“All we were wondering was if you might have seen something suspicious when driving there. I gather you’re sure you didn’t, correct?” Detective Bellinger asked Meghan.
“I’m sorry,” Meg said with a shrug. “I wish I could help.”
“All right then. We’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”
“If you happen to think of anything, remember anything at all, please get in touch,” and with that Moran handed her his card. “Have a good one.”
“You too,” Meg and I said at almost the same time, as we watched them walk back to their unmarked sedan.
In the kitchen, I asked my wife about that strange look she’d given me when Moran spoke with her. She seemed oddly more thrown off by their presence on our doorstep than circumstances warranted—after all, neither of us had murdered the man in the photograph.
“All I know,” she said, her voice tight as a fist, “is that nothing’s been right, nothing, since Slader showed up. Now I have to get Maisie’s sandwiches ready for her sail with the Bancrofts. They’re picking her up within the hour.”
I warmed my coffee with some from the pot. Meg may not have been leveling with me, not to mention with the detectives, but I was hardly in a position to question her further, so set off again toward the studio to press forward with my Tamerlane obligations
The minute I closed the door and stood alone in my sanctuary, a slow epiphany came over me. Now I wished I had studied the headshot as carefully as Meg had. Was it possible the man in the photograph was a young Ginger-head—Cricket, Slader had called him—as baleful as ever in pre–middle age, though perhaps more gimlet-eyed back in the day, wearing a full beard that was later shorn? I was aware he had a professional relation with my nemesis, but God only knew if it had abruptly ended, or, if so, why. While it was clear Slader hadn’t been acting in a way that could even slightly be construed as normal, I never had the sense that his hectoring and threats were those of a murderer, despite my willingness to let others carry on with their suspicions about his possible involvement in the Adam Diehl case. I glanced at my partly fingerless hand, as I’d done a thousand times, and still didn’t believe he had intended to kill me. Had he wanted to accomplish that two decades ago, he would have brought the cleaver down on my head or heart, not my hand.
Curiosity about any of this was neither immediately useful nor helpful. Indeed, I understood that any curiosity I might have betrayed on the front porch would, in turn, have invited the detectives’ own further curiosity. As I opened the back door to let in the fresh morning air, I cautioned myself that it would behoove me to remain circumspect—that is, dumb as dirt—with Henry Slader when it came to the question of Cricket’s fate.
I opened the safe. Put on, as always, nitrile gloves. With great care, I pulled out the original and—let me admit it to myself if no one else—the exquisite forgery of Tamerlane. As I set them side by side on the clean surface of my worktable, I experienced a moment of uncouth pride. Pride of a kind I hadn’t viscerally savored in many a year. Yes, I knew this wasn’t an achievement about which I ought to have felt anything but revulsion, not to mention shame for collaborating with my daughter. But I couldn’t suppress this moment of, what, gutter joy. I turned the pages with the kind of satisfaction only Calvin Frederick Stephen Thomas, born two hundred ten years ago to the month, must surely have felt when he held his first finished copy. By now I knew the book intimately and turned to Thomas’s most egregious typesetting error, where the printer had misread Poe’s manuscript of “Dreams,” one of the shorter verses following the title poem, and set the nonsensical
rather than the poet’s intended “In climes of my imagining.” I felt a twinge of fraternal pain for youthful Calvin and wondered why he never produced another book, fading into pleasant obscurity while Poe rose to tormented fame. But then, to be sure, our Tamerlane must by design keep its fabricators wrapped in an even greater obscurity, while its prototype should make headlines.
My transient pride flickered, faded, and snuffed out. What replaced it was the far less fanciful knowledge that this was nothing to be proud of, in fact, and that I had the unpleasant task ahead of handing the thing over to Slader.
Since I was firm in my decision not to add an inscription or autograph in Poe’s hand on the pamphlet, work on Tamerlane was done. Before heading back into the kitchen to wish Maisie a good time sailing the river, I pulled both twice-folded letters from the safe—the poet’s original and Nicole’s—and studied them with a magnifying glass. In each, the paper, ink, and script matched the other. Satisfied, I stowed the fakes in my fireproof safe, where they could be retrieved that afternoon for delivery downtown. Then I did something impulsive. Rather than place the originals alongside the copies, I pulled down a hardcover reference book of monotype ornaments from a high shelf of other seldom-perused volumes and tucked Tamerlane and Poe’s missive inside. Pamphlet and letter, which I’d preserved in a fresh archival polyester sleeve, were thin enough that when the reference book was closed, their presence, secured inside its many pages, was imperceptible. While a safe, I told myself, might be broken into—I’d noted Slader’s glance in its direction when he was here—a monotype reference book, in this case concealing a purloined letter, was invisible to even the most prying eyes. Shelving the volume back where it belonged, I recalled a time, as a boy, when I hid from my father my first forged letter using this very trick. I had been inordinately proud of that letter back then, before I stashed it in my father’s library in the second folio volume of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, figuring no one would ever bother to look there. I figured right. The dictionary was long since sold, but not before I retrieved my Doyle document from its hiding place. So it was that my first foray into the art of forgery, an imaginary log of my maiden voyage, survived to this day.
Nicole and Maisie were chatting away at the breakfast table when I returned to the kitchen. A place was set for me with jam and a scone. Maisie’s lunch was packed in her bright-pink backpack, which sat open on the counter, but Meghan was nowhere to be seen.
“You all ready, Maze?” I asked.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said, nodding.
“Got sunscreen?”
Nicole answered, “She’s got enough in that pack for a transatlantic voyage.”
“Where’s your mother?”
Nicole rose from the table, went to the counter, and zipped up Maisie’s pack for her, saying, “She ran into town to do weekend shopping, told me to tell you not to worry.”
Worry I did, though. Meg hadn’t been herself since well before those detectives paid their unwelcome visit. After she returned from checking on Maisie the other day, she’d been edgy, distracted. Dearly as I wanted that weird glance she gave me on the porch to be meaningless, I knew she wasn’t being straight with me about something. Yet how could the pot deem the kettle black? Hiding my distress, I responded, “All good.”