“So, Maisie, what’s the good news?”
“Having fun up here watching the grass grow?”
We were greeted by a friendly border collie, followed by the collector’s neighbor, a ponytailed woman in her sixties whose dress and manner suggested to me that she’d been something of a wild child in her youth. Batik tunic of reds and browns cinched at her waist. Moccasins on her feet, bangles on her wrists. Nicole would have loved to sketch her.
The attorney overseeing the estate was running behind, she informed me, and had asked her to let us into the house so we could begin packing. The books remained on their shelves, just as they had been when I’d visited this place a couple of weeks before. I asked the others to get started with boxing the lesser volumes of paperbacks, Modern Library books, runs of periodicals, and the like, while I concentrated on the library room, where the collector had kept his best material. Given that he had bought a number of books from us over the years, some of the volumes I pulled down were like old friends. His interests had run the gamut, but he’d been particularly keen on nineteenth-century American literature as well as mostly modern science fiction. I went through his collection, now and again handing Maisie a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Philip K. Dick, which she wrapped in heavy tissue and stacked in boxes we’d brought with us. The neighbor woman, meanwhile, carried on a mostly one-sided conversation to fill the silence. Doing my best to focus on what was at hand, I exchanged pleasantries with her about the strange weather.
“Your neighbor was quite an intriguing collector,” I said, in passing. “His two areas of interest are an unusual pairing.”
She told me about how he loved haunting book barns and out-of-the-way small bookshops all over New England, then continued with a lament about mortality and how much she was going to miss him. “At least he died peacefully. Pity he outlived the rest of his family,” she said. Admittedly, I was only half listening, but when she mused, “Did you hear about that awful murder over near Taghkanic, or was it Ancram?” I glanced sidelong at her where she was staring out the window.
“I hadn’t,” I said, briefly frozen with a large book in my hand.
Don’t ask anything, I told myself. Let her spin her yarn and see what she weaves with it. Meantime, I handed Maisie the quarto of Dante’s Purgatorio illustrated by Gustave Doré, which seemed afield in this library—unless the owner considered Dante a science-fiction writer, not an entirely absurd notion.
“They’re still trying to identify the body. Found him partly eaten by dogs or coyotes, they said on the radio.”
“How awful,” I managed, catching my breath.
“You all right, Meg—Mom?” Maisie asked. The second time I’d heard that question in recent days. Nor did I miss that she had referred to me as her mom in public.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s just that I had a similar worry when you were late coming home the other night and I thought I heard a coyote.”
“Oh, my,” the woman said to Maisie, wide-eyed. “Were you attacked by coyotes?”
Sensing possible jeopardy, my daughter glanced at me, Dante still in hand, and said, “No. They just come around our house sometimes.”
The woman returned her gaze to the clouds outside, saying, “It’s our own fault. We keep intruding on their habitat, what do we expect?”
Fortunately, the lawyer arrived soon after and scuttled any further exchanges about killings and coyotes. He presented me with a letter of agreement stipulating that the sale was final and everything was sold “as is,” which I signed after making out a check in the amount agreed upon.
When Maisie and I left—my colleagues stayed on to finish with their own packing, which was going smoothly—we took half a dozen boxes of books with us. At home, we carried the cartons inside and set them down in the study. I wanted to confer with Will about an inscribed H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man—just what my husband had become these past days—complete with a hand-drawn caricature, which I sensed might be the diamond of the lot. The collector’s one flaw was that he hadn’t been “condition-conscious,” as we say in the trade, but the Wells was an exception, a gorgeous copy, and Will would see that at once. Anything, I figured, to bring him back into our blessedly, bookishly, unassuming routine.
“Have you had enough of your mom for one day, or would you like to come pick some vegetables for dinner?”
“I’m good to help,” Maisie said, and we took down baskets hanging from the kitchen rafter and set off toward the chicken-wire-fenced garden, a short distance from the house. The sun was still strong though the afternoon was waning. Maisie picked peas while I gathered Swiss chard. I looked back uphill toward the printing studio and saw Nicole standing by the window, oblivious to me and her sister, holding a sheet of paper up to the light. Will stood behind her, peering at what was written or printed on it, and together they seemed to be engaged in discussing some detail. On any other day, with any other printing project, the vision of them there side by side would have stirred a deep contentment in me. But not today, not this project. My thoughts began to darken anew, as I realized that no one in my family had been untouched by this recent upheaval—Maisie maltreated, Will coerced, Nicole impelled, myself conflicted—when I heard a familiar cry.
Neither the yelp of a dangerous beast nor some pampered pretty kitty meowing for a bowl of cream. Instead, the feral mewl of a cat who seemed to have invented her own quirky way of vocalizing—somewhere between a squeak and a snarl—given she spent so little time, as far as we could tell, in the company of others of her kind.
“Where is she?” Maisie exclaimed, dropping her basket.
“Ripley?” I called out.
Sure enough, there she was, lolling at the garden gate, insouciant as the day she had adopted us. Maisie lifted her up and got scratched for the effort.
“She’s back,” she said, with the broadest smile I’d seen on her face in days. “Where have you been, you bad thing?”
I picked up Maisie’s basket and we climbed back to the house. The news of truant Ripley’s return would bring a smile to my husband’s face too. Little or nothing would make me happier, I thought, briefly allowing myself to believe that the weight of these last perverse and wayward days might soon lift, much like the pewter skies that had reigned over most of the summer. Then I remembered the man on the road. While there was nothing I could have done to save his life—he had already lost it—I might well have somehow prevented the indignity of his body’s being mutilated. I may not have known him. But I’d owed him that simple consideration, and horror had overwhelmed my humanity. How I would live with myself, going forward, was impossible to fathom. Yet there was no going back.
Early Saturday morning was overcast. Whether pearl or ash or some other shade of gray, I’d have to ask Nicole. Either way, overcast seemed fitting for the task I faced. So I thought as I poured my coffee before retreating to the studio to have one close final inspection of my handiwork. My and my daughter’s, I should say.