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 and 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 hoteclass="underline" 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 whirlpooclass="underline" 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.”