The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning Page B

with it. “The phone’s here beside
     the bed,” he said. “It’s on a separate
     line, so you just call over to the house just like any
     other phone call.” He bent over the end table and
     wrote a number on a pad. Then he stood up tall and looked
     at me. “I can’t think of anything
     else.”
    “Everything’s great.”
    He turned to leave and stopped at the door.
     “Crystal kids around a lot, but I really do have to
     go. There’s a waitress in Issaquah who’s got
     dibs on my time. You look like a man who understands
     that.”
    “I do have a faint recollection of such a
     situation, yes.”
    He gave a little half-laugh and asked if I’d be
     around tomorrow. “If you are, come see me. I run the
     newspaper, my shop’s over in Snoqualmie, just a few
     minutes from here. Anybody in either town can tell you
     where I’m at. If the sun comes out tomorrow,
     I’ll show you some of the best country in the world.
     I’ve got a cabin up in the hills about an
     hour’s drive from here. Built it forty years ago and
     it’s been swallowed up by national-forest lands,
     about a million acres of it. That’ll keep the Holiday
     Inn bastards at bay, at least for the rest of my life.
     It’s yours if you’d like to unwind in solitude
     for a few days.”
    Again he paused. “I can’t quite put my
     finger on it, Janeway. I’ve got the feeling we owe
     you more than we know. Does that make any sense?”
    “I can’t imagine why.”
    “I don’t know either, it’s just a
     feeling I’ve got. Like maybe you came along in the
     nick of time, not just to keep our little girl from getting
     herself wet.”
    “If I did, I don’t know about it. But
     I’m glad I could help her.”
    He looked at me hard. “The kid doesn’t tell
     us much anymore. She’s all grown-up, got a life of
     her own. She never had a lick of sense when it came to
     strangers. Hitchhiked home from L.A. when she was eighteen,
     damn near drove her mamma crazy when she told us about it
     that night at dinner. Today she got lucky and found you.
     Don’t ask me how or why, but I know we’re in
     your debt.”
    I made a little motion of dismissal.
    “All of us. Me too. Hell, I’ve known that
     kid since she was born, she used to hang around my
     printshop for hours after school, asking questions,
     pestering. ‘What’s this for, what’s that
     do?’ She’s such a sweetheart, I couldn’t
     think any more of her if she was my own daughter. And I
     know that anybody who helped her out of a tough spot could
     walk in here and the Rigbys would give him damn near
     anything they owned. So rest easy, I guess that’s
     what I wanted to say, just rest easy. These people
     aren’t kidding when they say they’re glad to
     see you.”
    Then he was gone, clumping down the stairs, leaving me
     with one of the strangest feelings of my life.
    I sat at the stove in Gaston Rigby’s clothes,
     gold-bricking.
    What the hell do I do now? I thought.

7
----
    A few minutes later I climbed down the stairs to the
     printshop and stood there in the quiet, aware of that
     primal link between Gaston Rigby’s world and my own.
     It was there, huge and fun-damental—amazing that I
     could live a life among books and be so unaware of the
     craftsmen who made them. Darryl Grayson had worked in a
     shop much like this one, and not far from this spot. Here
     he had practiced his voodoo, making wonderful things on
     quaint-looking equipment, just like this. I felt a strange
     sense of loss, knowing that someday we would attain
     technological perfection at the expense of individualism.
     This magnificent bond between man and machine was passing
     into history. I was born a member of the
     use-it-and-throw-it-away generation, and all I knew of
     Grayson’s world was enough to figure out the basics.
     The big press was power driven. The plate identified it as chandler and price , and it was run by a thick leather strap that connected a
     large wheel to a