“The signature’s damned convincing, I’ll admit,” I told her, glancing over to see that one of the balloons had strayed from the others and gotten tangled in a tall spindly ginkgo. “But can we agree that’s the last time you’ll do any such thing? I don’t care how compelling your reasons were.”
“I’m my father’s daughter, lest we forget,” she said, with a frown more magnetic than most people’s smiles. “What’s good for the pater is good for the filia.”
A heartwarming concept, under other circumstances. To hear her say it in so many words, though, made my heart ache. I forced a smile, surely not magnetic because laden with regret, however fleeting. “Then we’re done with this business after getting out from under Tamerlane.”
“Done,” she said, extending her hand, which I took in both of mine, never feeling more fortunate for being her father than at that moment, deeply unworthy as I was.
When Maisie and I were driving home with books from the handsome Victorian near Tivoli, she had asked out of the blue if I might ever discover a copy of Tamerlane in one of the collections we bought for the shop. This was the afternoon before she was to go sailing with her friends. Smiling, I assured her, “You and the Bancroft twins would have a far better chance of walking on water from the boat launch in Rhinecliff across the river to Kingston.”
That made her laugh.
“Not, mind you, that you better try,” I’d added.
Less than a week later, the answer to her guileless if prophetic question would be a simple “Yes.” Now it was I who seemed to be expected to walk on water, uncharted and dangerous water. Not to mention contaminated. How Slader had orchestrated everything from the opening note of Maisie’s scream to Sophie’s reprise in the shop, a kind of leitmotif of shock, I wasn’t sure. But having tried at every step to avoid involvement with his Poe machinations, indeed to resist them, I still ended up at the center of it all.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” was Will’s initial response to my confession about having witnessed the body being dumped out of a powder-blue Chevy that was similar to, or more likely the same as, the one Henry Slader had been conveyed in when visiting—make that plaguing—us at the farmhouse. Before I could answer, he said, “What possessed you to lie to those cops about it?”
“Detectives,” I corrected him, just as I myself had been chastened by one of them for the same mistake.
“Cops, officers, detectives, the fuzz—who cares? They weren’t accusing you of anything, is my point. You could have leveled with them about what you saw,” he insisted.
We were ensconced in our favorite corner of our favorite Irish pub, drinking dark stout at the end of our long and wearying day. In times past, this would’ve been a celebratory occasion. Beginning of the fall at the shop after a serene, restful August upstate. Back in the swim of things, with fresh inventory of desirable books that hadn’t seen the light for years. Will headed into a busy auction season. Both girls in school, one in the middle of her education, the other deciding whether to continue to grad school or take a gap year after finishing college. Instead, this.
“There’s more,” I said. “I never told you that the night Slader terrified Maisie, he pulled a similar sick trick on me.” When Will started to respond, I briefly raised my hand. “Hear me out. He was skulking around in the dark just across the road, wearing a homemade mask with Adam’s face on it, smiling and happy and rigid as death. The psycho was taunting me, as if I hadn’t suffered enough over my brother’s murder and with a photo I’d never seen before. On top of that, he got it into his head to steal that family photo, the one in the hallway, of me and Adam on the beach, only to return it to me in person, apologizing. When I asked him if he knew my brother, he said you knew the answer.”
“Meg, I—”
“So, is he gaslighting me or did he know Adam?”
Will averted his gaze momentarily before looking me square in the eyes. “Whether he’s gaslighting you is a matter of speculation. But he knew Adam well. To be frank, I even wonder if he and Adam weren’t involved.”
Now I was thoroughly confounded. “Involved in that he bought books and archival materials from Slader? That’s why the investigators questioned him when they were working on the case. Much as I don’t like the man, they never found a shred of evidence Slader had anything to do with Adam’s murder.”
“Any more than they found evidence against me,” he said, a declaration so off the point that it made me wonder why he would utter such a thing.
Ignoring him, I asked, “So what you’re telling me is that Adam and Slader were lovers? I find that hard to believe.”
“It might help explain how he had a photo you’d never seen. Slader does claim to be a photographer. Sociopath of many talents.”
I mulled that over. “Adam was private to the point of hermetic, so I suppose there would’ve been no reason for him to tell me, if what you’re saying is true.”
“There’s more, though, Meg,” said Will, his voice lowered. “You need to understand that besides trying his luck at fabricating documents himself—you’ll remember asking me to verify signatures in his library after he died—your brother was up to his ears fencing seriously sophisticated forgeries. Was he the amateur apprentice to masterful Slader? We’ll never know. One thing is certain—he didn’t die a lily-white innocent. My best guess is that whoever did him in was somebody he swindled out of a lot of money.”
Numbness spread through my limbs as I listened to Will bare these sordid details. “Or maybe an angry rival,” I conjectured, feeling a little nauseated.
“Or,” he said, “maybe a jealous lover, someone he might have threatened to expose?”
Every thread of Adam’s narrative seemed to lead back to Henry Slader, as if he were the Minotaur lurking at the center of my brother’s labyrinth.
“Meg, so why didn’t you tell me about his stealing a picture and coming to the house? Why did you stay mum about what you saw?”
I didn’t want to cry, especially not in public, here in one of our longtime haunts, but my eyes welled. “I don’t have a good answer for those questions, I’m ashamed to say. I guess because you became a black hole after Maisie delivered the Tamerlane. You were preoccupied, so anxious, evasive. I didn’t want to say anything that might implicate you, make bad things worse.”
“Meghan,” he said, and reached over to comfort me.
“No, let me finish,” pressing his hand. “One afternoon you were on the cell with somebody, Atticus maybe, walking down past the garden into the field. You weren’t aware of it, but I watched you from the kitchen, and you looked so alone in the meadow. My heart went out to you, despite my being really angry about what was happening. I guess those secrets I was keeping didn’t seem worth burdening you with.”