Whether it was Rigoletto or La Traviata or some other Verdi confection playing on the radio, I couldn’t say, but the note, a kind of scream really, that came from Sophie’s corner of the room was no less dramatic. Had she, or maybe Nicole, cut herself with one of the knives we used to trim Mylar? But no, when I reached the table, Sophie was standing there, staring at me, mouth open, holding out the pamphlet as if it had just burst into flames. A copy of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the original publisher’s sheepskin binding, a bit the worse for wear, lay on the table in front of her. Nicole hovered at her side, betraying nothing beyond a convincing imitation of Sophie’s shock.
“This can’t possibly be right,” Sophie exclaimed, shaking her head. “No way can it be right.”
“What have you got?” I asked, more nervous than I might have imagined I’d be when this inevitable moment came to pass. While I knew it eventually would resurface into my life, Atticus hadn’t let me in on when or how. Then I remembered. The night after we’d watched that Hitchcock movie and gone to bed, when Meg thought she had heard noises downstairs, noises I dismissed as not being Slader because he’d gotten everything he wanted from me—well, he hadn’t. Clearly, he’d broken into the house not to burglarize us but to plant the original among Meghan’s new acquisitions before leaving for Boston to install my forgery in the Fletcher library.
Feigning naïveté, I took the Tamerlane from her with all the clandestine terror and reluctance that only the deeply conflicted, the very guilty, can possibly know. My heart was racing so quickly that there was probably no difference between this physiological sensation, knowing what I knew, and what I would’ve felt if I were in the midst of actually discovering Poe’s first book.
“What is it?” asked Meghan, who rushed in from the adjacent room, with Maisie and Cal behind her. “Are you all right, Sophie?”
“It was tucked in the back of a Twain,” she said, her voice wavering at the edge of numb elation.
“What Twain? What was tucked?”
“I’m sorry,” she said more slowly, catching her breath. “The Huck Finn back cover was loose, its hinge was cracked down to the mull, the mesh, and this other book was hidden there between the flyleaf and rear pastedown. It literally just fell out on the table when I was examining the Twain. The collector must’ve put it there for safekeeping, same way other people hide money in books, or photos, or letters.”
Meghan looked at Tamerlane in my hands, then hard at me. I glanced again at Nicole, who, I could swear, was gesturing with her eyes to stay cool. Maisie, keying off her sister, was calm and quiet, watching.
“I thought I recognized the title,” Sophie continued, filling a brief awkward silence. “But when I saw Poe’s signature on the title page, I knew for sure what it was. Am I right, Will? Meg? Is the signature correct?”
So Slader had gone ahead, against all reason, against my categorical insistence that he should not, and forged an autograph. My thoughts flew, like startled birds, in several directions at once. I felt fury toward Slader for having possibly ruined an otherwise transcendent thirteenth copy of the Black Tulip, the first new example to have surfaced in a generation. Fear that Meghan might confess then and there to the scheme—so far as she half understood it—accusing those who had conspired to deposit this Tamerlane in her shop, where she and her staff would now be credited with a bibliographic discovery of the first magnitude. But also wonderment that this unicorn my father spoke of in Philadelphia a lifetime ago, when we marveled together at one displayed in the Free Library, had stepped out from obscurity into the light.
“Given how exceedingly rare an authentic first edition of Tamerlane is, I have to tell you I strongly doubt it,” I said, gamely as I could manage. “But let me have a look.”
Carefully, I lifted the front cover to reveal the title page and saw the signature there, scribed faintly in pencil. For one strange instant, I was seduced into thinking, This is right, how could it be? The impression didn’t—couldn’t—last, but I was damned if it wasn’t the most faultless Edgar Allan Poe autograph not made by the man himself that I had ever laid eyes on. Slader’d wisely elected not to use the author’s full name, just the initial of his long-suffering foster father’s last name, Allan, between his Christian name and surname. Edgar A Poe, clean, straightforward, beaming with authenticity, and no unnecessary flourish scudding beneath nor a full stop after the initial. Poe would likely have done the same had he ever in fact autographed this book. But I had a question to answer, and my family and Meg’s staff were waiting.
“Well, huh,” I said with a genuine frown. “It just doesn’t seem like a real possibility. If it were right, it would be the only one in existence. And that’s too good to be true.”
“If it doesn’t seem like a possibility, too good to be true, it probably isn’t right. We need to be careful,” Meg said, the pulse visibly pounding in her temples.
“Previously unknown things are discovered all the time,” Nicole spoke up, turning to her mother. “You yourself told me about that Igor Stravinsky manuscript—I think you said it was a funeral score for his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov—that everyone thought was lost forever during the Russian Revolution. Didn’t that just turn up a few years ago?”
“In Saint Petersburg, right,” I added, grateful to see Nicole side with me.
“This is different,” said Meg elliptically, without shooting our daughter the petulant look I fully expected, but raising Sophie’s eyebrows a little. “I know Will’s the expert here, but may I see the signature?”
“It’s your book,” I said, under my breath, right away wishing I had simply done as she asked.
When Meghan took the Tamerlane in her hands and scrutinized the handwriting on the title page, I stood beside her, silent, marveling at its outward legitimacy. Whatever I thought of Slader, it was a masterstroke on his part to have signed with an almost weightless touch, using not ink but the dulled tip of a graphite pencil, maybe a carpenter’s pencil. A counterintuitive gesture, one that would surely be noticed by Poe experts. Debated, certainly, but which, if proven to be a forgery, would not ruin the integrity of the pamphlet itself as much as, say, ineradicable ink would have. If the time ever arrived when I could congratulate him on this clever gesture, I would do so. Though I hoped that time might never come.
“In early books like this,” Sophie said, “when the author’s name isn’t printed on the title page, many times an owner will just write it there. We have a fifth edition of A Tale of a Tub upstairs, originally published anonymously, in which some owner from the eighteenth century wrote in ink By Dr Swift, beneath the title. Happened all the time.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “Swift’s first major book. But I don’t think this is that.”