Lethal Legacy (41 page)

“The books, Miss Eliot,” I asked. “Did you have
access to the books?”

“Mercy, yes. We thought the whole place was just a
playground for the three of us. Roller-skating down those hallways in the
evening, playing hide-and-seek in that great reading room.

“Christmas Day, once, George and our cousins
decided to play stickball in the corridor on the third floor,” she went on,
rubbing her hands together as she pulled up images from her youth. “He just
went into one of the collections—things weren’t all locked up back then—and
grabbed the biggest books he could find to be the bases. Turned out they were
all important double folios. Rare volumes of prints and such, worth a fortune.
George got the whipping of a lifetime for that.”

“George?” Mercer said, trying to keep up with her.

“My older brother was George Eliot,” she said.
“Mind you, my mother didn’t even have a high school education. When my father
got the job there, she decided to name all her children after writers. She
didn’t know George Eliot was a woman until she began to educate herself with
all the wonderful treasures under our roof.”

“For whom were you named?” I asked.

“Jane Austen. I’m Jane Austen Eliot. I had a big
sister, too. Edith Wharton Eliot. Both my siblings are gone now, but my niece
and nephews are very good to me.”

“I can appreciate that—mine are, too,” I said.
“Tell us more about the books, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ve always loved books, of course, and that may
be because I grew up surrounded by them. They were the center of the universe
in our family.”

“Did you have books of your own?”

“Our father made it very clear to us that
everything in the library was very special, that none of it belonged to us. But
for every holiday the trustees would present us with books. I remember our
birthdays in particular. After we returned from school, if it was a birthday,
we’d get called to the president’s office, all dressed up in our best, and one
of the board members would give us a gift, explaining the importance of the
particular book and its author.”

“Sounds like a fine little ceremony.”

“Oh, it really was. I got my first
Pride and
Prejudice
that way. They were always heavy on Austen for me, of course.
I’ve had a lifetime of pleasure because of those gifts, Alex. It made the loss
of my vision even more painful.”

“The books that were presented to you, Miss Eliot,
were they ordinary things you could buy in a store?”

“There’s no such thing as an ordinary book, is
there? But these were always particularly unusual. Beautifully bound in
Moroccan leather, or fixed up in those—what do you call them?—clamshell boxes,
I think. I can still remember how it felt to hold and smell them for the first
time.”

“Did you know the trustees?”

“Most of them knew my father well, of course. He
was responsible for making sure that their treasures were safe and protected,
at least according to the methods available back then. He made sure their great
institution ran like a smoothly sailing ship. And my mother catered some of
their smaller meetings—everything homemade, right in our kitchen. She was
really a saint.”

“These gifts you received,” Mercer asked, “were
they new books?”

“Some were, some weren’t, as I recall it.” Jane
Eliot put her elbow on the arm of the chair and closed her eyes to think.
“Later, as I learned more about these things, I’d have to assume that we got
some of the castoffs, either second or third editions of books that were of no
value to the great collectors, or copies that had been damaged by tears or
discolorations. Still, Alex, they opened the world to me. All the classics, all
the great literature you could imagine. The three of us were grateful to have
them.”

I could hardly contain my excitement. The perp
must have staged this burglary to get at something Jane Eliot owned, something
she didn’t even realize was of value.

“The books that you were presented with, Miss
Eliot, are they still in your apartment?”

She stretched her right leg and groaned, bending
to tug at her hose. “I gave them away ten years ago, maybe more. What’s the
use, I thought? I’d read and reread them, when I had my sight. Time to let the
next generation enjoy.”

“But you know where they are?” Mercer asked.

“Gone to my great-nieces and-nephews.”

“How lucky they are to have them,” I said. “Is
your family here, in the city?”

“Gosh, no. Some of them are upstate in Buffalo,
and others are out in Santa Fe. Must be several hundred books, all split up
between the relatives.”

I sat back in my chair, as deflated as the burglar
must have been to come up empty after ransacking Eliot’s apartment.

“Not a single one that you kept for yourself?”
Mercer asked.

“Help me up, Pridgen, will you?” Jane Eliot said.
“My joints get all locked tight if I sit too long.”

The sergeant helped her get to her feet.

“Walk with me, please,” she said, linking arms
with Mercer and with me as we stood up. She moved toward the door of the room.
“There was only one that I kept. Had to keep, actually. Edith’s daughter would
have nothing to do with it.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She winced as she put her weight on her left leg.
“My sister, Edith, had a very special book presented to her on her twelfth
birthday. I remember so well because I was terribly envious when she brought it
back to the apartment.”

“What was it?”

“You may be able to make more sense of what
happened than I ever did,” Eliot said. “Because of your job, I mean. Nobody
talked about things like that back then. It was a copy of
Alice in
Wonderland
. Quite a dazzling one.”

Mercer and I exchanged glances over Jane Eliot’s
head.

“Dazzling?” he asked. “How so? Was it old?”

“Indeed it was—old and wonderfully illustrated
with those drawings by John Tenniel that became so famous. The date in it was
1866.”

I thought of the call slip that had been found in Tina
Barr’s clothing.

“Did it ever belong to the library?” I asked.

“Not this one, I don’t believe. Most of our gifts
were donations from one trustee or another. From time to time, books were
quietly deaccessioned from the collections of course, especially if some more
desirable copy came along. But we could tell if that were the case. There were
markings inside the jackets with the name of the library branch, and those were
crossed through to show that the book had been discarded, so we knew we
wouldn’t get in any trouble.”

“Edith’s gift sounds very special.”

“Oh, yes. That was obvious. It was bound in the
most glorious red leather, with gold lettering on the spine and gilt designs
all over the cover. And then there was its size—we’d never had books of our own
quite that big.”

Jane Eliot let go of my arm and drew an outline in
the air. “You know, sort of double folio, if you’re familiar with that.”

“I’ve seen other copies of the early editions,
though, and I never knew any to be oversize,” I said.

“Well, you’re right. The manuscript was of average
size, for an illustrated work of that period, I’m sure. But this particular
edition had been mounted on larger parchment pages and bound into this folio
because it also included a rare set of prints of the photographs that Charles
Dodgson—Lewis Carroll, you know—took of young Alice.”

“The photographs were inside the book?” I asked.

“There was a pocket sewn into the back of the
book. That’s where the photos were. We could take them out and look at them,
spread them out on the living room floor,” she said. “In fact, that’s what got
Edith in trouble with Mother.”

Jane Eliot shuffled down the hallway of the
hospital, continuing to talk to us.

“Why?” I asked.

“The book wasn’t a problem. We’d all read the
story dozens of times. But those photographs? My goodness. Must have been weeks
after Edith’s birthday, Mother happened upon the picture of that child dressed
as a beggar maid, with her bare shoulders—you know the one I mean?”

“Yes, Miss Eliot. It’s a very famous image.”

“Well, it convinced my mother that Dodgson was a
pedophile. She wouldn’t have us looking at a little girl displaying herself
that way.”

“Alex was just telling me that story about him,”
Mercer said. “I’d never heard it before.”

“What did your mother do?” I asked.

“That was the last we saw of the book, until she
lay on her deathbed. She forbade Edith to have it, which created its own stir
at the time. Then Mother asked one of the curators in the children’s collection
to do some research about Dodgson. What she learned was that Alice Liddell’s
mother had a big falling out with him. Tore up all the correspondence that he’d
had with Alice. That inflamed my mother even more.”

Mercer tried to frame a question. “Because she
thought he’d been…?”

“Inappropriate, sir. That’s as explicit as we got
in those days,” Eliot said. “It seems Mrs. Liddell found every letter the man
sent to her daughter—mind you, she was only eleven or twelve at the time, and
he was a grown man—and she ripped them to shreds. That’s a fact. And then, when
Dodgson died, he left thirteen volumes of diaries. A record of his entire life.
But someone in his family was worried enough about the contents to destroy the
four years—every page of them—that detailed his friendship with Alice.”

“So your mother confiscated the book,” I said.

“First thing she did. Poor Edith—the girl had a
tantrum over that. I can still hear her screams. The next thing was, my mother
had it in her head to go after the trustee who’d given my sister the book. She
found some letters he’d written to Edith after the day he met her, telling her
how proud he was of her school grades.”

“How did he know about them?” Mercer asked.

“Some of the trustees—the nice ones—used to ask us
questions like that when they came to see Father, or on the holidays. Harmless
enough. What books did we like? What subjects were we studying? We were the
library’s little family, you see. But Edith kept the notes this man had sent
her, offering to take her out in his automobile—nobody had cars in those
days—show her parts of the city she hadn’t seen. He didn’t have a daughter, he
said. Just a boy. Said he wanted to be her friend.”

“I can understand why that upset your mother,” I
said. “Edith was only twelve at the time, right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Just like Alice Liddell. So Mother
went on a rampage. I was there the afternoon she came home and told Edith that
she had walked all the way up Fifth Avenue to his mansion, the day after a
terrible snowstorm. Knocked on the door and demanded to see the man. She wanted
to give him back his book. Can you imagine her taking on such a rich and
powerful person as a trustee of the New York Public Library?” Eliot asked,
proud of her mother’s spirit. “She came back and told Edith there’d be no more
presents from him, and no more visits.”

“Miss Eliot,” I said, trying not to get ahead of
myself. “Do you know the man’s name? The trustee who gave Edith the book?”

Her slippers scuffed along the linoleum floor.

“Of course I do,” she said. “It was Jasper Hunt.
Jasper Hunt. Edith said he called himself the Mad Hatter. Oh, she was very
peeved at Mother for ruining her fun.”

Jasper Hunt Jr., the eccentric owner of the rarest
map in the world.

“Did Edith ever tell you what she meant by her
‘fun’?” I asked.

“Not what you’re thinking, Alex. No, no. Mr. Hunt
never did anything improper, Edith assured me of that. But Mother’s concern was
with his intentions. And for Edith, it seemed like she’d been deprived of a
great adventure, a chance to be treated like a grown-up. In hindsight, I’d say
Mother nipped something in the bud.”

“And the book—how did you come to have the book?”

“Mr. Hunt was very patient with my mother. He
brought her inside, had her served tea and pastries, and removed the
photographs that had offended her. He told her that she must keep the book.
That one day it would be worth a lot of money and she couldn’t deprive Edith of
that.”

“So your mother returned home with the book?”
Mercer asked.

“Yes, but she had made such a fuss about the whole
thing that she never admitted it to us. Not till just before she died. She’d
kept it on a shelf in her linen closet all those years. Finally told Edith to
take it and have it appraised.”

“But you said Edith didn’t want it.”

“She was stubborn, my sister,” Jane Eliot said.
“She felt it had spoiled her birthday. Didn’t want anything to do with it. The
whole episode had embarrassed her with the staff and all that. You know how
girls that age are.”

“I sure do,” I said. “Did you ever show the book
to a dealer?”

“A couple of years ago, after Edith passed on, I
called someone at the library. I wouldn’t know how to find a reputable dealer.
The president’s assistant gave me the name of a man who worked closely with
them, she said. I’ve forgotten it at this point. Anyway,” Jane Eliot said, “by
the time I got around to contacting him, my letter was answered by the FBI.
They told me the fellow was in jail. Now, that was quite a shock, since it was
the library folks who had recommended him to me.”