On the front porch, I opened the unlocked door and poked my head in before entering the hallway. Other than the kitchen clock’s hollow ticking, the house was hushed, noiseless.
“Will?” I called out, deliberately trying to sound unworried as I strode the length of the worn antique Kazakh runner that lined the hall and into the kitchen. No sign whatsoever that my husband, or anyone else, had been in here. My forehead pulsed and palms grew damp as I continued to the back of the house and knocked on the studio door, which was closed. “Will? You in there?”
“Meg?” he answered. The preposterous nightmare image of him splayed out on the floor, soaked in his own blood, vanished the instant I opened the door to find him sitting at his worktable looking through a small drift of delicate, vintage-seeming paper, and jotting notes in his binder. “You all right? You look like you saw the proverbial ghost.”
Terror gave way to anger. “What was Slader doing here? That was Slader just now, wasn’t it?”
Will closed the notebook he’d been writing in and slipped the sheaf of papers into a portfolio. “It was,” he said, as he came around the table to put his arm around my waist and usher me out of the studio back toward the kitchen.
“You lied to me.”
“How’s that?”
“You promised he wasn’t going to bother us again.”
Will paused, took me by the shoulders, and said, “He didn’t bother us, or didn’t intend to. He meant to be gone before you were back from the station. Where are the girls?”
I couldn’t help myself. Forcing back tears, I said as sarcastically as I could, “They’re out cowering in the car, because he didn’t bother us again. Why on earth you would allow that criminal into our house, our refuge, our sanctuary here, is beyond me—”
“Meg—Meghan,” as that uncomfortable look of pleading and admonition loomed on his face again. “You’ve got to trust me that everything will be all right.”
“I’ll trust you, but you still haven’t told me what he was doing here.”
“Truth is, we’re grown men who made terrible mistakes when we were younger. Now we’re trying to make amends. It’s that simple and that complicated,” adding, almost as an afterthought, “From here on, the less you know about things, the better.”
“The less I know, the better? Will, that maniac mutilated you right in front of me, and I’m supposed to just not ask?”
“The girls are waiting, Meg. Let’s not upset Maisie more or ruin Nicole’s arrival. Please, just let me do this my way.”
Pull it together, I scolded myself, but not before warning my husband that if I ever saw Henry Slader inside this house again, I would go straight back to the city, taking both our children with me. Rarely was I this assertive because rarely did he give me cause to be. After our homecoming from the upheavals of Ireland and Will’s troubles with the law that were a small but real factor in sending us there in the first place, our lives had been, I confess, uncommonly settled, unruffled. Friends might even have viewed us as boring in our contentment. We seldom argued. We loved our girls. Savored our work with books. Slader promised to poison all that.
“What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”
Startled, we turned to see Nicole at the entrance to the kitchen, Maisie behind her.
“Your mother’s nervous about the man who just left,” Will explained, going over to give Nicole a welcoming hug.
After me, no one was closer to Will than Nicole, but still she said, “Who can blame her, after what that freak did to you. Not to mention Maisie.”
“I understand, and I agree,” he told her, told all of us. “But he’s gone, never to return. I think Maisie would be the first to insist she’s all right, no?”—at which Maisie, though still pale, vigorously nodded. “As for me, I’m here, quite unmurdered.”
“Good,” said Nicole, unsettled but clearly sensing it wasn’t the right moment to press him further. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Shall do. Meantime, can we consider having lunch? I thawed some chicken broth after you left,” he said, knowing full well that his attempt to pivot to another subject was as transparent as that very broth, if not more so. “Tortellini in brodo’s still one of your favorites, right, Nicky? I want to hear about your doings in the city, where life seems to be a bit slower than up-country these days.”
Over the course of that afternoon, the rhythms of family routine settled in again, uneasily but surely. Taking advantage of the sunshine, Maisie hunted around the yard for the still-missing Ripley before giving up her search to join me in the garden pulling weeds and picking tomatoes, kale, and pole beans. For their part, Nicole and Will went to the printing studio, where he showed her the rarest book she’d ever seen. He had assured me earlier, while the girls were out on the porch catching up with each other, that Tamerlane and its unsettling presence in our lives promised to be transient. He went so far as to say that though we could never reveal its being here, we might, as bibliophiles anyway, consider that sheltering it, however briefly, was an awkward honor.
On his first point, I was grateful. On the second, I demurred. Yet for all my striving to convince myself that things were going to be fine, that we weren’t living through an incipient calamity, there was no way I could explain why a small framed snapshot of me and my brother, taken when we were youngsters frolicking on a Montauk beach, was missing from the chestnut sideboard where family photos were arrayed in tabletop frames. Surely, Henry Slader had removed the memento. Other than our family, nobody had been inside the house.
Why do that? How well had Adam, whom Slader had impersonated for the unhappy benefit of me and Maisie, really known him? My brother had never mentioned Slader to me in the months before his death, though they were clearly acquainted. What was the purpose of stealing something with no intrinsic value whatsoever for anyone other than me, in that it served as a photographic prompt of a fond, faded memory? A memory of a time that had never been, in all likelihood, as happy as I preferred to remember it. Certainly not as content as my life had been in recent years, with the notable exception of Mary Chandler’s passing, and now this reappearance of Slader, which felt like a foreboding of death in and of itself.
True to his word, while Meg and Maisie were out of the house, Slader had delivered paper that matched the 1827 original with breathtaking fidelity. Wearing a pair of the disposable nitrile gloves I often used when mixing ink, I painstakingly candled each sheet against the daylight, both the virginal stock and several leaves of the original Tamerlane. The new was harmonious with the old, the fake visually indistinguishable from the prototype—although, of course, Slader’s paper wouldn’t by definition become “fake” until I printed Poe’s words on it. I marveled at its hue, texture, and weight, and told him as much. Once more, for a brief, surreal moment, I felt a weird kinship with this man, who, I’d grudgingly come to accept, was my equal in the dark craft of forgery. While I might have been overwhelmed by mistrust and ire, not to mention envy, I had come to realize each of us was a survivor of the other, each had shattered the other’s life in significant ways. We had been diabolically competitive back in our heyday, even before we’d ever met. Had cut one another out of lucrative deals and had forged that same illegitimate cache of Doyle letters about the genesis of The Hound of the Baskervilles, word for fictitious word, plus, for good measure, composed a passage of that famous novel that never made it into the book. We had each managed to cause the other to be brought in for questioning about Adam Diehl’s unsolved murder. I had deprived him of his covert business partner, maybe his lover; he had deprived me of several fingers on my right hand. He had suffered prison time that I myself might have seen had I not been much better at avoiding such indignities. At the end of the day, I had to admit, he was no worse a transgressor than I was myself. Had we been collaborators instead of competitors, God knows what satanic masterpieces we might have produced.