The Forger's Daughter Read online

  THE

  FORGER’S

  DAUGHTER

  Also by Bradford Morrow

  The Prague Sonata

  The Forgers

  The Uninnocent

  The Diviner’s Tale

  Ariel’s Crossing

  Giovanni’s Gift

  Trinity Fields

  The Almanac Branch

  Come Sunday

  THE

  FORGER’S

  DAUGHTER

  A Novel

  BRADFORD

  MORROW

  The Mysterious Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Bradford Morrow

  Jacket design by Becca Fox Design

  Jacket art background from first edition of

  Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane, courtesy of Susan Jaffe Tane

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Scans from the first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane

  reproduced courtesy of Susan Jaffe Tane.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in Canada

  This book set in 11-pt. Berling LT

  by Alpha Design and Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  is available for this title

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4925-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4927-5

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Cara Schlesinger & Susan Jaffe Tane

  I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements.

  —Edgar Allan Poe,

  “The Imp of the Perverse”

  The original is unfaithful to the translation.

  —Jorge Luis Borges,

  “On William Beckford’s Vathek”

  A scream shattered the night. At first it sounded feral, inhuman, even unworldly. I leaped up from my wingback reading chair in the study, dropping my book on the wide-plank floor, and heard my husband’s studio door jolt open at the back of the house. When he found me waiting in the front hall, he was gripping his letterpress composing stick, still wearing his stained apron with its rich scent of printer’s ink. We said nothing, just waited in shaken silence. Our sash windows were raised both upstairs and down to let in the evening air, and outside noises, we both knew, often seemed closer in the dark. Still, the scream was so sharp it seemed to have emanated from nearby, maybe even from the unmowed yard out front. I wondered—hoped, really—if coyotes were about to chorus, as the local pack sometimes did upon being prodded by the single wailing cry of an alpha individual. But no other voices joined in. By the time we opened the door of the farmhouse surrounded by enveloping black maples, the world was calm again aside from moths and nameless insects thudding against the porch light, and, from indoors, the faint continuation of a piano concerto by Saint-Saëns on the radio.

  “Maisie?” I shouted, peering into the near darkness past the overgrown hedge of lilacs that bordered the yard as I called our daughter’s name.

  Moths and Saint-Saëns were joined by the drone of crickets from every quarter of the woods and fields around the house. Nothing else. Often, I reminded myself, the lone coyote who isn’t answered simply moves along. Or perhaps what we’d heard was the death screech of a rabbit being killed by one of those same neighborhood coyotes. In Ireland once, I heard a hare being snatched from life, probably by a hungry fox, and the bloodcurdling scream that ripped the night in half was one I’d never forgotten.

  My husband called her name again, louder. “Maisie!”

  Our older daughter, Nicole, who still lived in our East Village apartment, wouldn’t join us upstate until the weekend, several days hence. But young Maisie was spending her August here as she had done for half a dozen years running, at the restored farmhouse in the Hudson Valley where we’d made it our annual custom to take off work the last month of summer and flee the city for greener terrain. Earlier that afternoon, she had biked, as she often did, the couple of miles to town—if a church, gas station with deli, antiques barn, and roadside bar can be so designated—to hang around with friends, play video games, stream movies, maybe cook out. Her girlfriends sometimes came here too, even though we couldn’t provide them with a decent Internet connection, and the joys of bird-watching, picking wild blueberries, and swimming in the nearby water hole only went so far. She should be heading home at any moment.

  Whereas the scream unsettled us before, now it was the throbbing quiet. At half past eight this time of year there was still light, if faint and swift-fading. Without exchanging a word—Will and I had been married some two decades and often intuited each other’s thoughts—we hastened down the steps, across the uneven bluestone path, and out to the country road, where we headed in the direction of town. Whether consciously or not, he still brandished his metal composing stick, a classic tool used by centuries of letterpress printers and one, I expect, rarely if ever used to fend off a possible assailant.

  We hadn’t gone fifty paces before we caught sight of her coming toward us, dully luminescent against the murky backdrop. Not racing on her bicycle, as that shriek—now I knew it had been human—might have led me to expect, she was walking it along with an oddly deliberate, slow, rigid gait, her head tilted forward. When we reached her, I saw the determination set on her tear-streaked face, ashen as pumice in the waning light. My words tumbled over Will’s as we stood together in the unpaved road, hugging the girl, stiff with fear, between us.

  “Maisie, what happened? Was that you? Are you hurt?”

  “Your brother,” was all she said in response, her voice reedy and breathless, gripping the handles of her old Schwinn Black Bomber, which she had spotted at a yard sale several summers before and lovingly restored with her father.

  Looking over at my husband, I saw that he was as bewildered as I.

  “You mean Uncle Adam?” I asked, as gently as I could, glancing around in the growing darkness, feeling at once alarmed and a little foolish.

  “He was just there,” she insisted, voice tight, and pointed back down the road in the direction she had been coming from.

  “But, Maisie. My brother’s been gone since before you were even born. He’s not with us anymore. You know that.”

  She shook her head violently, like a much younger girl. “He was, though. I know he’s dead. But he looked just like in the photos.”

  “Stay here,
” Will said, and walked back into the ­gloaming—beyond where we could see him—less to confirm whether my dead brother was inexplicably, impossibly, lurking there than to convince Maisie that the road was deserted.

  When he returned to us, striding with a bit of fatherly exaggeration, he assured her, “Nobody’s down there, honey. No ghosts, no nothing. Even the birds have gone to bed.”

  “Please, I want to go inside,” was all she said in response.

  Without another word, my hand on Maisie’s shoulder, I marched next to her toward the house. Will, wheeling the bicycle on her other side, kept glancing back into the dark, apparently pantomiming his concern, as if to reassure her no one was following. Ahead, the familiar windows of the house were illuminated with an amber glow that on any other evening would have filled me with a sense of peace. Tonight, the long ribbons of shadow and light they cast across the lawn had instead an intimidating noir effect.

  As my husband leaned the bicycle against the porch rail, Maisie retrieved something from the basket. It wasn’t until we were up the steps and into the entrance hall, with the door closed behind us, that she spoke again, her dark eyes averted. Choking back tears, she managed, “He said to give this to you,” and held out a thin, rectangular package wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with bakery twine.

  Will scowled as he took the package from her hands. “Who said?” he asked, before slipping it into the wide front pocket of his apron.

  Now in the warm light of the hallway, it was plain that Maisie had taken a nasty fall. Her right forearm and elbow were abraded and caked with bloodied dirt, and her thin, tanned right leg and both knees were scraped. I interrupted, “My God, what’s this? Maisie, you’re bleeding all over.”

  She looked down at herself with reddened eyes, examining her knees as if they were someone else’s. “I guess I must’ve fallen off my bike harder than I thought.” At that, I saw both palms were also chafed.

  “You guess? Let’s get you cleaned up,” I said, again hugging her to me, not only to comfort the girl but to steady myself as well. “That looks like it hurts.”

  “A little,” was her benumbed response as we walked, Maisie limping a bit, down the foyer into the kitchen, where I washed her wounds with warm, soapy water. To my relief, her lacerations appeared to be superficial, but I fought to hide the anger welling in me, crowding out my earlier fear. I applied antiseptic ointment and bandages, crushing their wrappers in my fist.

  Distracted and looking pale himself, my husband set his composing stick on the counter, removed his apron and draped it over the back of a chair, then sat down with us.

  “Do you want some cold water, Maze?” I asked, noticing that Will was staring at me instead of at our daughter, his breathing a bit labored. “Or, I think we have some apple juice?”

  “Water’s fine,” she said.

  Tossing the crumpled bandage wrappers into the wastebasket under the sink, I poured a glass from the tap, dropped in ice cubes, and sat next to Maisie at the round oak pedestal table that centered our kitchen. “You’re safe now, all right?”

  She nodded and took a drink.

  “I’m confused,” I said, placing one of my hands on her uninjured arm. “It couldn’t have been my brother who gave you this. Your scream, it sounded like—can you say who did this to you?”

  “He said you’ll know.”

  Will and I looked at each other with even greater alarm, as part of what had happened suddenly became as clear as a shard of broken crystal. Slowly, quietly, I asked her to tell us once more what she saw, in whatever detail she could manage.

  Maisie shifted in her seat, wincing, looking embarrassed. “He just, this man came out of nowhere. I was riding, saw the house lights up ahead. Then he was there, like that. I had to turn really hard to miss him, and I skidded and fell. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  “Did he have a weapon?”

  “No, I don’t know,” she said. “He just surprised me. Like in a nightmare. He had this weird white smiling face. I’m sorry I screamed.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I consoled her, hiding my own horror as I smoothed aside a stray strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead and caught on her eyelashes. “Believe me, I would’ve screamed bloody murder too.”

  Will was sitting rigid in his chair. Now he asked, “Did this man say anything to you, Maze? Was anybody with him?”

  Gingerly wrapping her hands around the ice-chilled glass, Maisie answered, “Not that I could see. He warned me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d get it to you safely.”

  “That was all he said?”

  “He was kind of in a hurry to get away.”

  I noticed the Saint-Saëns concerto had ended and a string quartet had taken its place, probably by Haydn, though many of that era’s string quartets sounded much the same to me. It had the disconcerting effect of briefly becoming a kind of soundtrack, one that made everything in our otherwise very real, very lived-in kitchen, with my collection of copper pans, vintage Amish baskets, and homegrown dried herbs hanging from the rafters, seem like a scene from a movie, a scene I didn’t want us to be actors in.

  Will, clearly stricken by Maisie’s description of the man’s threat, reached behind him to remove the package from his apron pocket and place it on the table. “Can’t you tell us more what he looked like? I mean, beyond any resemblance to your uncle Adam?”

  “It was too dark, happened too fast,” she explained, brushing tears from her eyes and glancing from the glass of water over at the parcel. For a moment we all studied it in silence. A thin dun mailer, the kind you would send a sheaf of photographs in, or perhaps a children’s book, with a cream-colored envelope secured beneath the knot. Will’s name was written on it with a calligraphic flourish. On either side of his name were skilled pen-and-ink drawings of what appeared to be black flowers. Black tulips. I saw a fleeting look of curiosity pass across Maisie’s face as she regarded the decorations on the envelope, rendered in an elegant art nouveau manner that belied, it seemed to me, the meanness of this act of terrifying a young girl.

  Maisie reached over to touch the tulips on the mailer, then snatched her hand back as if to avoid being bitten. Glancing at Will, she continued, “He came at me from behind a tree, or bushes along the road, I’m not sure.”

  “How old do you think he was?”

  “I don’t know. My headlamp wasn’t working.”

  “That we’ll fix in the morning, but about this man. Was he thin? Short-cropped hair, maybe bald?” he pressed. I shot him a glance meant to suggest he needed to ease up, but, intent on Maisie, he appeared not to notice. “Could you see what he was wearing?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, jutted her delicately cleft chin. “He came out so fast, and then I was on the ground and he was standing over me with his smile. Then he just shoved that package at me, told me to give it to Will—”

  “Wait, so he specifically said your father?”

  Maisie nodded; I felt awful for the poor girl. Her cheeks were blushing crimson with confusion and guilt at not being able to answer Will’s salvo of questions.

  My husband, who was seated on her left with his arm on the back of her chair, stood up as if to go somewhere, breathed in and out, then sat down again. I waited for him to speak, but he had fallen mute, agitated, preoccupied. For a moment it seemed he wasn’t fully with us in the room, while the wall clock continued indifferently to tick, the refrigerator hummed away, and the faucet softly went on dripping into the sink, as in my haste I hadn’t completely closed the spigot.

  “Do we call the police?” I asked him, gently squeezing Maisie’s slender forearm.

  Abruptly alert again, he said, “And tell them what? That a man, possibly a ghost, who didn’t at any rate identify himself, gave our daughter—who has no idea what he looks like other than your dead brother—a package on her way home from her friends’ house?�
��

  “Will,” I warned.

  Hearing me, and all of a sudden self-aware, he turned to Maisie with a concerned frown, and quietly asked, “Look, I know he frightened you. But did he touch you in any way?” He leaned forward and clasped his hands tightly, prayerlike, on the table.

  In that moment, I was forced to admit to myself that my husband, three years shy of sixty, seemed even more unnerved by the incident than eleven-year-old Maisie. This was not a criticism but a fathomable truth.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Would it make you feel better if we reported this to the police?” briefly overcoming his stubborn ­reluctance—the result of a serious encounter years ago—to have anything to do with the authorities.

  “No,” she repeated, surely to Will’s relief, and took another swallow of water. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist and forced a smile meant to let us know that she’d answered every question as best she could. “I’ll be fine. Can I go upstairs now?”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Meg, honestly. I’m all right.”

  Sometimes I still wished Maisie felt comfortable calling me Mom instead of by my name—though I wished far more that her biological mother had lived to raise the girl herself. My best friend, Mary Chandler, was the only person for whom that appellation would ever make a natural fit. Maisie wasn’t bothered when we referred to ourselves as her parents. But just as she rarely called Will Dad, I would always be Meghan, her loving, stand-in mom, even though I mothered her as naturally as I did our natural-born Nicole.

  “There’s an analgesic in that ointment that should help with the pain,” I said, aware that I needed to let her retreat to her room. Unlike Nicole, Maisie, for all her friends, was a private soul, and I’d learned there were times, like now, when I could minister to her afflictions only so far.

  “You’ll let us know if you need anything,” Will added, his supplicating expression revealing to me, if not to Maisie, that he was displeased with how he’d handled her disturbing experience. Her eyes still red, she gave him an oddly wise and forgiving smile—the kind only the young can offer to the old, the innocent to the ­informed—pushed her chair back, and rose.