The Forgers (18 page)

“Look,” I said. “We're dry and safe, not at sea. And plus it's your birthday. So I have something I hope you won't ever leave out in the rain.”

Meghan was, how to put it, overwhelmed. Talk about a book nerd. Those earth-blue eyes of hers teared up.

“I love you,” she said. “Thanks from the heart.”

In retrospect, having just experienced what was as close to perfection in the generally flawed life we lead, or some of us lead, I should not have taken the chance. But I did.

“There's another present, or so I think, that came in from New York. From the kids.”

She took the parcel, used a table knife to cut the string, and opened it.

“My god, this is wonderful,” Meghan exclaimed.

It was a nice book for sure, a dust-jacketed first of Yeats's
The Winding Stair
.

“They pooled their shekels for that one,” I said, relieved if at the same time surprised that they selected a volume whose design matched that of
The Tower
.

When she opened the book to the title page, everything good and hopeful went bad and sent Meghan into tears of a different kind. For myself, it sent me into a murderous rage, albeit behind as confused and concerned and benign an expression as I could manage.

The
Winding Stair
was inscribed in the poet's hand, the ink perfect, the placement on the page just exactly as Yeats would have done it, the lettering and signature impeccable, drop-dead impeccable, “To Meghan, on her birthday and in remembrance of things to come,

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

with all necessary affection, W. B. Yeats.”

A
SCRATCHING SOUND WOKE ME UP
from my light sleep. Blurry after those several glasses of Irish whiskey I'd downed once Meghan and I arrived back home from Kinsale, I wondered if the stubborn sound, a rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape, was real or else the
after-echo of some bad dream, an already forgotten nightmare about digging a grave or clawing out from inside a coffin. Meghan was deep asleep—she was gifted that way, able to sleep no matter how upset she was when she laid her head on the pillow—her breath shallow and slow. The scratching seemed to come from out in the yard behind the house, insistent and though faint not in the least concealed. Whoever was there didn't care about being discovered. Brazen bastard, I thought, hearing also a light drizzle against the windowpane.

Weary, wary, and disgusted that what should have been such a beautiful day ended up with my wife furious and bewildered, and myself now convinced that Henry Slader was back, I slipped out of our warm bed, careful not to waken her. Listening as I went, I climbed down the stairs, which creaked and sighed with each footfall even though they were carpeted. I made my way by touch through the night-blackened rooms to the kitchen where, again as silent as I could manage to be without benefit of any lights that might warn him of my presence, I withdrew the meat cleaver from its slot along the side of the old butcher block next to the sink. Why, I thought, had I not bothered to keep a gun? Just as our landlord had offered to set me up with his grown son, who was a professional ghillie and hunting guide, so I could learn the basics of salmon fishing, he'd also suggested that I might like to try my hand at skeet shooting and even take one of his shotguns out after some waterfowl. I had nothing against fishing and hunting but just hadn't gotten around to taking him up on his kind offer. Standing there barefooted in the dark, holding a somewhat dull meat cleaver in my hand—something else I hadn't gotten around to doing was to sharpen it with the whetstone we had recently bought for the purpose—I felt like an impotent barbarian. Too, I noted my palms were damp with sweat even though the cottage was cool.

The scratching stopped for a time. Had the intruder heard movement inside the house and decided to skulk off, back into the anonymous night? How I hoped so. But then it started up again and so I blind-man-bluffed my way to the back door. Assuming that the sound was somehow coming from Slader himself—still in a liminal state, I drifted ghostlike toward the switches for the security lights and flipped them on, instantly flooding the rear field with silver light—I was surprised to see no forger, no human nemesis, nothing more than a black-and-brown mongrel dog, hefty and mangy, vigorously digging along the fresh-buried trench where the electricians had laid their wires for the security system. Furious, I stepped outside into the drizzle and shouted at it, dropping the cleaver to clap my hands as I charged the idiotic cur. He lifted his head and, seeing me coming straight at him, nonchalantly limped off into the woods.

When I reached the spot where he had been digging, I could hear Meghan open a window upstairs in the bedroom.

“What on earth's going on out there?” Her voice combined alarm, irritation, concern, and, to be sure, sleepiness. It must have been three in the morning, certainly the witching hour, and the wet grass was painfully cold on my feet.

“There was a sound out here.”

Even as I shouted those words back toward the blinding lights of the house, unable to see Meghan in the glare, I felt preposterous, like an insane person explaining why he insists on wearing a sideways Napoleon hat and tucking his hand inside his ruffled blouse.

Meghan said something but I couldn't make out what it was as I continued toward the trees where the dog had been digging. With a flashlight I might have been able to see what he had been trying to unearth, but even with the security lights the hole was cast in shadow, and I was disinclined to reach into it. Waste of time, I thought. Can wait until morning. I headed back toward the house realizing that I was soaked head to toe, my pajamas plastered to my body, my feet muddy. Probably looked like a bogman, or else some lousy mongrel myself.

Meghan was downstairs with a towel when I came through the back door.

“What was it? You must be freezing.”

“You're going to laugh,” I said, peeling off my soaked nightclothes and drying myself.

Meghan handed me my bathrobe and lit the burner under the kettle to make tea. “I doubt that. I'm not much in a laughing mood.”

“Well, that's probably part of why I wound up outside. Whether or not you ever believe that I had absolutely nothing to do with that Yeats forgery, which, as I said over and over, was a cruel, thoughtless prank, I'm every bit as freaked out by it as you are. So when I woke up a little while ago because I heard a strange noise in the yard, my first thought was that whoever was behind that business might be back for more.”

Meghan considered that while getting out chamomile tea and honey from the pantry. “Why didn't you wake me up?”

“You were so sound asleep, and after such a rough evening, I don't know. I can't say I was thinking clearly myself.”

“So what was it? Really worth getting yourself soaked? Let's hope you don't get pneumonia.”

“A stray dog digging away at something.”

“Another hound of the Baskervilles?”

“Right,” I smirked, and couldn't help but laugh at myself a little along with her. “Huge thing with monstrous red eyes burning like fire.”

We had our tea and a rapprochement of sorts before going back upstairs to bed. In the morning I called work to ask if I could come in after lunch, as I was feeling a little off.

“Late night,” I explained, feeling guilty about making the request. After all, I myself had volunteered to come in on a Sunday when the storefront was closed so I could help do press work on the Vandercook, as we were behind with printing orders. Being a good Irishman, Eccles had no doubt forgiven an employee's hangover more than once in times past. No hangover or pneumonia either, my ailment, if such it could be called, was a brute apprehension that Henry Slader had managed to locate us and, riled by his newest interrogation regarding the Adam Diehl murder and my sale of the Baskerville archive, had decided to exact reprisal.

But Eccles was talking. “How'd your wife like the pochoir paper?”

“Loved it,” I said. “She's saving it to reuse for the first baby present.”

“Good, good. Take the day, not to worry. Feel better.”

While I dearly hated to miss a chance working the press, I needed time to think about what to do. Besides, I wanted to go out back and see what if anything that dog was after, maybe look around the woods. Before Meghan left to do some shopping, I couldn't help but tell her, “Be careful, you hear?”

“What, you afraid a dog is going to bite me?” she chided, reminding me, as if I needed reminding, that my wife was nothing if not resilient. “Look,” she went on, “I'm really sorry that I went off on you like I did last night. I was just shocked, is all, especially after your beautiful present.”

“Meg—” I interrupted, hoping we might avoid the dicey terrain of further discussion about the incident.

“No, listen. I should never have blamed you for that book. I know you had nothing directly to do with it—”

“Directly? Like I said over and over yesterday, I had nothing to do with it, period. Just because whoever did that knows a craft, call it, that I used to know, doesn't mean this rotten stunt has to do with me or my past. What I was trying to say last night, and probably didn't express myself that well because I was horrified by the inscription, too, is that there's every chance, and don't shoot the messenger, this has to do with Adam.”

Meghan clasped her hands as if in prayer and brought them slowly and smoothly up under her chin. She was standing still as carved marble next to the front door, her heavy Aran sweater on, her string shopping bag hanging from her fingers like a forlorn miniature fishnet, ready to go to town. She started to cry again, quiet sobs. “It's just—how could anybody be so cruel?” she managed between breaths.

I was speechless, not because her question wasn't reasonable but because if I were given a millennium to sit in a whitewashed monk's cell and try to come up with an answer that was as reasonable as the question, I knew I couldn't do it. A cynical voice inside me said, Ask god, he's the one who started all this. Another said, Shut up.

The drear overnight clouds and drizzle had given way to tentative patches of blue sky, which in turn opened up as the morning sun burned bright. Outside, the grass was lightly blanketed in low-lying mist as rainwater in the drenched fields began to evaporate. A pair of magpies strutted across the misty lawn in the near distance and, farther off, a glossy chough performed impressive acrobatics in a yew tree. Finishing my cup of coffee, aware that I was putting off going outside to investigate, I finally pulled on my wellies and opened the back door. The air, its swirling little galaxies of fog having disappeared under the sun's strength, could not have been any purer than it was that morning. Disturbed by my presence, the two magpies protested with a noisy
chack-chack
as they lifted off and gracefully took wing over the wood's edge.

As I started across the lawn where not so many hours ago I had ventured forth like some fool in a bad horror movie, I thought of Slader, marveling at his intractable temper, his genuine madness. Yes, he would be upset if he found out about the Baskerville letters—and very likely he had, given Atticus's report of excitement in the scholarly world when they were sold to a library. If our roles were reversed, though, I'd like to think I would admire the pluck, not to mention the skill, it took to pull off such an antic. And yet he had gotten his pile of money, his pound of flesh. What further did he hope to extract from me?

Most concerning, the rest aside, was why do that to Meghan? Meghan who among all of us was the innocent. But then I remembered how much I had learned to dislike and eventually loathe Adam Diehl, to the point where I began to obsess about ridding myself of the man—forgers are superb obsessives, and because they disrespect the law, by definition they are dangerous obsessives—and with that, Slader came into better focus. A far superior forger than most, Slader was capable of deeper feelings of entitlement, the kind that made one feel very much at ease stepping into another's world and becoming, to the degree the act of counterfeiting allows such a metamorphosis, that person.

Listen to you, I thought, smirking as I walked. Philosopher of Kenmare pontificating to himself in his wellies. Still, for an enterprise that involves such a degree of education, sophistication, and civilized engagement, forgery does attract the uncouth brutish as well. Slader seemed to embody all those rudiments, and for that I had to grudgingly admire the man.

Even though the ground mist had largely burned off, I had to search around a bit for the hole the dog had dug. Just as well, in retrospect, because what I found moments later would mark another turning point in my life, an abrupt precipice I might sooner have wished to avoid.

The hole was not that deep, just half a foot, if that. It wasn't deep because it wasn't intended to be deep enough to thwart the dog, not just the dog I witnessed but any dog, from digging up the bloody gloves that were deposited there. I gasped, or think I must have, and before examining them closer peered around me, squinting, to see if anyone out in the woods or back at the house was watching. Seeing no one, I knelt down. Made of natural calfskin and drenched in blood that was only partly dried, the gloves resembled a pair of dismembered hands. Human blood? No, this is a country where people eat blood pudding and the like; butcher shop blood is come by easily enough. Repulsive nonetheless, and whoever set the gloves here had even gone to the trouble of stuffing their fingers and wrist with mud and shanks of grass, for verisimilitude. The dog had managed to chew off one of the thumbs before I'd come outside and scared it off. Most disturbing of all, at least at the time, before I had a chance to absorb what was going on here, was that a round-headed spike had been driven into the gloves at the wrists presumably to hold the thing in place. In other words, I was meant to discover this travesty. Had Slader—for it had to be Henry Slader—even brought the mongrel along in order to set the discovery in motion? Looking around again, I noticed a large bone lying in the grass at the wood's edge, most of its meat gnawed off. Was it placed with the bloodied gloves as bait and dropped when the dog bolted?