by John Dunning
The padlock was a heavy-duty Yale, the same color as the third key in my hand. I snapped it open, gave a soft push, and the door creaked inward.
It’s a wine cellar, was my first thought.
A cool, windowless room, perfect for storing things away from heat and light. But something else, not wine, was aging on those shelves.
Books.
Dozens of books.
Scores…
Hundreds…
Hundreds!
And they were all The Raven .
A Disneyland of Ravens , row after row, elegantly bound and perfect-looking, all the same, all different. Some so different they seemed to mock the others for their sameness.
Funny thoughts race through your head.
Eureka!
Dr. Livingstone, I presume…
And Stewart Granger, buried alive in that African mountain, crawling into a treasure chamber with a torch over his head and the miracle of discovery on his lips.
King Solomon’s Mines!
That’s how it felt.
I took down a book and opened it to the title page.
1969.
I looked at another one.
1969.
Another one…and another one…and another one…
1969…
…1969…
…1969…
A year frozen forever, with no misspelled words.
I try not to presume too much in this business. That’s how mistakes are made.
But it was probably safe to say I had found the Grayson Raven .
54
I couldn’t shake the thrill of it, or chase away the faceless man who had made it. I stood at the dark front door, watching the house and not knowing what to do next. Then the second impact hit and I had to go back for another look. The room was different now, transposed in a kind of shivery mystical brew. It was alive and growing, nowhere yet near whatever it was trying to become. Twenty years ago it had been empty. Then the first book came and life began.
But where was it going? When would it end?
I supposed it would end when the artist died and his quest for the perfect book had run its course. Maybe he had even achieved that perfection, reached it a hundred times over, without ever accepting what he’d done.
It would never be good enough. He was mad, crazier than Poe. He had locked himself in mortal self-combat, a war nobody ever wins.
Again I watched the house. A shadow passed the kitchen window, leaping out at the meadow.
A light rain began.
I stood very still but I wasn’t alone. Grayson was there. In the air. In the dark. In the rain.
Across the yard I heard the door open. Two shadow figures came out on the porch and I moved over by the hedge, a few feet from where they stood.
“Archie.” Her voice was low and full of pain. “How could this happen to us?”
He took her in his arms and hugged her tight.
“Were we so evil?” she said. “Was what we did that wrong?”
“I got no easy answers, honey. We did what seemed best at the time.”
Now she cried. She had held it in forever and it came all at once. She sobbed bitterly and Moon patted her shoulders and gave her what comfort he could: “We’ll get past it. I’ll go find Gaston and bring him back here so we can figure it out together.” But she couldn’t stop crying and Moon was not a man who could cope with that. Gently he pulled away and turned her around, sending her back to that desolate vigil inside the house. He hurried down the steps and got into the truck, and I stepped behind the hedge and stood there still until his headlights swung past and he was gone.
I hung around for a while: I didn’t know why. Crystal was alone now but that wasn’t it. She was shaken and vulnerable and I thought I could break her if I wanted to try again. But I didn’t move except to step out from the hedge to the corner of the house. In a while the kitchen light went out and the house dropped into a void. Pictures began with color and sound and the case played out, whole and nearly finished, the way they say a drowning man sees his life at the end. A chorus of voices rose out of the past— Richard, Archie, Crystal, Grayson—battling to be heard. I couldn’t hear them all, only one broke through. Eleanor the child, growing up as that room grew and the bookman worked in his solitude. She read The Raven and read The Raven and read The Raven , and with each reading her knowledge grew and her wisdom deepened. Her entire understanding of life came from that poem, but it was enough. She heard the bump at the door and looked up from the table where she read The Raven by candlelight. ‘ Tis some visitor , she muttered, tapping at my chamber door …
The visitor was me.
She was six years old, what could she know? But her face bore the mark of the bookman: her mother had not yet returned to claim her. I hung there in the doorway, waiting for her statement, some tiny insight that had escaped us all. What she had for me was a sassy question.
Don’t you know what a cancel stub is?. . . How long have you been in business ?
I trudged across the meadow in a steady rain. I was wet again but I didn’t care. I was locked in that book room with Eleanor, caught up in its wonder and mystery. I stopped near the edge of the trees and looked back at the house, invisible now in a darkness bleached white. I wished Crystal would turn on a lamp. A powerful army of ghosts had taken the woods and the rain bore the resonance of their voices. In a while I moved on into the trees. The light from the house never came, but I could follow the bookman’s wake without it.
55
The cabin was fifty miles north, far across U.S. 2 near a place called Troublesome Lake. It was a wilderness, the access a graveled road and a dirt road beyond that. “There’s no telling what the last five miles is like,” Trish said, spreading the map across the front seat. “It shows up here as unimproved. That could be okay or it could be a jeep trail.”
She asked about police and I told her what I thought. There might be a sheriffs substation at Skykomish, a hole-in-the-wall office staffed by one overworked deputy who wouldn’t move an inch without probable cause. Unless we could lay out a case for him, we were on our own.
Trish was tense and trying too hard to fight it. We both knew I should take it from here alone, but somehow we couldn’t get at it. She was my partner, she had earned her stripes, I wasn’t about to insult her with macho-man bullshit. I had never had a female partner in my years with the Denver cops. I’d always thought I’d have no problem with it—if a woman was armed and trained and tough, I could put my life in her hands. Trish was not trained and she was unarmed. You never knew about the toughness till the time came, but that was just as true of a man.
It had to be said so I made it short and straight, well within the code. “If you have any doubts about going up there, this is the time to say so. It’s your call. But you’ve got no gun, we don’t know what’s there…nobody would think any less of you.”
She gave me a doleful smile. “I’ll be fine. I get nervous before anything that might put me on the spot. That’s all it is. If something starts, I’ll be fine.”
She had borrowed a press car equipped with two-way radio to her city desk. She had left a copy of the map, sealed in an envelope, with her night city editor. At least her common sense was alive and kicking. The problem was, the radio might not work at that distance, she said: its effective range was about forty miles, but mountains played hell with the signal and could cause fading at any distance. Once she had called in from Bellingham, a hundred miles north: another time she had barely got through in a thunderstorm from Issaquah. You never knew.
She asked for some last-minute ground rules. “If we find your friend up there, we wrap her up and bring her down. No theatrics, no cowboy heroics, no waiting around for whoever might come. We bring her down. Period, end of story. You go see Quintana and we let the cops take it from there.”
Life should be so simple. I said, “Deal,” and I hugged her and I truly hoped it would work out that way. She held me tight for another moment
. “I’m fine,” she said, and that was the end of it. There would be no more said about nerves or rules, no more second-guessing.
She started the car and drove us north on Highway 203.
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 t
he 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.”