“Slader?” I called out.
No response, so I lunged forward through a low hedge of barberry laden with bright berries and needle-sharp tiny thorns, then spotted him a hundred feet ahead, crouched over a fire surrounded by a girdle of stones. As I approached, he stood up, still saying nothing.
“What’s the big idea?” I asked, standing on the opposite side of the crackling, dingy makeshift firepit. “Poor man’s papal conclave? Adding arson to your list of offenses now?”
Slader bared his chipped tooth with a disdainful smile. He hadn’t shaved in days, looked as if he hadn’t slept, and the crescent-moon smudges under his eyes were sooty and damp. But none of his presumptuousness had abandoned him. “Papal conclave, funny. It got you down here, didn’t it? No, in fact I figured we could burn the lovely shots I have of you leaving Adam’s that morning in Montauk. I even brought negs,” he said, pulling a large mailer from the knapsack at his feet and waving it in my direction. “You’ve got my money, right?”
“Some of it,” I said. “If you spoke with Atticus you’ll know I’ve brought enough to tide you over until the auction.”
“Yes, and I told him I didn’t like that plan.”
“Like it or not, it’s what we’re able to do,” noticing a glint of silver winking in the open mouth of his canvas bag. “Your percentage—and I’m not privy to any arrangements you made with Atticus or that poor dead guy—is based on what the Poe brings. For all I know, it’ll be withdrawn from sale for some reason, and the money I’m prepared to give you now will be the only profit anybody makes off this whole goddamn mess.”
“Let me ask you a question, Will,” said Slader. “Do you think I’m capable of killing another person? You of all people know that when I came after you, I did so without a murderous thought in my head. Sure, I could have finished you, but I only wanted to punish you. Butchered the wrong hand, as it happened. Still, I never had it in mind to kill you like you killed Adam Diehl.”
Shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I said, “I’m not here to counsel you or console you, Slader, not here to listen to your excuses. I’m here to make that exchange we discussed back at the Beekman Arms, when I agreed to counterfeit a Poe letter and forge the Tamerlane, for supposedly incriminating photos. Whether you killed Cricket or Mallory or whoever the sorry sucker was is of zero interest to me.”
Slader looked up through the leaves to the dimming sky above before leveling his eyes at me. “You know, I’ve just realized something important—”
“Important to you maybe, not me.”
“No, no, no,” and with that he began to chuckle, however softly, as he dropped into the same crouch as when I first approached, his knees apart and forearms resting on both thighs with the knuckles of his hands gently touching. He looked limber, apish. “Important to you too. Maybe more important,” he said, glancing up at me through the smoke, and winking before returning his gaze to the fire.
Everything had abruptly changed. It occurred to me that he hadn’t asked how much money I’d brought, which was, as I understood it, his main interest in this entire unholy exercise. He was staring at the smudgy flames, grinning like a soulless fool, shaking his head from side to side with a look on his face that suggested a kind of existential weight had lifted off the man, replaced by his private realization, whatever it was. We remained like this, an uninterpretable tableau, for a minute, and another minute, until I finally broke the silence, saying, in a low voice, “Slader.”
In a single graceful and uninterrupted motion, he conveyed the butcher knife with his left hand from the sack, passed it into his right, and lurched across the pathetic fire itself, swiping the blade through the smoke without uttering a word. I fell backward, landing hard on the sharp-angled composing stick, yanked it out from behind my belt, and, regaining my footing, stood. My eyes were tearing from the ash he’d kicked into the air when he jolted through the shallow firepit. As I turned to face him again, his knife a revenant, a dream of a knife, it seemed, rather than something forged of metal, I heard a wet crack and an exhalation, a sorry moan, and witnessed Slader wheel around, buckle, and fall face-first into his fire. Before I could make sense of what was happening, my daughter was dragging the man by his feet—for all his dishevelment and blood welling now at his crown, his black shoes seemed to have been recently polished—pulling him away from the flames. The shovel she’d used lay in the tumble of brown needles and fallen leaves next to Slader’s knife, one I now recognized as Meghan’s, which I hadn’t noticed missing from the kitchen during our earlier cursory search. Nicole was paler than I remembered ever seeing her. An atmosphere of efficient savagery, how else to put it, had settled, if briefly, in all of her next gestures and words.
“First we burn his photographs, assuming he has any, and ID,” she said, as I stood there above my nemesis inert on the ground, feeling a strange sense of melancholy rather than relief or triumph or terror about what had just happened. “Then we put out this fire.”
Rifling through his knapsack, she found an apricot, a candy bar, a wallet stuffed with singles, a bus-ticket stub. The mailer he had waved at me was empty. A forger, a fraud to the last. Together my daughter and I excavated the hole we’d dug to hide the cache of plates and, enlarging it as twilight enshrouded the forest, the field, the house, and the rest of my world as I’d known it, we laid Slader, settled into a fetal position, in his grave, along with the worthless sundries he’d brought in the expectation of a different outcome to our final visit.
While we finished our work in the woods, Ripley, materializing out of nowhere like some mangy deity from the forest-spirit underworld, looked about and, as if confirming that what was done was done, turned to meander ahead of us, back up the hill to the house. We hosed off the shovel before putting it away in the garage, put the composing stick back in the studio, scrubbed the hefty knife and restored it to its block in the kitchen, changed and laundered our clothes after washing up. Our nerves were more jangled than either of us could admit—it was fair to say we were benumbed, in shock even—so though we debated whether to drive back to the city that night, I thought it best to set out early the following morning. That settled, Nicole proposed there was probably never going to be a right time to open Atticus’s gift of Comtes Lafon Meursault-Genevrières, so she carefully peeled away its foil wrapper, opened it with a corkscrew, and poured two glasses. We drank, having made no toast, as there was nothing in the world here to toast.
Much as a fast-moving storm can sometimes gather over the mountains, rush across the river, its wind and driving rain overwhelming the meadow and woods surrounding the farmhouse, only to be gone a quarter of an hour later, tears finally overcame Nicole. I hadn’t seen her cry, I realized, since she was much younger. Standing up from the table, I walked over to where she was sitting, placed my hands on her shoulders, and said, “I’m so sorry, Nicole.”