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.
H
eadlights 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?”