The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  “Nice drawing, Maze,” Nicole added.

  Afterward, we all watched an early Hitchcock movie, The 39 Steps, which, though part of it is set in the Scottish Highlands and our innocent protagonist is running from both police and murderous spies, made me nostalgic for Ireland. Ancient arched bridges over frothing creeks, moors shrouded in mists, old stone houses in picturesque valleys. Maybe we could visit over Christmas later this year, I thought, as on-screen a gyrocopter joined in the noir manhunt for our fugitive hero. Maisie had never been to the land of my birth, and Nicole, conceived in our cottage in Kenmare, and therefore, to my mind, an honorary Irish lass, would soon be too far along in her busy life to want to join us. I was so deep in my musings that I drifted in and out of the film’s plot, but was relieved to see that poor Richard Hannay, Hitchcock’s wronged Everyman, would in the end prove cleverer than either the authorities or the ruthless espionage ring bent on capturing or killing him.

  When we retired for bed after our memorably uneventful evening, I raised the Ireland idea with Will, who readily agreed. “It’s months away, so if we plan ahead around Nicky’s semester break—”

  “Let’s ask them both in the morning?”

  “Let’s do,” he said, kissing me goodnight before shutting off the light on his bedside table and falling asleep.

  I read a little before setting aside my book, extinguishing the lamp, and drifting toward sleep myself. Outside, all was quiet but for the periodic hoot of our nearby owl. An image of the Flying Scotsman express train rocketing across the black-and-white landscape of the film was what I remembered last, until some hours later, how many or few I couldn’t guess, I woke, not fully, and thought I heard a faint, distant thump. Not distant, downstairs. Then, another thump or thud sounded, softer than if the owl had brushed its wings against a window on the first floor.

  Fully awake now, I lay still and listened. Will’s breathing was deep and steady, and I resisted waking him as I knew he badly needed the rest. Naturally I thought of Slader, but from what my husband had said earlier, it seemed improbable he would have reason to trespass again.

  Time passed, my pulse slowed. Old houses, I knew, are percussion instruments in their way, making all manner of creaks and moans and ticks. Especially farmhouses such as ours, with a nineteenth-century laid-up, drystone foundation, in which there was no end of heaving and settling. Was it the same kind of wishful thinking I’d experienced the evening that Maisie was waylaid, when I imagined her scream was that of a coyote or a snared rabbit in death throes? Maybe so, but because we had locked every door and window, I began to second-guess myself. How long I continued to listen, I couldn’t say. But whether it was minutes or half an hour, the next thing I knew, sunlight was streaming into the room and my husband was gone from our bed.

  The others were stirring when I came downstairs. All three were beaming. They had specially made a breakfast of pancakes with blueberries.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked, sitting down at the table as Maisie poured coffee into my cup. “Why all the smiles?”

  Nicole had been chosen, it seemed, to answer my anticipated question.

  “Christmas this year in Ireland,” she announced.

  “Unanimous decision,” added Will. “When we’re back in the city, I’ll start working on logistics.”

  “Including a passport for me,” Maisie said, failing to contain her excitement.

  After breakfast, I began a cursory search around the downstairs rooms of the house to see what might have caused those noises during the night. The doors were still locked. None of the windows had been tampered with. Not a single book had been moved, so far as I could tell, in the study. Nothing had fallen off a shelf; no picture had come loose from its hook on the wall. I couldn’t fathom so much as a shadow of explanation for what I’d heard.

  “Need help?” Will asked, coming up behind me. “Looks like you lost something.”

  “My mind.”

  He laughed. “That makes two of us. But, seriously, what’re you looking for?”

  While I didn’t want to ruin his upbeat mood, given that he’d been suffering as much as—actually more than—the rest of us this past week, I explained about the nocturnal noises.

  “I hate to say it, but that makes no sense,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “The only person we know who’s been audacious enough to break in here—”

  “You mean crazy enough.”

  “Audacious, crazy, whatever—the only one who would do such a thing is you-know-who. Problem is, he already got what he wanted and he’s satisfied with it. And while we can call him crazy, he’s methodical, even businesslike, if rough as a buzz saw around the edges. He has no earthly need to be back here creeping around in the study.”

  That gave me an idea. “Ripley was in your studio last night. Maybe you forgot to let her out?”

  “As you know, whenever Ripley gets stuck indoors, she clues us in with some full-throated caterwauling, not just a quiet thud. Consider it a nightmare and leave it at that.”

  Will was right. I had to acknowledge that I’d been so anxious the slightest thing out of the ordinary made me more jumpy than it would have in normal times. For all I knew, I might’ve heard those same witching-hour noises in summers past and never given them a second thought. What was incumbent upon me to do was pull myself together.

  Disappearing is a dangerous business. A naked leap into the unknown, it promises an escape from adversaries, an exodus from life’s woes. But it’s also a confession, an abandonment of the very people who have stood by one’s side, defended one against all odds, believed when others refused. Running away from my troubles, no matter how bad they got, hadn’t crossed my mind for many years. How could it have, when I was married to a wonderful woman, with two magical, inimitable daughters, and a past of secular sins buried so deeply they were never likely to be lifted into the dreary light of day again, despite Slader’s harassment and threats? Sins, I should say, that I had willfully suppressed and all but forgotten until these past weeks, out of the habit of living a life free of wrongdoing. Or, mostly free.

  So why even ponder such an act of cowardice, forsaking everyone who ever mattered to me? Why give even a fleeting thought to disappearing—maybe inventing a new identity and slipping into the aether—when I knew it was nothing more than a craven fantasy?

  Because the invisible knots that bound me were tightening. Because every move I made in order to extricate myself seemed only to bind me all the more. And because I had to admit to myself that each day that followed Maisie’s encounter with Adam Diehl’s spurious ghost, his twilight doppelgänger who’d come to exact revenge on her father, saw me make one mistake after another, though I’d been convinced I was doing everything right. But I could no more undo what I’d done than run away from what lay ahead.

  After I got off the call and slipped my cell phone into my pants pocket, I looked around, as if emerging from a deep sleep, to find myself standing in the middle of the field below my house. Then I remembered why I was here. In an impromptu effort to keep my conversation with Atticus Moore private from my family, I had wandered past the garden, halfway to the edge of the woods. Because the signal was often stronger outdoors, neither Meghan nor Maisie—Nicole had run to town briefly on an errand of some sort—if she happened to look out the window, would think I was up to anything unusual. That is, unless rather than rejoining them in the farmhouse I simply put one foot in front of the other and marched off into a missing-persons file, not unlike what Agatha Christie did back in the 1920s after learning her husband, Archie, had fallen in love with another woman.

  Poor Agatha, I thought. How must she have felt when she later learned that a thousand officers and fifteen times as many volunteers took part in the desperate search to find her? Even Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, presenting a spirit medium with one of Christie’s gloves in the hope of tracking her down. When she was finally
located eleven days later at the Harrogate Hydro, a luxury hotel spa in North Yorkshire, she claimed to have no memory of how she got there or what had happened, but clearly she had staged the whole disappearance to shame her gallivanting husband. Either way, a dangerous business. And it didn’t save her marriage.

  My story would run along different lines, I thought, watching a swallowtail butterfly flit over the tall grasses. No worried armies of police would bother to hunt for me. Nor would my disappearance generate international media attention. Unlike Archibald Christie, whose infidelity drove his wife over the edge, Meghan hadn’t done me the slightest wrong. On the contrary. And rather than landing in some run-down New Age spa, nursing my misery in a fugue state, I could imagine myself winding up in a holding tank somewhere far upstate, having had too many Jamesons in a blue-collar bar near the Canadian border, say, and looking more suspicious than circumstances otherwise warranted.

  No, I thought. When you run away, people are rarely mistaken in viewing you with mistrust. Why flee if you’ve done nothing wrong? And the only people I would end up hurting were those who deserved it the least. Deserved it not at all.

  So rather than light out into the woods, I followed the meandering path of the butterfly toward the garden, contemplating my exchange with Atticus.

  “Why didn’t you come over and say hello?” he’d inquired, speaking as if two decades hadn’t passed, his tone of voice altogether amiable, that of the Atticus I’d known for many years before everything went south during an overseas call from Kenmare to Providence. A call during which the unthinkable—at the time, in any case—became clear to me, and Atticus’s unsuspected collusion with Slader reared its hideous head.

  “I suppose I could ask you the same question,” I told him.

  “You were with your beautiful daughter, and I didn’t want to interrupt the two of you. Besides, I knew that after I met with Henry, I’d be calling you today anyway, so thought it best to let life take its course.”

  I opened the rickety gate and lingered inside the garden. Persistent rains had made for a tough vegetable season this year. Meghan’s harvest of tomatoes, I saw, was barely half its usual size, and many of the lower leaves on the stalks were yellowed, with brown spots not unlike the coloration of the wings of the butterfly that presently abandoned me.

  “So how do you see life taking its course, old friend?” I’d said, without an ounce of sarcasm shading my use of the word friend. What I imagined we needed to negotiate was far too weighty to be polluted by quips, jabs, posturing.

  “That is going to depend on certain contingencies, some of which are out of my hands. How, by the way, is Meghan doing these days?” he asked. “From my provincial corner of the universe in Providence, I have to say how impressive she is, with her book business flourishing the way it has over the years.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, and I wholeheartedly agree. But as for how she’s doing these particular days? Not so well, as I think you might expect. Before Slader burst into our lives, she and the rest of us were doing fine—”

  Atticus’s response was quick and crisply intoned. “Slader’s insane antics had nothing to do with me, but I apologize for any of his misbehavior that upset your family.”

  “He needn’t have leaned so heavily into the faux-gangster angle, terrorizing my girl out of her wits. I probably would’ve cooperated without all the hysterics.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I doubt that,” Atticus replied. “But his behavior toward Maisie was unforgivable, and I’ve given him a piece of my mind about it. Now we’re at a different place, and you won’t be having to deal with him if I can help it. We need to talk, alone, as you’ve probably guessed. Much as I’d love to see Meghan and your girls, I think it’s best we get together in a more neutral environment than over there at your finca.”

  “That works in theory,” I agreed. “Forgive me, though, if I wonder whether meeting with you could result in my ending up like Slader’s accomplice, Cricket?”

  “What or who is Cricket?” he asked with such manifest puzzlement that I believed he had no idea what I was talking about. “Actually, no, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. In answer to your question, you needn’t worry about ‘ending up’ like anything, aside from quite a lot better off than you already are.”

  Having no idea how to respond to this claim, I waited.

  “Do you know the old hotel they renovated overlooking the river, down near the train station in Rhinecliff?” Atticus continued, interrupting the silence. “Adjacent to an iron footbridge over the tracks?”

  “I know the place,” I said.

  “The hotel bar is quite empty during the daytime, especially on a Sunday, and there’s a shaded porch patio just off the bar that looks out on the Hudson. All very civilized. Can you be here in an hour?”

  Now, standing among the waning summer plants, I picked one of the last of the cherry tomatoes, whose earthy scent was a reminder of how richly peaceful life had been two short weeks ago, before my earlier sins had caught up with me. I popped the tomato into my mouth, bit into its warm tartness, and closed the garden gate before hiking back to the house.

  Meghan was in the study going through more of the volumes in the collection she had bought. How I wished I could simply sit down with her and trade thoughts on Mark Twain’s Celebrated Jumping Frog—a debut markedly different from what Poe had experienced, one that brought its author widespread success not quite forty years after Tamerlane came out. The copy she was examining, with its fat gilt leaping frog on the front cover, looked a little the worse for wear but, still, it was always a good book to have in stock, if only because it wouldn’t remain there long. When, instead, I informed her that I was going out for a little while, she understandably replied, “Please, tell me it’s not Slader again.”

  “As I’ve said before, I honestly believe he’s gone from our lives.”

  Not one to mince words, she gibed, “As you’ve wrongly told me before,” then asked whom I was meeting with. At the mention of the name Atticus I could see a quick flicker of hopefulness pass across her face. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “Do you know whether Nicole’s back from town?” I asked.

  “I think so, yes. Heard the car pull in ten or fifteen minutes ago.”

  “All right,” I said, throwing on a light jacket. “Promise I won’t be gone long.”

  When I went to the garage and climbed into the car, my mind lingering on Meghan’s optimistic look, I was jolted by Nicole in the passenger seat, plugged in to one of her devices, listening to music, while reading “The Masque of the Red Death,” for all intents and purposes lost in her own world. Had she got it in her head to come along with me, having somehow overheard my conversation with Atticus? I knew that wasn’t physically possible. Even as I’d deliberately strolled down into the field, fifty yards, sixty, from the house, I had been careful to keep my voice low as I spoke with my Providence confidant from a lifetime ago.

  “Fish?” I said, after she told me what her Poe soundtrack was.

  “You don’t know Phish? Next-generation Grateful Dead.”

  “No, and I also don’t know what you’re doing in the car.”

  She pulled out her earbuds, shut her book, and said, “I know you’re more used to Mom’s classical longhair stuff”—indeed, Meghan had been sorting books to Vaughan Williams or Delius, I could never tell the ­difference—“but, trust me, Phish and Poe go well together.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “Meantime, you’ll pardon me but I’m going to have to ask that Phish and Poe and you get out of this car. I have to go somewhere.”

  Nicole turned toward me, her hazel eyes now serious. “So I gathered.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m sitting here.”

  “You can’t come along,” I said, with as much finality in my tone as I could
muster. My daughter was as stubborn as she was smart, and I doubted there was much I could concoct that would dissuade her from joining me. She was one of the three primary reasons I couldn’t flee from the labyrinthine mess I’d gotten myself into, one that dated back to before she even entered my life.

  Ignoring my dictum, she reached over her shoulder, pulled and buckled her seat belt. “I can sit in the car while you meet, or go sketch somewhere. Just, I want to be there to make sure you’re all right.”

  “Meet with whom?”

  “Slader, Atticus, Tamerlane the Turk, it doesn’t matter. You’re my father, and I know you’re in trouble, and I’m doing exactly what I imagine you would do for me if the roles were reversed,” she said.

  “Maybe my troubles should stay my troubles, not yours.”

  “Listen, I have a good idea what you’re up to. You’re making existential amends of some kind, and you’re in danger if you don’t follow through. How am I doing so far?”

  “You’ve always been very perceptive, but—”

  “Thank you,” she interrupted. “Now, I may not understand why you’re doing it, but I want to help you. Way I look at it, you invited me into this, I joined you without hesitation, and we’re in it together.”

  “I wish I could simply agree, but it’s more complicated than you think,” was my airy response to her heartfelt words.

  Ignoring me, she asked in a different voice altogether, “Have you ever read ‘The Masque of the Red Death’? It’s not one of his best, I don’t think, but his understanding of color—the ‘barbaric lustre,’ the ruddy light through blood-colored panes, the ebony this and scarlet that—well, it’s something else. Like a kaleidoscope from hell.”

  As I listened, a radical idea came over me, perhaps so fantastic as to be absurd. Not that it formed in words, as such, not yet. Maybe its genesis was in that glimpse of hope in her mother’s eyes just a short time before, a glimpse that suddenly stirred in me a similar hope that there might be a way out of the quagmire I was in. Who knew where some of our best, and worst, ideas finally come from? Much of what I began to ponder as a possibility came down to the character or caliber—I was hard-pressed to find the right terms for it, now that the idea began to frame itself—of Nicole’s loyalty. The affinity she and I had developed from her earliest years was still profound. And while she wasn’t in any way a so-called daddy’s girl—she’d been her own old-souled woman since grade school—she was, after Meghan, the person I most counted on in an unreliable world. How much of the truth about my past I could entrust her with, without her losing respect for me, indeed, without her coming to despise, revile, even repudiate me, I would never know without giving her fidelity a trial test.