“Have you had enough of your mom for one day, or would you like to come pick some vegetables for dinner?”
“I’m good to help,” Maisie said, and we took down baskets hanging from the kitchen rafter and set off toward the chicken-wire-fenced garden, a short distance from the house. The sun was still strong though the afternoon was waning. Maisie picked peas while I gathered Swiss chard. I looked back uphill toward the printing studio and saw Nicole standing by the window, oblivious to me and her sister, holding a sheet of paper up to the light. Will stood behind her, peering at what was written or printed on it, and together they seemed to be engaged in discussing some detail. On any other day, with any other printing project, the vision of them there side by side would have stirred a deep contentment in me. But not today, not this project. My thoughts began to darken anew, as I realized that no one in my family had been untouched by this recent upheaval—Maisie maltreated, Will coerced, Nicole impelled, myself conflicted—when I heard a familiar cry.
Neither the yelp of a dangerous beast nor some pampered pretty kitty meowing for a bowl of cream. Instead, the feral mewl of a cat who seemed to have invented her own quirky way of vocalizing—somewhere between a squeak and a snarl—given she spent so little time, as far as we could tell, in the company of others of her kind.
“Where is she?” Maisie exclaimed, dropping her basket.
“Ripley?” I called out.
Sure enough, there she was, lolling at the garden gate, insouciant as the day she had adopted us. Maisie lifted her up and got scratched for the effort.
“She’s back,” she said, with the broadest smile I’d seen on her face in days. “Where have you been, you bad thing?”
I picked up Maisie’s basket and we climbed back to the house. The news of truant Ripley’s return would bring a smile to my husband’s face too. Little or nothing would make me happier, I thought, briefly allowing myself to believe that the weight of these last perverse and wayward days might soon lift, much like the pewter skies that had reigned over most of the summer. Then I remembered the man on the road. While there was nothing I could have done to save his life—he had already lost it—I might well have somehow prevented the indignity of his body’s being mutilated. I may not have known him. But I’d owed him that simple consideration, and horror had overwhelmed my humanity. How I would live with myself, going forward, was impossible to fathom. Yet there was no going back.
Early Saturday morning was overcast. Whether pearl or ash or some other shade of gray, I’d have to ask Nicole. Either way, overcast seemed fitting for the task I faced. So I thought as I poured my coffee before retreating to the studio to have one close final inspection of my handiwork. My and my daughter’s, I should say.
Sometime in the moonless night I had come to the firm resolve to deny Slader one of his primary demands. While his point was well taken that some differentiating damage was needed to make the new Fletcher copy distinct from the original, and that a couple of trivial fabricated flaws in the true thirteenth Tamerlane—a couple of closed tears, some soiling that wasn’t there before—couldn’t depress either its intrinsic or auction value in any catastrophic way, I’d become adamant about not forging Poe’s autograph in the pamphlet. No matter how good the forgery, how seductive it would be to potential buyers—just fancy possessing the only known signed copy—I was convinced it would raise suspicion. Suspicion that wouldn’t enhance its stature and worth, and might even ruin both. Why take the risk when this correct, incontestable copy was already such a rare bird in hand? It had also dawned on me that while my reputation at the auction house was golden, or at least gold-plated, and my past as a confessed forger was all but forgotten, I was the last person to be entrusted with the authentication of a unique signed Tamerlane. Surely, it would doom the whole scheme.
As I set out down the hallway to the printing studio, I heard a knock at the front door. The rest of the household was still in bed, so I reversed course back through the kitchen and down the front foyer, wondering who the devil would come around so early on a weekend morning. I hoped it wasn’t some local with bad news about Ripley, especially now that she’d just resurfaced. While our road was seldom traveled, she had no fear of traffic and there was no training her to stick to the relative safety of the fields and woods.
I opened the door to find two men on the porch, each plainclothes but displaying a badge. Stomach churning, though I knew that I hadn’t broken any laws—it would be my word against his if Slader claimed I was knowingly harboring stolen property—I bade them good morning and asked what was up. Since they weren’t smiling, neither did I.
“I’m Detective Moran,” said the older of the two, casually dressed in jeans and a worn burgundy hoodie, unshaven, and hardened around the eyes. A man unused to sleep. “And this is Detective Bellinger. Sorry to bother you at this hour.”
“No problem. You like to come in?” I asked.
“That’s all right, thanks. We were just wondering if that car over there is yours,” pointing at our silver minivan, really the color of a dirty quarter, sitting in the driveway.
“Yes, that’s ours,” I said, and stepped out onto the porch where I set down my cup on a wicker table by the door. “Is something wrong?”
Moran said, “Probably not, but I wonder if you or anyone in your household drove it two days ago near”—and went on to describe a neighboring village I recognized as being where two of Maisie’s friends lived.
“I was here working, so I know I didn’t,” immediately regretting my having offered them an excuse they hadn’t asked for. Why sound guilty when I wasn’t?
“Any other individuals in your house possibly?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing I’d hardly been out of the house since I began work on the Tamerlane, and had been pretty inattentive to my family’s doings. What also came to mind, as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, was Slader’s passing comment in the Beekman Arms about how surprised the authorities would be if they only knew the unsolved crimes of those they’d imprisoned for lesser misdeeds. Be calm, I warned myself. You’re a free man, under no scrutiny. Still, it astonished me to think that if these detectives had any idea they were questioning someone in the midst of producing a million-dollar-plus forgery, they might want to pursue another line of inquiry altogether with me. “I know my daughter rode her bike there to visit friends,” I continued, serenely feigning concern. “The Bancrofts. My wife drove into Rhinebeck that day to pick up groceries. What’s this all about?”
“You are aware there was a murder in the county recently and that the victim’s body was disposed of on an abandoned road in the area in question?”
At once horrified and relieved—horrified by the slaying, relieved it had nothing to do with me—I blurted, “No, my God. I can’t believe Maisie was near there.”
“That’s your daughter?”
“One of my two daughters, yes, but what does any of this have to do with our car?”
“You’re not under suspicion, so don’t worry,” the other detective said, breaking his silence. He pulled a small accordion of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and showed me a scanned color photograph of a headshot, asking, “You know this person?”
Face unevenly round as a pomegranate, wiry reddish beard, the blue filmy gimlet eyes of a vulture behind wire-rim specs, a once-broken nose. He was sporting a flat tweed cap similar to the one my father sometimes wore up here in the country—an Ascot, I think he called it. He did seem familiar, but I couldn’t place the guy.
“I don’t, I’m afraid,” I told them. “Is this the victim or the suspect?”
“We don’t yet have a suspect,” was Moran’s circuitous answer.
The half-closed front door behind me now opened and, somewhat to my dismay, Meg stepped out onto the porch. “What’s going on? I heard voices down here.”
Startled, I said, “Meghan, these are D
etectives Moran and—”
“Bellinger.”
“—Bellinger, and they say there’s been a murder over in the Bancrofts’ neighborhood. I hadn’t heard about it, but I’ve been preoccupied this past week.”
She coughed, said, “When I was over near Tivoli the other day picking up books for the shop, a woman mentioned she’d heard about it on the news. I thought she said it happened in Ancram, though, or Taghkanic.”
“As I was telling your husband, we’re sorry to bother you so early.” Moran turned to her. “Someone not too far from where the body was ditched thought they’d seen a silver minivan in the neighborhood that afternoon.”
Meghan gave me a nervous glance, then acknowledged, “It could well have been my car they’re talking about. I went by our daughter’s friends’ house to check on her, but when I saw her bike there I just drove on without stopping. Ran some errands in town and came back home here.”
They showed Meghan the same photograph they’d asked me to look at. After giving it an even closer perusal than I had, she shook her head. “Sorry, but I just don’t know this man, officers—”
“Detectives,” Bellinger corrected her.
“—and I hope you’ll believe that none of us had anything to do with this.”
“Of course not,” Moran said, a warm if only partial smile of sympathy on his face. “That was never really in question.”
“All we were wondering was if you might have seen something suspicious when driving there. I gather you’re sure you didn’t, correct?” Detective Bellinger asked Meghan.
“I’m sorry,” Meg said with a shrug. “I wish I could help.”
“All right then. We’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”
“If you happen to think of anything, remember anything at all, please get in touch,” and with that Moran handed her his card. “Have a good one.”
“You too,” Meg and I said at almost the same time, as we watched them walk back to their unmarked sedan.
In the kitchen, I asked my wife about that strange look she’d given me when Moran spoke with her. She seemed oddly more thrown off by their presence on our doorstep than circumstances warranted—after all, neither of us had murdered the man in the photograph.
“All I know,” she said, her voice tight as a fist, “is that nothing’s been right, nothing, since Slader showed up. Now I have to get Maisie’s sandwiches ready for her sail with the Bancrofts. They’re picking her up within the hour.”
I warmed my coffee with some from the pot. Meg may not have been leveling with me, not to mention with the detectives, but I was hardly in a position to question her further, so set off again toward the studio to press forward with my Tamerlane obligations
The minute I closed the door and stood alone in my sanctuary, a slow epiphany came over me. Now I wished I had studied the headshot as carefully as Meg had. Was it possible the man in the photograph was a young Ginger-head—Cricket, Slader had called him—as baleful as ever in pre–middle age, though perhaps more gimlet-eyed back in the day, wearing a full beard that was later shorn? I was aware he had a professional relation with my nemesis, but God only knew if it had abruptly ended, or, if so, why. While it was clear Slader hadn’t been acting in a way that could even slightly be construed as normal, I never had the sense that his hectoring and threats were those of a murderer, despite my willingness to let others carry on with their suspicions about his possible involvement in the Adam Diehl case. I glanced at my partly fingerless hand, as I’d done a thousand times, and still didn’t believe he had intended to kill me. Had he wanted to accomplish that two decades ago, he would have brought the cleaver down on my head or heart, not my hand.
Curiosity about any of this was neither immediately useful nor helpful. Indeed, I understood that any curiosity I might have betrayed on the front porch would, in turn, have invited the detectives’ own further curiosity. As I opened the back door to let in the fresh morning air, I cautioned myself that it would behoove me to remain circumspect—that is, dumb as dirt—with Henry Slader when it came to the question of Cricket’s fate.
I opened the safe. Put on, as always, nitrile gloves. With great care, I pulled out the original and—let me admit it to myself if no one else—the exquisite forgery of Tamerlane. As I set them side by side on the clean surface of my worktable, I experienced a moment of uncouth pride. Pride of a kind I hadn’t viscerally savored in many a year. Yes, I knew this wasn’t an achievement about which I ought to have felt anything but revulsion, not to mention shame for collaborating with my daughter. But I couldn’t suppress this moment of, what, gutter joy. I turned the pages with the kind of satisfaction only Calvin Frederick Stephen Thomas, born two hundred ten years ago to the month, must surely have felt when he held his first finished copy. By now I knew the book intimately and turned to Thomas’s most egregious typesetting error, where the printer had misread Poe’s manuscript of “Dreams,” one of the shorter verses following the title poem, and set the nonsensical
rather than the poet’s intended “In climes of my imagining.” I felt a twinge of fraternal pain for youthful Calvin and wondered why he never produced another book, fading into pleasant obscurity while Poe rose to tormented fame. But then, to be sure, our Tamerlane must by design keep its fabricators wrapped in an even greater obscurity, while its prototype should make headlines.
My transient pride flickered, faded, and snuffed out. What replaced it was the far less fanciful knowledge that this was nothing to be proud of, in fact, and that I had the unpleasant task ahead of handing the thing over to Slader.
Since I was firm in my decision not to add an inscription or autograph in Poe’s hand on the pamphlet, work on Tamerlane was done. Before heading back into the kitchen to wish Maisie a good time sailing the river, I pulled both twice-folded letters from the safe—the poet’s original and Nicole’s—and studied them with a magnifying glass. In each, the paper, ink, and script matched the other. Satisfied, I stowed the fakes in my fireproof safe, where they could be retrieved that afternoon for delivery downtown. Then I did something impulsive. Rather than place the originals alongside the copies, I pulled down a hardcover reference book of monotype ornaments from a high shelf of other seldom-perused volumes and tucked Tamerlane and Poe’s missive inside. Pamphlet and letter, which I’d preserved in a fresh archival polyester sleeve, were thin enough that when the reference book was closed, their presence, secured inside its many pages, was imperceptible. While a safe, I told myself, might be broken into—I’d noted Slader’s glance in its direction when he was here—a monotype reference book, in this case concealing a purloined letter, was invisible to even the most prying eyes. Shelving the volume back where it belonged, I recalled a time, as a boy, when I hid from my father my first forged letter using this very trick. I had been inordinately proud of that letter back then, before I stashed it in my father’s library in the second folio volume of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, figuring no one would ever bother to look there. I figured right. The dictionary was long since sold, but not before I retrieved my Doyle document from its hiding place. So it was that my first foray into the art of forgery, an imaginary log of my maiden voyage, survived to this day.
Nicole and Maisie were chatting away at the breakfast table when I returned to the kitchen. A place was set for me with jam and a scone. Maisie’s lunch was packed in her bright-pink backpack, which sat open on the counter, but Meghan was nowhere to be seen.
“You all ready, Maze?” I asked.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said, nodding.
“Got sunscreen?”
Nicole answered, “She’s got enough in that pack for a transatlantic voyage.”
“Where’s your mother?”
Nicole rose from the table, went to the counter, and zipped up Maisie’s pack for her, saying, “She ran into town to do weekend shopping, told me to tell you not to worry.”
“She told me to say she’d be back long before you needed the car for your meeting at the Beek,” Nicole finished, just as one of the Bancroft girls knocked on the front door.
Nicole and I accompanied Maisie out front, where I shook hands with the twins’ father, whose leathery chestnut tan was reassuring evidence he spent many hours on the water. We exchanged cell numbers and off they went, Nicole and me standing side by side on the lawn, waving goodbye as if we were happy figures in a Norman Rockwell painting. Walking back indoors, she offered to take one last look at the Tamerlane before it was to be delivered, but I told her I’d examined it earlier.
“If you’re satisfied, so am I,” she said. “Think I’ll hike down to the woods and do a little nature sketching. Light’s beautiful this morning. After all the brash abstract paintings I’ve been surrounded with this summer, it’d be a nice change of pace for my eyes.”
“Good idea,” I told her, then almost, but not quite, began to raise the issue of Slader’s inappropriate demand that Nicole deliver the Poe.
“You all right?” she asked abruptly, hands pushed into the pockets of her jeans, mildly frowning. Before I could respond with a blithe falsehood, she went on. “You’re not, and it’s understandable. Tell you what, I’m coming with you this afternoon to Rhinebeck.”
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