Leaving the gloves where they were, I traipsed out into the thicket, which remained quite wet, shaded as it was from the sun. I hadn’t much hope of finding anything further—indeed, didn’t want to find anything, given how unsettling was the discovery I had already made—and didn’t. Any footprints, human or canine, were erased by rain. Nor did I possess the kind of deductive intuition that a Sherlock Holmes would have exploited to interpret this broken branch or that scrunched leaf. Phrenology of rustic woodlands, so to say, was never my strong suit and, as such, I gave up my dismal, halfhearted search and reluctantly returned to the gloves.
A more damning, insolent, yet insanely eloquent accusation couldn’t have been made, even if it had been written in large condemnatory block letters. You murdered Adam Diehl. You dismembered him and left him for dead. Now you’re content to let me take the fall?
How I wished I could speak with Henry Slader for a calm minute or two. Let him know he had things added up wrong. Sure, I bested his Baskerville forgery, big deal, but I had nothing whatever to do with the Montauk police’s interest in him. It was his own dealings with Diehl that persuaded them to seek him out. But of course the time for such a platonic dialogue, two respectful souls conferring, not only was long since past but was never, ever fated to be. There was nothing to be done about it. Nothing I could think of that morning.
I had no choice, meantime, but to hide the mess before Meghan got home. Fetching out a few plastic bags from the mudroom of the cottage and putting on a pair of my own gloves so I wasn’t forced to touch anything, I returned to the hole and withdrew the long nail. The calfskin gloves I pulled free of the stake, dropped them into one bag, and tightly cinched it up. Then I double and tripled bagged it. Carefully, I kicked the loose caked dirt over the shallow cavity and tamped it down with my boot. On Meghan’s return, I would simply tell her that I wandered out to have a look-see and found a partially chewed bone that must have been the object of the hound’s persistent interest. The plastic bag I hid beneath some mildewy burlap bags in the cellar, and as for the long nail I washed it clean of dirt and blood in the slop sink downstairs. Seeing that it looked like new, the most innocent stake ever to wink under the light of a bare bulb in a County Kerry cellar, I dried it off and burrowed it under a whole array of nails in a box on a workbench shelf.
Having showered and seeing that Meghan hadn’t yet returned, I decided to make us lunch, maybe recapture some remnant of the joyful married camaraderie we’d shared in Kinsale before the imposter Yeats—now banished to an unused cabinet drawer in an equally unused room—reared its ugly head. I set the table with our fanciest plates and silverware, got some soup going on the stove. Opening a tin of smoked kippers and toasting some thin-sliced bread, I boiled a few eggs and made up a quick cucumber salad. Self-consciously and perhaps unnecessarily, I placed Meghan’s copy of The Tower on her plate, a reminder that one of her presents was real, was given with affection. I planned on confessing to her that the reason I had Atticus locate a copy without a signature or any inscription was precisely because I wanted her to know it was unadulterated, unquestionable.
When she did arrive home, I helped her bring in the groceries and other sundries. She was delighted by my modest surprise lunch, although I could swear I detected the slightest distance in her demeanor and language. A distance so slender it wouldn’t have been noticed by anyone other than me. I assured myself she was still upset. And why shouldn’t she be?
“You figure out what your Baskerville hound was after last night?” she asked, setting her book on the sideboard and sitting down to eat.
“I did.”
“And, Sherlock?”
“Doggy wanted a bone, it seems,” and told her what I had found, the part that she needed to know, that is. “I left it where it was.”
“No, don’t do that. We’ll be up in the middle of the night again when it comes back looking for the thing.”
I agreed, knowing the sole reason I’d left it where I found it was in case Meghan had any desire to see for herself that the mystery was solved. After lunch, I went back outside by myself carrying yet another plastic bag and collected the calf femur, as I imagined it was, to bring back inside and toss in the trash. Purplish clouds were collecting over toward the west, promising another night of rain typical for the season. Walking back, I saw Meghan in the upstairs window, watching me I couldn’t see the look on her face but when she waved to me I could swear there was a mechanical stiffness to it, an obligatory gesture that wasn’t informed by the confidence and love I had grown so accustomed to seeing in my wife’s everyday moments. I waved back, rather too heartily I suppose. Likely trying to make up at my end the passion I found missing at hers.
This was going to be temporary, I knew. Still I couldn’t help but feel downcast. And now walking somewhat more tardily toward the cottage, my eyes lowered, I realized that the cleaver I had dropped on the grass when I chased after the dog last night was gone. I glanced back up at the bedroom window and, noticing that Meghan had withdrawn into the cottage, searched everywhere for the cleaver, to no avail. Not wanting to be asked what I was looking for, I gave up and went inside. I dropped the bone into the garbage bin and quietly, quickly looked all around the kitchen on the off chance Meghan had brought it in. But no. The cleaver was gone. Never, I hoped, to return.
MEGHAN THOUGHT WE SHOULD take the book to the police, which was, naturally, the last place I wanted to go.
“What would the complaint be?” I asked. “I’m not even sure that whoever did this committed a crime beyond ruining your birthday and what used to be a damned nice Yeats book.”
“The inscription’s a forgery,” she argued. “If anyone ought to know that’s against the law it’s you.”
Ignoring her barb, I said, “That’s true, but in this case the forger didn’t try to sell you the book. He gave it to you, and there’s nothing illegal about that, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of threatening, the inscription?” she persisted, probably knowing as well as I did that there was no concrete reason for us to bother the Kenmare sergeant with what surely was a private matter.
“Please don’t get mad at me if I tell you that while, sure, you and I don’t like the tone of it and feel there’s something wrong, an objective interpretation could just as easily suggest it’s perfectly friendly. ‘With all necessary affection’? ‘Remembrance of things to come’? A famous couplet from one of Yeats’s most famous poems? I can hear them asking us, Where’s the threat? We’re just settling in here, and I for one don’t think we ought to bring attention of this kind on ourselves.”
Meghan frowned, but it was a gently discouraged frown that made it clear she found herself agreeing with my points. After a moment, though, she did say something I had not thought of. “By the way, did you happen to notice that the poem he’s quoting is not from The Winding Stair but The Tower? What are the chances of that?”
She was right. A fine prickle of electricity bolted its way down my spine. I needed to make a couple of phone calls. First, I had to ask Atticus whether he had mentioned anything about my purchase of The Tower to Henry Slader, and if so—or, for that matter, if not—for godsakes never to mention any of my doings to the man in the future. Consider him my enemy, I planned on informing my Providence friend, though not in so many words. Second, I wanted to speak with a bookseller acquaintance up in Dublin who specialized in works by Irish writers, Yeats chief among them, see if he or any other dealers happened to have sold a copy of The Winding Stair recently. I didn’t want to call Atticus in front of Meghan because I didn’t want to further alarm her and, more to the point, needed to stave off letting her in on Henry Slader’s confounding relationship with me for as long as possible, hopefully forever. Slader could rip open my fragile world if and when it pleased him, it was becoming all too apparent. I needed time to figure out how to preclude that from happening, and scolded myself for having had the hubris to sell my Baskerville archive at Thanksgiving. That w
as a dangerous bit of immature roulette I might have spared both Slader and myself.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” I said. “But I agree it’s weird. Look, I can tell you where I bought your present if you want. You’ll see he’s a friend and that there’s no way he was in cahoots with whoever sent The Winding Stair. Either way, I don’t think it’s going to answer your question, any of these questions.”
Meghan, as if realizing suddenly that I hadn’t wronged her, that I had given her a beautiful book specifically without suspect handwriting in it—didn’t even pencil in a happy birthday wish on the front flyleaf—found her smile again, the smile I loved so much, and said, “I’m sorry, I think I’ve been taking some of my upset about this business out on you.” She walked over and wrapped her arms around me. “I don’t need to know where you got my lovely Tower and we don’t have to do anything about that other one. Who knows, maybe the kids at the shop are behind it and the whole thing is innocent as angel food cake. They could have hired somebody to make a decent facsimile of Yeats’s script and they worded it a little clumsily and meant no harm whatsoever.”
Drawing her closer, I could feel the slight bulge of her belly. I proposed in a voice as comforting as I could summon, “That’s how we’ll look at it unless we find out otherwise,” knowing even as I spoke that her conjecture might have had the weight of possibility, even probability, on its side but for the fact that The Winding Stair was a volume worth a couple thousand dollars at least. Or it was before the spurious inscription ruined it, turned it into a sickening curiosity. It was surely beyond the means of Meghan’s former staff who, at any rate, needed all their pennies to keep the shop afloat. No, who sent it meant to make a very clear, very serious statement—and, I knew, it was a statement intended for me more than my guiltless wife. I further knew, but no way was I going to tell her, that only an artisan of the highest order could have produced that inscription. One doesn’t just hire some everyday calligrapher off the street and hope for such perfection. Grudgingly, I had grown to admire Slader as much as I hated him.
My chance to call Providence came the next day while Meghan was at work. Taking my lunch break half an hour early with the excuse I had left my wallet at home, I drove back to the house and telephoned Atticus. Sure, if Meghan wanted to check she would be able to see it on the phone bill, but my need for privacy was less because I called my friend than that I didn’t want her to hear what I needed to ask him. Fate was on my side, as he picked up after a few short rings.
“So how did The Tower go over?” he asked, immediately. For a bookman as obsessed as Atticus, books always came first, the social niceties of enquiring how things were, how’s your health, all that congenial rigamarole, invariably taking a back seat.
“She loved it. I love it, too. Best copy I’ve ever seen.”
“Not a hint of the usual fading on that dust jacket, right?”
“Plus, the gold stamping on that binding underneath is bright as can be, blindingly so.”
“I told you it was a honey of a copy.”
“Well, I always said you’re a wizard. Thanks for finding it, Atticus, and like I said, just take whatever I owe you off what you owe me.”
“Already done.”
“Good, good.” Knowing my time was tight, I pushed forward, saying, “I have a kind of delicate question I need to ask you and hope you don’t mind keeping it to yourself. And don’t worry—” I anticipated him, “it’s not about forgery or anything of the kind.”
“Go on,” he said, with crisp Yankee brusqueness.
“We’ve talked about Henry Slader on occasion, and you were saying at Thanksgiving you’ve done some business with him.”
“Right.”
“I was just wondering if by any chance he happened to ask about me?”
Atticus Moore was a longtime friend, and I could always tell, even at a distance of several thousand miles, when he was disinclined to discuss something. A pause that went a beat too long, a modified tone in his voice. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, to be honest,” I said, quickly inventing a half-truth, “Henry and I had some dealings in years past that went south. Somebody I was talking to mentioned that he was still bad-mouthing me about it, and I wondered if he said anything to you.”
“Oh,” Atticus said, audibly relieved. “Nothing of the kind. He heard about my reacquisition of those Baskerville letters and made the journey to Mecca to see them for himself. I told him I planned on trying to sell them in tandem with the materials that came from him through another source. He was nothing but laudatory about both the archive and you. No bad-mouthing in the least.”
“I guess you must have told Henry you bought the Baskerville from me?”
“No need. He already seemed to know. I assumed you told him since he spoke so warmly about you. Asked how you were and about Meghan. Guess he knew her brother Adam quite well, he was saying. I think they were close.”
Tucking that odd last revelatory bit away to ponder or not some other time, I pressed on. “Did he ask where we’re living?”
“Oh, I hope I didn’t speak out of place. But yeah, I told him you were loving Ireland and had found a great place to live off the beaten track. It really all couldn’t have been more friendly and innocent.”
“No, I’m sure it was. That comes as a relief, then, that the rumor I heard was false.”
How dearly I wanted to ask Atticus if Slader knew I had purchased The Tower from him but I assumed he did, given the charming-like-a-fox geniality Slader had mimicked in order to get information he needed about me, my wife, our whereabouts. I wouldn’t have put it past the tawdry bastard if he even bought that doomed The Winding Stair from Atticus. Fell into the did-not-need-to-know category.
“One last thing, though, Atticus.”
“Talk to me.”
“If Henry or for that matter anybody else comes around enquiring after me and Meg, I would like to request you just play ignorant. We’re trying to start a brand-new life here after all the heartache we’ve both experienced and you’re one of the only people we want to be in touch with. You and the kids at the bookshop in New York. Hope you understand.”
“I respect that,” he said. “Sorry if I was a little loose-lipped with Slader. Didn’t seem at the time there was any ill will, quite the opposite. But we’re good. How’re Meghan and the little one on the way doing?”
“Fine, wonderfully,” I said and we finished the conversation on a very cordial note, although the minute I set the phone down, I bellowed at the top of my lungs a string of angry obscenities, directed at everybody, at nobody, mostly at myself. Slader knew everything. And Slader was here. That second call to Dublin I didn’t bother with. Whether The Winding Stair, a stair down which I wished I could shove Henry Slader, came from Providence or Dublin or Timbuktu didn’t matter any more. I had serious trouble on my hands and no good move to make.
Back in the stationer’s, I did my best but failed to keep my mind from wandering away from my work. Meghan had stopped by during her lunch to find me gone, and was told I’d gone home and why, so went about her business with the tacit understanding I would drop by at the end of my workday as usual. Eccles had me running the press, which was for the best given that it kept me in the back room, away from our customers. I couldn’t be sure I would be able to disguise my dismay about what I saw as an inevitable confrontation, and, besides, the repetitive labor involved with working the Vandercook had a meditative effect, cleared the mind at least temporarily. As a result, the afternoon hours quickly melted away, and sooner than expected my boss told me it was closing time. I cleaned the press, stacked the finished sheets neatly on the worktable, made sure the tins of ink and solvent were closed, and went to the bathroom to wash up.
Walking past the small industrial guillotine we used to trim business cards, menus, invitations, and all of our other print jobs, I thought of Adam’s missing hands and the accusatory bloody gloves recently planted in our yard. What I felt was not fear or
shame or inspiration or anything as emotional as all that. Numbness might best describe my feelings at seeing the sharp blade that we used almost daily and which, for whatever reason, I hadn’t much thought about before. In the bathroom I shook my head while soaping my own hands and rinsing them under a stream of very hot water. Fortunately, there was no mirror in the employee restroom. I wouldn’t have liked to see the look on my face just then. Not that I know what my demeanor might have been. Whether a scowl or smile, I didn’t need to witness it.
I dried my fingers, knuckles, palms, wrists, and held them before me. Mad as it may sound, I considered them, fronts and backs, for all the refined work they had accomplished over the years. All of us, I realized, had done very bad things with our hands, even those whose lifetimes were largely spent laboring in the sunnier fields of ethical goodness. Mine were just another such pair, with acts virtuous and sinful in their past. What they might do in the future I couldn’t know, although I swore that because of my wife and our coming baby I would do everything in my power to restrain them from erring in some destructive direction.
Outside, a south wind freshened the already nippy air. It tasted a touch of tidal brine as it often did, I had noticed, before rainstorms came in off the Kenmare River, a bay estuary where the freshwater Roughty meets the salty Atlantic beyond. I shoved those hands of mine, still warm from the faucet water, deep in my jacket pockets and strode down to the post office—no letters, thankfully—then up toward the bookshop. Unlike days past, I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder or search the pedestrians ahead for a face that should not have been as familiar as it was, given how few times I had actually met Slader. He would present himself when he felt it was opportune to do so, and since there was nothing I could logically do about it, I thought it best to conserve my strength by not devoting further energy to the matter.
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