The Bookman's Wake (20 page)

“I can’t say. That’s part of what has
to be kept confidential.”

“What do
you
think it is?” he said, suddenly coy.

“You’re the expert.”

He gave a mirthless grin. “You’re trying to
tell me that this little fragment is part of something that
I’m an expert in. But what can you expect from me,
with such a small piece? There are only four letters. How
can I tell?”

“The word
angel
appears in
The Raven
.”

“I know that. But what’s it prove? You think
this is part of Grayson’s
Raven
? It isn’t.”

“How can you tell?”

He picked up the fragment and held it up to the light.
He looked at it through a jeweler’s eyepiece, then
put it back on the counter.

“The paper, for one thing. Grayson would’ve
used a much finer stock than this. Probably an old stock.
And he’d have printed it damp. You follow what
I’m saying—he’d dampen the paper
slightly, so the press could get a real bite into it, so
the ink would go deep and become part of the page. Look at
this and you’ll see the ink’s sitting right on
top of the paper, which is a common and I’ll bet
cheap brand of copy paper.”

I felt a surge of relief. It was a photocopy, my hunch
was right, the real book was still out there,
somewhere.

I picked up the paper chip and put it in my wallet.
Huggins followed it with his eyes. He seemed irritated when
I put the wallet away in my pocket.

He looked at the clock. “It’s getting
late.”

I apologized for eating up his evening.

“A few more questions?”

He nodded. “Make it quick, though. I’ve got
a headache coming on.”

I took Eleanor’s address book out of my pocket and
opened it to the Grayson page.

“Does the name Nola Jean Ryder mean anything to
you?”

He took off his glasses and squinted at the book, then
at me.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“It just came up,” I said, not wanting to
tell him. “It’s probably not
important.”

“She was one of
Richard’s…girls.”

“Is she still around?”

He gave a faint smile. “Thinking of talking to
her?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“What could you possibly hope to gain by talking
to one of Richard’s old whores?”

“Is that what she was?”

He shrugged.

“It’s like you said yourself,” I said.
“With a man like Grayson, who knows where the answers
are?”

He grunted. “You think she’s got your
Raven
?”

Before I could answer, he said, “You’ll find
everything that’s known about Nola Jean Ryder in
Trish’s book.”

“You sure make her sound mysterious.”

“Do I? I don’t mean to, though she’s
certainly mysterious enough. She disappeared after the fire
and she hasn’t been seen since.”

We looked at each other and the questions rose in my
throat. He cut them off unasked. “Look, I don’t
know a damn thing about that. I told you before, this is
not my thing. If you want to talk about Grayson’s
books
, then I’m your man. But if you’re interested
in people, especially the whores in their lives, then
you’ll have to ask Trish. Or read her
book.”

I started to put the address book away.

“What other names do you have in there?” He
was suspicious now, his tone accusing.

I looked at the page. “Jonelle
Jeffords.”

He shrugged.

“Rodney Scofield.”

He sat up with a start. “What about
Scofield?”

“That’s what I was going to ask
you.”

“Did Scofield send you here?”

“I don’t even know the man.”

He looked dubious.

“Really.”

“Then where’d you get his name?”

“It’s just something I picked up.”

“Of course it is.” His tone was suddenly
mocking, almost hostile. “Really, sir, I think
you’ve been taking advantage of me.”

“I can’t imagine how.”

“Can’t you really? Do you think I’m a
complete idiot? You come in here and I don’t know you
from Solomon Grundy. How do I know who you are or what you
really want? You’ll have to leave now. I’m
tired.”

Just that quickly, I was hustled to the door.

I took a chance, told him to call me at the Ramada if he
had second thoughts, but I probably wouldn’t be there
beyond tonight. I sat in the car and looked at his house.
The questions had only begun. I still didn’t know why
Trish Aandahl thought the Graysons had been murdered, and I
never did get to see Huggins’s books.

O
n the way downtown I stopped at a Chinese joint. I ate some
great moo-shoo and arrived back at the Ramada at eight
o’clock. I sat on the bed and made my phone checks.
Leith Kenney was still incommunicado: in Taos, the recorded
welcome mat continued on the Jeffordses’ phone. By
nine o’clock I was tight in the grip of cabin fever.
I tried Trish Aandahl, but there was no answer. Outside,
the rain had resumed its hellish patter. Nothing to do at
this time of night but wait it out.

At quarter after nine a knock at the door made me jerk
to my feet, knocking the phone to the floor. I stood for a
moment, that line from Poe running through my
head…

“
‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered,
“tapping at my chamber door— Only this and
nothing more.“

. . . and slowly I moved to the window and
parted the curtains. I could see the dark outline of a man,
his shoulders and legs and the back of his head. He knocked
again: he meant business. He had probably heard the phone
falling and knew I was here, and he didn’t seem
interested in helping me by moving back out in the light so
I could see his face. I bit the bullet: went to the door
and opened it.

It was the deskman. “Sorry to disturb you, I just
wanted to check and see if that’s your car. I
didn’t recognize it from anybody who checked in
today.”

I assured him it was mine: the other car had belonged to
a friend. He apologized and went away. But he stopped in
the courtyard and looked back at the Nash, just long enough
to give me the jitters. He didn’t write the plate
number down, and I watched him through the curtain until he
disappeared into the office.

If I had any thought about staying here past tonight,
that ended it. I’d be gone with the dawn, looking for
a new place and a new name. I sat on the bed and tried the
phone again, but the world was still away from its desk.
Kenney and Jeffords I could understand, but Trish had asked
me to call, you’d think she’d be there. I would
try her each half hour until she came in. I was reaching
over to make the ten-o’clock call when it rang almost
under my hand. It caught me in that same tense expectancy,
and again I knocked it clattering down the table to the
floor. I gripped the coiled wire and the receiver bumped
its way back up the nightstand into my hands.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Hodges?”

“Yes…yeah, sorry about the
racket.”

“It’s okay, I’ve done that a few times
myself.” There was an awkward pause.
“It’s Allan Huggins.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been thinking about that chip of paper
you showed me.”

I waited, letting him get to it in his own way.

“Actually, I haven’t thought about anything
else since you left.”

“Have you changed your mind about it?”

“No…no.” I heard him breathe…in,
out…in, out. “No, I feel sure it’s a
photocopy. The question I can’t get out of my mind
is, what’s it a photocopy of?…And where’s
the original?…And how and when was it
made?”

“Interesting questions.”

“I’m wondering if I could see it again. I
know I wasn’t too hospitable when you were over
earlier. I apologize for that.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Would it be asking too much…Could I perhaps
make my own photocopy from your sample? I’d like to
study it at greater length.”

“I don’t think I want to do that just now.
You can see it again, if you’d like.”

“I would like, yes…very much. The
lettering’s what’s getting to me. The more I
think of it…I’ve never seen that exact
typeface, and yet…”

He didn’t have to elaborate: I knew what was going
through his head.

“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he suggested
hopefully.

“I’ll give you a call if I can.”

“Please do…please.”

“You could do something for me while we’re
at it Call it a trade-off.”

“Surely,” he said, but his voice was
wary.

“Tell me why the name Rodney Scofield set you off
like a fire.”

“Don’t you really know?”

“No,” I said with a little laugh. “I
keep telling you, I never heard of the guy.”

He grunted a kind of reluctant acceptance.
“Tomorrow, then. We’ll talk about it
then.”

He hung up. I made my phone checks yet again, to no
avail. Outside, the rain fell harder, bringing my spirits
down with it.

In this mood of desolate pessimism, having exhausted for
the moment my last best hopes by telephone, I lay back on
the bed and started reading Trish Aandahl’s book on
Darryl and Richard Grayson.

T
he earliest Grayson alphabets were etched in the cool, hard
sand of Hilton Head Island in the fall of 1937. It was a
wild beach then: there were no luxury hotels or golf
courses, and the beach was fringed by strips of jungle. On
Sunday mornings Grayson would crank up his ‘29
International pickup and clatter out on the oyster-shell
road from Beaufort.
Never again have I known such a sense of freedom and
raw potential
, he wrote, years later, to a friend in Atlanta.
Never have I had such a clear vision of the road
ahead
. He was seventeen and on fire with life. He walked the
beach alone, glorying in the solitude and in the wonder of
his emerging wisdom. His cutting tool was a mason’s
trowel. He covered the beach with alphabet, running with
the sunrise and racing the tide. He knew all the classic
typefaces: he could freehand a Roman face that was
startling, and when the tide came up and washed it all
away, it left him with a feeling of accomplishment, never
loss. It was all temporary, but so necessary—the
sweet bewilderment, the sudden clarity, the furious bursts
of energy that sometimes produced nothing more than a sense
that in his failure he had taken another vital step. It
would come, oh, it would come! He could do things at
seventeen that he could not have dreamt at sixteen. His
youth was his greatest ally, as fine an asset as experience
would be when he was forty. A photograph exists—two
photographs, reproduced back-to-back in Trish’s book.
The young Grayson stands on the beach, his face in shadow,
the sand behind him etched with letters. The same scene on
the verso, a young woman standing where Grayson had been.
The capsule identifies her as Cecile Thomas, the day,
September 15,
1931. He was my first love, the dearest, most
desperate, most painful. I was eighteen, a year older than
he was, but he was in all ways my teacher
. On that moonlit night, warm for early autumn, they had
become lovers on the sand, obliterating the writing he had
done by firelight.
Never mind
, he said,
I’ll make you another one
, and he did, running blind in the dark with the tide going
out, and when they came back in the morning, the incoming
tide had not yet reached it.

Oh, it’s perfect
, she had said:
when the tide finally did come up and wash it away, I
cried, and he laughed and said it was nothing
. Someday, Grayson told her, he would create something that
couldn’t be washed away, so why cry now for trifles
such as this?
God, I loved him…still do in a way. I
couldn’t believe how it affected me when I read of
his death, and I hadn’t seen him in more than
twenty-five years
. The world was a poorer place when he died. He cared
nothing for money or roles or the things that drove others.
He learned his art the only way an artist ever learns, by
probing the secrets of his own vast heart. He always took
the road less traveled, always: he rose up on the page and
strode across it, an unspent force even in death. Here he
comes now, walking up Hilton Head alone. He carves up the
sand with his trowel, running an alphabet of his own
creation, knocked off on the spot. The tide licks away the
A
even as he touches off the small
z
, and he stands ankle-deep in the surf, breathing the pure
Carolina air and tasting his coming victories. Only the
spirit of Trish Aandahl is there to keep him company, this
woman yet unborn, a kindred essence wafting in the wind.
Somewhere in the cosmos they connect, inspiring her to
better prose, perhaps, than she can ever do. And slowly as
she writes of Grayson, a dim picture emerges of herself.
She’s there beside him, coaxing him along the sandy
shore. She tells me things about Grayson that would leave a
photographer baffled. The camera would miss it all. A
magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect
words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never
be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

I
finally reached Leith Kenney at midnight. The conversation
was short but potent.

“Mr. Kenney?”

“Yes.”

“I’m calling from Seattle.” I
didn’t tell him who I was. I was more interested at
this stage in finding out who he was. I played my trump
card right out of the gate. “I’m calling about
Grayson’s
Raven
. The 1969 edition.”

I heard him catch his breath, as Lewis and Clark
might’ve done at their first glimpse of the Pacific
Ocean. I knew one thing right away: I had dealt myself a
strong hand, even if I couldn’t see all the
cards.

I let his pause become my own. Then I said, “Are
you interested in talking about it?”

“Oh, yes.” His voice quivered at the
prospect. “Yes, sir,” he said, underlining the
sir
part.

His eagerness was so palpable that I knew I could run
the show. “Tell me about Rodney Scofield.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Look, I’m just a guy who’s stumbled
into something. I was tipped to you people by somebody who
might know a lot more than I do. But right now I
don’t know you boys from far left field.”

“Mr. Scofield is a businessman…”

“And?”

“He collects books.”

“Grayson books.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s fair to say that Mr. Scofield is a
pretty substantial man.”

“You can check him out. You’ll find him in
most of the financial reports that are available in the
library.”

“And who are you?”

“Well,” he said as if it should be obvious,
“I work for Mr. Scofield.”

“Doing what, besides taking questions about
Grayson?”

“That’s my full-time job.”

I thought my way through a stretch of silence.
“Would it be fair to say that Scofield would pay a
small fortune if a Grayson
Raven
were to fall into his hands?”

The silence was eloquent. Mr. Scofield would pay more
than that. Mr. Scofield was that most dangerous of book
animals, the man with the unquenchable passion and the
inexhaustible bank account.

“I’ll get back to you,” I said.

I hung up before he could protest. I wouldn’t
worry anymore about Leith Kenney or Rodney Scofield. I had
their number, I knew where they were, and they’d be
there when I wanted them.