The Book of Illumination (9 page)

Get in line
, I thought.

According to Sylvia, the building was managed by a realty corporation and did not have a live-in superintendent. This made our task a little simpler: we didn’t have to deal with a suspicious old curmudgeon who had keys to every apartment, a nose for intrigue, and an inclination to place a matter like breaking and entering hastily and irrevocably into the hands of the Boston Police Department.

We had our own detective, thank you very much, and several good reasons for keeping this quiet for now. First of all, on paper at least, the book didn’t actually exist. Sylvia didn’t own it. Nor did the Athenaeum—it was not on any of the lists compiled and cross-checked when the museum took possession of Finny Winslow’s collection. Of course, there
was
a newly rebound second edition of Hoeffler’s
Mysterium Musicum
that was going to be a little hard to locate at the moment, should anyone care to look. But since Sylvia had been responsible for entering (or in this case, not entering) Finny’s books into the library’s database, no one was going to be looking.

Tad didn’t own the manuscript, either, though the letters from Moretti and Wescott had certainly piqued his curiosity. What
was
this rare and ancient volume? he’d asked us before handing over the letters. Why hadn’t he ever seen it or heard about it? When had his father acquired it, and where? Sylvia sidestepped Tad’s thrusts and parries with commendable dexterity, finally reassuring him that the book was safe and sound at the Athenaeum and was clearly
not
what they had once dared to hope it was. Still, he should come down and see it. It was really something. She’d be delighted to show it to him.

“It’ll never happen,” she’d whispered to me as we’d left the mansion on Commonwealth Avenue. “He just smells money.”

If we reported the theft, it would come out that Sylvia had been bending the rules a little, to put it mildly. Or, to put it not so mildly, she had deliberately defrauded both the Athenaeum and the Winslow heirs, and acted in a manner that would certainly cost her her job and likely her professional reputation. She might even go to jail.

Declan has no problem with jail, or with any kind of punishment that people have rightfully earned. But he does have a soft spot for Kildare, a county in which one of his favorite uncles still lives. Maybe he was intrigued by the idea of helping out old Saint Brigid, icon of the homeland. Imagine delivering into her hands, at least symbolically, the priceless treasure. Pull off a coup of that magnitude for a saint like Brigid, and, come time for the Big Tally in the Sky, he might even find his slate wiped clean of … me.

I doubt Declan really thinks that way. It was probably just my own guilty conscience spinning webs. All he said was, “Let’s give this a day or two before we let it out of the bag.”

He knew, because we’d explained it all, that if the manuscript really was the Book of Kildare, and it was located and authenticated, everybody and their brother would get involved in a fierce public battle for ownership and disposition rights. There would go the one and only chance we ever might have to do the right thing with it, whatever that might be. Although Declan plays by the rules, he does appreciate the occasional distinction between what’s legal and what’s right. Up to a point. The point was Monday morning. If he, or we, hadn’t made any progress in tracking down the book by then, he was going to insist that we bring in the bigger guns.

He told us he would start with a couple of guys who “worked art.” They’d been full-time on the Gardner Museum case for a couple of years and knew most of the art-world lowlifes on the
eastern seaboard. I had hoped that Dec and I would have a few minutes alone together, if only while walking out to our respective vehicles, but it was not to be. He was now in detective mode. He left, and left to us the job of canvassing the residents in the building, just in case anyone had buzzed in an unfamiliar repairman or noticed someone tiptoeing around wearing a little black mask.

We decided to tell Sylvia’s neighbors a partial truth: that there had been a robbery. But we’d leave out the fact that Sylvia’s lock had been picked; there was no sense alarming everyone in the building, when the thief was so obviously disinterested in the baubles and doodads of the average Brookline pad.

“My bike was stolen,” Sylvia lied to the first person who opened a door, a gloomy-looking man in his sixties. The cooking aroma of an unfamiliar meat—something gray, I intuited, and not normally consumed in the continental United States—drifted into the hall. It was carried on strains of what sounded like Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.

“Oh, no!” he said. Was he looking slightly more cheerful? No, he couldn’t be.

“It’s my own fault—it wasn’t locked,” Sylvia went on. “I thought it would be safe on the landing. I was just wondering if you might have seen anyone. If anyone asked to be buzzed in, or—”

No, no, he hadn’t seen anyone. He’d been at Symphony Hall all day (turned out he was a cellist) and had only been home for an hour.

The woman who lived below him had spent most of the day in the bathroom, she overshared enthusiastically, because she was having a colonoscopy in the morning. So no, she hadn’t been outside of her apartment or heard anything unusual. We wished her luck with her procedure and headed down to the first floor.

Sylvia knew the two guys who lived on the right, married gay men who owned a housewares shop called Chez Nous in the South End. She had been to a couple of their Academy Awards parties, once winning a bottle of Perrier-Jouet for being the only person to predict that Adrien Brody would take home an Oscar for
The Pianist
. I thought they would be fun to meet. They weren’t home.

Nor was the couple across the hall, a lawyer and her graduate student/high school baseball coach husband, who had just moved in within the past six months. Nor were the occupants of 2A or 3A. Well, we reminded ourselves, it
was
Friday night.

We hit pay dirt, though, with the woman who lived across the hall from Sylvia. She was a statuesque faux blonde named Carlotta McKay, employed, I later learned, as a writer of technical manuals four days a week. On Fridays, she worked from home, on a screenplay she was writing with her boyfriend, who lived in LA and was trying to break into the film business. If they could sell the screenplay, she was planning to move there.

Carlotta didn’t know anything about the bike—she had never even noticed it in the hallway—but she had met Sylvia’s new
friend
.

“Oh!” Sylvia said, a smile frozen on her face. She glanced at me.

They had run into each other in the hall. Carlotta had hit a wall with her writing, at about two thirty, and she’d decided to walk down to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things and get some fresh air. As she was locking her own door—

“What’s his name?” she asked us.

I jumped in with “John.” Dull, but serviceable.

“He was just coming out of your place. You guys must have had a late night!”

“Kind of,” Sylvia said, unconvincingly.

Carlotta liked older guys, too, she volunteered. In fact, Craig, that was her boyfriend, he was going to be forty-three in April, but she was sworn to secrecy on that, because if it got out, it might work against him when he went up for the younger parts. Which was really unfair, because he really did not look his age at all, on account of all the yoga and internal cleansing.

“You didn’t tell me he was
older,”
I said teasingly to Sylvia, then turned to Carlotta. “How old would you say he is?”

Carlotta looked questioningly at Sylvia.

“Guess!” Sylvia had the presence of mind to respond.

“Forty-five? Forty-six?”

Sylvia nodded. “Pretty close.”

“She’s hardly told me anything,” I confided, girlfriendlike, to the woman I had met thirty seconds ago. “She’s afraid she’ll jinx it. I don’t even know how tall he is.”

“Six one?” Carlotta squinted, shrugging at Sylvia. “Six two?”

“Around there,” Sylvia said.

“Blond?” I asked Carlotta. “Dark?”

Carlotta smiled slyly. “He colors it, doesn’t he?”

“What makes you think that?” Sylvia said. She was kind of getting into this.

“Come on!” Carlotta said. “Not a bit of gray at his age? Except in the eyebrows, like no one notices those. I mean, not to say he isn’t in good shape, and that leather coat was like butter, but he’s a good-looking guy. Rinses are tacky. If he’s going to go for it, he’s gotta really go for it—get some highlights, low-lights.”

“I know,” Sylvia said. “But I can’t say that, not yet.”

“No,” Carlotta said. “No way. You have to wait for him to bring it up. What does he do?”

“Oh, he’s—”

“Let me guess,” Carlotta interrupted. “He’s either a personal
trainer or he works construction. You don’t get a build like that by sitting at a desk.”

“You really have an eye for details,” I said. “I can see why you’re a writer.” It was a bit of puffery, but I sort of liked her.

Carlotta beamed.

H
ENRY WAS DUE
at Kelly and Dec’s by eleven. Normally, I take him over there after school on Friday, but since he’d been away with them for Columbus Day weekend, we’d decided to start this weekend’s visit on Saturday.

They have a great house. Like a lot of the immigrant Irish, Declan’s father put the money he saved into real estate, buying several rundown properties in Medford and North Cambridge and fixing them up on weekends. Declan took over one of the mortgages when he and Kelly got married. They live on the second and third floors of a Philadelphia-style two-family near Powderhouse Square. His sister Aileen, who got married last year, lives on the first floor with her husband, Alvar, an electrician for Tufts.

Delia and Nell had some kind of digging project going on in the side yard. Being close in age, they tend to argue a lot, but they were united in purpose today. Which was, apparently, to dig as deep a hole as they could. It was my son’s brilliant idea to add a hose to the equation. My heart sank, thinking of the thirty-eight dollars I had just plunked down for the new sneakers he was
wearing while his rain boots sat idle in the back hall at home. It was my own fault. I should have packed the boots.

Henry was uncoiling the hose.

“Don’t turn it on yet,” I said.

“Why not?”

I resisted the urge to reply, “Because I said so.” Instead, I answered, “You need to check with Daddy.”

Delia looked up. Her face was streaked with grime. “He’s not here,” she said. Delia has the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen, the palest blue, like ice.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He went to get a haircut,” Nell answered.

“And he’s bringing back doughnuts,” Delia went on.

“Did he say it was okay? To be digging here?”

“He doesn’t care,” Delia said, though I noticed she didn’t look at me. Clearly, a conversation with Kelly was in order.

That was when Henry squeezed the handle on the nozzle, spraying both Delia and the pile of dirt. She shrieked, dropped the shovel, and scooted away from the water. Nell, apparently delighted that her older sister, who can be on the fastidious side, was now both filthy and furious, screeched with enthusiasm.