She got up, paced, and sighed. “What am I gonna do with all this stuff?”
I broke it to her softly. “You’re gonna get rich with it.”
38
She couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I’d probably feel pretty rich if somebody wanted to walk in here and give me a hundred dollars for all of it,” she said. When I didn’t bite, she let it go. Just as well, I thought: there was no use speculating, she’d probably faint if I told her half of what I was thinking. But she looked at me across the room and a sense of it began filling up the space between us. The air seemed brighter: the sun had a different aura as it beamed through the window on the west side and lit up a million floating particles of dust. Amy moved out to the middle of the room and flipped up one of the flaps.
“Mamma never told me anything,” she said, fingering the papers in the box. “Not once did she ever say she thought this stuff might even be worth the paper it’s printed on.”
Maybe she didn’t know, I thought. Maybe value to her had nothing to do with money. Maybe she figured she’d talk about it someday and just ran out of time. You can’t plan a heart attack.
“I guess I should’ve figured there was something to it,” Amy said. “The way she never wanted me to let on it was here, not even to Archie or the Rigbys. I think she was always afraid somebody would come and take it away from her.”
“Yeah, but where’d it come from? How’d she get it?”
“Just like she got everything else. Piece by piece, starting way back when she first went to work at Grayson’s. I think that’s when they started talking about her doing his book someday. And he read some of the things she’d published, and he liked what she’d written, and he said okay, but it’s too early. He hadn’t done enough yet. But he gave her this stuff, sometimes just a few pages a day, to read and think about. She’d bring ‘em home with her—a few letters, some sketches he’d thrown aside—just stuff, you know. I never paid any attention when she told me about it.”
“And over the years it became this.”
Amy was reading. Whatever was on top was working its way through her brain as she tried to understand its larger significance. “This looks like a plain old letter. He’s talking about fishing…what’s so special about that?”
“It’s something other people will have to decide.”
“And these other people will want this stuff?”
“You can count on that. They’ll want this stuff.”
“And you know who they are?”
“I do now.”
She picked up the pages and read it all—the three-page letter that Grayson had written on January 4, 1954, I saw as I crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. I moved on to the window and stood staring down at the muddy yard, letting her read in peace. When I turned again, her eyes were fixed on mine. She gave a little smile, naive and worldly all at once. Do what you want, she seemed to say: I won’t fuss, I’ll go along.
The only thing in my mind was that it all had to be moved. It had been here twenty years and I couldn’t leave it even one more night. “The real question is, how does this help us find Ellie?” Amy said. I didn’t know, it was too vast, like standing at the edge of a forest on a hunt for one tree. But it had to be moved and then maybe we could start asking questions like that.
Now a funny thing happened—Amy lit into the work with a kind of driving impatience, as if she could clear the house all at once. She had put it off forever, but moving that first box had a galvanizing effect. “You go on,” she said, “I’ll keep working on it.” We had filled up the car. It would take six loads and a full backseat when we made our last run out of here. It was three o’clock, her children had to be picked up by seven, and I still had no idea where I’d make the stash or how long it would take us to get it all moved.
“Go,” she said, insistent now. “Go, dammit, you’re wasting time.”
I drove through Snoqualmie and out along the road to North Bend. Clouds moved in from the west and the air grew ripe with the promise of rain. It came, hard and furious, washing away the hope of the morning. I didn’t know how I felt anymore, I wasn’t sure of anything. I had made a colossal discovery, but I was no closer to Eleanor than I’d been yesterday. Overriding everything was the depressing thought that I could be saving one life and losing another. Amy Harper wouldn’t ever be going back to Belltown, but where was Eleanor?
I settled for the North Bend Motel, one of those older places with the rooms laid out in a long single-story row. I rented a room at the far end, where it might not be so evident to the guy in the office that I was using it for a storage locker. I paid two days in advance. The room was small—piled four high around the table and bed, the boxes would fill it up. I unloaded fast and started back. The rain had come and gone, but the clouds hung low and you could see there was more on the way. I turned into the Harper place at quarter to four. Amy had moved a dozen boxes and was still running hard. She was slightly giddy, confirming what I’d thought earlier, that the act of moving things had given her some badly needed emotional release. Her shirt was dark with sweat, soaked across the shoulders and under the arms, and her face was streaked with dirt. “Don’t forget to check the mail,” she called as I was going out with the second load.
But again the mailbox was empty.
At the end of the fifth load I ran into trouble. I stopped at the road and knew something was different.
The mailbox was open. I knew I had closed it.
I got out and crossed the road. The box was empty, but a cigarette had been thrown down and was still smoking on
