Mercer dominates the lower half of Lake Washington: you come off Interstate 90 and swing along a spectacular bluff that overlooks the highway; then you curl back inland on a street called Mercerwood Drive and up past some expensive-looking real estate. It was not a place I’d imagine a working reporter to live in. So she had a boat, pricey digs, and a job that let her write her own ticket: I still couldn’t imagine the Times paying her more than fifty grand. As I backtracked west, the houses seemed more ordinary. I turned left, deadended into a high school, and eventually found my way around it and came into her block.

It was an older house with a well-lived look to it. It sat on a large lot surrounded by trees. I pulled into her driveway and fished out the package she had left me from under the seat. She had left the night-light on as well as two lights inside the house. I got out and walked up like I owned the place.

The key was in the flowerpot, just where she’d said.

I came into a dark hallway. A brief memory of Pruitt’s house flashed through my mind before the place burst into life—two golden retrievers charged from the rear in joyous welcome. I got down with them and roughed them the way big dogs seem to like it. Mitzi and Pal, the tags on their collars said. Mitzi was especially affectionate and I felt welcome, less like a stranger in this town of endless rain.

The hall opened into a large living area. There was a TV, VCR, and disc player, all the comforts. Just off the big room was a dining room, with a mahogany table that seated eight, and beyond that was the kitchen.

In the middel of the table was a cassette tape player, with the door flipped open.

Near the tape player was a note, telling her friend Judy Maples how much to feed the dogs and where things were. The dogs came and went, I saw, through a doggie door that opened off the kitchen into a groundlevel deck, and from there into a backyard.

I opened the refrigerator, which was well stocked with beer; I fetched myself one and sat at the counter sipping the foam. I took the tape out of the bag and snapped it into place in the machine.

“Hi,” she said. “Isn’t this cozy?”

She paused as if we were there together and it were my turn to talk. I said, “Yes ma’am, and I thank you very large.”

“You’ll find beer in the fridge,” she said, “but knowing you, you already have. Seriously, make yourself at home. The dogs will want to sleep with you, but they won’t pester: if you close your door, they’ll whine for about five minutes, then they’ll shut up and go about their business. They’re well behaved; I’m sure you’ll get along famously.

“There’s plenty of food. The freezer’s well stocked, and if you don’t see anything there you want, there’s a big freezer in the garage. You can defrost just about anything in the microwave. Again I’m anticipating your little idiosyncrasies and impatiences, and assuming that you’ve never read an instruction booklet in your life. Do yourself a favor and read the two paragraphs I’ve left open and marked on the table. It’s impossible to defrost food without knowing the codes. You could spend years of your life trying to figure it out on your own. I imagine you’ll try anyway.

“I thought you’d be most comfortable in the big room on the right at the top of the stairs. It’s a man’s room—I rented this house from an FBI agent who’s now doing a tour of duty in Texas. So that’s where you should go—the room upstairs, not Texas—when you’re ready to call it a night.”

There was another pause. I stopped the tape, looked through the freezer, found a pizza, and put it in the real oven on a piece of tinfoil. The hell with instructional booklets written by committee in Japan.

I pushed the on button on the tapedeck.

“So,” she said, “on to business.”

Yes ma’am.

“The cops picked up that kid who was with Pruitt and Carmichael. His name is Bobby John Dalton, date of birth”—I could hear her shuffling through notes—“one nine…umm…‘sixty-six. He’s got a record, nothing major: one or two fights, one assault charge, a drunk and disorderly, carrying an unlicensed weapon, having an open can in a moving vehicle. He thinks of himself as a tough guy, a muscleman. Maybe he is—I mention it so you’ll know…he’ll figure he owes you for what you did to him in the garage. He was a bouncer in a nightclub, a bodyguard…Quintana wouldn’t tell me much more than that. I’m recording this on Saturday night. My plane leaves in two hours and I don’t know at this moment whether they’ve actually booked this Dalton kid or are just holding him for questioning. He was still downtown the last time I checked, about an hour ago. I don’t know if the cops have any new leads on Pruitt after talking to the kid.”

Again she leafed through her notes. “Here’s a little more personal information on the Dalton kid…just a minute.”

She read off a home address, on Pine Street east of 1-5. “It’s a boardinghouse owned by his mother. She seems to be a character in her own right, in fact as mean as he thinks he is. His father’s been dead for years, though probably not long enough. The old man was a gambler and a drunk and was probably abusive. It’s no wonder Bobby’s on a fast track to nowhere.

“This should make you feel pretty good. At least the cops are doing their part. They’re looking at Rigby as a serious abduction, so you’ve accomplished what you wanted without coming in. However, comma, be advised that Quintana is still on your case.”

I heard a click, then another, as if she had turned the machine off then on again. “As you would imagine, the cops are playing it close to the vest on the particulars at the murder scene. I did find out, from a source inside the department, one strange bit of information. At this point they think the woman in the house was killed sometime earlier than Carmichael…maybe as much as two hours. They’ll know more when the lab gets through and, hopefully, so will I. But assuming that holds up, don’t you find it strange?”

Yes ma’am.

“That’s all I have on it. I guess you should burn this tape. I’ve set a fire for you in the living room: all you’ve got to do is light it and toss this in. In fact, I don’t know if you’ll get in touch with Judy, or if you’ll hear this tape, or if you do hear it, when that might be.”

She took a deep breath. “I should be back in Seattle by Tuesday night…earlier if I get lucky.”

I could hear doubt in her voice now, as if she had come to a new bit of business and wasn’t sure how much if any of it she wanted to tell me.

“Have you read my book yet? Did you like it?”

Yes ma’am.

“I guess you could say I’m rewriting the final chapter.”

I heard her breathe: she had moved the microphone closer to her mouth and was fiddling with it, trying to set it up straight.

“Help me, Janeway, I’m not having an easy time here. Send me some vibes, give me a clue. I’m trying to tell you some things you should probably hear, but I’m still a reporter and this is the big story of my life. I’ve lived with it a long time and I don’t share these things easily.”

I waited. The tape was hot and running.

“I’ll tell you some things I put in my original draft and later had to take out. But I won’t name names or places here, and I don’t want to tell you yet where I’ve gone. We’ll talk about it next week, when I get home, and we’ll see where we are then.

“There was a man I wanted to interview, back when I was doing my research. He lived in the city I’m going to tonight. He probably wasn’t important. His connection to Grayson was slender—all he did was collect and love Grayson’s books. I don’t think they ever met, and to tell the truth I’m not sure what my original intent was in seeking him out…to see his books, maybe, or get some insight into the quintessential Grayson collector. I didn’t think he’d contribute more than a line to my book, but I was in his town, I had his name and a few hours to kill. So I tried to look him up.

“Turned out he was dead…he’d been murdered years before, in 1969 as a matter of fact, a few days after the Graysons died. This in itself might mean nothing, but it put an uneasy edge on my trip. I decided to stay over an extra day and ask around. The investigating officer had since retired from the police. I found him running security for a department store. He didn’t mind talking about it—it was an old case then, nothing had been done on it for years, and the old cop told me things about the scene that he might not’ve said a few years earlier. One thing in particular stood out, and I thought of it this morning when you were telling me about the scene at Pruitt’s. This Grayson collector was found dead in a room full of books twenty years ago. Right beside his body was a pile of ashes.”

37

I opened my eyes to a blinding sunrise. It was six forty-five, the clock radio had just gone off, and the sun was shining.

I shooed the dogs off the bed and hit the shower. Wrapped in steam, I considered Trish and the tape she’d left me. The fire had eaten the tape, but the chimney had gagged on the words. They hung in the air and chilled the morning.

Traffic was reaching its rush-hour peak, a freeway horror show that made 1-25 in Denver seem like a solo flight. But the sun was shining: the city sparkled like a crown jewel in a setting of lakes and mountains, and there wasn’t a speck of pollution in the air. I felt better than I had in days, better by far than a confirmed fuckup had any right to feel. Damned if this wasn’t the first day of the rest of my life. Good things lay off in the distance, waiting to be discovered; I could feel the potential as I crawled off the exchange at Interstates 90 and 5. It was so strong that even having to fight traffic all the way downtown and back again couldn’t sour the moment.

By the time I picked up Amy and we got her kids dropped off at day care, it was after eight o’clock. She caught my upbeat mood and we crept back along the freeway with hopeful hearts. She had been enchanted by her night in the hotel: when you’re young and poor and the best thing you’ve ever slept in was a $20 room by the railroad tracks, the Hilton must seem like Buckingham Palace. We chatted our way into Issaquah, ate breakfast in the same Denny’s where Eleanor and I had eaten a lifetime ago, and made the final run into North Bend a few minutes shy of nine o’clock.

It was the first time I’d had a good look at the town: I had only been here at night, in a misty rain, or on the fly. Now I saw what Grayson had seen when he’d first stepped off here in 1947: a land of swirling mists and magnificent vistas and above it all that incredible mountain, looming like a sleeping giant. As a rule mountains do not impress me much: I grew up in Colorado, and I had seen many that were higher, deeper, bigger in every way. But I’d never seen one that so dominated its landscape, that commanded without being majestic. It pulled at you like a vast black whirlpool: it stood alone over the town and denned it. “Impressive, isn’t it?” Amy said. “Mamma came here as a child in 1942 and never wanted to go anywhere else. She told me once that she got here when they were tearing up the streets for the new highway and the town was nothing but mud. But right from the start, she wanted to live her life here.”

“It’s the mountain. It gets a grip on you.”

“People say there’s an Indian in the mountain. If you look on a clear day, like today, you’re supposed to be able to see his face. The knee’s about halfway down. I never could do that, though. Can’t see diddly.”

The sister towns, North Bend and Snoqualmie, were connected by narrow back roads. We came into Snoqualmie past the high school, Mount Success, which Amy followed with her eyes as we circled around it.

“My whole history’s tied up in that stupid building,” she said sadly.

“Amy, you haven’t lived long enough to make a statement like that. Your history’s hiding out there somewhere, in the next century.”

She smiled. “You’re a good guy, aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”

“Just one who’s lived a fair piece of his own history…enough to wish for a little of it back.”

She gave the high school a last lingering look. “In the ninth grade they gave us an IQ test. I got one twenty-eight, which surprised a few people. For a week or so I thought I was hot stuff. I asked Eleanor how she’d done, but she kinda blew it off and said not very good. I found out about a year later, when Crystal let it slip one day.”

She directed me along a road to the left.

“Her score,” she said, emphasizing each digit, “was one…eighty…six.”

She laughed. “She’s a genius, sealed and certified.”

Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

Amy, suddenly moved to tears, said, “God, I love her.”

Snoqualmie was just a few blocks of businesses, two bars, stores, a laundry, a Realtor, and a bowling alley. Many of the shops were named for the mountain: There was Mt. Si Hardware, Mt. Si Video, and the Mt. Si Country Store, which had a sign in the window that said this family supported by timber dollars . Begone, spotted owl: never mind what your habits are, you’ll have to find another place to have your habits. We were on the town’s main drag, looking for a gas station. The street was called Railroad Avenue: it skirted the train tracks, with an old-time railroad station (was this where Moon had stepped out all those years ago and been drawn by Grayson into his new life?) and a historic log pavilion that boasted a log the size of a house perched on a flatbed. As if on cue, Amy said, “There’s Archie’s place,” and I saw a dark shop with the letters the vista printing company painted on glass and under it, in smaller letters, the snoqualmie weekly mail . He put out a newspaper, I remembered. I got a glimpse of him through the glass, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Again I thought of a timber wolf, lean and wiry, and I had the feeling he’d be a good man to know, if I ever had the time.

I stopped at the Mt. Si Sixty-six. Amy filled the tank while I checked in with Denver from a pay phone.

Millie answered at my store. She had been worried, she said: the Seattle police had been calling. Business was lousy, she said. On the other hand, there was an appraisal job in the works, almost twenty thousand books, a job that could run weeks at $50 an hour. But they needed me to start next week.

I told her to give them my regrets and refer the job to Don at Willow Creek Books. If the cops called back, ask for Quintana and tell him I’d buy him a pitcher at his favorite watering hole when this was all over.

We backtracked through town. If Quintana doesn’t get me, the poorhouse will, I thought.

Selena Harper had lived just outside town. “There’s a helluva waterfall a few miles that way,” Amy said. “Supposed to be half again higher than Niagara.” But we weren’t on a sight-seeing trip and she turned me off on one of those narrow blacktops running west. I saw a marker that said se 80th: we hung a left, then another, and doubled back into se 82nd. There was a mailbox at the end, but the lettering had long ago worn away and had never been replaced. “Mamma never believed in doing any unnecessary work,” Amy said. “Everybody in both towns knew her, so why bother putting a name on the box?” The mailbox was empty.

A dirt road wound back into the trees. The woods were thick and undisturbed here; the road was rutted and muddy from last week’s rain. I didn’t see a house anywhere, but soon it appeared as we bumped our way through the brush. A clearing opened and a ramshackle building shimmered in the distance like a mirage. There had once been a fence, but it had long ago crumbled, falling section by section until now only a few rotting posts and an occasional tangle of wire marked where it had been.

“Welcome to my castle,” Amy said. “The only real home I’ve ever known.”

I pulled into a dirt yard, slick with mud and ringed by weeds. The house was indeed in a sorry state. “I just don’t know what to do with it,” Amy said: “it’s become a white elephant. I’ve been told the land’s worth something, but not as much as Mamma owed. I doubt if I’ll break even when I sell it, if I can sell it. I’m having a real problem with that, you know. How do you cut your losses on a piece of your heart?”

She got out of the car and stood looking at it. “The last big thing she went into debt for was a roof. Right up to the end, she wanted to protect all that stuff in the attic, make sure it didn’t get ruined by a leak. So about five years ago she borrowed the money and had a guy come out and fix it. She’s been paying the interest on the loan ever since, but hasn’t made a dent in the principal. So what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a ten-dollar tablecloth for a two-dollar table. Let’s go inside.”

We picked our way up to the porch, where she found two notes taped to the door. On one was scrawled the word BITCH; on the other, which had been there longer, Amy you whore you better stop this shit . She tore them down and crumpled them in her fist: “Well, I see my ex has been here. Now my day is complete.”

I heard the jingle of keys. She opened a door, which creaked on rusty hinges, and I followed her into the most jumbled, crowded, disorganized room I had ever seen. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” Amy said over her shoulder. “My mother was constitutionally unable to throw out anything. This is just the beginning.” She turned and leaned against a doorjamb, watching me as I beheld it. The first problem was the magazines—years of such extinct publications as Coronet, Collier’s, Look, Radio Mirror …they were piled in every corner, on the chairs, at both ends of the sofa. As a book dealer I had made house calls on people who had survived their family pack rats, but I’d never seen anything quite like this.

“The funny thing is, she really did write for some of these magazines,” Amy said. “She really was a good writer, she just had trouble deciding what to write, and then making the time to do it. She got five hundred dollars once from one of these jobs. I think that’s when she began to talk to Gray son about doing his life in a book. She had worked for him, you know, she was the first person he hired when his shop began doing so well back in the fifties. She answered his phone, wrote his letters, kept his business records. And at work she was neat as a pin…or so she said. She never left work without putting everything where it belonged, then she’d get home and throw her own stuff on the nearest pile.”

She led me through the hall to the kitchen. The cupboards too were clogged with papers, magazines, clippings.

“Happy New Year,” she said.

She pointed to a stair that led down into darkness: “Cellar. More of the same down there. Whatever’s there is pretty well ruined by the moisture…the whole place has got a mildewy smell. I never go down there without getting depressed and wanting to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it to the ground.”

The kitchen opened on the other side into a back bedroom. There was another short hall, with steps to the upper floor.

“What you want’s up there. You won’t even need a flashlight on a sunny day like this. There’s a big window in the attic that faces east, and the sun’ll light you up like the Fourth of July. Do you need me for anything?”

“Let me go on up and see what I find.”

“I’ll putz around down here. Stomp on the floor if you want me.”

Sunlight beamed down the stair like a beacon. The air was heavy and filled with floating dust. I went up past the second floor, up a narrower stair to the top. Light from the east flooded the room, giving you the notion of being a sample on a slide under a microscope. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling—after the days of rain, you were willing to be a bug if it bought you a little sunshine—and I stood there for a moment with my head poking up into the attic before going the last few steps. The attic felt crowded, like the rest of the house, but the room was small and an immediate difference was apparent up here. There was order…there was purpose…there was care. The boxes were all of one size, fitted together in one large block. They were neatly stacked on pallets in the center of the room, far away from the walls. Each had been wrapped in polyethylene and sealed with clear tape; then the whole bundle was covered by a sheet of the same plastic, making it as nearly waterproof as possible.

It was one of those moments that only a bookman can appreciate, that instant of discovery when you know without opening that first box that you’ve just walked into something wonderful. Your mouth dries up and your heart beats faster, and the fact that none of it belongs to you or ever will is strangely irrelevant. I walked around the stuff, taking its measure. It was a perfect cube—four high, four deep, four across: sixty-four cartons of Grayson lore.

I stripped back the plastic cover and leaned down for a closer look. I could read the words she had written on the cardboard with a heavy black marker.

Richard/Letters, Poems, Miscellany

Sketches for Christmas Carol/Correspondence with Benton

Tape Recordings/Darryl Grayson and Selena Harper

Worksheets /Logs of Days

Correspondence/1950-55

Ideas for Phase Two

I took down the box marked Richard’s Letters and broke open the seal. It was packed tight with original notes, all of it handwritten on legal pads. Selena Harper had probably done his typing and kept the originals, maybe without the author’s permission or knowledge. I put the box off to one side and opened the one marked Correspondence . It was full of carbon copies, letters Grayson had written and typed himself during the formative years of the Grayson Press. Here was the man’s life and philosophy…you could plunge in almost anywhere and be caught up in whatever had engaged his mind at the time. He wrote impressions of history to old friends in Georgia; he had long discussions on art with a teacher he’d had in high school and wrote rambling letters on almost any topic to people he’d never met. He was a faithful and generous writer. If you wrote to him praising one of his books, he would answer you, even if he’d never heard of you till that moment. He had a Southerner’s sense of chivalry and honor: women would get more consideration than men, warm, chatty greetings to ladies who loved his work. He had a lengthy correspondence of more than five years with a woman in Knoxville: it was a romance of the mind, as they had apparently never met. I picked up a handful of pages, several hundred, and came upon a correspondence with Bruce Rogers that ran through much of 1953. It was hard-core typography, incredible stuff. Grayson had saved all of Rogers’s originals along with copies of his own replies. At one time they had sent drawings through the mail, the old master illustrating his points to the prodigy in that language that only they and others like them could read. This will be published someday, I thought—some university press will bring it out in two volumes, The Letters of Darryl Grayson , with scholarly footnotes and an index, and some expert—maybe Huggins—would write a long introduction setting Grayson in his proper significance. Grayson was an average speller, and the editor would probably apologize for that and leave it alone. In the final analysis, writing and spelling don’t have much to do with each other.

Behind this box was another, Correspondence/ 1956-58 , and behind that was another covering the next year. Grayson liked to write. He seemed to have written at least one letter a day, sometimes more. I thumbed through the year 1957 and saw many letters headed Dear Laura . It was his old friend Laura Warner, who had not, it seemed, been lost in the blitz after all. She had moved to New Orleans after the war and was following his career from afar. In one letter she teasingly called him My Pyotr , to which he angrily replied that, Goddammit, he was not Tchaikovsky and she was not his goddamn patron saint, and she laughed in her next letter and called him my darling boy and said one of the characteristics of genius was temper. Huggins would die to get into this, I thought. So would Trish. How different their books would’ve been.

The box labeled Tape Recordings was just what it said—a dozen reels of fragile-looking recording tape, sandwiched between sheaths of notes. Selena Harper and Darryl Grayson: October 4, 5, 6, 1958 . The master’s voice, if it could be retrieved, was apparently preserved right here. The oldest recordings seemed to be from mid-1953, brown on white, oxide on a paper backing, and the oxide was beginning to flake. I kept digging. It didn’t take long to figure out what Ideas for Phase Two was. The material dated from 1968 and 1969—notes, letters, and lists of possible projects, along with rough sketches of new alphabets. There was a list of artists whose work Grayson had admired, who might have been invited to collaborate on future projects. I remembered something Huggins had said, that Grayson had seen his career enclosed by those two Ravens , like definitive parenthetical statements, but Huggins had only been half-right. Grayson in no way considered his career finished. He was still a young man with much great work to do: a successful Raven would simply write an end to his youth and launch him into his major phase.

I found a box of letter sketches, hundreds of freehand drawings on thin paper. He couldn’t be sitting still, I thought—if he had dead time on his hands, he’d draw letters. Some were signed, some were not. All were originals.

There was too much. I began to skim.

I tore down the block and scattered the center cartons around the room. In the exact middle was the box with the photographs. There were pictures of Grayson’s childhood home, of the high school, of the parents…but again, nothing of the brothers themselves. There were copies of the newspaper that Grayson had worked on in school and pictures of old girlfriends. In a separate folder was the North Bend stuff—Grayson’s shop under construction, his house, the finished shop, the ancient-looking Columbian press with its cast-iron ornamentation—eagle, sea serpent, snakes—alive in the hard light that poured in through the window. Then there was a run of people shots. Rigby and Crystal: she convulsed over some long-forgotten joke, he slightly uncomfortable in coat and tie, politely amused. Moon in his element, hiking in the high country. Moon again, standing at the edge of a mountain cabin with the alpine scenery stretching out behind him. And there she was, the woman who looked like Eleanor Rigby, posed in the woods with a man I had never seen. She had her arm around him and both of them were laughing into the camera, exuding sexuality. In the background was another woman, obviously unhappy. If looks could kill, the woman in the background would kill them both. There were no names, just that faint inscription in Selena’s hand, giving the location and date, always May 1969. But there was something about the two women that drew them together and kept them that way in your mind.

Then there was the snapshot, shoved deep in the file between papers and obviously taken by a much less sophisticated camera. The Eleanor-woman, fat with child, standing on the mountain at Moon’s cabin: Grayson’s handwriting on the back (I could recognize it now at a glance) giving a date, Sept. 28, 1968, and a short caption, Queen of the world . She had that same seductive smile, a wanton, sexual animal even in the last days of pregnancy. She pointed at the picture-taker with her left hand, at her swollen tummy with the other. I could almost hear her teasing voice in the room: Oh, you nasty man, you naughty boy, you .

Eleanor’s voice.

I heard Amy bumping up the stairs. “Hey,” she called. “You gonna die up here?…It’s almost two o’clock.”

She came through the trap and sat on one of the boxes. “Now maybe you’ve got some idea what I’m up against.” She got up, paced, and sighed. “What am I gonna do with all this stuff?”

I broke it to her softly. “You’re gonna get rich with it.”

38

She couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I’d probably feel pretty rich if somebody wanted to walk in here and give me a hundred dollars for all of it,” she said. When I didn’t bite, she let it go. Just as well, I thought: there was no use speculating, she’d probably faint if I told her half of what I was thinking. But she looked at me across the room and a sense of it began filling up the space between us. The air seemed brighter: the sun had a different aura as it beamed through the window on the west side and lit up a million floating particles of dust. Amy moved out to the middle of the room and flipped up one of the flaps.

“Mamma never told me anything,” she said, fingering the papers in the box. “Not once did she ever say she thought this stuff might even be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Maybe she didn’t know, I thought. Maybe value to her had nothing to do with money. Maybe she figured she’d talk about it someday and just ran out of time. You can’t plan a heart attack.

“I guess I should’ve figured there was something to it,” Amy said. “The way she never wanted me to let on it was here, not even to Archie or the Rigbys. I think she was always afraid somebody would come and take it away from her.”

“Yeah, but where’d it come from? How’d she get it?”

“Just like she got everything else. Piece by piece, starting way back when she first went to work at Grayson’s. I think that’s when they started talking about her doing his book someday. And he read some of the things she’d published, and he liked what she’d written, and he said okay, but it’s too early. He hadn’t done enough yet. But he gave her this stuff, sometimes just a few pages a day, to read and think about. She’d bring ‘em home with her—a few letters, some sketches he’d thrown aside—just stuff, you know. I never paid any attention when she told me about it.”

“And over the years it became this.”

Amy was reading. Whatever was on top was working its way through her brain as she tried to understand its larger significance. “This looks like a plain old letter. He’s talking about fishing…what’s so special about that?”

“It’s something other people will have to decide.”

“And these other people will want this stuff?”

“You can count on that. They’ll want this stuff.”

“And you know who they are?”

“I do now.”

She picked up the pages and read it all—the three-page letter that Grayson had written on January 4, 1954, I saw as I crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. I moved on to the window and stood staring down at the muddy yard, letting her read in peace. When I turned again, her eyes were fixed on mine. She gave a little smile, naive and worldly all at once. Do what you want, she seemed to say: I won’t fuss, I’ll go along.

The only thing in my mind was that it all had to be moved. It had been here twenty years and I couldn’t leave it even one more night. “The real question is, how does this help us find Ellie?” Amy said. I didn’t know, it was too vast, like standing at the edge of a forest on a hunt for one tree. But it had to be moved and then maybe we could start asking questions like that.

Now a funny thing happened—Amy lit into the work with a kind of driving impatience, as if she could clear the house all at once. She had put it off forever, but moving that first box had a galvanizing effect. “You go on,” she said, “I’ll keep working on it.” We had filled up the car. It would take six loads and a full backseat when we made our last run out of here. It was three o’clock, her children had to be picked up by seven, and I still had no idea where I’d make the stash or how long it would take us to get it all moved.

“Go,” she said, insistent now. “Go, dammit, you’re wasting time.”

I drove through Snoqualmie and out along the road to North Bend. Clouds moved in from the west and the air grew ripe with the promise of rain. It came, hard and furious, washing away the hope of the morning. I didn’t know how I felt anymore, I wasn’t sure of anything. I had made a colossal discovery, but I was no closer to Eleanor than I’d been yesterday. Overriding everything was the depressing thought that I could be saving one life and losing another. Amy Harper wouldn’t ever be going back to Belltown, but where was Eleanor?

I settled for the North Bend Motel, one of those older places with the rooms laid out in a long single-story row. I rented a room at the far end, where it might not be so evident to the guy in the office that I was using it for a storage locker. I paid two days in advance. The room was small—piled four high around the table and bed, the boxes would fill it up. I unloaded fast and started back. The rain had come and gone, but the clouds hung low and you could see there was more on the way. I turned into the Harper place at quarter to four. Amy had moved a dozen boxes and was still running hard. She was slightly giddy, confirming what I’d thought earlier, that the act of moving things had given her some badly needed emotional release. Her shirt was dark with sweat, soaked across the shoulders and under the arms, and her face was streaked with dirt. “Don’t forget to check the mail,” she called as I was going out with the second load.

But again the mailbox was empty.

At the end of the fifth load I ran into trouble. I stopped at the road and knew something was different.

The mailbox was open. I knew I had closed it.

I got out and crossed the road. The box was empty, but a cigarette had been thrown down and was still smoking on top of the damp grass. A beer bottle had been dropped in the mud. Beside it was the print of a man’s shoe, an impression that hadn’t yet begun to fill with water.

I felt the fear. Night was coming fast, fingers of fog wafted across the land, and Amy was alone in the house.

I splashed along the road with my lights off. I could see a flickering light in the trees ahead. It took on bulk and form and became a car, idling in the clearing.

I stopped and reached under the seat where my gun was. I clipped it to the front of my belt near the buckle. I got out of the car and walked up through the trees.

Headlights cut through the mist at the edge of the porch. Two men sat there in the dark.

I started across the clearing. A voice came at me from somewhere.

“Hey!…Where you going?”

I looked at them across the gap. “Going to see Ms. Harper.”

“Ms. Harper’s dead.”

“Ms. Amy Harper wasn’t dead, when I left her here half an hour ago.”

“That’s Mrs . Amy Willis to you, dum-dum. You can’t see her now. She’s busy.”

“She’s having a re-yoon-yun with her old man,” the other one said, and they both laughed.

I started toward the house. They got out of the car. They were punks, I had seen their kind many times, I had sweated them in precinct rooms when I was a young cop working burglary. When they were fifty, they’d still be seventeen.

The one riding shotgun had the James Dean look, dark, wavy hair over a fuck-you pout. They thought they were badasses and I was an old fart. That made two surprises they had coming.

“This asshole don’t hear so good,” the James Dean act said.

His partner said, “What’ll it be, Gomer?…You wanna walk out of here or be carried out strapped over the hood of this car.”

“I’ll take the hood, stupid, if you two think you can put me there.”

I veered and came down on them fast. I caught little Jimmy a wicked shot to the sternum that whipped him around and juked him across the yard like Bojangles of Harlem, sucking air till he dropped kicking in the mud. His partner jumped back out of range. My coat was open and he’d seen the gun, but he’d already seen enough of what went with it. I stepped over Little Jimmy as the ex loomed up on the porch.

“Who the hell’re you?” he growled.

“I’m Rush Limbaugh. Who the hell’re you?”

“I don’t know you.”

“I’m taking a poll to see who’s listening to the Asshole Radio Network. Maybe you’d better get out of my way.”

“Maybe what I’ll do is come down there and kick your ass.”

“Maybe what you’ll do is shit, if you eat enough.”

He started to launch himself off the porch. He balked, almost slipped, and stood tottering at the top.

Then he came, with too little too late. His pal yelled, “Look out, Coleman, he’s got a gun!” and he balked again, missed his step, and splashed face-first in the mud.

I went around him in a wide circle. “So far you boys are terrifying as hell,” I said. He struggled to one knee. I asked if he could sing “April Showers.” I hate to waste a line like that, but I know he didn’t get it. I walked past him, close enough for him to grab my leg, but he didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. By the time I got Amy to open the door, they were gone.

Amy stood at the window and watched them go. It was the last vestige of her childhood, the beginning of a long and wonderful and fearsome journey.

“ C’est la vie ,” she said to the fading day.

I thought about the woman in Irwin Shaw’s great story of the eighty-yard run. I told Amy to read it sometime and take heart.

She had never heard of Shaw. I felt a twinge of sadness, not only for the fleeting nature of fame but of life itself. I told her what a powerhouse Shaw had been when he was young, and how the critics had come to hate him and had made him the most underrated writer of his day. She didn’t understand why people would do that, so I explained it to her. Shaw made a lot of money and they never forgive you for that. She asked what the story was about and I said, “It’s about you and the damn fool you married, when you were too young to know better.” I didn’t want to diminish it by telling her any more than that.

We gathered ourselves for the trip to town. I’d be leaving fourteen boxes under Selena Harper’s roof for one more night.

“I don’t think we made much headway,” Amy said.

“We didn’t find Eleanor. Maybe we found you, though.”

She didn’t say anything. She gave me the key and I locked the house. She sank back in the car and closed her eyes, a picture of sudden weariness.

I told her what I had in mind as we drove. “I’m going to call a man who knows all there is to know about this stuff. If I’m right, he’ll want to fly up from Los Angeles and look at it.”

“It’s in your hands. I trust your judgment and I won’t go back on you, whatever you decide to do.”

I pointed out the motel where I’d made the stash. She gave it a polite look and we swung west with the night, into the freeway, into the driving rain.

39

The night was full of surprises. The first came when I called Leith Kenney from Amy’s room at the Hilton. She sat behind me, discreetly nursing her child while I punched in the call.

It rang three times in L.A. and a woman answered.

“Mr. Kenney, please.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not here.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I really can’t say.” There was an awkward pause. “He’s gone in to a meeting tonight and it’ll probably run late. Then he’s going out of town.”

I blinked at the phone but recovered quickly. “I’m calling from Seattle.”

“That’s where he’s going. Is this Mr. Pruitt?”

I felt my heart trip. I looked at Amy in the mirror, but she was busy changing breasts and didn’t notice anything.

“Yes,” I said, thinking on my feet. “Yes, it is.”

“Has there been a change of plan? This is Mrs. Kenney. Lee will be calling me when he gets there. I could give him a message.”

“I don’t know…I might have to change things.”

There was a brief silence. It would really help, I thought, if I had the slightest idea what the hell I was talking about.

“Well,” she said, “would you like to leave a message with me?”

“I’ll catch him here. Is he staying at the same hotel?”

“Yes, the Four Seasons. They should get in early tomorrow morning.”

“Is Scofield coming with him?”

“I don’t think you could keep him away, Mr. Pruitt.”

“I’ll see them then. Thanks.”

I hung up and stared at the floor. Pruitt stared back at me.

Amy was looking at me in the glass.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

She went across the room and put her children down. I headed for the door and got the second surprise of the night.

“I remembered something today,” she said. “I thought of the man who came and looked in the attic just after Mamma died. His name popped right into my head. I knew I’d forget it again, so I wrote it down.”

She fished in her jeans and came up with a paper. “His name was Otto.”

Again I walked through that cluttered bookstore. I held a bag of Ayn Rand and wondered why the man wasn’t there. I looked up a dark stairwell leading to…what?

“Otto Murdock.”

She looked at me hard. “How’d you know that?”

40

I headed north on the freeway and hoped I’d remember where Murdock’s was. I found it after twenty minutes of trial and error. I arrived on a wave of deja vu. It looked exactly as I’d last seen it—the same dim light shone from deep in the building, the same open sign was propped in the window and tilted at the same slight angle—even the rain was the same, as if the world had turned back on its axis and erased the last seventy-two hours. I pushed open the door and called his name. There was no sound. If any customers had come in since last Friday night, they had left no evidence of their presence. They had come, looked, and left as we had, perhaps with a slight sense of unease. Those who knew Murdock would figure it as another bout with demon rum: the others would mind their own business.

I crossed the store and looked in the back room. Everything was the same…the dim light in the corner…the rolltop desk with its piles of magazines and papers…the canvas briefcase pushed off to one side with my note still taped to the handle…the rickety stacks of books and the thick carpet of dust, undisturbed where we hadn’t walked and already filming over where we had. I followed our three-day trail across the room and into the stairwell. I looked up into the black hole and called him, but I knew he wasn’t going to be inviting me up. My voice felt heavy, like a man shouting into a pillow.

I touched the bottom of the stair with my foot. I leaned into it, took a deep breath, got a firm hold on my gun, and started up. The light faded quickly: there was none at all after the fifth step and I had to go by feel, knowing only that the next step would be onward and upward. I had a sense of movement coming from somewhere… music! . . . and now the feeling that it had all happened before was as sharp as a scream. I planted each foot, letting my fingers slip along the inner edge of the wooden banister and guide me up. Don’t screw up again , I was thinking: don’t make the same mistake twice .

Now I could hear the melody, some classical piece on a radio. I saw a thin line of light…the crack at the bottom of a door. It dropped below eye level as I climbed higher, and a kind of sour dampness lay over the top. And I knew that smell, better than the people of Seattle knew the rain. In my old world it came with the smell of Vicks, the stuff homicide cops use to help them get through the bad ones.

I was standing at the top with an old memory playing in color and sound. My partner was a skinny guy named Willie Mott, who was giving me the lowdown on Vicks VapoRub. This one’s ripe…put a little glop of Vicks up each nostril and you won’t notice it so much .

I stood at the door of hell and nobody had brought the Vicks.

I touched the wood with my knuckles. Found the knob. Gripped it carefully by the edge, with the joints of my fingers and thumb.

The latch clicked: the door creaked open and the warm moist air sucked me in.

I retched.

I backtracked and stumbled and almost fell down the stairs.

On the third try, I made it into the room. I cupped my hand over my nose and got past the threshold to the edge of a ratty old sofa.

A single lamp near the window was the only source of light…a forty-watter, I figured by the dim interior. Dark curtains covered the window. I couldn’t see the body yet, but the room was full of flies. The music poured out of an old radio. It wasn’t “Rigby,” just something he’d been listening to when he finally ran out of time. I moved toward it, still fighting my gut. I hadn’t seen much of anything yet.

There was the one window.

A closed door across the room.

A pile of books on the table.

A typewriter…a pile of magazines…a roll of clear sealing tape…and a bottle of lighter fluid.

I moved around the table, watching where I walked. A wave of rotten air wafted up in a cloud of flies.

I tasted the bile. What I didn’t need now, after compromising the first scene, was to throw up all over this one.

The lighter fluid might help. I know it’s an evil solvent; I’ve heard it can get in your blood through the skin and raise hell with your liver. But it’s stronger by far than Vicks, and even the smell of a cancer-causing poison was like honeysuckle after what I’d been smelling.

I put my handkerchief on the table, then turned the plastic bottle on its side and pried open the squirt nozzle. Liquid flowed into the rag. I touched only the ribbed blue cap, so I wouldn’t mess up any prints on the bottle itself.

I made the wet rag into a bandanna. Found a roll of cord and cut off a piece, then tied it over my mouth and nose.

I was breathing pure naphtha. It was cold and bracing and it had an immediate calming effect on my stomach.

If it didn’t kill me, I could function like a cop again.

I found him sprawled on the far side of the table. He had been there most of a week from the looks of him. His face was gone, but I could guess from the wispy white hair that he had probably been Otto Murdock.

I didn’t know what had killed him: there wasn’t enough left to decide. What there was was hidden under a carpet of flies.

Let the coroner figure it. Whatever they pay him, it’s not enough, but let him earn it…and in the end tell supercop what I already knew.

Murdock hadn’t keeled over and died of old age.

And Janeway hadn’t done it. This would break his super heart, but when the reaper came cal-ling, Janeway was still in Denver, doing what came naturally. Trying to fit John Gardner into his proper shade of orange, with murder the last thing on his mind.

I didn’t see any weapon. Nothing on the table looked promising as a motive or a clue.

There were no ashes.

No sign of a struggle. Even the chair he had been sitting in was upright, pushed back slightly as if he’d been getting up to greet a visitor.

I went to the far door and opened it.

His bathroom. Nothing out of place there.

I was feeling lightheaded by then: the naphtha was doing its dirty work. The skin under my eyes felt like blisters on the rise.

I ripped off the rag and got out of there.

Downstairs, I looked through his rolltop.

Some of the notes in the pigeonholes were three years old.

I looked through the drawers.

Bottle of cheap bourbon, with not much in the bottom.

Letters…bills…

The sad debris of a life that didn’t matter much to anybody, not even, finally, to the man who had lived it.

Pushed off to one side was the canvas bag. Eleanor had wanted to look inside, but I wouldn’t let her.

I opened it now and hit the jackpot.

A thick notebook, old and edgeworn…

I seemed to be holding Darryl Gray son’s original subscriber list. With it was a manuscript, a dozen pages of rough draft on yellow legal paper. I knew the handwriting, I had seen it on other papers in Amy’s attic. The top sheet was a title page, aping Vic-toriana.

JOHN DUNNING

THE CRAVEN

A Tragic Tale of a God’s Downfall

Told in Verse by Richard Grayson,

A Witness

I took it all and went back to Aandahl’s and read it. I read it many times. I was reading it again at midnight when Trish came home.

41

She had returned almost a full day early. There was a click and the dogs swarmed her at the front door.

She looked at me across the room, as if she hadn’t expected me to be there and didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. “You’ve changed,” she said, and I gave her an old man’s grin. She threw her raincoat over a wicker basket, came slowly around the couch, and sat facing me with an almost schoolmarm-ish primness.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “Been running it through my head all the way home from Albuquerque, trying to figure out what I ought to do.”

“What’s the verdict?”

“I’m in it now.”

“I thought you always were.”

“It’s different now. I’m in it with you.”

This was happy news. I felt a warm glow at the sound of it.

She said, “Whatever happens, we go together.”

We didn’t need to hash out the ground rules. When you connect with someone, things like that are understood. Suddenly we were like police partners, comparing notes, poring over evidence. There was a lot to be done, and the first commandment was the test of fire. You never hold out on your partner.

We ate a late supper and talked into the morning. For the first time in a long time I broke bread with a good-looking woman without thinking of Rita.

42

She had covered a lot of ground in two days. She had flown out of Sea-Tac at nine-forty Pacific time on Saturday night. Her destination was St. Louis, where she arrived in light snow at two-twelve in the morning. She had a room reserved, but her old companion, insomnia, was along for the ride. She filled the dead time reading. At nine a.m. she was in the homicide room downtown, looking at photographs and evidence from an old murder case. Stuff that was once under tight wraps was shared with her, off the record, by the man on duty Sunday morning. It had been a long time, years, since anything exciting had been added to the file, and they didn’t have much hope of cracking it now. She had flown two thousand miles and that impressed them. She had observed the proper protocol, speaking first by telephone with the chief, and they let her see the file.

The victim was Joseph Hockman, fifty-two, a bachelor. She looked at the pictures, including the close-ups. It didn’t bother her: she had been a reporter for a long time and had seen it all many times.

The victim lay in a pool of blood in a library room. Pictures had been taken from every angle, so she could see the shelving and the arrangement of books on all four walls. The black and whites were vivid and sharp, clear enough that the titles could be read and the jacket formats identified. Her eyes traveled along one row and she saw some famous old books.

All the King’s Men.

Elmer Gantry.

Miss Lonelyhearts.

Manhattan Transfer …

She began to make notes. Mr. Joseph Hockman collected so-called serious fiction—no mysteries, no fantasy, nothing that smacked of genre. He liked his literature straight, no sugar, no cream. He did have a weak spot for fine limiteds: a shot over the body toward the window wall showed a good-sized section of books in slipcases. She asked for a magnifying glass, and the detective, fascinated, got her one from a desk drawer.

Grapes of Wrath in two volumes.

Anthony Adverse in three…

“Looks like Limited Editions Club,” she said.

The detective said, “Oh,” the way people do when they have no idea what you’re talking about.

Near the end of the shelf was a gap where some books had been taken out but not returned.

“Looks like there’s fifteen or twenty books missing here,” she said.

The detective, who had been reading the reports from the original investigating officers, said, “There was some discussion at the time about the possibility of theft being the motive. They thought that was pretty weak, though. Who’d kill a man that way just to steal a bunch of books?”

“Any indication in the file whether the books ever turned up?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Or what they were?”

“Nope. One of the officers pursued that thought as far as he could take it, but the guy didn’t keep records like that. He kept it all up here.” He tapped his head.

“Somebody took those books and the officer knew that—that’s why he pursued it,” she said. “Look in this shot, you can see a book on the floor, right under that empty place in the bookshelf. When he pulled the books out, this one came out with it. But he didn’t bother to pick it up.”

“What does that tell you?”

“It tells me he didn’t want that book, just the ones that filled about this much shelf space.” She held up her hands about two feet apart. “He didn’t care about any of the others.”

She went book by book with the glass. Some of the titles were unreadable, but there wasn’t a Grayson book that could be identified as such anywhere in the room.

“That’s funny,” she said. “I heard this guy had all the Grayson books.”

The detective said, “Oh,” again, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he cared enough to ask her who Grayson was. “They tossed the book angle back and forth but it didn’t excite them much. The feeling was, yeah, the perp might’ve taken a few books, but that wasn’t the prime motive.”

“But they never found a motive.”

“Early in the investigation, the feeling was it might’ve been personal.”

“Did Mr. Hockman have any enemies?”

“Looks like he’d had some words with people. He was becoming a crusty old bastard. But, no, they never got anything they could pin on anybody.”

“Did their thinking change later?”

“Like it always does with crimes like this that you can’t solve. Some nutcase.” He flipped a page and went on reading. “Here’s something about a book.”

She looked up.

“They interviewd a woman named Carolyn Bondy, who did secretarial work for Hockman. Once a week she’d come over and take dictation, do his correspondence. The week of the murder he sent a letter to a book publisher. He’d gotten a book with a mistake in it and it seemed to ruin his week.”

“Really?”

“Does that interest you?”

“Yeah, you bet.”

“Too bad they didn’t take it much further than that.”

“They didn’t ask her what the book was or who published it?”

“It just seemed to come up in the course of things.”

“Or what the mistake might’ve been?”

“Just that he was annoyed. He’d been looking forward to this book…something special, I guess. Nobody thought it was much of a motive for murder. The woman did say Hockman was a good deal more annoyed than he let on in his letter. The letter he wrote was pretty soft and that surprised her. It was almost like Hockman was apologizing for telling the guy he’d screwed up.”

“Anything else?”

“Just this. The reason Hockman was annoyed was because it was the same mistake the guy had made before.”

“Is that what she said?…The same mistake…”

“That’s what’s in here.”

“Is there an address or phone number for this woman—what’s her name?”

“Carolyn Bondy.” The detective read off an address and phone number. “Doubt if she still lives there. It’s been twenty years.”

She looked through more evidence. She picked up a clear plastic bag that was full of ashes.

“I’ll have to ask you not to open that,” the detective said. “I mean, we do want to cooperate, but, uh…”

“Hey, I appreciate anything you can do. May I just move it around a little?”

“I don’t guess that’ll hurt anything.”

She took the bag with both hands and made a rotating motion like a miner panning gold. Slowly a fragment of white paper rose through the charred silt on the top.

She peered through the filmy plastic and saw two letters.

“Look at this…looks like a capital F …and a small r…part of the same word.”

The detective leaned over her shoulder.

She looked up in his face. “Are you in the mood to do me a huge favor?”

“I won’t kill ya for asking.”

“Is that a Xerox machine over there?…”

She called Wilbur Simon, an assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . As a young reporter from Miami, she had won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a year of study and meditation at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Simon had been one of her teachers. They had had good rapport and he had pursued her for his own paper ever since.

She sat in the empty newsroom on Sunday afternoon, reading the clip file on the Hockman case. She and Simon had coffee in a diner not far away and talked about old times, the rain in Seattle, and the Hockman case. Simon had vivid recollections of Hockman. He had been the paper’s news editor then and had done the layout on the first-day story and on most of the follow pieces. It stuck in his mind as the beginning of the crazy age. He had said as much in a diary he had kept then and had dug out and reviewed just after she had called him this morning. He had written about life and work and his personal evolving philosophy. The thing about Hockman was, you never thought much about random killers before then and you were always aware of them since. Suddenly you couldn’t pick up hitchhikers without taking your life in your hands. The day of the serial killer had come.

“I don’t think this was a serial killer, Wilbur,” she said.

At least not the kind of serial killer people meant when they used the term, she thought.

They parted with a hug and Simon offered her a job. She smiled and said she was flattered, but it would take more than rain to get her to give up Seattle for St. Louis.

She looked up Carolyn Bondy in the telephone book. There was a George Bondy at that address. The man who answered said Carolyn Bondy, his mother, had died just last month.

She ate dinner alone in the city and caught a ten-o’clock flight to Albuquerque.

She slept on the plane, just enough to keep her awake the rest of the night. A rental car got her into Taos at three o’clock in the morning, mountain time, thankful that she had reserved a room and secured it with a credit card. She had made photocopies of the Post-Dispatch clips, but it was that single sheet from homicide with the shadowy image of the two con-nected letters shot through plastic that she looked at now as she faced the new day. She had done her homework: she knew that Charlie and Jonelle Jeffords lived in the hills fifteen miles from town. She had studied the maps and knew where to drive with only occasional stops to refresh her memory. She bumped off the highway and clattered along a washboard road, leaving a plume of dust in her wake. The road twisted up a ridge and skirted a valley. She saw patches of snow in the high country as the road U-turned and dipped back into the hills. There were washouts along the way, but each had been repaired and the drive was easy. She reached the gate at nine o’clock. A sign nailed to a post said keep out , and she thought that hospitality at Rancho Jeffords was like the weather, chilly with a chance of sudden clouds. She slipped the rope loop off the gate and drove in. The house was a hundred yards away, shaded by trees and hidden from the road by hilly terrain. It was a splitlevel mountain home with a deck that faced west. There was no sign of life. She pulled into the yard and decided to go ahead with caution, remembering the inclination of the cheerful Mr. Jeffords to greet trespassers with the business end of a gun.

She walked out in the yard and stood in the sun.

Called out to whoever might hear.

“Hello!…Is anybody here?”

The hills soaked up her voice.

She tried again but got nothing for it.

She went up the walk and knocked on the door. There wasn’t a sound inside.

It had been a gamble coming here without an appointment, but she knew that when she booked the flight. She walked along a flagstone path to the edge of the house. The path led around to a garage, whose side door beckoned her on.

She knocked on the door. “Anybody in there?”

No one.

She touched the door and it swung open.

A workroom, long ago surrendered as the place for cars.

There was clutter, but also a staleness in the air. It was a shop set up for a working man but unused for some time now. The walls gave off a feeling of dry rot and musk.

She saw some equipment she recognized and it drew her into the room. A heavy iron bookpress had been set up on the edge of the bench. A much older bookpress, made of wood, stood on a table behind it.

The tools of a bookbinder.

As she came deeper into the room, her impression of disuse deepened. The place was deep in dust and heavily cobwebbed. The chair at the bench was ringed with spiderwebs.

She was nervous now but she came all the way in, wanting to see it all with a quick look. Again she observed the bookbinder’s tools: the rawhide hammer lying on the floor where he’d dropped it long ago, covered with dust; a steel hammer at the edge of the bench, a few feet from the bookpress; balls of wax thread; needles; paper. There was lots of paper, fine marbled stock for endsheets, standard stock for the pages, colored papers and white sheets and some with a light creamy peach tone. Against the wall was a paper rack. And there were leathers, very fine under the dust, and edging tools that looked like cookie cutters and were used, she knew, for laying in the gilt on a gold-trimmed leather book. There was a hot plate to heat the edging tool on, and behind the hot plate was a row of nasty-looking gluepots. She opened one and smelled PVA, the bookbinder’s glue. A newspaper, open on the table, was a year old.

She went outside and closed the door. The wind whistled down from the hills. She walked back to her car, opened the door, and sat with her feet dangling out, hoping they’d come home soon.

An hour passed and the sun grew hot. The arroyo baked under the glare of it and the chill melted away. Slowly she became aware of a creepy sensation, like the feeling you get driving on the freeway when the man in the next car stares at you as he comes past.

She looked at the house and saw curtains flutter upstairs. This might be nothing more than the temperature control blowing air up the window, but her sense of apprehension grew as she looked at it.

She wanted to leave but she couldn’t. She had come a long way, and though the chance of failure had always been strong, she had never failed at anything by default.

The curtain moved again. No heating flue did that, she thought.

She got out and walked across the yard. She went up the path to the door and gave it another loud knock.

There was a bump somewhere. Her unease was now acute.

She circled the house. Out back was a smaller deck with steps leading up to a door. She went up and knocked. Through a filmy curtain she saw movement, as if someone had crossed from one room to another.

“Hey, people,” she called. “I’ve come a long way to talk to you. Why don’t we hear each other out?”

Nothing.

Not a sound now, but the presence behind the door was as tangible as the purse slung over her shoulder. She had a vision of something sexless and faceless, holding its breath waiting for her to leave.

“It’s about the Rigby girl and the burglary you had here.”

She could feel her voice soaking through the old wood around the window sash. There wasn’t a chance of them not hearing her.

“It’s about Darryl and Richard Grayson, and the book Grayson was working on when he died.”

Even the house seemed to sigh. But the moment passed and nothing happened, and in a while she wondered if the sound had been in her mind.

“It’s about the Graysons and their friends…you and the Rigbys.” She took a breath and added, “And Nola Jean Ryder.”

As if she’d said a magic word, the door clicked and swung inward. Someone…a man, she thought…looked through a narrow crack.

“Mr. Jeffords?…Is that you?…I can’t see you very well.”

“Who are you?”

It was the same voice she had heard on the telephone recording—the same only different. The recording had rippled with macho arrogance: this man sounded tired and old and shaky.

“What do you want here?”

“I came down from Seattle to talk to you. I’m a reporter for the Seattle Times .”

She told him her name, but he seemed not to hear. Technically, ethically, it didn’t matter. The rules only demanded that she give him fair warning. He was talking to a reporter and they were now on the record. She could use him if he said anything worth using.

But she had never played the game that way. “I’m a reporter, Mr. Jeffords.” It still meant nothing to him. He heard but did not hear. He listened but his mind heard only words and blipped out meanings. She had done too many interviews with people like him, private souls who suddenly found themselves newsworthy without understanding how or why it had happened. They were always appalled when they opened their newspapers the next morning and learned what they had said.

“Trish Aandahl, Seattle Times ,” she said, loud and clear.

She still couldn’t see him. He stood just beyond the doorway, a shadow filling up the crack, his face reduced to an eye, a cheek, part of a nose.

“D’you think it would be possible for me to come in and talk to you for just a minute? I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”

He didn’t seem to hear that either. He leaned closer to the door and in a voice barely louder than a whisper said, “Did you say something about Nola Jean?”

This was the key to him, the only reason he had opened his door to her. Blow this and you lose him, she thought.

“We can talk about Nola,” she said as if she’d known the woman all her life.

He opened the door wide and let her in.

She had to squeeze past him in the narrow hall. In that second they shared the same space, close enough to bristle the hair on her neck. She brushed against his arm and felt the soft flannel of his long-sleeve shirt. She smelled the sun-baked male smell of him. She smelled tobacco, the kind her father used to smoke, that Edgeworth stuff with the hint of licorice.

She moved quickly past him, through the dim hall to the big room at the end. The door clicked shut behind her and she heard the lock snap in. His footsteps came along behind her, and for a strange moment she fought the urge to run on through and out the front door.

His house was orderly. The hardwood floor gleamed under a coat of varnish, and there were rugs with what looked to her like Navajo designs in the places where people walked the most. It was not a new house. The floor creaked under her weight and she could see faint ceiling stains where the roof had leaked. The room was steeped in ancient smoke. It had soaked into the drapes and walls and furniture, and in here it had no hint of flavor. They were both chain-smokers, she thought, remembering her parents and what her childhood had smelled like. They smoked what they liked when they had it, but if times were tough, they’d sweep the dust off“ the floor and roll a tobacco paper around that.

He had a homemade going in the ashtray and a coffee cup that still had almost a full head of steam. His living room was narrow and long. It opened out to the front deck and a secondary hall led away to the right, probably to a bedroom. She turned and looked at him. He was a rugged guy in his sixties. His hair was slate gray, his skin the leathery brown of a cowboy or a farmer. His demeanor was flat, the last thing she expected after hearing his forceful voice on the telephone recording. He had a curious habit of avoiding eye contact: he almost looked at you but not quite. He seemed to gaze past her left shoulder as she told him her name for the fourth time. He sat without offering her a chair and made no move to offer coffee as he leaned forward and sipped his own.

She grappled toward an opening. “I’ve heard a lot about Nola.”

What a bad start, she thought, but it seemed to make no real difference to him. His eyes lit up at the mention of the name; then his mind lost its focus and he looked around the room. He flitted his eyes across her face, stopping on a spot somewhere behind her head. But he didn’t say anything and she came toward him slowly and sat on a hard wooden chair facing him. His eyes followed her down, but he kept looking slightly behind her, always picking up something just behind her left ear. There’s nothing back there , she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

Then he spoke. “Who…did you say you are?”

“Trish Aandahl…I write for the Seattle Times .”

“Why did you come here? Did you bring Nola back with you?”

There’s something wrong with this guy, she thought. He acted like the prototype for all the dumb jokes you heard kicking around. One shovel short of a full load . She didn’t know how to talk to him, but she made the long reach and said, “I’m going to try to find her, Mr. Jeffords.”

“Good.” He gave what passed for a smile. “Real good.”

He blinked at whatever held his attention behind her head and said, “I want to see her real bad.”

“I want to see her too.”

“She was here.”

“Was she?”

“Yeah. Nola Jean.”

“When was she here?”

“Soon.”

This guy’s from the twilight zone, she thought. She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “When will Mrs. Jeffords be home?”

“She’s gone to the store.”

“When will she be back?”

“Grocery shopping.”

She would have to wait until Mrs. Jeffords returned and, hopefully, gave her something coherent. The thought of entertaining Jeffords until then was less than thrilling, but she had done heavier duty for smaller rewards than this story promised.

Then she looked in his face and knew what his Problem was. She had seen it before, and the only mystery was why it had taken her so long to figure it out.

The recording on the telephone was an old one—a year, maybe two years or more.

Charlie Jeffords had Alzheimer’s.

Her next thought chilled her even as she thought it.

She was thinking of the gunplay the night of the break-in, and what Eleanor had said. I never fired a gun in my life . . .

She thought of Mrs. Jeffords and the temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees. Goose bumps rose on her arms and she hugged herself and leaned forward in the chair.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to wait for your wife.”

“Aren’t you gonna bring Nola Jean back?”

“I’d like to. Would you like to help me?”

He didn’t say anything. She took a big chance and reached for his hand.

He looked into her eyes, his lips trembling.

“Nola,” he said.

She squeezed his hand and he burst into tears.

He sobbed out of control for a minute. She tried to comfort him, as much as a stranger could. She held his hand and gently patted his shoulder and desperately wanted to be somewhere else. This was the curse of Alzheimer’s: even as it eats away your brain, you have times of terrible clarity. Charlie Jeffords knew exactly what was happening to him.

“Mr. Jeffords,” she said.

He sniffed and sat up and released her hand.

“The night the trouble happened. Can you tell me about that?”

He didn’t say anything. She pushed ahead. “That girl who broke in. Do you remember what she wanted?”

“Her book.”

“What book?”

“Came for her book back.”

“What book?”

“She wanted her book back.”

“What was the book?”

“I been holding it for her.”

“Whose book was it?”

“Nola’s.”

“Wasn’t it Grayson’s book? Wasn’t that Darryl Grayson’s book, Mr. Jeffords?”

“It’s Nola’s book. Gave it to me to hold.”

She leaned forward. He tried to look away but she wouldn’t let him.

“I’m tired,” he said.

Damn, she thought: don’t know what’s real anymore.

She tried again. “Mr. Jeffords…”

But that was as far as she got. Through the front curtain she saw a pickup truck pull into the yard.

Mrs. Jeffords was home.

She left Charlie Jeffords there on the couch. She hurried down the hall and let herself out the back way.

There’d be time enough later to think back on it. She’d have a lifetime to wonder if she’d acted like a frightened fool.

Now all she wanted was to put some distance between herself and the woman in the truck.

She stood on the back porch, flat against the wall, listening for some hint of how and when to make her break.

She heard the woman yell.

“Charlie!”

Then, when he didn’t answer, a shriek.

“Charlie!”

She heard the thumping sounds of someone racing up the front steps. At the same time she soft-toed down the back and doubled around the house.

She stopped at the corner and looked out into the yard. For reasons she only half understood, she was now thoroughly spooked.

There was no time to dwell on it. The truck sat empty beside her rental car: the woman had jumped out without closing the door or killing the engine.

Go, she thought.

Run, don’t walk.

She sprinted across the yard, jumped in her car, and drove away fast.

43

She looked at me across the table and said, “It seems silly now, and yes, before you ask, I do feel like a fool. I’ve never done anything remotely like that. To break and run just isn’t my nature. I can’t explain it.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve done a few things that I can’t explain either.”

“Charlie Jeffords never shot at anybody, and I don’t think the Rigby girl did either. Where does that leave us? All I can tell you is, the thought of being there when that woman came home was…I don’t know. The only thing I can liken it to is having to walk past a graveyard at night when I was a kid.”

“It’s like me walking through the blood at Pruitt’s house, and every dumb thing I’ve done since then. Sometimes you do things.”

“I don’t know, I had this feeling of absolute dread. My blood dropped to zero in half the time it takes to tell about it, and I was just…gone, you know?“

“So what did you think about it later, when you had time to think about it?”

“I kept thinking that one of the people who’s missing in this story is a woman, this Nola Jean Ryder. She’s always been the missing link.”

“You didn’t have much about her in your book.”

“I didn’t know much about her. She was just a girl Richard met and brought home. I couldn’t find out where she came from and nobody knows where she went. It’s like she dropped off the earth when the Graysons died.”

“How much work did you actually do on her, trying to track her down?”

“Quite a bit. Probably not enough. By then it was obvious even to me that I wasn’t going to get it in the book. I was still making more changes on the galleys than the publisher wanted to live with, and we were up against a horrendous deadline. The book was already scheduled and promoted as a March title and publishers want everything done yesterday.”

She shrugged and poured herself more coffee. “I had to let her go. Then, after the book came out, I tried to keep up with it, but I had a living to make. I wasn’t exactly Robert Ludlum, flush with royalties. It made me some money, but not enough to stop being a working gal.”

I reached for the coffeepot. “So what do you think about it now? Are you thinking this missing woman is hiding out down there in Taos?”

“When I saw the truck pull up, I didn’t think at all, I just wanted to get out of there. Halfway back to town I realized that, yeah, I had been thinking of them as one. In my head, Ryder had become Jeffords.”

“Which is at least possible, I guess.”

We looked at each other.

I said, “If you had to make book on it now, what do you think happened twenty years ago?”

“I think Nola Jean Ryder set fire to that shop and killed the Graysons. I’ve always thought that.”

“Okay,” I said in a semidoubting voice. “Make me believe it.”

“I probably can’t, unless you’re willing to give me some veteran’s points for intuition.”

“I’ll play with you up to a point. But you’ve got to have something concrete, you can’t just pull this intuition act out of thin air.”

“I’ve got three things and that’s all, you can take it or leave it. First, I talked to the fire investigator who worked the Grayson fire. This man is extremely competent, and he’s convinced it was arson. He’s got my slant on life, if you know what I mean…we talk the same language, he gets the same vibes I do. You don’t meet many people like that, and when you do, you listen to what they say. And he knows that fire was set, it just killed him not to be able to prove it. In a thirty-year career you get maybe half a dozen like that, so strong yet elusive. It sticks in your craw and you remember every bloody detail till the day you die. That’s my first point.

“Here’s the second. Nola Jean Ryder was very much in evidence at the Grayson place all through the last year of their lives and was never seen again afterward. She was there the day of the fire. Archie Moon saw her arguing with Grayson. Her relationship with Grayson was volatile, very stormy: he couldn’t seem to live with or without her, and toward the end it got so bad it affected his work. One man I talked to saw Ryder in the North Bend pub that afternoon, drinking with some guys. She went off with one of them and was gone a couple of hours. Then she was seen walking back to Grayson’s in the early evening, in a light rain. That’s the last time anybody ever saw or to my knowledge heard of Nola Jean Ryder. A few hours later the Graysons died and she dropped off the edge of the earth.

“Last point. Nobody who knew her doubts that she was capable of doing it. She had a temper that went off like a firecracker and burned at a full rage for hours. Even today it makes people uneasy to talk about her. Archie Moon told me some stuff, then he clammed up and called it ancient history and said he didn’t want to talk anymore. Rigby wouldn’t talk at all. Crystal at least was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, for a while anyway. Nobody could understand the hold she had on Grayson: it was as if, after a lifetime filled with women, he had met the one who brought him to his knees.”

“This is Darryl Grayson we’re talking about now.”

“Absolutely. Richard’s the one who first met her, but it was Darryl Grayson who wound up with her. I guess things like that can’t be explained, how a woman can get under the skin of even a strong man and make him do just about anything.”

“And vice versa.”

“Yes. There isn’t much that separates us when you get down to what counts.”

I sat thinking about what she’d told me, then it was my turn to talk. I told her about Amy Harper and she listened like a bug-eyed kid, trying to imagine that treasure hidden all those years in the Harper woman’s attic. “I never understood why she was so hostile when I tried to interview her. Now I know. She considered Grayson her own personal territory. She was going to write her own book.”

Then I told her about Otto Murdock. I watched the sense of wonder drain out of her face, replaced by horror and dread.

“Did you call the police?”

“Sure. I seem to spend a lot of my time doing that.”

“Where’d you call them from?”

“Phone booth not far from Murdock’s.”

“Did you talk to Quintana?”

“He didn’t seem to be there. Supercops in this neck of the woods have a different work ethic than I used to have.”

“Did you tell the dispatcher this was part of Quintana’s case?”

“I had to. I’ve told you how important that is, for the main guy to know that stuff right out of the gate.”

She took a deep breath. “Sounds to me like you did everything but give them your name.”

“I did that too. I wanted to make sure it got to him right away. That part of it doesn’t matter anymore, he’d know it was me anyway. They’ve got me on tape twice now and I’ve never been much of a ventriloquist. They’ll also have the paper I left.”

“What paper?”

“Last Friday when I went to Murdock’s with Eleanor, I took some pricey books out of his store. I left an offer taped to the canvas bag.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them wide. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You left him a note and signed your name to it. Then you went back there tonight and the note was still there but he was dead, and you left the note there for the police to find. Is that about it?”

“It’s a bookseller’s code, Trish—thou shalt not steal thy colleague’s books. I owed the man three thousand dollars. Now I owe it to his estate, wherever that goes. Maybe he was one of those nuts who left everything to his pet cat, but that doesn’t change my obligation to him. If I walked out with that note, I’d be stealing his books, in the eyes of the law and in my eyes too.”

She looked at Grayson’s notebook but did not touch it. “What about this?”

“I didn’t steal that, Murdock did. When I’m finished with it, it goes back to Amy Harper.”

She gave me a long, sad look.

“All right,” I said, “what would you have done?”

“I can’t even imagine. I’m not making light of it, it’s just that I’m starting to worry about your chances of ever getting back to Denver as a free man.”

“I’ll worry too if you think that’ll help. But I’m still going to pay off Murdock’s cat, so I can own those books with a clear conscience and not add grand theft to all the other stuff I’ve got hanging.”

She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she had to be thinking.

“If this is getting too dicey for you, I can understand that. If you want to change your mind, I’ll understand that.”

“No,” she said too quickly. Then, after a few seconds’ thought: “No, I’m fine.”

She gestured at Grayson’s notebook. “But look what you’ve done, you’ve messed up another crime scene. Quintana will have your head on a stick.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t have to find out.”

“I hate to break this to you, Janeway, but luck is not the first word that crosses my mind when I think of you.”

“Then you’ll have to admit that I’m due for a break.”

“You’re hanging by a thread. You’re walking a tightrope with deep trouble on both sides of you. It had to occur to you that this little notebook just might be the motive for that old man’s murder.”

“Then why didn’t the killer take it?”

“How should I know?…Maybe he couldn’t find it…you said yourself the place was a mess.”

“He didn’t even look for it, that’s what I’m telling you. The place was a mess, but it was an accumulated mess. There weren’t any drawers emptied, no papers thrown around. I didn’t see any ashes on the floor. I don’t think the killer even knew this notebook was there.”

“Then why was Murdock killed?”

“I don’t know that. All I can tell you is, it’s different than the others.”

“Different killers?…Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, it’s the same guy, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find one motive at the bottom of it. But he was drawn to these guys for different reasons. Carmichael was killed for what was in Pruitt’s house. Same thing with Hockman, years ago: he was killed for what he had. Murdock was killed for what he knew.”

She leaned over and looked at the notebook close up. But she avoided touching it, as if whatever lay beneath its cover had been hopelessly tainted. “It’s still a wonderful motive for murder. Imagine what someone like Huggins would pay for it. He’d sell his house to get it. It’s the map to Treasure Island, the only thing a Grayson freak would ever need for the scavenger hunt of his dreams.”

I was thinking the same thing, with Scofield playing the Huggins role. A rich man could chase down the subscribers or their heirs and suck the market dry in no time. Each year fewer Graysons would appear at auction and no one would quite know why. Suddenly dealers would list them in catalogs as rare and mean it. In ten years the prices on the few odds and ends would be stratospheric.

I told her about Scofield and Kenney and about the interesting talk I’d had with Mrs. Kenney earlier in the evening. She listened with her fingers to her lips and came to the same conclusion I had reached a few hours before.

Kenney and Scofield were flying in to meet Pruitt.

That meant Pruitt had been in touch, sometime since I last spoke with Kenney, probably well within the last twenty-four hours.

“My God, he’s found the book,” Trish said breathlessly.

“That…would seem to be the case.”

“What else could it mean?”

“I don’t know what it means. Or might mean for Eleanor.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna be there when the deal goes down. After that it’s up for grabs.”

She said something under her breath that sounded like “Jesus.”

I nudged Grayson’s notebook in her general direction. “Maybe you should break down and give this a look. It tells us some things we never knew before.”

“Such as what?”

“It turns out that Grayson did a tiny lettered run for each of his books. A superlimited series that went to a few select customers.”

“I don’t remember seeing that in Huggins.”

“It wasn’t in Huggins. I looked.”

“Huggins would never leave something like that out.”

“Unless he never knew about it. Or maybe he did know and couldn’t verify it, like the fact that Grayson was working on another Raven .”

“This is different than another Raven . The Raven might not even exist. But if there was a lettered series, Huggins would have to have it.”

“But the limitation was so small it was next to nothing. None of the books has ever turned up to prove their existence, and until now it was assumed by everybody that Grayson’s records all went up in the fire.”

She still made no move to pick up the notebook. I picked it up for her and opened it to the first page.

“Each title had five hundred numbered copies. There were also five lettered copies. These were for customers who had been with Grayson from the beginning…the faithful. They loved his books way back when everybody else could care less.”

I watched her eyes. It was beginning to come to her now, she was starting to see the dark road we were heading into.

“These lettered copies usually preceded the regular run by a month or so,” I said.

Suddenly she knew where we were going. I could see it in her eyes.

“ A ,” I told her, “was a fellow named Joseph Hockman, of St. Louis, Missouri.”

She didn’t say anything. She reached across the table and took the notebook out of my hands. She read the name in Grayson’s own hand, as if nothing less would make her believe it. She put it down on the table, looked across at me, picked it up, and read it again.

“ B ,” I said, “was Mr. Reggie Dressier of Phoenix, Arizona. C was Corey Allingham of Ellicott City, Maryland. D was Mike Hollingsworth, looks like a rural route somewhere in Idaho. E was Laura Warner of New Orleans. That’s all there were. The faithful five.”

She finally got past Joseph Hockman and let her eyes skim the page. “He knew Laura Warner from Atlanta.”

“I know he did. I read your book.”

“Jesus!…Have you checked these other names yet?”

“I’ve only had the damn thing a couple of hours. I didn’t want to make any police checks from this telephone, even to departments a thousand miles from here. There are other offices I could check, but they won’t be open at midnight.”

“No, but the newspapers will be.”

She sat at her telephone and made some calls: to night city editors at the Arizona Republic , the Baltimore Sun , the Idaho Statesman , and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. While people in distant cities chased down any clip files that might exist, we sat at the table drinking coffee.

Now that she had begun on Grayson’s notebook she couldn’t leave it alone. “I’ve interviewed some of these people. Look, here’s Huggins…number twenty-three of the regular run. He got in early.”

A minute later she came to Otto Murdock, number 215.

“Let’s look at what else we’ve got,” I said. “I hear dawn cracking.”

We had our physical evidence spread out on the table between us. We had Richard’s poem, which Trish had yet to read. We had the paper chip from Pruitt’s house, and the sheet she had brought back from St. Louis with the two dim letters standing out in the soot. And I had brought in from the car an envelope containing the photographs I had found in Amy Harper’s attic.

Trish opened the envelope and looked at the first picture—the Eleanor woman, shot at Grayson’s printshop in May 1969.

“Imagine how the kid must’ve felt, finding this,” she said. “You grow up thinking you know where you come from. Your home and family are the real constants in life. Then in one second you see that nothing’s what you thought it was.”

She turned the picture down and looked at the one beneath it. Three people walking in the woods: the Eleanor woman, another woman, and a man.

“Look at this,” she said. “There’s Charlie Jeffords.”

“Really?” I took the picture out of her hand. The guy was standing in a little clearing, smirking at the camera. The Eleanor woman was posing with him in the same sleeveless blouse, her arm over his shoulder. The other woman stood a few feet away, clearly unhappy.

“This is Jeffords?” I said. “You’re sure of that?”

“Sure I’m sure. He’s got dark hair here and that horny leer of his’ll never be there again, but yeah. Same guy I talked to in Taos.”

“I wonder who the other woman is.”

She shook her head. “This bothers me a lot. It’s fairly obvious now that Jeffords was a player of some kind in Grayson’s life and I missed it. Damn.”

I wanted to move her past it, beyond her own shortcomings. I took the handle of my spoon and changed the subject, nudging the chip of paper until my words still and whisp lined up opposite her Fr .

“I’m no expert,” I said. “But this typography looks the same to me.”

“They seem to be the same point size. But the letters are different so it’s hard to be sure.”

I unfolded the library copy I had made of the original “Raven” and showed her the words still and whisp where I had circled them in the fifth stanza. “Here’s where your Fr comes from. Fourth line, second stanza, first word. ‘From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.’”

But I could see she had already accepted the inevitability of its being there. She picked up the yellow pages and read Richard’s poem. I watched her face as she read it, but she went through the entire thing deadpan.

“What do you make of this?” she said, putting it down.

I told her what I thought, the obvious supple-mented with guesswork. It was a rough draft of something, hand-dated July 1967, two years before the Graysons died. There were numerous strike-outs and places where lines had been rewritten between lines. In the margins were long columns of rhyme words, many keyed to the dominant suffix ore . Mixed among the common words— core, store, door, lore — were exotic and difficult possibilities such as petit four, centaur , and esprit de corps .

“Whore,” she said, looking up from the page. “That’s one Poe couldn’t use.”

In technique it was like “The Raven,” written out in eighteen full stanzas with the Poe meter and cadence. The tone was allegorical, like the old Orson Welles version of Julius Caesar in a blue serge suit. You couldn’t quite be sure what was real and what had been skewed for effect, or how much might just be the author’s own grim fantasy.

The style was in part mythic. It told the story of two young gods, one fair, the other dark: brothers forced to choose between good and evil when they were too young to understand the consequences. The road to hell was an orgy without end, lit up with laughter and gay frolic. Salvation came at a higher price.

One took the path of least resistance and tumbled into hell. The other chose the high road, finding strength in purpose and contentment in his work. But temptation was a constant, and in the end the darkhaired god was his own undoing.

Rigby was the symbol of blind youth. His was the only proper name in the tale. Richard had chosen to write it that way, the entire eighteen stanzas a lecture to youth.

On paper he could do that. He could sit Rigby down and make him listen. He could turn whores into saints and make the dark-haired god bow at the devil’s feet.

“There are a couple of lines crossed out,” she said, “as if he had changed his mind about something and took off in another direction.”

“He wanted to take his brother’s name out. You can still read it, though: all he did was draw a squiggly line through it.”

She read aloud.

Rigby was a fresh young boy when he arrived like

Fauntleroy

And took his bashful place beyond the shadows of

the Grayson door;

Little did he know that Grayson had a legendary

place in

Bedrooms: everywhere he’d hasten, wives and

daughters to explore.

Grayson had them everywhere; on the stair and on

the floor,

Grayson lusted, evermore.

“Why take that out?” she said.

“It’s too blunt. He wanted it to flow differently, he wanted that godlike flavor. He felt he could do that better by keeping himself and his brother nameless.”

The telephone rang. She picked it up and said a few words, scribbled a few notes, asked a few questions about when, where, and how. “That’s great, friend,” she said. “Yeah, do send me copies of those clips, and listen, that’s one I owe you if you ever need a Seattle angle.”

She hung up and looked at me. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t need to ask. She looked down at the poem and said, “I think you’re right, if it matters. Richard had a well-honed sense of bitter satire. A frontal attack was never as much fun as a hit-and-run.”

“The title was blatant enough.”

“‘The Craven.’ What an insult that would’ve been to a man like Darryl Grayson.”

“It belittles his genius. It reduces Grayson’s life to the level of his own. And yet it has moments of real…what?”

“Love.”

“Read it again.”

She read aloud from the top: the world according to Richard, first revised version.

One night sitting with dear Gaston, as the night

fell deep and vast in

All its blackened glory: such a night to chill him

to the very core;

A colder wind I blew upon him, one I thought

would shake and stun him

And might even break and run him far away from

sorrow’s door.

But the child remained undaunted: all his faith

again he swore

Was in his god forevermore.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “It doesn’t square with what I know about Richard or Rigby.”

“You can’t take it literally, you’ll end up doubting it all. I admit it strikes a false note at the top. We know Rigby wouldn’t sit still for what comes later, but that doesn’t mean other parts of it aren’t true.”

She read two flashback stanzas telling of the gods’ humble origins.

“I had it right,” she said. “If anything, I underwrote it.”

The father was a mean drunk and drunk much of the time. The mother was dead and unforgiven. If she wanted understanding, she’d have to find it in the next world because the son she’d left on earth had none to give her.

Lines in the middle of the third stanza made short work of these two and the sorry life they’d given their sons.

Brute and whore together spawned ‘em; then

forsook ‘em; tossed and pawned ‘em

To the devil who upon them did his vile and

wicked powers pour…

I joined her reading, quoting from memory.

One would join Old Scratch the devil, while he

watched the other revel

In himself, and gaze with level eyes upon the

predator…

“I don’t see that in here.”

“He squiggled it out. But it’s there, off to the side of the verse he kept. You can read it through the squiggle.”

“Yeah, I see it now.”

Up to this point Richard had worshiped his brother blindly, much as Rigby would do a generation later. “At that time, he was buying his own god scenario,” I said. “Grayson was his protector, the only real constant in his life.”

“Then it all changes. The god proves false.”

“He has his first serious romance, and Richard rankles with fear and jealousy.”

“Cecile Thomas,” Trish said. “I talked to her. She had gone to grammar school with the Graysons, then her parents moved away to North Carolina and came back to Atlanta when she was a teenager. A classic coming-of-age romance. Grayson thought of her as a brat when they were kids. Then suddenly there she was again, eighteen and lovely.”

“There’s a squiggled-out verse, just partly finished, when Richard was still trying to do it in a half-modern idiom, with names and all.”

She read it.

Grayson had with him a harlot, who had come to

him from Charlotte,

Though Atlanta, Georgia, was her domicile of

yore…

“There’s another line I can’t read,” she said.

“It says, Who, you ask me, could this pig be, who so got the goat of Rigby . If you look at it under a glass, you can make it out.”

“He’s doing it again, mixing his own role with Rigby’s.”

“But he catches it before the stanza’s done and squiggles it out.”

Her telephone rang.

She took back-to-back calls, from Phoenix and Baltimore. She made her notes with a poker face, as if she were working a rewrite desk assembling facts for a weather report.

She looked up from the phone without a word, pushed her notes off to one side, and again took up Richard’s poem.

“You can see the words changing as it goes along. The tone gets darker, angrier.”

‘’He was a clingy kid,“ I said. ”He was what?…thirteen, fourteen years old. His brother was four years older, the difference between a boy and a young man. Richard counted on his brother to be there when things in his life went wrong.“

“Then it got to be too much.” She flipped a page. “We can only guess how Darryl felt, when all we’ve got is Richard’s side to go by.”

“My guess is the same as yours. He was being suffocated by his father on one side and by Richard on the other. So he ran away with his girlfriend to the coast, only his friend Moon knew where.”

“And Moon wasn’t telling.”

“And Richard settled into a cold rage. He had already lost his mother, and now the unthinkable was happening, he was losing his brother. To a kid that age, the feeling of abandonment was probably enormous.”

“He hated Moon for obvious reasons.”

“Moon was everything he could never be. Strong, independent…the kind of man Grayson would want for a brother.”

“In South Carolina, Grayson found that sense of purpose that would carry him through life. He’d fought Old Scratch and won.”

She read it.

And when the young god chose to fight, he waged

a battle that was mighty;

Purpose kept his honor far away from Satan’s

harsh and blust’ry roar.

This was how he rose above it: did his work and

learned to love it,

And his skills made others covet everything he

made and more.

‘Tis some deity, they marveled, living there

beyond that door:

He’d joined the gods, forevermore.

For three stanzas the god walked on water, could do no wrong. All he touched was blessed: he was on a spiral ever upward.

Then came The Raven .

And when it seemed that none could daunt him,

A sepulchre rose up to haunt him

Stuck in there as if to taunt him, all the more to

underscore

That he who’d walked among the gods

Had tumbled down to hell’s back door,

A-burning there, forevermore.

“The misspelled word,” she said. “But it’s all out of sequence. He’s giving his brother all that success before The Raven , when it really didn’t happen till five or six years later.”

“Creative license again. He thought it worked better dramatically. But the real question is, what is this business of the misspelled word? What the cop in St. Louis told you, that Hockman had just gotten a new book with a misspelled word…that’s damned interesting.”

“And not just any word. The same word.”

“How could Grayson make that mistake again?”

“If we knew that, we’d know something, wouldn’t we?”

“Whatever happened, it was disastrous.”

“The god begins to fail. He starts doubting himself, becomes obsessed by a vision of his failure. He tries to put it right, but he can never do it well enough.”

“Nothing he does can satisfy him now.”

“It can never be good enough.”

“He sinks into despair.”

“And takes refuge in alcohol and sex.”

And Rigby heard in disbelief the Craven’s method

and motif

Of luring maidens into wretchedness behind his

bedroom door.

One poor fool she filled herself with fantasy, then

killed herself,

Unable to instill herself into his craven heart

before

She turned up high the unlit gas and died upon

her father’s floor:

To irk the Craven nevermore.

“God, there was a girl who killed herself,” Trish said. “I kissed her off with a paragraph. I didn’t think it had that much to do with Grayson, it was months after their affair and she seemed despondent over everything, not just him.”

She looked at me, riddled with doubt.

“Who knows what it had to do with,” I said. “Maybe it’s just Richard again, trying to blame some circumstantial tragedy on his brother.”

“What about Laura Warner?”

“You did what you could with her. You chased her pretty hard.”

“Not hard enough.”

“Then that’s what revised editions are for.”

We were in the last lines now. The dark-haired god idolized in the early verse had suddenly been reduced to ridicule.

The time had come to resurrect the ancient failure

that infected

Every facet of his life…

She looked at me and I gave her the next line from memory.

But his second task was tougher; it was Poe who

made him suffer…

“Poe defeated him,” she said. “He never did get it right.”

“Then where’d the book come from?”

She shook her head.

“And the ashes…”

“I don’t know.”

“If Grayson was such a failure at the end of his life,” I pressed, “why is his book still causing so damned much trouble?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

We didn’t speak again till the phone rang. The late man at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

She talked for a while and hung up.

“He burned her house,” she said flatly. “Killed her, then set fire to her house.”

“Laura Warner.”

She nodded. “They’re all dead. St. Louis, Phoenix, Idaho…all dead. All but a blind, crazy woman in the Maryland case.”

BOOK III

THE RAVEN

44

It was raining again. I heard two things, the steady drumming of the rain and the click of my bedroom door as Trish came in. I lay still for a moment, listening to her footsteps as she approached my bed. I had been in a deep sleep for all of ninety minutes: the digits on the clock beside the bed told me it was now 4:52. I blinked my eyes and gradually came awake, aware of her presence a foot or two away. She stood for a long minute, then leaned over and touched my shoulder, shaking me gently.

“It’s time,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

“We gotta get going.”

She went away and I lay there for another minute, thinking about what we had discovered in the night. I thought about five old murder cases in five different cities, and about the blind woman the killer had left alive in Maryland.

I hit the shower. Thought about it some more as I stood in the steam.

I smelled bacon as I came downstairs. She stood in the half-dark kitchen, cooking by the light from the smoke hood over the range.

“Didn’t we just eat?” I asked in a surprised tone of voice.

“Such as it was.”

But my appetite is always good in the morning and I was hungry again. I sat at her kitchen table and let her pamper me.

“Scofield and Kenney are due in at six-thirty, more or less, according to the flight plan they filed in L.A.,” she said. “We should play it safe and be there with time to spare.”

I agreed with that. We were probably safe if we could leave in another ten minutes. We were already slightly south of town, and that would give us a full hour to make the few miles to Sea-Tac before the rush hour began.

I asked if she’d gotten any sleep. “Didn’t even try,” she said, handing me a plate of food. She sat across from me with her own plate and said, “I can’t sleep with stuff like this going on.”

She had been thinking about the sequence of those five old murder cases and had come up with a point of logic that had escaped us at midnight. “The cases all followed the Grayson lettering sequence, in precise order. A came before B , then came C, D , and E , all within days of each other. Think about that a minute. Picture a map of the United States and ask yourself, if you were going to kill people in five different parts of the country, how would you go about it? I’d do the two in the West first because I’m out here already and it’s closer. Do Idaho first, then fly to Phoenix. Then go east and do the others, St. Louis, then New Orleans and Baltimore, in either order. What the killer did, though, was St. Louis first… A . Then he went to Phoenix, B; then he flew clear back across the country to C , Baltimore. Then back across the country again to Idaho. Then back again to New Orleans. Does this make sense? Not unless you’ve got Grayson’s list and can see the connections.”

“It’s like he couldn’t see anything beyond the list.”

“Just get there, do it, and move on the next one.”

“Whatever it was, the urgency was so great he didn’t even think about geography.”

She shivered. “This is a real crazy one we’ve got here.”

“And he’s still out there doing it.”

Forty minutes later we were sitting in a maintenance truck at the end of a concourse where the smallest airline carriers and various private flights were routed. Our driver was a cheerful fellow named Mickey Bowman, who ran the airport’s public relations office and didn’t seem to mind being roused from bed when Trish had called him at three-thirty. I knew a little about the odd relationships that sometimes develop between PR people and the press—the Denver cops had a public affairs specialist with the rank of division chief, and depending on who held the job, you could sometimes see the good and bad of what he did on the front pages of the Denver newspapers. If he stonewalls, they dig out the facts anyway, only they write them in such a way as to make his boss look stupid, silly, or devious. A good PR guy knows when to promote and when to back off and do the gal a favor. He is always in when the press calls: he never gives her the feeling that, all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia than sitting in a maintenance truck at six o’clock on a rainy morning talking to her. He is an expert at damage control, and if the story is going to be critical, he sometimes earns his pay more for what’s left out of a piece than what’s put in.

Bowman had been a reporter himself in a previous life and he knew the routine. He knew what her deadlines were, just as he knew that she seldom did stories of that nature. “We’d like to meet a guy at the airport, Mickey,” she had said, “and we’re not sure yet whether we’ll want to announce ourselves after he gets here.” Bowman’s dad had been in the Seabees in the big war, she told me later: he had passed along that can-do mentality to his son. Bowman was waiting when we arrived. He got us through security, verified when and where Scofield’s plane would be coming in, and now we sat with Trish wedged tight in the seat between us, the airport VISITOR tags clipped to our lapels.

I sat quietly splitting my concentration. One side of my brain listened to the shoptalk between Aandahl and Bowman while I thought about our killer with the other half. I thought about a blind woman in Baltimore who had been left alive in the middle of a nine-day rampage, who had later gone mad and been committed. Trish was telling Mickey Bowman about a great public-relations man she knew by phone but had never met. The guy worked for United Airlines in Miami, and he had all but written her first big story for her on deadline. A plane had been hijacked: FBI sharpshooters had gotten under the aircraft without the hijacker’s knowledge, and one was trying to crawl up the plane’s nose assembly before the gunman figured out where they were. The United man had an office window that looked down on the scene. Trish sat at a desk across town, her phone rigged through a headset, taking verbatim descriptions as the United guy talked the story out to her. “They killed the hijacker,” she said, “but I’ve never forgotten that PR man. You’re pretty good yourself, Mick.”

This was high praise from someone who never dealt in bullshit, and Bowman knew it. “Mickey used to be a bureau chief for the AP in Indianapolis,” Trish said for my benefit. I joined the small talk and learned a few things about wire-service reporters. But I was still thinking about the blind woman in Maryland.

At six-thirty sharp a burst of noise came through Bowman’s radio. “Your bird’s on the ground,” he said. At almost the same instant a car materialized, a black Cadillac that came slowly up the runway and stopped, idling about thirty yards to our right. The two men sitting in the car would be Scofield bodyguards, I guessed. Bowman started his engine and cleared away the steam from our windows with his air blower. I had to hand it to him: he must be curious as hell about the story we were doing, but he never asked.

A sleek-looking jet nosed its way around the corner and came toward us. “Well, what do you think?” Trish asked. I told her I tried not to think, I just react, and Bowman laughed when she did not. She was letting me call the plays, at least for now. It had been my decision to get on Scofield’s tail as soon as he touched down at Sea-Tac; I just wasn’t comfortable waiting around for him to show up at the Four Seasons. When you’re dealing with a fruitcake like Pruitt, a lot can happen in ten miles.

The plane taxied in and came to a stop. The ground crew rolled out a steel stairwell, a door opened, and a man got out and popped open an umbrella. Then Rodney Scofield stepped out in the rain. I didn’t need a formal introduction: he was an old man whose snowy hair curled in tufts under the edges of his hat, whose ruddy face—as near as I could tell from that distance—was all business. This was his clambake, he was the boss. The grunt beside him held the umbrella over his head, and the two grunts in the Caddy got out and stood at attention. He was at the bottom of the stairs when Leith Kenney emerged from the aircraft. Kenney looked just as I’d pictured him, which doesn’t happen often when all you have is a voice to go by. He had a neatly trimmed beard: he was slender and tall and had the word bookman stamped all over him. He was carrying a small suitcase, which he looked ready to defend with his life. He reminded me of a diplomatic courier in wartime, transporting top secrets with the valise chained to his wrist. But I was willing to bet that this suitcase contained nothing but money.

Here we go, I thought.

We went south, a surprise. I was happy to have done something right for a change and picked up Scofield at the airport. The Cadillac whipped into 1-5 and headed for Tacoma like a homing pigeon. Bowman followed without question: Trish would owe him a big-league debt when it was over. The Caddy cruised at the speed limit and Bowman kept our truck two or three cars behind it. We didn’t talk: just sat rigid, tense in the seat. After eight or ten miles, the Cadillac turned off the highway and took to a two-lane, state-numbered road. Bowman dropped back but kept him-in sight, cruising along at forty.

The rain had stopped and the sky was breaking up into long streaks of blue. A stiff wind blew down from Rainier, buffeting the truck as we rocked along. I thought we must be due east of Tacoma now, skirting the city on Highway 161. It was small-town suburban, broken by stretches of open country. Snow blew off the mountain in the distance, a swirling gale driven by the same wind that rolled down the valley. We came to a river, crossed it, and arrived in the town of Puyallup.

The Cadillac stopped. Pulled off to the side of the road.

We drove on past and I got a glimpse of Scofield and Kenney confering over something in the backseat.

“They’re looking at directions,” Trish said. ‘’ Double-checking.‘’

“Then we’re almost there.”

Bowman hung a left, did a quick U-turn, and came cautiously to the corner. We could see the Cadillac still parked off the road in the distance. We sat at roadside and waited.

They came a minute later. Bowman allowed just the right gap to develop, then swung in behind them. I wasn’t too worried: none of the guys in the Caddy looked like pros to me, meaning the only way they’d make us was by accident. The Caddy hung a right, into a road that ran along the river. The place they were going was about half a mile along, a small cafe well back from the road. There was a gas pump out front and a couple of junk autos at the east side of the building. The yard was unpaved, puddle-pocked from all the rain. “Pull in,” I said, and Bowman did, taking a position between cars on the far end. Scofield and Kenney got out and went in, leaving the two grunts alone in the car.

“Well,” I said. “Looks like we fish or cut bait.”

“Let me go in,” Trish said. “At least if Pruitt’s in there he won’t know me on sight.”

“Okay, but do it quick. Get us three coffees to go, then get back out here and tell me what’s going on.”

She clutched her raincoat and struggled through the wind to the front door. I got back in the truck and waited. Bowman didn’t say anything, and in a minute I forgot he was there. I thought about Pruitt and Grayson, and about the blind woman in Baltimore. And I was suddenly very nervous.

One of Scofield’s grunts got out of the Caddy and tried valiantly to light a cigarette. No smoking allowed in the old man’s car, I thought. But the wind was fierce and at last he had to give it up.

The cafe got busy. It was a workingman’s joint, the customers coming and going in blue jeans and flannel. The slots in front of the building were now filled in with cars, and another row had begun out near the road behind us. A young couple brushed past, then two farmers, then a guy in coveralls who looked like the town grease monkey. They all converged at the front door, just as the door swung open and Trish came out.

She stepped aside, clutching a brown paper bag against her breast. I got out and let her into the truck and she gave me the news. Our friends had taken a booth at the far end of the dining room and were sitting there alone, waiting.

Trish gave out the coffees. “Hope you don’t have to be anywhere,” she said by way of apology to Bowman. He just grinned, well aware of the points he was piling up with her, and said his time was her time. He’d need to call in at nine and make sure a few things got done: other than that, he was all hers. More people came and went, old men in twos and threes mixed with the occasional loner. They would fill up the tables in a corner, eat their soft-boiled eggs and gripe as old men in small towns have always done about the thieves and sons of bitches running things in Washington. I could fit right in if they’d let me: a helluva lot better that would be than sitting out here like three bumps on a log. This was a difficult place for a stakeout. But you’d be much too conspicuous out on the road, so you took what the situation gave you and hoped you blended in. I hunched down in the seat till my eyes were level with the dash. I could still see everything that went on at the front door.

Bowman and Trish were talking shop again. I listened but did not hear. Then we all settled into that quiet restlessness that always seems to come in the second hour. I replayed the case in my head, trying to remember everything from the top. Slater walked into my store and we did our little macho dance. I crossed swords with Pruitt, came to know Eleanor and the Rigbys, absorbed the legend of the Graysons, met Huggins and Amy Harper. But through it all I kept thinking about a woman I had never met and probably never would, a blind woman who had gone crazy in Baltimore.

I got my chance at her when Bowman went to make his phone call. “The guy in Baltimore,” I said. “When he called you back, did he say anything about the particulars of that particular case?”

“He read me some stuff from the clips. I made some notes.” She opened her purse and got out her steno pad. “I spent more time with him than the others because of the blind woman.”

“Yeah, the blind woman.”

“What’re you thinking?”

“I don’t know yet. Go on with what he told you.”

“The victim’s name was Allingham. He lived with his wife on the outskirts of Baltimore, a suburb called Ellicott City. Nice house, secluded neighborhood, well-to-do people in their midfifties.”

“And the wife survived.”

“Not only survived, she seemed to’ve been deliberately left alone. He came into the room with her. She could hear him breathing.”

“ Him …did she say it was a him?”

“That’s how the clips had it. He came in… he stood there breathing hard. She knew what was happening, too: knew they had an intruder and he had just killed or seriously hurt her husband. Blind people see better than we think.”

“What else?”

She flipped a page. I looked at her notes and saw a cryptic brand of shorthand, probably something of her own making that was unreadable to the rest of the world. “Her name was Elizabeth. She was never a credible witness. She just sank into darkness after that. But who could blame her?”

I closed my eyes and tried to see it. Irish said, “The cops thought it might’ve been her dog that saved her. She had this German shepherd Seeing Eye dog, very protective. They say the dog raised hell when the cops arrived. They had to bring in a dog man to muzzle him before they could interview the widow.”

“I don’t think the dog had anything to do with it.”

“How so?”

“Dogs don’t usually discourage that kind of killer, at least not for long. If he’d wanted her, he’d go through the dog to get her.”

“Maybe the noise scared him off.”

“Maybe. And I can’t help wondering how she could hear the killer breathing if the dog was barking.”

“Who knows what she really heard? But look, are you going somewhere with this?”

“I don’t know yet. It’s just nagging at me. Did any of your news guys mention ashes at the scene?”

“No, but that wouldn’t be in the clips. The cops never…”

“But you did say the house in New Orleans was torched and burned.”

“Yeah, the cops there thought it was done to cover up the murder.”

“They may’ve told the press that, but I’ll bet there were some cops down there who didn’t believe it.”

“What’re you thinking?” she asked again.

“Might’ve been somebody burning a book. He left it burning and the fire spread and burned the house.”

Bowman had come out of the restaurant, standing off to one side to grab a smoke. I looked at Trish and the question that had nagged at me all morning bubbled up and out.

“Why would he leave the blind woman alive?”

“You tell me.”

“Because of her blindness. That’s the one thing all the others had in common that made her different. They could see.”

“He knew she couldn’t see him. Couldn’t identify him.”

“That’s the logical answer. But this bird wasn’t thinking logically. And I can think of another possibility.”

She shook her head. “I must be dense.”

“There was something in the book. Something they could see and she couldn’t. Something that had been put in or bound in by mistake. Something so awful in the killer’s mind that it had to be retrieved, and anybody who had seen it killed.”

“I don’t know, Janeway.”

“I don’t know either. I’m just doing what cops always do in murder cases, I’m playing it through in my head. Maybe he never intended to kill anybody. But he went to St. Louis to get his book back, and Hockman wouldn’t play. Now we get into the collector’s mentality. Hockman suddenly knew he had something unique. He wasn’t about to give it up, not for Jesus Christ, not for Daryl Grayson himself. The only way to get it from him was to kill him.”

“Keep going,” she said, but her voice was still laced with doubt.

“The killer was single-minded, you figured that out yourself. He flew from A to B , and so on. He had one thing on his mind, getting that book. There was a desperate urgency to it, the cause transcended geography, transcended everything: he couldn’t think about anything else. So he gets to St. Louis and Hockman won’t give it to him. He whacks Hockman, maybe in a fit of rage. Now he’s a killer.”

I let that thought settle on her for a few seconds.

“Let me tell you something about killers, Trish…something you might know but never thought about. There are people who never kill till they’re forty, fifty, then they kill a dozen times. That first one pushes them over the edge, sets them on a dark path they never intended to travel. The first one’s the catalyst: there’s no question after that. He goes to Phoenix and this time he doesn’t even ask. He wades in, kills the people, takes the book. And so it goes.”

“Until he gets to Baltimore…”

“And he walks into the room and there’s this woman, obviously blind, with a dog and all, maybe a cane leaning against a table. She’s blind, she didn’t see anything, she’s not part of this. He leaves her alive.”

“But who’d go to such a length? Who’d do something like that?”

“Only one guy I can think of. The guy who made it.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Jesus, Janeway, what’re you thinking?” she asked for the third time, her voice now an urgent whisper.

“Did you ever talk to the coroner who did the Graysons?”

“No,” she said in a tiny voice. “There was never a reason.”

“There was never any doubt that it was really Darryl and Richard Grayson who died in that fire?”

She never got to answer because Bowman came back and got in beside us. We sat in the car, still as death, thinking about it.

All this time we’ve had the wrong motive, I was thinking. We’ve been thinking money, but that was never it. All the specter of money had done was cloud it. Only after Scofield had begun to collect Grayson and the books had become so avidly sought and eagerly paid for did money become a credible possibility. But this case had begun long before that.

The clock pushed ten: the breakfast rush was over. Scofield and Kenney had been inside more than two hours.

“They must be getting discouraged by now,” I said.

It was on that weary note that Pruitt arrived.

45

He was the invisible man, leaving footprints in the snow. Watch out for old ladies , Slater had said, but you still couldn’t see him except that he was carrying Scofield’s suitcase. The suitcase was like the snow in that old horror film: it lit him up, made his tracks visible so you could pop him as he ran across the yard. It danced of its own volition, as if the arm clutching it against the gingham dress had vanished. He had tried to cover it with a shawl, which was too small. I sat up straight in the seat, so suddenly that Trish jumped up with a jerk of her own. “What’s going on?” she said, but I was already out of the truck, splashing after the hooded squaw who moved between cars and headed across the muddy yard twenty yards to our right. He looked like old Mother Bates in Psycho , walking with the sure and deadly gait of a man. I fell in behind him and we headed out toward the row of cars parked by the road. The wind whipped at his shawl and clutched the corners of his hood. I got a glimpse of cheek as he half-turned and tried to look back. But he didn’t turn far enough: he was caught in the Satchel Paige syndrome, afraid to look, afraid to see how much trouble followed him. If he could make it to his car without having to look upon his enemy, he’d be home free.

He didn’t make it.

“Pruitt,” I said, and he spun on his heel and locked in my eyes from a distance of six feet.

His free hand slipped down into the folds of his dress. I danced in close and grabbed him. With the other hand I ripped away the suitcase and made him fumble it. It popped open on the ground and the wind sucked up the money, a fluttery gale of greenbacks that blew back across the yard toward the cafe. He cried out and tried to dive down and save it. I met him coming down with a knee to the jaw, flopping him back on his ass in the mud.

It was all fast motion and unreal after that. I stood over him and said, “Take out that gun and I’ll kick your head off,” but I knew that wouldn’t stop him. He cleared the dress with a handful of iron and I drove my shoe under his armpit. He grabbed at the sky, fired a round in the air, and I nailed him hard with the other foot. He withered, twisting in agony like a deflating balloon, rolling under the wheels with a gaffing, hissing sound. I kicked his gun and it spun off into a puddle. I knew I had hurt him, maybe busted his ribs, but he wasn’t finished yet. He still had the knife, and as I dragged him out, he rolled into me with the blade leading the way. I caught his wrist with a wet smack. For a few seconds we strained against each other while the point of the knife quivered like a seismograph that couldn’t tell if an earthquake was coming. Then I knew I had him. I saw it first in his eyes, that chink in the hard shell that comes to all bullyboys when they play one hand too many. He didn’t look mean anymore. He looked small and tired and astonished.

“Now you are going to tell me where the girl is.” I said this with the knife at my throat but the tide turning fast. His arm collapsed and he let the knife fall away as if surrender could save him. I hit him hard with my fist so he’d know better, and I hit him again, then again, then I lost track as I battered his face back and forth. I could hear my voice pounding at him as well, “Where is she…where is she,” with every punch, and after a while he stopped saying he didn’t know. I felt Trish on my back, heard her screaming at me to for Christ’s sake stop it, but for that long minute stopping was just not possible. I had slipped over the edge and become every bad cop who ever took up a rubber hose or swung a billy club in anger.

Trish grabbed me around the neck. I shrugged her off and went at Pruitt again.

Then I did stop. I lunged at him one more time, a reflex, but I pulled back without letting that last fist fall. I looked at him, bloody and cold, and I knew he wouldn’t be telling anybody anything for a while.

I got up and looked around. Trish was sitting in mud ten feet away. Bowman was standing far back, watching as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Farther back, people were running out of the diner as word spread that hundred-dollar bills were falling out of the sky.

In the babble of the crowd I heard the word police . I had a few minutes on the long end to do what I had to do and get out of there.

I dragged Pruitt around the car, took out Slater’s handcuffs, and locked him to the door handle. I didn’t see Irish when I looked for her again: I didn’t know where she’d gone, but Bowman was still there. I went over to him and said, “Gimme the truck keys, Mickey,” and he looked at me as if I was not a guy to argue with and he gave me the keys. I handed him the keys to the cuffs and told him to give them to Trish.

I headed toward the cafe. The crowd at the door pushed back and gave me a wide berth.

I heard voices as I moved through. Again the word police . Somebody else said they were on the way. A woman asked what the hell was going on and a man said, “Some crazy guy beat up an old lady in the parking lot.”

I pushed past the waiting area and saw Scofield and Kenney sitting at the booth in the corner. They were looking at something on the table between them, studying it so intently they couldn’t even hear the commotion up front.

I walked right over and pulled up a chair. Scofield jerked back, as startled as if I’d attacked him. He grabbed a book off the table and put, it out of sight on his lap. Kenney looked at me with unruffled eyes and I jumped into the breach as if we were all old friends.

“I’m glad to see you didn’t come all this way for nothing.”

“Do I know you?” Kenney was wary now, but in his manner I caught a glimmer of recognition.

“That’s a good ear you’ve got. I’m the guy you’ve been talking to on the phone.”

He didn’t say anything. I could see he was with me but he tried to shrug it off. This was all a moot point: they had what they’d come for.

“Before you go flying back to Tinseltown,” I said, “I should tell you there’s a lot more where that came from.”

“Lots more what?”

“I don’t have time to draw you a picture. I’m talking sixty cartons of Grayson ephemera. I’m talking notes, diaries, letters, sketches, photographs. You name it, I got it.”

Kenney took the news like a world-class poker player. But Scofield began to tremble.

“And, oh, yeah,” I said as an afterthought: “I also happen to have picked up Grayson’s original subscriber list along the way…if something like that could be of any interest to you.”

Scofield fumbled in his pocket and got out a vial of pills. He took two with water. Kenney looked in my eyes and said, “What do you want?”

“Right now just listen. You boys go on up to Seattle and wait for me in your room at the Four Seasons. I’ll either come to you or call you later today or tonight. Don’t talk to anybody about this till I get back to you. Are we all on the same page?”

They looked at each other.

“Yes,” Scofield said in a thin voice. “We’ll be there.”

I got up and left them, pushing my way through the crowd. Outside, the yard looked like a convention of lunatics. People ran back and forth, crawled under cars in the mud, screamed at each other. Two fistfights were in progress off to the side, and in the distance I heard a siren.

I didn’t see Bowman or Trish and didn’t have time to look. I got in the truck and drove away.

I was well up the highway when I realized that something was clinging to my windshield. It was a crisp C-note. Franklin flapped madly against the glass as I banked north into 1-5. I didn’t stop even for him. In a while he lost his hold and blew away.

46

I was waiting at a table in the Hilton coffee shop when Huggins came in. He glanced around nervously, scanning the room twice before he saw me. A flash of annoyance crossed his face, but he chased it away and put on a passive mask in its place. I didn’t move except to raise my eyes slightly as he crossed the room in my direction.

“Mr. Hodges,” he said, sitting down.

“My name isn’t Hodges, it’s Cliff Janeway. I’m a book dealer from Denver.”

If this surprised him, he didn’t show it. His eyes had found the bait that had lured him here, that charred paper chip that had been haunting his dreams since Saturday night. I had put it out on the table, on top of the sheet Trish had brought back from St. Louis.

He leaned over the table and looked at it. “May I?”

“Carefully.”

He picked up the fragment and again gave it the long, hard look through the eyepiece. His breath flared out through his nostrils as he looked. When at last he put the paper down, his eyes looked tired, as if he’d just gone halfway round the world.

“What do you think?”

He grunted. “It’s hard to say.”

“Come on, Mr. Huggins, let’s not play around. The day is going fast and I’ve got lots to do.”

“I’m not sure what you want from me.”

“Let’s start with this.” I shoved the paper from St. Louis across the table and under his nose. “That look like the same alphabet to you?”

It pained him to look: you could see it in his eyes, the sure knowledge that he had something here but he’d never be able to keep it.

“Mr. Huggins?”

“Yes…I guess I’d have to say it probably is.”

We looked at each other.

“So,” he said: “now you can go tell Scofield and that’ll be that.”

I was finding it hard to argue with him. A part of me knew where he was coming from and sympathized with his viewpoint. As a bookman I was offended at the prospect of Scofield buying up every remaining scrap of Grayson’s work. But I had Amy Harper to consider. This stuff was her future.

Suddenly Huggins was talking, one of his now-familiar monologues. But the tone was different: his voice had taken on the soft weariness of the defeated. “Twenty years ago, Grayson was an incredibly fertile field for a collector. He had just died and his books could still be had at almost every auction of fine-press items. I built my own collection piece by piece, scrap by scrap. It was so satisfying. You carve out your expertise, you shape and define it, and because of your scholarship others come into it and find the same pleasures and satisfactions you have. But you remain the leader, the first one they think of when they’ve taken it as far as they want to go with it and they’re ready to sell. Then a man like Scofield comes along and everything changes.”

He sipped his water and gave me a hard look. “I haven’t been able to buy anything now for more than seven years. Only isolated pieces here and there, things that fall into my lap. You can forget the auction houses…Scofield’s man is always there, always. And you can’t outbid him, you’d have to be Ross Perot…I don’t know, maybe it’s time I donated what I’ve got to a library and got out of the Grayson business. The trouble is, I don’t know what else there is in life. I’ve never known anything that can give me the thrill of finding a Grayson variant…the thought of not having that is almost more than I can bear. Now, with my wife gone, the notion of clearing out my Grayson room and giving it all away…and yet, I’ve always been a practical man. When something’s over, it’s over.”

“You could try taking pleasure in what you have.”

He gave me a bitter smile. “I think you know better than that. The thrill is in the hunt, sir.”

“Of course it is. And I wish I could help you.”

“But in the end you’re just what I feared most…Scofield’s man.”

“Not quite that. I wasn’t lying to you, I didn’t know who Scofield was.”

“But you do now, and that’s where you’ll go. I don’t blame you, understand, but I can’t help fretting over it and wishing money didn’t rule the world.”

We seemed to be finished. Then he said, “How did you find it? Was it Otto Murdock?”

I sat up straight. “What about Murdock?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. Obviously you know the name.”

“How does he figure into it?”

“The same way everyone else does. He’s been chasing it.”

“You mean the Grayson Raven ?”

“That, or anything else that’ll keep him in potato water for the rest of his life.”

“I understand he was a pretty good Grayson man once.”

“Second only to yours truly,” he said with a sad little smile. “Otto really had the bug, fifteen, twenty years ago.”

“And had a helluva collection to prove it, I’ve been led to believe.”

“Until he started selling it off piece by bloody piece to pay the whiskey man.”

“Where’d he sell it?”

He gave a little laugh. “That shouldn’t be hard to guess.”

“You bought it.”

“As much of it as I could. Otto was going through periods of trying to straighten himself out. Then he’d fall off the wagon and have to sell something. He sold all the minor stuff first. Then, just about the time he was getting to the gold-star items, along came Scofield with all the money in the world to buy them from him. I was like a duck shot right out of the water. Scofield paid him fifteen thousand dollars for a Ben-ton Christmas Carol that wouldn’t get fifteen hundred at auction. How do you compete with somebody like that?”

I let a couple of heartbeats pass, then I said, “Have you seen Murdock recently?”

“Hadn’t seen him for years, till about a month ago.”

“What happened then?”

“He called me up one night and asked if I could get some money together.”

“Was he trying to sell you something?”

“That’s what it sounded like. I never could get him to be specific. All he’d say was that he was working on the Grayson deal of a lifetime. Stuff he’d known about for years but had never been able to get at it. Whoever owned it was unapproachable. But that person had died and now somebody else had come into it, somebody who didn’t know as much or care as much about it. He needed some money to approach her with.”

“How much money?”

“He wasn’t sure. He had seen this person once and he couldn’t tell if she was as naive as she seemed or was just taking him for a ride. My impression was, she wasn’t a heavyweight, but you only get one shot at something like that. Misjudge her and you lose it. Pay too little, lose it. Pay too much, you still lose it. What he asked for was five thousand.”

“He was going to try to steal it.”

“I figured as much. If he was going to pay five, it had to be worth fifty. God knows what a madman like Scofield would pay.”

“Why wouldn’t Murdock go to Scofield for the money in the first place?”

“Who knows what Otto was thinking? If this really was a once-in-a-lifetime Grayson score, you’d want to try to buy it yourself and then sell it to Scofield. That’s how I’d do it, if I was Otto and had a little larceny in my heart.”

“So when he came to you for the five, what’d you tell him?”

“What do you think I told him? I said I’d need to know exactly what I’d be getting for my money. You don’t just hand over five thousand dollars to a man who’s fully capable of drinking it up in a lost weekend.”

Now he wavered. “I made a mistake. I can see it in your face.”

“You both did. He could’ve bought it all for a hundred dollars. She might’ve given it to him just for hauling it out of there.”

He looked ready to cry. He didn’t want to ask, didn’t dare ask, but in the end he had to.

“What the hell are we talking about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“No,” he said dryly. “I probably don’t.”

“So Murdock came and went. Was that the last time you saw him?”

“Saw him, yes.”

“But you heard from him again.”

“He called me about ten days ago. He had been drinking, I could tell that immediately. He was babbling.”

“About what?”

“He was raving about some limited series of Grayson books that I had missed in my bibliography. He seemed to think Grayson had made a special set, just a few copies of each title, at least since the midfifties.”

“What did you tell him?”

“To find a good hangover cure and go to bed.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“They’re all dead. That’s what he said, they’re all dead, all five of ‘em.”

“What did you make of that?”

“Nothing. He was hallucinating.”

“Was that the end of it?”

“Just about. He rambled on for a while longer. Talked about getting himself together, becoming a real bookman again. Said he was going to write the real story of Darryl Grayson: said it had never been told but he was going to tell it, and when he did, the book world would sit up and take notice. It was all drunken balderdash.”

He looked weary, suddenly older. “If you want to chase down a drunk’s pink elephants, be my guest. Archie Moon and the Rigbys might know something. Otto said he’d gone out to North Bend and talked to them about it.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t take any more.”

He was ready to leave now. As he pushed back his chair, I said, “By the way, did you know Murdock was dead?”

He blinked once and said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

“I’m sure it’s been on the news by now.”

“I don’t read newspapers and I never watch anything but network news on television. I can’t stand these local fools.”

“Anyway, he’s dead.”

“How?…What happened?”

“Murder.”

He blinked again. “What the hell’s happening here?”

“Good question, Mr. Huggins. I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.”

47

A my Harper had brushed out her long red hair and put on her one good dress. She looked less all the time like the doe-eyed schoolgirl I had rescued from Belltown. She had found someone to stay with her children overnight: a good thing, because this was going to run late.

She wouldn’t be doing any lifting and toting today. She was going to sit in a chair and supervise while a billionaire’s handyman did the work for her.

We zipped along 1-90 in the Nash and I told her what the game plan was. Somewhere on the road, ahead of us or just behind, Scofield and Kenney were heading for the same destination: I had called them from Amy’s room and told them where to go. She listened to what I was telling her and demanded nothing. She had a Spartan nature, patient and gutsy and uncomplaining, and I liked her better every time I saw her.

A kind of muted excitement filled the car as we flew past Issaquah for the run into North Bend. I was anxious without being nervous. I knew what we had: I knew the power it would hold over Scofield, and even Amy felt the strength of it as the day gained momentum. I had taken on the role of Amy’s guardian, her agent, in the talks to come. But a murder case was also on the fire: the fate of another woman I cared about greatly was still in doubt. It’s not about money , I thought again. I believed that now more than ever. But money had become so mixed up in it that only the moneyman could help me untangle it, and I wasn’t above using the Grayson papers as a wedge on him.

It seemed impossible but it was still only one o’clock. I thought about Trish and wondered how she was doing with Pruitt. I had left Bowman’s truck at her house and changed over to the Nash before meeting Huggins at the Hilton.

Now I banked into the familiar North Bend off-ramp. The day was lovely, chilly like a mountain pool, and the wind swirled clouds behind the mountain in the distance. For a moment I thought I saw the Indian in the mountain, but when I blinked and looked again, he was gone. I headed down toward the main street and turned into the motel where I’d left the stash.

The black Cadillac was there in the yard.

“They’re here,” I said.

I got out, went to the office, and asked for Rodney Scofield. Room four, the man said, and I walked up the walk and knocked on the door.

Kenney opened it. He had a cocktail glass in his hand, ice bobbing in amber liquid.

We went in. I drew up a chair and Amy sat on the foot of the bed. “This is Miss Amy Harper. She’s running this show. My name’s Cliff Janeway, I’m a book dealer from Denver.”

“Leith Kenney.” He shook hands, first with Amy, then with me.

“Where’s Scofield?” I asked.

“In the bathroom. He’ll be out. Want a drink?”

“Sure. What’re we having?”

“Can you drink Scotch?”

“I’m a William Faulkner bourbon man. That means between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”

He smiled: he knew the quote. Suddenly we were two old bookmen, hunkering down to bullshit. He looked at Amy and said, “Miss Harper?”

“Got a Coke?”

“7-Up.”

“That’ll be cool.”

Kenney and I smiled at each other. He took a 7-Up out of a bag, filled a glass with ice, and poured it for her. He asked how I wanted my drink and I told him just like they shipped it from Kentucky.

A door clicked open and Rodney Scofield came into the room.

He was thin, with a pale, anemic look. His white hair had held its ground up front, retreating into a half-moon bald spot at the back of his head. His eyes were gray, sharp, and alert: his handshake was firm. He sat at the table, his own 7-Up awaiting his pleasure. He had a way about him that drew everyone around to him, making wherever he chose to sit the head of the class. He was a tough old bird, accustomed to giving orders and having people jump to his side. Now he would sit and listen and take orders himself, from a girl barely out of her teens.

It was up to me to set the stage, which I did quickly. “Everything I told you in the restaurant is true. Gentlemen, this is the Grayson score of your lifetime. This young lady here owns it, and she’s asked me to come and represent her interests.”

“Whatever you pay me,” Amy said to Scofield, “Mr. Janeway gets half.”

I looked at her sharply and said, “No way.”

“I won’t even discuss any other arrangement.” She looked at Kenney and said, “If it wasn’t for this man, I’d‘ve given it away, maybe burned it all in the dump.”

“Amy, listen to me. I couldn’t take your money, it’d be unethical as hell, and Mr. Kenney knows that.”

“Lawyers do it. They take half all the time.”

“So do booksellers, but this is different. And you’ve got two kids to think about.”

“Maybe I can help you resolve this little dilemma,” Kenney said smoothly. “Let’s assume for the moment that you’ve really got what you think you’ve got. That remains to be seen, but if it’s true, Mr. Janeway would have a legitimate claim for a finder’s fee.”

I felt my heart turn over at the implication. I had come here chasing five thousand dollars, and now that jackpot was beginning to look small.

“What does that mean?” Amy said.

“It’s a principle in bookselling,” I told her. “If one dealer steers another onto something good, the first dealer gets a finder’s fee.” I looked at Kenney and arched an eyebrow. “Usually that’s ten percent of the purchase price.”

“That doesn’t sound like much,” Amy said.

“In this case it could he a bit more than that,” Kenney said.

I leaned forward and looked in Amy’s face. “Trust me, it’s fine.”

“Let’s move on,” Kenney said. “Let’s assume we’re all dealing in good faith and everybody will be taken care of. Where’s the material?”

“It’s not far from here,” I said. “Before we get into it, though, I need to ask you some questions. I’d like to see that book you bought back in the restaurant.”

Kenney was immediately on guard. “Why?”

“If you humor me, we’ll get through this faster.”

“What you’re asking goes beyond good faith,” Kenney said. “You must know that. You’ve told us a fascinating story but you haven’t shown us anything. I’ve got to protect our interests. You’d do the same thing if you were me.”

I got up and moved around the bed. “Let’s you and me take a little walk.” I looked at Amy and said, “Sit tight, we’ll be right back.”

We went down the row to the room at the end. I opened the door and stood outside while he went in alone. When he came out, ten minutes later, his face was pale.

My first reaction to the Grayson Raven was disappointment. It’s been oversold as a great book , I thought as Kenney unwrapped it and I got my first real look. It was half-leather with silk-covered pictorial boards. Grayson had done the front-board design himself: his initial stood out in gilt in the lower corner. The leather had a still-fresh new look to it, but the fabric was much older and very fine, elegant to the touch. In the dim light of the motel room it gave off an appearance of antiquity. The boards were surprisingly thin: you could take it in your hands and flex it, it had a kind of whiplash suppleness, slender and tough like an old fly rod. The endpapers were marbled: the sheets again had the feel of another century. You don’t buy paper like that at Woolworth’s and you don’t buy books like this on chain-store sale tables. The slipcase was cut from the same material that had been used for the boards: the covering that same old silk. A variation of the book’s design, but simpler, serving only to suggest, was stamped into the front board of the slipcase. My first reaction passed and I felt the book’s deeper excellence setting in. The effect was of something whisked here untouched from another time. Exactly what Grayson intended, I thought.

I opened it carefully while Kenney stood watch. Scofield hadn’t moved from his chair, nor had Amy. I leafed to the title page where the date, 1969 , stood out boldly at the bottom. A plastic bag containing some handwritten notes had been laid in there: I picked it up and moved it aside so I could look at the type without breaking my thought. The pertinent letters looked the same. Later they could be blown up and compared microscopically and linked beyond any doubt, if we had to do that. For my purpose, now, I was convinced.

I flipped to the limitation page in the back of the book. It was a lettered copy, E , and was signed by Grayson.

E was New Orleans. Laura Warner’s book.

“Well,” I said to Scofield. “How do you like your book?”

“I like it fine.”

“Then you’re satisfied with it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” His eyes were steady, but there was something about him…a wavering, a lingering discontent.

“Are you satisfied you got what you paid for?…That’s what I’m asking.”

“It’s the McCoy,” Kenney said. “If it’s not, I’ll take up selling shoes for a living.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll have to do that, Mr. Kenney,” I said. “But something’s wrong and I can’t help wondering what.”

They didn’t say anything. Kenney moved away to the table and poured himself another drink.

“On the phone you told me something,” I said. “You said Scofield had touched the book and held it in his hands.”

I looked at Scofield. “What I seem to be hearing in all this silence is that this is not the book.”

“It’s not the one I saw,” Scofield said. “I don’t know what this is. It may be some early state or a variant, maybe some experiment that Grayson meant to destroy and never did.”

Kenney sipped his drink. “It’s a little disturbing because we know that Grayson didn’t do lettered books.”

“So the hunt goes on,” I said with a sly grin.

Scofield’s eyes lit up. This was what kept him alive as he headed into his seventh decade. The hunt, the quest, that same hot greed that sent Cortez packing through steamy jungles to plunder the Aztecs.

I fingered the plastic bag.

“That’s just some ephemera we found between the pages,” Kenney said.

I opened the bag and looked at the notes. One was from Laura Warner, an enigma unless you knew how to read it. Pyotr , she had written, don’t you dare scold me for teasing you when you yourself tease so. It does please me that you can laugh at yourself now. Was this a test to see if I’d notice? How could you doubt one who hangs on your every word? I’m returning your little trick, lovely though it is, and I await the real book with joyful anticipation .

None of us rehashed the words, though the last line hung heavy in the room. I opened the second note, a single line scratched out on notebook paper. Hang on to this for me, it’ll probably be worth some money. Nola .

“What do you make of it?” I said.

“Obviously it’s passed through several hands,” Kenney said. “People do leave things in books.”

I turned the pages looking for the poem “Annabel Lee.” I found it quickly, with the misspelled word again misspelled.

Kenney had noticed it too. “Strange, isn’t it?”

I held the page between my ringers and felt the paper. I thought of something Huggins had said: there’s no such thing as a perfect book. If you look with a keen eye, you can always find something. I pressed the page flat against the others and saw that the top edge trim was slightly uneven. There’s always something.

“Just a few more things and we can get started,” I said. “I know you boys are dying to get into this stuff, but you have to help me a little first.”

“What do you want?” Scofield said.

“I want to know everything that happened when you saw that other Raven and held it in your hands. I want to know when it happened, how, where, who was involved, and what happened after that. And I want to know about Pruitt and where he came from.”

“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with you.”

“I’ve got a hunt of my own going, Mr. Scofield. I’m hunting a killer and I’ve got a hunch you boys are sitting on the answers I’ve been looking for.”

48

Twelve years ago, Pruitt had been a hired gun for Scofield Industries. He was a roving troubleshoot-er whose job took him regularly into fifteen states, the District of Columbia, Europe, South America, and the Far East. Within the company he was known as the Hoo-Man, an inside joke that had two cutting edges. HOO was short for his unofficial title, head of operations, but in private memos that floated between department heads it was often spelled WHO . Pruitt knew who to see, who to avoid, who would bend, who would bribe. In third-world countries, Scofield said without apology, bribery was a way of life. If you wanted to do business in Mexico, it was grease that got you through the doors. You could play the same game in the Philippines, as long as you played by the Filipino rule book.

The remarkable thing about Pruitt was his ability to function in foreign countries without a smattering of language. There were always translators, and Pruitt knew who to ask and how to ask it. He was fluent in a universal tongue, the whole of which derived from half a dozen root words.

Love and hate. Sex. Life and death. Fear. Money and politics.

The stuff that gets you where you want to go, in far-flung places that only seem different from the town you grew up in. A military junta has a familiar look to a guy who’s gone before a mom-and-pop city council in Ohio, asking for a liquor license.

Grease rules the day, from Alabama to Argentina.

This was a big job and Pruitt was good at it. He was always at the top of his game when the specs called for double-dealing and mischief. He was a shadow man whose best work could never be preplanned or monitored. He was judged strictly on the big result, success, while the boss insulated himself in a glass tower high over Melrose Avenue, never to know the particulars of how a deal had been set up.

“I wasn’t supposed to know these things,” Scofield said. “But I didn’t get where I am by not knowing what’s going on. I have a remarkable set of ears and I learned sixty years ago how to split my concentration.”

Pruitt had witnessed Scofield’s Grayson fetish from the beginning. He watched it sprout like Jack’s beanstalk, exploding in a passion that was almost sexual. Pruitt knew, without ever understanding that attraction himself, that this spelled money.

With cool eyes he saw Scofield’s collection outstrip itself ten times during the first year. By the end of year two it resembled a small library, with the end nowhere in sight. Scofield was no green kid, to burn bright and burn out when his whim of the day withered and left him dry. Scofield knew what he wanted for the rest of his life. He was a serious player in the Grayson game. Pruitt may have been the first of the Scofield associates to understand the old man’s real goal: to be not just a player but the only player.

By the middle of the third year, Scofield had acquired many of the choice one-of-a-kind items that push their owners into paranoia. He had moved the collection from the office to his mansion in the Hollywood hills, where it was given an entire room in a wing on the second floor. Scofield was nervous. He summoned his security people, discussed plans for a new system, impregnable, state-of-the-art. Pruitt, who was expert in such things, was brought in to consult and was there to help supervise the installation.

Thus sealed in artificial safety, Scofield breathed easier. But no system is better than the men who create it.

Pruitt waited and watched, biding his time.

“That year I began buying books from Morrice and Murdock in Seattle,” Scofield said. “My dealings were all with Murdock, who was then considered the country’s leading dealer in Grayson books.”

It was the year of the Morrice and Murdock breakup, when Murdock stumbled out on his own in an alcoholic stupor. “He still had a lot of books,” Scofield said, “things he had hoarded over the years. But he was cagey, difficult. He knew Grayson was on an upward spiral, but the books were his ace in the hole. He also knew that I was the market: if I happened to die or lose interest, it would stabilize and Grayson would settle into his natural level, still upward bound but at a much slower rate. Murdock wanted to make all he could on every book, but even then he was afraid of selling. No matter what I paid him, he seemed to go through it at an unbelievable clip.

“He was the kind of man who would promise the moon and give you just enough real moonbeams that you couldn’t help believing him. He talked of fabulous things, hidden in places only he knew about, and all that time he dribbled out his books one or two at a time. I bought everything he showed me and paid what he asked. I knew the day was coming when he’d get down to brass tacks and I’d see what he really had. I’ve had experience with alcoholics. Eventually they lose everything.”

In the fourth year the big break came. Murdock called, claiming to have a client who owned the only copy of Darryl Grayson’s last book.

But the deal had to be handled with tenterhooks. The woman was extremely nervous. She would only meet with Scofield under mysterious conditions, in a place of her choosing, with her identity fully protected.

“Did you ever find out,” I asked, “why this was?”

“It was fairly obvious to me,” Scofield said, “but Murdock explained it later. His client knew Darryl Grayson personally. They had had an intimate relationship. She had been a married woman then, still was, and if any of this came out, her marriage might be jeopardized.”

“Did you buy that?”

“Why not, it was perfectly feasible. Have you read the Aandahl biography on the Graysons?”

I nodded.

“Then you know how Grayson was with women. The fact that a pretty young woman was married to someone else wouldn’t have slowed him up much. She wouldn’t have been the first woman to have carried on with Grayson while she was married to someone else. And Grayson was known to have given his women presents—books, notes, charts…mementos of completed projects. It was part of the pleasure he took in his work, to give out valuable pieces of it after the main work was finished. Once a project was done, Grayson wasn’t much for keeping the records or hanging on to his dummy copies. For years it’s been assumed that these were all destroyed, but I’ve never been convinced of that.”

“So what happened?”

“We flew to Seattle.”

“Who is we?” I looked at Kenney. “You?”

Kenney shook his head. “I hadn’t been hired yet.”

“I took Mr. Pruitt,” Scofield said.

“Surely not,” I said in real dismay.

“There was no reason to doubt him then.”

“But what purpose did he serve?”

“He was what he always was: a bodyguard. I learned long ago that it pays to have such men with you. When you’ve got money, and that fact is generally known, you get accosted by all kinds of people.”

“But you had nobody with you to function as an expert…nobody like Kenney?”

“Murdock was my expert. He had already had one meeting with this woman and had examined the book himself. There was no doubt in his mind what it was.”

I didn’t point out that the ax Murdock was grinding would’ve given Paul Bunyan a hernia. It wouldn’t help to beat that horse now.

“So you took Pruitt,” I said. “What happened when you got there?”

“Murdock met us at the airport and took us straight to the meeting place. I wasn’t at my best: I’m prone to colds and flu, and I felt I was coming down with something. The weather was bad: I remember it was raining.”

“What else does it ever do in this town?”

“We went to the place she had picked out, a restaurant downtown. She wanted to meet in a public place, probably for her own protection. Murdock had reserved a table in a far corner, where she’d told him to go. It was dark back there, but that’s how she wanted it. We did it her way…everything, her way.”

He sipped his drink, gave a little cough. “She was late. We waited half an hour, maybe more. Murdock and I had little to talk about. It seemed like a very long wait, and I was not feeling well.”

“Where was Pruitt all this time?”

“Posted at the door, up front.”

“So when she finally did get there…”

“She had to walk right past him.”

“And he’d have seen her.”

“But not to recognize. She wore a veil…black coat, black hat…and a deep red dress. The veil did a good job. I never saw her face and neither did Murdock. With the veil, and the darkness at that table, she could’ve been anyone.”

“Did she bring the book?”

“Oh, yes.” He trembled at the memory of it. “It was superb…magnificent…completely lovely. Beyond any doubt, Grayson’s masterpiece.”

“You could tell all this in the dark?”

“Murdock had come prepared. He had a small penlight and we examined the book with that. You can’t be sure under conditions like that, but there we were. I still didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t seem to know either. She seemed in dire financial need one moment and unconcerned the next, as if her two greatest fears were selling the book and losing the deal we had come there to make. The ball was in my court: I felt I had to do something or risk losing it. I had brought some cash—not much, about twenty thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. I offered her this for the opportunity to examine the book for one week. The money would be hers to keep regardless of what we finally decided to do. We would sign a paper to that effect, handwritten by me and witnessed by Murdock. In exactly one week we’d meet back at that same restaurant. If the book passed muster, she would be paid an additional fifty thousand. Her reaction was palpable: it was more than she’d dreamed…she took it, and I felt I was home free.”

The room was quiet. Kenney stood back like a piece of furniture. Amy sat on the edge of her chair. I held fast to Scofleld’s pale eyes.

“So you had the book,” I said. “Then what?”

“We flew back to Los Angeles with it. I wrote Murdock a check for his work, and at that point I decided to have some independent appraisers fly in and look at it. I called Harold Brenner in New York.”

He looked at me expectantly. I had heard the name, had seen Brenner’s ads in AB , but I had never had any dealings with the man. Kenney said, “Brenner’s one of the best men in the country on modern small-press books.”

“But Brenner couldn’t come out till the end of the week,” said Scofield. “This would still leave us time to have the book examined and get back to Seattle for our meeting with the woman in red, early the following week. Then I got sick—whatever I had caught in Seattle got dangerously worse, and on my second day home I was hospitalized as a precaution. That night my house was burglarized. My choice Grayson pieces were taken.”

“Including The Raven , I’m sure,” I said. “How long did it take you to realize that Pruitt was behind it?”