The Forgers Page 10

  The house was not quite two kilometers from the center of Kenmare village and our stroll home was quiet, with Meghan humming one of the songs we had heard. My Slader sighting aside, calmed by the pub fare and tired from the walk, I slept like the dead that night and woke up predawn next morning full of vigor. We had already chosen the bedroom adjacent to ours as the nursery and were repainting it a cheery yellow—no pink or blue for us, as we decided we didn’t want to know the baby’s gender until it was born. Seeing I had an extra hour on my hands, I rolled out a second coat of acrylic on one of the walls by a window that overlooked a spacious span of mowed field behind the cottage. As the sun rose, the grass that extended to the curtain of mature slouch-boughed pines at the end of our yard changed from dark forest green to the bright emerald unique to this landscape—the very shade of emerald green used by William Morris and other Victorians in their wallpapers, which was mixed with arsenic and produced lethal fumes. Death by William Morris wallpaper, who would have thought it possible? Oh, the trivia a good forger must know, I thought, as the dew winked and twinkled in the lawn, making it look as if diamonds had been scattered there by some beneficent creature of the night.

  As I painted, I glanced now and then out the window, imagining how many mornings our boy or girl would view this same sylvan scape with wonder—that is, once he or she was tall enough to peer on tiptoes past the sill. It reminded me of my own childhood weekend home in upstate New York, where my parents retreated with almost fanatical regularity from Friday nights through Sunday evenings, to escape the city and, as my father put it, “recharge the batteries.” Didn’t matter what case he was involved with or whether he had to make business calls and prepare rebuttals or cross-examinations, pore over testimony, whatever his practice demanded. He always did it in an office attached to our restored farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. So it was that I as a youth had a view out my window that wasn’t altogether unlike this one. Grass and more grass, a valance of flowers in summer, and at the periphery a tall partition of trees beyond which lay a forest.

  This visual memory was as strong as any from my past and prompted the question, What kind of father was I going to be? My own dad, looking back, wasn’t unassailable, but he presented a model to aspire to, perhaps one that was both too good to be true and thus undesirable because unattainable. Who knows. But as for me? I had much to hide and knew I would always be looking out at the forest edge with different eyes than I did in my youth. I who had never been afraid of what might lurk in the dark woods now couldn’t feel quite so self-assured as before, would have to consider the slim but real possibility the forest was looking back at me, framed here in the window.

  Dying is, once again, a dangerous business, but so is living. In fatherhood I would have to find a new fearlessness and at the same time be protective of my too-vulnerable family. I realized in that moment how much easier it had been to avoid, erase, ignore such thoughts before Meghan discovered she was pregnant. Now this exile of sorts was no longer a perfect displacement from life and lives past. I would just have to deal with it, and the best way, it seemed as I rolled some fresh paint along the dado, was to embrace anew the fact—and it was a fact, damned if it wasn’t—that I was a free man with not a single consequential finger pointed in my direction.

  Meghan had entered the room silent as fog. “You plan on going to work today, Picasso?”

  “Oh man, you startled me,” I rasped, wheeling around.

  “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to,” said Meghan, a bit startled herself. “We’ve got to get going soon though, since we have to walk, remember?”

  It was true, I had utterly forgotten we left the car in town. Hurriedly cleaning things up, I changed into my casual work clothes, and we set off.

  “That was kind of strange,” she said, after we turned out of the drive and headed down the dirt lane toward the paved road that led to the village. “I never saw you lock the door before.”

  “I hadn’t even realized I did.”

  “You all right, Will?”

  The answer was clearly no, but I assured her, “Fine, I’m fine,” startled at hearing my name, a name I never much liked. Usually endearments—none of which need be listed here, as we are all guilty of the same maudlin sobriquets—dislodged my given name from our conversation, which was fine by me. Shadow men never like being called by name, I guess one could say, although now that I was out of the shadows, why shouldn’t I shout my name from mountaintops? Habit, caution, self-disgust? I was definitely off this morning and didn’t like it. “It’s just that I was thinking how isolated the house is. Hope the little one won’t be scared of the dark.”

  Meghan gave a relieved laugh and told me I was getting way ahead of myself. “Besides,” she said, taking my hand as we strolled along beside the hedgerow, “it’s good to be scared of the dark sometimes.”

  IN LOCKING DOORS—of cottages, cars, any other thing with a key and bolt—we reveal what we treasure. What we desire to protect from others, be they prying or covetous. I thought about Meghan’s offhand yet inarguable comment the rest of that morning. What I most needed to protect had no fail-safe lock or key. Nor was it something I treasured. Rather, I wondered, was it an act that had by now become so unreal to me as not to exist? Fortunately business was brisk at work, and anxieties about our cottage or car—the latter was unmolested, of course—dispersed as the day wore on.

  As it turned out, to my joyful chagrin, Henry Slader was also so unreal as not to exist. At least, not in Kenmare. I spotted the bastard again during my lunch hour, this time as he climbed out of a parked car, helped an elderly woman from the passenger side, and escorted her into a pharmacy. The resemblance was uncanny, and as I followed him inside I recognized a familiar stature, even a familiar face, but when I heard him speak in a distinctly Irish brogue, relief came over me the likes of which no drug on any shelf at any dosage in the place could possibly have afforded me. I was never more delighted to feel like a perfect imbecile.

  That said, I did stop by the hardware store after work to make an enquiry about who in Kenmare might be hired to install security lights at the cottage. Assuming Meghan would agree with my idea, I decided to propose to our landlord that we would let him approve the lighting design and that, in turn, we would pay for everything, including whatever increase there might be in the utility bill. Yes, I realized one of the many reasons we settled in pretty Kenmare was that crime was so low. This was, as far as we could tell, misdemeanor country at worst. Petty theft or, say, the occasional reveler who’d overindulged and maybe broken a window or a nose in schnockered exuberance because his favorite hurling team had won their match, his favorite footballer had scored the winning goal. Still, I knew myself well enough to know my concerns about security at the cottage had taken root, foolish or otherwise, and rather than let them fester it was better to take action. What was more, it occurred to me that when I explained to Mr. Sullivan, whose family had owned the house for generations, that we had lost Meghan’s brother to a violent crime in the hours between midnight and predawn, he would be understanding in the extreme. Indeed, how could he not agree? It would constitute a free improvement to his property.

  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 stuff? 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.

  WHEREAS I ADMIRED MY FATHER, I ador
ed 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.