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 owclass="underline" 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 that’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.