Bookman's wake

She looked up in his face. “Are you in the mood to do me a huge favor?”

“I won’t kill ya for asking.”

“Is that a Xerox machine over there?…”

She called Wilbur Simon, an assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . As a young reporter from Miami, she had won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a year of study and meditation at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Simon had been one of her teachers. They had had good rapport and he had pursued her for his own paper ever since.

She sat in the empty newsroom on Sunday afternoon, reading the clip file on the Hockman case. She and Simon had coffee in a diner not far away and talked about old times, the rain in Seattle, and the Hockman case. Simon had vivid recollections of Hockman. He had been the paper’s news editor then and had done the layout on the first-day story and on most of the follow pieces. It stuck in his mind as the beginning of the crazy age. He had said as much in a diary he had kept then and had dug out and reviewed just after she had called him this morning. He had written about life and work and his personal evolving philosophy. The thing about Hockman was, you never thought much about random killers before then and you were always aware of them since. Suddenly you couldn’t pick up hitchhikers without taking your life in your hands. The day of the serial killer had come.

“I don’t think this was a serial killer, Wilbur,” she said.

At least not the kind of serial killer people meant when they used the term, she thought.

They parted with a hug and Simon offered her a job. She smiled and said she was flattered, but it would take more than rain to get her to give up Seattle for St. Louis.

She looked up Carolyn Bondy in the telephone book. There was a George Bondy at that address. The man who answered said Carolyn Bondy, his mother, had died just last month.

She ate dinner alone in the city and caught a ten-o’clock flight to Albuquerque.

She slept on the plane, just enough to keep her awake the rest of the night. A rental car got her into Taos at three o’clock in the morning, mountain time, thankful that she had reserved a room and secured it with a credit card. She had made photocopies of the Post-Dispatch clips, but it was that single sheet from homicide with the shadowy image of the two con-nected letters shot through plastic that she looked at now as she faced the new day. She had done her homework: she knew that Charlie and Jonelle Jeffords lived in the hills fifteen miles from town. She had studied the maps and knew where to drive with only occasional stops to refresh her memory. She bumped off the highway and clattered along a washboard road, leaving a plume of dust in her wake. The road twisted up a ridge and skirted a valley. She saw patches of snow in the high country as the road U-turned and dipped back into the hills. There were washouts along the way, but each had been repaired and the drive was easy. She reached the gate at nine o’clock. A sign nailed to a post said keep out , and she thought that hospitality at Rancho Jeffords was like the weather, chilly with a chance of sudden clouds. She slipped the rope loop off the gate and drove in. The house was a hundred yards away, shaded by trees and hidden from the road by hilly terrain. It was a splitlevel mountain home with a deck that faced west. There was no sign of life. She pulled into the yard and decided to go ahead with caution, remembering the inclination of the cheerful Mr. Jeffords to greet trespassers with the business end of a gun.

She walked out in the yard and stood in the sun.

Called out to whoever might hear.

“Hello!…Is anybody here?”

The hills soaked up her voice.

She tried again but got nothing for it.

She went up the walk and knocked on the door. There wasn’t a sound inside.

It had been a gamble coming here without an appointment, but she knew that when she booked the flight. She walked along a flagstone path to the edge of the house. The path led around to a garage, whose side door beckoned her on.

She knocked on the door. “Anybody in there?”

No one.

She touched the door and it swung open.

A workroom, long ago surrendered as the place for cars.

There was clutter, but also a staleness in the air. It was a shop set up for a working man but unused for some time now. The walls gave off a feeling of dry rot and musk.

She saw some equipment she recognized and it drew her into the room. A heavy iron bookpress had been set up on the edge of the bench. A much older bookpress, made of wood, stood on a table behind it.

The tools of a bookbinder.