The Book of Illumination (16 page)

I let out a sigh. This was bad.

“What did you say?”

“What could I say? I lied. I said I knew about the book, that Finny
had
had it and it was beautiful and probably very valuable, but that I wasn’t privy to everything he did, every decision he made. Especially toward the end. When the manuscript wasn’t among the ones that got packed up to come over here, I told her, I just assumed that Finny had done something else with it—given it to one of his children, sold it privately, I don’t know. He didn’t have to answer to me. I was just someone he hired to bind his books.”

“So she has no idea how close you were, you and Finny.” I was fishing here.

“No,” she said. “None at all. No one did, really.” I thought so.

“Do you think she believed you?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Sylvia said. “For all I know, she thinks
I
stole it.”

“No! Why would she think that? What you said makes perfect sense.”

Sylvia sat back and shook her head. We were startled by the ringing of her cell phone. She glanced at the screen on her phone.

“Oh, no,” she groaned. “It’s Tad.”

Tad’s call, like Amanda’s, was more of a summons. It had nothing to do with the books he’d asked Sylvia to appraise; he seemed to have forgotten all about those. It concerned a phone call he’d gotten on Friday from Amanda. She was trying to solve a puzzle,
she’d told him, and there were a couple of missing pieces. She was hoping he’d be able to help.

Tad asked Sylvia how soon he could see her; he was leaving in the morning for a trip to London and wanted to straighten this out before he left. Could he take her to lunch? No, she replied, that wasn’t possible today. But she could leave work around three and meet him at the house at three thirty.

“Will you come with me?” she pleaded.

The timing wasn’t ideal—I had to pick up Henry at five—but accompanying Sylvia would solve one problem: getting me back into that house so that I could try to help John Grady.

“Please?” she asked. “Just for a half hour?”

“All right,” I said.

The Boston Common felt strangely forsaken as we walked slowly toward Arlington Street. The recently refurbished wading pool, which doubled as a skating rink in winter, had the lonesome, soulful look of beach houses boarded up off-season. Soggy leaves had accumulated around the recessed drains, and a girl of about three, wearing rain boots with glandular-looking froggy eyes, was trying to kick the leaves across the aqua concrete. Nearby, a bored young mother talked on her cell phone, smoking and dropping ashes into the empty pool.

“I have to tell him the truth,” Sylvia announced.

I didn’t say anything for a moment, as a cascade of potential consequences unfolded in my mind. She’d lose her job. I’d lose mine. Charges would be filed. Declan would be reprimanded, maybe even demoted, for handling the theft “unofficially.” And no matter how it turned out in the end, Sylvia would have a hard time ever getting hired again, after a vague, cloudy incident that left people in the book world whispering, something to do with fraud and theft. I started to feel angry at this prospect. It wasn’t
right. She was a good person. She was just trying to honor a promise to a dying man she’d obviously loved.

“Which truth?” I finally asked.

She looked up quickly.

“The fact,” I said, “that his father didn’t trust him enough to let him in on a secret he shared with
you?
That his own dad thought he was so shallow and greedy that he would never be able to appreciate the meaning of what he had? That all Tad would want to do would be to sell it to the highest bidder? Even if that meant the book would be locked away forever in somebody’s private collection?”

“Finny didn’t want that,” Sylvia said, looking more and more upset. “It’s the one thing he
didn’t
want.”

“I know.”

“He was on a mission,” she said, with feeling. “It meant so much to him. It was like a parting gift he wanted to give to the world.”

I nodded. Tears were gathering in her eyes. She paused and sat down on a bench. I sat down beside her. The bench was wet, but it was too late now. She pulled a Kleenex out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes.

“He just didn’t live long enough,” she whispered, as the tears spilled over.

“I know,” I said softly.

I glanced at my watch. Three twenty.

“Look,” I said, “if you come clean now, the whole thing’s going to blow sky-high. Between him and Amanda, it’ll be all over the papers. Plus, whoever took the book will probably decide it’s too hot to handle right now and they’ll go underground with it, so even Declan won’t be able to help. If telling the truth would get the book back, that would be one thing. But I don’t think it will.”

“Me, either.”

“And,” I added, “I hate to say it, but … you’ll probably get arrested.”

“Oh, I’ll definitely get arrested,” she said, sniffing. She let out a deep sigh, then turned and looked me in the eye. “What would you do?” she asked.

“I
think
I’d—” I paused. To be honest, I didn’t know what I would do in her shoes. Court was court, jail time was jail time, and there was Henry. But I actually don’t think I would ever have had the idea—or the guts—to make the false cover in the first place, setting this whole thing in motion. I don’t mind the occasional white lie, or even the occasional whopper, but in this case, I think the goody-goody in me probably would have won out.

Did that make me a better person than Sylvia, who was risking everything—her job, her livelihood, her future—to honor a promise, and to try to shepherd Finny’s gift into the world?

No. I didn’t think it did. The world was full of mean, selfish cowards who hid behind the letter of the law when it served their ends. If this
was
the precious Book of Kildare, and it was stolen, then hidden away from the world for the narcissistic pleasure of one person, or a small group of people, this was wrong. Finny was right: it should be in a place where everyone who wanted to could see it and appreciate it and be inspired by it.

“I think I’d try to stall,” I finally said. “If you can. Maybe by the time Tad gets back from London, Dec will have made some progress. Maybe we’ll even have gotten the book back.” I doubted this, but I said it anyway. “And you can return it to him and at least explain what you were trying to do. He might still be mad, but at least he’ll have the book.”

“What about Amanda?” Sylvia said.

“She’s got no right to it. Would Finny have wanted them to have it? Probably not. Would Tad have given away a book that’s probably worth millions of dollars?”

“No,” Sylvia said firmly. “Definitely not.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course she’s sniffing around, but that book doesn’t belong to them and it never did. And it was never meant to.”

She nodded, a little uncertainly.

“Of course she’s desperate for it,” I hammered on. “Who wouldn’t be, in her position? It’d be a coup to bring it in.”

“She’s just doing her job,” Sylvia said, with more kindness than I thought was called for. Then she sighed, stood up, and motioned for me to come along. We didn’t speak for the rest of the way.

F
INNY’S HOUSE SEEMED
gloomier than ever. Tad opened the door himself, and he looked surprised to see me by Sylvia’s side. I could practically hear him thinking,
What are you two, joined at the hip?

He was dressed in a navy polo shirt and pants the shade of ripe persimmons. I had learned last year, when Henry and I took a day trip to Nantucket, that wearing pants like these signified that you were a Nantucket person. They were in all the shops, marked down that day because it was the end of September, the color identified on the tag as “Nantucket red.” Henry had wanted a pair, and one of the canvas belts embroidered with whales. He settled for the belt.

We followed Tad across the foyer and into the living room. We sat down on a threadbare sofa, and Tad established himself in a black wooden Harvard chair. It was still a beautiful room, but it had seen more impressive days. A grand piano stood in the bay of windows that faced Commonwealth Avenue, and a massive fireplace of black marble dominated the far wall. Mahogany bookcases, crowned with intricately carved moldings, ran floor to ceiling
for the length of the room. A plaster
frieze
of grapes, flowers, and leaves drew my eye toward the twenty-foot ceiling.

And there he was, the ghost of John Grady, up in the corner of the room. Once he caught my eye, he floated down to the floor and stood at attention behind a tatty gold armchair. I winked at him to let him know that I saw him, and he smiled and bowed gratefully.

“Thank you for coming,” said Tad, in the irritated tone of a busy executive who has been forced to make time for something he considers beneath him.

“Sure,” said Sylvia.

He glanced at me and appeared to hesitate. “Are you two … roommates?” he asked. What I think he meant was,
Are you two … girlfriends?

“Oh no,” I said, hopping in quickly. “I live in Cambridge. With my son.”

This had the dual purpose of clearing up the roommate business and establishing that the woman who looked exactly like me, whom he might have seen rummaging through his family’s trash yesterday, was not likely to have been me. I would have been in Cambridge, with my son.

“And I’m in Brookline,” said Sylvia. “Near Cleveland Circle.”

If what he was actually wondering about was our personal relationship, we hadn’t really answered his question. But maybe that was just as well; it might keep him a little off balance, confused and distracted, so Sylvia would have an easier time pulling the wool over his eyes.

Tad nodded, glancing from Sylvia to me, and then back.

“I’m a little confused,” he said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t confused at all, but was going to pretend to be, so that Sylvia could hang herself with lies and evasions.

“I’m hoping you can help me straighten something out.”

“Be glad to,” Sylvia chirped. “If I can.” She seemed like a different person than the one who had sat beside me weeping on a park bench not fifteen minutes ago. She seemed downright … perky. If she was able to keep up this bright and cheery facade, she just might pull this off.

“A manuscript seems to be missing,” said Tad, imperially.

I looked over; there was a slight tightness to Sylvia’s smile, but she seemed to be holding steady.

“Really? From where?” she asked.

Good answer
, I thought.

“From here?” she went on quickly.

“Uh, no,” said Tad. “Well, not exactly. I mean, I’m not quite sure.” He suddenly sounded even more annoyed. Apparently, he didn’t like being asked questions to which he didn’t have the answers.

“From the Athenaeum?” Sylvia asked. I wondered if she was beginning to sense an advantage. “You mentioned that Amanda had called you.”

“Yes, she did.” Of this fact, at least, he
was
sure.

“On Friday,” Sylvia continued briskly, shooting me a glance.

I held my breath, just praying that Tad had not heard from Amanda again today. If the only conversation they’d had was the one on Friday, he wouldn’t know that a couple of hours ago, Sylvia had admitted to Amanda that she was familiar with the manuscript.

“Yes,” he said.

I looked over. Relief was evident on her face. “So it was about … one of the books you gave them?” Sylvia continued, frowning and looking puzzled.

Excellent choice of pronoun
, I thought.
You
.

“Well, yes,” he said. “At least, I’m fairly certain I did. There were so many books.”

That were so unimportant to you
, I thought. Sylvia had described to me the dispensation of the collection. Tad had declared that he had no room in his home for all these old books. What he meant was, books were not his style. He and his second wife lived in an ultramodern house in Wayland. It had recently been featured in the Sunday magazine section of the
Globe
, lately devoted almost entirely, it seemed to me, to home makeovers and the residential work of local architects and interior designers.