I
talked her into my room at the Hilton with little effort. I
explained it away as a room I had rented but couldn’t
use, and she wasn’t inclined to ask questions. To her
it was a
Wheel of Fortune
vacation: two nights in Oz, with a color TV, a king-size
bed, and room service. I told her to order whatever she
wanted, it was already paid for; then I left another
hundred on deposit at the desk to cover it. It was after
nine when I got over to Mercer Island, a wooded, hilly
residential neighborhood just across the bridge from the
city. Mercer dominates the lower half of Lake Washington:
you come off Interstate 90 and swing along a spectacular
bluff that overlooks the highway; then you curl back inland
on a street called Mercerwood Drive and up past some
expensive-looking real estate. It was not a place I’d
imagine a working reporter to live in. So she had a boat,
pricey digs, and a job that let her write her own ticket: I
still couldn’t imagine the
Times
paying her more than fifty grand. As I backtracked west,
the houses seemed more ordinary. I turned left, deadended
into a high school, and eventually found my way around it
and came into her block.
It was an older house with a well-lived look to it. It
sat on a large lot surrounded by trees. I pulled into her
driveway and fished out the package she had left me from
under the seat. She had left the night-light on as well as
two lights inside the house. I got out and walked up like I
owned the place.
The key was in the flowerpot, just where she’d
said.
I came into a dark hallway. A brief memory of
Pruitt’s house flashed through my mind before the
place burst into life—two golden retrievers charged
from the rear in joyous welcome. I got down with them and
roughed them the way big dogs seem to like it. Mitzi and
Pal, the tags on their collars said. Mitzi was especially
affectionate and I felt welcome, less like a stranger in
this town of endless rain.
The hall opened into a large living area. There was a
TV, VCR, and disc player, all the comforts. Just off the
big room was a dining room, with a mahogany table that
seated eight, and beyond that was the kitchen.
In the middel of the table was a cassette tape player,
with the door flipped open.
Near the tape player was a note, telling her friend Judy
Maples how much to feed the dogs and where things were. The
dogs came and went, I saw, through a doggie door that
opened off the kitchen into a groundlevel deck, and from
there into a backyard.
I opened the refrigerator, which was well stocked with
beer; I fetched myself one and sat at the counter sipping
the foam. I took the tape out of the bag and snapped it
into place in the machine.
“Hi,” she said. “Isn’t this
cozy?”
She paused as if we were there together and it were my
turn to talk. I said, “Yes ma’am, and I thank
you very large.”
“You’ll find beer in the fridge,” she
said, “but knowing you, you already have. Seriously,
make yourself at home. The dogs will want to sleep with
you, but they won’t pester: if you close your door,
they’ll whine for about five minutes, then
they’ll shut up and go about their business.
They’re well behaved; I’m sure you’ll get
along famously.
“There’s plenty of food. The freezer’s
well stocked, and if you don’t see anything there you
want, there’s a big freezer in the garage. You can
defrost just about anything in the microwave. Again
I’m anticipating your little idiosyncrasies and
impatiences, and assuming that you’ve never read an
instruction booklet in your life. Do yourself a favor and
read the two paragraphs I’ve left open and marked on
the table. It’s impossible to defrost food without
knowing the codes. You could spend years of your life
trying to figure it out on your own. I imagine you’ll
try anyway.
“I thought you’d be most comfortable in the
big room on the right at the top of the stairs. It’s
a man’s room—I rented this house from an FBI
agent who’s now doing a tour of duty in Texas. So
that’s where you should go—the room upstairs,
not Texas—when you’re ready to call it a
night.”
There was another pause. I stopped the tape, looked
through the freezer, found a pizza, and put it in the real
oven on a piece of tinfoil. The hell with instructional
booklets written by committee in Japan.
I pushed the on button on the tapedeck.
“So,” she said, “on to
business.”
Yes ma’am.
“The cops picked up that kid who was with Pruitt
and Carmichael. His name is Bobby John Dalton, date of
birth”—I could hear her shuffling through
notes—“one
nine…umm…‘sixty-six. He’s got a
record, nothing major: one or two fights, one assault
charge, a drunk and disorderly, carrying an unlicensed
weapon, having an open can in a moving vehicle. He thinks
of himself as a tough guy, a muscleman. Maybe he is—I
mention it so you’ll know…he’ll figure he
owes you for what you did to him in the garage. He was a
bouncer in a nightclub, a bodyguard…Quintana
wouldn’t tell me much more than that. I’m
recording this on Saturday night. My plane leaves in two
hours and I don’t know at this moment whether
they’ve actually booked this Dalton kid or are just
holding him for questioning. He was still downtown the last
time I checked, about an hour ago. I don’t know if
the cops have any new leads on Pruitt after talking to the
kid.”
Again she leafed through her notes. “Here’s
a little more personal information on the Dalton
kid…just a minute.”
She read off a home address, on Pine Street east of 1-5.
“It’s a boardinghouse owned by his mother. She
seems to be a character in her own right, in fact as mean
as he thinks he is. His father’s been dead for years,
though probably not long enough. The old man was a gambler
and a drunk and was probably abusive. It’s no wonder
Bobby’s on a fast track to nowhere.
“This should make you feel pretty good. At least
the cops are doing their part. They’re looking at
Rigby as a serious abduction, so you’ve accomplished
what you wanted without coming in. However, comma, be
advised that Quintana is still on your case.”
I heard a click, then another, as if she had turned the
machine off then on again. “As you would imagine, the
cops are playing it close to the vest on the particulars at
the murder scene. I did find out, from a source inside the
department, one strange bit of information. At this point
they think the woman in the house was killed sometime
earlier than Carmichael…maybe as much as two hours.
They’ll know more when the lab gets through and,
hopefully, so will I. But assuming that holds up,
don’t you find it strange?”
Yes ma’am.
“That’s all I have on it. I guess you should
burn this tape. I’ve set a fire for you in the living
room: all you’ve got to do is light it and toss this
in. In fact, I don’t know if you’ll get in
touch with Judy, or if you’ll hear this tape, or if
you do hear it, when that might be.”
She took a deep breath. “I should be back in
Seattle by Tuesday night…earlier if I get
lucky.”
I could hear doubt in her voice now, as if she had come
to a new bit of business and wasn’t sure how much if
any of it she wanted to tell me.
“Have you read my book yet? Did you like
it?”
Yes ma’am.
“I guess you could say I’m rewriting the
final chapter.”
I heard her breathe: she had moved the microphone closer
to her mouth and was fiddling with it, trying to set it up
straight.
“Help me, Janeway, I’m not having an easy
time here. Send me some vibes, give me a clue. I’m
trying to tell you some things you should probably hear,
but I’m still a reporter and this is the big story of
my life. I’ve lived with it a long time and I
don’t share these things easily.”
I waited. The tape was hot and running.
“I’ll tell you some things I put in my
original draft and later had to take out. But I won’t
name names or places here, and I don’t want to tell
you yet where I’ve gone. We’ll talk about it
next week, when I get home, and we’ll see where we
are then.
“There was a man I wanted to interview, back when
I was doing my research. He lived in the city I’m
going to tonight. He probably wasn’t important. His
connection to Grayson was slender—all he did was
collect and love Grayson’s books. I don’t think
they ever met, and to tell the truth I’m not sure
what my original intent was in seeking him out…to see
his books, maybe, or get some insight into the
quintessential Grayson collector. I didn’t think
he’d contribute more than a line to my book, but I
was in his town, I had his name and a few hours to kill. So
I tried to look him up.
“Turned out he was dead…he’d been
murdered years before, in 1969 as a matter of fact, a few
days after the Graysons died. This in itself might mean
nothing, but it put an uneasy edge on my trip. I decided to
stay over an extra day and ask around. The investigating
officer had since retired from the police. I found him
running security for a department store. He didn’t
mind talking about it—it was an old case then,
nothing had been done on it for years, and the old cop told
me things about the scene that he might not’ve said a
few years earlier. One thing in particular stood out, and I
thought of it this morning when you were telling me about
the scene at Pruitt’s. This Grayson collector was
found dead in a room full of books twenty years ago. Right
beside his body was a pile of ashes.”
I
opened my eyes to a blinding sunrise. It was six
forty-five, the clock radio had just gone off, and the sun
was shining.
I shooed the dogs off the bed and hit the shower.
Wrapped in steam, I considered Trish and the tape
she’d left me. The fire had eaten the tape, but the
chimney had gagged on the words. They hung in the air and
chilled the morning.
Traffic was reaching its rush-hour peak, a freeway
horror show that made 1-25 in Denver seem like a solo
flight. But the sun was shining: the city sparkled like a
crown jewel in a setting of lakes and mountains, and there
wasn’t a speck of pollution in the air. I felt better
than I had in days, better by far than a confirmed fuckup
had any right to feel. Damned if this wasn’t the
first day of the rest of my life. Good things lay off in
the distance, waiting to be discovered; I could feel the
potential as I crawled off the exchange at Interstates 90
and 5. It was so strong that even having to fight traffic
all the way downtown and back again couldn’t sour the
moment.
By the time I picked up Amy and we got her kids dropped
off at day care, it was after eight o’clock. She
caught my upbeat mood and we crept back along the freeway
with hopeful hearts. She had been enchanted by her night in
the hotel: when you’re young and poor and the best
thing you’ve ever slept in was a $20 room by the
railroad tracks, the Hilton must seem like Buckingham
Palace. We chatted our way into Issaquah, ate breakfast in
the same Denny’s where Eleanor and I had eaten a
lifetime ago, and made the final run into North Bend a few
minutes shy of nine o’clock.
It was the first time I’d had a good look at the
town: I had only been here at night, in a misty rain, or on
the fly. Now I saw what Grayson had seen when he’d
first stepped off here in 1947: a land of swirling mists
and magnificent vistas and above it all that incredible
mountain, looming like a sleeping giant. As a rule
mountains do not impress me much: I grew up in Colorado,
and I had seen many that were higher, deeper, bigger in
every way. But I’d never seen one that so dominated
its landscape, that commanded without being majestic. It
pulled at you like a vast black whirlpool: it stood alone
over the town and denned it. “Impressive, isn’t
it?” Amy said. “Mamma came here as a child in
1942 and never wanted to go anywhere else. She told me once
that she got here when they were tearing up the streets for
the new highway and the town was nothing but mud. But right
from the start, she wanted to live her life
here.”
“It’s the mountain. It gets a grip on
you.”
“People say there’s an Indian in the
mountain. If you look on a clear day, like today,
you’re supposed to be able to see his face. The
knee’s about halfway down. I never could do that,
though. Can’t see diddly.”
The sister towns, North Bend and Snoqualmie, were
connected by narrow back roads. We came into Snoqualmie
past the high school, Mount Success, which Amy followed
with her eyes as we circled around it.
“My whole history’s tied up in that stupid
building,” she said sadly.
“Amy, you haven’t lived long enough to make
a statement like that. Your history’s hiding out
there somewhere, in the next century.”
She smiled. “You’re a good guy, aren’t
you, Mr. Janeway?”
“Just one who’s lived a fair piece of his
own history…enough to wish for a little of it
back.”
She gave the high school a last lingering look.
“In the ninth grade they gave us an IQ test. I got
one twenty-eight, which surprised a few people. For a week
or so I thought I was hot stuff. I asked Eleanor how
she’d done, but she kinda blew it off and said not
very good. I found out about a year later, when Crystal let
it slip one day.”
She directed me along a road to the left.
“Her score,” she said, emphasizing each
digit, “was one…eighty…six.”
She laughed. “She’s a genius, sealed and
certified.”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
Amy, suddenly moved to tears, said, “God, I love
her.”
Snoqualmie was just a few blocks of businesses, two
bars, stores, a laundry, a Realtor, and a bowling alley.
Many of the shops were named for the mountain: There was
Mt. Si Hardware, Mt. Si Video, and the Mt. Si Country
Store, which had a sign in the window that said
this family supported by timber
dollars
. Begone, spotted owl: never mind what your habits are,
you’ll have to find another place to have your
habits. We were on the town’s main drag, looking for
a gas station. The street was called Railroad Avenue: it
skirted the train tracks, with an old-time railroad station
(was this where Moon had stepped out all those years ago
and been drawn by Grayson into his new life?) and a
historic log pavilion that boasted a log the size of a
house perched on a flatbed. As if on cue, Amy said,
“There’s Archie’s place,” and I saw
a dark shop with the letters
the vista printing company
painted on glass and under it, in smaller letters,
the snoqualmie weekly mail
. He put out a newspaper, I remembered. I got a glimpse of
him through the glass, talking to someone I couldn’t
see. Again I thought of a timber wolf, lean and wiry, and I
had the feeling he’d be a good man to know, if I ever
had the time.
I stopped at the Mt. Si Sixty-six. Amy filled the tank
while I checked in with Denver from a pay phone.
Millie answered at my store. She had been worried, she
said: the Seattle police had been calling. Business was
lousy, she said. On the other hand, there was an appraisal
job in the works, almost twenty thousand books, a job that
could run weeks at $50 an hour. But they needed me to start
next week.
I told her to give them my regrets and refer the job to
Don at Willow Creek Books. If the cops called back, ask for
Quintana and tell him I’d buy him a pitcher at his
favorite watering hole when this was all over.
We backtracked through town. If Quintana doesn’t
get me, the poorhouse will, I thought.