When Will returned from Rhinecliff, Nicole with him, I enlisted their help in sealing and stacking the boxes by the door so we could load them into the minivan the following morning. Because of the extra weight, we’d decided the girls and I would take the train while Will drove the Taconic to the city. If he arrived before we did, Cal and Eliot, the same bookshop colleagues who’d driven upstate to pack the rest of the collection, would help haul the boxes inside and get them into our back room for processing. Old penciled prices would next be carefully erased unless they had intrinsic bibliographic interest. Protective Mylar jackets would be cut and folded onto books that required them. Some that came to us damaged would be set aside for our freelance binder to inspect for possible repair. It was a process more laborious than our customers might imagine. One, also, that was in my blood.
Alone with Will later in our bedroom, after the girls had retired, I asked him how his meeting with Atticus had gone.
“The truth? It felt as if I were seeing a favorite relative, a brother even, after many years of being separated.”
Surprised by the warmth of his words, I asked, “But if he’s somehow behind all this madness—”
“He made it clear that the madness was Slader’s contribution, and not something he himself condones. In fact, I think Slader’s treading on dangerous ground.”
“Nothing new for him,” I said. “He belongs back in prison as far as I’m concerned.”
“He might be safer there,” were Will’s cryptic words. “Be that as it may, I did notice Atticus seemed unhealthy. He’s elegant as ever, eloquent as ever. Just something in his eyes made me think he was staring down mortality while tidying up some loose ends of his life.”
“He told you that?”
“I have a question, Meg,” Will said, any sentimentality now vanished. “He seemed to have followed your bookselling career over the years with a lot of admiration.”
“Nice to hear.”
“Was he ever directly in touch with you, maybe about buying or handling inventory?”
That took me aback. “No, I would have let you know. Why?”
“When we were saying our goodbyes, he asked me to give Maisie a special hug and kiss for him, then made a pretty unveiled threat toward Slader over the way he’d gone about getting the Tamerlane to me.”
“Slader was an absolute ape, and Maisie deserves all the hugs and kisses that come her way.”
“The look on his face when we talked about her was, I don’t know, complicated,” he continued, sitting on the side of the bed. “I’m not clear on how he even knew her name. I never mentioned it to him.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Slader must have told him.”
“You’re probably right,” he said with a shrug. “But there was real tenderness in his voice when Maisie came up.”
“He’s a father of daughters too, remember.” Then, “You know, Mary Chandler used to do quite a bit of business with Atticus after I left the shop, but they drifted apart not long after I bought back in.”
“Then she certainly would have mentioned Maisie to Atticus back in the day, wouldn’t she?”
“Not to forget the bookseller grapevine. When Mary had Maisie without there being a father in the picture, there was plenty of chatter and buzz. It’s not impossible he just heard her name along with the gossip.”
“Makes sense,” Will agreed. “Do you remember whether he ever met her, Maisie I mean, before Mary died?”
“Mary and I may have been close as sisters, but, like sisters, there were some things we rarely talked about, and Atticus was one,” I told him, climbing into bed. “She was sensitive to your falling-out, I guess, and didn’t want to ruffle feathers.”
After our traditional Labor Day family brunch, a mélange of French toast from the last of the bread and a patchwork omelet made with leftovers from the fridge, we closed the house and double-locked its doors. As we did, I couldn’t help but feel we were leaving it vulnerable to intruders. Or, that is, one intruder who seemed able to pass, like a ghost might, through the doors, windows, walls. The girls and I headed for the train station in a taxi, Will already having hit the road with my precious cargo of books. As we pulled away, I glanced back to see the farmhouse with its classic white clapboards, eyebrow windows, and shake roof receding, and felt a twinge of melancholy. Would our upstate sanctuary ever feel safe again?
We saw no bald eagles along the riverside on the trip down to Penn Station, but I did notice how pensive Nicole seemed, watching through the scratched windows of the train as the landscape shot past us.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I said.
She turned, smiled. “My thoughts aren’t worth a penny,” shifting in her window seat to face me. “I just hope everything will work out for Dad.”
Not knowing how much of his forger past her father had shared with her, nor if she’d surmised Atticus’s and Slader’s different roles in his life long ago, I said, “Your father may have his shortcomings. Who doesn’t? But he always seems to land on his feet.”
“Like a falling cat,” she said.
“It’s true he’s got a bit of the nine-lived cat in him, I’ve always thought. Maybe that’s why he and Ripley get along so well.”
“They both know how to negotiate their terrain.”
“Is Ripley going to be all right?” Maisie interjected.
“She’s a nine-lived cat too,” answered Nicole. “She’s probably got another softhearted family down the road somewhere, looking out for her. Ripley’s a survivor, worthy of emulation.”
“And, not to forget, your father has us,” I said, as the gray stone citadel of West Point ranged into view across the river. Though we had both passed it a hundred times before over the years, it occurred to me to ask, because of Edgar Allan Poe’s recent presence in our lives, “Maybe you know, but isn’t it true that Poe attended there for a time as a cadet?”
She turned again to admire the neo-Gothic architecture of the academy towering over the Hudson like some fortress out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. “You’re right. I think he was enrolled at West Point a few years after he published Tamerlane.”
“Am I also right in thinking he either resigned before they kicked him out, or they kicked him out before he could resign?”
“Actually, he deliberately had himself court-martialed. Troublemaking seemed like second nature to him.”
“Wonder if living there among all those granite towers and fortifications inspired his gothic sensibility.”
Nicole nodded. “Makes sense. I read somewhere that he liked the Hudson Valley at least enough to spend time hiking one summer around Saratoga Springs. Visited the farm that eventually became Yaddo, and revised ‘The Raven’ there. For all of his bad-boy brilliance, I think he was a nature lover.”
“More into ravens and rats than chickadees and chipmunks, though.”
I was grateful that Nicole, her summer job as a studio assistant over, was going to be able to spend a little time more with me and Will processing the new books before her final semesters at school swept her away. Quietly, without making a display of it, she’d amassed quite a store of knowledge. Talking with her, I increasingly discovered, was a learning experience. And Maisie, rather than pressing her face to the screen of some mobile device, lost in a galaxy of scintillant pixels, liked being near her sister for much the same reason.
As it happened, our train was delayed around Spuyten Duyvil, so Will did reach the bookshop and unload the car without me. The girls and I, when we finally arrived, spent much of the day at our apartment, unpacking and reacquainting ourselves with the same familiar rooms we’d known for years. Nicole had done a nice job with upkeep, watering plants, sorting mail, the like. We strolled outside to run errands, restock the fridge, replenish the wine rack, and afterward the four of us went to dinner at a favorite local Vietnamese restaurant, joined by one o
f Nicole’s friends.
The very low-keyedness of our East Village homecoming put my nerves at ease, and knowing that in the morning I would be joined by my family at the bookshop made me happier than I’d been since pre-Slader days. The memory of the man ditched on the road had by now nearly reached a vanishing point. And with it, I suppose, went some ethical part of myself, which, at this moment, I wasn’t clear how to retrieve from the edge of the horizon. As I fell asleep that night to the percussion of downtown sounds, I made myself a promise that I would start by finally telling Will what had happened, no more putting it off, no more obfuscating. I had always stood by my husband in good times and bad, and had to believe he would understand how I’d been shocked into paralysis. He was, I knew, the one person I could rely on for insights into what if anything I should do, having lied to those detectives.
On the walk with him across Tompkins Square the next morning, I said, “When we’re done for the day, I’d like to take you out for a drink, my treat.”
“Good news?”
“No, not really.”
“Would you rather just sit in the park and tell me now?”
I wanted to get my hands dirty with the new books first. Nicole and her friend were taking Maisie out to a film later, I told him, and so we’d have plenty of time to talk then.
“Fine by me,” he said. “I’m keen on going through the rest of his Wells holdings. That copy of The Invisible Man was the best I ever laid eyes on.”
“I appreciate your help, you know,” hooking my arm around his, bidding my mood to lighten. We were, I reminded myself, back in our downtown stomping grounds, back on crowded sidewalks and squares. Since all the encounters I’d had with Henry Slader had been in the natural settings of rural life—our isolated Irish cottage outside Kenmare, our solitary Dutchess County farmhouse—his power to threaten me here in the city seemed diminished.
In hindsight, I should have known. Should have foreseen. Had I been more prescient, I might even have been keeping an eye out for it. Though I would never ask him—honor among thieves, and such—I believe the discovery happened exactly as my old Providence colleague intended.
Cal and Eliot, along with Sophie, the senior member of Meghan’s small staff, had come in an hour before we got there and were already at work on the collection. They had laid out the better science-fiction titles on one of our long oak library tables in back, and the nineteenth-century American fiction and poetry on another. While Meg worked with Cal to price less expensive stock, Maisie hung out with them and helped to shelve. Sophie, who was most knowledgeable when it came to American literature, searched out comparable offerings online and, with Nicole’s assistance, entered catalog descriptions of books by Hawthorne, Irving, Dickinson, Twain, James, and other authors in the trove. As ever, music played on the sound system, some opera or another.
Myself, I went through the science-fiction titles and occasionally consulted with Sophie when she had a question about an issue point or inscription. Many of the works were familiar. A decent jacketed first of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles was here, as were Frank Herbert’s Dune and several, not all, of its sequels. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1870 was the earliest representative of the genre, and while it was clear from annotations made by the bookseller who originally sold it to the collector that it had been purchased as an autographed copy, Verne’s signature was all wrong. His V—which typically looked like a drawing of a seagull in flight—was stunted, stubby, a real botch, and the terminal e in Verne, rather than dramatically descending into a stylized underscore, not unlike that of Oscar Wilde, curled upward, as if raising its hand to bring attention to itself: Behold Me, a Sorry Forgery! Meghan wouldn’t recoup the steep price the collector had paid, but at least the book wouldn’t reenter the market on my watch as a first edition of Verne’s classic signed by the author. Indeed, I noted in the volume that the signature was incorrect, and advised Eliot to be sure not to shelve it in the section of autographed books upstairs. The irony of this was not lost on me.
Whether it was Rigoletto or La Traviata or some other Verdi confection playing on the radio, I couldn’t say, but the note, a kind of scream really, that came from Sophie’s corner of the room was no less dramatic. Had she, or maybe Nicole, cut herself with one of the knives we used to trim Mylar? But no, when I reached the table, Sophie was standing there, staring at me, mouth open, holding out the pamphlet as if it had just burst into flames. A copy of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the original publisher’s sheepskin binding, a bit the worse for wear, lay on the table in front of her. Nicole hovered at her side, betraying nothing beyond a convincing imitation of Sophie’s shock.
“This can’t possibly be right,” Sophie exclaimed, shaking her head. “No way can it be right.”
“What have you got?” I asked, more nervous than I might have imagined I’d be when this inevitable moment came to pass. While I knew it eventually would resurface into my life, Atticus hadn’t let me in on when or how. Then I remembered. The night after we’d watched that Hitchcock movie and gone to bed, when Meg thought she had heard noises downstairs, noises I dismissed as not being Slader because he’d gotten everything he wanted from me—well, he hadn’t. Clearly, he’d broken into the house not to burglarize us but to plant the original among Meghan’s new acquisitions before leaving for Boston to install my forgery in the Fletcher library.
Feigning naïveté, I took the Tamerlane from her with all the clandestine terror and reluctance that only the deeply conflicted, the very guilty, can possibly know. My heart was racing so quickly that there was probably no difference between this physiological sensation, knowing what I knew, and what I would’ve felt if I were in the midst of actually discovering Poe’s first book.
“What is it?” asked Meghan, who rushed in from the adjacent room, with Maisie and Cal behind her. “Are you all right, Sophie?”
“It was tucked in the back of a Twain,” she said, her voice wavering at the edge of numb elation.
“What Twain? What was tucked?”
“I’m sorry,” she said more slowly, catching her breath. “The Huck Finn back cover was loose, its hinge was cracked down to the mull, the mesh, and this other book was hidden there between the flyleaf and rear pastedown. It literally just fell out on the table when I was examining the Twain. The collector must’ve put it there for safekeeping, same way other people hide money in books, or photos, or letters.”
Meghan looked at Tamerlane in my hands, then hard at me. I glanced again at Nicole, who, I could swear, was gesturing with her eyes to stay cool. Maisie, keying off her sister, was calm and quiet, watching.
“I thought I recognized the title,” Sophie continued, filling a brief awkward silence. “But when I saw Poe’s signature on the title page, I knew for sure what it was. Am I right, Will? Meg? Is the signature correct?”
So Slader had gone ahead, against all reason, against my categorical insistence that he should not, and forged an autograph. My thoughts flew, like startled birds, in several directions at once. I felt fury toward Slader for having possibly ruined an otherwise transcendent thirteenth copy of the Black Tulip, the first new example to have surfaced in a generation. Fear that Meghan might confess then and there to the scheme—so far as she half understood it—accusing those who had conspired to deposit this Tamerlane in her shop, where she and her staff would now be credited with a bibliographic discovery of the first magnitude. But also wonderment that this unicorn my father spoke of in Philadelphia a lifetime ago, when we marveled together at one displayed in the Free Library, had stepped out from obscurity into the light.
“Given how exceedingly rare an authentic first edition of Tamerlane is, I have to tell you I strongly doubt it,” I said, gamely as I could manage. “But let me have a look.”
Carefully, I lifted the front cover to reveal the title page and saw the signature there, scribed faintly in penc
il. For one strange instant, I was seduced into thinking, This is right, how could it be? The impression didn’t—couldn’t—last, but I was damned if it wasn’t the most faultless Edgar Allan Poe autograph not made by the man himself that I had ever laid eyes on. Slader’d wisely elected not to use the author’s full name, just the initial of his long-suffering foster father’s last name, Allan, between his Christian name and surname. Edgar A Poe, clean, straightforward, beaming with authenticity, and no unnecessary flourish scudding beneath nor a full stop after the initial. Poe would likely have done the same had he ever in fact autographed this book. But I had a question to answer, and my family and Meg’s staff were waiting.
“Well, huh,” I said with a genuine frown. “It just doesn’t seem like a real possibility. If it were right, it would be the only one in existence. And that’s too good to be true.”
“If it doesn’t seem like a possibility, too good to be true, it probably isn’t right. We need to be careful,” Meg said, the pulse visibly pounding in her temples.
“Previously unknown things are discovered all the time,” Nicole spoke up, turning to her mother. “You yourself told me about that Igor Stravinsky manuscript—I think you said it was a funeral score for his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov—that everyone thought was lost forever during the Russian Revolution. Didn’t that just turn up a few years ago?”
“In Saint Petersburg, right,” I added, grateful to see Nicole side with me.
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