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.