The Forgers (13 page)

While Mr. Sullivan did like and approve the project—he generously offered to pay half the costs, as it happened—Meghan was less sure.

“Don't get me wrong,” she said, over lunch in town a few days later, after having met with the contractor. “It does get dark there at night, especially when there's no moon or the sky's clouded over—”

“Which is often enough.”

“Which is often enough. But I'm just concerned you're overworrying the whole thing. Locking the doors, which I might add we rarely did for the first months, really ought to suffice. It's not like this is New York, you know.”

I scratched my cheek and looked past her for a moment before agreeing, “Well, no, it's not. I suppose it's normal to want to protect my family, now that we're really going to be a family. But if you don't think it's necessary we don't have to move ahead with it.”

Her turn to think. She reached across the table and rested her hand on mine, in a gentle, almost mothering way. “You do what you think's best.”

“We can play croquet by halogen floodlight,” I said, trying for a little joke, relieved the discussion was over and that Meghan was, while not foursquare behind me, at least tolerant of my idea. Whether I was being paranoid after my false Slader sighting, which did stir up some old but logical fears, was beside the point, I assured myself as I asked our waiter for the bill.

What Meghan said next surprised me so much I didn't know how to respond. “You know, I owe you an apology.”

“About this lighting stuf
f
? No apologies and no worries.”

“No, I mean, listen. Sometimes it's too easy for me to forget that Adam's murder had a huge impact on your life, too. He was my brother and we were very close, maybe even too close. He really depended a lot on me. Probably needed more from me than I was able to give him, especially after I met you.”

I felt my feet freeze, as if they had been abruptly encased in ice blocks. “No, Meghan, don't worry,” I started to say.

“But when he died in such an awful way, I know I probably was harsh with you. I remember some of what I said, and it wasn't always very kind. So I want to apologize for that. What I'm trying to say here is, I get it with the door locking and these security lights and your concerns about the cottage being rural and all of it. If Adam had locked his doors, had motion sensor lights for instance, who knows?”

“Meghan—”

“I need to honor your loss, since you lost Adam, too,” and with that she gently wept.

We left the restaurant, our arms around each other as if supporting wounded comrades staggering off a battlefield. What could I say? Many crosscurrenting thoughts flew about in my head but the one that made most sense was to say nothing. So I remained mute as I walked her back to the bookstore, dropped her off after she daubed her eyes with my scarf, and returned to the contractor's office to sign papers.

“How soon can we get started?” I asked.

“Beginning of next week,” he said.

“And while we're at it, I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind giving me an estimate for an alarm system. You know, doors and downstairs windows.”

I took off the following week from work in order to oversee the job or, that is, watch the installation from a close distance. Doing my best not to be underfoot as the electricians began wiring lights beneath the thatched eaves, I spent much of my time in the nursery-to-be, where I completed the walls and trim, then started refinishing the bassinet Meghan and I had bought in an antique shop up in Killarney. The building was old, obviously, and getting the alarm contacts in place and functional demanded at times a bit of ingenuity, as did digging narrow trenches in the rocky yard to bury electric cable for several peripheral ground lights positioned near the forest edges. But the men were experienced and work went smoothly. When the undertaking was finished, Meghan brought home a celebratory bottle of cider and only half-jokingly toasted, “Here's to a thousand and one nights of unworried sleep.” We walked the perimeter of the yard after nightfall, taking our glasses with us, as the lights illuminated not just the house but the surrounding field, sending long shadows out behind individual trees that stood here and there in the yard. It was quite a sight, exactly what I had hoped for. Night could instantly become day if I ever heard an unusual, disturbing sound outdoors after we'd retired. While Meghan had every right to deem this security project of mine the unnecessary act of an already overprotective father, at the end of the day she was happy to see me happy. “You could be spending our hard-earned money on worse things,” she added.

Fact was, I still found myself looking over my shoulder for no apparent reason, and as for my sleep, it remained dreamless but continued to be troubled by bouts of insomnia. I knew the hours when constellations would rise into view and the moon, traveling endlessly through its phases, would appear to shed a soft eddying light across our bedroom. I reasoned with myself that we had found as safe an asylum as could be hoped for and chided myself for becoming a seek-sorrow, one who can find trouble and torment even where there is none.

The very next week, news that the police—or, that is, the one detective who continued to be interested in Adam Diehl's cold case, the guy who had turned up that chilly day at the funeral—had brought a man in for further questioning stirred up a whole host of emotions. Our fragile calm was fractured, with hope lifting my wife's spirits and covert panic dampening mine.

Meghan got the call from Montauk on the day Henry Slader was let go a second time in not quite as many years for lack of evidence. The officer, whose name was Pollock, like the painter, told her he just wanted her to know about the interrogation and that he was still following any leads, going over old evidence, trying to keep the search for her brother's murderer alive, so to say. At my insistence she told me, twice from beginning to end, everything that the detective had related. It was all I could do not to request that she walk through the conversation word for word yet a third time. As it stood, I probably betrayed far more interest in Pollock and Slader's meeting than was necessary or, for that matter, prudent. And yet Meghan's unnerving apology to me for her failure to acknowledge the impact of Adam's death on my own life provided a good justification for my hypercuriosity about this call. My keen interest in the news about Slader could reasonably be attributed to concern about justice for Adam. So, I believed, it must have seemed to my wife, and that was for the best. The truth was I felt a raw and desperate unease about Slader and Slader alone.

“What's the next move?” I asked, figuring I would soon have to let it go, lest it look to her like another obsession along the same lines as the outdoor security lights and alarm system—which indeed it was. “Did he say what happens now?”

“Not really, just that he intends to keep at it.”

“He sounds more hopeful they'll catch somebody? Seems pretty devoted to the case.”

She pulled her hair back with both hands and frowned, an anything-but-hopeful look in her eyes. “He told me again that he'd give his eyetooth if he could go back in time and be there to direct the first responders who contaminated the crime scene. One was a rookie and the other a seasonal, is what he said. And forensics, for all the movies and miniseries that portray it as miracle work, is a science that depends on clean evidence.”

Guilt is unbecoming in the guilty. That is what I thought, listening to the last of Meghan's narrative of her overseas phone call. After overcoming the initial surprise at hearing that my nemesis had been dragged from whatever lair he'd been operating out of—was he still making forgeries?—I found myself looking at the bright side. Or not so much looking at it as basking in the odd glow of a fact that hadn't initially occurred to me. And that was this. If the authorities were at such an impasse that they had nothing better to do than interrogate old Slader again, Slader who was guilty of nothing more than fraud, extortion, avarice, and who knows what other pedestrian misdeeds, it meant they had no viable case against a living soul. And, in particular, against me.

For an uncanny, fleeting moment it dawned on me that I myself had somehow managed to become my own best forgery. Were it not for my authentic love for Meghan and the expectant love a father-to-be feels for his unborn child, love that for better or worse does tether one to some trace of morality—a word as suspect as
permanence
and
reality
—I would be ready to take my place in the pantheon of forgers, most all of whom were prime examples of life imitating their art. But I wasn't there yet. One expert remained at large who could yet attempt to declare me, like a cache of magnificently faked Sherlock Holmes letters, to be not what I seemed. While I told Meghan how great it was that Pollock was still on the case, what silently concerned and even annoyed me most about his hapless efforts was that they might have awakened a beast best left asleep.

W
HEREAS I ADMIRED MY FATHER
, I adored my mother. My father's legacy as a book collector was key to my education about literary first editions, and the debt I owe to him about all things Arthur Conan Doyle, indeed all things rare books, could never be overstated. But it was my mother—several of whose watercolors were hung in our Kenmare cottage, charming landscapes that reminded Meghan a little of those by W. B. Yeats's brother, Jack—whose influence on me was of paramount importance when it came to calligraphic prowess.

The illustrated nursery rhyme and fairy tale books Meghan and I had begun to collect into a little library for our child were, in my youth, read to me by my mother as I sat on her lap and marveled at the colorful pictures of princes and princesses, runaway bunnies and
velveteen rabbits, wild things and talking animals, all manner of other fanciful characters. When, in elementary school, my teachers urged me to write with my right hand, it was my mother who intervened on my behalf, telephoning the principal to demand that they allow me to follow my natural southpaw instincts. My mom, champion of nonconformity and a lefty herself, won the day and henceforth I became the lefthander that genetics demanded, a minor challenge to my later work as a forger though obviously one over which I triumphed. Once I was a precocious six or seven, it was my mom who took me to the Frick, the Morgan, the Met, and showed me not only old master paintings and Roman frescoes but the astonishing paintings William Blake made to surround his poems, the meanings of which she patiently tried to explain to me. It was my wonderful mom who, seeing my youthful interest in calligraphy, made sure that I saw master Japanese scrollwork from this or that dynasty at the Asia Society and a major exhibit of illuminated medieval manuscripts at the New York Public Library. And it was my mom who sat me down with ink and paints, brushes and nibbed pens, and taught me how to approach the glorious tabula rasa of a blank sheet of paper. She who first showed me how to copy written characters and words on tracing paper and later, after setting aside any such nets to catch my figurative falls, how to see the finished line before that line is even drawn on a beautiful piece of handmade foolscap.

My mother saw to it that every impediment to an early mastery of the calligraphic arts was removed from my path. Any true portrait of the artist as a young forger would have to include her as my teacher, my prompter, my consoler, with the obvious proviso that never in a million years would she have wanted me to become what I became. She was a mentor, not a prophetess. As a mother, she gave her boy tools with which to build secular cathedrals, not elegant outhouses, as she would surely have viewed the forger's enterprise. That I preferred outhouses, to continue the metaphor, was never her hope nor her fault. I found my way to that proclivity all on my very own.

I remember my first lessons from her as she encouraged me to try my hand at forming letters in chancery cursive script while sitting next to her at the kitchen table of our upstate farmhouse. As always, I began by doing doodle exercises to warm up, drawing parallel S-curves that resembled abstract waves or thick straight verticals that looked like a bamboo fence or, and this was perhaps what astonished her most, forming perfect circle after perfect concentric circle. But doodles weren't chancery cursive any more than a classic stick figure is a da Vinci pastel nude. At first I found the whole business foreign and frustrating. But I liked being near her—I was admittedly something of an asocial fellow at school, prone to either sulk through classes or get myself into physical altercations that resulted in suspensions—and so I persisted. Whenever the principal barred me from class for days or weeks after I'd found myself in a fistfight, I far preferred the tutoring I got at home to anything I learned formally in the school system. Without ever admitting it to the authorities, my parents, or even to myself at the time, my motivation for getting into trouble had less to do with striking back at a bully or roughing up some kid who rubbed me the wrong way than that it afforded me a chance to spend more time with my mom.

I must have been around twelve years old when I surpassed her in technical skill. I could replicate most every writing style reproduced in her calligraphy manuals and history books—oh, there were some hoary scrawls such as the earliest Magna Carta, scribbled with iron gall ink on parchment, that I had no interest in bothering with—matching word for word what was on the page and signing my own name in all manner of various hands. Rather than compete, though, she only urged me on.

When she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, she put a brave face on it and continued to work with me as long as she was physically able. Having run out of handwriting samples for me to copy, we turned to my father's collection for inspiration. In retrospect, she must have been fully aware he would disapprove but went ahead with our exercises anyway. We kept it secret from him that I soon excelled in copying out respectable facsimiles of some of his Conan Doyle letters and manuscripts. Did the potential ethical issues that might surround our then-innocent activities disturb her? I have no idea, but doubt it. These were not forgeries I was producing, after all, because I wasn't even attempting to replicate the paper or even the exact color of ink the master had used, nor did either of us ever consider defrauding someone by offering them for sale as originals. No, it was just the size, shape, form, and figure of the words that interested me. Obsessed me, really. And made her proud. When I finished copying a warm personal epistle to one of the author's friends, for instance, a part of my soul merged with Doyle's, or so I fancied in my greenhorn naivete.