Nicole said, “Good on Poe. Why reinvent the wheel?”
“Why indeed? But we ourselves are going to need to alter just a few things once we’re ready to move to Slader’s period paper.” I pointed at the name of the recipient of Poe’s Tamerlane cover letter and said, “This Theodore Johnston needs to be changed to another name. Date will be different by a day or two. Contents should stay essentially the same, but we’ll alter a couple of words here or there with others that have a correct period feel.”
“And Poe feel?” she added, without missing a beat. Startled by her tone, I glanced up from the letter. I couldn’t remember a time when Nicole had given me such a strange, concerned look. In this low light, her unblinking eyes appeared quizzical. Not a countenance I was used to or relished. Even her tattooed kingfisher seemed to be fixing its inky eye on me.
Softly, simply, she asked, “Why?”
Her question might have devastated me, but I hadn’t the right to be devastated. My daughter was no naïf, and I wondered if she’d already seen through my week of ruses anyway.
Just as softly and simply, I replied, making it up as I went, “Because the man who commissioned it—”
“Henry Slader.”
“Actually, another long-ago acquaintance in the trade, Atticus Moore—Slader’s his courier—wanted it to be as exact as possible. But to avoid any chance that it might in fact be mistaken as a forgery of the original, he asked that details be altered to something similar but different enough that there’d be no confusion. Thomas Johnson is the name he proposed. I haven’t bothered researching it and imagine it’s entirely fictitious. This way the facsimiles of both the Tamerlane and its accompanying letter could be used for educational purposes.”
“What about these originals then? What happens to them?”
I persuaded myself that Nicole was curious, not accusatory.
“If I understood correctly, I gather the owner up in Boston may be considering putting them up for auction,” I said. “Though they seem to cherish their anonymity, so I’m not sure how their identity will be protected. Possibly subterfuge.”
“It’ll be auctioned through your house?”
Knowing Nicole had a keen capacity for sussing out truth from lies—a trait genetically passed down from the barrister grandfather she’d never met?—I honestly told her I hoped so, even as I hoped I wasn’t blushing in the wake of my other half-truths. “It would be a high-water mark in any auction season, so of course I’d love for us to handle it.”
“But surely you wouldn’t want this Slader to have any involvement, right?”
“As I say, Atticus’s anonymous client is the owner, and he is acting as representative. He’s a member of every distinguished antiquarian book association there is.”
“That may be, but he doesn’t seem to have good taste in couriers, if you ask me.”
I chuckled. “I didn’t ask, but you’re not wrong.”
“Well,” she concluded, looking back toward the drafting board and antique paper that had an almost imperceptibly gray-green cast to it in the lamplight, “how many tries do I get to do this right?”
“We have three matching sheets,” I said, grateful to get back to the work at hand. Seeing the resolve on her face as she removed all of the silver rings from her fingers and set them aside, I asked, “So you’re up for this?”
She was, and then some, as it happened. Her second attempt proved to be the best of the three, although any of her drafts would have passed muster in the eyes of most antiquarians. As I had already done with proof passes, rejected pages, and other discards from the print job, I shredded the two lesser Poe letters and placed the keeper, along with the original, in the safe next to the Tamerlanes—one the first, one the faux. Slader had demanded I give him back any foul matter, my discarded pages, but I didn’t trust him any more than he trusted me. No, they were better off burned to curlicues of blackened ash in the fireplace out back, then stirred with a stick into oblivion. By destroying the documents myself, I was assured they would never resurface.
After thanking Nicole for lending an accomplished hand, I said, “Maybe we ought to try to get a little more shut-eye before the sun comes up?”
Together we turned off the studio lights.
“You realize, I hope,” she said, “that you could have done a better job at it than I did.”
I disagreed. “Either way, I don’t think we should let Slader in on our switch. If he doesn’t like the letter, I’ll take the fall, whatever that might mean.”
“Let him do it himself,” said Nicole, and we silently left the studio and went back upstairs to our rooms.
Meg shifted a little when I slipped into bed, muttered a few incomprehensible words in her sleep before turning over. I don’t know if Nicole managed to fall back asleep, but her father certainly did not, for hours on end. Friday would be spent painstakingly aging both the forged Tamerlane and its ersatz accompanying letter that Edgar Allan Poe had never written to any Thomas Johnson, fictitious or otherwise. My thoughts about the best ways to accomplish this churned away, until I finally dozed off just as the soft white disk of sun was climbing through the treetops outside.
The problem was this. The man on the road did exist. Just because he was dead did not mean he didn’t exist. Just because I didn’t know him did not mean he didn’t exist. My yearning to shunt him off to the edge of my consciousness, to suppress if not possibly even forget him altogether, had held for a day or so, but couldn’t hold longer. I was witness to a crime. Or the aftermath of a crime. By going out of my way not to report it, had I become an accessory to murder?
Since my family was slow to get up, I busied myself with breakfast—baked fresh bread from aging spotted bananas, resurrection metaphor there?—and reasoned whoever had driven his victim to that desolate lane and dumped the body onto the road must surely have seen me, or at least my car, not two hundred feet ahead. But what if they hadn’t? What if they’d been blind to anything beyond the wretched act they were performing on an otherwise postcard-lovely summer day? Or, all right, what if they noticed me but weren’t in the least alarmed by the presence of a lone woman, one who stood frozen with confusion and fear, just far enough away to be unable to change the course of what transpired? Was it possible I wasn’t viewed as sufficiently important to bother with one way or the other?
Will finally recognized the change in me at dinner last evening, but fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—he’d been so wrapped up in his own problems with that damnable Poe job that all he said was, “You seem miles away.”
The girls had gone out to the garage to adjust the chain tension on Maisie’s bike, spend a little sister time together, while Will and I finished with dishes.