Bookman's wake

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.

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.”