“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?”