Bookman's wake

and called him a crook and a few other things before Trish managed to pull him away and we headed for Indianapolis.

I had a dream that night about the first Grayson Raven . In the dream Richard fixed that one too: changed two letters of type after Grayson had quit work and gone to the pub for the evening. It would’ve been easy then, in 1949, when it was just the two brothers working alone and a mistake was easy to miss. No glue, no tip-ins to tell a tale years later: just switch the letters and it would always be assumed, even by Grayson, they’d been set that way. At breakfast in the morning I told Trish and Quintana and none of us laughed. For a long time we couldn’t shake the notion that the whole Grayson tragedy had been for nothing.

We were out ten days, in all a great trip. They stayed with me another three days in Denver, and the house felt empty when I put them on the plane and watched them fly away.

A year has come and gone. It’s winter in Denver, late on a snow-swept Saturday night as I sit at my front counter writing in the little diary that I’ve begun keeping of my life in books. Far up the street a shrouded figure comes out of the snow, battling a wicked wind that howls in from the east, and I think of Eleanor Rigby. I still have a delusion that one of these days she’s going to walk into my bookstore and help me write a fitting end to the Grayson case. Grayson was my turning point as a bookman. I came home with enough of Scofield’s money that, for now, I can buy just about any collection of books that walks in my door. I still have Grayson’s notebook: Amy gave it to me. Kenney calls once a month and asks if I’m ready to sell it. I should probably do that: the money they’re throwing around is just too good to keep turning it down. But Kenney understands when I laugh and tell him how it would diminish the old man’s life if suddenly he had that roadmap to everything.

Among the fallout from the Grayson papers were letters indicating the real identity of Amy Harper’s father. The name Paul Ricketts had been one of the pseudonyms used by Richard Grayson in his early writings, and the letters revealed an affair of many years’ duration between Richard and Selena Harper. “So we’re first cousins,” Amy wrote of herself and Eleanor. “Imagine that.” The news from the Northwest gradually tapered off. I had to return the Ayn Rand books to Murdock’s estate as his last two relatives could never agree on anything. The best guess, the one that seemed most likely to me, was that these were the last of Murdock’s really good books, gathered for a wholesale run so he could get some money together to make Amy an offer. The cops found a big batch of real Gray sons‘—all the lettered copies of everything but the 1969 Ravens —in the rafters above Rigby’s shop. He couldn’t resist taking them, holy books made by the hand of God, as he traveled through St. Louis, Phoenix, Baltimore, Boise, and New Orleans. As for his own, they are called the Rigby Ravens now and are widely admired by people who have seen them. Scofield wants them but his woman in red doesn’t seem to care so much about money anymore. The books will belong to Eleanor, wherever she is.

The New Mexico case is still open. Charlie Jeffords died not long ago and it remains to be seen who fired the gun, if and when the cops find Eleanor. I’ve just about decided that it’s too easy for people to disappear into that street- level book subculture. I keep showing her picture around when I’m on the road. There’s a lot of money waiting for her and Scofield’s not getting any younger.

It’s ten o’clock—time to get the hell out of here and go home. The figure in the street has reached my door, and in this moment, in less than an instant, I think, hey!…maybe … maybe . At the edge of her hood I see the facial features of a young woman. She turns her head, our eyes meet through the plate glass and she smiles faintly. It’s the neighborhood’s newest hooker, heading on up to the Safeway after a hard day’s night. I give her a friendly wave and turn off the lights fast. In the yard behind the store I look at the black sky and wonder what books tomorrow will bring.

John Dunning is the national and New York Times bestselling author of Booked to Die , which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe award, The Bookman’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of 1995), the Edgar Award-nominated Deadline, The Holland Suggestions , and Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime . An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. He is also an expert on American radio history, authoring On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio . His latest Cliff Janeway novel, The Bookman’s Promise , is forthcoming in hardcover from Scribner. He lives in Denver, Colorado.