Sometime in the moonless night I had come to the firm resolve to deny Slader one of his primary demands. While his point was well taken that some differentiating damage was needed to make the new Fletcher copy distinct from the original, and that a couple of trivial fabricated flaws in the true thirteenth Tamerlane—a couple of closed tears, some soiling that wasn’t there before—couldn’t depress either its intrinsic or auction value in any catastrophic way, I’d become adamant about not forging Poe’s autograph in the pamphlet. No matter how good the forgery, how seductive it would be to potential buyers—just fancy possessing the only known signed copy—I was convinced it would raise suspicion. Suspicion that wouldn’t enhance its stature and worth, and might even ruin both. Why take the risk when this correct, incontestable copy was already such a rare bird in hand? It had also dawned on me that while my reputation at the auction house was golden, or at least gold-plated, and my past as a confessed forger was all but forgotten, I was the last person to be entrusted with the authentication of a unique signed Tamerlane. Surely, it would doom the whole scheme.
As I set out down the hallway to the printing studio, I heard a knock at the front door. The rest of the household was still in bed, so I reversed course back through the kitchen and down the front foyer, wondering who the devil would come around so early on a weekend morning. I hoped it wasn’t some local with bad news about Ripley, especially now that she’d just resurfaced. While our road was seldom traveled, she had no fear of traffic and there was no training her to stick to the relative safety of the fields and woods.
I opened the door to find two men on the porch, each plainclothes but displaying a badge. Stomach churning, though I knew that I hadn’t broken any laws—it would be my word against his if Slader claimed I was knowingly harboring stolen property—I bade them good morning and asked what was up. Since they weren’t smiling, neither did I.
“I’m Detective Moran,” said the older of the two, casually dressed in jeans and a worn burgundy hoodie, unshaven, and hardened around the eyes. A man unused to sleep. “And this is Detective Bellinger. Sorry to bother you at this hour.”
“No problem. You like to come in?” I asked.
“That’s all right, thanks. We were just wondering if that car over there is yours,” pointing at our silver minivan, really the color of a dirty quarter, sitting in the driveway.
“Yes, that’s ours,” I said, and stepped out onto the porch where I set down my cup on a wicker table by the door. “Is something wrong?”
Moran said, “Probably not, but I wonder if you or anyone in your household drove it two days ago near”—and went on to describe a neighboring village I recognized as being where two of Maisie’s friends lived.
“I was here working, so I know I didn’t,” immediately regretting my having offered them an excuse they hadn’t asked for. Why sound guilty when I wasn’t?
“Any other individuals in your house possibly?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing I’d hardly been out of the house since I began work on the Tamerlane, and had been pretty inattentive to my family’s doings. What also came to mind, as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, was Slader’s passing comment in the Beekman Arms about how surprised the authorities would be if they only knew the unsolved crimes of those they’d imprisoned for lesser misdeeds. Be calm, I warned myself. You’re a free man, under no scrutiny. Still, it astonished me to think that if these detectives had any idea they were questioning someone in the midst of producing a million-dollar-plus forgery, they might want to pursue another line of inquiry altogether with me. “I know my daughter rode her bike there to visit friends,” I continued, serenely feigning concern. “The Bancrofts. My wife drove into Rhinebeck that day to pick up groceries. What’s this all about?”
“You are aware there was a murder in the county recently and that the victim’s body was disposed of on an abandoned road in the area in question?”
At once horrified and relieved—horrified by the slaying, relieved it had nothing to do with me—I blurted, “No, my God. I can’t believe Maisie was near there.”
“That’s your daughter?”
“One of my two daughters, yes, but what does any of this have to do with our car?”
“You’re not under suspicion, so don’t worry,” the other detective said, breaking his silence. He pulled a small accordion of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and showed me a scanned color photograph of a headshot, asking, “You know this person?”
Face unevenly round as a pomegranate, wiry reddish beard, the blue filmy gimlet eyes of a vulture behind wire-rim specs, a once-broken nose. He was sporting a flat tweed cap similar to the one my father sometimes wore up here in the country—an Ascot, I think he called it. He did seem familiar, but I couldn’t place the guy.
“I don’t, I’m afraid,” I told them. “Is this the victim or the suspect?”
“We don’t yet have a suspect,” was Moran’s circuitous answer.
The half-closed front door behind me now opened and, somewhat to my dismay, Meg stepped out onto the porch. “What’s going on? I heard voices down here.”
Startled, I said, “Meghan, these are Detectives Moran and—”
“Bellinger.”
“—Bellinger, and they say there’s been a murder over in the Bancrofts’ neighborhood. I hadn’t heard about it, but I’ve been preoccupied this past week.”
She coughed, said, “When I was over near Tivoli the other day picking up books for the shop, a woman mentioned she’d heard about it on the news. I thought she said it happened in Ancram, though, or Taghkanic.”
“As I was telling your husband, we’re sorry to bother you so early.” Moran turned to her. “Someone not too far from where the body was ditched thought they’d seen a silver minivan in the neighborhood that afternoon.”
Meghan gave me a nervous glance, then acknowledged, “It could well have been my car they’re talking about. I went by our daughter’s friends’ house to check on her, but when I saw her bike there I just drove on without stopping. Ran some errands in town and came back home here.”
They showed Meghan the same photograph they’d asked me to look at. After giving it an even closer perusal than I had, she shook her head. “Sorry, but I just don’t know this man, officers—”
“Detectives,” Bellinger corrected her.
“—and I hope you’ll believe that none of us had anything to do with this.”
“Of course not,” Moran said, a warm if only partial smile of sympathy on his face. “That was never really in question.”