The Bookman's Wake (28 page)

She had to squeeze past him in the narrow hall. In that
second they shared the same space, close enough to bristle
the hair on her neck. She brushed against his arm and felt
the soft flannel of his long-sleeve shirt. She smelled the
sun-baked male smell of him. She smelled tobacco, the kind
her father used to smoke, that Edgeworth stuff with the
hint of licorice.

She moved quickly past him, through the dim hall to the
big room at the end. The door clicked shut behind her and
she heard the lock snap in. His footsteps came along behind
her, and for a strange moment she fought the urge to run on
through and out the front door.

His house was orderly. The hardwood floor gleamed under
a coat of varnish, and there were rugs with what looked to
her like Navajo designs in the places where people walked
the most. It was not a new house. The floor creaked under
her weight and she could see faint ceiling stains where the
roof had leaked. The room was steeped in ancient smoke. It
had soaked into the drapes and walls and furniture, and in
here it had no hint of flavor. They were both
chain-smokers, she thought, remembering her parents and
what her childhood had smelled like. They smoked what they
liked when they had it, but if times were tough,
they’d sweep the dust off“ the floor and roll a
tobacco paper around that.

He had a homemade going in the ashtray and a coffee cup
that still had almost a full head of steam. His living room
was narrow and long. It opened out to the front deck and a
secondary hall led away to the right, probably to a
bedroom. She turned and looked at him. He was a rugged guy
in his sixties. His hair was slate gray, his skin the
leathery brown of a cowboy or a farmer. His demeanor was
flat, the last thing she expected after hearing his
forceful voice on the telephone recording. He had a curious
habit of avoiding eye contact: he almost looked at you but
not quite. He seemed to gaze past her left shoulder as she
told him her name for the fourth time. He sat without
offering her a chair and made no move to offer coffee as he
leaned forward and sipped his own.

She grappled toward an opening. “I’ve heard
a lot about Nola.”

What a bad start, she thought, but it seemed to make no
real difference to him. His eyes lit up at the mention of
the name; then his mind lost its focus and he looked around
the room. He flitted his eyes across her face, stopping on
a spot somewhere behind her head. But he didn’t say
anything and she came toward him slowly and sat on a hard
wooden chair facing him. His eyes followed her down, but he
kept looking slightly behind her, always picking up
something just behind her left ear.
There’s nothing back there
, she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

Then he spoke. “Who…did you say you
are?”

“Trish Aandahl…I write for the
Seattle Times
.”

“Why did you come here? Did you bring Nola back
with you?”

There’s something wrong with this guy, she
thought. He acted like the prototype for all the dumb jokes
you heard kicking around.
One shovel short of a full load
. She didn’t know how to talk to him, but she made
the long reach and said, “I’m going to try to
find her, Mr. Jeffords.”

“Good.” He gave what passed for a smile.
“Real good.”

He blinked at whatever held his attention behind her
head and said, “I want to see her real
bad.”

“I want to see her too.”

“She was here.”

“Was she?”

“Yeah. Nola Jean.”

“When was she here?”

“Soon.”

This guy’s from the twilight zone, she thought.
She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “When will
Mrs. Jeffords be home?”

“She’s gone to the store.”

“When will she be back?”

“Grocery shopping.”

She would have to wait until Mrs. Jeffords returned and,
hopefully, gave her something coherent. The thought of
entertaining Jeffords until then was less than thrilling,
but she had done heavier duty for smaller rewards than this
story promised.

Then she looked in his face and knew what his Problem
was. She had seen it before, and the only mystery was why
it had taken her so long to figure it out.

The recording on the telephone was an old one—a
year, maybe two years or more.

Charlie Jeffords had Alzheimer’s.

Her next thought chilled her even as she thought it.

She was thinking of the gunplay the night of the
break-in, and what Eleanor had said.
I never fired a gun in my life
. . .

She thought of Mrs. Jeffords and the temperature in the
room dropped another ten degrees. Goose bumps rose on her
arms and she hugged herself and leaned forward in the
chair.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to wait
for your wife.”

“Aren’t you gonna bring Nola Jean
back?”

“I’d like to. Would you like to help
me?”

He didn’t say anything. She took a big chance and
reached for his hand.

He looked into her eyes, his lips trembling.

“Nola,” he said.

She squeezed his hand and he burst into tears.

He sobbed out of control for a minute. She tried to
comfort him, as much as a stranger could. She held his hand
and gently patted his shoulder and desperately wanted to be
somewhere else. This was the curse of Alzheimer’s:
even as it eats away your brain, you have times of terrible
clarity. Charlie Jeffords knew exactly what was happening
to him.

“Mr. Jeffords,” she said.

He sniffed and sat up and released her hand.

“The night the trouble happened. Can you tell me
about that?”

He didn’t say anything. She pushed ahead.
“That girl who broke in. Do you remember what she
wanted?”

“Her book.”

“What book?”

“Came for her book back.”

“What book?”

“She wanted her book back.”

“What was the book?”

“I been holding it for her.”

“Whose book was it?”

“Nola’s.”

“Wasn’t it Grayson’s book?
Wasn’t that Darryl Grayson’s book, Mr.
Jeffords?”

“It’s Nola’s book. Gave it to me to
hold.”

She leaned forward. He tried to look away but she
wouldn’t let him.

“I’m tired,” he said.

Damn, she thought: don’t know what’s real
anymore.

She tried again. “Mr. Jeffords…”

But that was as far as she got. Through the front
curtain she saw a pickup truck pull into the yard.

Mrs. Jeffords was home.

She left Charlie Jeffords there on the couch. She
hurried down the hall and let herself out the back way.

There’d be time enough later to think back on it.
She’d have a lifetime to wonder if she’d acted
like a frightened fool.

Now all she wanted was to put some distance between
herself and the woman in the truck.

She stood on the back porch, flat against the wall,
listening for some hint of how and when to make her
break.

She heard the woman yell.

“Charlie!”

Then, when he didn’t answer, a shriek.

“Charlie!”

She heard the thumping sounds of someone racing up the
front steps. At the same time she soft-toed down the back
and doubled around the house.

She stopped at the corner and looked out into the yard.
For reasons she only half understood, she was now
thoroughly spooked.

There was no time to dwell on it. The truck sat empty
beside her rental car: the woman had jumped out without
closing the door or killing the engine.

Go, she thought.

Run, don’t walk.

She sprinted across the yard, jumped in her car, and
drove away fast.

S
he looked at me across the table and said, “It seems
silly now, and yes, before you ask, I do feel like a fool.
I’ve never done anything remotely like that. To break
and run just isn’t my nature. I can’t explain
it.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve done a few
things that I can’t explain either.”

“Charlie Jeffords never shot at anybody, and I
don’t think the Rigby girl did either. Where does
that leave us? All I can tell you is, the thought of being
there when that woman came home was…I don’t
know. The only thing I can liken it to is having to walk
past a graveyard at night when I was a kid.”

“It’s like me walking through the blood at
Pruitt’s house, and every dumb thing I’ve done
since then. Sometimes you do things.”

“I don’t know, I had this feeling of
absolute dread. My blood dropped to zero in half the time
it takes to tell about it, and I was just…gone, you
know?“

“So what did you think about it later, when you
had time to think about it?”

“I kept thinking that one of the people
who’s missing in this story is a woman, this Nola
Jean Ryder. She’s always been the missing
link.”

“You didn’t have much about her in your
book.”

“I didn’t know much about her. She was just
a girl Richard met and brought home. I couldn’t find
out where she came from and nobody knows where she went.
It’s like she dropped off the earth when the Graysons
died.”

“How much work did you actually do on her, trying
to track her down?”

“Quite a bit. Probably not enough. By then it was
obvious even to me that I wasn’t going to get it in
the book. I was still making more changes on the galleys
than the publisher wanted to live with, and we were up
against a horrendous deadline. The book was already
scheduled and promoted as a March title and publishers want
everything done yesterday.”

She shrugged and poured herself more coffee. “I
had to let her go. Then, after the book came out, I tried
to keep up with it, but I had a living to make. I
wasn’t exactly Robert Ludlum, flush with royalties.
It made me some money, but not enough to stop being a
working gal.”

I reached for the coffeepot. “So what do you think
about it now? Are you thinking this missing woman is hiding
out down there in Taos?”

“When I saw the truck pull up, I didn’t
think at all, I just wanted to get out of there. Halfway
back to town I realized that, yeah, I had been thinking of
them as one. In my head, Ryder had become
Jeffords.”

“Which is at least possible, I guess.”

We looked at each other.

I said, “If you had to make book on it now, what
do you think happened twenty years ago?”

“I think Nola Jean Ryder set fire to that shop and
killed the Graysons. I’ve always thought
that.”

“Okay,” I said in a semidoubting voice.
“Make me believe it.”

“I probably can’t, unless you’re
willing to give me some veteran’s points for
intuition.”

“I’ll play with you up to a point. But
you’ve got to have something concrete, you
can’t just pull this intuition act out of thin
air.”

“I’ve got three things and that’s all,
you can take it or leave it. First, I talked to the fire
investigator who worked the Grayson fire. This man is
extremely competent, and he’s convinced it was arson.
He’s got my slant on life, if you know what I
mean…we talk the same language, he gets the same
vibes I do. You don’t meet many people like that, and
when you do, you listen to what they say. And he knows that
fire was set, it just killed him not to be able to prove
it. In a thirty-year career you get maybe half a dozen like
that, so strong yet elusive. It sticks in your craw and you
remember every bloody detail till the day you die.
That’s my first point.

“Here’s the second. Nola Jean Ryder was very
much in evidence at the Grayson place all through the last
year of their lives and was never seen again afterward. She
was there the day of the fire. Archie Moon saw her arguing
with Grayson. Her relationship with Grayson was volatile,
very stormy: he couldn’t seem to live with or without
her, and toward the end it got so bad it affected his work.
One man I talked to saw Ryder in the North Bend pub that
afternoon, drinking with some guys. She went off with one
of them and was gone a couple of hours. Then she was seen
walking back to Grayson’s in the early evening, in a
light rain. That’s the last time anybody ever saw or
to my knowledge heard of Nola Jean Ryder. A few hours later
the Graysons died and she dropped off the edge of the
earth.

“Last point. Nobody who knew her doubts that she
was capable of doing it. She had a temper that went off
like a firecracker and burned at a full rage for hours.
Even today it makes people uneasy to talk about her. Archie
Moon told me some stuff, then he clammed up and called it
ancient history and said he didn’t want to talk
anymore. Rigby wouldn’t talk at all. Crystal at least
was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, for a
while anyway. Nobody could understand the hold she had on
Grayson: it was as if, after a lifetime filled with women,
he had met the one who brought him to his knees.”

“This is Darryl Grayson we’re talking about
now.”

“Absolutely. Richard’s the one who first met
her, but it was Darryl Grayson who wound up with her. I
guess things like that can’t be explained, how a
woman can get under the skin of even a strong man and make
him do just about anything.”

“And vice versa.”

“Yes. There isn’t much that separates us
when you get down to what counts.”

I sat thinking about what she’d told me, then it
was my turn to talk. I told her about Amy Harper and she
listened like a bug-eyed kid, trying to imagine that
treasure hidden all those years in the Harper woman’s
attic. “I never understood why she was so hostile
when I tried to interview her. Now I know. She considered
Grayson her own personal territory. She was going to write
her own book.”

Then I told her about Otto Murdock. I watched the sense
of wonder drain out of her face, replaced by horror and
dread.

“Did you call the police?”

“Sure. I seem to spend a lot of my time doing
that.”

“Where’d you call them from?”

“Phone booth not far from
Murdock’s.”

“Did you talk to Quintana?”

“He didn’t seem to be there. Supercops in
this neck of the woods have a different work ethic than I
used to have.”

“Did you tell the dispatcher this was part of
Quintana’s case?”

“I had to. I’ve told you how important that
is, for the main guy to know that stuff right out of the
gate.”

She took a deep breath. “Sounds to me like you did
everything but give them your name.”

“I did that too. I wanted to make sure it got to
him right away. That part of it doesn’t matter
anymore, he’d know it was me anyway. They’ve
got me on tape twice now and I’ve never been much of
a ventriloquist. They’ll also have the paper I
left.”

“What paper?”

“Last Friday when I went to Murdock’s with
Eleanor, I took some pricey books out of his store. I left
an offer taped to the canvas bag.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them wide.
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You
left him a note and signed your name to it. Then you went
back there tonight and the note was still there but he was
dead, and you left the note there for the police to find.
Is that about it?”

“It’s a bookseller’s code,
Trish—thou shalt not steal thy colleague’s
books. I owed the man three thousand dollars. Now I owe it
to his estate, wherever that goes. Maybe he was one of
those nuts who left everything to his pet cat, but that
doesn’t change my obligation to him. If I walked out
with that note, I’d be stealing his books, in the
eyes of the law and in my eyes too.”

She looked at Grayson’s notebook but did not touch
it. “What about this?”

“I didn’t steal that, Murdock did. When
I’m finished with it, it goes back to Amy
Harper.”

She gave me a long, sad look.

“All right,” I said, “what would you
have done?”

“I can’t even imagine. I’m not making
light of it, it’s just that I’m starting to
worry about your chances of ever getting back to Denver as
a free man.”

“I’ll worry too if you think that’ll
help. But I’m still going to pay off Murdock’s
cat, so I can own those books with a clear conscience and
not add grand theft to all the other stuff I’ve got
hanging.”

She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she had
to be thinking.

“If this is getting too dicey for you, I can
understand that. If you want to change your mind,
I’ll understand that.”

“No,” she said too quickly. Then, after a
few seconds’ thought: “No, I’m
fine.”

She gestured at Grayson’s notebook. “But
look what you’ve done, you’ve messed up another
crime scene. Quintana will have your head on a
stick.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t
have to find out.”

“I hate to break this to you, Janeway, but luck is
not the first word that crosses my mind when I think of
you.”

“Then you’ll have to admit that I’m
due for a break.”

“You’re hanging by a thread. You’re
walking a tightrope with deep trouble on both sides of you.
It had to occur to you that this little notebook just might
be the motive for that old man’s murder.”

“Then why didn’t the killer take
it?”

“How should I know?…Maybe he couldn’t
find it…you said yourself the place was a
mess.”

“He didn’t even
look
for it, that’s what I’m telling you. The place
was a mess, but it was an accumulated mess. There
weren’t any drawers emptied, no papers thrown around.
I didn’t see any ashes on the floor. I don’t
think the killer even knew this notebook was
there.”

“Then why was Murdock killed?”

“I don’t know that. All I can tell you is,
it’s different than the others.”

“Different killers?…Is that what
you’re saying?”

“No, it’s the same guy, and if you dig deep
enough, you’ll find one motive at the bottom of it.
But he was drawn to these guys for different reasons.
Carmichael was killed for what was in Pruitt’s house.
Same thing with Hockman, years ago: he was killed for what
he had. Murdock was killed for what he knew.”

She leaned over and looked at the notebook close up. But
she avoided touching it, as if whatever lay beneath its
cover had been hopelessly tainted. “It’s still
a wonderful motive for murder. Imagine what someone like
Huggins would pay for it. He’d sell his house to get
it. It’s the map to Treasure Island, the only thing a
Grayson freak would ever need for the scavenger hunt of his
dreams.”

I was thinking the same thing, with Scofield playing the
Huggins role. A rich man could chase down the subscribers
or their heirs and suck the market dry in no time. Each
year fewer Graysons would appear at auction and no one
would quite know why. Suddenly dealers would list them in
catalogs as
rare
and mean it. In ten years the prices on the few odds and
ends would be stratospheric.

I told her about Scofield and Kenney and about the
interesting talk I’d had with Mrs. Kenney earlier in
the evening. She listened with her fingers to her lips and
came to the same conclusion I had reached a few hours
before.

Kenney and Scofield were flying in to meet Pruitt.

That meant Pruitt had been in touch, sometime since I
last spoke with Kenney, probably well within the last
twenty-four hours.

“My God, he’s found the book,” Trish
said breathlessly.

“That…would seem to be the case.”

“What else could it mean?”

“I don’t know what it means. Or might mean
for Eleanor.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna be there when the deal goes down.
After that it’s up for grabs.”

She said something under her breath that sounded like
“Jesus.”

I nudged Grayson’s notebook in her general
direction. “Maybe you should break down and give this
a look. It tells us some things we never knew
before.”

“Such as what?”

“It turns out that Grayson did a tiny lettered run
for each of his books. A superlimited series that went to a
few select customers.”

“I don’t remember seeing that in
Huggins.”

“It wasn’t in Huggins. I looked.”

“Huggins would never leave something like that
out.”

“Unless he never knew about it. Or maybe he did
know and couldn’t verify it, like the fact that
Grayson was working on another
Raven
.”

“This is different than another
Raven
. The
Raven
might not even exist. But if there was a lettered series,
Huggins would have to have it.”

“But the limitation was so small it was next to
nothing. None of the books has ever turned up to prove
their existence, and until now it was assumed by everybody
that Grayson’s records all went up in the
fire.”

She still made no move to pick up the notebook. I picked
it up for her and opened it to the first page.

“Each title had five hundred numbered copies.
There were also five lettered copies. These were for
customers who had been with Grayson from the
beginning…the faithful. They loved his books way back
when everybody else could care less.”

I watched her eyes. It was beginning to come to her now,
she was starting to see the dark road we were heading
into.

“These lettered copies usually preceded the
regular run by a month or so,” I said.

Suddenly she knew where we were going. I could see it in
her eyes.

“
A
,” I told her, “was a fellow named Joseph
Hockman, of St. Louis, Missouri.”

She didn’t say anything. She reached across the
table and took the notebook out of my hands. She read the
name in Grayson’s own hand, as if nothing less would
make her believe it. She put it down on the table, looked
across at me, picked it up, and read it again.

“
B
,” I said, “was Mr. Reggie Dressier of Phoenix,
Arizona.
C
was Corey Allingham of Ellicott City, Maryland.
D
was Mike Hollingsworth, looks like a rural route somewhere
in Idaho.
E
was Laura Warner of New Orleans. That’s all there
were. The faithful five.”

She finally got past Joseph Hockman and let her eyes
skim the page. “He knew Laura Warner from
Atlanta.”

“I know he did. I read your book.”

“Jesus!…Have you checked these other names
yet?”

“I’ve only had the damn thing a couple of
hours. I didn’t want to make any police checks from
this telephone, even to departments a thousand miles from
here. There are other offices I could check, but they
won’t be open at midnight.”

“No, but the newspapers will be.”