But it was probably safe to say I had found the Grayson
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 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.
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.
