by John Dunning
“No. He kills people because he’s a killer. He just didn’t know that till he’d done the first one.”
This is how it works. You get an idea. Usually you’re wrong. But sometimes you’re right. In police work, you follow your idea till it pays off or craps out.
One thing leads to another…
And suddenly I knew where Eleanor was.
“There’s a cabin in the mountains,” I said. “She goes there when she wants to be alone.”
I kicked into my pants, tore into my shirt, got up, sat on a box, and pulled on my shoes.
“What’re you thinking now,” Trish asked, “that she’s free to come and go?”
“I don’t know. But I’m betting that’s where she’ll be.”
“Where is this cabin?”
I stopped short. I didn’t know.
“So what do you know about it?”
“Moon’s supposed to own it, but they all use it. It’s an hour’s drive from here.”
“Maybe still in King County, though.”
“Moon said he built it forty years ago and gradually it’s been surrounded by national-forest lands.”
“But he still owns it.”
“That’s the impression I had.”
“If it’s in his name, I can find it. There’s a title company the paper uses when we’re doing stories that deal with land. They can search out anything. If I can catch them before quitting time, we can plot it out on a topographical map.”
We agreed to coordinate through Amy at the motel. Then we split up, Trish on a fast run back to Seattle, me to Snoqualmie, to stake out Archie Moon’s print-shop.
51
I waited but he didn’t come. Eventually I headed on over toward North Bend. It was almost six o’clock, almost dark, and almost raining when I drove up to the Rigby place and found the gate open. The sun had gone and the night rolled in from the Cascades, pushing the last flakes of light on to the Pacific. The house looked smaller than I remembered it. Crystal had left the front porch light on, casting the yard in a self-contained kind of glow that was almost subterranean. You got the feeling that divers would come down from the hills, swim around the windows and eaves, and wonder what strange creatures might be living there.
Behind the house the printshop was dark. Beyond that, a stretch of meadow ran out to the woods. For a brief time, perhaps no more than these few moments on this night only, the field caught the last of the day’s light in this particular way and spread a silver-blue blanket at the foot of the trees.
Crystal heard me coming and was standing at the door. I clumped up the stairs and she opened the door.
“Well, Janeway, I didn’t expect to see you here. You look like an old man.”
“I am an old man, and getting older by the minute. Have the cops been back?”
“Just once, that same night. They decided not to tap the phone. They don’t seem as worried about you as they were at first.”
“That’s good to know. Can we talk?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
The house was dark, like the first night I’d seen it, except for the one light coming out of the kitchen down the hall. I went on back like one of the family. She came in behind me and motioned to the table, and I pulled out the same chair I’d sat in earlier.
“Where’s your husband?”
“Out in the shop working.”
“I didn’t see any lights out there, that’s why I wondered.”
“You can’t see the lights when he’s in the back room.”
She poured coffee from a pot on the counter and offered second-day rolls. They microwaved instantly, she said, and were about as good the day after. I shook my head no and she sat across from me, her face etched with the sadness of the ages. She sipped her coffee, looked at me through her glasses, and said, “What’s on your mind?”
“Nola Jean Ryder. We could start with that, go on from there.”
Her face didn’t change, but I could sense her heartbeat picking up to a pace something like a jackhammer.
“I haven’t heard that name in twenty years.”
“Really?”
“Well, that woman who wrote the book about Darryl and Richard did want to ask me about her. I couldn’t help her much. That’s something Gaston and Archie and I never talk about.”
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t what you’d call a pleasant association. It’s something we’d all rather forget.”
I waited her out.
“Nola Jean was DarryFs…I don’t exactly know how to put it.”
“Huggins called her his whore.”
She stared off at the dark window. “So who the hell’s Huggins and what does he know about it? Was he there? I only met the man once or twice, years ago, and he didn’t seem much interested in Nola Jean then.”
“Well, was she a whore?”
“If you mean did she walk the streets and hook for her supper, the answer’s no.”
“There are all kinds of whores, though.”
“Are you talking from experience?”
“You seem to forget, I was a cop. I did my time in vice.”
“Of course. You’ve probably seen whores in their infinite variety, and all in the line of duty. Somehow I don’t think you ever met anyone quite like Nola Jean. She was the kind of dark-spirited gal people write books about.”
She got up and went to the coffeepot but did not pour. Looking out across the meadow, she said, “She could get men to do anything. I never knew how she did it. The only one she couldn’t touch that way was Gaston. She sure tried, but none of it worked. I guess that’s why she hated him.”
She rinsed out her cup and turned it bottom-up on the counter. Again she stared through the window, past the edge of the printshop to the meadow. She turned her head toward me and said, “This is all ancient history. I don’t see what she’s got to do with anything today.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
“No idea at all. Just drifted away, seems to be what everybody thinks.”
The room was heavy with the presence of this long-lost woman. Crystal hugged herself as if that would make her warm again.
“I don’t think about her anymore.” But she looked away. She was not a woman who lied easily.
“I can’t even remember what she looked like,” she said, trying to shore up one lie with another.
“It shouldn’t be this hard. Just think of Eleanor.”
She jerked around and smacked her coffee cup into the sink, breaking it. Surprise became anxiety, then dismay, finally despondence.
“How did you know?”
“Saw some old photographs. There’s really not much doubt.”
“Oh, God.” She gave a mighty shiver. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Crystal,” I said as kindly as I could. “We’ve got to stop the lies now. Get your husband in here so we can talk it out.”
“No!…No. We don’t talk about these things to Gaston.”
“We’re gonna have to start. It can’t stay buried any longer.”
“Oh, don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Ask me…whatever you want, ask me.”
“Why would Gaston Rigby raise Nola Jean Ryder’s daughter?”
She gave a little cough and took off her glasses. Dabbed at her eyes with trembly hands.
“Crystal…”
“Why do I get the feeling you already know these things? You ask the questions but you already know the answers.”
“There’s only one answer that makes sense. Grayson’s her father.”
She looked out at the shop and said nothing.
“What did Gaston think when she started to grow up? When every time you looked in her face you saw this evil woman you all hated?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
She turned and looked at me straight on, wanting me to believe her.
“Truly,” she said, and I did believe her.
“Then tell me how it was.”
“I don’t
know if I can. You’d have to’ve been part of it, watched them together when she was growing up. She didn’t look anything like Nola then, all we could see was Darryl in her face. And Gaston thought the sun rose and set on that child, she just lit up his life. I’ve never heard that song ”You Light Up My Life“ without thinking of Gaston and Ellie. He loved her to pieces. Read to her nights, took her over to Seattle to walk along the waterfront. He was so crazy about that child, I actually envied her sometimes. He’d take her walking and later tell me it was like Darryl himself was walking with them. So that’s how it was. She’s ours but she came from Darryl, the last living part of him. It was like he’d made her, like a book, without any help from any woman, and left her here for us. And what’s in a face? I mean, really, who cares what someone looks like? Ellie’s really nothing like Nola Jean in any way that counts. She didn’t get her heart from her mamma, or her mind…we all know where that came from. And when she started to grow up and look like Nola, Gaston didn’t seem to notice at all. To him she was Darryl’s little girl, and I don’t think he ever worried or even stopped to consider who her mother was.”
“What about you, Crystal? Did you think about it?”
She didn’t want to answer that. She had thought about it plenty. “She’s got nothing to do with Nola Jean Ryder anymore. You can’t raise a child from the cradle and not love her.” She fidgeted with her hands. “Only two things have mattered in my life—first Gaston, then Eleanor. Anybody who thinks I didn’t love that child is just full of it, and they’d better not say it to me. I had her almost from the day she was born. Nola never cared: as soon as Ellie was born, she was out of here, gone on the road with some bum she met down at the tavern. We started thinking of Ellie as ours, right from that first winter. Even when Nola came back here in the spring and took up with Darryl again, she couldn’t care less about her daughter. And after Darryl died, she never came back.”
We looked hard at each other. I leaned across the table so she couldn’t escape my eyes. “I hate to break this to you, Crystal, but you’re still lying to me.”
Another shock wave rippled across her face. She touched her lips with her fingers and seemed to be holding her breath.
“You keep talking about Darryl Grayson as if he’s really dead.”
“Of course he’s dead. Everybody knows that.”
“I think he’s alive and well.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I think he’s alive and still working after all these years.”
She shook her head.
“And you and Rigby and maybe Moon have devoted your lives to his secret. You’ve created a safe haven where he can do his stuff in peace and seclusion, back there in that shop, in that back room where nobody ever goes.”
“You are out of your mind.”
“Then I might as well tell you the rest of it, since you feel that way anyway. I think Grayson is obsessed by the idea of his own genius. I think after a while it became all that mattered to him. The mystique, the Grayson legend, the almost religious following that’s coming along behind him. I think that’s what this case is all about. You tell a guy often enough that he’s a god, after a while he starts to believe it. And it led him straight over the edge, till he became as cold-blooded a killer as I’ve ever seen.”
“You must be mad.”
“Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of Otto Murdock?”
She tried to shake her head. I wouldn’t let her.
“He’s a book dealer, or was, but you know that. He’s dead now. Murdered.”
“I saw it…in the newspaper.”
“Ever hear of Joseph Hockman?”
She made a little no movement with her head.
“What about Reggie Dressier?…Mike Hollings-worth?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What about Laura Warner?”
Nothing from her now. Her face looked like stone.
“They were book collectors. Grayson killed them.”
“I want you to leave now,” she said numbly.
“You remember your stalker?…The guy named Pruitt?”
Her eyes came up and gripped mine. Oh, yes, she remembered Pruitt.
“He’d be dead now too if he hadn’t been lucky. Somebody else took the knife that was meant for him.”
“Will you leave now?” she said thickly.
“Yeah, I’m finished. And I’m sorry, Crystal, I really am. I liked you all.”
I got up from the table. “I suppose you’ll tell Grayson what’s been said here tonight. I imagine he’ll come after me next.”
I gave her a last sad look. “Tell him I’m waiting for him.”
I walked out.
***
Down in the yard, where the night was now full, I turned away from the car and went along the path to the printshop. I looked back once, but Crystal was nowhere in sight. I was confident now, strong with faith in my premise. The old bastard was out there somewhere, his return as inevitable as the rain. I remembered the night I’d spent here, squirreled away in the loft, and the constant feeling that some presence was close at hand. Someone downstairs. Someone a room away. Someone walking around the house in the rain at four o’clock in the morning. Bumps in the night. You feel him standing in the shadows behind you, but when you turn to look, he’s gone. Cross him, though, and he will find you and cut your heart out.
I stood in the total dark of the printshop door. I put my hand in my pocket and took hold of the gun. Then I pushed open the door and went inside.
I crossed to the inner door. It made a sharp little click as I pushed it in.
“Crystal?”
It was Rigby’s voice, somewhere ahead. I stepped into the doorway and saw him, perched on a high steel chair halfway down the long worktable. No one was in the room with him, but that meant nothing. People can be anywhere, for any reason.
“Who’s there?”
I came all the way in, keeping both hands in my pockets. My eyes took in the length and breadth of it, from the far window to the locked door on this end that looked like nothing more than a storage room. Then, when I was sure he was alone, I came around the end of the workbench so he could see my face. I felt a chill at having my back to the door.
He took off his glasses and squinted.
“Janeway. Well, gosh.”
He’d been doing something there at the table, working on a sketch of some kind. He pulled open a thin, flat drawer, dropped his work inside, closed and locked it. Then he put one foot down from the chair he sat on and leaned forward into his knee.
“You look different,” he said.
“It’s this case. It’s aged me a lot.”
“Case?”
“Yeah, you know. Your missing daughter.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “These are hard days,” he said after a while.
“I’m sure they are. Maybe it’s almost over now. You could help…answer a few questions maybe?”
“Sure,” he said, but he was instantly uneasy. He was not a great talker, I remembered. He was private and sensitive and reluctant to let a stranger see into his heart.
He smiled kindly through his beard and gave it a try. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Grayson.”
His smile faded, replaced by that shadow of distress I had seen in him that first night. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I could tell you that would make any difference today.”
I waited, sensing him groping for words. Let him grope it out, I thought.
“I have a hard time with that.”
“What about Nola Jean Ryder?”
His eyes narrowed to slits. I never found out what he might have said, because at that moment the outer door slammed open and Crystal screamed, “Gaston!” and I heard her charging through the dark front room.
She threw open the door and vaulted into the back shop.
“Don’t say another word!” she yelled at Rigby.
/> “What’s—”
“Shut up!…Just… shut up ! Don’t tell him anything.”
She came toward me. I moved to one side.
“I told you to get out of here.”
We circled each other like gladiators. By the time I reached the door, she and Rigby were side by side.
“Don’t you come back,” Crystal said. “Don’t ever come back here.”
“I’ll be back, Crystal. You can count on it.”
I went through the shop with that chill on my neck. The chill stayed with me as I doubled back toward Snoqualmie. I thought it was probably there for the duration.
52
Headlights cut the night as Archie Moon turned out of Railroad Avenue and came to a squeaking stop on the street outside his printshop. For a time he sat there as if lost in thought: then, wearily showing his age, he pulled himself out of the truck’s cab and slowly made his way to the front of the building. A key ring dangled from his left hand: with the other hand he fished a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on long enough to fit the key in the lock, turn the knob, and push the door open. He took off the glasses and flipped on the inner light, stepping into the little reception room at the front of the shop. He stopped, bent down, and picked up the mail dropped through the slot by the mailman earlier in the day.
He rifled through his letters with absentminded detachment. Seeing nothing of immediate interest, he tossed the pile on the receptionist’s desk and moved on into the back shop.
I got out of the car across the street, where I’d been waiting for more than an hour. I crossed over, opened the door without a noise, and came into the office.
I could hear him moving around beyond the open door. The back shop was dark with only a single light, somewhere, reflecting off black machinery. Shadows leaped up in every direction, like the figures in an antiquarian children’s book where everything is drawn in silhouette.
I heard the beep of a telephone machine, then the whir of a tape being rewound. He was playing back his messages, just around the corner, a foot or two from where I stood.
“Archie, it’s Ginny. Don’t be such a stranger, stranger.”
Another beep, another voice. “Bobbie, sweetheart. Call me.”