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 the 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.”