“How was the trip?” I asked, hugging her hello, and we fell in step together walking toward the badly rusted stairs that led from the platform to the station.
“Three bald eagles today,” she answered. “Down past Bear Mountain.”
“Not half bad,” said Maisie.
“And how’re you doing, Maze?” Nicole asked, shifting her pack from one shoulder to the other. Nodding at the bandages on Maisie’s arm, she added, “How’s the other guy look?”
That was Nicole. Mince no words, take no prisoners. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d expressed concern about Maisie’s scraped knees too, even though the girl was wearing long pants today. My younger glanced at me for guidance, and Nicole didn’t fail to spot that either.
“We had an unwelcome visitor near the house the other night,” I said, and as we drove away from the Hudson inland toward the farmhouse, I filled her in, leaving the Tamerlane out of my account, figuring Will would prefer to do that himself. Changing the subject, I asked how her art opening had gone the previous evening.
“The paintings were great, the crowd was middling, and the wine was pure poison,” she answered. “A few art-school pals were there, so that was good.” She paused for a beat. “What about this so-called visitor?”
“Your father’ll tell you about it when we’re home,” I replied, noting her frown and knotted eyebrows. “He can explain better than I.”
After meeting with Slader, Will had holed himself up in the studio. It seemed that he’d set other printing projects aside so he could devote his time to a close study of the Poe pamphlet, whose rarity, I now believed, was less a factor to marvel at than to worry about. When he’d returned from Rhinebeck, I inquired, as tranquilly as I could after seeing such a perplexed look on his face, “So, then, is everything straightened out between you? You’re giving him back the book?”
“Yes,” he muttered. “No.”
We sat facing each other across the kitchen table, a wooden bowl of purple grapes between us. He stared at the fruit, pulled a couple off their stems with his left hand, jostled them in his cupped palm, not looking up.
Impatient, I prodded, “You mean yes, things are resolved? No more of him lurking around the house in the dark? No more attacking Maisie?”
He leveled his eyes at me. Maybe I was misreading, but it seemed there was a look akin to pleading in them. Pleading, and warning. Then he blinked several times and was fully present again.
“How was it”—he sidestepped the subject, clearing his throat—“that Mary decided to name her daughter Maisie?”
“What? I have no idea—no, wait, it was Mary’s favorite aunt’s name, or something along those lines. There was also a raft of B movies, starring Ann Sothern, about a girl named Maisie who went on adventures. Why ask that, of all things?”
“Just curious,” he said, tossing the grapes into his mouth, chewing, and swallowing. “Slader was, to answer your question, more reasonable than anticipated. According to him, he hadn’t any intention of frightening Maisie, and swears he never laid a finger on her. Be that as it may, he won’t bother her again.”
“Then why the mask? Why accost her in the dark?” I asked in frustration.
“That was meant for me more than Maisie, strange as it may sound.”
“I don’t understand any of this. You can trust him if you want, but I don’t know why you would. What’s he want? Why give you that Poe?”
While my husband explained, I sensed I was being given a redacted version of the story. Maybe even heavily redacted. Rather than press him, though, I reasoned that any deliberate omissions were probably for the girls’ well-being, and mine. There were those who, especially in our early years together, frowned on my implicit trust in Will. Some of them had reason not to trust him, but I was not one of them. As best I could manage, I let the matter go. Nicole was joining us, after all, and not just for the weekend but through the following last week of August to Labor Day. Unlike the past, when having the whole family under one roof wasn’t out of the ordinary, now that our elder worked during the summer between semesters at college, such a stretch of time together was a luxury not to be taken for granted.
After a stop at the grocery and another to pick up a bottle of wine, the girls and I headed homeward. All three of us were in an upbeat mood. Her sister’s arrival had raised Maisie’s spirits, and together they overruled my habitual radio soundtrack of classical music, tuning instead to indie rock. As we neared the farmhouse, they were singing some superbly inane lyrics. All of us were laughing, so it was the more jarring to see a car parked in front that I didn’t recognize, an older-model Chevy, I think it was, powder blue. Leaning against it was a man I didn’t recognize, arms crossed over a distended belly, wan sun gleaming on his reddish hair. I instinctually braked, pulled to the side of the road. Phlegmatic if scowling, he turned toward us for a moment, then faced the house again.
“What’s the problem?” asked Nicole.
“Is that him again?” Maisie said, trying her best to sound unafraid.
I turned their music down. “Not sure.”
“Unless I misunderstood, why would he give the package to Maze when it was too dark for anybody to see him, but now come back in broad daylight? Doesn’t make sense,” Nicole said, then delicately added, “Think you’re being a bit paranoid, Mom? That could be a delivery guy, maybe ran out of gas, something the opposite of sinister.”
Her point was well taken, but didn’t stay tenable for long. As I placed my palm on the gearshift to put the car back into drive, another man emerged from the front door of our house, shutting it behind him—which seemed odd; why was this stranger letting himself out?—and made his way down the steps and across the yard. Slader. The only time I’d seen him up close had been in a night-dark bedroom. He’d held a tiny flashlight in his teeth and a cleaver in his hands, and he’d been trying to kill my husband in bed next to me. But I’d have known that silhouette anywhere, night or day.
Fighting shock, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Maisie frozen in the back seat, mouth agape. Forward again, and there was Slader walking toward the parked car, lean and lank, swathed in defiant black in the summer heat, hands in the large square pockets of a leather jacket, chin against chest, with a dark-blue baseball cap. Looking neither left nor right, he went straight up to the red-haired man and spoke forcefully to him, clearly annoyed. I couldn’t hear their voices through our closed windows, only saw scolding hand and head movements before the redhead climbed into the driver’s seat, Slader went around to the passenger side of the vehicle and got in, and they drove off in a hurry beneath the dense overhang of boughs that shaded the lane. Too late, I realized that I ought to have written down its license-plate number.
Had the girls not been with me, I might have been impetuous enough to follow the car. Instead, I pulled into the driveway, my thoughts turning to Will.
“I know you’re going to think I’m still being paranoid, but I’d appreciate it if you stayed here with Maisie for a minute while I check inside.”
Nicole obliged, though I’m sure she would have preferred to accompany me. Truth was, I wished she could. A terrifying memory of that bloody, barbarous night in Kenmare was surging through my mind as I got out of the car. But I had to think of my younger daughter, who, brave demeanor aside, was still recovering from her own trauma.
On the front porch, I opened the unlocked door and poked my head in before entering the hallway. Other than the kitchen clock’s hollow ticking, the house was hushed, noiseless.
“Will?” I called out, deliberately trying to sound unworried as I strode the length of the worn antique Kazakh runner that lined the hall and into the kitchen. No sign whatsoever that my husband, or anyone else, had been in here. My forehead pulsed and palms grew damp as I continued to the back of the house and knocked on the studio door, which was closed. “Will? You in there?”
&nbs
p; “Meg?” he answered. The preposterous nightmare image of him splayed out on the floor, soaked in his own blood, vanished the instant I opened the door to find him sitting at his worktable looking through a small drift of delicate, vintage-seeming paper, and jotting notes in his binder. “You all right? You look like you saw the proverbial ghost.”
Terror gave way to anger. “What was Slader doing here? That was Slader just now, wasn’t it?”
Will closed the notebook he’d been writing in and slipped the sheaf of papers into a portfolio. “It was,” he said, as he came around the table to put his arm around my waist and usher me out of the studio back toward the kitchen.
“You lied to me.”
“How’s that?”
“You promised he wasn’t going to bother us again.”
Will paused, took me by the shoulders, and said, “He didn’t bother us, or didn’t intend to. He meant to be gone before you were back from the station. Where are the girls?”
I couldn’t help myself. Forcing back tears, I said as sarcastically as I could, “They’re out cowering in the car, because he didn’t bother us again. Why on earth you would allow that criminal into our house, our refuge, our sanctuary here, is beyond me—”
“Meg—Meghan,” as that uncomfortable look of pleading and admonition loomed on his face again. “You’ve got to trust me that everything will be all right.”
“I’ll trust you, but you still haven’t told me what he was doing here.”
“Truth is, we’re grown men who made terrible mistakes when we were younger. Now we’re trying to make amends. It’s that simple and that complicated,” adding, almost as an afterthought, “From here on, the less you know about things, the better.”
“The less I know, the better? Will, that maniac mutilated you right in front of me, and I’m supposed to just not ask?”
“The girls are waiting, Meg. Let’s not upset Maisie more or ruin Nicole’s arrival. Please, just let me do this my way.”
Pull it together, I scolded myself, but not before warning my husband that if I ever saw Henry Slader inside this house again, I would go straight back to the city, taking both our children with me. Rarely was I this assertive because rarely did he give me cause to be. After our homecoming from the upheavals of Ireland and Will’s troubles with the law that were a small but real factor in sending us there in the first place, our lives had been, I confess, uncommonly settled, unruffled. Friends might even have viewed us as boring in our contentment. We seldom argued. We loved our girls. Savored our work with books. Slader promised to poison all that.
“What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”
Startled, we turned to see Nicole at the entrance to the kitchen, Maisie behind her.
“Your mother’s nervous about the man who just left,” Will explained, going over to give Nicole a welcoming hug.
After me, no one was closer to Will than Nicole, but still she said, “Who can blame her, after what that freak did to you. Not to mention Maisie.”
“I understand, and I agree,” he told her, told all of us. “But he’s gone, never to return. I think Maisie would be the first to insist she’s all right, no?”—at which Maisie, though still pale, vigorously nodded. “As for me, I’m here, quite unmurdered.”
“Good,” said Nicole, unsettled but clearly sensing it wasn’t the right moment to press him further. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Shall do. Meantime, can we consider having lunch? I thawed some chicken broth after you left,” he said, knowing full well that his attempt to pivot to another subject was as transparent as that very broth, if not more so. “Tortellini in brodo’s still one of your favorites, right, Nicky? I want to hear about your doings in the city, where life seems to be a bit slower than up-country these days.”
Over the course of that afternoon, the rhythms of family routine settled in again, uneasily but surely. Taking advantage of the sunshine, Maisie hunted around the yard for the still-missing Ripley before giving up her search to join me in the garden pulling weeds and picking tomatoes, kale, and pole beans. For their part, Nicole and Will went to the printing studio, where he showed her the rarest book she’d ever seen. He had assured me earlier, while the girls were out on the porch catching up with each other, that Tamerlane and its unsettling presence in our lives promised to be transient. He went so far as to say that though we could never reveal its being here, we might, as bibliophiles anyway, consider that sheltering it, however briefly, was an awkward honor.
On his first point, I was grateful. On the second, I demurred. Yet for all my striving to convince myself that things were going to be fine, that we weren’t living through an incipient calamity, there was no way I could explain why a small framed snapshot of me and my brother, taken when we were youngsters frolicking on a Montauk beach, was missing from the chestnut sideboard where family photos were arrayed in tabletop frames. Surely, Henry Slader had removed the memento. Other than our family, nobody had been inside the house.
Why do that? How well had Adam, whom Slader had impersonated for the unhappy benefit of me and Maisie, really known him? My brother had never mentioned Slader to me in the months before his death, though they were clearly acquainted. What was the purpose of stealing something with no intrinsic value whatsoever for anyone other than me, in that it served as a photographic prompt of a fond, faded memory? A memory of a time that had never been, in all likelihood, as happy as I preferred to remember it. Certainly not as content as my life had been in recent years, with the notable exception of Mary Chandler’s passing, and now this reappearance of Slader, which felt like a foreboding of death in and of itself.
True to his word, while Meg and Maisie were out of the house, Slader had delivered paper that matched the 1827 original with breathtaking fidelity. Wearing a pair of the disposable nitrile gloves I often used when mixing ink, I painstakingly candled each sheet against the daylight, both the virginal stock and several leaves of the original Tamerlane. The new was harmonious with the old, the fake visually indistinguishable from the prototype—although, of course, Slader’s paper wouldn’t by definition become “fake” until I printed Poe’s words on it. I marveled at its hue, texture, and weight, and told him as much. Once more, for a brief, surreal moment, I felt a weird kinship with this man, who, I’d grudgingly come to accept, was my equal in the dark craft of forgery. While I might have been overwhelmed by mistrust and ire, not to mention envy, I had come to realize each of us was a survivor of the other, each had shattered the other’s life in significant ways. We had been diabolically competitive back in our heyday, even before we’d ever met. Had cut one another out of lucrative deals and had forged that same illegitimate cache of Doyle letters about the genesis of The Hound of the Baskervilles, word for fictitious word, plus, for good measure, composed a passage of that famous novel that never made it into the book. We had each managed to cause the other to be brought in for questioning about Adam Diehl’s unsolved murder. I had deprived him of his covert business partner, maybe his lover; he had deprived me of several fingers on my right hand. He had suffered prison time that I myself might have seen had I not been much better at avoiding such indignities. At the end of the day, I had to admit, he was no worse a transgressor than I was myself. Had we been collaborators instead of competitors, God knows what satanic masterpieces we might have produced.
When I glanced at him across the drafting table by the sunny window, he was oddly smiling at me. He had smirked and grinned before, but I couldn’t remember ever witnessing Henry Slader smile. That smile brought me back, like a dropped stone, to my senses.
The plates for front and back covers, which we unwrapped next, would have to be proofed on the Vandercook, their registration meticulously matched with the original. At first blush, they looked almost too perfect, counterintuitive as that may sound. In this, as in any forgery worthy of running the gauntlet of high-minded, keen-eyed experts, perfection
was less compelling than the stab of the real. Just the right amount of imperfection was key to fakery’s rising toward the believable. I would have to remedy its antiseptic newness by aging the decorative border surround just a touch, degrading the type here and there to look more like the Fletcher copy.
“Solid quality,” I said. “Who made these?”
He looked past me out the window to where several deer stood at the bottom of the field, browsing low-hanging branches laden with heavy leaves. “Unwise question, man. Not to forget, the less you know, the better off you and yours will be.”
Masking my irritation with a veneer of deference, I removed the text plates from their kraft-paper wrapping. Plates like these are heavy for their bulk and easily damaged if dropped. Anyone observing me might have thought I was handling precious gems, given how cautious I was in transferring them from their packaging to the stainless-steel shelves beside the Vandercook.
“Do you have any idea how hard it will be to make a decent copy of this pamphlet? It’s delicate as can be, so unevenly printed in the first place, so damned inconsistent. This level of amateur work is beyond hard to replicate—”
“Make it of its period, of its day, and we’ll be golden. Where’s the original, out of curiosity?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
He chuckled, glancing sidelong in the direction of my fireproof safe. “Suit yourself. Just don’t lose it.”
No need for me to respond.
“There’s one more thing.”
I glanced at my watch. Unless Nicole’s train was late, Meghan and Maisie would already have picked her up and the three of them would be shopping in Rhinebeck by now.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be out of here in a heartbeat,” he said. “I have just one other item I wanted to leave with you. Like the Tamerlane, this needs a virtual twin,” and with that Slader produced from his satchel a stiff card envelope from which he pulled a letter protected in a clear Mylar sleeve.
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