After looking behind me to assure myself that nobody was nearby watching, I reached high and pulled down the manual of monotype ornaments to double-check my impression that it hadn’t been tampered with. I carried it over to the worktable, set it down, carefully opened the large volume. And of course, of course, despite my self-reassurances, I should have known—both Tamerlane and the Edgar Allan Poe letter had vanished. Like a fool, I climbed a stepladder, pulled out books shelved adjacent to my ornaments volume, and looked through them, one after the other, on the off chance I’d misremembered where I had stored the Poe gems. From the topmost rung of the ladder I peered at the dusty back of the top shelf that abutted the wall, hoping somehow they might have fallen out. But it wasn’t to be. I could have yanked every last volume from its perch, could have turned my studio inside out, but the bald truth of it was that the thirteenth Black Tulip was gone.
I knew the authorities would have taken the body away. What I hadn’t anticipated was that no evidence remained of its ever having lain there in the first place, stiff as a sculpture. No yellow police tape dangled from nearby branches. No dried blood discolored the ground or grass. As I looked farther up the road toward the guardrail where I’d been standing when the incident happened, a wave of hope passed through me. There was a fair to middling chance the driver might not, after all, have seen me from this vantage where he’d briefly parked. Not only was the distance greater than I had originally thought, but the trees there cast heavy dappled shade over the terrain. Maybe, just maybe, I’d blended into the shadowy scenery, inconspicuous, unseen.
Breathing a tentative sigh of relief, I drove to the end of the road, where I proceeded to turn around. I sat with my arms crossed and replayed the incident in my mind. On the radio, a Saturday morning opera was airing, a Benjamin Britten work unfamiliar to me. Lots of atonality and jagged rhythms gave the music an overarching mood of angst. Appropriate, maybe, but I was already struggling with plenty of atonal notes in my own inner soundtrack and hadn’t any patience for music this morning.
I cut the engine, and with it the radio, so all I could hear were the same families of untroubled birds as before and, faintly, that nearby rippling brook. Arms crossed again, I recalled sunlight glancing off the Chevy’s windshield, which further buttressed my growing conviction that I’d been an unseen witness to the grotesque, coldhearted act. Not that this necessarily exonerated me or lessened my feelings of guilt. But what it did mean was that my original reason for leaving Maisie and Nicole at the kitchen table, more or less on the spur of the moment before Will came out to join us, seemed no longer tenable. My nebulous plan had been to come here, confirm for myself that Slader had done what he did to intimidate me into silence—just as everything he’d done since reentering our lives was meant to threaten us into cooperation—then go straight to the police to confess I’d lied, and let the chips fall where they may.
Now that plan collapsed. Maybe Will was on the right path after all. Do what Slader wanted as a kind of long final farewell before getting our own lives back on track.
So, yes, the man on the road did exist, or had. But that didn’t mean I did, or had. While somebody may have spotted a minivan in the area, my excuse for having been here was tight as piano string. I’d heard criminals often revisited the scenes of their crimes, and while I didn’t consider myself a criminal, I did realize it behooved me to get out of here, never to return. As before, I covered my tracks at home with a domestic excuse, one I’d already planted with Nicole.
“Where the hell have you been?” Will demanded, when I walked in the door.
Not wanting to lie more than I already had, I hedged. “Excuse me, but everybody in the county decided to do their Labor Day shopping all at once,” I told him as I pushed past to set down grocery bags on the kitchen counter. “Why are you so upset?”
“You and the girls had gone off in different directions, so I was here looking through your books in the study when I heard the door bang shut in the studio—”
“Slow down, Will. Please.”
He placed his hands on his hips, looking less enraged than resigned. “Long story short, somebody broke in during the last hour and stole the Tamerlane.”
“What? Yours or the original?”
“The original, unfortunately,” he said, a note of despair clotting his voice. “What’s more, I’d hidden it where I was sure nobody would ever bother looking.”
“Slader?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“That’s my hope,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m in some serious trouble.”
I resisted telling him, You’re already in serious trouble, asking instead, “Did he take anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so. But, you know, Meg, he had to have been spying on me somehow when I stashed it where I did. There’s no damn way he could have intuited such a thing.”
Will walked over to the window and stared hard down the wide slope to the forest edge. “I suppose with a pair of decent binoculars—,” he mumbled.
“Maybe it’s time to turn Slader in,” I said, well aware he couldn’t really afford to do that without bringing down all manner of trouble on his own head, indeed on Nicole’s and mine as well. Still, it needed saying.
He didn’t respond, just kept searching the perimeter of woodlands past the garden’s rustic deer fence.
“Where is Nicole, by the way?”
“Outside drawing somewhere.”
“You think she’ll be safe doing that?”
“He already got what he wanted—or half of what he wanted—so I don’t see what point there’d be in his bothering Nicky,” he reasoned. “On the other hand, I’m not sure any of us is really safe until I give him what he came for in the first place. After that, we’ll see. And as for turning him in, I think we both know what a slippery slope that would be. Let me fulfill my end of the bargain, Meg.”
I hummed in reluctant assent before we both went quiet.
“Agreed?” he finally asked.
Nodding that I did while thinking I probably didn’t, I let the matter drop. My sense of balance wasn’t as stable as I was used to. Hoping to change both subject and mood, I asked, “You were saying you looked at those books in the study? See the Wells?”
“It’s wonderful,” he exclaimed, turning toward me with a strained smile. “Given how things have been disappearing around here, I put it in the safe. Meantime, I managed to get a few other books priced—at least gave you and your team my two cents’ worth.”
Saying not a word, I took a few steps over to Will, slid my arms around him, held him close. We had hardly touched in the last week and he felt warm and familiar against me. “We’ll get through this,” I whispered.