The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  Sylvia let out a sigh of relief.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “I was shaking. Could you tell?”

  I shook my head.

  “I just want to say hi to Mrs. Martin,” she continued. “I know you have to go, so …Thanks for coming.”

  “No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  John Grady had not moved in the past ten minutes. I glanced over to let him know that I had not forgotten my promise.

  “I’ll just use the ladies’ room before I go,” I said.

  “There’s one down the hall,” Sylvia replied.

  “I have an idea,” I whispered as I approached the ghost of the butler. I opened the heavy mahogany door to the bathroom, stepped inside, and waited for him to follow. He didn’t; his posture remained rigid and his gaze downcast. He shook his head slowly.

  “We can’t talk out there,” I said quietly. “Tad or Mrs. Martin might hear us. Or rather, hear me.”

  “No, no, I … I couldn’t, ma’am,” he said shyly.

  I understood his embarrassment at the prospect of coming into the bathroom with me. But something much larger was at stake. This just wasn’t the time for butlery propriety.

  “Please,” I said. “I really want to help you find that deed. But I have to leave in a minute. I have to go pick up my son.”

  He looked up at me, took a deep breath, and appeared to steel himself. He stepped gingerly inside, and I closed the door softly behind him. I leaned against the edge of the marble sink. He could barely meet my gaze.

  “You said that Mrs. Martin leaves at six,” I began.

  “She does,” the ghost replied.

  “Every day?”

  “Every day,” he answered.

  “I assume that the house has an alarm system.”

  He nodded. “Mrs. Martin puts in the code before she leaves at night.”

  “Is there anyone else besides Tad who’s in and out?”

  “No, Miss …”

  “My name is Anza. Please—it feels really weird to be called ‘Miss’ or ‘ma’am.’”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said politely. “Then you must call me Johnny.”

  “All right,” I said, “Johnny.”

  “Anza,” he said sweetly, bowing. “Pleasure.”

  “You know that Tad is going to London?” I asked. “I was thinking that if you could disable the alarm system, I could come back some night and try to help you find your book.”

  Ghosts, being comprised of pure energy, can really muck up an electronic burglar alarm. He would only have to stand right beside or in front of the primary control panel for the signal waves to be completely disrupted, effectively disabling the system.

  He frowned slightly. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can, trust me.”

  “Now, I wouldn’t want to be putting you in any danger,” he said. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” I said. “As long as nobody’s here.”

  He nodded vaguely. Something about this plan made him uneasy.

  “Look, you’re not doing anything wrong. That deed is yours. It’s just … lost.”

  He looked up searchingly.

  “And if you don’t find it now—” I broke off.

  “I never will,” he concluded sadly. “I know that.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  There was a moment of companionable silence. We could hear Mrs. Martin and Sylvia talking in the kitchen, but through the centuries-old walls, their words were just a low rumble. Tad’s leather soles were clunking back and forth on the floorboards just above us, and a road crew somewhere within hearing distance seemed to be jack hammering up concrete.

  “I can’t come tomorrow night,” I offered, “but I could come on Wednesday. We should probably wait until after dark, say nine thirty or so. I’ll come in the back way.”

  He nodded.

  “The alarm. What do I do?”

  “Do you know where the main control panel is?”

  He nodded.

  “At nine thirty, you go and stand as close to it as you can. Right up in front of it. You’ll see—the little red light will go off, or turn green, depending on what type of system it is. I’ll wait a few minutes and then I’ll come in the back way. I’ll figure out the lock somehow.”

  What I meant was, I would figure out a way to break in.

  “You come down and get me. All right?”

  “What will you tell your husband?” Johnny asked.

  “I don’t have one. Only a son.” I smiled.

  “How old is he?”

  “Five.”

  “What’s his name?” Johnny inquired.

  “Henry. Henry Owen O’Malley.”

  “Owen was my father’s name,” Johnny said softly.

  “And mine,” I replied.

  “You know it’s the Irish for John,” he continued. “As is Sean, of course.”

  “I do,” I said.

  The social event of the fall, in Henry’s kindergarten class, was to be the marriage of Q and U.

  “You’ll get a letter,” my son informed me, crumbling a stack of Ritz crackers into his cream of tomato soup. He brushed the crumbs off his palms and stirred the crackers into a thick, tomato mush. I hoped he would eventually eat some of this, and some of the grilled cheese sandwich that was getting cold beside his bowl, but with Henry, you never knew. He might finish it all and ask for seconds or eat three bites and beg to be excused.

  “It’s a real wedding,” he insisted. “With a cake. It’ll come in the mail.”

  “The cake?” I was teasing.

  “The letter,” he said.

  “Who’s it from?” I asked.

  “Me. And Miss O. And the other kids.”

  I nodded. Henry took a bite of tomato mush. And then another. I decided to add some Ritz to my soup. “When is this?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

  “Soon? Or in a while?”

  “In a while,” Henry said.

  Details of the event emerged at a glacial pace. They were doing two letters a week. This week’s letters were m and n. Didn’t I remember? He told me they had had mmmmmuffins on Monday. That was because mmmmmuffin was an m-word. Miss O. had made the muffins. Blueberry, but Melanie couldn’t have one, because she was allergic to blueberries. And peanuts. If she ate one peanut she would die. So Miss O. had a needle for a shot. In case by mistake she ate a peanut. Melanie, not Miss O. Miss O. wasn’t allergic to peanuts, but she didn’t like them, so she didn’t ever eat them.

  My eyes were beginning to glaze over. I had to break into this stream of consciousness or we would be here until midnight.

  “What are you doing for n?” I asked.

  Friday was going to be Nnnnnnight Day, Henry informed me. Didn’t I think that was funny? Night Day?

  “Very funny,” I said, falsely cheerful.

  “But not knight like a knight in shining armor,” he informed me, biting into his sandwich and pulling it away to create a long loopy string of mozzarella. “That’s a k word, but you don’t say the k, like ‘kuh-night’—you just say ‘night.’”

  “Hmm,” I said. “There’s a k in knight? I never knew that.”

  Henry nodded, pleased with his superior knowledge.

  “What are you doing for Night Day?” I asked. “Going to school in your pajamas?”

  “No! But after lunch it’s going to be Night. Miss O.’s going to turn off all the lights and pull down the shades and she’s going to read us two books with a flashlight.”

  “Which books? Do you know?”

  “In the Night Kitchen,” Henry answered. “Which she said is a little scary. And Goodnight Moon.”

  “Which isn’t.”

  “No,” Henry said. “But I wouldn’t be scared anyway.”

  “Not you,” I said. “You’re not the type to get scared.”

  “Nope,” he said, concentrating now on his sandwich. The information stream had apparently trickled into
a dry bed.

  “Sweetie,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite get the wedding part.”

  He gave me a look I expected I would see a lot in his teenage years, a look that said, How can you possibly be so dense?

  He took a deep breath and pushed his bowl aside. This was serious.

  “Okay. You know letters make up words, right?” I nodded.

  “Do you know what a vowel is?”

  “I do.”

  “A,” Henry said, refreshing my memory, or educating me, in case I was bluffing, “e … i … o … u …”

  “And sometimes y,” I sang.

  He looked relieved to learn that I wasn’t completely illiterate.

  Channeling Miss O., he continued. “Why do we need vowels?”

  I shrugged. He had a definite answer in mind, so I let him go for it.

  “Because otherwise,” he explained patiently, “words would sound like this: nklprtstrlkdtrplmpwxlpthk!”

  “Mlpktrbxlpdyrtszmlpywt?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning now and adding more loudly, “LMNPKLTRBZKHTRGY!!!”

  “That’s a mouthful.”

  “Yes,” he said triumphantly. “So you put a vowel next to a constenent so you can say it!”

  “I see,” I said seriously. “I always wondered about that.”

  “But the tricky part is, there’s only one vowel you can ever put with q!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah! U!”

  He sat back with a swagger, flush with confidence. “Never a?” I said. “Nope.”

  “E?”

  “Unh-unh,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “Or no i. Or no o. Or no u. I mean, yes u.”

  “But no y,” I said.

  “Yeah, so that’s why we’re having a wedding, so we’ll always remember. Dylan’s going to be U and Katie R.’s going to be Q. And Miss O. will marry them.”

  “Katie R.?”

  “Yeah. There’s Katie M. and Katie R.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure there’s going to be cake? Because it isn’t really a wedding without cake.”

  “Yup,” he said proudly. “Vanilla. We took a vote.”

  “Then count me in,” I said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HENRY HAD JUST fallen asleep when the phone rang. I lunged for it before the ringing could wake him and sentence me to another half hour of his stalling and claiming to be unable to fall back to sleep.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Dec.”

  This was a surprise. “Hi! Where are you?”

  “Down in the driveway. You busy?”

  “Nope; I just got him down.” I glanced out the window and sure enough, there was Declan’s truck. “You want to come up?”

  “Yeah, if that’s okay.”

  Oh yeah, it was okay. It was always okay.

  I speed-cleaned the kitchen for forty-five seconds, throwing our dishes into the sink and wiping off the table, stuffing the newspapers and junk mail into the recycling bin, straightening the rag rug. I opened the door at the top of the stairs so Declan wouldn’t wake Henry by knocking and raced into my bedroom to pull a sweater over my black T-shirt, which had gotten wrecked with bleach. Dec was pulling out a kitchen chair when I came back into the kitchen.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Hi. You working?”

  “Just got off.”

  “You want a beer?”

  He pondered this for a moment. “Ah, why not?” he said.

  I always keep his favorite—Smithwick’s—in the fridge, but he hardly ever has one. There are some problems with “the drink” in his extended family, so he’s thoughtful about alcohol. It surprised me that he said yes.

  I reached into the fridge, pulled out a beer, opened it, and handed it to him. I poured myself an inch or two of zinfandel and sat down.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “I have, thanks.”

  “Cheers,” I said, and we clinked bottle and glass.

  “So, I paid a visit to your pal Carlotta,” he began. “She’s a piece of work.”

  “Aw, she seemed sweet.”

  He made a face and shook his head. “She asked if she could call me about some screenplay she’s writing. Get ‘the cop stuff’ right, she said, Jay-sus, that’s all I need.”

  I laughed. “Did you get any more information?”

  He shook his head. “Not much. I did blow the bit about the boyfriend, though, and the bike, so you might want to give Sylvia a heads-up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dec had a sip of his beer. “Well, I wouldn’t be asking Carlotta to tell me about Sylvia’s boyfriend, now, would I? I’d be asking Sylvia herself. I told Carlotta straight up that the place had been broken into and that something valuable had been stolen. I just didn’t mention what.”

  I nodded.

  “There was one interesting bit, though,” he went on. “She told me the lad spoke with an accent. I said, What, like me? She said no, and not British, either, and not Italian or Polish, she would have recognized those on account of her grandparents. Perfect English, it was, though, so I asked her, could the accent have been Dutch?”

  “Dutch? Where’d you come up with that?”

  “Scully.” Dec raised his bottle in a toast and had a sip of beer.

  “The guy who agreed to help you?”

  Declan nodded. “He’s cooperating. Gotten downright chatty, he has.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s that or a decade or two of Christmas Eves at Cedar Junction.”

  “I guess I’d pick Door Number One,” I said.

  “There you go. I had some time alone with him before Bowen and Darrah came in to question him. I told him I needed a special favor, just between me and himself. Poor bastard; I like the guy. I told him I was the one who broke the Loughlin case, so I had a very special relationship with Judge Weinstein. You scratch my back, I told him, and I’ll scratch yours. On the QT, though—he wasn’t to breathe a word to Darrah or Bowen, or the deal was off. And I’d deny to the death that we’d ever had the conversation.”

  Dec had broken the Loughlin case with a little help from me. It was a horrible murder—a public defender named Rick Loughlin had been gunned down in front of his son and half the boy’s Little League team after Loughlin defended a Cambodian gang member charged with rape and aggravated assault. Loughlin had gotten his client off, and a week or so later, three members of a rival gang came after the lawyer one evening at a local ice cream stand, where he was buying cones for the kids.

  I offered to try to help, and it turned out I could. I located the ghost of Rick Loughlin at one of several locations I tried: the West Concord ball field, watching his son’s team compete for the city championship, in a game that was dedicated to him. Loughlin’s ghost, anxious to see his killer behind bars, told me everything I needed—or rather, Dec needed—to crack the case. In doing so, Dec earned the respect of a powerful judge, Judge Weinstein, who’d been a public defender with Loughlin before being appointed to the bench. When the time came for Scully’s fate to be determined, a whisper from Declan into the good judge’s ear wouldn’t hurt a bit.

  “Right off the bat, he had an idea,” Declan went on.

  “How would he know?” I asked, incredulous. “He’s been in custody! You sure he’s not just throwing you a dead end?”

  “And why would he do that?”

  “To get in your good graces. Make it seem like he’s eager to help.”

  Declan laughed, a laugh that indicated he was choosing to tolerate good-naturedly my serious underestimation of his shrewdness.

  “Well, there were some helpful details,” Dec said. “Like what?”

  “Bastard picked the lock, for starters. That’s not everybody’s MO, not in this day and age. No question it was a high-end job; fellow was probably paid a tidy sum to go after the one thing, and he went in, found it, and got the hell out. Didn’t even help himself to the emerald earrings, whi
ch tells you we’re dealing with a class act. As felons go, I mean. The emeralds would have been a snap to fence. Easy. Or at the very least, a real decent gift for his girlfriend.”

  He paused and smiled, and I was suddenly embarrassed. Had I ever been his girlfriend? Would he ever have thought to apply that affectionate term to me?

  Probably sensing the awkwardness of the moment, he went on. “He’s also got to be smooth enough to handle a complication like Carlotta. Runs into her on the landing with the book in his knapsack and doesn’t so much as break a sweat. Just launches right in, cool as trout on a plate. That takes a certain level of skill.”

  “So Scully thought of this guy …”

  “Immediately,” Declan said. “Dutch lad, Jannus Van Vleck. Probably involved in that Van Gogh heist. Maybe not the lifter himself, but definitely in the mix. No question. If somebody with money to burn wants to get their hands on a specific painting or something like, say, your manuscript, Van Vleck’s name would be on the short list. And Scully knows for certain that he’s been in the area.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “So what do we do? Find the person with money to burn?”

  Dec had a sip. “I’m thinking on that. I’ve gotta be really careful. They’ll have me by the—sorry! It’ll be hell to pay if it comes out that I’m cuttin’ deals on the side.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, well, you let me worry about that.”

  “Thanks.” I love it when Dec says things like this. He’s such a guy’s guy.

  He nodded. “But what I’m asking myself here is much more basic. Who knew about the book? Not that she had it at her flat, I’m not talking about that. Just—who even knew that the book existed?”

  “Well, Finny, obviously.”

  “Yeah, but he’s dead,” Declan said. “Isn’t he?”

  I nodded. “There’s Sam Blake, Sylvia’s old boss, but she really trusts him.”

  Declan gave me a sly look.

  “I don’t see it,” I said. “I really don’t. I had lunch with him. He’s just not the type.”

  “There is no type, darlin’.”

  “Plus, I doubt he has any money. I could ask Sylvia, though.”

  “Do that.”

  “They wrote to some people in the field,” I continued. “Finny and Sylvia did. But these folks are world-renowned curators at huge museums. They wouldn’t hire an art thief because … they wouldn’t have to. If they found out about something they wanted, they’d just buy it. Besides, one of them didn’t even think the book was all that important. Old, rare, beautiful, yeah, but not the discovery of the decade.”