Mind reader, I thought. “No, your mother would never allow it. Neither will I.”
“What time do we leave? Two thirty?”
“You’re not coming.”
“I’ll be back and ready by two fifteen,” she finished, glancing over her shoulder as she walked away. “You’ll go in, I’ll just wait in the car.”
“Nic, you’re already more involved with this”—but she’d already left the room. I stood there for a while, wondering where Meghan had gone off to, wondering whether Slader would approve of the copies, wondering how I got myself into this nightmarish mess. The screen door to the studio slammed, and I watched out the back kitchen window as Nicole strode down the meadow. She wore a wide-brim straw hat her mother had given her years ago and a shoulder bag full of pencils and oil crayons, no doubt, and carried a sketchbook under her arm. As the forest enveloped her, I exhaled and turned away.
Upstairs, alone in the master bathroom, I glimpsed myself in the mirror above the antique porcelain sink and was taken aback by how slovenly I looked. Rusticated not in a pastoral sense but wretched as a runaway convict. I showered—hadn’t for a couple of days—and shaved—hadn’t for a few. Was it possible my hair was grayer now than a week ago? No wonder Nicole had expressed worry.
To kill time before my meeting in a few hours, I settled in the study to pore through some of the rarer books Meghan had retrieved near Tivoli. I made my way through a dozen of them stacked on the table, penciling suggested prices on slips of paper, as I often did for her if time allowed. Since most of the titles were familiar to me, it was easy work for a seasoned bibliophile and balm for an uneasy mind.
When I opened her first edition of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, however, I was bowled over. Had I been paying attention these past days, I never would have left it sitting on the table, though Meg was not at fault since she’d mentioned it with great excitement. Its issue points were correct, with the first page wrongly numbered 2. The requisite pages of advertisements were present at the rear of the volume. Its red cloth binding, stamped in gold and black, was bright and square, unusual for this title which had been, coincidentally, published the same year that Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly wrote my confessional letter to his brother, Innes. While I didn’t recognize the recipient of Wells’s inscription, what made it exceptional was that above the presentation, the author had added a pen-and-ink drawing of the invisible man himself, replicating in caricature his image from the front cover, seated comfortably on a chair in slippers and robe, lifting a cup to unseeable mouth, headless and handless. Twenty thousand, I thought, just for openers. I could hardly wait to give Meg the good news, maybe clear some of the downer clouds that had been shadowing us all week.
Rapt as I was with the Wells sketch, I only half heard the studio screen door slap shut at the rear of the house. At first, I didn’t give it much thought, assuming Nicole was back early from her walkabout—that was quick; had she changed her mind?—and so continued perusing the book, trying to figure out the name of the recipient who had inspired the author to draw this elegant doodle. Thinking Nicole might lend her sharp eye to the exercise, I rose from the table, The Invisible Man in hand, and made my way toward the kitchen to show her. Our small world had been Poe, Poe, and more Poe since she’d arrived upstate, so I thought this would offer a nice respite.
“Nic?” I called out.
No response, so I walked toward the studio.
“Nicky? Got something I want to show you.”
The door was ajar, so I nudged it.
“Nicole, you here?” I asked more quietly.
But the sunlit room, redolent of an odd fusion of ink and flowers, was empty. The back door was open with just the screen shut. I gazed down the slight declivity of the field studded with mustardy goldenrod and saw one of the same lone whitetails near the forest edge, browsing, as ever. Unseen, a prop plane droned like a steel mosquito somewhere overhead. The clock ticked in the kitchen down the hall. No sign of my daughter anywhere.
Paranoia abruptly kicked in. An image of Henry Slader, pasty as a nightwalker, shot through my imagination. He himself had boasted about trespassing in this house when we weren’t here. Maybe he’d let himself in again, thinking the place was vacated—what with the car gone, Maisie off with friends, and Nicole in the woods—and was lurking inside. Clutching the Wells as if for dear life, I searched for him downstairs, room by room and, coming up empty, bounded up the flight to the second floor to make a circuit through the girls’ rooms, our master bedroom, even checked both baths. Slader was nowhere to be found. Had a daytime ghost of wind, a freakish microburst, shoved the screen door open enough so it smacked into its frame, even though the leaves outside weren’t so much as rustling? Fantastical idea, one for an H. G. Wells tale. But this wasn’t some damn work of fiction.
Then it clicked. The noise I’d heard hadn’t been made by somebody entering the house at all. If it was Slader—I could almost feel his malign presence now—he might stealthily have entered the printing studio while I was appraising books and allowed, on purpose or not, the screen door to slam when making his escape.
The Poe treasures. In an icy sweat, I rushed back to the studio. As I glanced up at the folio of monotype ornaments that I’d used as a kind of smuggler’s Bible to hide the originals, I was relieved to see it appeared undisturbed, exactly as I’d shelved it earlier. My fireproof book safe was locked, per usual, but knowing I shouldn’t trust appearances, I dialed the combination, opened the door, and peered inside to see that the Tamerlane forgery and facsimile letter were just where I’d stowed them. A cursory search of other compartments in the safe confirmed nothing else was missing either. Had I simply imagined the whole thing? Given the insomnia and strain of the week, it wouldn’t have been out of the question. For safekeeping, I set The Invisible Man inside before closing and locking the safe again.
After looking behind me to assure myself that nobody was nearby watching, I reached high and pulled down the manual of monotype ornaments to double-check my impression that it hadn’t been tampered with. I carried it over to the worktable, set it down, carefully opened the large volume. And of course, of course, despite my self-reassurances, I should have known—both Tamerlane and the Edgar Allan Poe letter had vanished. Like a fool, I climbed a stepladder, pulled out books shelved adjacent to my ornaments volume, and looked through them, one after the other, on the off chance I’d misremembered where I had stored the Poe gems. From the topmost rung of the ladder I peered at the dusty back of the top shelf that abutted the wall, hoping somehow they might have fallen out. But it wasn’t to be. I could have yanked every last volume from its perch, could have turned my studio inside out, but the bald truth of it was that the thirteenth Black Tulip was gone.
I knew the authorities would have taken the body away. What I hadn’t anticipated was that no evidence remained of its ever having lain there in the first place, stiff as a sculpture. No yellow police tape dangled from nearby branches. No dried blood discolored the ground or grass. As I looked farther up the road toward the guardrail where I’d been standing when the incident happened, a wave of hope passed through me. There was a fair to middling chance the driver might not, after all, have seen me from this vantage where he’d briefly parked. Not only was the distance greater than I had originally thought, but the trees there cast heavy dappled shade over the terrain. Maybe, just maybe, I’d blended into the shadowy scenery, inconspicuous, unseen.
Breathing a tentative sigh of relief, I drove to the end of the road, where I proceeded to turn around. I sat with my arms crossed and replayed the incident in my mind. On the radio, a Saturday morning opera was airing, a Benjamin Britten work unfamiliar to me. Lots of atonality and jagged rhythms gave the music an overarching mood of angst. Appropriate, maybe, but I was already struggling with plenty of atonal notes in my own inner soundtrack and hadn’t any patience for music this morning.
I cut the engine,
and with it the radio, so all I could hear were the same families of untroubled birds as before and, faintly, that nearby rippling brook. Arms crossed again, I recalled sunlight glancing off the Chevy’s windshield, which further buttressed my growing conviction that I’d been an unseen witness to the grotesque, coldhearted act. Not that this necessarily exonerated me or lessened my feelings of guilt. But what it did mean was that my original reason for leaving Maisie and Nicole at the kitchen table, more or less on the spur of the moment before Will came out to join us, seemed no longer tenable. My nebulous plan had been to come here, confirm for myself that Slader had done what he did to intimidate me into silence—just as everything he’d done since reentering our lives was meant to threaten us into cooperation—then go straight to the police to confess I’d lied, and let the chips fall where they may.
Now that plan collapsed. Maybe Will was on the right path after all. Do what Slader wanted as a kind of long final farewell before getting our own lives back on track.
So, yes, the man on the road did exist, or had. But that didn’t mean I did, or had. While somebody may have spotted a minivan in the area, my excuse for having been here was tight as piano string. I’d heard criminals often revisited the scenes of their crimes, and while I didn’t consider myself a criminal, I did realize it behooved me to get out of here, never to return. As before, I covered my tracks at home with a domestic excuse, one I’d already planted with Nicole.
“Where the hell have you been?” Will demanded, when I walked in the door.
Not wanting to lie more than I already had, I hedged. “Excuse me, but everybody in the county decided to do their Labor Day shopping all at once,” I told him as I pushed past to set down grocery bags on the kitchen counter. “Why are you so upset?”
“You and the girls had gone off in different directions, so I was here looking through your books in the study when I heard the door bang shut in the studio—”
“Slow down, Will. Please.”
He placed his hands on his hips, looking less enraged than resigned. “Long story short, somebody broke in during the last hour and stole the Tamerlane.”
“What? Yours or the original?”
“The original, unfortunately,” he said, a note of despair clotting his voice. “What’s more, I’d hidden it where I was sure nobody would ever bother looking.”
“Slader?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“That’s my hope,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m in some serious trouble.”
I resisted telling him, You’re already in serious trouble, asking instead, “Did he take anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so. But, you know, Meg, he had to have been spying on me somehow when I stashed it where I did. There’s no damn way he could have intuited such a thing.”
Will walked over to the window and stared hard down the wide slope to the forest edge. “I suppose with a pair of decent binoculars—,” he mumbled.
“Maybe it’s time to turn Slader in,” I said, well aware he couldn’t really afford to do that without bringing down all manner of trouble on his own head, indeed on Nicole’s and mine as well. Still, it needed saying.
He didn’t respond, just kept searching the perimeter of woodlands past the garden’s rustic deer fence.
“Where is Nicole, by the way?”
“Outside drawing somewhere.”
“You think she’ll be safe doing that?”
“He already got what he wanted—or half of what he wanted—so I don’t see what point there’d be in his bothering Nicky,” he reasoned. “On the other hand, I’m not sure any of us is really safe until I give him what he came for in the first place. After that, we’ll see. And as for turning him in, I think we both know what a slippery slope that would be. Let me fulfill my end of the bargain, Meg.”
I hummed in reluctant assent before we both went quiet.
“Agreed?” he finally asked.
Nodding that I did while thinking I probably didn’t, I let the matter drop. My sense of balance wasn’t as stable as I was used to. Hoping to change both subject and mood, I asked, “You were saying you looked at those books in the study? See the Wells?”
“It’s wonderful,” he exclaimed, turning toward me with a strained smile. “Given how things have been disappearing around here, I put it in the safe. Meantime, I managed to get a few other books priced—at least gave you and your team my two cents’ worth.”
Saying not a word, I took a few steps over to Will, slid my arms around him, held him close. We had hardly touched in the last week and he felt warm and familiar against me. “We’ll get through this,” I whispered.
He kissed me, then said, “Let me help you put these groceries away.”
When Nicole walked through the back door into the kitchen not long after, her news sundered our momentary reprieve.
“Question,” she announced, with no greeting of any kind. “Have Maisie or any of her friends been camping in the woods? Like thirty yards into the forest, past the stone wall?”
The probability of Henry Slader’s having secretly set himself up in the woods was both terrifying and made perfect sense. “What did you find?”
“Not like there’s remnants of a fire or anything. But somebody’s been hanging out for sure. The ground cover was matted like maybe there’d been a sleeping bag used for a night or two. And there was an old stool closer to the edge of the field. I sat on it and you could see the back of the house clearly, even though it was camouflaged by barberry bushes.”
“Any empty seltzer bottles?” Will asked with an uninterpretable smirk.
“No, but I did find Ripley’s food bowl. Left it on the back porch.”
Will and I looked at each other. “That explains how he knew where you’d hidden the Tamerlane,” I said.
Nicole unconsciously finger-tousled her dark jagged hair, a nervous tic of hers, silver rings palely flashing in the sun, and asked what had happened. After I filled her in, Will looked at the wall clock. “I need to go soon. Nic, our earlier plan may need to be scratched. I don’t think it’s wise for you to come along.”
This was news. “You mean to the Beekman Arms? No way,” I fumed.
“It was my idea, don’t blame Dad,” Nicole told me, before Will intervened to explain that Slader had demanded that she, not he, was to deliver the Poe materials.
“Why?” I asked my husband, glimpsing fleeting surprise on our daughter’s face. “I don’t get it.”
“He said we shouldn’t be seen together again. And while I don’t disagree, there’s no feasible alternative. Besides, by breaking in here today, he tossed his rules out the window.” Will shook his head at Nicole. “I still don’t think you should come.
“I still think I should,” she insisted. “I’ll stay in the car while you make the delivery.”
My husband shrugged, hands in his back pockets. He was willing for her to go along, but neither of them knew what I knew about the mystifying blue Chevy, the murdered man, and their probable connection to Slader. “It’s risky enough that your father’s doing this, Nicole. I know he has to. You, on the other hand, don’t.”
“I rarely contradict you, Mom, but tell you what,” she said, turning to Will. “I’ll drop you off at the inn, then drive around nearby, maybe do an errand. When you’re done, just call my cell, then take a left on 9G, and walk past the old church—”
“The Terrapin?”
“—and head to the fairgrounds, where I can pick you up. This way, I’m there but not there.”
Flummoxed, seeing no better alternative, I reluctantly agreed. Nicole ran upstairs to change clothes while Will disappeared to pack the facsimile Tamerlane and letter. When they left, I couldn’t help myself. Sitting at the study table, surrounded by far less valuable and historically less important books than Poe’s fragile pamphlet, I broke down in tears.
These, t
hese were the books I’d always cherished my whole life, I thought. Not so precious, so priceless that blood might be spilled over them, or lives wrenched out of their usual orbit. I wondered if Poe, given the gothic darkness of his tales, wouldn’t have been weirdly flattered, morosely heartened somehow, by the magnetic desires his first book generated in the hearts of men so many years later. No, that wasn’t right. He would have been horrified, I thought, and comprehending. After all, Poe had a profoundly empathetic side to him that helped sustain his darkest visions. For all of Roderick Usher’s human failings, his literary creator still pitied him at the moment of his downfall.
Brushing away my pathetic tears, I also recognized that this was not the end of Tamerlane in our lives. No matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, this was only a fresh beginning. And by fresh I mean rotten.
Slader was sitting at the same table as before, facing the wall, when I slid in opposite him on the bench. He had already ordered seltzer with lime for himself and—tellingly, as he must have guessed I’d never allow Nicole to meet with him—a Jameson for me. I took a sip and marveled at how spruce and rested he looked—not unkempt as I might have expected of one who’d spent recent days and nights bivouacking in the woods. His pate was alabaster and appeared as if he never exposed himself to sunlight. Made me wonder if it hadn’t been his accomplice, Cricket, who’d been spying on us instead of Slader.
“Where’s your daughter?” he asked, as he brought his gaze up from the table, where his hands were lightly wrapped around his glass
“Where’s the Fletcher Tamerlane and letter? And why did you break into my house for it this morning when it was you who shoved it into Maisie’s hands in the first place?”
“Questions begging questions,” he calmly observed, leaning back in his chair with a pseudo-exasperated sigh. “And no answers, none that you’d believe. Call it insurance, call it leverage. Besides, it’s not like I took something that wasn’t mine.”
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