The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  He had gone over the events of last night and this morning again and again and had come every time to the same conclusion—he was to blame for the death of Graham Sykes. The murder could only have been an attempt to cover up something that Sykes knew about B.B., something that would cast enough doubt on the authenticity of the Pandosto that Julia Alderson and Thomas Gardner would not be able to sell it for millions through the gullible American bookseller whom they had so far duped into believing that he had found the Holy Grail of English literature.

  They had given Peter only a week to evaluate the Pandosto, knowing that was insufficient time to detect its flaws—for it was undoubtedly a forgery. Why else would they have murdered Sykes? They assumed Peter would test the ink and paper, but they knew that B.B. was a master forger and that his work would pass the basic tests. But there were two things that Julia and Thomas hadn’t counted on. They hadn’t expected Peter to discover the books proving the connection between B.B. and the forger John Payne Collier, and they hadn’t expected him to find out about Graham Sykes’s upcoming book on B.B., which no doubt exposed him as a forger. They must have known about Sykes and his work, because the old man had come nosing around Evenlode Manor. Peter supposed that Julia Alderson and her lover had panicked when that happened, knowing they had to sell the Pandosto before Sykes published his book. The presence in Kingham of an American bookseller provided them the perfect opportunity. Julia suggested to her brother that he sell off some of the old family library, giving her the chance to put the Pandosto in Peter’s hands. No doubt she and Thomas had been watching him ever since, and when Peter went to Cornwall and found Graham Sykes, there was only one way to be sure the old man didn’t give away the game—murder Sykes and steal his manuscript.

  Suddenly the presence of his business card in Sykes’s study made sickening sense. It hadn’t been dropped there by accident. Not only had Peter left forensic evidence all over the crime scene, he was being actively framed for the murder of Graham Sykes.

  If Peter hadn’t come to Cornwall, Graham Sykes would probably still be alive and snoring loudly in his bed—and Peter was supposed to have protected Sykes, not endanger him. When he thought of the neck of Liz Sutcliffe falling open under the pressure of a kitchen knife, his panic transformed into anger. He was surprised to discover how possessive he felt toward Liz and how furious it made him to think of anyone harming her. But he liked the anger; it pushed away the nausea and dizziness and left him with determination in the face of his fear.

  As he sped toward London, he glanced frequently at the passenger seat, hoping Amanda might show up and tell him what to do, but she seemed farther away than ever. If she were here, he thought, she would calm him, she would convince him that everything would be okay, that the police would discover the real killer. In her absence, all Peter could see was a Hitchcock movie running in his mind—the innocent man is convicted, the metal door slams, the gallows are prepared. True that the man was always saved at the last minute, but that was the movies. There might be no gallows anymore, but that didn’t mean innocent people didn’t spend their lives in prison.

  He was surprised to find, when he glanced to his left for the tenth time, that Liz Sutcliffe was sitting in the passenger seat, twirling spaghetti on a fork.

  “Speeding may not be the best idea for a man who’s wanted for murder,” she said teasingly.

  “I thought of that,” said Peter. “But I thought it was more important to get to you.”

  “You don’t think I can take care of myself?”

  “I just don’t think you’ll be expecting a visit from a murderer.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to meet you and I handled that well enough.”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” asked Peter, but when no response came, he turned and found the seat empty again. He passed a sign saying he was one hundred miles from London and nudged the speedometer up to eighty-five.

  Ridgefield, 1986

  Peter spent much of the summer after his junior year in the Volvo station wagon that Amanda had given him. The upholstery on the backseat was badly scratched and the parking brake sometimes stubbornly refused to disengage, but as far as Peter was concerned, only two things about the car mattered: it made him independent, and it had been a gift from Amanda. He didn’t turn the key, close the door, or shift the gears without thinking of her.

  He took several excursions that summer, starting with day trips to Raleigh and Charlotte, then a weekend in Atlanta, and culminating with a three-week visit to New England.

  “Three weeks?” said Amanda, as they lay in the sun side by side next to the Ridgefields’ pool.

  “Hey, you gave me the car,” said Peter. “And you decided to get a job.” Amanda was working three days a week at an art gallery in Raleigh.

  “I know, but I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  “You’ll just miss the bed,” said Amanda. Peter had confessed to her that he planned to sleep in the back of the Volvo to save money. Charlie Ridgefield had offered to invest in Peter’s business, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it.

  “The bed and who’s in it,” said Peter, grinning.

  “Yeah, I notice you haven’t spent much time at your apartment this summer.” Amanda’s parents seemed happy to have Peter around and either didn’t know or didn’t mind that Amanda joined him in the guest room every night.

  “Do you want me to go back to my place?” said Peter.

  “No,” said Amanda, smiling. “I want you right here.”

  “And I’ll be right here.”

  “Yeah, in three weeks,” said Amanda, pretending to pout.

  “Well, we can have some fun saying good-bye tonight,” said Peter.

  “You have fun,” said Amanda, tossing her towel over Peter’s head. “I’m going for a swim.”

  Peter pulled the towel away in time to see Amanda’s bikini-clad body slice into the water. He wished he were an artist, that he could paint her. He couldn’t imagine being able to capture her beauty.

  That night they did have fun, but Amanda refused to say good-bye.

  —

  Heading north, Peter found bookshops in every small town. He drove through Pennsylvania and New York and spent five days in Connecticut and Rhode Island before heading out to Cape Cod. He ventured into Boston, and on his way back south he parked his car in Hoboken and took a train into New York. His bunk in the back of the Volvo gradually shrunk as the boxes of books multiplied.

  His usual trepidation about meeting strangers did not seem to extend to fellow book enthusiasts, and one of the most glorious parts of the trip was the long conversations he had with booksellers. Peter felt as if he’d finally joined a fraternity—not the beery, raucous clubs at Ridgefield, which had had no more interest in him than he in them, but a real brotherhood of men and women with a shared passion.

  Peter had saved up his money from extra hours worked at the library, and even though he wouldn’t take Charlie Ridgefield’s money, he had allowed both Francis and Hank to invest small amounts in his fledgling company. When Amanda had tried to do the same, Peter would not allow it. “You bought the car,” he said. “That’s investment enough.” He did allow her to make one other financial contribution to his summer. Every night he called her collect.

  He would share each day’s discoveries with her—underpriced gems found on a dusty shelf, charming villages with greens where he had eaten lunch, booksellers who welcomed him into their midst. Amanda would gush about her work in the art gallery and the artists and collectors she had met. But mostly they talked about nothing, talked just to hear each other’s voices, to be together.

  “Mother says she misses you,” said Amanda one night, as Peter stood in a phone both at a back-roads gas station in Massachusetts. “Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Tell her I miss her, too,” said Peter. In fact, he realized, he didn’t miss j
ust Amanda; he missed the family he had become a part of. “And tell Charlie I drove by Fenway Park the other day.”

  “And do you have any messages for me?” said Amanda.

  “Yes,” said Peter, “but I’m not sure AT&T would approve.”

  —

  He was in a phone booth in Princeton the night Amanda did not pick up on the first ring and he heard someone else’s voice accepting the charges after nearly a minute of ringing.

  “Peter, is that you?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Cynthia,” said the voice. “Sorry I took so long to answer. I came over to wait for your call, but I had trouble with the damn key. Jesus, I’m sorry, Peter. It was getting dark and I couldn’t see the lock and it was just . . . just the goddamn key.” Peter could hear both tears and hysteria in Cynthia’s voice.

  “Cynthia, are you all right? You sound like you’re kind of flipping out.”

  “It’s Amanda. Peter, you’ve got to get down here right away. It’s Amanda.”

  Peter felt a jolt in his stomach—that old familiar knot he hadn’t felt in weeks but that could hit him like a thunderclap, without the warning of gathering clouds. “What about Amanda?” She hadn’t felt well the past few days. She thought she might have had a bout of food poisoning—she’d said something about bad clams at a cookout. But it had been passing, she said. Last night it had been nothing but cramps; her period was on the way and it had just knocked her out this time.

  “Is she there?” said Peter, trying to keep his voice even. One hysterical person on the phone seemed quite enough.

  “She’s in the hospital.” Peter’s stomach tightened another notch, and sweat broke out on his brow and palms.

  “Give me the number,” he said tersely. “I want to call her. I need to talk with her right now. What’s the number?”

  “You can’t talk to her,” said Cynthia. “She’s in surgery.” Peter now felt the onslaught of a full-blown panic attack, Later, after he hung up, it occured to him that perhaps this was what genuine, justifiable panic felt like. The only way it differed from his usually irrational attacks was that Amanda was in trouble.

  “What the hell is she doing in surgery?” said Peter, giving up all pretense of calmness.

  “They think her appendix ruptured,” said Cynthia. It sounded like she was crying now. “She felt so bad this morning and you know her parents are in France so she called me and I took her to the doctor and he said . . . he said . . .”

  “Take a breath, Cynthia,” said Peter, who was having a hard time doing so himself. “What did the doctor say?”

  “He said he thought she had some sort of infection,” said Cynthia. “And they did these tests and an ultrasound and they say they think her appendix might have burst and so this afternoon they sent her to the hospital outside Raleigh and now she’s in surgery and they won’t tell me what’s going on because I’m not family.” Cynthia’s crying was steady now.

  “Bullshit you’re not family,” said Peter, surprised at his own anger. “What did they say before she went in?”

  Peter could hear Cynthia drawing a deep breath. “They said she could be okay, but it depends how far the infection has spread. They said . . . they said there’s always a chance in cases like this that . . . that—”

  “I’m on my way,” said Peter, before Cynthia could finish her sentence. He had no desire to hear her say aloud what he knew they were both thinking. Even though he had been up since seven and it was now nearly ten o’clock, he swallowed one of his anxiety pills, got in the Volvo, and headed south.

  London, 1876

  Phillip Gardner lay in the arms of his lover, the waning light of the winter sun playing across her pale, perfect skin. Miss Prickett had taken a liking to her second cousin, and Isabel had convinced her governess to make the journey to Brixton every Thursday. It had been the most glorious three months of Phillip’s life. On the one occasion after Phillip’s wedding when Mrs. Gardner had condescended to share Phillip’s bed, her performance had been perfunctory and dispassionate. Isabel was anything but. She threw herself into lovemaking with a passionate abandon that thrilled and sometimes even frightened Phillip. On more than one occasion he had feared her cries might cause the neighbors to send for the police; other times, when she collapsed on the bed, spent from her exertions, he feared for her health. How such a delicate creature could be capable of such energetic coupling was a mystery that both intrigued and delighted Phillip. Now she rolled atop him, slipping him into her with a dexterous hand and moving languidly above him. He reached for her breasts and dug his fingers into their softness as she increased her pace. He thrust uncontrollably, gripping her tighter and tighter, unsure if she was crying out from pain or pleasure or both, until finally, with a cry of his own, he reached his climax.

  Nearly an hour later he awoke to see Isabel sitting at her dressing table, running a brush through her waist-length hair. He loved seeing her hair unclasped and free, loved the way it cascaded over her still uncovered breasts, teasing her nipples to hardness with her every stroke of the brush. Though he was too spent to consider luring her back to bed, he was never too tired to watch. There on the stool before her mirror, turned partially away from him so that he could see not only hair and hand and brush and breasts but also the whiteness of her bare shoulder, the curve of her hip, the narrowing of her lower back, and even a hint of the cleft of her bottom, she was transformed from a woman into a work of art, as perfect as anything he had seen at the Royal Academy. He wished only that he could paint her in a way that would begin to do justice to her beauty and to the perfect happiness he felt in that moment.

  “When must you go?” she said, catching his eye in the mirror.

  “When must you go?” said Phillip teasingly.

  “I live here,” she said.

  “You mean you are visiting here,” said Phillip, sitting up in bed and taking a more serious tone. “Surely your parents expect you to return from your grand tour someday.”

  “I’d rather not think about it,” said Isabel.

  “Nor would I,” said Phillip. “But I cannot bear the thought that every time with you could be my last.”

  “This won’t be the last,” she said, her reflection smiling at him. At least he had extracted that promise—that he would lie in ecstasy with his beloved Isabel again. He rose and pulled on his clothes, all the while watching her hair sweep across her breasts as she brushed.

  “I’d best catch the five seventeen from Paddington,” he said, answering her original question. He leaned forward and pressed his lips gently onto a bit of exposed shoulder, sliding his hand up her side to cup a breast and run his thumb lightly across a nipple.

  “You don’t mind showing yourself out?” she said.

  “Not at all,” said Phillip, and he left her in front of the mirror, a smile on her lips and the dying light of day shimmering off her hair.

  London, Tuesday, February 21, 1995

  Peter had never driven in London before, and this didn’t seem like the morning to try. He saw a sign for the Reading train station, and decided the most efficient way into town would be to take a train to Paddington.

  He left the Vauxhall in the multistory car park and took his satchel with him, not wanting to let the Pandosto out of his sight for a moment. As he stood in the queue for a ticket, he could hear the morning news playing over a television that hung near the ticket office. He felt a sudden chill when he heard the headlines.

  “In Cornwall this morning, police discovered the body of an elderly man brutally murdered in his remote cottage. Investigators are currently on the scene.” Peter had left Sykes’s house only three hours ago. If the murder was already being reported on the news, he must have made a narrow escape indeed. But how could Sykes have been discovered so quickly? His house was miles from the nearest village. As Peter took his ticket and turned toward the platforms, he fel
t another jolt of dread slam into his body. The police knew about Sykes because Julia Alderson and Thomas Gardner had reported the murder they themselves had committed. No doubt an anonymous call had come in in a strong Cornish accent: we saw a strange American man round Mr. Sykes’s place last night, driving a beige Vauxhall. Then this morning, we’re out for a walk, and we hear screaming. There was no other explanation.

  He slumped into a seat on a London-bound train and half expected, in another Hitchcockian moment, to see his own face on the newspaper of the man sitting opposite him. How much had Alderson and Gardner told the police? Peter picked up the stray newspaper on the seat next to him and hid behind it for the half-hour journey to Paddington. His fellow passengers, if they noticed him, must have thought he was fascinated by rugby scores.

  At Paddington he did his best to immerse himself in the crowds that poured from the mainline station into the Underground. He was now utterly convinced that every law enforcement official in the British Isles was holding a copy of his picture and had received orders to “detain at all costs.” When he emerged from the tube into the relative calm of Russell Square, he came face-to-face with a uniformed officer just outside the station. After the policeman passed him with indifference, Peter allowed himself to think that, perhaps, he was safe for a bit longer.

  Bloomsbury Art Publishers was in a narrow building on Bury Place, just around the corner from the British Museum. Two stories up, on a small window, were painted the initials B.A.P., the only indication from the street of the presence of Liz Sutcliffe’s office. Peter pushed open the door and entered a cramped corridor that led to a tightly wound staircase. Beside the stairs was an elevator, but Peter supposed that walking would probably be quicker and mounted the steps. Taped to the door of Bloomsbury Art Publishers was a note on the company’s letterhead: TUESDAY—B.A.P. CLOSED FOR STAFF TO ATTEND SEMINAR OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS’ GUILD. PLEASE CALL AGAIN.