Bookman's wake

“The police were surprisingly efficient. Pruitt had been out playing cards that night: four other men would swear that the game had gone on till dawn and he’d only left the room once or twice to use the facility. But from the start, one of the detectives knew it was an inside job. How could it be anything else?…Who else would know how to defeat the system and get in so easily? The big problem was proving it…they had to catch the perpetrator and make him talk. Within forty-eight hours they had questioned everyone remotely connected with the installation of the security system, including all of Pruitt’s local cronies. Early on the third day they made an arrest, a petty hoodlum named Larson, who had known Pruitt for years. When he was picked up, he still had one of the break-in tools in his possession.”

I gave a dry little laugh. Even after my long police career, the stupidity of some criminals amazes me. This is why the jails are full.

“It was a screwdriver,” Scofield said. “One of those extra blades that comes on a utility knife, you know, a six-tools-in-one instrument. He had used it to break open the bookshelf locks. This was easy: once he’d gotten into the house, then into the library, breaking open the cabinets themselves was relatively simple— he just wedged his screwdriver into the metal lock and pried it open. But it left a scrape mark, which was identical to the sample police made later with the same tool. He also left a partial heelprint in the garden outside the house. His heel fit it perfectly. We had just fertilized that flowerbed, and a chemical residue was found in the nail holes of his heels. I was getting that fertilizer from Germany, it wasn’t yet widely available in the United States, so the odds of finding that precise mix of ingredients in any other garden would have been quite long. We didn’t even have the analysis back from the crime lab yet, but Mr. Larson—and more to the point, Mr. Pruitt—must have known what it would show. Larson was a two-time loser who was looking at a long trip up the river. His incentive to deal was getting better by the hour.”

“To give them Pruitt’s head on a platter.”

“You could put it that way.”

“I can almost guess the rest.”

He nodded. “Suddenly my attorney got a call from Larson’s lawyer…Larson’s new lawyer. We were told that full restitution might be made if the case could be discreetly dropped.”

“I’ll bet the cops loved you for that.”

“The detective who had made this case was not thrilled, to say the least. He fumed and yelled and said this was not my call to make.”

“But he soon learned better, didn’t he? Grease runs the world in L.A. too.”

“You’ve got to understand something. This was never said, but there was a strong implication that if I didn’t agree right then, on the spot, my books might end up in the Pacific Ocean. What was I supposed to do? I agreed to have the case dropped, and on Monday morning a note was delivered to my office. If I showed up at a certain corner at a certain time, a taxi would arrive and the driver would have my books in two big boxes. And that’s what I did. I never saw Pruitt again until just this morning. End of story.”

“Not quite, Mr. Scofield. You left the woman in red hanging from a cliff.”

“I flew back to Seattle that same night. There wasn’t time to have the book examined by Brenner or anyone else. I went on my gut, as they say, not the first time I’ve done that in my life. I was still weak from my illness, and the stress of having lost the book for the better part of a week had also taken its toll. I went against my doctor’s orders, had to be helped to my chair in the restaurant. She was already there when I arrived. She seemed quite nervous, unsure. But even then I had no idea anything was wrong. We chatted for perhaps three minutes. I had the money all ready for her, in a small valise, just as I brought it to Pruitt this morning. The book and the valise were there on the table between us. I felt so sure…and then…”

“What?”

“I remember I had a coughing attack…a bad one. And it was almost as if that was what finally made her balk and call the deal off. She reached out and picked up the book, not the money, and for a minute I still didn’t realize what it meant. Then she apologized and said she just couldn’t sell it after all. I tried to persuade her…if it was more money she needed…but no, it was more like…”

I waited, my eyes on his.

“I don’t know how to put it exactly…an act of conscience maybe. I guess that’s it, she was overcome by conscience and guilt. She reached in her purse and brought out the money I’d given her. I made her keep it. I thought maybe it would give me a claim on the book if the day ever came when she’d change her mind again.”

He looked around from face to face. “Then she walked out. We never heard from her again.”

No one said anything for a long moment.

“Just like Dillinger,” I said.

None of them seemed to know what I was talking about.

“You and John Dillinger,” I said. “Both laid low by a woman in red.”

49

I left them there, Kenney and Scofield to their work and Amy watching them from a chair near the door. I drove into North Bend alone. I had fish to fry. This is where it all happens, I thought: it doesn’t have anything to do with Baltimore or Phoenix or even Seattle except that those cases all spun out of here. I was thinking of Grayson, doing the work he loved without having to compete with his own fame and glory. We do get older: sometimes we even get wiser. Fame and glory don’t mean as much when we’re fifty, when they’re finally within reach, as they did when we could only dream about them at twenty.

The gate was locked at the Rigby place so I went on past to Snoqualmie. Fingers of sunlight led the way, beaming down through pockets of mist that wafted across both towns. The area bustled with commerce in the middle of the afternoon. Tourists drifted along the avenue, going or coming to or from the waterfall. A mailman moved along the block, stopping in each store. Near a corner a team of glaziers was busy replacing a broken storefront.

I drove past Smoky Joe’s Tavern and turned a corner, pulling up at the curb. Archie Moon’s print-shop was dark and locked. I got out and went to the door, cupped my hands, and peeped through the glass. Somewhere back in the shop a faint light shone, but I rapped on the glass and no one came.

“I think she’s gone for the day,” a voice said.

I turned and said hello to the mailman.

“If you’re looking for Carrie, she usually takes half a day off on Tuesdays,” he said.

“Actually, I’m looking for Archie.”

“Carrie can tell you where he’s at: she rides herd on him like a mother hen. But you’ll have to catch her tomorrow.”

I thanked him and got back in the car. I watched him sort some mail and drop it through the frontdoor slot. Then he moved on down the street and I drove out of town, on to Selena Harper’s house.

Things were soon looking up. Trish was sitting on the front porch steps when I turned into the yard.

“I figured you’d turn up here,” she said. “The only hard part was finding this place. And psyching myself up for a long wait.”

I wanted to hear all about the other theaters of war, about Pruitt and the cops and all that had happened since I’d seen her five hours ago. But her mood was cool, almost hostile as she watched me come toward her.

“Sorry I had to run out on you like that. Things got kinda hectic.”

“Didn’t they though,” she said, unforgiving. “You’re quite an act, Janeway. But I can’t say I wasn’t warned.”

She cocked her head to one side, showing a long bruise under her left eye. “Pretty, huh?”

“What happened to you?”

“Think about it a minute. You’re a bright boy, you’ll figure it out.”

I thought about it and came up with nothing.

“You were trying to turn Pruitt into next week’s dog food. I grabbed you around the neck. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back in the mud.”

“Wait a minute, hold it. Play that back again.”

“You slugged me, you son of a bitch.”

I was, for once in my life, speechless.

“Wanna hear it again?”

“No…I really don’t think I do.”

“Do you know what I did to the last man who tried to raise a hand to me?”

“I’ve got a feeling I’m about to find out.”

“Think of a hot-oil enema and maybe you can relate to it.”

“Ayee.” Beyond that I didn’t dare laugh. I tried to reach out to her, but she looked at my hand the way you’d look at a spittoon.

“Come on, Trish.”

She stared off at the graying sky.

“Come on.”

She didn’t move.

“Come on. Please.”

“Please what?”

“Get up, tell me it’s okay, and let’s get on with it.”

“Is that the full and complete text of your apology? Now I know why you’re so successful with women.”

“I am sorry. I really am.”

She didn’t respond, so I said it again. “I’m sorry.”

“How sorry are you?”

“I don’t know. How sorry do you want me to be?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

I didn’t say anything. I seemed to know what she wanted.

She gripped my wrist and I pulled her up. She smoothed her skirt with her free hand and said, “I want you to go in and talk to Quintana.”

I moved on past her to the top of the porch.

“I’m serious about that,” she said, losing no ground behind me.

I turned and she was right there, so close we bumped together.

“He’s gonna treat you right. But you’ve got to do it now.”

I unlocked the front door and stood aside so she could go in first. The house smelled musty and looked golden and gray. A light rain had begun, with the sun still shining off to the west, the dark places broken by splashes of streaky sunlight. She came in reluctantly, like an infidel desecrating a holy place, and I followed her on through the front room toward the kitchen. She stopped for a moment, seemed to be listening for something, then turned and looked at me across a shaft of watery yellow haze. “Am I imagining this,” she said, “or is something happening between us?” The question was sudden and improbable, infusing the air with erotic tension. I thought of the midnight supper we had had and how easily she had done the impossible, taken Rita’s place at the other end of the table. “It does seem to be,” I said. But I didn’t yet know the shape it might take or where it might go from here. She lived in Seattle and I lived in Denver, and neither of us had had time to give it much thought.

She looked away, into the clutter of the kitchen. I came up behind her, close enough to touch. But she was not a woman you did that to until you were very sure.

She sensed me there behind her, took a half-step back, and pressed herself lightly against me.

I put an arm around her, then the other. She leaned her head back and I hugged her a little tighter.

“Something’s certainly happening,” she said. “I know that s not my imagination.”

“In Rome they had a term for it.”

“ Lustus profundus ,” she said, stealing it.

“The next best thing to a chariot race.”

She laughed and pulled herself away, moving across the room. “God, I don’t know what to do with you. I wish I knew.”

“Whatever you want. It’s not that complicated. I don’t come with a Japanese instructional booklet.”

She took a long breath. “I’ve been celibate almost two years.”

“I can’t imagine why. It can only be by choice.”

“I got hurt. I mean really burned. I swore off men. And meant it, too, until…”

She blushed. Her skin looked hot.

“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said.

“But, see, you don’t have to know. You can figure it out in your own good time. Nobody’s pushing you.”

“Now that I’m over here,” she said, and we both laughed.

She asked where the Grayson stuff was and I led her back to the stairs and up to the loft. I crawled up into the room and reached back for her. We clasped hands and I helped her up. It was all as I’d left it, the two remaining rows separated by a three-foot gap and draped by a sheet of clear polyethylene. I walked out on the plastic and held up my hands like Moses going through the Red Sea.

Behind me, she said, “Who the hell am I kidding?”

When I turned, she had pulled her blouse out of her skirt and had taken loose the top buttons.

“So what do you think?” she said brightly. “Is that plastic cold?”

50

I’ve always hated plastic, the symbol of everything phony in the world.

Not anymore.

It was hot and quick, intense. We were both long overdue.

I buried my face in her hair, loving her, and she clawed the plastic down and sealed us inside it. We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.

Then we lay on top and cooled off, and in a while, when she was ready, she told me about Pruitt. They had parked him in the Pierce County Jail on a hold order from Seattle. Quintana would be sending someone down, maybe as early as tonight, to pick him up. Trish was vague on the possible charges. What Quintana wanted now was to talk to him and see how his story compared with the version they had gotten out of the kid, Bobby John Dalton. “I had a long talk with Quintana on the telephone. He actually talked to me. I must be living right.“

“Cops tend to do that when they think you know more than they do.”

“He seemed almost human. I got some great background out of him, off the record.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Off the record. That means you tell no one without my permission, under penalty of death.”

Sure, I said: I could play her reporter game.

“Bobby’s version of that night remained constant through two days of questioning. You broke his jaw, by the way—the cops had to take his statement through clenched teeth. He’s eating through a straw, which is hard work for a meat eater.”

“I’ll send him a get-well card.”

“Bobby and Carmichael took the Rigby girl to Carmichael’s house. That’s just off Aurora Avenue, not far from downtown. By the time Pruitt got there Rigby had been trussed up, gagged, and stashed in a room off the kitchen. There was an argument over what to do with her. Carmichael was worried about Pruitt—he had this sudden fear that Pruitt might go too far and hurt her if she didn’t come up with the book. I take it Pruitt doesn’t always know when to stop once he gets started.”

I thought of Slater’s battered face and told her Carmichael had good reason to worry. “Where was Bobby in all of this?”

“By then he was hurting so bad he wasn’t worrying about anybody but himself. Carmichael was the one sweating it. If Rigby was going to come to any real harm, Carmichael didn’t want to know about it—and he sure didn’t want it happening there in his house. But he couldn’t stand up to Pruitt. At one point Pruitt lost his temper and knocked Carmichael back into the kitchen table and broke off one of the legs. Pruitt yelled at him and said he was worse than Slater. If it hadn’t been for Slater, he’d have taken the girl last week and they’d have the book by now.”

“Which is probably true.”

“Pruitt went into the room with Rigby alone. There wasn’t a sound, to hear Bobby tell it. He said it was spooky, the two of them standing in the dead silence looking at each other and not knowing what was happening in the other room. Then Pruitt came out and said he was going to get the book.”

“He scared it out of her. He was her bogeyman, Slater said. I don’t know why.”

“Maybe why’s not important. It was in the bus station, in a locker. She had put it there the first day she got to town.”

I gave a little laugh and shook my head.

“That’s about it. Pruitt told Carmichael to take Rigby on up to his house, he’d be along himself as soon as he could get downtown and get the book. Then he’d settle up with them and they could both go to hell. Bobby took off for the nearest emergency room, and that’s the last he saw or heard of them till he read about Carmichael in the newspaper.”

“We can finish the story ourselves from there. Carmichael took Eleanor on to Pruitt’s alone. Olga was already dead in the house and the killer was still inside waiting. The only thing about it that I can’t believe is that Quintana would tell it all to you.”

“He wants you to come in.”

“He’s moved on in his thinking. He’s past Pruitt now, same as I am. He knows it’s not Pruitt and he knows it’s not me. He told you this stuff to send me a message. This goddamn man is one pretty good cop.”

“Go see him, Cliff. Do this for me, please, do it now, before it gets any worse. Who knows when the moon will turn and Quintana will start drinking blood again.”

“I’ll make you a deal. If I don’t wrap this mother up by tomorrow, Quintana can have me. Solemn word of honor.”

She lay there weighing it, clearly unhappy.

“I’ve got to follow this one out, Trish. If I’m wrong, Quintana can have everything I’ve got and you can come visit me every third Tuesday of the month in the crowbar hotel.”

“You’re chasing a ghost.”

“I’m betting all those deaths were set off by something in those books. Something that humiliated him beyond any imaginable reason. It attacked him in his guts, in his heart, where he lived: it made his life unbearable to imagine them out there for someone else to see. It threatened to destroy the one thing that made life worth living. The Grayson mystique.”

“But you’re hanging all this on the blind woman.”

“It’s not just the blind woman, it’s far more than that now. We’ve got the chronology, with the homicides following the Grayson lettering schemes to the point of making no geographic sense. We’ve got the ashes at Hockman’s and Pruitt’s, and what do you want to bet there weren’t ashes at all the others too? The house in New Orleans caught fire, there were lots of ashes there. We know he didn’t go there to burn old newspapers, we know exactly why he was there and what he’d come to burn. Why do I have to work so hard convincing you of this?—it’s even in your book, that scene when he wanted to burn those 1949 Ravens because of the misspelled word. Now the injury was ten times worse. This was to’ve been his masterpiece, the book to put that old one to rest at long last. And somehow he messed it up again, and the masterpiece turned to dust. And that offended him so deeply that he couldn’t even wait to get those books outside the murder scenes to destroy them. Who else would do that but Grayson himself?”

“He would kill people, you’re saying, because of the mistake he’d made.”

“No. He kills people because he’s a killer. He just didn’t know that till he’d done the first one.”

This is how it works. You get an idea. Usually you’re wrong. But sometimes you’re right. In police work, you follow your idea till it pays off or craps out.

One thing leads to another…

And suddenly I knew where Eleanor was.

“There’s a cabin in the mountains,” I said. “She goes there when she wants to be alone.”

I kicked into my pants, tore into my shirt, got up, sat on a box, and pulled on my shoes.

“What’re you thinking now,” Trish asked, “that she’s free to come and go?”

“I don’t know. But I’m betting that’s where she’ll be.”

“Where is this cabin?”

I stopped short. I didn’t know.

“So what do you know about it?”

“Moon’s supposed to own it, but they all use it. It’s an hour’s drive from here.”

“Maybe still in King County, though.”

“Moon said he built it forty years ago and gradually it’s been surrounded by national-forest lands.”

“But he still owns it.”

“That’s the impression I had.”

“If it’s in his name, I can find it. There’s a title company the paper uses when we’re doing stories that deal with land. They can search out anything. If I can catch them before quitting time, we can plot it out on a topographical map.”

We agreed to coordinate through Amy at the motel. Then we split up, Trish on a fast run back to Seattle, me to Snoqualmie, to stake out Archie Moon’s print-shop.

51

I waited but he didn’t come. Eventually I headed on over toward North Bend. It was almost six o’clock, almost dark, and almost raining when I drove up to the Rigby place and found the gate open. The sun had gone and the night rolled in from the Cascades, pushing the last flakes of light on to the Pacific. The house looked smaller than I remembered it. Crystal had left the front porch light on, casting the yard in a self-contained kind of glow that was almost subterranean. You got the feeling that divers would come down from the hills, swim around the windows and eaves, and wonder what strange creatures might be living there.

Behind the house the printshop was dark. Beyond that, a stretch of meadow ran out to the woods. For a brief time, perhaps no more than these few moments on this night only, the field caught the last of the day’s light in this particular way and spread a silver-blue blanket at the foot of the trees.

Crystal heard me coming and was standing at the door. I clumped up the stairs and she opened the door.

“Well, Janeway, I didn’t expect to see you here. You look like an old man.”

“I am an old man, and getting older by the minute. Have the cops been back?”

“Just once, that same night. They decided not to tap the phone. They don’t seem as worried about you as they were at first.”

“That’s good to know. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

The house was dark, like the first night I’d seen it, except for the one light coming out of the kitchen down the hall. I went on back like one of the family. She came in behind me and motioned to the table, and I pulled out the same chair I’d sat in earlier.

“Where’s your husband?”

“Out in the shop working.”

“I didn’t see any lights out there, that’s why I wondered.”

“You can’t see the lights when he’s in the back room.”

She poured coffee from a pot on the counter and offered second-day rolls. They microwaved instantly, she said, and were about as good the day after. I shook my head no and she sat across from me, her face etched with the sadness of the ages. She sipped her coffee, looked at me through her glasses, and said, “What’s on your mind?”

“Nola Jean Ryder. We could start with that, go on from there.”

Her face didn’t change, but I could sense her heartbeat picking up to a pace something like a jackhammer.

“I haven’t heard that name in twenty years.”

“Really?”

“Well, that woman who wrote the book about Darryl and Richard did want to ask me about her. I couldn’t help her much. That’s something Gaston and Archie and I never talk about.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t what you’d call a pleasant association. It’s something we’d all rather forget.”

I waited her out.

“Nola Jean was DarryFs…I don’t exactly know how to put it.”

“Huggins called her his whore.”

She stared off at the dark window. “So who the hell’s Huggins and what does he know about it? Was he there? I only met the man once or twice, years ago, and he didn’t seem much interested in Nola Jean then.”

“Well, was she a whore?”

“If you mean did she walk the streets and hook for her supper, the answer’s no.”

“There are all kinds of whores, though.”

“Are you talking from experience?”

“You seem to forget, I was a cop. I did my time in vice.”

“Of course. You’ve probably seen whores in their infinite variety, and all in the line of duty. Somehow I don’t think you ever met anyone quite like Nola Jean. She was the kind of dark-spirited gal people write books about.”

She got up and went to the coffeepot but did not pour. Looking out across the meadow, she said, “She could get men to do anything. I never knew how she did it. The only one she couldn’t touch that way was Gaston. She sure tried, but none of it worked. I guess that’s why she hated him.”

She rinsed out her cup and turned it bottom-up on the counter. Again she stared through the window, past the edge of the printshop to the meadow. She turned her head toward me and said, “This is all ancient history. I don’t see what she’s got to do with anything today.”

“Do you have any idea where she went?”

“No idea at all. Just drifted away, seems to be what everybody thinks.”

The room was heavy with the presence of this long-lost woman. Crystal hugged herself as if that would make her warm again.

“I don’t think about her anymore.” But she looked away. She was not a woman who lied easily.

“I can’t even remember what she looked like,” she said, trying to shore up one lie with another.

“It shouldn’t be this hard. Just think of Eleanor.”

She jerked around and smacked her coffee cup into the sink, breaking it. Surprise became anxiety, then dismay, finally despondence.

“How did you know?”

“Saw some old photographs. There’s really not much doubt.”

“Oh, God.” She gave a mighty shiver. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Crystal,” I said as kindly as I could. “We’ve got to stop the lies now. Get your husband in here so we can talk it out.”

“No!…No. We don’t talk about these things to Gaston.”

“We’re gonna have to start. It can’t stay buried any longer.”

“Oh, don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Ask me…whatever you want, ask me.”

“Why would Gaston Rigby raise Nola Jean Ryder’s daughter?”

She gave a little cough and took off her glasses. Dabbed at her eyes with trembly hands.

“Crystal…”

“Why do I get the feeling you already know these things? You ask the questions but you already know the answers.”

“There’s only one answer that makes sense. Grayson’s her father.”

She looked out at the shop and said nothing.

“What did Gaston think when she started to grow up? When every time you looked in her face you saw this evil woman you all hated?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

She turned and looked at me straight on, wanting me to believe her.

“Truly,” she said, and I did believe her.

“Then tell me how it was.”

“I don’t know if I can. You’d have to’ve been part of it, watched them together when she was growing up. She didn’t look anything like Nola then, all we could see was Darryl in her face. And Gaston thought the sun rose and set on that child, she just lit up his life. I’ve never heard that song ”You Light Up My Life“ without thinking of Gaston and Ellie. He loved her to pieces. Read to her nights, took her over to Seattle to walk along the waterfront. He was so crazy about that child, I actually envied her sometimes. He’d take her walking and later tell me it was like Darryl himself was walking with them. So that’s how it was. She’s ours but she came from Darryl, the last living part of him. It was like he’d made her, like a book, without any help from any woman, and left her here for us. And what’s in a face? I mean, really, who cares what someone looks like? Ellie’s really nothing like Nola Jean in any way that counts. She didn’t get her heart from her mamma, or her mind…we all know where that came from. And when she started to grow up and look like Nola, Gaston didn’t seem to notice at all. To him she was Darryl’s little girl, and I don’t think he ever worried or even stopped to consider who her mother was.”

“What about you, Crystal? Did you think about it?”

She didn’t want to answer that. She had thought about it plenty. “She’s got nothing to do with Nola Jean Ryder anymore. You can’t raise a child from the cradle and not love her.” She fidgeted with her hands. “Only two things have mattered in my life—first Gaston, then Eleanor. Anybody who thinks I didn’t love that child is just full of it, and they’d better not say it to me. I had her almost from the day she was born. Nola never cared: as soon as Ellie was born, she was out of here, gone on the road with some bum she met down at the tavern. We started thinking of Ellie as ours, right from that first winter. Even when Nola came back here in the spring and took up with Darryl again, she couldn’t care less about her daughter. And after Darryl died, she never came back.”

We looked hard at each other. I leaned across the table so she couldn’t escape my eyes. “I hate to break this to you, Crystal, but you’re still lying to me.”

Another shock wave rippled across her face. She touched her lips with her fingers and seemed to be holding her breath.

“You keep talking about Darryl Grayson as if he’s really dead.”

“Of course he’s dead. Everybody knows that.”

“I think he’s alive and well.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I think he’s alive and still working after all these years.”

She shook her head.

“And you and Rigby and maybe Moon have devoted your lives to his secret. You’ve created a safe haven where he can do his stuff in peace and seclusion, back there in that shop, in that back room where nobody ever goes.”

“You are out of your mind.”

“Then I might as well tell you the rest of it, since you feel that way anyway. I think Grayson is obsessed by the idea of his own genius. I think after a while it became all that mattered to him. The mystique, the Grayson legend, the almost religious following that’s coming along behind him. I think that’s what this case is all about. You tell a guy often enough that he’s a god, after a while he starts to believe it. And it led him straight over the edge, till he became as cold-blooded a killer as I’ve ever seen.”

“You must be mad.”

“Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of Otto Murdock?”

She tried to shake her head. I wouldn’t let her.

“He’s a book dealer, or was, but you know that. He’s dead now. Murdered.”

“I saw it…in the newspaper.”

“Ever hear of Joseph Hockman?”

She made a little no movement with her head.

“What about Reggie Dressier?…Mike Hollings-worth?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What about Laura Warner?”

Nothing from her now. Her face looked like stone.

“They were book collectors. Grayson killed them.”

“I want you to leave now,” she said numbly.

“You remember your stalker?…The guy named Pruitt?”

Her eyes came up and gripped mine. Oh, yes, she remembered Pruitt.

“He’d be dead now too if he hadn’t been lucky. Somebody else took the knife that was meant for him.”

“Will you leave now?” she said thickly.

“Yeah, I’m finished. And I’m sorry, Crystal, I really am. I liked you all.”

I got up from the table. “I suppose you’ll tell Grayson what’s been said here tonight. I imagine he’ll come after me next.”

I gave her a last sad look. “Tell him I’m waiting for him.”

I walked out.

***

Down in the yard, where the night was now full, I turned away from the car and went along the path to the printshop. I looked back once, but Crystal was nowhere in sight. I was confident now, strong with faith in my premise. The old bastard was out there somewhere, his return as inevitable as the rain. I remembered the night I’d spent here, squirreled away in the loft, and the constant feeling that some presence was close at hand. Someone downstairs. Someone a room away. Someone walking around the house in the rain at four o’clock in the morning. Bumps in the night. You feel him standing in the shadows behind you, but when you turn to look, he’s gone. Cross him, though, and he will find you and cut your heart out.

I stood in the total dark of the printshop door. I put my hand in my pocket and took hold of the gun. Then I pushed open the door and went inside.

I crossed to the inner door. It made a sharp little click as I pushed it in.

“Crystal?”

It was Rigby’s voice, somewhere ahead. I stepped into the doorway and saw him, perched on a high steel chair halfway down the long worktable. No one was in the room with him, but that meant nothing. People can be anywhere, for any reason.

“Who’s there?”

I came all the way in, keeping both hands in my pockets. My eyes took in the length and breadth of it, from the far window to the locked door on this end that looked like nothing more than a storage room. Then, when I was sure he was alone, I came around the end of the workbench so he could see my face. I felt a chill at having my back to the door.

He took off his glasses and squinted.

“Janeway. Well, gosh.”

He’d been doing something there at the table, working on a sketch of some kind. He pulled open a thin, flat drawer, dropped his work inside, closed and locked it. Then he put one foot down from the chair he sat on and leaned forward into his knee.

“You look different,” he said.

“It’s this case. It’s aged me a lot.”

“Case?”

“Yeah, you know. Your missing daughter.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “These are hard days,” he said after a while.

“I’m sure they are. Maybe it’s almost over now. You could help…answer a few questions maybe?”

“Sure,” he said, but he was instantly uneasy. He was not a great talker, I remembered. He was private and sensitive and reluctant to let a stranger see into his heart.

He smiled kindly through his beard and gave it a try. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Grayson.”

His smile faded, replaced by that shadow of distress I had seen in him that first night. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I could tell you that would make any difference today.”

I waited, sensing him groping for words. Let him grope it out, I thought.

“I have a hard time with that.”

“What about Nola Jean Ryder?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. I never found out what he might have said, because at that moment the outer door slammed open and Crystal screamed, “Gaston!” and I heard her charging through the dark front room.

She threw open the door and vaulted into the back shop.

“Don’t say another word!” she yelled at Rigby.

“What’s—”

“Shut up!…Just… shut up ! Don’t tell him anything.”

She came toward me. I moved to one side.

“I told you to get out of here.”

We circled each other like gladiators. By the time I reached the door, she and Rigby were side by side.

“Don’t you come back,” Crystal said. “Don’t ever come back here.”

“I’ll be back, Crystal. You can count on it.”

I went through the shop with that chill on my neck. The chill stayed with me as I doubled back toward Snoqualmie. I thought it was probably there for the duration.

52

Headlights cut the night as Archie Moon turned out of Railroad Avenue and came to a squeaking stop on the street outside his printshop. For a time he sat there as if lost in thought: then, wearily showing his age, he pulled himself out of the truck’s cab and slowly made his way to the front of the building. A key ring dangled from his left hand: with the other hand he fished a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on long enough to fit the key in the lock, turn the knob, and push the door open. He took off the glasses and flipped on the inner light, stepping into the little reception room at the front of the shop. He stopped, bent down, and picked up the mail dropped through the slot by the mailman earlier in the day.

He rifled through his letters with absentminded detachment. Seeing nothing of immediate interest, he tossed the pile on the receptionist’s desk and moved on into the back shop.

I got out of the car across the street, where I’d been waiting for more than an hour. I crossed over, opened the door without a noise, and came into the office.

I could hear him moving around beyond the open door. The back shop was dark with only a single light, somewhere, reflecting off black machinery. Shadows leaped up in every direction, like the figures in an antiquarian children’s book where everything is drawn in silhouette.

I heard the beep of a telephone machine, then the whir of a tape being rewound. He was playing back his messages, just around the corner, a foot or two from where I stood.

“Archie, it’s Ginny. Don’t be such a stranger, stranger.”

Another beep, another voice. “Bobbie, sweetheart. Call me.”

And again. “Mr. Moon, this is Jewell Bledsoe. I’ve been thinking about that job we discussed. Let’s do go ahead. And, yes, I would like to have dinner sometime. Very much. So call me. Tomorrow.”

Moon gave a little laugh laced with triumph. “Ah, Jewell,” he cried out to the empty room. “Ah, yeah !”

He was a busy man with a heavy social docket. He was much like his pal Darryl Grayson that way. In great demand by the ladies.

There was another message on the tape. She didn’t identify herself, didn’t need to. It was a voice he had heard every day for twenty years.

“Oh, Archie, where are you! Everything’s gone crazy, I feel like I’m losing my mind. Call me, please…for God’s sake, call me!”

He picked up the telephone and punched in a number. Hung up, tried again, hung up, replayed the message.

“Goddammit, honey,” he said to the far wall. “How the hell am I supposed to call you if you’re over there blabbin‘ on the goddamn phone?”

He tried again and hung up.

I heard him move. I stepped back to one side, leaning against the receptionist’s desk with my left hand flat on some papers. I rolled my eyes around and looked out to the deserted street. My eyes made the full circle and ended up staring down at the desk where my hand was.

At the stack of mail he had thrown there.

At the letter Eleanor had mailed from the Hilton.

I touched the paper, felt the lump of something solid inside. A federal crime to take it: not much time to decide.

“Janeway.” He was standing right there, three feet away. “Where’d you come from? You look like you been rode hard and put away wet.”

“You got the wet part right.” I leaned back from the desk, trying not to be too obvious. “And, yeah, I been rode pretty hard, too.”

“How’d you get in here? I didn’t hear the door.”

“Just walked right in. Saw the light, came in, heard you back there on the phone…thought I’d sit on the desk and wait till you’re done.”

“Half-blind and now I can’t hear either. What’s on your mind?”

“I’ve been thinking some about that cabin of yours.”

“I guess I told you I’d give you a tour of God’s country, didn’t I? Can’t say I expected you tonight, though.”

“Just thought I’d come by and see if the offer’s still good.”

“Yeah, sure it is. Why wouldn’t it be? If you’re still around in a few days…”

“You get up there much?”

“Not anymore, not like I used to. It’s too hard to make a living these days; I gotta work Saturdays and sometimes Sundays and I’m gettin‘ too damn old and too slow. Two or three times a year is all.”

He held his hand up to his eyes. “Let’s step on back in the shop. That bright light’s playing hell with me.”

I followed him around and leaned against the doorjamb, keeping my hands in my pockets and letting my eyes work the room. It was a busy printer’s printshop, cluttered with half-finished jobs and the residue of last week’s newspaper. Long scraps of newsprint had been ripped out and thrown on the floor. Paper was piled in rolls in the corner, and in stacks on hand trucks and dollies. A fireman’s nightmare, you’d have to think. He had a Chandler and Price like Rigby’s, a Linotype, and an offset press that took a continuous feed of newsprint from a two-foot roll.

He stood in the shadows a few feet away. “Crystal said you’re still trying to find Ellie. Havin‘ any luck?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m having a helluva time just getting people to talk to me.”

“Maybe you’re asking the wrong people.”

“I don’t know, Archie, you’d think the people who’re supposed to love her would be knocking me down to help. But everybody seems more interested in pandering to the vanity of a dead man than finding that girl.”

This bristled him good. I thought it might.

“Who’s everybody? Who the hell are you talking about?”

“Crystal…and Rigby.”

“Hell, that’s easy enough to understand.”

“Then make me understand it.”

“Why do I smell an attitude here? It oughta be obvious what their problem is, if you came at them the way you just came at me.”

“Rigby’s relationship with Grayson, you mean.”

“Yeah, sure. You don’t walk in that house and say anything against Darryl…not if you want to come out with your head in one piece. And the same is true over here, by the way, so let’s back off on the rhetoric and we’ll all be a lot happier.”

“And I still don’t get my questions answered.”

“You got questions, ask ‘em. Let the sons of bitches rip.”

“Let’s start with this one. Do you think Nola Jean Ryder set the fire?”

He rocked back in his tracks. But he kept on moving, trying to cover his surprise by making the sudden movement seem intentional. He climbed up on a high steel chair at the table where the answering machine blinked its red light and looked at me from there, leaning in and out of the shadow.

I wasn’t going to ask him again. Let him stew his way through it. Finally the silence got to him and he said, “The fire was an accident.”

“Some people don’t think so.”

“Some people think the world is flat. What do you want me to do about that?”

Who’s got an attitude now? I thought. But I said, “Give it a guess.”

“Darryl died, that was the end of it. That’s my guess. There wasn’t any reason for Nola Jean to be here anymore. I doubt she ever stayed in one place more than six months in her life till she came here. Why would she stick around after Darryl died? Everybody here hated her.”

“Did you hate her?”

“I never gave her that much thought.”

I grunted, the kind of sound that carries a full load of doubt without the bite.

“Look,” he said, annoyed that I’d caught him lying. “She was Darry’s woman. That made her off-limits to me, no matter what I might’ve thought from time to time or how willing she might’ve been to play around.”

“Did she come on to you?”

“That woman would come on to a green banana. Look, I’m having a hard time understanding how any of this old shit’s gonna help you find Ellie.”

“This sounds like the stone wall going up again, Arch.”

“Well, fuck, what do you expect? This stuff hurts to talk about.”

“Who does it hurt? Grayson’s dead, right? Can’t hurt him.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Who does it hurt?…You?…Rigby?…Crystal?”

“Hurts us all. When you lose somebody like that, it hurts.”

“But real people get over it. At least they move on past that raw hurt and get on with life. I’m not saying you forget the guy: maybe you love him till you die. But you don’t carry that raw pain on your sleeve for twenty years.”

He rocked back, his face in darkness.

“So what’s the real story here? Why does Rigby get the shakes every time Grayson’s name comes up? Why does Crystal go all protective and clam up like Big Brother’s listening? You’d think the man just died yesterday.”

“Gaston…”

I waited.

“Gaston thought Darryl walked on water. Damn near literally. Haven’t you ever had somebody in your life like that, Janeway?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got enough trouble with the concept of a real god. Don’t ask me to deal with men being gods.”

“Then how can you expect to understand it?”

I reached into my jacket where I’d tucked the envelope under my arm. Took out the glossy photograph and held it up in the light so he could see it. “Can you identify the people in this picture?”

He made a show of it. Took the picture and grunted at it. Leaned way back in his steel chair. Put on his glasses, squinted, and finally said, “Well, that’s Nola Jean Ryder there in the front with her arm around that fella.”

“Are you telling me you don’t know the others?”

“I don’t seem to recall ‘em.”

“That’s strange, Archie, it really is. Because here’s another shot of all of you together. I believe that’s you over there in the corner, talking to this fella you say you can’t remember.”

“I can’t remember everybody I ever talked to. This has been a long time ago.”

“Try the name Charlie Jeffords. Does it ring a bell now?”

“That’s the fella down in New Mexico…”

“Whose house Eleanor burgled. Now you’ve got it. Maybe you see why it bothers me so much, the fact that all of you know exactly who Jeffords was right from the start. The minute she got arrested and the name Jeffords came up, you knew why she went down there and what she was trying to find out. You could’ve shared that information with me when it might’ve meant something, last week in court. But for reasons of your own, you all hung pat and let that kid take the fall.”

The room simmered with rage. “I’ll tell you, Janeway, you might be thirty years younger than me, but if you keep throwing shit like that around, you and me are gonna tear up this printshop.“

“Who was Charlie Jeffords?”

He was still rocking slightly. The steel chair made a faint squeaking noise as he moved back and forth on it.

“Charlie Jeffords,” I said.

“Leave it alone.”

“Who’s the other woman in this picture with Jeffords?—the one standing back there glaring at them from the trees?”

He shrugged.

“I seem to be doing all the work here. Maybe I can figure it out by myself; you can sit there and tell me if I go wrong.” I gave the picture a long look. “The first time I saw this, something struck me about these two women. They look too much alike not to be related. They’ve got the same hairline. They’ve both got Eleanor’s high cheekbones.”

He leaned forward and looked at the picture as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “That damn Ryder blood must be some strong shit.”

“Keep trying, Archie, maybe you can find somebody you can sell that to. Me, I’m not buying any more. When you’ve worked in the sausage factory, you try to be careful what brands you buy.”

“What do you want?”

“The only thing that’s left. Everything.”

“I don’t think I can help you with that.”

“Then I’ll tell you. Charlie Jeffords was Darryl Grayson’s binder.”

He took in a lungful of air through his nose.

“Grayson never wanted that known, did he? That’s why you’re all so tight about it, you’re still protecting the legend, pushing the myth that every book was created from dust by one man only, start to finish. The mystique feeds on that. Even Huggins can’t understand how Grayson could turn them out so fast and so perfect and with so many variants. Well, he had help. That’s not a capital crime, the man was human after all. Most of us would be proud of that, being human. But not Grayson.“

“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”

“I’m not guessing here, you know. A friend of mine went to Taos to see Jeffords. What do you think she found there? A garage full of binding equipment. Very fine leathers, a bookpress or two…do I need to go on? Charlie Jeffords was a bookbinder by trade, right up till last year when he got sick. Jeffords did the binding on every Grayson book that came out of here.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then what is?”

“Darryl did a lot of it…a helluva lot. I did some. Gaston did. Richard did, before he started making so much money with his own books. But Charlie was the best…him and Gaston. Those two could bind a book you’d want to take home and eat.” He leaned forward, slapped his knee, and said, “Ah, shit,” with a sigh.

He shook his head, hating it. “You can’t take anything away from Darryl just because he turned some of it over to other people at the end. He did all the conceptual stuff. The design, the lettering, the layout—that’s where the real genius is. And he told all of us how he wanted ‘em bound and we did ’em that way to the letter. And he looked ‘em over with an eagle eye and tossed back any that weren’t right. I’m not saying the binding’s not important, it’s damn vital, it’s the first thing you see when you look at it. But it’s a craft, it can be learned. What Darryl did came from some goddamn other place, who knows where. Ain’t that what genius is?”

“I guess.”

“You know damn well.”

“Well, we’ll leave it at that. You wanna tell me now who the other woman was?”

“Jonelle.”

“And she was…”

“Nola Jean’s sister.”

He got off the bench and I tensed. But he sat back down again, pushed back and forth by restless energy.

“Richard played around with both of ‘em at one time or another. Then he brought ’em over here and the trouble started. I guess it appealed to his sense of humor. Two screwed-up sisters and two screwed-up brothers. I remember him saying that one time. Nola thought it was funny as hell.”

“Did anybody ever ask Jonelle what became of her sister?”

“She didn’t know either. That’s what she told the people that investigated the fire. Me, I didn’t give a damn. Good riddance, we all thought. Then Jonelle moved away too.”

“And she and Jeffords landed in Taos.”

“Apparently so.”

“And ended up together.”

“I guess that proves some damn thing. Fairy tales come true or something. Jonelle always had this crazy lust for Charlie Jeffords. But Nola Jean always took Jonelle’s men away from her. It came as natural as breathing. She tortured Charlie Jeffords and drove that poor bastard nuts. Diddled and teased him and never even gave him a good look at it.”

The telephone rang. He didn’t want to answer it. But we both knew who it was, and he picked it up just as the recording started to kick in.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he’s here now.”

Then Crystal told him something that made his mouth hang open.

He held the phone away from him, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got to take this.”

“Sure.”

“Shut that door but don’t go away. We’re not done yet.”

I stepped back into the front room and closed the door. I couldn’t hear anything. Crystal seemed to be doing all the talking.

I looked down at the desk, at Eleanor’s letter. Picked it up and put it in my pocket.

What’s a little federal crime at this stage of the game, I thought, and I walked out.

I crossed the street and stood in the dark place between buildings. I watched his storefront and I waited. He seemed to be back there a long time. When he did come out, he came slowly. He came to the front door and out onto the sidewalk.

“Janeway,” he called up the empty block.

I didn’t move.

“Janeway!”

He jumped in his truck and drove away, leaving his door wide open. I let him get well ahead. I wasn’t worried. I knew where he was going.

53

Archie, she wrote. I’ve done it again. Took one of the books thinking I’d put it back in a day or so. Then got busted and the book’s still in my car, wrapped in a towel under the

front seat. I know, you’ve warned me about it, but he never seems to miss them and it brightens my life when I’ve got one with me. I love them so much. I wish I could love people that way but I can’t. The books never disappoint me. They are eternally lovely and true, they’ve been at the core of my life for as long as I can remember. Even when I’m far away, just knowing they’re there can lift me out of the gutter and make me fly again. Just the possibility that he might destroy them fills me with despair. I think I would die if that happened, especially if the cause was some stupid act of my own. So please get the book and put it back in the room, so he won’t notice it’s gone. Here are my keys so you can get in. Think good thoughts and smile for me. Love ya. Ellie.

There were three keys in the envelope—one for a car, two for more substantial locks. I put them in my pocket, got out of the car, and started across country through the woods.

It was easy going. The ground was damp but hard: the underbrush sparse. I followed my flashlight till the trees began to thin out and a clear beam of moonlight appeared to light the way. I saw the Rigby house in the distance as I approached from the east, moving along the edge of the silver glade. Dark clouds drifted across the moon in wisps, and the meadow seemed to flutter and undulate in the stillness around it. The light from the kitchen window stood out like a beacon, the darkened printshop squatting like a bunker behind it. I stayed at the edge of the trees, skirting the dark wall to blend in with the night. As I walked, the printshop seemed to drift until it slowly covered the light from the window like an eclipse. When the blackout was full, I turned and walked straight across the meadow.

I came up to the back of the shop and eased along the outer wall. The clouds had covered the moon and again the night was full. The glow from the kitchen was a muted sheen at the comer of the shop, a suggestion of radiance from some black hole. I turned the other way, circled the building from the south, and came to the front door at the corner where there was plenty of dark cover.

I was looking into the front yard and, beyond it, down the side of the house. Rigby’s truck was gone but Moon’s was there at the front steps. The only light anywhere was the one cast out of the kitchen. I slipped along the front of the shop, keeping in shadow as much as I could. A clock had begun ticking in my head, a sense of urgency that drove me on.

I reached the door with the keys in my hand. Fished out the car key and dropped it in my other pocket. The heavy brass key slipped in easily on the first try and the lock snapped free. I put that key away too and stepped inside the shop. The smell of the leadpot, faint but unmistakable, was the evidence that Rigby had been here plying his trade. I flipped up the switch one notch on the flashlight, so it could be flicked on and off at a touch. I flicked it once, satisfied myself that nothing stood between me and the back room: then I locked the front door, crossed the room, and went into Grayson’s workshop.

Funny to think of it that way, as Grayson’s, though that had been my thought the first time I’d seen it. I knew the back-room lights could not be seen from the house, but it was not a chance I wanted to take. I flicked my light, three quick flashes around the room. Saw the high steel chair where Rigby had been sitting three hours ago and the open space where Crystal and I had squared off as if in battle. Across the room was the door I had noticed with the half-frivolous thought perhaps it’s in there, the answer to everything .

The padlock was a heavy-duty Yale, the same color as the third key in my hand. I snapped it open, gave a soft push, and the door creaked inward.

It’s a wine cellar, was my first thought.

A cool, windowless room, perfect for storing things away from heat and light. But something else, not wine, was aging on those shelves.

Books.

Dozens of books.

Scores…

Hundreds…

Hundreds!

And they were all The Raven .

A Disneyland of Ravens , row after row, elegantly bound and perfect-looking, all the same, all different. Some so different they seemed to mock the others for their sameness.

Funny thoughts race through your head.

Eureka!

Dr. Livingstone, I presume…

And Stewart Granger, buried alive in that African mountain, crawling into a treasure chamber with a torch over his head and the miracle of discovery on his lips.

King Solomon’s Mines!

That’s how it felt.

I took down a book and opened it to the title page.

1969.

I looked at another one.

1969.

Another one…and another one…and another one…

1969…

…1969…

…1969…

A year frozen forever, with no misspelled words.

I try not to presume too much in this business. That’s how mistakes are made.

But it was probably safe to say I had found the Grayson Raven .

54

I couldn’t shake the thrill of it, or chase away the faceless man who had made it. I stood at the dark front door, watching the house and not knowing what to do next. Then the second impact hit and I had to go back for another look. The room was different now, transposed in a kind of shivery mystical brew. It was alive and growing, nowhere yet near whatever it was trying to become. Twenty years ago it had been empty. Then the first book came and life began.

But where was it going? When would it end?

I supposed it would end when the artist died and his quest for the perfect book had run its course. Maybe he had even achieved that perfection, reached it a hundred times over, without ever accepting what he’d done.

It would never be good enough. He was mad, crazier than Poe. He had locked himself in mortal self-combat, a war nobody ever wins.

Again I watched the house. A shadow passed the kitchen window, leaping out at the meadow.

A light rain began.

I stood very still but I wasn’t alone. Grayson was there. In the air. In the dark. In the rain.

Across the yard I heard the door open. Two shadow figures came out on the porch and I moved over by the hedge, a few feet from where they stood.

“Archie.” Her voice was low and full of pain. “How could this happen to us?”

He took her in his arms and hugged her tight.

“Were we so evil?” she said. “Was what we did that wrong?”

“I got no easy answers, honey. We did what seemed best at the time.”

Now she cried. She had held it in forever and it came all at once. She sobbed bitterly and Moon patted her shoulders and gave her what comfort he could: “We’ll get past it. I’ll go find Gaston and bring him back here so we can figure it out together.” But she couldn’t stop crying and Moon was not a man who could cope with that. Gently he pulled away and turned her around, sending her back to that desolate vigil inside the house. He hurried down the steps and got into the truck, and I stepped behind the hedge and stood there still until his headlights swung past and he was gone.

I hung around for a while: I didn’t know why. Crystal was alone now but that wasn’t it. She was shaken and vulnerable and I thought I could break her if I wanted to try again. But I didn’t move except to step out from the hedge to the corner of the house. In a while the kitchen light went out and the house dropped into a void. Pictures began with color and sound and the case played out, whole and nearly finished, the way they say a drowning man sees his life at the end. A chorus of voices rose out of the past— Richard, Archie, Crystal, Grayson—battling to be heard. I couldn’t hear them all, only one broke through. Eleanor the child, growing up as that room grew and the bookman worked in his solitude. She read The Raven and read The Raven and read The Raven , and with each reading her knowledge grew and her wisdom deepened. Her entire understanding of life came from that poem, but it was enough. She heard the bump at the door and looked up from the table where she read The Raven by candlelight. ‘ Tis some visitor , she muttered, tapping at my chamber door …

The visitor was me.

She was six years old, what could she know? But her face bore the mark of the bookman: her mother had not yet returned to claim her. I hung there in the doorway, waiting for her statement, some tiny insight that had escaped us all. What she had for me was a sassy question.

Don’t you know what a cancel stub is?. . . How long have you been in business ?

I trudged across the meadow in a steady rain. I was wet again but I didn’t care. I was locked in that book room with Eleanor, caught up in its wonder and mystery. I stopped near the edge of the trees and looked back at the house, invisible now in a darkness bleached white. I wished Crystal would turn on a lamp. A powerful army of ghosts had taken the woods and the rain bore the resonance of their voices. In a while I moved on into the trees. The light from the house never came, but I could follow the bookman’s wake without it.

55

The cabin was fifty miles north, far across U.S. 2 near a place called Troublesome Lake. It was a wilderness, the access a graveled road and a dirt road beyond that. “There’s no telling what the last five miles is like,” Trish said, spreading the map across the front seat. “It shows up here as unimproved. That could be okay or it could be a jeep trail.”

She asked about police and I told her what I thought. There might be a sheriffs substation at Skykomish, a hole-in-the-wall office staffed by one overworked deputy who wouldn’t move an inch without probable cause. Unless we could lay out a case for him, we were on our own.

Trish was tense and trying too hard to fight it. We both knew I should take it from here alone, but somehow we couldn’t get at it. She was my partner, she had earned her stripes, I wasn’t about to insult her with macho-man bullshit. I had never had a female partner in my years with the Denver cops. I’d always thought I’d have no problem with it—if a woman was armed and trained and tough, I could put my life in her hands. Trish was not trained and she was unarmed. You never knew about the toughness till the time came, but that was just as true of a man.

It had to be said so I made it short and straight, well within the code. “If you have any doubts about going up there, this is the time to say so. It’s your call. But you’ve got no gun, we don’t know what’s there…nobody would think any less of you.”

She gave me a doleful smile. “I’ll be fine. I get nervous before anything that might put me on the spot. That’s all it is. If something starts, I’ll be fine.”

She had borrowed a press car equipped with two-way radio to her city desk. She had left a copy of the map, sealed in an envelope, with her night city editor. At least her common sense was alive and kicking. The problem was, the radio might not work at that distance, she said: its effective range was about forty miles, but mountains played hell with the signal and could cause fading at any distance. Once she had called in from Bellingham, a hundred miles north: another time she had barely got through in a thunderstorm from Issaquah. You never knew.

She asked for some last-minute ground rules. “If we find your friend up there, we wrap her up and bring her down. No theatrics, no cowboy heroics, no waiting around for whoever might come. We bring her down. Period, end of story. You go see Quintana and we let the cops take it from there.”

Life should be so simple. I said, “Deal,” and I hugged her and I truly hoped it would work out that way. She held me tight for another moment. “I’m fine,” she said, and that was the end of it. There would be no more said about nerves or rules, no more second-guessing.

She started the car and drove us north on Highway 203.

For about twenty miles we headed away from where we wanted to go. The map showed the cabin off to the northeast, but the road drifted northwest. The entire middle part of the country was mountainous backwoods with no main roads, so we had to go around. We stopped for coffee, took it with us, and pushed on. I wasn’t tired: I was running on high octane as the case played out and I was drawn to the end of it. The night had been a revelation. I had broken the problem of the misspelled word after taking another long look at Scofield’s Laura Warner book at the motel. One thing leads to another. Once you knew how that had happened, you could make a reach and begin to imagine the rest.

How the fire might have started.

The who and why of the woman in red.

What had happened to Nola Jean Ryder.

What the face of the bookman looked like.

I rode shotgun and let the case play in my head. I ran it like instant replay, freeze-framing, moving the single frames back and forth. I peered at the blurred images and wondered if what I thought I saw was how it had all happened.

The road dipped and wound. The rain beat down heavily.

Somewhere on the drive north, I began to play it for Trish.

“Richard sabotaged his brother’s book. I should’ve seen that long ago. The bitterness between them was obvious in your own book, and there was plenty more in that ‘Craven’ poem he wrote. There’s one line in ‘The Craven’ that even tells how he did it. ‘And when it seemed that none could daunt him, a sepulchre rose up to haunt him.’ The line after that is the one I mean. ‘Stuck in there as if to taunt him.’ That’s exactly what he did—came down to the shop, unlocked the plate, scrambled the letters, printed up some pages on Grayson’s book stock, then put the plate back the way it was, washed the press, took his jimmied pages, and left. This is a simple operation. A printer could do it in a few minutes.

“Remember how Grayson worked. He was an old-time print man who liked to lay out the whole book, make up all the plates before he printed any of it. This is how he got that fluidity, the ability to change things from one copy to another: he didn’t print up five hundred sheets from the same plate, he tinkered and moved stuff throughout the process. And he cast his own type, so he always had plenty even for a big book job. So here they were, Grayson and Rigby, ready to print The Raven . They did the five lettered copies. You can imagine the back-and-forth checking and double-checking they went through. No nit was too small to pick—never in the history of the Grayson Press had pages been so thoroughly examined. There must be no flaws, no hairline cracks, not even the slightest ink inconsistency, and—you can be damn sure—no misspelled words. The finished books were examined again. Rigby probably did the final look-over and pronounced them sound. He was the one with the eagle eye—remember you wrote about that, how Grayson had come to count on him to catch any little thing. Boxing and wrapping them was the point of no return. Once those five books were shipped, The Raven was for all practical purposes published. This was it, there’d be no calling it back: he was telling the world that this was his best. And he knew he’d never get a third crack at it, he’d look like a fool.

“I don’t know how Richard got to the books. I imagine they were right there on an open shelf in the printshop the night before they were shipped. The shop would’ve been locked, but Richard had a key. His big problem was that Rigby was living in the loft upstairs. Maybe Grayson took Rigby out to celebrate and that’s when it was done. Maybe Richard waited till he was sure Rigby was asleep, then came quietly into the shop, lifted the books, took them to his house, and did the job there. It doesn’t matter where he did it—the one thing I know now is what he did. He sliced that one page out of each book and bound in his own page. And the misspelled word was misspelled again.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“It is simple. It’s like outpatient day surgery for a world-class doctor. It’s even been done for commercial publishers by people a helluva lot less skilled than he was. You cut out the page with a razor, trim the stub back to almost nothing, give the new page a wide bead of glue so the gutter seals tight and the stub won’t show at all. I think I could do it myself, now that I know how it was done, and I’m no bookbinder.”

“When did you figure this out?”

“Eleanor saved me from buying a book that had been fixed like that. It wasn’t uncommon for publishers in the old days to do it. And later, when I examined the book that Scofield had bought from Pruitt, I noticed that the top edge was just a hair crooked. It didn’t impress me much at the time, but when I looked at the book again a while ago, it was just that one page that was off. When I looked down at it from the top, I could see the break in the page gathering where the single sheet had been slipped in past the stub. Even when you know it’s there, it’s not easy to see. He did a damn good job of it and the book is the proof. The whole story is wrapped up in that book—the only surviving copy of the five Grayson Ravens .

“Laura Warner’s note tells us how the book got back to North Bend. She saw the misspelled word and thought Grayson was joshing her. She should’ve known better—Grayson didn’t kid around, not about this stuff. In St. Louis, Hockman had already seen the mistake and had sent Grayson a letter about it. What would Grayson do when he got such a letter? Stare at it in disbelief for a minute, then get right on the phone to St. Louis. He wanted the book back, but Hockman had had time to think about it. He was a collector first of all, and it had crossed his mind that he might have something unique, maybe some preliminary piece never intended to be released. It was ironic—he had sent the letter wanting Grayson to take the book back, but he ended up refusing to part with it.”

“At that point Grayson would go out to his shop. Look at his plate…”

“And see what?” I let her think about that for a few seconds. Then I said, “If you were Richard and you wanted to drive your brother crazy, what would you do? I’d wait till the books were shipped, then I’d go back in that shop and change the plate back to the mistake again. Talk about diabolical—you’d have Grayson doubting his sanity. He wouldn’t be able to believe his eyes, but it would be right there in front of him. In trying so hard not to make a mistake, he’d made the same old one again. Such things do happen in printing. It’s the stuff you think you know that comes back to bite you.”

“So then Grayson did what?…Went to St. Louis? Killed Hockman?”

“I don’t know. I’m not so sure of that anymore.”

“Well, somebody did.”

“Let’s keep following the natural order of things. I think Richard set the fire. One thing leads to another. If Richard did the book, he also did the fire. Whether he knew his brother was passed out drunk in the back room is something we can argue till shrimps learn to whistle. Richard was a screwed-up, pathetic man and everybody knew it. Nobody knew it better than he did. No one has ever made a case that this guy had even one happy day in his whole lousy life. He hated his brother but he loved him too. What he’d done to him had him jumping for joy one minute and despising himself the next. But it was done and you can’t undo something like that. He couldn’t get it off his conscience—he’d never find the courage to confess. He had wrecked his brother’s dream, destroyed his vision, and left his masterpiece in ruins. He’d been planning it for years, probably since Grayson had made the decision to do another Raven . We know he was thinking about it at least two years before the fact: his Craven notes are dated 1967, and he writes of it then as a fact accomplished. Now he’d done it and he was glad, but in the end he couldn’t forgive himself. He cashed his chips, but he still had enough rage to take Grayson’s printshop with him.”

A small town sprung up on the wet road, I saw a sign for U.S. 2 and she turned right, heading east.

“The story should’ve ended there,” I said, “but the dark parts of it were just beginning. Laura Warner’s book had arrived back in North Bend. The sequence of events was tight—the book may’ve come a day or two either side of the fire, or maybe on the day itself. In any case, the scene at Grayson’s was chaotic, and it all centered on this one book. The book arrived and Nola Jean Ryder lifted it and passed it on to her sister for safekeeping. My guess is that Nola got the book before anybody even knew it was there. Then something happened, I don’t know what, that caused her to drop off the face of the earth. Hold that thought for a minute. Something happened, we don’t know what. And it set our killer off on a chain reaction that’s still going on.”

“He killed her.”

“That’s what I think. She was the first victim. That’s what made him snap, and he hasn’t drawn a sane breath since.”

“He killed her,” Trish said again. Her voice was a strange mix of certainty and doubt. “Have you got any evidence?”

“Not much, not yet. Nothing you’d want to take into court without a body. But the argument still packs a lot of weight. Turn the question around. What evidence do we have for her being alive? There isn’t any. She’s been missing twenty years, three times what the law demands for a presumption of death. That seven-year-wait didn’t get established in law by itself. When people go missing that long without a trace or a reason, they’re almost always dead. Damn few of them ever turn up alive again. Add to this the fact that Nola was self-centered and greedy—you know she’d come back for that book if there was money in it. But her own sister hasn’t seen her— Jonelle still had the book, after all, twenty years later. Charlie Jeffords told you Nola’d been there, but that wasn’t Nola, it was Eleanor. That’s what got him so upset. That’s why Jonelle was so upset when Eleanor popped up without any warning on her doorstep. What a shock, huh? There stood Nola Jean in the flesh. The woman who’d always driven Charlie a little crazy, whose memory still does on the bad days. And damn, she hadn’t changed a bit.”

We stopped at the side of the road and I sat with my eyes closed while Trish looked at the map. I was thinking of the sequence again, probing it at the weak places. Laura Warner sent her book back, but by then the killer was on the road, coming her way. Hockman had mailed his letter from St. Louis, as much as a week earlier. Hockman was already dead and the killer was somewhere between St. Louis and New Orleans, taking the scenic route. The killer arrived in New Orleans after stopovers in Phoenix, Baltimore, and Idaho. He killed Laura Warner but couldn’t find her book. So he burned the whole house down, figuring he’d get it that way.

We were moving again: I heard Trish give a nervous little sigh and the car regained its steady rhythm. “Not much further now,” she said, and I answered her with a grunt so she’d know I was still among the living. I was thinking of the woman in red, nervous about selling her Raven , willing to consider it because of the money but finally backing out in a jittery scene that Scofield would remember as a sudden attack of conscience. And I thought of the Rigby place where all the Ravens were, and I thought again how one thing leads to another in this business of trying to figure out who the killers are.

We had stopped. I opened my eyes and saw that she had turned into a long, straight forest road, a mix of mud and gravel that stretched out like a ribbon and gradually faded to nothing. She was looking at me in the glow of the dash, and I had the feeling she was waiting for me to laugh and say the hell with this, let’s go back to town and shack up where it’s dry and warm. I reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Let’s go get her,” I said.

Her mouth trembled a little. She put the car in gear and we started into the woods.

56

It was desolate country, the road rutted and water-filled. We banged along at fifteen miles an hour and it seemed too fast, and still we got nowhere. I sat up straight, watching the odometer move by tenths of a mile. The road would run north by northeast for seven miles, I remembered from the map: then we’d come to a fork and the branch we wanted would run along the creek and climb gradually past the lake. The cabin would be in the woods at the top of the rise. Our chances of making it would depend on the condition of the road beyond the fork. Down here the gravel kept it hard, basic and boring, one mile-slice indistinguishable from the next. We would come to a bend, but always the ribbon rolled out again, winnowing into a black wall that kept running away from us. I had a vision of a vast mountain range off to my right, though nothing could be seen past the narrow yellow shaft thrown out by the headlights. We could be anywhere in the world, I thought.

I put an arm over Trish’s shoulder and stroked her neck with my finger. She smiled faintly without taking her eyes off the road. I touched her under the left ear and stirred the hair on her neck. She made a kissing gesture and tried to smile again. Her skin felt cool and I noticed a chill in the air. She had started to shiver, perhaps to tremble—I had never thought about the difference until then—but she made no move to turn on the heater, and finally I reached over and did it for her. “Don’t pick at me, Janeway, I’m fine.” In the same instant she reached up and took my hand, pressed it tightly against her cheek, kissed my knuckles, and held me tight. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

Incredibly, we had come just two miles. It seemed we had been on this road to nowhere half the night. The odometer stood still while the clock moved on, flicking its digit to 1:35 in the march toward a gray dawn four hours away. We had already debated the wisdom of coming in the dark, the most significant of the pros and cons being the possibility of getting in close before anyone could see us coming versus groping around in an alien landscape. Best to stay loose, I thought: see what we found when we got there. We could park and wait in the trees if that seemed best. Given my temperament, neither of us could see that happening.

The road had begun to rise gradually out of the valley and the rain was now little more than a fine mist. The headlights showed a wall of rock rising up from the right shoulder and a sudden drop-off on the left. We came to a short steep stretch, then it leveled off again and the climb went on at its steady upward drift. “I think the lake’s over there,” Irish said, nodding into the chasm. “The fork’s got to be right here somewhere.”

We reached it a few minutes later, as the clock turned over at 2:04. Now the tough part would begin. But it wasn’t tough at all. The rain ceased to be a factor up here as the road faded into simple ruts on a grassy slope. The grass held the earth firm even in the rain. We could make it, but it was going to be slow going on a road well-pocked with deep holes. The car rocked, sloshed through what seemed like a gully, and then began to climb again. This continued until we crested on a hill. “Probably lovely up here on a sunny day,” Trish said. God’s country, I thought. I hoped God was home to walk us through it.

“Let’s do it,” I heard myself say. “Let’s get it on.”

This was a stupid thing to say and she laughed a little. She said, “Jesus,” under her breath, and the name seemed to come up from some ethereal force in the car between us. How did we get here, defying logic, with no viable alternatives in sight? I wanted to get it done now, pull out the stops and get on down the road. But we rocked along at a crawl. It was 2:30 a.m.

Then we were there. I knew it. She knew it. There were no signs posted and no cabins in sight, but something made her stop on the slope and let the car idle for a long moment. “I think we’re very close,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. The terrain had stiffened in the last hundred yards as if in a last-ditch effort to push us back. We were sitting on a sharp incline, her headlights pointing into the sky. “Careful when you go over the hill,” I said. “Better cut your lights and go with the parking lights.” She pushed the switch too far and the world plunged into a darkness so black I had nothing in my experience to compare it to. She pulled on the parking lights and the only relief from the oppressive night was that the dashboard light came on and lit up our faces. “Not gonna be able to see a damn thing with these parking lights,” she said. But we didn’t dare make our final approach any brighter.

“Let’s see how the radio’s doing,” she said.

She lifted the little transmitter off its hook, pressed a button, and said, “Car six to desk, car six to desk.”

Static flooded the car.

She sighed and tried again.

Nothing.

“No offense to you, sweetheart,” she said, “but I can’t remember ever feeling quite this alone.”

“Let’s get going.”

She eased the car over the hump. The road made a severe dip to the right, and I braced against the door with my foot and leaned against her to keep her steady behind the wheel. We straightened out and went into another dip. The floor scraped against the rocks as we straddled deep holes at the bottom. Up we went again, Trish hunched tight over the wheel, fighting shadows and ghosts that hadn’t been there before. The parking lights weren’t much better than nothing. “God, I can’t even see the road now,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

“Hold it a minute.”

She stopped and I told her I was going to get out and lead her along on foot. She didn’t like that, but she didn’t like this either. I took my flashlight and opened the door and stepped out on a rocky hillside. Underbrush grew thick on the slope beneath me: I could see an almost impenetrable blanket of it in the faint glow of the parking lights. The rain was steady but light: it didn’t bother me at all. I flicked my flashlight and motioned her on, walking slowly three feet ahead. The ground rose again and we took it easy and gradually worked our way to the top.

Something flashed off through the trees. She killed the lights and I felt my way back to the car.

We sat in the dark, listening to the rain drumming lightly on the roof.

“Looks like somebody’s home.”

It was my voice, rising out of nothing. I moved over next to her and we sat for a while just looking at the light from the cabin.

“Whoever’s there keeps late hours,” I said.

I put my gun on the seat beside my right leg, along with the flashlight. It was hard to know what to do, to do the wise and right thing. It would be a grope, going up there in the dark, and I couldn’t take a chance on using the light. Slip on the rocks and maybe break a leg. But I knew I couldn’t sit here till first light either.

Trish was trying the radio again. “Car six to desk.”

A broken voice came at us from the dash. “…esk…ix…you…ish?”

“Stand by, please.” She turned her face and spoke in my ear. “I don’t know if he’s really reading me. What should I tell him?”

“Whatever you want.”

It doesn’t matter, I thought grimly. It’s up to us.

Correction. It was up to me.

I felt a little sick thinking about my predicament. Trish had no place in this action except to complicate it. Should’ve seen that, Janeway, and read her the rules accordingly. You see things differently at the bottom of the hill. You play by her rules, bending over to be politically correct, and you bend too far and put your tit in a wringer.

But it wasn’t my call anymore because that’s when the killer came for us.

57

These things happened in less time than it takes to tell it.

I felt his presence. I knew he was there, and then he was there.

The windshield smashed and shards burst in on us. I heard a clawing sound, someone tearing at the door on the driver’s side. I brought up the light and saw a flash of steel, and I killed the light and fell across Trish as two slugs came ripping through the door glass.

The back glass blew out, crumbling into hundreds of little nuggets. I reached behind me and slammed down the lock—just in time, as he grabbed the handle and yanked it hard, rocking the car with his power. Something heavy came down on the roof: the car took a rapid-fire pounding as if some giant had begun battering it with a log. He was kicking at the door with his boots, as if he could smash it in and tear us apart with raw power. I heard the side window break: another kick and it came completely out of its frame, and I knew in seconds he’d have his hand inside grabbing for the lock. I couldn’t find my gun—in the scramble on the seat it had fallen somewhere and I didn’t have time to fish for it. What I did was instinct: I grabbed the gearshift, jerked it down, and hit the accelerator with my fist. The car bumped down the slope, driverless and blind, clattered off the road, hit a deep hole, and threw us together with a punishing jolt. Trish took the brunt of my weight: her breath went out like a blown tire, and the car careened again and she took another vicious hit. I thought we were going over, but no—there was a tottering sensation and a heavy thud as the wheels came down. I heard the sound of bushes tearing at us: we were plunging through the underbrush, spinning crazily on a quickening downward course. I was going after the brake when the crack-up came—a thud, a crunch, and a shattering stop, flinging me against the floor with Trish on top. I felt a tingle in my legs, and in that moment my great fear was that I had broken my back.

I kicked open the door and slipped out on a carpet of wet grass. I lay there breathing hard, listening for approaching footsteps. I heard Trish move inside the car, a few feet away. “Where are you?” she said thickly, and I shushed her and pulled myself close. I reached back into the car, felt along the seat and down to the floor. I felt her leg, her thigh, her breast, her arm…and under the arm, my gun.

“Hold tight,” I whispered. “Don’t move.”

I pulled myself around to the end of the car, facing what I thought was the upslope. Now, you son of a bitch, I muttered. Come now.

Now that I can bite back.

But of course he didn’t come, he was too cunning for that. I sat in the rain and waited, guessing he could be anywhere. He could be ten feet away and I’d never know it till too late. This worked two ways—he couldn’t see in the dark any better than me, I could hope, and in any exchange of gunfire my odds would have to be pretty good. I had been in gunfights and left two thugs in cold storage: all he’d done was kill people.

I felt better now. The gun was warm in my hand, like the willing flesh of an old girlfriend. Sweetheart, I thought, papa loves you. I looked back where I knew the open door was: wanted to say something that would cheer her up but didn’t dare. I didn’t know where he’d gone: couldn’t risk even a slight bit of noise that might stand out in the steady drip of the forest. He’d have to assume I was now armed. He’d have missed his chance to overpower us and now he would know—if he knew anything about me—that I’d had time to get out my piece. If not, it was a big mark for our side. Maybe he’d even come after us in that same reckless, frenzied way. Come ahead, Fagan, I thought—come and get it. I willed him to come and I waited in the grass like a scorpion. But he wasn’t there.

I felt a great sense of calm now. He had tried and missed—tough luck for him. He had taken his shot but I was still here, huddled in the cop mode with my gun in my hand. I heard something move behind me. Trish was out of the car, coming on her hands and knees. I shushed her again, took her in my arm, and pulled her down against me. I told her it was all right now, it was going to be fine. I was goddamned invincible and I wanted her to know it, to help quiet the desperate fear I thought must be eating her alive. Then she whispered, “What do you want me to do?” in a voice so wonderfully calm it pushed me up another notch, past the cop mode to a place I’d never been.

It wasn’t just me anymore, protecting some helpless woman. She was my partner again and I drew on her strength.

“Janeway.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Well, knock it off.”

I made a little laughing sound through my nose and hugged her tight.

Don’t get too cocky, I was thinking: don’t try to be Doc Savage or Conan the Barbarian. You don’t need to be now, she’s here with you.

Gotta plan, I thought. Gotta be more than strong, gotta be smart.

Draw him out. Use the environment, whatever the hell it is out there. Bloom where you’re planted, in the country of the blind.

See him first and you’ve got him. Draw him to the place where he thinks you are, then be somewhere else.

H. G. Wells had it right when he lifted that proverb. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king .

Light might do it.

Noise might.

I put my mouth against her ear and said, “I’m going back to the car. Keep alert.”

I crawled to the door and up to the front seat. Static poured out of the radio, through the open door, and blended into the rain. I wasn’t sure yet what I was doing: the first bit of business was to find out what was possible. I needed to see. I took off my jacket to make a shield against the light, then I reached over and turned the light switch back so the dash would light up. A voice came through the radio—“Desk to car six”—and I jumped back against the seat, startled. But the voice broke up and disappeared in the static. I opened the glove compartment. There wasn’t much inside—a few papers, the registration, an ownership manual, a screwdriver, some road maps, and a roll of electrical tape. What could I make of that?

The radio said “six” and faded, and I had an idea. I leaned out and hissed. Irish crawled over and I told her what I was going to do. The static on the radio was now a jumble of voices, low enough that it couldn’t be heard much beyond the open door, but the noise was constant. It wouldn’t matter, I thought: he wouldn’t hear it. I tore one of the road maps apart, wadded up a quarter section, added some spit, and made it into a gummy mass, a spitball about half the size of my fist. It would fit well enough into the slight recesses of the steering wheel spokes where the horn buttons were. I picked up the electrical tape and leaned out into the rain. “Here we go,” I said.

I blew the horn. Twice…three times.

“Scream,” I said, and she screamed my name at the black sky.

I mashed the wadded paper into the horn button and the steady wail began. I whipped the tape tight around it, three, four, five times, and left it dangling. The horn blared away: it would drive a sane man crazy and a crazy man wild. He’d have to come now, I thought: he’d have to.

I took her hand and we moved away from the car.

Carefully…one step at a time.

Eight steps…ten…

Underbrush rose up around us.

“Get down here,” I said. “Lie flat under those bushes and don’t move.”

She dropped to the ground and was gone. I stood still and waited.

I tried to remember what little I had seen of the terrain. The car had tilted right as it clattered down the slope. We had gone a hundred yards, I guessed, which would put the cabin somewhere to the left and above us.

The horn filled the night with its brassy music. I felt as if I were standing on top of it, it was that loud.

Off in the distance a light flashed. It flicked on and off twice. I said, “Uh-huh,” and waited. He was gambling, hoping he could find his way without tipping his hand. You lose, I thought. His flashlight came on again, swung in a quick semicircle, dropped briefly down the slope, and off again. I now knew that the road was about fifteen feet above me, that the ground was steeper than I’d thought, and he was forty to sixty yards away, moving along to my right. He wouldn’t dare use the light again, I thought, but almost at once he gave it another tiny flick, as if he’d seen something he couldn’t quite believe the first time. Yes, he had caught a piece of the car in that swing past it: he saw it now, and if he raised the beam by a few degrees, he’d see me too, standing by the trees waiting. If he moved the light at all, I’d go for him right from here. Knock him down and he’s done for…give him a flesh wound, a broken arm, a ventilated liver. On the firing range I’d been a killer— shooting from the hip, in a stance, close up or distant, it didn’t matter. I could empty a gun in three seconds and fill the red with holes. It’s an instinct some cops have and sometimes it saves your life.

I should’ve taken him then, but the light was gone now and it didn’t come back. Minutes passed and I battled my impatience. Think of the hundred and one stakeouts in a long career: waiting in a blowing snow for fifteen hours and not being bothered by it. I had learned how to wait: I’d learned the virtue of patience—and had unlearned it all in minutes. I saw the bookman’s face pass before me in the dark.

Rigby.

Who else fit the Grayson pattern all up and down the line?

Who did Grayson count on? Who would be this destroyed by a misspelled word? Who would take that failure so personally and torture himself and take up the sword against those who’d tarnish Grayson’s memory?

Who had the skills and the single-mindedness to spend the rest of his days trying to finish Grayson’s book?

He had the greatest hands, Moon had said. He had the finest eye.

Rigby.

That’s what happens when you make gods out of men, I thought.

And now he was here. I felt my hand tremble slightly, uncharacteristically. Chalk it up to the dark: I still couldn’t see him and I strained against the night, trying not to make that big fatal mistake. We were a few feet apart, microorganisms, deadly enemies who would kill each other if we happened to bump while floating through the soupy ether that made up our world.

There wasn’t a sound. The blaring horn had ceased to exist. It can happen that way when it’s constant, no matter how loud it gets.

I was betting my life on a shot in the dark.

Be right with your own god, I thought, and I opened fire.

In the half-second before the gun went off I had a flash of crushing doubt. Too late, I wanted to call it back. Instead I pumped off another one, took his return fire, and the slope erupted in a god-awful battle in the dark. I went down—didn’t remember falling, didn’t know if I’d been shot or had slipped on the wet slope. Something hard had hit my head. I rolled over on my back, only then realizing that my gun was gone and he was still on his feet. There was light now, bobbing above me. I saw his shoes, heard the snap of the gun as the pin fell on an empty chamber, saw the log he’d hit me with clutched in his other hand. He dropped the gun and got up the knife. I tried to roll to my feet but couldn’t quite make it. Got to one knee and fell over, like a woozy fighter down for a nine count. He loomed over me, then something came out of the dark and hit him.

Trish.

It wasn’t much of a fight. The light dropped in the grass and they struggled above it. He knifed her hard in the belly. She grabbed herself, spun away, and, incredibly, spun around and came at him again. He knifed her in the side and this time she went down.

She had bought me a long count, fifteen seconds.

I was up on one knee with the gun in my hand, and I blew his heart out.

58

I carried her to the car and put her down on the seat.

Don’t die, I thought. Please don’t die.

I worked her clothes off…

Gently.

Everything was blood-soaked. The frontal wound was the scary one. The knife had gone in to the hilt, just at the hairline above her crotch. Her navel was a pool of blood, like an eight-ounce can of tomato paste. The cut was raw and ugly. I dabbed at it and tried to push the blood back, but it welled up again like a pot flowing over. I covered it with my hand. The last thing I worried about, now, was infection.

Blood oozed between my fingers and kept coming. She was going to die, right here on this car seat, and there wasn’t a thing on earth I could do to save her.

There wasn’t anything to be done. Even if I could get the hole plugged, she’d be hemorrhaging inside. I was watching her die.

She smiled. Her face had a peaceful, dreamy look.

“Tam-pons,” she said. “Almost that…time of month.”

Tampons. Jesus Christ, tampons.

I got them out of her bag. The package looked small in my hand. It was what it was.

I tore the electrical tape off the steering wheel. There wasn’t enough left to go around her. But I had my belt, my shirt…

I ripped off the shirt and rigged her up the best I could. I cut a hole in my belt so it would fit her tight, and I pulled the shirt up between her legs, tying it to the belt front and back. It would be like a crude chastity belt and would work about as well as that ancient device ever had.

I shoved the tampons in and it took the whole package to stop the flow in the front. The wound on the side had sliced through her flesh, but the entire layer was still hanging there. I laid it back and drew the shirt tighter so it would hold.

A work of art.

A waste of time and we both knew it.

Then I got on the radio. I called nonstop for two hours and had no idea if I was getting through.

I held her hand and told her to be brave. These were just words. Who the hell was I to tell her about bravery?

She slipped into a deep sleep. I was losing her.

Dawn was breaking as the helicopter came over the trees.

Now the medics had it. I had to get away from there: my guts were in turmoil.

I climbed the hill. The cabin rose up suddenly, the lights still blazing. A woman stood in shadow at the window.

Eleanor.

I clumped up the steps and walked in. One look at my face and she knew. She cried and I held her and I looked down the slope with its aura of death and its red lights flashing.

In a while one of the medics came up the hill. “They’re taking her off now,” he said. “She’s awake and she wants to see you.”

I asked him to sit with Eleanor while I climbed back down the slope. Someone had covered Rigby with a blanket and I stepped around him on my way to the copter. I got inside and sat on the floor beside the cot where Trish lay pale as death.

She didn’t say anything, just held my hand a moment. “We gotta get moving,” the medic said, and his eyes met mine and I knew what he meant. It was touch and go.

“You boys ride her easy,” I said. “She’s got a bigger heart than all of us put together.”

I met the second medic coming down the hill. I stood on the bluff and watched the copter rise slowly over the woods. In the distance I could see police cars coming.

I went into the cabin to look for Eleanor, but she was gone.

59

I was sitting in the precinct room on the perp’s side of the table when I finally met Quintana. He came into the room with a steaming cup in his hand, sat across from me, and doled out the evil eye.

“You dumb fuck,” he said after a while.

The coffee was for me. I drank it black, same as he did.

They interrogated me for two hours. His partner, Stan Mallory, brought in some Danish and we went till noon. Twice during the questioning Quintana let me phone the hospital, where nothing had changed.

At twelve-fifteen he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

He seemed to be talking to me, so I followed him out to the parking lot, where he shuffled me to the shotgun side of a late-model Ford.

“This is supposed to be my day off,” he said as he drove the wet streets.

I waited a moment, and when he didn’t follow his thought, I said, “There aren’t any days off, Quintana. Don’t you know that yet?”

He knew it. He was just about my age and going through the same brand of burnout that had made my last year on the job so restless.

“I hear you were a good cop,” he said.

“I was okay.”

“A damn good cop. That’s what they all say. I made some calls.”

“I put a few assholes away.”

“I hate to see a cop take a fall. Especially a good cop.”

He was up on the freeway now, heading north. But he dropped off on the John Street ramp. We drove past the Times building, where the clock on the Fairview side said quarter to three.

“We need to talk to Eleanor,” he said.

“You’ll never find her. She could be anywhere by now.”

“You remember where you left her car?”

“I think so.”

“Show me.”

We went north, and after a bit of double-tracking I found it. He opened the door and looked under the seat and took out the Raven she had left there.

“What do you think, maybe she took this out to compare it with the other one?” he said.

“I think that’s part of it. And some of it’s just what she said. She just loved having them.”

He touched the book with his fingertips. “Isn’t that a lovely goddamn thing.”

“Rigby was no slouch. They say Grayson was good, but there ain’t no flies on this.”

We drove back downtown. A voice came through his radio, telling us Miss Aandahl was out of surgery. Her condition was guarded.

“I got a guy at the hospital keeping tabs,” Quintana said. “We’ll know what he knows as soon as he knows it. If I were you, I’d get some sleep. Where’ve you been holed up?”

I looked at him deadpan. “At the Hilton.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said with a dry laugh.

Surprisingly, I did sleep. Six hard hours after a hard shower.

I came awake to a pounding on the door. It was Quintana.

“I didn’t say die, Janeway, I said sleep. Get your ass dressed.”

I asked what he’d heard from the hospital.

“She’s been upgraded to serious. No visitors for at least three days, and she won’t be climbing Mount Rainier for a while after that. But it’s starting to look like she’ll live to fight another day.”

He took me to dinner in a seafood place on the waterfront. It was superb. He paid with a card.

We didn’t talk about the case. We talked about him and me, two pretty good cops. He was going through burnout, all right, it was written all over him. At thirty-eight he was having serious second thoughts about decisions he had made in his twenties. He had been a boxer, a pretzel baker, a welder, a bodyguard, a bartender, and, finally, at twenty-three, cop. He was solidly Roman Catholic, a believer but unfortunately a sinner. In his youth he had studied for the priesthood, but he had repeatedly failed the test of celibacy. A guy could go crazy trying to do a job like that. Now, after spending a few hours with me, he was charmed by something he’d never given a moment’s thought. Quintana was the world’s next killer bookscout.

“This stuff is just goddamn fascinating,” he said.

“My world and welcome to it.” I didn’t know if he’d make the literary connection, so I helped him along. “That’s a line from Thurber.”

“I know what it’s from. You think I’m some wetback just crawled over the border? Walter Mitty’s from that book.”

“Good man.”

He had a leg up on the game already.

I asked if he had a first name.

“Shane,” he said, daring me not to like it.

But I couldn’t play it straight. “Shane Quintana ?”

“I see you come from the part of Anglo-town where all brown babies gotta be named Jose.”

“Shane Quintana.”

“I was named after Alan Ladd. Kids today don’t even know who the hell Alan Ladd was.” He deepened the Chicano in his voice and said, “Ey, man, Shane was one tough hombre, eh? He knock Jack Palance’s dick down in the mud and stomp his gringo ass.”

“I think it was the other way around. And Shane was a gringo too.”

“Don’t fuck with Shane, Janeway. I can still put you in jail.”

“That’s your big challenge in the book world, Quintana. Shane . Find that baby and it gets you almost two grand.”

We went to a place he knew and shot pool. Neither of us would ever break a sweat on Minnesota Fats but we took a heavy toll on each other. He had a beeper on his belt but nobody called him. I could assume Trish was alive and holding her own.

Late that night we ended up back downtown in the precinct room. Mallory was still there, two-fingering some paperwork through an old typewriter.

We sat and talked. Eventually Mallory asked the big question.

“So what’re you gonna do?”

About me, he meant.

Quintana shrugged. “Talk to the chief. I dunno, Stan, I don’t see where we’ve got much evidence for a case against this man.”

Mallory gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.

“We’ll see what the chief says tomorrow,” Quintana said.

In a little while Mallory left. Quintana said, “If I get you out of this shit, it’ll be a miracle. The Lady of Fatima couldn’t do it.”

I followed him into an adjacent room. He sat at a table with some video equipment. “I talked to Mrs. Rigby today. You interested?”

“Sure I am.”

He popped a cassette into a machine and Crystal’s haggard face came up on a screen. “Most of this’s routine. Stuff you already know. The kicker’s at the end.”

He hit a fast button and looked in his notebook for the counter number where he wanted to stop it. “Her problem was, they never had any money,” he said. “They owned the property they lived on, they’d bought it years ago before prices went out of sight. And she had a piece of land in Georgia that she’d inherited. I guess that’s gone now. She’d given it to Eleanor and they put it up for the bail.”

The machine whirred.

“Rigby wasn’t interested in anything that generated their day-to-day income. He was always doing his Raven thing. But she loved him. So he sat out in that shop and made his books, and they just kept getting better and better. After a while she thought they were better than Grayson’s. One day Rigby went down to Tacoma to look at some equipment in a printshop liquidation, and Crystal brought Moon over to see the books. Moon couldn’t believe his eyes. He thought Grayson had come back to life, better than ever.

“The temptation to sell one was always with her after that. She started hearing what people were paying—all that money changing hands out there and they had none of it. If she could just sell one, for enough dough. She could hide the money and dribble it into their account and they wouldn’t be so damn hard up all the time. Rigby didn’t seem to notice things like that. As long as there was food on the table and a roof over their heads, he didn’t spend a lot of time fretting. He didn’t care much about the books either. He’d finish one and toss it back in that room and never look at it again. Sometimes he talked about destroying them, but he never did because Eleanor loved them and he couldn’t stand to hurt her. But all of them knew—Crystal, Moon, Eleanor—they all knew that if he ever made one that satisfied him, the others were all history.

“The temptation killed her. But she was afraid, scared to death. If Rigby ever found out…well, he’d never forgive her, would he?”

“If she was lucky.”

“Yeah, except she didn’t think of it that way. She’d be betraying Grayson in his eyes and that scared her silly. It came to a head about seven years ago. They had a string of money problems all at once and she started making some calls. Eventually she got fun-neled to Murdock, who was then the leading Grayson dealer in the country. The rest of it’s pretty much like Scofield told it to you. When he had that coughing attack, that’s what scared her off. It dawned on her what an old man she was dealing with. If Scofield should die and the book get out…well, that would make news, wouldn’t it?”

“It would in the book world.”

“And there was a chance Rigby would hear about it and go look and see the book was missing from that back room.”

“Eleanor might even tell him. She’d read it in AB , a new Grayson book found, and tear it out and show it to him.”

He stopped the tape, ran it back slightly to the spot he wanted, and leaned back in his chair. “That’s when Pruitt came into it. When he lost his job with Scofield, it was all downhill from there. He thought if he could find this woman in red, he could do two things—get back at Scofield and put himself on easy street. But he figured wrong. He thought it had to be one of Grayson’s old girlfriends, and for most of a year he chased down that road, trying to track ‘em all down.“

“What a job.”

“That’s what he found out. This Nola Jean—he worked on her for months and came to the same dead end everybody else came to. He went out and interviewed the Rigbys one time, even went to Taos, tracked down her sister, tried to talk to her. None of it panned out. Finally he ran out of leads and had to give it up. But he never stopped thinking about it.

“In the last five years, Pruitt really descended to his natural level in the order of man. He was a cheap hood, dreaming of glory. Then Eleanor got busted in New Mexico. That was the catalyst, that’s what started this new wave of stuff. There was a little article in one of the Seattle papers, not much, just police-blotter stuff. There wasn’t any what they call byline on the story, it was just a long paragraph, Seattle woman arrested in Taos heist and murder attempt, but your friend Aandahl says she wrote it. Pruitt saw it. Suddenly Grayson was back on the front burner again. The Rigby girl had broken into the Jeffords woman’s house. What could that mean? Maybe Jeffords had been Scofield’s woman in red. The only thing Pruitt knew for sure at that point was that Jeffords had had something the Rigbys wanted, and he had a pretty fair idea what that thing was. He called Slater and sent him to New Mexico to watch Rigby. Then Pruitt went to North Bend to confront Crystal, but she wouldn’t admit anything. He harrassed her for a day or two, but that didn’t get him anywhere. So he flew down to New Mexico and turned up the heat on Eleanor. He stalked her, called her at night with threats. He’d call at midnight and hum that song. Anything to rattle her, to get her to give up the book.”

“This was when she was out on bail.”

“Yeah, there was a period of about a week there when Pruitt and Slater were hard on her case. She didn’t have the book then but she knew where it was. Charlie Jeffords had told her, it was Nola’s book. So she went back and took it and made her run. The funny thing is, she might not’ve done any of that if the Jeffords woman had just talked to her.”

“All she wanted was to find her mother.”

“So they get back up here and Pruitt starts in on Crystal again. Stalking, calling. There were some death threats. He’d call her at night and play that song, just a snatch of it, just enough of it, just enough of it. But loud, menacing. Then he started on Rigby too, and that was his big mistake. He was messing with the wrong dude. Rigby wound up at Pruitt’s house and you know what happened after that. He ransacked the joint and found the photocopies of Grayson’s Raven —that what you found burned in the wastebasket. I figure Pruitt made that copy when he stole Scofield’s book, years ago.

“There wasn’t even a misspelled word in that one.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t even look.”

He punched the tape. Crystal’s voice filled the room.

“We stood around in shock,” she said, faltering.

Quintana leaned back in his chair. “She’s talking about the morning after the fire.”

“We were over at Archie’s shop, in Snoqualmie,” she said. “We were like three dead people. Gaston and Archie were beside themselves. Gaston was inconsolable. It was the worst day of our lives…until this one. I don’t think we said a word to each other the whole time. What could be said? Then we heard the door open…someone had come into the shop. And I remember Archie yelling out that he was closed… go away, just…go away. But the footsteps came on, and then she was there. Nola. I kept waiting for her to say something…maybe to cry. But she looked at Gaston across the room…she looked straight at him and said, mean as hell, ‘Cry if you want to, suckers. I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead.’“

Crystal sniffed and dabbed her eyes. “I knew she didn’t mean that, it was just spite. She’d had that awful fight with Darryl the day before…and she’d always hated Gaston because she could never move him the way she always got at other men. When she said it, I felt sick. I turned away from her, I couldn’t look at her…and then…then there was this thump, or a kind of…crushing sound…and when I turned around, she was lying there with her brains…and Gaston stood over her with the bloody hammer and Archie…Archie’d kinda shrunk back to the wall and we all just…just…”

Her face was pale. She looked faint.

Quintana’s voice came in. “Take your time, Mrs. Rigby. Would you like some water?”

“No.”

But she took the glass he handed her and gulped it.

“Then what happened?”

“Archie said…something like…it’s a good thing you did that or I woulda. But that was just talk, it was Gaston who’d done it. And he’d sat down and there was no concern or…anything…on his face…and somebody mentioned the police. And I said no…can’t call them, they’ll lock him up and what would I do without him? He was my life, how would I live? So we rolled her in a rug and that night Archie and I took her off in the truck and we buried her.”

Off camera, Quintana said, “What about the other people he killed?”

“I don’t know.” She began to cry again.

“Should we believe that, Mrs. Rigby?”

“I don’t care what you believe. My life is over.”

Quintana snapped off the machine and rewound the tape. Neither of us spoke until it clicked.

“Did she know Rigby had taken Eleanor?”

“I don’t think so. She says no. I believe her.” He put the cassette away and pushed himself back from the desk. “I found out a few more things while you were out playing the Lone Ranger. It was Rigby who made that call at four o’clock in the morning. He called the cops on his own kid. I think he was afraid of himself, what he might do if it turned out that Eleanor really had that flawed book. Hell, he was right to be afraid, he’d killed everybody else who ever had one. He tried to hide his voice, but I’ve got the tape and it was him. He was on long enough for the number to get logged, so we know the call came from that phone. I think he turned on the record at Pruitt’s for the same reason. There was a part of him that wanted us to catch him.”

I thought of Crystal and Archie and asked what he thought would happen to them now.

“Whatever it is, it won’t be anything compared to what they’ve already been through. We’ll see if the facts bear out her story. I doubt if they’ll do any jail time; the only charge would be rendering criminal assistance, and the statute’s probably run on that. They don’t seem to care right now. They waived their rights to a lawyer, gave us statements of their own free will, and the statements jibed and I believe ‘em.”

He turned up his palms. “You might as well be in on the payoff if I can swing it. There’s just one thing. You’ve got to teach me this bookscouting stuff. Call it one you owe me.”

“I’ll give you the two-day crash course, teach you all I know.”

“I’m a quick read. One day will do it.”

In the morning he came to get me. Trish had a restless night but was upgraded to fair. She was asking for me but her doctors told her not yet, maybe tomorrow.

Quintana and I ate breakfast together and then did a couple of bookstores. I watched him buy without comment, and afterward we sat in a coffee shop and I told him what he’d done wrong.

Never buy a bad copy of a good book. The better the book, the more the flaws magnify.

Condition, condition, condition…

We drove to the jail and picked up Moon. He looked old in his jail clothes, and he looked strangely small sitting between the two deputies in the backseat.

We arrived at Rigby’s in brilliant sunshine. Moon walked between us as we crossed the meadow. We went along the path I had followed up from the house, dipped into the trees, and stopped a hundred yards into the woods.

An hour later, the deputies dug up the rug containing the bones of Nola Jean Ryder.

In the spring they flew into Denver for Quintana’s long-postponed book odyssey. Trish was looking good and I was thrilled at the sight of her. We ate that night in a Mexican place on a hill near Mile High Stadium, and in the morning we lit out for Nebraska, Iowa, and points east. The trouble with Denver is it’s a light-year from everywhere, a hard day’s ride to any other city with bookstores. The landscape is bleak, though there are those who love the brown plains and the dry vistas and the endless rolling roads. We filled the day with shoptalk, of books and crime and the people who do them. We laughed our way across Nebraska, drawn by the Platte and bonded by the good companionship that makes book-hunting so special and rich. We prowled in little towns where thrift-store people are uncorrupted by the greedy paranoia of the big-city stores. It was in such a place that Quintana made the first good strike of the trip, a sweet copy of Alan Le May’s The Searchers . It wasn’t Shane , but it was a solid C-note, which is not bad for thirty-five cents.

We scouted Lincoln and found some gems at Blue-stem, an oasis of books just off downtown; then we moved on to Omaha. The weather was grand all the way, and we laughed about it and Trish swore it had not rained a drop in Seattle since I’d been there last October. Quintana made a dubious cough but had to agree that the winter had been unusually dry. We swung north into Minneapolis and spent a day tramping around with Larry Dingman of Dinkytown Books. I still had the picture of Eleanor that Slater had given me long ago, and in every stop I showed it to bookpeople in the hope that someone had seen her.

In Chicago I saw a guy brazenly doctor a Stephen King book, just the way Richard Grayson had done The Raven . He sat at his front counter and tipped a first-edition title page—sliced out of a badly damaged and worthless book—into a second printing. The book was The Shining , an easy deception because the second printings are so much like the firsts in binding, jackets, and stock. The only notable difference is on the title page verso, the magic words first edition are at the bottom of a real one and missing from the others. The entire operation took less than five minutes, and when it was done, even a King guy would have a hard time telling. The guy marked it $200. Quintana leaned over his counter and called him a crook and a few other things before Trish managed to pull him away and we headed for Indianapolis.

I had a dream that night about the first Grayson Raven . In the dream Richard fixed that one too: changed two letters of type after Grayson had quit work and gone to the pub for the evening. It would’ve been easy then, in 1949, when it was just the two brothers working alone and a mistake was easy to miss. No glue, no tip-ins to tell a tale years later: just switch the letters and it would always be assumed, even by Grayson, they’d been set that way. At breakfast in the morning I told Trish and Quintana and none of us laughed. For a long time we couldn’t shake the notion that the whole Grayson tragedy had been for nothing.

We were out ten days, in all a great trip. They stayed with me another three days in Denver, and the house felt empty when I put them on the plane and watched them fly away.

A year has come and gone. It’s winter in Denver, late on a snow-swept Saturday night as I sit at my front counter writing in the little diary that I’ve begun keeping of my life in books. Far up the street a shrouded figure comes out of the snow, battling a wicked wind that howls in from the east, and I think of Eleanor Rigby. I still have a delusion that one of these days she’s going to walk into my bookstore and help me write a fitting end to the Grayson case. Grayson was my turning point as a bookman. I came home with enough of Scofield’s money that, for now, I can buy just about any collection of books that walks in my door. I still have Grayson’s notebook: Amy gave it to me. Kenney calls once a month and asks if I’m ready to sell it. I should probably do that: the money they’re throwing around is just too good to keep turning it down. But Kenney understands when I laugh and tell him how it would diminish the old man’s life if suddenly he had that roadmap to everything.

Among the fallout from the Grayson papers were letters indicating the real identity of Amy Harper’s father. The name Paul Ricketts had been one of the pseudonyms used by Richard Grayson in his early writings, and the letters revealed an affair of many years’ duration between Richard and Selena Harper. “So we’re first cousins,” Amy wrote of herself and Eleanor. “Imagine that.” The news from the Northwest gradually tapered off. I had to return the Ayn Rand books to Murdock’s estate as his last two relatives could never agree on anything. The best guess, the one that seemed most likely to me, was that these were the last of Murdock’s really good books, gathered for a wholesale run so he could get some money together to make Amy an offer. The cops found a big batch of real Gray sons‘—all the lettered copies of everything but the 1969 Ravens —in the rafters above Rigby’s shop. He couldn’t resist taking them, holy books made by the hand of God, as he traveled through St. Louis, Phoenix, Baltimore, Boise, and New Orleans. As for his own, they are called the Rigby Ravens now and are widely admired by people who have seen them. Scofield wants them but his woman in red doesn’t seem to care so much about money anymore. The books will belong to Eleanor, wherever she is.

The New Mexico case is still open. Charlie Jeffords died not long ago and it remains to be seen who fired the gun, if and when the cops find Eleanor. I’ve just about decided that it’s too easy for people to disappear into that street-level book subculture. I keep showing her picture around when I’m on the road. There’s a lot of money waiting for her and Scofield’s not getting any younger.

It’s ten o’clock—time to get the hell out of here and go home. The figure in the street has reached my door, and in this moment, in less than an instant, I think, hey!…maybe … maybe . At the edge of her hood I see the facial features of a young woman. She turns her head, our eyes meet through the plate glass and she smiles faintly. It’s the neighborhood’s newest hooker, heading on up to the Safeway after a hard day’s night. I give her a friendly wave and turn off the lights fast. In the yard behind the store I look at the black sky and wonder what books tomorrow will bring.

John Dunning is the national and New York Times bestselling author of Booked to Die , which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe award, The Bookman’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of 1995), the Edgar Award-nominated Deadline, The Holland Suggestions , and Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime . An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. He is also an expert on American radio history, authoring On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio . His latest Cliff Janeway novel, The Bookman’s Promise , is forthcoming in hardcover from Scribner. He lives in Denver, Colorado.