by John Dunning
She sat in the empty newsroom on Sunday afternoon, reading the clip file on the Hockman case. She and Simon had coffee in a diner not far away and talked about old times, the rain in Seattle, and the Hockman case. Simon had vivid recollections of Hockman. He had been the paper’s news editor then and had done the layout on the first-day story and on most of the follow pieces. It stuck in his mind as the beginning of the crazy age. He had said as much in a diary he had kept then and had dug out and reviewed just after she had called him this morning. He had written about life and work and his personal evolving philosophy. The thing about Hockman was, you never thought much about random killers before then and you were always aware of them since. Suddenly you couldn’t pick up hitchhikers without taking your life in your hands. The day of the serial killer had come.
“I don’t think this was a serial killer, Wilbur,” she said.
At least not the kind of serial killer people meant when they used the term, she thought.
They parted with a hug and Simon offered her a job. She smiled and said she was flattered, but it would take more than rain to get her to give up Seattle for St. Louis.
She looked up Carolyn Bondy in the telephone book. There was a George Bondy at that address. The man who answered said Carolyn Bondy, his mother, had died just last month.
She ate dinner alone in the city and caught a ten-o’clock flight to Albuquerque.
She slept on the plane, just enough to keep her awake the rest of the night. A rental car got her into Taos at three o’clock in the morning, mountain time, thankful that she had reserved a room and secured it with a credit card. She had made photocopies of the Post-Dispatch clips, but it was that single sheet from homicide with the shadowy image of the two con-nected letters shot through plastic that she looked at now as she faced the new day. She had done her homework: she knew that Charlie and Jonelle Jeffords lived in the hills fifteen miles from town. She had studied the maps and knew where to drive with only occasional stops to refresh her memory. She bumped off the highway and clattered along a washboard road, leaving a plume of dust in her wake. The road twisted up a ridge and skirted a valley. She saw patches of snow in the high country as the road U-turned and dipped back into the hills. There were washouts along the way, but each had been repaired and the drive was easy. She reached the gate at nine o’clock. A sign nailed to a post said keep out , and she thought that hospitality at Rancho Jeffords was like the weather, chilly with a chance of sudden clouds. She slipped the rope loop off the gate and drove in. The house was a hundred yards away, shaded by trees and hidden from the road by hilly terrain. It was a splitlevel mountain home with a deck that faced west. There was no sign of life. She pulled into the yard and decided to go ahead with caution, remembering the inclination of the cheerful Mr. Jeffords to greet trespassers with the business end of a gun.
She walked out in the yard and stood in the sun.
Called out to whoever might hear.
“Hello!…Is anybody here?”
The hills soaked up her voice.
She tried again but got nothing for it.
She went up the walk and knocked on the door. There wasn’t a sound inside.
It had been a gamble coming here without an appointment, but she knew that when she booked the flight. She walked along a flagstone path to the edge of the house. The path led around to a garage, whose side door beckoned her on.
She knocked on the door. “Anybody in there?”
No one.
She touched the door and it swung open.
A workroom, long ago surrendered as the place for cars.
There was clutter, but also a staleness in the air. It was a shop set up for a working man but unused for some time now. The walls gave off a feeling of dry rot and musk.
She saw some equipment she recognized and it drew her into the room. A heavy iron bookpress had been set up on the edge of the bench. A much older bookpress, made of wood, stood on a table behind it.
The tools of a bookbinder.
As she came deeper into the room, her impression of disuse deepened. The place was deep in dust and heavily cobwebbed. The chair at the bench was ringed with spiderwebs.
She was nervous now but she came all the way in, wanting to see it all with a quick look. Again she observed the bookbinder’s tools: the rawhide hammer lying on the floor where he’d dropped it long ago, covered with dust; a steel hammer at the edge of the bench, a few feet from the bookpress; balls of wax thread; needles; paper. There was lots of paper, fine marbled stock for endsheets, standard stock for the pages, colored papers and white sheets and some with a light creamy peach tone. Against the wall was a paper rack. And there were leathers, very fine under the dust, and edging tools that looked like cookie cutters and were used, she knew, for laying in the gilt on a gold-trimmed leather book. There was a hot plate to heat the edging tool on, and behind the hot plate was a row of nasty-looking gluepots. She opened one and smelled PVA, the bookbinder’s glue. A newspaper, open on the table, was a year old.
She went outside and closed the door. The wind whistled down from the hills. She walked back to her car, opened the door, and sat with her feet dangling out, hoping they’d come home soon.
An hour passed and the sun grew hot. The arroyo baked under the glare of it and the chill melted away. Slowly she became aware of a creepy sensation, like the feeling you get driving on the freeway when the man in the next car stares at you as he comes past.
She looked at the house and saw curtains flutter upstairs. This might be nothing more than the temperature control blowing air up the window, but her sense of apprehension grew as she looked at it.
She wanted to leave but she couldn’t. She had come a long way, and though the chance of failure had always been strong, she had never failed at anything by default.
The curtain moved again. No heating flue did that, she thought.
She got out and walked across the yard. She went up the path to the door and gave it another loud knock.
There was a bump somewhere. Her unease was now acute.
She circled the house. Out back was a smaller deck with steps leading up to a door. She went up and knocked. Through a filmy curtain she saw movement, as if someone had crossed from one room to another.
“Hey, people,” she called. “I’ve come a long way to talk to you. Why don’t we hear each other out?”
Nothing.
Not a sound now, but the presence behind the door was as tangible as the purse slung over her shoulder. She had a vision of something sexless and faceless, holding its breath waiting for her to leave.
“It’s about the Rigby girl and the burglary you had here.”
She could feel her voice soaking through the old wood around the window sash. There wasn’t a chance of them not hearing her.
“It’s about Darryl and Richard Grayson, and the book Grayson was working on when he died.”
Even the house seemed to sigh. But the moment passed and nothing happened, and in a while she wondered if the sound had been in her mind.
“It’s about the Graysons and their friends…you and the Rigbys.” She took a breath and added, “And Nola Jean Ryder.”
As if she’d said a magic word, the door clicked and swung inward. Someone…a man, she thought…looked through a narrow crack.
“Mr. Jeffords?…Is that you?…I can’t see you very well.”
“Who are you?”
It was the same voice she had heard on the telephone recording—the same only different. The recording had rippled with macho arrogance: this man sounded tired and old and shaky.
“What do you want here?”
“I came down from Seattle to talk to you. I’m a reporter for the Seattle Times .”
She told him her name, but he seemed not to hear. Technically, ethically, it didn’t matter. The rules only demanded that she give him fair warning. He was talking to a reporter and they were now on the record. She could use him if he said anything worth using.
But she had
never played the game that way. “I’m a reporter, Mr. Jeffords.” It still meant nothing to him. He heard but did not hear. He listened but his mind heard only words and blipped out meanings. She had done too many interviews with people like him, private souls who suddenly found themselves newsworthy without understanding how or why it had happened. They were always appalled when they opened their newspapers the next morning and learned what they had said.
“Trish Aandahl, Seattle Times ,” she said, loud and clear.
She still couldn’t see him. He stood just beyond the doorway, a shadow filling up the crack, his face reduced to an eye, a cheek, part of a nose.
“D’you think it would be possible for me to come in and talk to you for just a minute? I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”
He didn’t seem to hear that either. He leaned closer to the door and in a voice barely louder than a whisper said, “Did you say something about Nola Jean?”
This was the key to him, the only reason he had opened his door to her. Blow this and you lose him, she thought.
“We can talk about Nola,” she said as if she’d known the woman all her life.
He opened the door wide and let her in.
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 tr
uck.
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.
43
She 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.”