“He was referring to purity and impurity, as I recall, good and evil.”
“Interesting idea, but it doesn’t get the ink mixed.” Together we laughed, then she went on, “I just mean in the spectrum, every other color is contained in black. For me, it’s the richest, most dynamic color of all. In terms of wavelength, black takes them all in, doesn’t let any of them go.”
“How greedy of it,” I joked.
Arching one eyebrow, she agreed, “Well, it does feed on other colors. That’s why there are different blacks—it all depends on their appetite. Like flamingos.”
“Flamingos?” My turn to arch an eyebrow.
“You know, how their feathers are pink because of all the shrimp they eat—”
“Sturgeon and rabbits and shrimp, oh my.”
Scowling at my feeble humor, she said, “As for Tamerlane, all we have to do is nail just the right black.”
That was my daughter. It still surprised me that, through all the inevitable adolescent tantrums, all the wing stretching as she fledged into her own brilliant colors and tested adult flight, we remained closely bonded over what we both loved.
And so we pressed forward. The more Nicole and I shared information, the more we labored side by side that week, the less this task felt like the wrongful act it was. It morphed, rather, into a rewardingly difficult father-daughter assignment, and at moments I almost forgot what we were in fact doing—but, alas, never entirely.
I wasn’t sure how much thought Nicole had given to our printing project, but at night, in bed with Meghan, I knew her mother was quietly seething about the matter.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked me around midnight, midweek, just as I was about to turn off my bedside lamp.
“Doing what?” was my lame dodge.
“It’s bad enough that you’re making this fake—”
“Meg. It’s a facsimile.”
“—but to willfully drag Nicole into it?”
How I wished I’d extinguished the light and pretended to snore before she began with her questions. “Nicole’s not being dragged into anything. She always helps me.”
“Helps you with legitimate book projects, with Stone Circle. Not this.”
“Since when is making a facsimile illegitimate?”
Ignoring me, she said, “You should just tell Slader the jig’s up. You have to stop. If you owe him money, we can figure out how to pay him.”
“I don’t owe the man a penny—”
“Whatever it is you owe, nothing’s worth your backsliding and, yes, dragging Nicole along in the bargain.”
“I can’t argue with you,” I said, after a moment during which my conscience gnawed at me, then reluctantly offered to ask Nicole not to continue in the morning. “It has to be her call, though,” I finished, uncertain whether I would follow through with this pacifying offer. The cold truth of it? Nicole was far more dexterous than her father, and I was all too aware that folding, trimming, and sewing the pages, as well as adhering the cover, lay ahead of us—me. Besides, the girl was nobody’s fool. She knew that the difference between a top-flight facsimile and a forgery was a game of but a few negligible degrees, rather like the difference between cold water and hard ice.
Awakened not by screams or by worries about Will but by a chorus of birdcalls out the window and sunlight streaming into the bedroom, I experienced my first taste of serenity since that night last week when Maisie was assaulted and our lives were infected by Poe’s juvenilia. Glancing at the bedside clock, I saw I’d slept in. A bowl of granola had been set out for me downstairs, along with fresh-cut fruit and a pitcher of milk. A half-finished pot of hazelnut coffee sat on the stove, ready to be reheated. After lighting the gas burner, I switched on the radio, as I did by rote every morning. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier further brightened my mood. It seemed a safe risk to feel at peace.
While the coffee warmed, I walked partway down the hall toward the printing studio but, seeing its door was shut, decided to leave my husband and daughter to their dialogue about Tamerlane, to let Nicole find her own way to making the right decision and bowing out. Back in the kitchen, I went to the fridge for juice and saw Maisie’s handwritten note moored beneath a magnet shaped like a hen wearing a polka-dot kerchief.
Morning, Meg, it read, Rode the Bomber over to hang out with the twins. Back after lunch. xoMazey. PS. Will be careful so don’t worry!
Easier asked for than done. Still, we had agreed at a family meeting, with Nicole serving as informal negotiator, that Maisie would be allowed to go to town alone—“It’s barely a village,” Nicole pointed out—but only during daylight hours, even though Will had installed new batteries in her headlamp. Given Slader had already revealed himself, it seemed unlikely he would threaten her again. Further, because he had convinced—or else coerced—Will to print the Tamerlane, it wouldn’t have been in his best interest to do so. I poured milk on my cereal, sat at the table. Nothing, I told myself, was going to spoil the feeling of tranquility that settled over me this morning, like a vessel becalmed, its sails slackened, after days and nights of rough waters. Mawkish as it seemed, I felt Bach’s clavier underscored my thoughts.
Naïveté is its own undoing. I knew as much. Just, it felt good to forget for a brief half hour. My enveloping serenity was erased in a heartbeat when I heard a knock at the front door. Not loud, not insistent or threatening. Tentative, which was somehow all the more unnerving.
On the porch, as I feared, stood Henry Slader. I pulled open the door and demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I won’t be long,” he said, staring past me into the house.
“Have you done something to Maisie? Is she all right?”
Confusion swept across his face. “How should I know? I haven’t seen her. That’s not why I’ve come.”
“I’ll get my husband.”
“No, that’s not why, either.”
“What is it then?” I felt at once furious and terrified. “You’re not welcome here.”
Ignoring my self-evident remark, he gave me a paper bag with cord handles, stating, “This is yours.” I looked inside and saw it was the missing framed photograph of me and Adam on the beach.
“Why do you have this?” Though I’d suspected him of the theft myself, my shock was so deep, I spoke the words almost before I realized I’d formulated the question.
“I took it without thinking when I was with your husband last Saturday,” Slader replied. “I thought it’d make me happy to have it, but it doesn’t.”
“I’m glad to have it back, but I don’t understand. What—did you know my brother?”
Slader tilted his head, like an inquisitive dog, albeit a shorn albino one, and gave me a look tinged by an unsettling combination of frustration, glumness, and hostility. “Your husband knows the answer to that question. You should ask him sometime.”
“I will,” I said, floored by this odd encounter.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, regaining his composure as impudent self-assuredness spread across his narrow, bleached face, “you need to understand it’s in everybody’s best interest that you don’t interfere with the work he is doing right now.”
Across the yard, parked at the side of the road, was the same pale-blue Chevy that I’d seen when my girls and I had returned from the Rhinecliff train station. This time, no one was waiting for him by the car.
“Has he said how it’s coming along?” he asked.
“No, and I don’t want to know.”
“Suits me,” Slader said. “Just, as I say, don’t get in his way. I’m tying up loose ends, and don’t need you or anybody else impeding my progress.”
Was that a threat? Sarcastic, while again realizing just how much this man confused and frightened me, I told him, “Thanks for returning what you stole. If you ever come here again, I’ll call the police,” an
d shut the door in his face. After bolting it, I leaned my back against its cool oak, as if that would somehow keep him at bay. Unable to quell my curiosity, I hurried into the living room and peeked from behind the curtain in time to witness Slader climb into the car and, unlike before, get behind the wheel and drive off by himself.
Maisie, I thought. I needed to go to her friends’ house at once and, making excuses, pick her up. Placing the photograph back where it belonged with the others, I went to the kitchen and grabbed my wallet and car keys. I scribbled a note, Back shortly, left it on the table, turned off the burner, and rushed out.
Her closest friends were Celia and Janine Bancroft, twin sisters her own age. So it was toward the Bancrofts’ house I drove. As I passed the stretch of road where I believed Maisie had been ambushed by Slader, I slowed, wondering which thicket of bushes he’d been hiding in. Also, despite myself, I couldn’t help but ponder what on earth his connection was to Adam. How bizarre for Slader—who else could it have been?—to have impersonated my brother with that photo mask I found in the woods. Weird too that he filched the picture of Adam and me, and weirder yet that he returned it in person. It would have been much easier for him just to throw it out, knowing no one would be the wiser. Had he apologized? It happened so unexpectedly, I wasn’t sure one way or the other.
One thing I did know, as the woods gave way to a few houses on either side of the lane and I made several turns that would take me to town, was that I intended to ask Will what he knew about Slader’s relationship with my brother. My deep well of grief over Adam’s unsolved murder had been tapped again. When Will was finished with this vexing, this galling project of his, I would ask if he knew more than he’d let on about that bloody night in Montauk. Well-trod terrain, but maybe there was some small detail he’d remember that might open the cold case again. All these years I’d believed that Henry Slader had gotten away with murder, persuading myself that the prison time he served for assaulting Will doubled as bad-karma punishment for what I believed he’d done to Adam. Now I began to wonder.
Bikes littered many of the yards in the sparsely populated hamlet. A field-hockey goal with torn netting and no players in sight stood, a bit forlornly, in one yard across from a small church whose steeple was sorely in need of reshingling. An overturned russet wheelbarrow and Adirondack chairs with peeling yellow and orange paint occupied another. Here was a skinny teenager in jeans and sleeveless T-shirt bent under his open car hood; there, an elderly woman on a shaded porch, dozing in her wheelchair. And everywhere, the kaleidoscopic greens and flower-laden beds of deep August. Somehow, this interplay between games and work, youth and senescence, left me feeling more restless than when I’d left the farmhouse. I shook my head, concentrated on my driving.
To my relief, Maisie’s old-fashioned Black Bomber stood upright on its kickstand in the Bancrofts’ driveway. Finding myself reluctant to put my worries on exhibit in front of her friends, I drove down the mile-plus curve of road to its dead end, then parked next to what appeared to be the foundation of an unbuilt house. Nettles, blooming loosestrife, and an extended family of weeds were its only inhabitants now, together with a clan of fieldmice, or voles, rustling in the concrete fissures. Cutting off the engine, I got out of my car, walked over to an old guardrail that had been placed at the terminus of the road, and sat down on it to think. Behind me somewhere in the woods I could hear a stream trickling. Overhead, a family of finches peeped without a seeming care. No houses were in sight, though it was clear that when the developer paved this road some years ago, there had been every intention of lots being surveyed on either side, and homes built. While bucolic all the same and calming in its solitude, this shaded spot struck me as a place whose promise was unfulfilled, a place the past had somehow let down.
I shook my head and studied my hands clenched in my lap. Ease it up, Meg, I chided myself. Life’s a sine wave, and you’re nowhere near the bottom of the trench. Nicole’s a healthy, luminous, smart young woman. Maisie’s a brave and tenacious survivor, safe with her friends. And whatever Will is doing, it’s something he has to see through for reasons of his own. He’s been a paragon as a husband and father these many years. Nothing really is all that dire, surely, and the chances were good that I was projecting my own disquietude on these abandoned acres of cul-de-sac woodland. Noticing an empty gin bottle and discarded beer cans in the underbrush, I realized this must be a high schoolers’ partying site, a moonlight parking spot for lovers. So at least it was a locus of some sort of happiness, however secretive or fleeting.
A soft crunching roused me from my reverie. Not footsteps but the unbroken, smooth, rolling sound of tires over pebbles on pavement. When I snapped my head up, my eyes refocused from the folded hands in my lap to a car a couple hundred feet up the road from where I was parked. Its engine cut, it glided quietly to a halt. Sun and shadows on the windshield made it impossible for me to see who was in the car, and though I had only seen Slader’s—or whoever’s—Chevy from the rear, its pale-blue color was identical.
Unthinking, I gulped in air, got up from my corroded perch, and weighed whether to climb over the guardrail and run into the woods toward the stream or wait where I was, stand my ground. I patted my jeans pocket and, reassured that the key was there, considered striding the dozen paces over to my car, turning it around, and driving toward, then hopefully past, him, or them. If I bolted, I could be chased. If I tried escaping in the car, I could be blocked. Just when I needed to be clearheaded, my thoughts became a thicket of panicky, worthless non sequiturs. Caught in a paralysis of fear, I stood and stared down the road.
Movement, then. The door on the passenger side of the car opened. But rather than Slader or anybody else stepping out to return my gaze or confront me in some way, I saw a bulky shape, brown like burlap, fall from the opened door onto the macadam road, where it lay motionless. Now I took several steps forward, trying better to make out what was going on. For about the time it takes an orchestra to tune, nothing further happened as I gaped at this uninterpretable tableau. Overhead, the family of finches, which had fallen silent, began to chitter away again. Up much higher, circling like weightless black rags in the rich blue of the sky, several crows squawked.
The car door was unhurriedly pulled shut from inside. I squinted hard but couldn’t make out who was in the driver’s seat. Time passed; no one moved. Certain the driver could see me, his rapt and helpless audience, I began to wonder if the whole performance might not have been for my benefit. Panic thinks its own thoughts. Had Slader somehow followed me after our brief encounter on my porch, only to dump what appeared to be a body on the road, a body that surely must have already been in the car when he returned the photo of Adam? Logically, I knew that the form lying on the ground was far too bulky to be my daughter. If not Maisie, then who?
Before I could puzzle my way further toward any explanation, the Chevy’s engine started. With dreamlike fluidity, it began backing up slowly, so slowly it felt like an arrant taunt, never stopping to turn around, and soon enough receded from where I stood aghast. The license plate that should have been visible above the front bumper was either missing or had been obscured. Again, how I wished I’d been astute enough to have taken down the number when this same car, which now disappeared around the long tree-choked curve, was parked in front of our house.
The creek burbled, indifferent. A breeze meandered through the uppermost branches of black cherry and ash trees, indifferent. My breathing was shallow and fast. I badly wanted none of this to be happening.
Rather than run down the road to check on whatever it was that had been shoved from the mysterious car, I climbed into the relative safety of my own and, hands quaking, managed to start the engine. When it came to life, its mechanical hum and the sudden accompaniment of incongruous harpsichord music on the radio helped snap me out of my liminal fog. I turned the vehicle around and drove at a crawl, scanning up ahead in case the Chevy driver decided to return, hop
ing my imagination had skewed something innocent toward the sinister, until I was alongside the heap on the side of the road.
It was a wasted hope. The body, for it was a body, lay crumpled on its side, facing away from me. An adult, a male in a dun suit. As I weighed whether to step out and look more closely, it occurred to me that no one I knew had this man’s anemic copper-colored hair, curly to the point of being wiry. He was broad shouldered, somewhat heavyset. The skin of his ankles—he wore run-of-the-mill brown walking shoes but no socks—was purplish white. His torso didn’t rise and fall, which meant he wasn’t drugged or semiconscious. One of his livid hands was raised, clawlike and rigid, inches above the pebbly ground. Remembering now the man Slader had argued with when the girls and I’d returned from Rhinecliff, I wondered if he wasn’t the same. Was this what Slader had meant by tying up loose ends? I stared for a long minute, paralyzed myself but, unlike the body, breathing. A fly, in stops and starts, traversed the rim of his blue left ear.
That was it for me. That was enough.
Even then I knew I wouldn’t be pleased, an hour from now, a day, maybe forever, by my decision to leave this man where he’d been unceremoniously ditched but, shifting my eyes from his corpse, I glared ahead and, deaf to any wiser angels, drove away.
Queasy and faint, I told myself I had to get to a phone immediately—in my haste, I hadn’t brought my cell—to report what I had just seen. But I pressed on, knowing that if I pointed my finger at Slader, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to implicate Will and rain fiery hell on my whole family. The sporadic front yards I’d passed earlier were even less populated now than they had been. Both the teenage auto mechanic and the nodding grandmother had moved along, which was good. No eyes meant no eyewitnesses. Maisie’s bike was gone as well, also a relief since it meant I didn’t have to encounter her here, and chances were she had already headed home. So far as I knew, not one soul had noticed me drive through this rural neighborhood, and by way of excusing my absence from the house, I visited a bakery in Red Hook, where I bought a fresh carrot cake, Nicole’s favorite and my own. Inevitably, on my way home I found myself being followed by a police cruiser for half a mile before it turned onto another road. Should I have called an ambulance? No point, I convinced myself. Judging by the color of his flesh and rigidity of his limbs, the man had been dead for some time before being abandoned. There was nothing for it. I breathed in and out.
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