“Until now. And let us not forget the gifted Nicole.”
“Out of the question.”
“I’ve got to go,” Slader said. “You’ll find everything else you need’s provided, some small leaves for the letter, half a dozen sheets of cover stock. That gives you plenty for makeready, and enough for one good cover. Give me back any sheets you don’t use or that get misprinted or ruined in trial runs.”
“I can discard the waste sheets myself.”
He smiled at me again. “One can’t be too careful now, can one? Meantime, as we both know, the cover’s an especially important component since, given the book’s fragility, many people, including Abbie Fletcher, won’t tend to open it up past the first page or two.”
Realizing more time had passed during this delivery than planned, I offered to show him to the door.
“Don’t bother, I can let myself out. It’s not like I don’t know the way.”
Meghan’s earlier cliché about me being a moth drawn to flame crossed my mind, now replaced by the more piteous image of a moth drowning in printer’s ink. Of course, I scolded myself. Of course he’d been lurking around inside the house when we weren’t here. Scoping out my family, invading my private life. It wasn’t like we had a security system. Besides, hadn’t he managed to sidestep the one we’d installed at the cottage in Kenmare, when he broke in and attacked me? I wouldn’t even put it past him to have had something to do with Ripley’s disappearance. Sure, she was a wise old lady inured to the elements, but she rarely strayed far from her food bowl—and, for that matter, her food bowl itself had never strayed either. Compelled as I was to ask him how long he had been trespassing, I said instead, “Go right ahead,” and as he turned to leave, I asked, “When do we meet next?”
“How long, on a fast track, will it take to finish and deliver?”
Gazing out the window as I made quick calculations about setup, first-pass proof, performing any necessary adjustments, second pass if needed, then final print run, folding, binding, I told him, “If all goes smoothly, by Thanksgiving.”
“Sorry, that won’t do. Let’s make it a week from today,” he said.
“Ridiculous. Ink needs to dry.”
“Use a hair dryer. We’ve both done that with calligraphic inks, right?”
“Printing ink is more viscous. The heat can cause alligatoring, even bad crackling,” I countered, noticing that the deer had disappeared into the woods below the house.
“I’ll be at the Beekman Arms next Saturday afternoon at three,” he said.
“Will your ugly ginger-head friend be there shadowing us again?”
“Cricket wasn’t shadowing us,” said Slader, without so much as a blink. “He was just enjoying a drink like everyone else.”
“Cricket?” I rolled my eyes.
“He’ll be there if it’s useful to me for him to be there. Otherwise, he’s already done the work that’s necessary to our Poe book, so it may be time for him to disappear.”
“He made these engravings? Or pulled the paper?”
Slader let out an exaggerated sigh, tapped on his wristwatch, and said, “One last thing. Now that your daughter will be here, I want her to deliver the goods.”
“Absolutely not,” I snapped. “She can’t be involved.”
“You and I should never be seen together again. She’s the only one who can do it,” he finished, and abruptly left the studio.
I called after him, “That’s not going to happen,” but he didn’t respond. Even as I shouted a second time, I heard the front door close.
Like it or not, Slader had me trapped. Many times over the years I wished I hadn’t been compelled to remove Adam Diehl from our lives—Slader, not Diehl, had been my true nemesis, though I hadn’t known it then—but never had I regretted it more than now. Nicole make this contraband delivery? Even shadowed by her incognito father? Impossible. Meanwhile, any plans my wife had made to celebrate our daughter’s arrival for the holiday would have to be postponed. Or at least curtailed. What was more, I’d be forced to explain to Nicole in as roundabout a way as possible what was going on here.
How I wished I could keep her out of it. But, painful as it was to confess, my ability to distinguish dark blues, grays, and blacks had been diminishing in recent years, and I couldn’t confidently rely on my own color vision. I badly needed her help with mixing the exact shade of ink, an apprentice task she was used to doing. She’d nicknamed herself “blind Milton’s daughter” as a way of alleviating any self-consciousness on my part when she was assisting me with coloration on far lesser, more innocent projects. Equally important, though very much a task she was not used to doing, I hoped she could assist me with aging the faux Tamerlane cover. To be sure, this wasn’t why Meg and I’d supported her decision to go to art school, but I wasn’t unaware that she might have picked up fresh insights to offer beyond my old-school methods. She had already studied techniques for staining and scumbling, as well as precision scratching to produce an aciculated surface—all the tricks in the book. Tricks, however, not designed to be applied to the book.
Nor did it help that Slader had nearly crossed paths with Meg and the girls, and that rather than starting this unholy project from a place of even the most tenuous calm, I’d been thrown into an even deeper inner chaos. When I assured them there was no reason to worry about Slader darkening our door again, and swore that all was well and I was quite unmurdered, I was grateful to hear Nicole respond, “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
Early the following morning, having skipped breakfast, I fortified myself with strong black coffee and got down to work. My first step was to prep the press in order to run off test proofs on modern paper of a weight similar to Slader’s—I needed to get a feel for the plates and the bite of their type. When I heard a knock on the studio door, I knew by its confident timbre it was Nicole. I invited her to come in and shut the door behind her.
Without so much as a Beautiful day out—it was—or How did you sleep?—not awfully well—she asked, “So what exactly are we doing?”
Ambivalent as I was about the way she phrased her question, and all the pitfalls it implied, I told her, “As I hinted yesterday when I showed you the Tamerlane, I’ve been commissioned to make a facsimile of it for a client.”
“Client?” she mildly scoffed. “I thought this guy was your enemy.”
“He was, is. But without getting into our whole tortured history, I owe him this favor. When it’s finished, he and I’ll be square.”
As far as Nicole knew, her much-loved father had never failed to be straight with her. While her little sister’s twilight run-in with this stranger, and her mother’s manifest fear of the man, surely worried her, she didn’t question my commitment to make as perfect a replica—the word forgery was expunged from my spoken lexicon—as possible. Not that Nicole was some ingenue. Far from it. I knew that, like a treed cat on a slippery limb, I would have to be careful not to make any false moves with her. How much easier my life had been before Slader reentered it. A week turnaround on this project was short, yes, but on the other hand, it couldn’t be over with quickly enough.