Bookman's wake

“Huggins would never leave something like that out.”

“Unless he never knew about it. Or maybe he did know and couldn’t verify it, like the fact that Grayson was working on another Raven .”

“This is different than another Raven . The Raven might not even exist. But if there was a lettered series, Huggins would have to have it.”

“But the limitation was so small it was next to nothing. None of the books has ever turned up to prove their existence, and until now it was assumed by everybody that Grayson’s records all went up in the fire.”

She still made no move to pick up the notebook. I picked it up for her and opened it to the first page.

“Each title had five hundred numbered copies. There were also five lettered copies. These were for customers who had been with Grayson from the beginning…the faithful. They loved his books way back when everybody else could care less.”

I watched her eyes. It was beginning to come to her now, she was starting to see the dark road we were heading into.

“These lettered copies usually preceded the regular run by a month or so,” I said.

Suddenly she knew where we were going. I could see it in her eyes.

“ A ,” I told her, “was a fellow named Joseph Hockman, of St. Louis, Missouri.”

She didn’t say anything. She reached across the table and took the notebook out of my hands. She read the name in Grayson’s own hand, as if nothing less would make her believe it. She put it down on the table, looked across at me, picked it up, and read it again.

“ B ,” I said, “was Mr. Reggie Dressier of Phoenix, Arizona. C was Corey Allingham of Ellicott City, Maryland. D was Mike Hollingsworth, looks like a rural route somewhere in Idaho. E was Laura Warner of New Orleans. That’s all there were. The faithful five.”

She finally got past Joseph Hockman and let her eyes skim the page. “He knew Laura Warner from Atlanta.”

“I know he did. I read your book.”

“Jesus!…Have you checked these other names yet?”

“I’ve only had the damn thing a couple of hours. I didn’t want to make any police checks from this telephone, even to departments a thousand miles from here. There are other offices I could check, but they won’t be open at midnight.”

“No, but the newspapers will be.”

She sat at her telephone and made some calls: to night city editors at the Arizona Republic , the Baltimore Sun , the Idaho Statesman , and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. While people in distant cities chased down any clip files that might exist, we sat at the table drinking coffee.

Now that she had begun on Grayson’s notebook she couldn’t leave it alone. “I’ve interviewed some of these people. Look, here’s Huggins…number twenty-three of the regular run. He got in early.”

A minute later she came to Otto Murdock, number 215.

“Let’s look at what else we’ve got,” I said. “I hear dawn cracking.”

We had our physical evidence spread out on the table between us. We had Richard’s poem, which Trish had yet to read. We had the paper chip from Pruitt’s house, and the sheet she had brought back from St. Louis with the two dim letters standing out in the soot. And I had brought in from the car an envelope containing the photographs I had found in Amy Harper’s attic.

Trish opened the envelope and looked at the first picture—the Eleanor woman, shot at Grayson’s printshop in May 1969.

“Imagine how the kid must’ve felt, finding this,” she said. “You grow up thinking you know where you come from. Your home and family are the real constants in life. Then in one second you see that nothing’s what you thought it was.”

She turned the picture down and looked at the one beneath it. Three people walking in the woods: the Eleanor woman, another woman, and a man.

“Look at this,” she said. “There’s Charlie Jeffords.”

“Really?” I took the picture out of her hand. The guy was standing in a little clearing, smirking at the camera. The Eleanor woman was posing with him in the same sleeveless blouse, her arm over his shoulder. The other woman stood a few feet away, clearly unhappy.

“This is Jeffords?” I said. “You’re sure of that?”

“Sure I’m sure. He’s got dark hair here and that horny leer of his’ll never be there again, but yeah. Same guy I talked to in Taos.”

“I wonder who the other woman is.”