Nicole said, “Good on Poe. Why reinvent the wheel?”
“Why indeed? But we ourselves are going to need to alter just a few things once we’re ready to move to Slader’s period paper.” I pointed at the name of the recipient of Poe’s Tamerlane cover letter and said, “This Theodore Johnston needs to be changed to another name. Date will be different by a day or two. Contents should stay essentially the same, but we’ll alter a couple of words here or there with others that have a correct period feel.”
“And Poe feel?” she added, without missing a beat. Startled by her tone, I glanced up from the letter. I couldn’t remember a time when Nicole had given me such a strange, concerned look. In this low light, her unblinking eyes appeared quizzical. Not a countenance I was used to or relished. Even her tattooed kingfisher seemed to be fixing its inky eye on me.
Softly, simply, she asked, “Why?”
Her question might have devastated me, but I hadn’t the right to be devastated. My daughter was no naïf, and I wondered if she’d already seen through my week of ruses anyway.
Just as softly and simply, I replied, making it up as I went, “Because the man who commissioned it—”
“Henry Slader.”
“Actually, another long-ago acquaintance in the trade, Atticus Moore—Slader’s his courier—wanted it to be as exact as possible. But to avoid any chance that it might in fact be mistaken as a forgery of the original, he asked that details be altered to something similar but different enough that there’d be no confusion. Thomas Johnson is the name he proposed. I haven’t bothered researching it and imagine it’s entirely fictitious. This way the facsimiles of both the Tamerlane and its accompanying letter could be used for educational purposes.”
“What about these originals then? What happens to them?”
I persuaded myself that Nicole was curious, not accusatory.
“If I understood correctly, I gather the owner up in Boston may be considering putting them up for auction,” I said. “Though they seem to cherish their anonymity, so I’m not sure how their identity will be protected. Possibly subterfuge.”
“It’ll be auctioned through your house?”
Knowing Nicole had a keen capacity for sussing out truth from lies—a trait genetically passed down from the barrister grandfather she’d never met?—I honestly told her I hoped so, even as I hoped I wasn’t blushing in the wake of my other half-truths. “It would be a high-water mark in any auction season, so of course I’d love for us to handle it.”
“But surely you wouldn’t want this Slader to have any involvement, right?”
“As I say, Atticus’s anonymous client is the owner, and he is acting as representative. He’s a member of every distinguished antiquarian book association there is.”
“That may be, but he doesn’t seem to have good taste in couriers, if you ask me.”
I chuckled. “I didn’t ask, but you’re not wrong.”
“Well,” she concluded, looking back toward the drafting board and antique paper that had an almost imperceptibly gray-green cast to it in the lamplight, “how many tries do I get to do this right?”
“We have three matching sheets,” I said, grateful to get back to the work at hand. Seeing the resolve on her face as she removed all of the silver rings from her fingers and set them aside, I asked, “So you’re up for this?”
She was, and then some, as it happened. Her second attempt proved to be the best of the three, although any of her drafts would have passed muster in the eyes of most antiquarians. As I had already done with proof passes, rejected pages, and other discards from the print job, I shredded the two lesser Poe letters and placed the keeper, along with the original, in the safe next to the Tamerlanes—one the first, one the faux. Slader had demanded I give him back any foul matter, my discarded pages, but I didn’t trust him any more than he trusted me. No, they were better off burned to curlicues of blackened ash in the fireplace out back, then stirred with a stick into oblivion. By destroying the documents myself, I was assured they would never resurface.
After thanking Nicole for lending an accomplished hand, I said, “Maybe we ought to try to get a little more shut-eye before the sun comes up?”
Together we turned off the studio lights.
“You realize, I hope,” she said, “that you could have done a better job at it than I did.”
I disagreed. “Either way, I don’t think we should let Slader in on our switch. If he doesn’t like the letter, I’ll take the fall, whatever that might mean.”
“Let him do it himself,” said Nicole, and we silently left the studio and went back upstairs to our rooms.
Meg shifted a little when I slipped into bed, muttered a few incomprehensible words in her sleep before turning over. I don’t know if Nicole managed to fall back asleep, but her father certainly did not, for hours on end. Friday would be spent painstakingly aging both the forged Tamerlane and its ersatz accompanying letter that Edgar Allan Poe had never written to any Thomas Johnson, fictitious or otherwise. My thoughts about the best ways to accomplish this churned away, until I finally dozed off just as the soft white disk of sun was climbing through the treetops outside.
The problem was this. The man on the road did exist. Just because he was dead did not mean he didn’t exist. Just because I didn’t know him did not mean he didn’t exist. My yearning to shunt him off to the edge of my consciousness, to suppress if not possibly even forget him altogether, had held for a day or so, but couldn’t hold longer. I was witness to a crime. Or the aftermath of a crime. By going out of my way not to report it, had I become an accessory to murder?
Since my family was slow to get up, I busied myself with breakfast—baked fresh bread from aging spotted bananas, resurrection metaphor there?—and reasoned whoever had driven his victim to that desolate lane and dumped the body onto the road must surely have seen me, or at least my car, not two hundred feet ahead. But what if they hadn’t? What if they’d been blind to anything beyond the wretched act they were performing on an otherwise postcard-lovely summer day? Or, all right, what if they noticed me but weren’t in the least alarmed by the presence of a lone woman, one who stood frozen with confusion and fear, just far enough away to be unable to change the course of what transpired? Was it possible I wasn’t viewed as sufficiently important to bother with one way or the other?
Will finally recognized the change in me at dinner last evening, but fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—he’d been so wrapped up in his own problems with that damnable Poe job that all he said was, “You seem miles away.”
The girls had gone out to the garage to adjust the chain tension on Maisie’s bike, spend a little sister time together, while Will and I finished with dishes.
I smiled, or rather winced, and shook my head. “Nothing of the kind.”
“Maybe I’m projecting,” he added. “Wouldn’t put it past me.”
In a single fleet moment, I decided to tell him what I’d witnessed, then backed away from the idea. Part of me didn’t want to hear his advice about how I should or shouldn’t proceed. Another part reminded me that I had no proof that Slader was behind the wheel, and to make such a claim was to allege, in so many words, that my husband was working with a murderer. Maybe even a two-time killer. Even worse was my confusion about Slader’s filthy intimation that Will knew about his relationship with my brother and had hidden it from me. I hardly needed to remind myself that the man was a provocateur and disrupter and, what’s more, a liar.
“What I want,” I vented, though not raising my voice, “is for you to finish what you’re doing and get Henry Slader out of our lives.”
“Believe me, Meg, this is not how I’d hoped to spend our last full week of summer with the girls,” he said, setting down a dish he’d been drying before placing both his palms on the stone counter, head lowered, leaning forward like a reluctant marathoner stretching his muscles. “
Saturday afternoon he’ll have what he needs, and that should be the end of him coming around.”
“Yes, it should. But I’m beginning to wonder if there will ever be an end of Slader in our lives.”
Yet now, this morning, as I stood at the same kitchen counter, it occurred to me that going to the police and reporting what I’d seen might be a better way to rid us of this forger and stalker. I could say I was too traumatized to report it earlier. Could set things straight so I didn’t have to spend another minute with this bleak, grimy cloud hovering over my head. It might even provide a path for me to tell them about Slader’s theft of my photograph of Adam, which in turn could open my brother’s murder case to fresh scrutiny.
Reality set in, however, when I imagined the questions they were bound to ask me. Questions like, What were you doing on that dead-end street? Did you recognize the deceased man? If not, then how is it you recognized the powder-blue Chevy? Its driver, you say, is a friend of your husband? Not a friend, you say? What is his relationship with your husband? May we ask where your husband is right now? You say he’s meeting with the man you saw in the powder-blue car, tomorrow afternoon at the Beekman Arms? What time did you say they’re scheduled to get together? And if, as you claim, this man your husband’s meeting with stole your family photograph and returned it to you undamaged, what charges do you think could be pressed against him after the fact? While we’re at it, why haven’t you reported any of this before?
I felt as pinned as a butterfly on a black velvet mounting board, in a display case with one-way glass where I could be seen but couldn’t see out. Maisie’s sudden appearance in the kitchen saved me from these swarming questions.
“Smells good in here,” she said. “Can I help?”
“Would you mind cutting up some melon?” I asked, forcing myself to turn away from my morbid thoughts and pay attention to the present.
After breakfast, Will and Nicole returned to the studio, while Maisie came along with me on an errand for the bookstore. A couple of weeks earlier, our shop had purchased the library of a collector we’d done business with over the years, who had passed away after a brief illness. He was a widower with no next of kin, and the attorney charged with settling his estate found an unpaid invoice of ours among his papers and called the shop, asking if the volume might be returned. He further asked if we would be interested in making an offer on the rest of the library, which, of course, we were.
So Will had joined me—this was before Henry Slader reentered our lives—and one of my senior staff, who’d taken the train up for the day, to go through the collection and tally up what we thought would be a fair price. Buying libraries is one of the bread-and-butter ways booksellers replenish their inventories, and while several other dealers were also invited to bid on the whole lot, ours proved to be the best offer. The sole caveat was that the winning bidder had to remove not just the obviously valuable volumes, but every last scrap of printed matter in the house.
“Toss out whatever you don’t want to sell, or give it away,” the attorney said. “I hope you make a profit on the rest. But it all has to go so we can clear out the house for sale.” We agreed and set about making arrangements to pick everything up before the end of August.
The collection was a bit of a hodgepodge. As often happened when we bought a library under similar circumstances, where an executor or attorney was trying to expedite the dispersal of property so an estate could be closed, this one was a combination of musty magazines and out-of-date catalogs, cheek by jowl with some genuinely desirable first editions.
On the drive over, I filled Maisie in about all this, telling her we were meeting with two of my colleagues she liked, Cal and Eliot, who had driven up from the city in a van and would be taking the bulk of the library back down with them. “This collector kept his books all over the house,” I said.
“Even the bathrooms?”
“Do you and Nicky have a stack of books in your bathroom?”
“Even in the bathrooms,” she said, answering her own question.
“The guys are going to pack everything that’s not in the library, which is where I’ll need your help. I need to sift through the better items there so we can take them back to the house for some preliminary pricing before we head to the city,” I said. “Some of the books are pretty old and fragile, so I’ll need for you to give me a hand boxing them as carefully as possible.”
Today’s work was just the kind of “bibliophilic triaging”—Will’s tag for sifting the gems from regular stock and recyclables—that my husband loved to help with, and I was sorry this Poe business precluded his coming along. He possessed a sixth sense about which books might have an authorial inscription inside, and was a walking encyclopedia of “issue points,” the typos and other arcane details that made the difference between a copy being the true first edition or a later printing. He also knew more about relative rarities than anyone else I’d ever met. Whereas many a book person might prefer, say, a pristine first edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in its handsome pictorial dust jacket from 1903, it was the far less famous The Sea-Wolf, published the following year, which—if it was in its legendarily rare dust jacket—would launch Will into an ecstasy. Even torn, even chipped, even in pieces. Pure ecstasy.
No slouch myself, I welcomed the distraction of being in my favorite milieu—rooms filled with books—with Maisie at my side. The library was in an old Carpenter’s Gothic near the river, just north of Tivoli. When we pulled into the drive, my colleagues were already waiting in their van. They were quite a pair—one a short, prematurely balding lapsed academic, the other a skinny urban book geek who looked every bit the heavy-metal devotee he was. Both greeted me with friendly deference even as they showered Maisie, who was adored by the bookshop staff, with greetings.
“So, Maisie, what’s the good news?”
“Having fun up here watching the grass grow?”
We were greeted by a friendly border collie, followed by the collector’s neighbor, a ponytailed woman in her sixties whose dress and manner suggested to me that she’d been something of a wild child in her youth. Batik tunic of reds and browns cinched at her waist. Moccasins on her feet, bangles on her wrists. Nicole would have loved to sketch her.
The attorney overseeing the estate was running behind, she informed me, and had asked her to let us into the house so we could begin packing. The books remained on their shelves, just as they had been when I’d visited this place a couple of weeks before. I asked the others to get started with boxing the lesser volumes of paperbacks, Modern Library books, runs of periodicals, and the like, while I concentrated on the library room, where the collector had kept his best material. Given that he had bought a number of books from us over the years, some of the volumes I pulled down were like old friends. His interests had run the gamut, but he’d been particularly keen on nineteenth-century American literature as well as mostly modern science fiction. I went through his collection, now and again handing Maisie a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Philip K. Dick, which she wrapped in heavy tissue and stacked in boxes we’d brought with us. The neighbor woman, meanwhile, carried on a mostly one-sided conversation to fill the silence. Doing my best to focus on what was at hand, I exchanged pleasantries with her about the strange weather.
“Your neighbor was quite an intriguing collector,” I said, in passing. “His two areas of interest are an unusual pairing.”
She told me about how he loved haunting book barns and out-of-the-way small bookshops all over New England, then continued with a lament about mortality and how much she was going to miss him. “At least he died peacefully. Pity he outlived the rest of his family,” she said. Admittedly, I was only half listening, but when she mused, “Did you hear about that awful murder over near Taghkanic, or was it Ancram?” I glanced sidelong at her where she was staring out the window.
“I hadn’t,” I said, briefly frozen with a large boo
k in my hand.
Don’t ask anything, I told myself. Let her spin her yarn and see what she weaves with it. Meantime, I handed Maisie the quarto of Dante’s Purgatorio illustrated by Gustave Doré, which seemed afield in this library—unless the owner considered Dante a science-fiction writer, not an entirely absurd notion.
“They’re still trying to identify the body. Found him partly eaten by dogs or coyotes, they said on the radio.”
“How awful,” I managed, catching my breath.
“You all right, Meg—Mom?” Maisie asked. The second time I’d heard that question in recent days. Nor did I miss that she had referred to me as her mom in public.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s just that I had a similar worry when you were late coming home the other night and I thought I heard a coyote.”
“Oh, my,” the woman said to Maisie, wide-eyed. “Were you attacked by coyotes?”
Sensing possible jeopardy, my daughter glanced at me, Dante still in hand, and said, “No. They just come around our house sometimes.”
The woman returned her gaze to the clouds outside, saying, “It’s our own fault. We keep intruding on their habitat, what do we expect?”
Fortunately, the lawyer arrived soon after and scuttled any further exchanges about killings and coyotes. He presented me with a letter of agreement stipulating that the sale was final and everything was sold “as is,” which I signed after making out a check in the amount agreed upon.
When Maisie and I left—my colleagues stayed on to finish with their own packing, which was going smoothly—we took half a dozen boxes of books with us. At home, we carried the cartons inside and set them down in the study. I wanted to confer with Will about an inscribed H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man—just what my husband had become these past days—complete with a hand-drawn caricature, which I sensed might be the diamond of the lot. The collector’s one flaw was that he hadn’t been “condition-conscious,” as we say in the trade, but the Wells was an exception, a gorgeous copy, and Will would see that at once. Anything, I figured, to bring him back into our blessedly, bookishly, unassuming routine.
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