29
I woke to a gray dawn, certain I’d heard a noise off my left elbow. It went click-click, like the sound a lockpick makes when someone is trying to open a door. But I had been dreaming about a raven, its talons clicking as it walked across the table to peck my eyes out.
Both sounds stopped as I came awake and sat up in the bed.
It was Sunday, the day of rest.
Television promised more rain, followed by bad weather. The weather clown played with his million-dollar toys, swirling clouds over a map and grinning with all thirty-two as he did his dance. But this was a floor show next to the competition. Evil, two-faced evangelists pranced about, talked of Jesus and money in the same foul breath, and sheared their glass-eyed flock. Praise the lord, suckers.
The radio was fixed to an oldies station, with something called a salute to the British Invasion already in progress. I got “Eleanor Rigby” as a curtain call to my shave-and-shower, and I stood in the buff anticipating every beat and lyric, for all the good it did me.
The clock was pushing nine, and my departure seemed somehow less urgent than it had at midnight, Nothing was open yet. Check-in at the Hilton wasn’t till three o’clock. The library, another of my scheduled stops, informed by recorded message that its Sunday hours were one to five p.m. I had time on my hands.
I sat on the bed and started my phone checks. It was ten o’clock in Taos.
I punched out the number and heard it ring.
“Hello?”
“Jonelle Jeffords?”
“Who are you?”
It didn’t seem to matter so I told her my real name, then began to improvise. “I’m a friend of the court. The judge in Seattle gave me the job of getting Miss Rigby back to New Mexico in the burglary of your house. I need to ask you a few questions.”
She expelled her breath like a hot radiator.
“Goddammit, can’t you people leave us alone?”
This was a strange attitude for a victim, but I already knew she was not the run of the mill victim. I put an official tone in my voice and said, “Most people who’ve been burglarized cooperate. I find your attitude a little unusual. Is there a reason for that?”
She hung there a moment, surprised, then said, “My husband is very upset by all this. It’s going to be bad enough having to go to court when they finally do bring that crazy girl back here. What can I tell you that hasn’t already been asked and answered fifty times?”
“I’m sure you’re tired of answering questions. But I’m in Seattle, I don’t have access to the files they’ve built in Taos, and I need to know more about what she stole from you. Otherwise I don’t know how you expect to get your property back.”
“I don’t want it back. I should’ve burned it years ago.”
“Burned what?”
“That book.”
“It was mainly a book, then, that she took from you?”
“If I’d just given it to her when she first came here, maybe she’d‘ve just gone away. Then none of this would’ve happened.”
“Where did you get the book?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything. It’s personal business, very old business. It doesn’t have any bearing on this.”
“It might, if we have to determine who owns it.”
“What are you saying, that I stole the book?”
“I’m just asking a few questions, Mrs. Jeffords. If I seem to be going in a way you don’t like, it’s your attitude that’s leading me there. You’re going to have to answer these questions, you know, sooner or later.”
“Listen to me, sir, and understand what I’m telling you. My husband is extremely upset by all this. He’s outside now on the deck, he’ll be in here any minute, and the last thing I need is for him to find me talking to you about that crazy girl. It hasn’t been easy coping with this. She could’ve killed us. Charlie gets a little crazy himself just thinking about it. If you call here again, you’ll cause me a lot of trouble.”
“Can you describe the book?”
“No! Can’t I make you understand English? I haven’t even looked at it in twenty years.”
“Are you familiar with the names Slater or Pruitt?”
“No. Should I be?”
“Slater says you hired him to find your book.”
“He’s lying. I never heard of the man.”
“What about Pruitt?”
Her voice dropped off to a whisper. “Charlie’s coming. Charlie’s here. Go away, don’t call me again.”
She banged the phone down.
What a strange woman. I could just see her, scurry-ing across the room to distance herself from the telephone. Smoothing her dress, sitting primly, trying to look like a poster from Fascinating Womanhood as her big old bear came home from the hill.
Trying her damnedest to give away a book others would kill for.
I hadn’t gotten to the hard questions yet. Who really fired that gun, Mrs. Jeffords? What’s the link between you and the Rigby girl, and why do I get the feeling that it’s personal?
I knew, though, that I’d had my one shot at her. She was far away and she wouldn’t be picking up the telephone again without letting that recording screen it first.
I tried Trish and got nothing.
Decided to put Allan Huggins on hold for the moment.
Checked out of the motel and went looking for breakfast.
At eleven o’clock, I parked on the street outside the library and passed the time reading.
30
Suddenly it’s 1963. Gaston Rigby stands in North Bend at the dawn of his life, ready and waiting to be molded by the genius Darryl Grayson. Who would think that Grayson might hire him, even to sweep out the shop? Now there are days when every green kid with a yen to publish turns up on Grayson’s doorstep, hat in hand, begging for a chance to work for nothing. The mystique is in full bloom, and Grayson is still well on the sunny side of fifty. What is it that separates Rigby from the others?…How does he get to Grayson on that primal level, that place where the genius lives? Grayson leaves no clue. He is not one to talk of such things. The hunt for verbal profundity makes him uneasy and, if he’s pushed too hard, cross. Speaking of Rigby, Grayson will say only that he’s a good one. He’s willing to let it go at that, as if trying to isolate and define everything that goes into making a good one is beyond him. And this is Archie he’s talking to, and Archie knows a good one as well as he does.
Moon looks back at it many years later. At times he thinks Rigby took the place of the younger brother— almost but not quite. He thinks Grayson and Rigby were, almost but not quite, like father and son. That spiritual bond can be difficult to understand when you stand outside it: it goes deeper than anything Moon has ever seen between men of solidly heterosexual persuasion. He insists he felt no jealousy: he is secure in his own importance to Grayson, and if Rigby mattered as much on another level, why should it worry him? He was still Grayson’s best friend in life. They grew up together, they swam buck naked as kids, tramped woods and fields, hunted deer and birds, chased women as young hell-raisers, drank, dreamed and shared the same calling. When Grayson left the South after the war and wrote that he had found a promised land, Moon came along to see for himself. Moon still remembers the first words he spoke as he got off the train in Snoqualmie. What the hell is this little burg gonna do with two goddamn printers, for Christ’s sake ?