The Forger's Daughter Read online

  “Everything’s good. Don’t worry about me.” And with that, she left us sitting at the table looking at each other.

  My thoughts were addled as I tried to make sense of what was going on. Why the man had chosen Maisie to be his messenger, the blameless handmaiden of a convicted criminal, I could only imagine. But if he was who Will and I both tacitly assumed he was, I knew he’d have no qualms about terrorizing anybody associated with my husband. Given the thick woods surrounding the front and sides of our house, as well as our isolation here, it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to spy on us for a time and mark our young daughter as his target. I got up, poured each of us a glass of Scotch, and set them on the table, thinking it was likely cowardice behind the assailant’s decision to make Maisie deliver the parcel on his behalf. Or at least a disinclination to confront Will face-to-face, unannounced, after such a long time and given the bad blood between them.

  When I’d heard Maisie close her bedroom door and knew she was out of earshot, I asked Will, my voice lowered, “Henry Slader?”

  “Who else could it possibly be,” he said, sipping his drink.

  “Is he even out of prison?”

  “So it would seem. I’ve spent as little time thinking about him as humanly possible.”

  He was right. Slader’s wretched name had rarely come up since his trial and conviction for his brazen assault on my husband years ago.

  “But Adam didn’t look anything like Slader,” I said.

  “Who knows what he was up to. The question is why he’s doing any of this now.”

  We sat at the kitchen table for a time, as the music faintly continued and the clock calmly ticked. I broke our silence.

  “Aren’t you going to open the package? Or at least read what’s in the envelope?”

  Will hesitated, swirled the contents of his glass, intent upon its golden hue. “You know, it’s entirely possible he’s out there in the yard looking at us.”

  An owl, a great horned that nested nearby, hooted. It reminded us both that while, yes, we were sitting in the relative privacy of the house, the world just outside the windows was very much with us. In the distance, a lower-pitched female owl faintly answered our neighbor’s call.

  “Maybe we should pull the shades,” I said, eyeing a kitchen window through which I could see nothing other than inky darkness.

  He shook his head. “And give him the pleasure? No, I’m sure nothing he’s written or sent needs immediate attention. Damn his eyes anyway. Attacking Maisie, even if he never laid a finger on her, tells me more than I need to know at the moment. I’ll open it in my own good time, when I’m sure he won’t be able to watch.”

  I felt bad for both of these people I loved, even as I was petrified about what was to come. More than anything, I hoped Maisie would not retreat back into her defensive shell as a result of this incident. In the first years after she was orphaned she’d been a bit of a loner, withdrawn and diffident, so any circumstances that helped her to blossom and reenter life were ones we encouraged. We’d all worked so hard to get her this far, to where she truly felt she was a member of our family, appellations aside. As for my husband, I worried that he too might withdraw into paranoia from days long gone, paranoia he’d struggled with considerable success to bury. I knew he would share with me what Henry Slader—if indeed it was Slader who’d accosted Maisie—had delivered in this coercive, cryptic way, once he’d had time to digest the tectonic shift that had just unsettled our placid lives. I rose, put my hand on his shoulder, told him I’d shut the first-floor windows and lock up, then left him alone as the string quartet flowed on, a whisper of empty encouragement from a distant century.

  When I went to secure the screen door on the front porch, I saw someone stirring on the far side of the road, just beyond the perimeter of light. No body was visible to my eyes, just the vaguest nimbus of a face afloat out there like an illusionist’s trick in a blackened theater. I was reminded of lonely No-Face in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, or those enigmatic flat-faced Cycladic sculptures I loved to see whenever we visited the Met. But this wasn’t some anime film figure staring at me or an ancient visage carved from limestone. It was palpably real, gradually withdrawing into the woods, never looking away.

  My natural impulse was to call out, demand an explanation. But I didn’t dare. For one, my family had been through enough tonight. What was more, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. As the gaze that was fixed between me and the mystifying face continued for a troubling minute, maybe longer, I realized Maisie was right. The face’s features, however ambiguous and shadowy in what postdusk light remained, resembled those of my brother, Adam, dead these twenty-two years. Murdered and laid to rest without his killer’s ever having been brought to justice.

  Impossible. Ghosts were for children and dime novelists. But this apparition was real, and my mind was not playing ghoulish tricks on me. Was the face, so rigid, slightly smiling as Maisie had said? Did I hear soft laughter, or was it the whispering breeze that ruffled the maple leaves and pine needles? I glanced behind me to see if the sound might have come from the hallway. No one was there. And when I turned back again to look across the yard, the face had vanished. Ignoring any fears I felt, I ventured outside and down the steps, where I hesitated by Maisie’s bicycle, clutching the newel post at the foot of the railing. Blinking hard, hoping to see something further, I realized the visitation, or whatever had just happened, was over. I looked up toward the stars, but none were visible. The overcast sky promised rain by dawn.

  After lingering another moment, I returned inside, locked the doors, extinguished the porch light, and went upstairs to bed. It wasn’t until the following afternoon, when curiosity drove me out across the front yard in my slicker and into the wooded thicket on the far side of the lane, that I discovered evidence I’d not been hallucinating. An oversize black-and-white headshot of Adam lay propped against the trunk of an ash tree, its eyes neatly and nightmarishly cut out and an elastic string fixed on either side so it could be worn as a mask. Unthinking, I wrapped my arms around myself as if taken by a sudden, fierce chill. This image was one I’d never seen before. My brother looked relaxed, carefree, happier than in most photos of him as an adult. It seemed to have been taken in the last year of his life, given the pronounced crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and the deep wrinkles on his forehead. I was afraid to touch the photo mask—it looked like a freakish religious talisman out here among the tiny wildflowers, club moss, and orchard grasses beneath the shimmering canopy of damp leaves.

  Strange, I thought. The glossy photograph hadn’t been damaged by the rain that had fallen off and on, a fitful deluge, most of the day. The way the mask had been placed, protected from the elements against the fissured bole of the old tree, seemed, however morbid, almost like a shrine. Not wanting to handle it, distressed that anybody would have been cruel enough to use it to torment us, I left it where I’d found it. As I hurried back through the woodland toward the house, the world before me began rivering, wavering, growing more and more indistinct. No sooner had I brushed away my tears than they welled up again. I hoped against hope that neither Maisie nor Will, nor anybody else, was watching as I made my hasty, unsteady way home.

  Once a forger, always a forger. For twenty long years I had been an exception to that truism, never practicing the dark art I had once loved so well, the mystical crafting of a new reality with ink and a steel-nibbed wand. Until I was arrested for injecting countless beautiful faked literary manuscripts and inscriptions into the bloodstream of the rare book trade, I had quietly earned my living as a master mimic, an impersonator on paper of some of the most revered writers in the canon. So fully had I escaped my past, I’d almost forgotten that I myself was my own best forgery. But now my nemesis had returned, angrier, it seemed, crazier than before. If my wife and daughters were the foundation of my life, and the leafy lushness of our upstate house was meant to be free of
strife, free of cares, then his message to me tonight was that I was living in a fool’s fortress. One in which barely perceptible fissures could easily open, zigzag from the roof of the building to its base, causing everything to collapse and swallow me whole. We all have demons. Some imaginary, others flesh and blood. Mine had resided for years as an ugly memory, one so suppressed it seemed unreal. Would that it had stayed in the realm of nightmares.

  I lowered the wooden blinds, despite my reluctance to convey fear to the man I imagined might be lingering outside in the pitch-dark field, and slowly opened the envelope string-tied to the package Maisie had delivered. Though my wife and daughter were surprised I hadn’t opened it immediately, I couldn’t possibly have risked revealing its contents in front of them, given that I had no idea what Slader had secreted inside. Alone in the letterpress printing studio I shared with Nicole, set up in an extension at the rear of our house, I unfolded the letter.

  Dear Will-o’-the-Wisp, it began, We both knew this day or, better yet, night, would eventually come, did we not? Before reading another word I folded it back up and returned it to its envelope. The handwriting, I immediately recognized, was impeccably that of Edgar Allan Poe. My gut went hollow.

  I hadn’t bothered to track this man, the true author of the letter, after he had been arrested, tried, and imprisoned back in the late 1990s for his attack on me while I slept with Meghan in our cottage outside the fairy-tale Irish village of Kenmare, near the Ring of Kerry in the southwestern elbow of the country. After I’d made my barest minimum of statements to the authorities, I did my best to cut—sever, slash, cleave—the assailant Henry Slader from mind and memory. Meg and I had moved to Ireland in order to live quietly, simply, above reproach and outside the turbulent, churning stream of life, of which he was a small if virulent part. Pipe dream, I suppose. But then, most dreams are. Still, I never imagined my past would catch up with me in the hinterlands of Eire in the form of a man attempting to butcher me in bed, hacking at me with my own kitchen cleaver, any more than I imagined it would find me again here, a hundred miles north of New York City on a narrow road in the upstate sticks.

  Meghan was seven months along in her pregnancy then, so I had more than my share of reasons to get well, or at least functional, as soon as possible. Our idyllic haven having turned out to be anything but, we were set on returning to New York to have the baby. Before our ship sailed back across the pond, I plodded through weeks of recovery and long hours of rehab each day to learn how to work with a partially severed, if nondominant, right hand. My physical therapist, an amiable young woman named Fiona, who filled our time together with tales of a Galway childhood and her passion for bodhrán and fiddle playing in pubs, was more than skillful at her day job. And I, her patient and pupil, strove to make my work with her proceed apace. A southpaw since youth, I hadn’t realized how much I had relied on my right hand to do simple quotidian tasks. Buttoning my shirt, tying my shoes, buttering my bread—these were paltry acts I did unthinkingly before my injury. Now they all became bedeviling problems that needed to be solved. Motor skills had to be learned anew as I healed, methods of compensation practiced and mastered. Many were the frustrating hours when I had to remind myself that going through life with a fleshy crab’s claw at the end of my right arm was better than having no hand at all.

  Thanks to Fiona’s expertise, and that of my doctors both in Ireland and stateside, as well as the support of my devoted wife, I succeeded bit by bit. No doubt, my own vinegary stubbornness played its role as well. And on a wet February morning, as freezing rain blistered the windows of the sublet Meg’s friend and former store manager, Mary, had found for us, Meghan, with the help of a midwife, gave birth to a healthy, bouncing, elfin baby girl. At Meg’s insistence we named the child Nicole, in honor of my mother, who I knew would have been thrilled by her granddaughter, though not by the events that had led up to the baby’s father having to flee a would-be assassin. An amateur assassin, quite literally a hatchet man, whose motivations, I had to admit to myself though not to those who held him behind bars, were not entirely without reason.

  After Nicole’s birth, I continued my work with a physical therapist on Union Square through the rest of that winter and deep into spring. Meghan and I were bewitched, if run a bit ragged, by the presence of little Nicole in our lives. Insofar as things could settle back to normal after such upheaval, they did, and the fear of Henry Slader that had haunted me slowly began to dissipate, like thinning mist under a strong morning sun. Stretches of time passed now and then without his coming into my waking mind or even visiting me in dreams. His name had surfaced in the local County Kerry papers for a brief period after his crime was made public, but he and his victim soon enough slipped from view. Which was fine by me. Memory is gossamer. Most of us have, I always believed, the attention span of a kitten rushing from one toy to another. Once the food is set down, the string and the tinfoil ball are swiftly forgotten. Whether my theory is true or not, I hold it as close to my heart as a mackintosh in mizzle.

  Spring came and went, as did summer, before Meg and I truly adjusted to having left Kenmare. We loved it there, but told ourselves that enchanting as rural Ireland was, young Nicole should have the advantages of the culture and diversity of experience that life in a metropolis would afford her. Besides, it wasn’t as if there weren’t expanses of bucolic forests, beaches, and mountains just a few hours’ drive from Manhattan. One could, to be sure, make a reasonable argument that growing up in such a pastoral, sane, kind-spirited place as rural Ireland was superior to the hardships of urban living. But we figured we could always visit the old country whenever we liked, once she was old enough to travel. What was more, hadn’t we gotten a little homesick for the grit and genius of the city?

  By autumn’s end, I was more or less healed. Functionally, at least. As I’d told Fiona when we said our goodbyes, I would always be scarred, but thanks to her and the surgeon who salvaged much of my hand, my life had been given back to me. What I hadn’t anticipated in Kenmare, or even in New York, when the bandages were finally removed for good, was that missing my middle fingers and some of my pinkie would prove less physically than emotionally onerous. Getting through my days without feeling the embarrassment of being maimed was something I hadn’t worked on in physical therapy. It was hardly necessary, as my friends and even people I didn’t know personally in tight-knit Kenmare had heard about what happened, so there was nothing to explain or feel defensive about. In the big city, it took a while, but eventually I learned there was no need to keep hiding my hand in my pocket. Manhattan, home to its fair share of the mutilated, was forgiving that way. And if I did happen to notice some ignoramus staring at me, maybe finding sick amusement in my misfortune, I could always raise my phantom middle finger in their direction and they’d never be the wiser.

  Meghan and I eventually took up more permanent residence in our old neighborhood, the East Village. Our fond plans of living off the grid in Ireland having been upended by the assault, we craved familiarity. These were the streets, shops, and restaurants we knew so well from our earliest days together. Not to mention that Meghan’s brainchild used-book shop, which she had sold to Mary and the other employees around Thanksgiving the year before our return, was nearby. Its doors were always open to us, and while the new owners had expanded to include first editions of literary gems housed in tall barrister bookcases, the place retained its same homey feel. Mary even kept Meghan’s favorite overstuffed chair in the office, with its whimsical upholstery depicting antique handwriting that was meant to look like the Declaration of Independence or some such. Ugly artifact, in my eyes, but like a pair of old shoes that have stood one in good stead over many miles and difficult terrain, it was comfortable, reliable.

  What we sought was just like that, a known quantity, a safe refuge, an embracing asylum. So when the rental agent showed us a walk-up in a brownstone not far from Tompkins Square with lots of light and lots of room, we leapt at it. S
queaking hardwood floors, old-school kitchen with a commercial six-burner stove and cupboards that clung like foolhardy mountaineers to the walls, electric outlets partly shrouded by layers of paint from generations before us—what was there not to love? We shared a bottle of champagne to complement the Cantonese takeout that first night in our new flat, while the baby cooed in her crib, blessedly oblivious to her parents’ noiseless lovemaking after dinner.

  Once Nicole had graduated from bassinet infancy, Meg was thrilled to be invited to take on a part-time role at the bookshop, which was doing well enough that it had opened a second floor with nicely worn Oriental rugs, built-in shelving for more stock, even a brick-walled gallery space for antiquarian maps and prints. As a result of her exposure to the wide-ranging interests of others on the staff, she began branching out beyond her earlier specialties in art and culinary books. I couldn’t have been happier for her. Mary Chandler, who’d been closest to my wife when Meghan had sold the shop, was the primary force behind the store’s growth and widened focus. A blessedly incurable book addict, Mary, who had tucked away a substantial nest egg while working in corporate law, had, after a few years, fled the mercenary grind of contracts and NDAs to devote herself to her true love, plowing her money and energy into expanding and deepening the quality of the shop’s inventory. Word was that she had also benefited from the help of a private backer, which had allowed her to buy out the other co-owners during a time when the going got rough with the business, but I never knew one way or the other. Mary had been the first person Meghan hired, a couple of years before my future wife and I met, and now, roles reversed, it was Mary who happily asked her friend and former supervisor to rejoin the family.