The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  In shock, I handed the card to Nat.

  “Well, well, well,” she said.

  I’d planned to go into the Athenaeum, but around noon, when I was still drifting around the apartment, trying to get myself organized and out of the house, I realized that this made no sense. In less than five hours, two of which would have to be spent commuting into Boston and back, the much-anticipated weekend with Delia and Nell would be upon me, and I was nowhere near ready.

  I needed to shop, do laundry, bake chocolate chip cookies, clean the house, blow up air mattresses, and generally ensure that when the girls returned home with tales of their weekend, I wouldn’t come off as a slacker semi-mom with an empty fridge and no clean sheets. Shallow, I know, and probably deeply insecure, but Kelly sets a pretty high bar, with campfires and scavenger hunts and beach afternoons and complicated art projects. I didn’t want Nell and Delia telling tales of frozen pizza and hours spent zoning out in front of the TV.

  I phoned Sylvia, and as I expected, she was fine with my not coming in. Officially, for the purposes of Amanda Perkins and the director of Human Resources and other nonrelevant busybodies, I’m a freelance bookbinder working twenty hours a week. But as Sylvia and I both know, I wasn’t really hired to bind books. I was hired to interact with the monks.

  Finny Winslow would have been fine with this use of his money, Sylvia assured me, and whether she was right about that or not, the call was hers to make. And truthfully, there wasn’t much point in my being in the bindery today, or any day, until I could appease the persnickety ghosts by showing up with a monsignor or an auxiliary bishop in tow.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as I hung up. Not only did I have other things to think about than the concerns of three anxious spirits, which had basically taken over my waking life for nearly two weeks, I had other work to do. And I don’t mean baking cookies. There were the tacky Sherwood Glen coffee-table books, to be presented to the lucky new home owners in less than a month. I had four other binding projects in various stages of incompletion, and five or six inquiries to which I had yet to respond—calls and e-mails regarding jobs that might get me through Christmas, if I was lucky enough to get them.

  One concerned a full-time position that a friend had just heard was going to be opening up at the Boston Public Library. A job with benefits! No matter what else I did or didn’t get around to doing this afternoon, that was a call I had to return.

  Then there was my father, with whom I hadn’t spoken in two weeks. Nona’s seventy-fifth birthday was coming up, and Jay had sent me an e-mail about Thanksgiving plans. What that was all about, I had no idea; every year we do the same thing—converge on Dad and Nona and settle into behaving and being treated like children for three days. I also had to talk to Ellie about the costume, find a new pediatrician for Henry—the one we’d had since Henry was born was taking a staff position at Children’s Hospital—and go through the various notices and requests from the school, which had been piling up on the kitchen counter since the beginning of the term.

  In other words, I had to deal with Life.

  By six o’clock, when Declan and Kelly arrived with the girls, I’d made real progress. The cookies were cooling, the house was respectable, and I’d responded to all the work inquiries. I hadn’t trod the sheeny paths of Sherwood Glen, but I’d lined up two more freelance jobs, placed a call to my friend at the BPL, and left a message on my dad’s machine.

  I sat down briefly and contemplated what lay just ahead: forty-eight hours of supervising and cooking for and refereeing and entertaining three wildly overexcited children. Forty-eight hours. Without a break. Two overnights.

  I couldn’t do it. I was too tired. No, I wasn’t just tired, I was fried.

  Delia was bursting with anticipation as she raced up the stairs. She handed me a package she had obviously wrapped herself.

  “It’s a present,” she said, eyes sparkling. “Open it!”

  The wrapper was also a card. It read: “I Anza,” followed by lots of x’s and o’s and a signature fancied up with curlicues. There were rainbows, quite a few, above a picture of a little stick person holding hands (I think) with a big stick person wearing a triangle of a skirt. I noticed there were no other little stick people in the picture.

  The gift was a bracelet made of elbow macaroni and string and colored with Magic Markers. I tried to slip it on but it was too small.

  “It’s beautiful! I love it!” I raved, sweeping her up in a huge hug.

  Of course I could do it.

  Henry grabbed Kelly by the hand and dragged her in to show her his bedroom. She’d seen it before, many times, but in his excitement over their arrival, he seemed to forget that Kelly had ever stepped foot inside his room.

  Declan had good news and bad news. The bad news was, a guy he described as a “scuzzy lowlife” had been able to post Scully’s bail, so Scully had been released late on Thursday.

  “No!” I protested. “Couldn’t you find a way to hold him?”

  Declan smiled. “Afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

  The good news was, Scully seemed genuinely determined to avoid as much jail time as possible, so in the twenty-four hours since he’d hit the street, he’d made a number of fruitful inquiries regarding the recent activities of Jannus Van Vleck.

  “And?” I asked.

  Declan nodded.

  “What?

  “Could well be our man.”

  My stomach dropped. “How do you know?”

  “Well, I don’t. Not for sure, anyway, not yet. But he did fly from Amsterdam to New York about a week ago. And he was definitely here in the area between Wednesday and Friday—three of Scully’s contacts either saw him or spoke to him.”

  “Where is he now? Do they know?”

  “Possibly Nantucket.”

  “Does he have the book?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I paused and listened to voices and laughter from Henry’s room. The regular screech of straining springs told me that someone was bouncing, if not actually jumping, on the bed.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Declan asked. “Because no one’s reported a crime, Anza. You wanted me to handle everything on the DL, so I can’t do anywhere near what’d I’d be able to do if I could put it up on the board. Remind me again why we can’t just treat this like a standard B and E?”

  “Because there’ll be too many questions: why she had the book in her apartment, who actually owns it—”

  “And who does?” he asked.

  “No one, really. That’s the problem. Tad will feel it belongs to him and his sisters, and he’ll probably want to sell it, which was exactly what Finny didn’t want. He wanted Sylvia to keep on doing what they had been doing—talking to art historians, trying to prove that their theory was right. She was the only one he trusted with it.”

  “If he trusted her so goddamned much,” Declan said, “he should have left her the friggin’ book. It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

  “He probably wasn’t thinking straight, Dec. The poor man was dying.”

  Declan let out a sigh and reached for one of the cookies. He nodded approvingly as he took a bite.

  “So I was thinking,” he said, “that we might try floating a counteroffer. See what kind of bugs crawl out from under the rock. Meantime, we try to get a reliable bead on Van Vleck’s whereabouts.”

  This meant nothing to me: “float a counteroffer.”

  I must have looked as though he was speaking Japanese, because he said, “I’ll have Scully put the word out that a second party, someone besides whoever commissioned this, is aware that the book is …available, and is prepared to double Van Vleck’s fee.”

  “Who’s going to put up the money?”

  “No one, Anza.” He was speaking slowly, as though he was explaining a simple concept to one of the girls. “We don’t actually need the cash. We show up, demand t
o inspect the book, and then offer the bastard immunity from prosecution if he tells us who commissioned the theft. I tell you, it’ll fry my ass to let that slippery son-of-a-b walk, but you’ll have your book, and if we’re lucky, we might be able to take some kind of action against whoever put him up to it.”

  “And if we’re not? Lucky?”

  “Then at least you’ll have your book. And what’s-his-name can rest in peace.”

  I didn’t want to ask the question, but I had to. “Is this legal, Dec?”

  “Hell, no. I’m breaking every rule in the book.”

  “Then maybe it isn’t such a good idea.”

  “You got any others?”

  I didn’t, unfortunately, but I had no time to regret that, nor to bemoan the fact that I had ever dragged Declan into this sorry mess, because a small typhoon comprised of three manic children was roaring in my direction. Actually, it was the cookies they were roaring toward, so I only had a moment to sweep the cooling racks out of reach.

  You see, given a few hours to get Life under control, I can be a pretty fair mom, or at least the kind who doesn’t let famished children tuck into racks of warm chocolate chip cookies before they’re almost filled up with chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans.

  I smiled, though, when Declan snagged a couple more cookies for the road. For the journey to the inn where he was about to spend an enviable weekend romancing his wife, he could take as many of my cookies as he liked.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I HAD AN unexpected break on Saturday afternoon. As I cleaned up the kitchen following our first group activity, the surprisingly messy project of making homemade waffles, the kids started working on a hideout in the backyard, in the sheltered space between our overgrown holly hedge and the fence that our neighbors had recently put up.

  I’d tried to steer them toward another location—the points on those holly leaves are as sharp as pins—but the foliage there was dense and opaque, which I guess was why they liked the spot. They settled themselves in under the pine-green canopy, at first with just a painting tarp to make the ground beneath them sittable, but then with an ever-expanding cache of creature comforts—cups of juice, flashlights, cheese Goldfish crackers, books.

  The hubbub attracted Homer, the flatulent St. Bernard from a few houses over. Homer’s excited barking brought Ellie into the backyard, and as it turned out, she had just come home with half a dozen pumpkins. She wondered if the kids wanted to help her carve them. Beginning to tire of being pricked by the holly leaves, they jumped at the chance. They hurried into her kitchen, where the woodstove was crackling with an unnecessary fire, black bean soup was bubbling on the burner, and a pan of crusty corn bread sat cooling on the sill.

  Had she been planning to try to lure them into an afternoon of grandmotherly delights? I can’t be sure, though black bean soup just happens to be one of Henry’s favorites. But carving the pumpkins? This early? By Halloween, they would surely sag into soft, toothless caricatures of the witchy and the ancient. Still, there’d be no complaints from me—the kids were happy, Ellie and Max sure seemed happy, and I was overjoyed. That only left poor, abandoned Homer, moping on the steps.

  I drifted in and out of Max and Ellie’s as the afternoon wore on, making it known to them every half hour or so that I was more than ready to take the kids off their hands. But the kids didn’t want to be taken off their hands. Activities were flowing happily along from one to the next. Finally, Max put it to me bluntly.

  “Why don’t you just go … take a walk?”

  I smiled. As Ellie led the parade up to the attic, where she had two big trunks of “dress-up clothes,” Max remained at the kitchen table, up to his elbows in pumpkin guck. They were planning to roast the seeds, but first Max had to clean off all the slimy strings.

  “A walk where? I’m too pooped,” I responded.

  “Then go take a nap!” he snapped.

  I don’t take Max’s snaps personally. Snapping is what he does. He’s like my dad that way.

  “Sounds like you’re the one who needs a nap,” I shot back.

  “Aw, get out of here,” he said. “Stop bending my ear.”

  So I kissed him on the cheek, a kiss he squirmed away from, and left him alone with his pumpkins.

  I was just drifting off to sleep, wrapped up in an afghan on the couch, when the phone rang.

  I reached up to the table behind me, grabbed the receiver, and glanced at the number. Was it Julian?

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Anza?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Esther Winslow.”

  “Oh!” I struggled up to a sitting position.

  “Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  “No, no.” It was inevitable, really—you finally get a half hour to yourself, and the minute you close your eyes, the phone rings. “I just wanted to let you know that I talked to my sister.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. She thinks she might have the book.”

  “Really?”

  “She’s got some boxes in her attic that she’s going to go through. I gave her your number. I hope that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” I said. No problem at all, I thought. I’d be thrilled to hear from the psycho who nearly gave me a heart attack a few days ago.

  “Did you tell her about Mr. Grady?” I went on.

  “I had to,” said Esther. “It wasn’t a secret, was it?”

  “No, no! How did she respond?”

  “I don’t think she believed me at first. Not until I mentioned Millie.” Esther paused. “Anyway, she’s going to look for the book over the weekend. She said she’d call us both tomorrow or Monday.”

  “All right. Great. Thanks so much.”

  “No problem. I’ll talk to you soon. Oh, and Anza?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you see Mr. Grady before we talk again, give him my love.”

  “I will,” I said.

  All hell broke loose on Saturday night. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, but it did.

  At about five o’clock, I could hear through the upstairs doorway, the one that connects our third-floor hall with Ellie and Max’s, that the kids were beginning to whine and bicker. It was about time, really; if not for Ellie’s angelic good cheer and apparently limitless enthusiasm, it would have started to happen in mid-afternoon. In any case, it was time for me to step in and reclaim my grouchy charges.

  They put up only a halfhearted fight, which told me they actually were ready to come home. I put on the DVD of 101 Dalmatians and had them take turns in the bathtub. By seven thirty, they were clean and restored to relatively good spirits, and we were eating spaghetti and meatballs by candlelight. The candlelight was Nell’s idea and might have been responsible for Henry’s next brainstorm.

  “Can we make a campfire?” he asked. “And toast marshmallows?”

  “Where?” I said.

  “In the backyard.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the trees are too low out there. The branches hang way down.”

  “So?” he said, freshly.

  “So?” I responded, freshly. Sometimes he brings out the five-year-old in me. “You want to set a tree on fire?” I doubted this was likely, given the rain we’d had in the past few days, but it was the first thought that came into my head. It should have occurred to me that a five-year-old boy would like nothing better.

  “That’d be cool!” Henry said.

  Nell giggled.

  “Well it wouldn’t be very cool to burn the house down,” I went on. “I don’t think you’d be very happy about that.”

  In a gesture of sisterly solidarity, Delia said quietly, “We do it at the lake …”

  “I know, honey, but you have a place to do it there.”

  “No we don’t,” Henry argued. “We do it right on the beach.”

  “I know. That’s what I’m saying. It’s fine if you’re right by the water. But
you have to be careful if you’re building a fire right underneath a whole bunch of trees.”

  “We will be careful. I promise! Please?”

  “Please?” echoed Delia and Nell.

  And this was when I started feeling bad, particularly with the girls pleading. Despite the fact that they’d had a perfectly wonderful day, a day 99 percent of the world’s children would consider really first-rate, I suddenly felt it had not been enough. To make matter worse, Dec and Kelly could give them a campfire, not only at Lake Sunapee, but right in their own backyard.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said, trying to excite them with an excess of enthusiasm. “How about we make chocolate chip cookie sundaes and you can eat them out in your fort! In the dark! With flashlights!”

  “Yeah!” said Nell, who was always easy to please. Henry’s initial expression suggested that he suspected they were being conned somehow, but when Nell got behind the idea, followed by Delia, he went along.

  So out came the ice cream and the cookies, and the jar of fudge sauce and the bottle of cherries. I didn’t have cream for whipping, but I had red sugar sprinkles left over from Christmas baking and half a package of M&Ms.

  I produced a tray and three juice boxes. I turned up a couple of flashlights for them to share, of immense interest to the girls because they were the wind-up kind that don’t need batteries. An hour later was when it all went south, after the sundaes had been finished and darkness had really fallen and they were still out there in the dim backyard, playing a primitive version of flashlight tag.

  I had been cleaning up the kitchen and having a glass of wine, one ear attuned to their happy shrieks. The sounds had brought me back to the summer evenings of my own childhood, dusky interludes involving Jay and Joe and five or six other neighborhood kids: the Davios and the Cunninghams and Frankie Lobelli. We usually played hide-and-seek. A memory as clear as a film clip came back to me: I was crouched behind some kind of evergreen bush, bursting with excitement over the fact that no one—not even the big kids—could find me. I was using every fiber of self-control I possessed not to swat at a pair of humming mosquitoes that had found me behind the bush.