The car door was unhurriedly pulled shut from inside. I squinted hard but couldn’t make out who was in the driver’s seat. Time passed; no one moved. Certain the driver could see me, his rapt and helpless audience, I began to wonder if the whole performance might not have been for my benefit. Panic thinks its own thoughts. Had Slader somehow followed me after our brief encounter on my porch, only to dump what appeared to be a body on the road, a body that surely must have already been in the car when he returned the photo of Adam? Logically, I knew that the form lying on the ground was far too bulky to be my daughter. If not Maisie, then who?
Before I could puzzle my way further toward any explanation, the Chevy’s engine started. With dreamlike fluidity, it began backing up slowly, so slowly it felt like an arrant taunt, never stopping to turn around, and soon enough receded from where I stood aghast. The license plate that should have been visible above the front bumper was either missing or had been obscured. Again, how I wished I’d been astute enough to have taken down the number when this same car, which now disappeared around the long tree-choked curve, was parked in front of our house.
The creek burbled, indifferent. A breeze meandered through the uppermost branches of black cherry and ash trees, indifferent. My breathing was shallow and fast. I badly wanted none of this to be happening.
Rather than run down the road to check on whatever it was that had been shoved from the mysterious car, I climbed into the relative safety of my own and, hands quaking, managed to start the engine. When it came to life, its mechanical hum and the sudden accompaniment of incongruous harpsichord music on the radio helped snap me out of my liminal fog. I turned the vehicle around and drove at a crawl, scanning up ahead in case the Chevy driver decided to return, hoping my imagination had skewed something innocent toward the sinister, until I was alongside the heap on the side of the road.
It was a wasted hope. The body, for it was a body, lay crumpled on its side, facing away from me. An adult, a male in a dun suit. As I weighed whether to step out and look more closely, it occurred to me that no one I knew had this man’s anemic copper-colored hair, curly to the point of being wiry. He was broad shouldered, somewhat heavyset. The skin of his ankles—he wore run-of-the-mill brown walking shoes but no socks—was purplish white. His torso didn’t rise and fall, which meant he wasn’t drugged or semiconscious. One of his livid hands was raised, clawlike and rigid, inches above the pebbly ground. Remembering now the man Slader had argued with when the girls and I’d returned from Rhinecliff, I wondered if he wasn’t the same. Was this what Slader had meant by tying up loose ends? I stared for a long minute, paralyzed myself but, unlike the body, breathing. A fly, in stops and starts, traversed the rim of his blue left ear.
That was it for me. That was enough.
Even then I knew I wouldn’t be pleased, an hour from now, a day, maybe forever, by my decision to leave this man where he’d been unceremoniously ditched but, shifting my eyes from his corpse, I glared ahead and, deaf to any wiser angels, drove away.
Queasy and faint, I told myself I had to get to a phone immediately—in my haste, I hadn’t brought my cell—to report what I had just seen. But I pressed on, knowing that if I pointed my finger at Slader, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to implicate Will and rain fiery hell on my whole family. The sporadic front yards I’d passed earlier were even less populated now than they had been. Both the teenage auto mechanic and the nodding grandmother had moved along, which was good. No eyes meant no eyewitnesses. Maisie’s bike was gone as well, also a relief since it meant I didn’t have to encounter her here, and chances were she had already headed home. So far as I knew, not one soul had noticed me drive through this rural neighborhood, and by way of excusing my absence from the house, I visited a bakery in Red Hook, where I bought a fresh carrot cake, Nicole’s favorite and my own. Inevitably, on my way home I found myself being followed by a police cruiser for half a mile before it turned onto another road. Should I have called an ambulance? No point, I convinced myself. Judging by the color of his flesh and rigidity of his limbs, the man had been dead for some time before being abandoned. There was nothing for it. I breathed in and out.
To my relief, no powder-blue car was parked anywhere near the farmhouse. Will and Nicole were still back in the studio working as I entered the kitchen, removed my note, and threw it away. When Maisie came flying down the stairs two at a time, my queasiness returned. Was she about to confront me? Had she somehow seen me or even Slader drive by the Bancroft house?
“Maisie, there you are,” I said, numbly smiling.
“Meghan, there you are,” she teased. “Oh, look what you brought home. What, no raisins?”
“They only had plain today.” I felt my pulse beginning to slow again, now that I was back in this familiar world of daughters, cookbooks, apples and oranges in a yellowware bowl on the granite counter—the ordinary, everyday, mundane things we surround ourselves with in the hope they’ll somehow protect us from different, harsher worlds. “What’s doing with the Bancroft twins?”
Picking up one of the apples and taking a healthy bite, she said, “They’re going out on the water this Saturday with their dad, sailing down to Pollepel Island to see the ruins of Bannerman Castle. And I’m invited. OK for me to go?”
I nodded, told her yes, so long as the weather held and she promised to wear a life jacket as always. Life jacket, I thought. How immoral, how illicit of me was it to realize, just then, that the poor fellow with the wiry hair who lay lifeless on the side of that deserted road seemed, for a brief moment, to be so far away as not to exist at all?
Ripley had been missing for a full week by the time Nicole and I began printing finished sheets of our Tamerlane on the Vandercook press. My daughters had ventured with me out beyond the tall grass surrounding the house, well past the verge of woods, absurdly calling her name and making various tongue clicks and kissing sounds to catch her attention. Being half feral and very much not a dog, she didn’t respond. While I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that Slader’s abrupt entrance into our lives and Ripley’s equally abrupt exit weren’t coincidental, I was damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of accusing him. I remembered all too well how he’d mistreated a poor hound back when he was bedeviling me in Ireland. Besides, maybe Ripley had, as strays sometimes do, just moved along to freeload elsewhere. Or perhaps she’d fallen prey to a coyote. Still, I found myself glancing out the windows, hoping to catch sight of her as she skulked in the green, altogether aware that Saturday was only a few days away and other, more urgent matters needed my undivided, undistracted attention.
Despite my promise to Meg, I hadn’t found the courage to come clean with my unsuspecting daughter. Hours passed as Nicole and I, like surgeons hovering over a patient, checked and rechecked plate placement and ink distribution on the rollers, and held our breath as blank sheets of chaste paper rode the cylinder and emerged with Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry impressed, with perfect imperfections, on their surfaces. It was as if we were superintending a time machine, ink-smudged demigods—the idea made us smile, me guiltily, she with delight—fashioning not something new from old, but old from new.