by John Dunning
In the middel of the table was a cassette tape player, with the door flipped open.
Near the tape player was a note, telling her friend Judy Maples how much to feed the dogs and where things were. The dogs came and went, I saw, through a doggie door that opened off the kitchen into a groundlevel deck, and from there into a backyard.
I opened the refrigerator, which was well stocked with beer; I fetched myself one and sat at the counter sipping the foam. I took the tape out of the bag and snapped it into place in the machine.
“Hi,” she said. “Isn’t this cozy?”
She paused as if we were there together and it were my turn to talk. I said, “Yes ma’am, and I thank you very large.”
“You’ll find beer in the fridge,” she said, “but knowing you, you already have. Seriously, make yourself at home. The dogs will want to sleep with you, but they won’t pester: if you close your door, they’ll whine for about five minutes, then they’ll shut up and go about their business. They’re well behaved; I’m sure you’ll get along famously.
“There’s plenty of food. The freezer’s well stocked, and if you don’t see anything there you want, there’s a big freezer in the garage. You can defrost just about anything in the microwave. Again I’m anticipating your little idiosyncrasies and impatiences, and assuming that you’ve never read an instruction booklet in your life. Do yourself a favor and read the two paragraphs I’ve left open and marked on the table. It’s impossible to defrost food without knowing the codes. You could spend years of your life trying to figure it out on your own. I imagine you’ll try anyway.
“I thought you’d be most comfortable in the big room on the right at the top of the stairs. It’s a man’s room—I rented this house from an FBI agent who’s now doing a tour of duty in Texas. So that’s where you should go—the room upstairs, not Texas—when you’re ready to call it a night.”
There was another pause. I stopped the tape, looked through the freezer, found a pizza, and put it in the real oven on a piece of tinfoil. The hell with instructional booklets written by committee in Japan.
I pushed the on button on the tapedeck.
“So,” she said, “on to business.”
Yes ma’am.
“The cops picked up that kid who was with Pruitt and Carmichael. His name is Bobby John Dalton, date of birth”—I could hear her shuffling through notes—“one nine…umm…‘sixty-six. He’s got a record, nothing major: one or two fights, one assault charge, a drunk and disorderly, carrying an unlicensed weapon, having an open can in a moving vehicle. He thinks of himself as a tough guy, a muscleman. Maybe he is—I mention it so you’ll know…he’ll figure he owes you for what you did to him in the garage. He was a bouncer in a nightclub, a bodyguard…Quintana wouldn’t tell me much more than that. I’m recording this on Saturday night. My plane leaves in two hours and I don’t know at this moment whether they’ve actually booked this Dalton kid or are just holding him for questioning. He was still downtown the last time I checked, about an hour ago. I don’t know if the cops have any new leads on Pruitt after talking to the kid.”
Again she leafed through her notes. “Here’s a little more personal information on the Dalton kid…just a minute.”
She read off a home address, on Pine Street east of 1-5. “It’s a boardinghouse owned by his mother. She seems to be a character in her own right, in fact as mean as he thinks he is. His father’s been dead for years, though probably not long enough. The old man was a gambler and a drunk and was probably abusive. It’s no wonder Bobby’s on a fast track to nowhere.
“This should make you feel pretty good. At least the cops are doing their part. They’re looking at Rigby as a serious abduction, so you’ve accomplished what you wanted without coming in. However, comma, be advised that Quintana is still on your case.”
I heard a click, then another, as if she had turned the machine off then on again. “As you would imagine, the cops are playing it close to the vest on the particulars at the murder scene. I did find out, from a source inside the department, one strange bit of information. At this point they think the woman in the house was killed sometime earlier than Carmichael…maybe as much as two hours. They’ll know more when the lab gets through and, hopefully, so will I. But assuming that holds up, don’t you find it strange?”
Yes ma’am.
“That’s all I have on it. I guess you should burn this tape. I’ve set a fire for you in the living room: all you’ve got to do is light it and toss this in. In fact, I don’t know if you’ll get in touch with Judy, or if you’ll hear this tape, or if you do hear it, when that might be.”
She took a deep breath. “I should be back in Seattle by Tuesday night…earlier if I get lucky.”
I could hear doubt in her voice now, as if she had come to a new bit of business and wasn’t sure how much if any of it she wanted to tell me.
“Have you read my book yet? Did you like it?”
Yes ma’am.
“I guess you could say I’m rewriting the final chapter.”
I heard her breathe: she had moved the microphone closer to her mouth and was fiddling with it, trying to set it up straight.
“Help me, Janeway, I’m not having an easy time here. Send me some vibes, give me a clue. I’m trying to tell you some things you should probably hear, but I’m still a reporter and this is the big story of my life. I’ve lived with it a long time and I don’t share these things easily.”
I waited. The tape was hot and running.
“I’ll tell you some things I put in my original draft and later had to take out. But I won’t name names or places here, and I don’t want to tell you yet where I’ve gone. We’ll talk about it next week, when I get home, and we’ll see where we are then.
“There was a man I wanted to interview, back when I was doing my research. He lived in the city I’m going to tonight. He probably wasn’t important. His connection to Grayson was slender—all he did was collect and love Grayson’s books. I don’t think they ever met, and to tell the truth I’m not sure what my original intent was in seeking him out…to see his books, maybe, or get some insight into the quintessential Grayson collector. I didn’t think he’d contribute more than a line to my book, but I was in his town, I had his name and a few hours to kill. So I tried to look him up.
“Turned out he was dead…he’d been murdered years before, in 1969 as a matter of fact, a few days after the Graysons died. This in itself might mean nothing, but it put an uneasy edge on my trip. I decided to stay over an extra day and ask around. The investigating officer had since retired from the police. I found him running security for a department store. He didn’t mind talking about it—it was an old case then, nothing had been done on it for years, and the old cop told me things about the scene that he might not’ve said a few years earlier. One thing in particular stood out, and I thought of it this morning when you were telling me about the scene at Pruitt’s. This Grayson collector was found dead in a room full of books twenty years ago. Right beside his body was a pile of ashes.”
37
I opened my eyes to a blinding sunrise. It was six forty-five, the clock radio had just gone off, and the sun was shining.
I shooed the dogs off the bed and hit the shower. Wrapped in steam, I considered Trish and the tape she’d left me. The fire had eaten the tape, but the chimney had gagged on the words. They hung in the air and chilled the morning.
Traffic was reaching its rush-hour peak, a freeway horror show that made 1-25 in Denver seem like a solo flight. But the sun was shining: the city sparkled like a crown jewel in a setting of lakes and mountains, and there wasn’t a speck of pollution in the air. I felt better than I had in days, better by far than a confirmed fuckup had any right to feel. Damned if this wasn’t the first day of the rest of my life. Good things lay off in the distance, waiting to be discovered; I could feel the potential as I crawled off the exchange at Interstates 90 and 5. It was so strong that even having to fight traffic all the way downtown a
nd back again couldn’t sour the moment.
By the time I picked up Amy and we got her kids dropped off at day care, it was after eight o’clock. She caught my upbeat mood and we crept back along the freeway with hopeful hearts. She had been enchanted by her night in the hotel: when you’re young and poor and the best thing you’ve ever slept in was a $20 room by the railroad tracks, the Hilton must seem like Buckingham Palace. We chatted our way into Issaquah, ate breakfast in the same Denny’s where Eleanor and I had eaten a lifetime ago, and made the final run into North Bend a few minutes shy of nine o’clock.
It was the first time I’d had a good look at the town: I had only been here at night, in a misty rain, or on the fly. Now I saw what Grayson had seen when he’d first stepped off here in 1947: a land of swirling mists and magnificent vistas and above it all that incredible mountain, looming like a sleeping giant. As a rule mountains do not impress me much: I grew up in Colorado, and I had seen many that were higher, deeper, bigger in every way. But I’d never seen one that so dominated its landscape, that commanded without being majestic. It pulled at you like a vast black whirlpool: it stood alone over the town and denned it. “Impressive, isn’t it?” Amy said. “Mamma came here as a child in 1942 and never wanted to go anywhere else. She told me once that she got here when they were tearing up the streets for the new highway and the town was nothing but mud. But right from the start, she wanted to live her life here.”
“It’s the mountain. It gets a grip on you.”
“People say there’s an Indian in the mountain. If you look on a clear day, like today, you’re supposed to be able to see his face. The knee’s about halfway down. I never could do that, though. Can’t see diddly.”
The sister towns, North Bend and Snoqualmie, were connected by narrow back roads. We came into Snoqualmie past the high school, Mount Success, which Amy followed with her eyes as we circled around it.
“My whole history’s tied up in that stupid building,” she said sadly.
“Amy, you haven’t lived long enough to make a statement like that. Your history’s hiding out there somewhere, in the next century.”
She smiled. “You’re a good guy, aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”
“Just one who’s lived a fair piece of his own history…enough to wish for a little of it back.”
She gave the high school a last lingering look. “In the ninth grade they gave us an IQ test. I got one twenty-eight, which surprised a few people. For a week or so I thought I was hot stuff. I asked Eleanor how she’d done, but she kinda blew it off and said not very good. I found out about a year later, when Crystal let it slip one day.”
She directed me along a road to the left.
“Her score,” she said, emphasizing each digit, “was one…eighty…six.”
She laughed. “She’s a genius, sealed and certified.”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
Amy, suddenly moved to tears, said, “God, I love her.”
Snoqualmie was just a few blocks of businesses, two bars, stores, a laundry, a Realtor, and a bowling alley. Many of the shops were named for the mountain: There was Mt. Si Hardware, Mt. Si Video, and the Mt. Si Country Store, which had a sign in the window that said this family supported by timber dollars . Begone, spotted owl: never mind what your habits are, you’ll have to find another place to have your habits. We were on the town’s main drag, looking for a gas station. The street was called Railroad Avenue: it skirted the train tracks, with an old-time railroad station (was this where Moon had stepped out all those years ago and been drawn by Grayson into his new life?) and a historic log pavilion that boasted a log the size of a house perched on a flatbed. As if on cue, Amy said, “There’s Archie’s place,” and I saw a dark shop with the letters the vista printing company painted on glass and under it, in smaller letters, the snoqualmie weekly mail . He put out a newspaper, I remembered. I got a glimpse of him through the glass, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Again I thought of a timber wolf, lean and wiry, and I had the feeling he’d be a good man to know, if I ever had the time.
I stopped at the Mt. Si Sixty-six. Amy filled the tank while I checked in with Denver from a pay phone.
Millie answered at my store. She had been worried, she said: the Seattle police had been calling. Business was lousy, she said. On the other hand, there was an appraisal job in the works, almost twenty thousand books, a job that could run weeks at $50 an hour. But they needed me to start next week.
I told her to give them my regrets and refer the job to Don at Willow Creek Books. If the cops called back, ask for Quintana and tell him I’d buy him a pitcher at his favorite watering hole when this was all over.
We backtracked through town. If Quintana doesn’t get me, the poorhouse will, I thought.
Selena Harper had lived just outside town. “There’s a helluva waterfall a few miles that way,” Amy said. “Supposed to be half again higher than Niagara.” But we weren’t on a sight-seeing trip and she turned me off on one of those narrow blacktops running west. I saw a marker that said se 80th: we hung a left, then another, and doubled back into se 82nd. There was a mailbox at the end, but the lettering had long ago worn away and had never been replaced. “Mamma never believed in doing any unnecessary work,” Amy said. “Everybody in both towns knew her, so why bother putting a name on the box?” The mailbox was empty.
A dirt road wound back into the trees. The woods were thick and undisturbed here; the road was rutted and muddy from last week’s rain. I didn’t see a house anywhere, but soon it appeared as we bumped our way through the brush. A clearing opened and a ramshackle building shimmered in the distance like a mirage. There had once been a fence, but it had long ago crumbled, falling section by section until now only a few rotting posts and an occasional tangle of wire marked where it had been.
“Welcome to my castle,” Amy said. “The only real home I’ve ever known.”
I pulled into a dirt yard, slick with mud and ringed by weeds. The house was indeed in a sorry state. “I just don’t know what to do with it,” Amy said: “it’s become a white elephant. I’ve been told the land’s worth something, but not as much as Mamma owed. I doubt if I’ll break even when I sell it, if I can sell it. I’m having a real problem with that, you know. How do you cut your losses on a piece of your heart?”
She got out of the car and stood looking at it. “The last big thing she went into debt for was a roof. Right up to the end, she wanted to protect all that stuff in the attic, make sure it didn’t get ruined by a leak. So about five years ago she borrowed the money and had a guy come out and fix it. She’s been paying the interest on the loan ever since, but hasn’t made a dent in the principal. So what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a ten-dollar tablecloth for a two-dollar table. Let’s go inside.”
We picked our way up to the porch, where she found two notes taped to the door. On one was scrawled the word BITCH; on the other, which had been there longer, Amy you whore you better stop this shit . She tore them down and crumpled them in her fist: “Well, I see my ex has been here. Now my day is complete.”
I heard the jingle of keys. She opened a door, which creaked on rusty hinges, and I followed her into the most jumbled, crowded, disorganized room I had ever seen. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” Amy said over her shoulder. “My mother was constitutionally unable to throw out anything. This is just the beginning.” She turned and leaned against a doorjamb, watching me as I beheld it. The first problem was the magazines—years of such extinct publications as Coronet, Collier’s, Look, Radio Mirror …they were piled in every corner, on the chairs, at both ends of the sofa. As a book dealer I had made house calls on people who had survived their family pack rats, but I’d never seen anything quite like this.
“The funny thing is, she really did write for some of these magazines,” Amy said. “She really was a good writer, she just had trouble deciding what to write, and then making the time to do it. She got five hundred dollars once from one of these jobs. I think t
hat’s when she began to talk to Gray son about doing his life in a book. She had worked for him, you know, she was the first person he hired when his shop began doing so well back in the fifties. She answered his phone, wrote his letters, kept his business records. And at work she was neat as a pin…or so she said. She never left work without putting everything where it belonged, then she’d get home and throw her own stuff on the nearest pile.”
She led me through the hall to the kitchen. The cupboards too were clogged with papers, magazines, clippings.
“Happy New Year,” she said.
She pointed to a stair that led down into darkness: “Cellar. More of the same down there. Whatever’s there is pretty well ruined by the moisture…the whole place has got a mildewy smell. I never go down there without getting depressed and wanting to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it to the ground.”
The kitchen opened on the other side into a back bedroom. There was another short hall, with steps to the upper floor.
“What you want’s up there. You won’t even need a flashlight on a sunny day like this. There’s a big window in the attic that faces east, and the sun’ll light you up like the Fourth of July. Do you need me for anything?”
“Let me go on up and see what I find.”
“I’ll putz around down here. Stomp on the floor if you want me.”
Sunlight beamed down the stair like a beacon. The air was heavy and filled with floating dust. I went up past the second floor, up a narrower stair to the top. Light from the east flooded the room, giving you the notion of being a sample on a slide under a microscope. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling—after the days of rain, you were willing to be a bug if it bought you a little sunshine—and I stood there for a moment with my head poking up into the attic before going the last few steps. The attic felt crowded, like the rest of the house, but the room was small and an immediate difference was apparent up here. There was order…there was purpose…there was care. The boxes were all of one size, fitted together in one large block. They were neatly stacked on pallets in the center of the room, far away from the walls. Each had been wrapped in polyethylene and sealed with clear tape; then the whole bundle was covered by a sheet of the same plastic, making it as nearly waterproof as possible.
