Atticus took the further step of meeting with me and Maisie, albeit briefly, for a gelato near Washington Square Park, when he’d traveled down from Providence supposedly to view the Poe. Furtive, we signed documents while we sat on a bench as Maze tossed crumbs of her uneaten cone to pirouetting pigeons near the fountain.
“Death’s just that way,” he said, watching Maisie from behind the dark screen of his sunglasses. “We can know the why, but never precisely the when.”
“Speaking of the when of things, when can I tell Will about you and Mary?”
Atticus coughed, cleared his throat. “Mary thought never. Not to protect herself, but to protect me. Me, my family, Will, and, above all, Maisie,” he said, slowly, pausing on each. “For myself, I think it’s best to leave it up to you, Meghan. I’m putting things in order, including what you insisted on the phone, that I take care of Abigail Fletcher by overpaying for manuscripts and books she seems finally willing to let go of. Restitution, you called it.”
“That, and penance,” I said, leveling my gaze at him and, disconcertingly, seeing my face mirrored in his tinted glasses, darkened and distorted. “May I ask what will happen with that facsimile Will printed with Nicole?” I ventured, not wholly sure I knew of its real place in the larger picture.
Atticus shook his head. “Honestly? I thought about destroying it, but it was truly a beautiful piece of work, something I sense would give Abigail Fletcher the same satisfaction, whether spurious or not. Besides, when such things are out in the world, they often take on a life of their own, become as indisputable as the originals. So, to answer your question, it’s in Abbie’s collection,” he said, looking away. “As for telling Will about Mary and me, let me finish up my own finishing up. After I’m gone, as I say, you can decide what’s best.”
I told him he could trust me, shook his hands, kissed his cheek. Afterward, when Maisie and I said our goodbyes and walked toward Broadway and the East Village, I could feel his eyes on us, on Maisie in particular, as we receded from view. Before we reached home, I decided she would learn about her parentage on her twenty-first birthday, when her trust was opened. If Atticus wanted to die in peace, taking his secret with him, who was I to interfere?
Downstairs in the tearoom at the lodge, I found myself a wingback chair of floral damask nearer to the fire than the windows, and settled myself in. Soda bread and blackberry jam were delivered on a tray along with my black tea. The sun poked in and out from behind the clouds. Piano music, improvisational and romantic and unknown to me, played softly in the background.
I had half expected to see Slader show up, menacing and proprietary, at the auction, but he didn’t. And after Tamerlane was sold for a record amount, I was certain he would appear, like an unwelcome specter, an inescapable bane, when we were upstate during the full glory of the Hudson Valley autumn, but he never showed his sallow face. Oddly, his absence was more of a noticeable presence than I might have expected. The paranoiac needs a foe in order to persist. Slader had worthily filled that role for years. I had seen no notice of his, or anyone else’s, arrest in the apparent murder of that man on the road. The simplest answer was that Slader had gotten what he was looking for and moved on into another life far beyond these precincts.
One morning in late October, when Will and Nicole were sequestered in their printing studio working on a new Stone Circle project and Maisie had ridden her old Schwinn Black Bomber to the village to visit the Bancroft twins, I remembered something Slader had used to taunt me. For whatever reason, I’d hardly thought about it in the weeks after he assailed Maisie and terrified me with his photo mask of my brother Adam, floating surreally in the woods across from the farmhouse. I closed my laptop in the study, where I had been doing some remote correspondence for the shop, and, after tying the laces of my walking shoes, descended the front porch steps and crossed the road.
Fallen leaves crunched underfoot as I stepped deeper into the tangled woods, searching for the ash tree where, back in August, I had discovered the glossy photograph of Adam, fixed with an elastic string on either side and with my brother’s eyes scissored out for Slader to see through. The photo seemed nowhere to be found. After these intervening months, had the paper disintegrated, or been blown away? Or, perhaps, had Slader himself retrieved it? Hands on hips, I paused to look up through the forest canopy. A brisk breeze detached some of the highest leaves that came floating down, like so many lost souls, to the woodland floor, a few alighting on my shoulders and head.
Then there it was, sheltered still among tiny wildflowers now dead, club moss that had yellowed, and faded orchard grass that had collapsed and fallen over the image, partially obscuring it from view. I knelt down. Still hesitant to touch the thing, I brushed away stems and leaves that partially buried it.
“Who killed you?” I asked, startled by my human voice here in nature’s surround. No answer was forthcoming, of course, but for the first time since the murder, I felt as if no answer was possibly the only answer I would ever have. No answer was possibly even for the best, given the alternatives.
Reaching out, I removed the photo from its makeshift shrine and carried it back to the house, where, with Nicole’s help, I would restore its eyes and frame it to place among other family mementos on the chestnut side table in the foyer. While it would never represent full closure, it would have to constitute, for me, closure enough. Will once referred to forgery as not a distinction without a difference, but a difference without a distinction. So it would have to be with my forged reconciliation with Adam’s death.
“Mom? Meghan?” was followed by nervous laughter, and when I looked up to see Maisie and Nicole standing over me in the tearoom, I realized I’d fallen asleep by the fire.
“What’s doing?” I asked with a yawn, closing the unread book in my lap.
“What’s doing is we’re ready to go see my birthplace,” Nicole said, reaching her hand out to me as Maisie retrieved the book on my lap, a Jane Austen novel I’d read many times before and returned to as a kind of security blanket.
“Not your birthplace,” Maisie corrected her.
“The place where my birth began then.”
As we drove to our old cottage, crosscurrenting memories flickered in and out of mind, like the rushing sunlight on the windshield, glinting through the tunnel of trees overhead. Yes, this was where Will and I had attempted to escape our troubles long ago, and succeeded but briefly. Happy times, unhappy ones. Nicole’s life began here, true, and Will’s almost ended.
Because I believed, as most of us tend to do, that I’d retained an unblemished image of the past, of the fairy-tale house and its rustic surroundings, I was surprised by the gap between my remembrance and what was there before me as we pulled into the drive. Smaller than I recalled, it had been repainted and rethatched. Some rhododendrons that Will and I had planted on either side of the front steps had grown into stately sentinels. We knocked on the door, but no one was home, so we furtively peeked through the windows. The rooms looked for the most part to have refurnished, although an antique walnut cupboard elaborately carved with griffins and winged serpents remained where it was before. An oil painting of fishing boats bobbing up and down in Bantry Bay still hung over the fireplace. To think we had lived here filled me with wonder and wistful melancholy. Happy as I was for Nicole to see her place of origin, it was time for us to move on.