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.
I
t 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.