The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  “Actually, it went well in retrospect, insofar as such a meeting could be said to go well. I just don’t like Henry Slader, and the feeling’s mutual. But for what it’s worth, he does know rare books better than most anybody I’ve ever met.”

  “Rare books or forgeries of rare books?” she asked.

  “One doesn’t preclude the other, as far as knowledge is concerned.”

  “So did they fly? The facsimile, the letter? Sorry, I shouldn’t ask, but there it is.”

  “He said to say as much.”

  “You really want to go down to the river?” she asked, putting the idling car in gear.

  “Why don’t we do something a little more celebratory,” I said. “Let’s head back into town and drop by that wineshop across from the Beek. Pick up a bottle of a really excellent red for your mother. Not like it’s been a picnic for her this past week, with us holed up in the studio, the hermits of Tamerlane.”

  “I’m pretty sure they stock some nice Barolo from the Piemonte region.”

  “Listen to you,” I said, as we retraced my steps back to the center of Rhinebeck.

  In the shop, Nicole, whose college education apparently included advanced wine tasting, looked through the stacked cases of Côte d’Ors, Bordeaux, and Riojas until she found offerings from northern Italy, which she began assessing. As she did, I couldn’t help staring out the windows at the imposing white inn that rose several stories across the street, on the off chance of catching a glimpse of Atticus Moore. Assuming Slader had told me the truth—in this instance, I saw no reason for him to have lied, other than maybe to keep in practice—my once-close friend would be arriving, and probably lodging, there sometime soon.

  I remembered back to the time, the lowest in my life, when my early, extensive, and brazen habit of creating forgeries caught up with me and I was arrested. This would have been the mid-1990s, when I was in my middle thirties. Reimbursing dealers and collectors the money they’d paid, along with heavy interest in some cases, to avoid lawsuits and other legal quicksands, was difficult to bear. But having to apologize to Atticus, my closest mate and patron in the book world, was personally devastating. He was rightfully angry and hurt. And it was only by the grace of residual friendship and my full restitution of his losses that, over time, we were able to patch things up. It was to Atticus that I sold most of my venerated father’s rare-book collection when Meghan and I decided to get married and decamp to Ireland to start over. Atticus ended up deceiving me in turn—my moment for anger and hurt—only later to make his own apologies by sending me more money, surely, than he really owed me. We were even. But our friendship was fractured. That I was the one who messed up first always left me feeling, unfairly or not, that our convoluted downhill path had been my fault, not his. While his name came up in passing now and then, at either auctions or book fairs, we hadn’t spoken for over two decades.

  Now he was back in my life, I gathered, and it was clear as high-proof gin that we found ourselves together on the wrong side of virtue.

  “What do you think of this one?” Nicole asked, breaking my reverie as she held out the bottle of wine she’d selected.

  “I’ll defer to you,” I said. “Why not get two bottles?”

  “Splurging, are we?”

  “The label looks eighteenth-century and I like the eighteenth century.”

  “It’s vintage,” she said, “but not quite that vintage.”

  Outside on the curb, as we strolled toward the car, I saw him. Or thought I did. Nor was I surprised, since this isn’t that populous a town even on a holiday weekend swarming with city people here to bid farewell to summer. His hair was silver, longer than he used to wear it, leonine. While his age showed, he still had about him a kind of limber, prosperous appearance in cream trousers and dark-blue blazer. Were he done up instead with waistcoat and breeches, and perhaps a cape thrown in for good measure, he might have passed for a Georgian-era gentleman. He walked now with a cane, although from my vantage across the street it looked to be more of an affectation than for any medical purpose.

  “You know that guy, I gather,” Nicole said, as he turned up the sidewalk toward the wide front door of the inn, where, no doubt, he’d be meeting with Slader.

  I glanced at her. “Used to.”

  “Atticus, isn’t he,” she continued, without a pause.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Doesn’t take an Auguste Dupin to put it together. When you wanted to come back to town, and not only that but to a wine store right across from where you’d just been, I figured you weren’t quite done here.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted. “But tell you what. I think I’ve seen more than I expected to see, and enough’s enough. Let’s go home.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He’ll be in touch with me when and if he sees fit.”

  Nicole and I got into the car, she at the wheel as before.

  “Dupin, eh?” I said. “You’ve been reading your Poe.”

  “I mean, I studied him in school. But I’ve been rereading his tales in bed this past week,” she said, pulling away from the curb to head home. “Black tulips or no-color tulips, Poe’s the man. Conan Doyle himself knew that Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t exist without Poe’s Dupin. Think about it. I know Holmes is your all-time favorite, but they’re both eccentric, both cocky as hell in their way, and they’re both brilliant at deduction. Magically, surreally so. They’re shamans in tailored suits. And Monseiur G—, the prefect of the Paris police? He matches up with that dense Scotland Yard guy—”

  “Inspector Lestrade.”

  “Right, Lestrade.”

  “So who is Watson?”

  Without pause, she said, “Poe’s unnamed narrator, obviously.”

  Having been a lifelong Conan Doyle devotee, I knew he’d made a rather backhanded acknowledgment to his predecessor in the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, when Watson mentioned to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin,” at which the great sleuth scoffed, “Dupin was a very inferior fellow . . . very showy and superficial.” I sometimes wondered if Doyle wasn’t betraying some anxiety of influence with that, demeaning a literary forebear’s detective in order to make room for his own, though it is true that, many years later, in a 1912 poem in the London Opinion, he wrote

  . . . As the creator I’ve praised to satiety

  Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,

  And have admitted that in my detective work,

  I owe to my model a deal of selective work.

  Not by any means great verse, but honest and respectful.

  Straight-faced, I teased my daughter, “So how do you explain why Holmes smoked a clay pipe or a briar root in the Conan Doyle stories, and a calabash in the movies, while Poe’s Dupin is always puffing a meerschaum?”

  “Details, details,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at me.

  While I had no right to feel good about things, Nicole lifted my mood. A custard of clouds was gathering out west across the river, whisking over the mountains, which would make for a memorable sunset. After her day of sailing, Maisie would be cheery, if exhausted. Meghan, I hoped, might find herself calmer now that the Tamerlane materials were out of our farmhouse. Everything, I almost convinced myself, was going to be fine.

  Moran again. This time by himself. After a prelude of apology for disturbing me once more, especially on a lovely Saturday afternoon, he politely asked if he might have just a few more minutes of my time. Did he actually say, “Murder investigations run on their own schedules, and sorry to say they don’t much care about ours”? I was so rattled by his reappearance that it’s possible I might have thought that to myself. Either way, I invited him inside.

  As I led him toward the kitchen, I couldn’t help but glance at the photograph of me and Adam on the beach. An object that surely pre
served the fingerprints of Henry Slader. We sat down and I offered him ice water or maybe some apple juice, same as I’d proposed to Maisie on the night this all started.

  “Thanks, I’m fine,” he said.

  I did fill myself a glass of cold water, then sat across from the detective, doing my utmost to betray none of my nervousness, though I felt dull arcing electricity run up and down my spine.

  “Something came up since I was here earlier that I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Progress with your murder case?”

  “Not so much. Just that it’s come to light that you were caught on camera driving on the same cul-de-sac where the body was discovered the other day,” he said flatly, looking at the dried herbs and Amish baskets hung from the hand-hewn crossbeams along the ceiling.

  “Camera?”

  “No one was there filming you, as such,” he explained. “And it’s not like there are security cameras, which is a shame. Turns out one of the residents we questioned has digital wildlife videocams mounted on his porches front and back to tape, you know, foxes, fishercats, black bears, whatever goes bump in the night. Nature lover, all very innocent.”

  “I see,” I said. “So the camera runs in the day too, and it recorded me driving by.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I already told you that I went over there to check on my daughter.”

  “You did,” he said, his eyes now focused on me rather than the decor of the kitchen. “That perfectly explains your earlier trip. What I’m wondering is—well, two things. First, I’m wondering why you drove there a second time.”

  “That’s easy to explain—”

  “Second, and more important, I’m wondering why so much time elapsed between when you were caught on the camera headed in the direction of the dead end, and when the video shows you going by the other way, driving back toward the main road that would lead to town or home. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, Mrs.—”

  “Meghan is fine.”

  “We’re just wondering what the explanation might be.”

  His use of the plural we’re unnerved me, probably just as it was meant to do. “Am I under some kind of suspicion? I haven’t done anything.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” he said. “We’re just wondering if you might have more information than you’ve given us.”

  Knowing this was a crossroads moment, one in which it would have been best to tell Moran what I’d seen, instead I stuck with my story. Because I was now convinced that Slader, or whoever, hadn’t noticed me down by the guardrail, I felt surer than before about the plausibility of what I’d already stated for the record. Some small embellishment was now necessary, I gathered, so I told the detective that though I didn’t have any wildlife cameras mounted on our porch, I too was a nature lover.

  “It’s a peaceful and meditative place,” I said.

  “It’s peaceful right here, I’d have thought,” Moran countered, looking out the window at the serrated forest canopy below.

  “Yes, but I live here. Sometimes I want to get away to think.”

  “Got it,” he said, eyes back on me. “So you’re saying the second time you went there was to meditate again?”

  “The second time I went there was to make sure I remembered everything exactly the way I’d told you and your partner.”

  “I see. And was it?”

  “Exactly the same,” I said, feeling the confidence of a liar who was certain of getting away with her fabrications. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “If that wildlife camera taped me, wouldn’t it have taped the murderer’s car too?”

  Moran shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not. The guy had wiped the card in his camera before we got there, so he had jack left from the day in question. There’s another ingress road to the dead end, and it’s even less populated than the one your daughter’s friends live on. No cameras there, wildlife or otherwise. The perp possibly used that one. We don’t know.”

  “Too bad,” not knowing what else to say.

  “Got that right,” he agreed, getting up from the table. “Well, sorry to have bothered you again. A piece of advice?”

  “Of course,” I said, as we walked back to the front door.

  “Since we haven’t collared this perp, you might want to steer clear of that location.”

  “What about my daughter Maisie?”

  “Well,” he said, “it might be better if she stayed away too, just until we identify and catch our suspect. Chances are, he’ll never go there again. But we’ve advised the residents in that neighborhood to be vigilant and lock their doors.”

  Watching Moran stride down the steps and across the front yard to his sedan, I came to the realization that my decision not to tell Will what I’d witnessed might not have been a good one. I’d seen how crazed he was with the Poe job, how intimidated by Slader, whether or not he admitted it to himself. But I needed to confront him. Get the truth from him about why he felt threatened. If he’d been making forgeries behind my back all these years since we returned from Kenmare, I needed to know. If there was some secret they shared from the deep past, something Slader knew that would bring Will down, then I needed to know that.

  In the interim, I wasn’t oblivious to Moran’s having hinted, however obliquely, that I myself hadn’t been ruled out as a suspect. Or at least as a person of interest. Were he to accuse me, any protest I might make that, no, it was somebody else, in a pale-blue Chevy, who dumped the victim’s body while I, innocent as a child, merely looked on, wouldn’t wash. My moment for that had passed.

  Maisie was dropped off by the Bancrofts, windburn coloring her cheeks and forehead, full of stories to share about tacking and jibbing and manning the tiller. When Will and Nicole parked and came inside, she was regaling me with a tale about spotting a seven-foot sturgeon lazing on the waves—“all spiky like a dragon monster”—which caught the attention of her sister, who asked if Maisie could draw it.

  “After she changes,” I said, asserting some motherly authority, wondering if anything in the Hudson grew to that length. Maisie ran upstairs, two steps at a stride, as Nicole presented me with bottles of fancy wine. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Family reunion,” said Will. “We haven’t had much chance to sit down together this week, so I thought it would be good to revel a little.”

  “Thank you,” I said, touched by the thought, if beleaguered by my earlier concerns. “How did your meeting go?”

  Will got the corkscrew out of a drawer and opened one of the bottles, while Nicole reached down three etched-glass goblets from the cupboard, elegant inheritances from a mother-in-law I never knew.

  “So far as such a meeting could go well, it went well,” he said, pouring the dark-red wine and handing me a generously filled glass, and another to Nicole, who swished it around in the bowl of the stemware, nosing its bouquet with the confidence of a sommelier.

  “Prosit,” she said, as our goblets lightly chimed.

  We chatted for a few minutes about Nicole’s wine savvy, but I finally had to ask if Slader had admitted to breaking in here to steal the Tamerlane.

  “In point of fact, it was his Tamerlane all along,” said Will. “The issue was briefly raised, as quickly dropped, and, with both copies in his hands, along with both letters, I think he’s finished with such skulduggery.”

  “So, that’s it? No more Slader?”

  I noticed Nicole fidgeting with her rings. It was never a good sign for my resolute, unusually coolheaded daughter to display a case of nerves.

  Will set his wineglass on the counter. “I think so, yes. But Atticus Moore is in town, and this entire exercise, as I understand it, was to make it possible for the original Tamerlane to come up for sale.”

  “I don’t even want to know what that means,” I told him, caug
ht off guard by the unexpected presence, not to mention possible involvement, of Atticus. He was the closest friend Will ever had, in or out of the trade, and was the first to forgive Will after the forgery scandal broke. Though Mary Chandler and Atticus lived and ran their bookshops in different cities, I always appreciated how the elder bookman helped her from afar, shared customers and leads on archives or book collections with her. Success of the kind Atticus had achieved in his long career can sometimes breed callousness, but in his case, from my limited vantage, I saw it generating only largesse, certainly when it came to Will and Mary. He appeared to have been an honest broker when it came to paying Will’s part of the profits from the sale of his father’s books and manuscripts. Why they stopped speaking years ago, I never understood. Bookselling, though, like any vocation, can breed as many antagonists as comrades. Years back, on a visit from Ireland to the States, when I sold the last shares of my bookstore to Mary and her then-partners, I enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with Atticus and his family, and was sorry his relationship with Will had soured. Sorry, above all, for Will.

  “That’s fair,” he said, startling me from my reverie. “I can’t say I know what it means either. What I can say is that if Atticus and I could somehow come to a rapprochement, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

  All four of us helped make dinner that evening. Will and Maisie grilled local duck, leeks, and portobello mushrooms out back, while Nicole and I made a fresh walnut pesto with basil from the garden, prepared an heirloom tomato salad, and together sliced the first Cortland apples of the season to make tarts. Around the table, as a ravishing sunset of corals and tangerines painted the walls, we ate our feast in higher spirits than any of us had been in during the twelve days of what I privately thought of as the Henry Slader siege. While we were not precisely held prisoner by his army of one, our movements—mine, at least—had morphed into the self-conscious, looking-over-the-shoulder variety. We’d been living on tenterhooks and finally, that night, we all put our worries aside.

  During dessert, Maisie produced a pencil sketch that Will said looked just like an Atlantic sturgeon, prehistoric with a spatulate snout. “That’s a pretty rare sighting,” he said. “They’re endangered, you know.”