“Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t have to find out.”
“I hate to break this to you, Janeway, but luck is not the first word that crosses my mind when I think of you.”
“Then you’ll have to admit that I’m due for a break.”
“You’re hanging by a thread. You’re walking a tightrope with deep trouble on both sides of you. It had to occur to you that this little notebook just might be the motive for that old man’s murder.”
“Then why didn’t the killer take it?”
“How should I know?…Maybe he couldn’t find it…you said yourself the place was a mess.”
“He didn’t even look for it, that’s what I’m telling you. The place was a mess, but it was an accumulated mess. There weren’t any drawers emptied, no papers thrown around. I didn’t see any ashes on the floor. I don’t think the killer even knew this notebook was there.”
“Then why was Murdock killed?”
“I don’t know that. All I can tell you is, it’s different than the others.”
“Different killers?…Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, it’s the same guy, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find one motive at the bottom of it. But he was drawn to these guys for different reasons. Carmichael was killed for what was in Pruitt’s house. Same thing with Hockman, years ago: he was killed for what he had. Murdock was killed for what he knew.”
She leaned over and looked at the notebook close up. But she avoided touching it, as if whatever lay beneath its cover had been hopelessly tainted. “It’s still a wonderful motive for murder. Imagine what someone like Huggins would pay for it. He’d sell his house to get it. It’s the map to Treasure Island, the only thing a Grayson freak would ever need for the scavenger hunt of his dreams.”
I was thinking the same thing, with Scofield playing the Huggins role. A rich man could chase down the subscribers or their heirs and suck the market dry in no time. Each year fewer Graysons would appear at auction and no one would quite know why. Suddenly dealers would list them in catalogs as rare and mean it. In ten years the prices on the few odds and ends would be stratospheric.
I told her about Scofield and Kenney and about the interesting talk I’d had with Mrs. Kenney earlier in the evening. She listened with her fingers to her lips and came to the same conclusion I had reached a few hours before.
Kenney and Scofield were flying in to meet Pruitt.
That meant Pruitt had been in touch, sometime since I last spoke with Kenney, probably well within the last twenty-four hours.
“My God, he’s found the book,” Trish said breathlessly.
“That…would seem to be the case.”
“What else could it mean?”
“I don’t know what it means. Or might mean for Eleanor.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna be there when the deal goes down. After that it’s up for grabs.”
She said something under her breath that sounded like “Jesus.”
I nudged Grayson’s notebook in her general direction. “Maybe you should break down and give this a look. It tells us some things we never knew before.”
“Such as what?”
“It turns out that Grayson did a tiny lettered run for each of his books. A superlimited series that went to a few select customers.”
“I don’t remember seeing that in Huggins.”
“It wasn’t in Huggins. I looked.”
“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.”