I smiled, or rather winced, and shook my head. “Nothing of the kind.”
“Maybe I’m projecting,” he added. “Wouldn’t put it past me.”
In a single fleet moment, I decided to tell him what I’d witnessed, then backed away from the idea. Part of me didn’t want to hear his advice about how I should or shouldn’t proceed. Another part reminded me that I had no proof that Slader was behind the wheel, and to make such a claim was to allege, in so many words, that my husband was working with a murderer. Maybe even a two-time killer. Even worse was my confusion about Slader’s filthy intimation that Will knew about his relationship with my brother and had hidden it from me. I hardly needed to remind myself that the man was a provocateur and disrupter and, what’s more, a liar.
“What I want,” I vented, though not raising my voice, “is for you to finish what you’re doing and get Henry Slader out of our lives.”
“Believe me, Meg, this is not how I’d hoped to spend our last full week of summer with the girls,” he said, setting down a dish he’d been drying before placing both his palms on the stone counter, head lowered, leaning forward like a reluctant marathoner stretching his muscles. “Saturday afternoon he’ll have what he needs, and that should be the end of him coming around.”
“Yes, it should. But I’m beginning to wonder if there will ever be an end of Slader in our lives.”
Yet now, this morning, as I stood at the same kitchen counter, it occurred to me that going to the police and reporting what I’d seen might be a better way to rid us of this forger and stalker. I could say I was too traumatized to report it earlier. Could set things straight so I didn’t have to spend another minute with this bleak, grimy cloud hovering over my head. It might even provide a path for me to tell them about Slader’s theft of my photograph of Adam, which in turn could open my brother’s murder case to fresh scrutiny.
Reality set in, however, when I imagined the questions they were bound to ask me. Questions like, What were you doing on that dead-end street? Did you recognize the deceased man? If not, then how is it you recognized the powder-blue Chevy? Its driver, you say, is a friend of your husband? Not a friend, you say? What is his relationship with your husband? May we ask where your husband is right now? You say he’s meeting with the man you saw in the powder-blue car, tomorrow afternoon at the Beekman Arms? What time did you say they’re scheduled to get together? And if, as you claim, this man your husband’s meeting with stole your family photograph and returned it to you undamaged, what charges do you think could be pressed against him after the fact? While we’re at it, why haven’t you reported any of this before?
I felt as pinned as a butterfly on a black velvet mounting board, in a display case with one-way glass where I could be seen but couldn’t see out. Maisie’s sudden appearance in the kitchen saved me from these swarming questions.
“Smells good in here,” she said. “Can I help?”
“Would you mind cutting up some melon?” I asked, forcing myself to turn away from my morbid thoughts and pay attention to the present.
After breakfast, Will and Nicole returned to the studio, while Maisie came along with me on an errand for the bookstore. A couple of weeks earlier, our shop had purchased the library of a collector we’d done business with over the years, who had passed away after a brief illness. He was a widower with no next of kin, and the attorney charged with settling his estate found an unpaid invoice of ours among his papers and called the shop, asking if the volume might be returned. He further asked if we would be interested in making an offer on the rest of the library, which, of course, we were.
So Will had joined me—this was before Henry Slader reentered our lives—and one of my senior staff, who’d taken the train up for the day, to go through the collection and tally up what we thought would be a fair price. Buying libraries is one of the bread-and-butter ways booksellers replenish their inventories, and while several other dealers were also invited to bid on the whole lot, ours proved to be the best offer. The sole caveat was that the winning bidder had to remove not just the obviously valuable volumes, but every last scrap of printed matter in the house.
“Toss out whatever you don’t want to sell, or give it away,” the attorney said. “I hope you make a profit on the rest. But it all has to go so we can clear out the house for sale.” We agreed and set about making arrangements to pick everything up before the end of August.
The collection was a bit of a hodgepodge. As often happened when we bought a library under similar circumstances, where an executor or attorney was trying to expedite the dispersal of property so an estate could be closed, this one was a combination of musty magazines and out-of-date catalogs, cheek by jowl with some genuinely desirable first editions.
On the drive over, I filled Maisie in about all this, telling her we were meeting with two of my colleagues she liked, Cal and Eliot, who had driven up from the city in a van and would be taking the bulk of the library back down with them. “This collector kept his books all over the house,” I said.
“Even the bathrooms?”
“Do you and Nicky have a stack of books in your bathroom?”
“Even in the bathrooms,” she said, answering her own question.
“The guys are going to pack everything that’s not in the library, which is where I’ll need your help. I need to sift through the better items there so we can take them back to the house for some preliminary pricing before we head to the city,” I said. “Some of the books are pretty old and fragile, so I’ll need for you to give me a hand boxing them as carefully as possible.”
Today’s work was just the kind of “bibliophilic triaging”—Will’s tag for sifting the gems from regular stock and recyclables—that my husband loved to help with, and I was sorry this Poe business precluded his coming along. He possessed a sixth sense about which books might have an authorial inscription inside, and was a walking encyclopedia of “issue points,” the typos and other arcane details that made the difference between a copy being the true first edition or a later printing. He also knew more about relative rarities than anyone else I’d ever met. Whereas many a book person might prefer, say, a pristine first edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in its handsome pictorial dust jacket from 1903, it was the far less famous The Sea-Wolf, published the following year, which—if it was in its legendarily rare dust jacket—would launch Will into an ecstasy. Even torn, even chipped, even in pieces. Pure ecstasy.
No slouch myself, I welcomed the distraction of being in my favorite milieu—rooms filled with books—with Maisie at my side. The library was in an old Carpenter’s Gothic near the river, just north of Tivoli. When we pulled into the drive, my colleagues were already waiting in their van. They were quite a pair—one a short, prematurely balding lapsed academic, the other a skinny urban book geek who looked every bit the heavy-metal devotee he was. Both greeted me with friendly deference even as they showered Maisie, who was adored by the bookshop staff, with greetings.