“It’s a peaceful and meditative place,” I said.
“It’s peaceful right here, I’d have thought,” Moran countered, looking out the window at the serrated forest canopy below.
“Yes, but I live here. Sometimes I want to get away to think.”
“Got it,” he said, eyes back on me. “So you’re saying the second time you went there was to meditate again?”
“The second time I went there was to make sure I remembered everything exactly the way I’d told you and your partner.”
“I see. And was it?”
“Exactly the same,” I said, feeling the confidence of a liar who was certain of getting away with her fabrications. “May I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” he said.
“If that wildlife camera taped me, wouldn’t it have taped the murderer’s car too?”
Moran shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not. The guy had wiped the card in his camera before we got there, so he had jack left from the day in question. There’s another ingress road to the dead end, and it’s even less populated than the one your daughter’s friends live on. No cameras there, wildlife or otherwise. The perp possibly used that one. We don’t know.”
“Too bad,” not knowing what else to say.
“Got that right,” he agreed, getting up from the table. “Well, sorry to have bothered you again. A piece of advice?”
“Of course,” I said, as we walked back to the front door.
“Since we haven’t collared this perp, you might want to steer clear of that location.”
“What about my daughter Maisie?”
“Well,” he said, “it might be better if she stayed away too, just until we identify and catch our suspect. Chances are, he’ll never go there again. But we’ve advised the residents in that neighborhood to be vigilant and lock their doors.”
Watching Moran stride down the steps and across the front yard to his sedan, I came to the realization that my decision not to tell Will what I’d witnessed might not have been a good one. I’d seen how crazed he was with the Poe job, how intimidated by Slader, whether or not he admitted it to himself. But I needed to confront him. Get the truth from him about why he felt threatened. If he’d been making forgeries behind my back all these years since we returned from Kenmare, I needed to know. If there was some secret they shared from the deep past, something Slader knew that would bring Will down, then I needed to know that.
In the interim, I wasn’t oblivious to Moran’s having hinted, however obliquely, that I myself hadn’t been ruled out as a suspect. Or at least as a person of interest. Were he to accuse me, any protest I might make that, no, it was somebody else, in a pale-blue Chevy, who dumped the victim’s body while I, innocent as a child, merely looked on, wouldn’t wash. My moment for that had passed.
Maisie was dropped off by the Bancrofts, windburn coloring her cheeks and forehead, full of stories to share about tacking and jibbing and manning the tiller. When Will and Nicole parked and came inside, she was regaling me with a tale about spotting a seven-foot sturgeon lazing on the waves—“all spiky like a dragon monster”—which caught the attention of her sister, who asked if Maisie could draw it.
“After she changes,” I said, asserting some motherly authority, wondering if anything in the Hudson grew to that length. Maisie ran upstairs, two steps at a stride, as Nicole presented me with bottles of fancy wine. “What’s the occasion?”
“Family reunion,” said Will. “We haven’t had much chance to sit down together this week, so I thought it would be good to revel a little.”
“Thank you,” I said, touched by the thought, if beleaguered by my earlier concerns. “How did your meeting go?”
Will got the corkscrew out of a drawer and opened one of the bottles, while Nicole reached down three etched-glass goblets from the cupboard, elegant inheritances from a mother-in-law I never knew.
“So far as such a meeting could go well, it went well,” he said, pouring the dark-red wine and handing me a generously filled glass, and another to Nicole, who swished it around in the bowl of the stemware, nosing its bouquet with the confidence of a sommelier.
“Prosit,” she said, as our goblets lightly chimed.
We chatted for a few minutes about Nicole’s wine savvy, but I finally had to ask if Slader had admitted to breaking in here to steal the Tamerlane.
“In point of fact, it was his Tamerlane all along,” said Will. “The issue was briefly raised, as quickly dropped, and, with both copies in his hands, along with both letters, I think he’s finished with such skulduggery.”
“So, that’s it? No more Slader?”
I noticed Nicole fidgeting with her rings. It was never a good sign for my resolute, unusually coolheaded daughter to display a case of nerves.
Will set his wineglass on the counter. “I think so, yes. But Atticus Moore is in town, and this entire exercise, as I understand it, was to make it possible for the original Tamerlane to come up for sale.”
“I don’t even want to know what that means,” I told him, caught off guard by the unexpected presence, not to mention possible involvement, of Atticus. He was the closest friend Will ever had, in or out of the trade, and was the first to forgive Will after the forgery scandal broke. Though Mary Chandler and Atticus lived and ran their bookshops in different cities, I always appreciated how the elder bookman helped her from afar, shared customers and leads on archives or book collections with her. Success of the kind Atticus had achieved in his long career can sometimes breed callousness, but in his case, from my limited vantage, I saw it generating only largesse, certainly when it came to Will and Mary. He appeared to have been an honest broker when it came to paying Will’s part of the profits from the sale of his father’s books and manuscripts. Why they stopped speaking years ago, I never understood. Bookselling, though, like any vocation, can breed as many antagonists as comrades. Years back, on a visit from Ireland to the States, when I sold the last shares of my bookstore to Mary and her then-partners, I enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with Atticus and his family, and was sorry his relationship with Will had soured. Sorry, above all, for Will.
“That’s fair,” he said, startling me from my reverie. “I can’t say I know what it means either. What I can say is that if Atticus and I could somehow come to a rapprochement, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”
All four of us helped make dinner that evening. Will and Maisie grilled local duck, leeks, and portobello mushrooms out back, while Nicole and I made a fresh walnut pesto with basil from the garden, prepared an heirloom tomato salad, and together sliced the first Cortland apples of the season to make tarts. Around the table, as a ravishing sunset of corals and tangerines painted the walls, we ate our feast in higher spirits than any of us had been in during the twelve days of what I privately thought of as the Henry Slader siege. While we were not precisely held prisoner by his army of one, our movements—mine, at least—had morphed into the self-conscious, looking-over-the-shoulder variety. We’d been living on tenterhooks and finally, that night, we all put our worries aside.