Assuring myself that nothing providential awaited me in Providence, I logged off. Later the same day, I set up an appointment with an old colleague at a Manhattan auction house where I’d worked some years earlier as an expert in literary and historical autographs. While before I had labored in their dignified, well-lit rooms under the cloud of being a confessed forger—the Frank Abagnale of literature, as it were—now I presented myself as fully reformed, a responsible father happily married to a woman admired in the industry, and by every measure among the most discriminating and informed experts in my field. As it happened, one of their specialists was winding down toward retirement, so I started soon afterward. To say I was exhilarated to be back in my element—verifying inscriptions, ferreting out fakes, researching provenance, collating and meticulously cataloging lots that would go on the block for thousands of dollars—would be a gross understatement. Nor was I tempted to undermine my newfound position at the house by making the slightest false step.
Even when one of my own early forgeries came over the transom within the first month of my employment, I flagged the book. It was a first edition set of Henry James’s The Europeans, which I had embellished with an inscription from the master to George Eliot upon his visiting her country house at Witley, Surrey, in 1878, two years after she published Daniel Deronda and two years before she died. The quality of the forgery was every bit as refined as its existence was improbable. For all I knew at the time I faked the autograph association, James may well have given Eliot The Europeans, which had been issued right around the time of his social call in Witley. But I hadn’t bothered putting in the research to find out one way or another. If he had, this was not that copy. In the interest of continuing my path on the right side of the law, I expressed my concerns to the head of the department, telling him—without confessing to my own handiwork—that the inscription seemed off. I didn’t like the formulation of several letters in the phrase With the warmest possible regards of, and even questioned the phraseology itself. James, who famously referred to Eliot as a “great horse-faced bluestocking,” yet one whose intellect and passion he admired, wasn’t much of a warmest possible kind of guy.
As it turned out, however, the seller, who’d consigned a number of distinguished books to the house on this particular occasion, insisted on its legitimacy. He had acquired it in England from a seller with impeccable credentials, who himself evidently purchased the set at auction in London. My ambitious youthful forgery, it seemed, had made quite a journey before arriving back in its fabricator’s hands. I was overruled, which was neither here nor there as far as I was concerned. When the lot came up on auction day and surpassed its high estimate by a tidy sum, it was everything I could do not to laugh out loud. I wished I could share the whole absurd story with Meghan that night—how one of my past bastard creations had orbited into my world once more, like a comet looping around the sun, then ricocheted back into the darkness of the universe, its icy tail burning bright, proud, and false.
Instead, I kept my own counsel, privately thinking, Godspeed, simulacrum! Nor would George Eliot’s copy of The Europeans be the last time such a situation arose and a forgery of mine would continue its vibrant life outside the precincts of reality. More often than not, when I threw shade on the genuineness of a manuscript or signature, my colleagues heeded my advice. I must confess, though, that whenever one of my early forgeries was debunked and removed from circulation, the moment was less professionally satisfying than personally bittersweet.
We hadn’t seen such ceaseless gray skies and persistent rain since our days in County Kerry, and the morning after Maisie’s confrontation and my odd encounter was no different, with fresh showers pelting the eaves and overrunning the rainspouts. She and I both came downstairs later than usual, having slept in, unawakened by even the slightest hint of a sunrise. Will, long since stirring, had brewed a pot of coffee and disappeared into his studio with a cup, no doubt to read the letter and open that mysterious parcel in the light of day, however dim. I considered wandering out to the garden and collecting some fresh zucchini flowers to fry, but it was too soggy to bother. Fried squash blossoms weren’t at the forefront of anyone’s thoughts anyway. I offered to make a tomato frittata instead, knowing it was one of Maisie’s favorites, if she would set the table.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked, reaching out for her right hand, then frowning at her arm, where she’d suffered the nastiest of her injuries.
“Much better,” she said, crooking it to show me her elbow as well.
I peeled away her bandages and was relieved to see that, aside from constellations of pitted punctures, some of which had begun to scab over, it looked like she was going to heal apace. Wasn’t it Picasso who said, “It takes a long time to become young”? While Maisie was in many ways old for her age, her ability to heal was strictly that of a healthy kid. “Were you able to sleep all right?”
“Well, I sort of got my nightmare out of the way before I went to bed.”
Not coming up with any good riposte, I told her I was glad she was doing better but we’d still keep a close eye on her wounds over the next few days. With that, she began to set out plates and silverware, as I reached down a cast-iron pan from the hanging rack and prepped eggs, shallots, tomatoes, and prosciutto for breakfast. This morning it was Claude Debussy on the radio, a marathon celebrating his birthday. But for the disturbing memory of what had transpired the night before, a memory that hung over us like the very dampness outside, it would have been a typical start to one of our August days.
When Will joined us, he looked neither shaken nor relieved. Confused was more like it, bewildered.
Maisie wasted no time asking. “What was in the package, anyway? Guess the guy didn’t know they have post offices for that sort of thing.”
Post offices, I thought, have security cameras and postmarks, both of which he must have wanted to avoid. A twilight country road was far preferable to a post office suffused by fluorescent overheads.
Will said simply, “I could use another cup of coffee.”
“Well, who is he?” Maisie continued. “Are we even safe here?”
She had a valid question. When, last night, Will had finally come to bed, later than usual after sequestering himself in his studio with the accursed package, I was still awake thinking about my brother, wondering as I had myriad times over the years if Slader had been behind his homicide. The way Adam’s hands had been severed at our bungalow on the beach in Montauk so eerily mirrored Slader’s vicious, partly successful attempt to amputate Will’s at our cottage in Kenmare that it seemed impossible the assaults were coincidental. Yet while the authorities apprehended Slader for his attack on my husband, they were never able to bring charges against him in my brother’s case.
I had whispered, “It’s Slader, isn’t it?”
“The handwriting is Edgar Allan Poe’s, and a damn good forgery of it, I have to admit. Beautiful, in fact.”