“You know that guy, I gather,” Nicole said, as he turned up the sidewalk toward the wide front door of the inn, where, no doubt, he’d be meeting with Slader.
I glanced at her. “Used to.”
“Atticus, isn’t he,” she continued, without a pause.
“How do you figure?”
“Doesn’t take an Auguste Dupin to put it together. When you wanted to come back to town, and not only that but to a wine store right across from where you’d just been, I figured you weren’t quite done here.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I admitted. “But tell you what. I think I’ve seen more than I expected to see, and enough’s enough. Let’s go home.”
“You’re sure?”
“He’ll be in touch with me when and if he sees fit.”
Nicole and I got into the car, she at the wheel as before.
“Dupin, eh?” I said. “You’ve been reading your Poe.”
“I mean, I studied him in school. But I’ve been rereading his tales in bed this past week,” she said, pulling away from the curb to head home. “Black tulips or no-color tulips, Poe’s the man. Conan Doyle himself knew that Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t exist without Poe’s Dupin. Think about it. I know Holmes is your all-time favorite, but they’re both eccentric, both cocky as hell in their way, and they’re both brilliant at deduction. Magically, surreally so. They’re shamans in tailored suits. And Monseiur G—, the prefect of the Paris police? He matches up with that dense Scotland Yard guy—”
“Inspector Lestrade.”
“Right, Lestrade.”
“So who is Watson?”
Without pause, she said, “Poe’s unnamed narrator, obviously.”
Having been a lifelong Conan Doyle devotee, I knew he’d made a rather backhanded acknowledgment to his predecessor in the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, when Watson mentioned to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin,” at which the great sleuth scoffed, “Dupin was a very inferior fellow . . . very showy and superficial.” I sometimes wondered if Doyle wasn’t betraying some anxiety of influence with that, demeaning a literary forebear’s detective in order to make room for his own, though it is true that, many years later, in a 1912 poem in the London Opinion, he wrote
. . . As the creator I’ve praised to satiety
Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work,
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
Not by any means great verse, but honest and respectful.
Straight-faced, I teased my daughter, “So how do you explain why Holmes smoked a clay pipe or a briar root in the Conan Doyle stories, and a calabash in the movies, while Poe’s Dupin is always puffing a meerschaum?”
“Details, details,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at me.
While I had no right to feel good about things, Nicole lifted my mood. A custard of clouds was gathering out west across the river, whisking over the mountains, which would make for a memorable sunset. After her day of sailing, Maisie would be cheery, if exhausted. Meghan, I hoped, might find herself calmer now that the Tamerlane materials were out of our farmhouse. Everything, I almost convinced myself, was going to be fine.
Moran again. This time by himself. After a prelude of apology for disturbing me once more, especially on a lovely Saturday afternoon, he politely asked if he might have just a few more minutes of my time. Did he actually say, “Murder investigations run on their own schedules, and sorry to say they don’t much care about ours”? I was so rattled by his reappearance that it’s possible I might have thought that to myself. Either way, I invited him inside.
As I led him toward the kitchen, I couldn’t help but glance at the photograph of me and Adam on the beach. An object that surely preserved the fingerprints of Henry Slader. We sat down and I offered him ice water or maybe some apple juice, same as I’d proposed to Maisie on the night this all started.
“Thanks, I’m fine,” he said.
I did fill myself a glass of cold water, then sat across from the detective, doing my utmost to betray none of my nervousness, though I felt dull arcing electricity run up and down my spine.
“Something came up since I was here earlier that I wanted to ask you about.”
“Progress with your murder case?”
“Not so much. Just that it’s come to light that you were caught on camera driving on the same cul-de-sac where the body was discovered the other day,” he said flatly, looking at the dried herbs and Amish baskets hung from the hand-hewn crossbeams along the ceiling.
“Camera?”
“No one was there filming you, as such,” he explained. “And it’s not like there are security cameras, which is a shame. Turns out one of the residents we questioned has digital wildlife videocams mounted on his porches front and back to tape, you know, foxes, fishercats, black bears, whatever goes bump in the night. Nature lover, all very innocent.”
“I see,” I said. “So the camera runs in the day too, and it recorded me driving by.”
“That’s right.”
“But I already told you that I went over there to check on my daughter.”
“You did,” he said, his eyes now focused on me rather than the decor of the kitchen. “That perfectly explains your earlier trip. What I’m wondering is—well, two things. First, I’m wondering why you drove there a second time.”
“That’s easy to explain—”
“Second, and more important, I’m wondering why so much time elapsed between when you were caught on the camera headed in the direction of the dead end, and when the video shows you going by the other way, driving back toward the main road that would lead to town or home. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, Mrs.—”
“Meghan is fine.”
“We’re just wondering what the explanation might be.”
His use of the plural we’re unnerved me, probably just as it was meant to do. “Am I under some kind of suspicion? I haven’t done anything.”
“I’m sure you haven’t,” he said. “We’re just wondering if you might have more information than you’ve given us.”
Knowing this was a crossroads moment, one in which it would have been best to tell Moran what I’d seen, instead I stuck with my story. Because I was now convinced that Slader, or whoever, hadn’t noticed me down by the guardrail, I felt surer than before about the plausibility of what I’d already stated for the record. Some small embellishment was now necessary, I gathered, so I told the detective that though I didn’t have any wildlife cameras mounted on our porch, I too was a nature lover.