Bookman's wake

“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.”

“He killed her,” Trish said again. Her voice was a strange mix of certainty and doubt. “Have you got any evidence?”

“Not much, not yet. Nothing you’d want to take into court without a body. But the argument still packs a lot of weight. Turn the question around. What evidence do we have for her being alive? There isn’t any. She’s been missing twenty years, three times what the law demands for a presumption of death. That seven-year-wait didn’t get established in law by itself. When people go missing that long without a trace or a reason, they’re almost always dead. Damn few of them ever turn up alive again. Add to this the fact that Nola was self-centered and greedy—you know she’d come back for that book if there was money in it. But her own sister hasn’t seen her— Jonelle still had the book, after all, twenty years later. Charlie Jeffords told you Nola’d been there, but that wasn’t Nola, it was Eleanor. That’s what got him so upset. That’s why Jonelle was so upset when Eleanor popped up without any warning on her doorstep. What a shock, huh? There stood Nola Jean in the flesh. The woman who’d always driven Charlie a little crazy, whose memory still does on the bad days. And damn, she hadn’t changed a bit.”

We stopped at the side of the road and I sat with my eyes closed while Trish looked at the map. I was thinking of the sequence again, probing it at the weak places. Laura Warner sent her book back, but by then the killer was on the road, coming her way. Hockman had mailed his letter from St. Louis, as much as a week earlier. Hockman was already dead and the killer was somewhere between St. Louis and New Orleans, taking the scenic route. The killer arrived in New Orleans after stopovers in Phoenix, Baltimore, and Idaho. He killed Laura Warner but couldn’t find her book. So he burned the whole house down, figuring he’d get it that way.

We were moving again: I heard Trish give a nervous little sigh and the car regained its steady rhythm. “Not much further now,” she said, and I answered her with a grunt so she’d know I was still among the living. I was thinking of the woman in red, nervous about selling her Raven , willing to consider it because of the money but finally backing out in a jittery scene that Scofield would remember as a sudden attack of conscience. And I thought of the Rigby place where all the Ravens were, and I thought again how one thing leads to another in this business of trying to figure out who the killers are.

We had stopped. I opened my eyes and saw that she had turned into a long, straight forest road, a mix of mud and gravel that stretched out like a ribbon and gradually faded to nothing. She was looking at me in the glow of the dash, and I had the feeling she was waiting for me to laugh and say the hell with this, let’s go back to town and shack up where it’s dry and warm. I reached over and squeezed her hand.