“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.
A
rchie
, 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
.
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.
T
he 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.