The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  We were ensconced in our favorite corner of our favorite Irish pub, drinking dark stout at the end of our long and wearying day. In times past, this would’ve been a celebratory occasion. Beginning of the fall at the shop after a serene, restful August upstate. Back in the swim of things, with fresh inventory of desirable books that hadn’t seen the light for years. Will headed into a busy auction season. Both girls in school, one in the middle of her education, the other deciding whether to continue to grad school or take a gap year after finishing college. Instead, this.

  “There’s more,” I said. “I never told you that the night Slader terrified Maisie, he pulled a similar sick trick on me.” When Will started to respond, I briefly raised my hand. “Hear me out. He was skulking around in the dark just across the road, wearing a homemade mask with Adam’s face on it, smiling and happy and rigid as death. The psycho was taunting me, as if I hadn’t suffered enough over my brother’s murder and with a photo I’d never seen before. On top of that, he got it into his head to steal that family photo, the one in the hallway, of me and Adam on the beach, only to return it to me in person, apologizing. When I asked him if he knew my brother, he said you knew the answer.”

  “Meg, I—”

  “So, is he gaslighting me or did he know Adam?”

  Will averted his gaze momentarily before looking me square in the eyes. “Whether he’s gaslighting you is a matter of speculation. But he knew Adam well. To be frank, I even wonder if he and Adam weren’t involved.”

  Now I was thoroughly confounded. “Involved in that he bought books and archival materials from Slader? That’s why the investigators questioned him when they were working on the case. Much as I don’t like the man, they never found a shred of evidence Slader had anything to do with Adam’s murder.”

  “Any more than they found evidence against me,” he said, a declaration so off the point that it made me wonder why he would utter such a thing.

  Ignoring him, I asked, “So what you’re telling me is that Adam and Slader were lovers? I find that hard to believe.”

  “It might help explain how he had a photo you’d never seen. Slader does claim to be a photographer. Sociopath of many talents.”

  I mulled that over. “Adam was private to the point of hermetic, so I suppose there would’ve been no reason for him to tell me, if what you’re saying is true.”

  “There’s more, though, Meg,” said Will, his voice lowered. “You need to understand that besides trying his luck at fabricating documents himself—you’ll remember asking me to verify signatures in his library after he died—your brother was up to his ears fencing seriously sophisticated forgeries. Was he the amateur apprentice to masterful Slader? We’ll never know. One thing is ­certain—he didn’t die a lily-white innocent. My best guess is that whoever did him in was somebody he swindled out of a lot of money.”

  Numbness spread through my limbs as I listened to Will bare these sordid details. “Or maybe an angry rival,” I conjectured, feeling a little nauseated.

  “Or,” he said, “maybe a jealous lover, someone he might have threatened to expose?”

  Every thread of Adam’s narrative seemed to lead back to Henry Slader, as if he were the Minotaur lurking at the center of my brother’s labyrinth.

  “Meg, so why didn’t you tell me about his stealing a picture and coming to the house? Why did you stay mum about what you saw?”

  I didn’t want to cry, especially not in public, here in one of our longtime haunts, but my eyes welled. “I don’t have a good answer for those questions, I’m ashamed to say. I guess because you became a black hole after Maisie delivered the Tamerlane. You were preoccupied, so anxious, evasive. I didn’t want to say anything that might implicate you, make bad things worse.”

  “Meghan,” he said, and reached over to comfort me.

  “No, let me finish,” pressing his hand. “One afternoon you were on the cell with somebody, Atticus maybe, walking down past the garden into the field. You weren’t aware of it, but I watched you from the kitchen, and you looked so alone in the meadow. My heart went out to you, despite my being really angry about what was happening. I guess those secrets I was keeping didn’t seem worth burdening you with.”

  “None of this is on you,” Will half whispered. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry about everything.”

  “Can you tell me why Slader hates you so much?”

  “The usual rubbish.”

  “But why force you into forging again, and don’t tell me that’s not what it is. Even Nicole seems caught up in this chaos,” and with that I did finally begin to weep, pulling my hand from his and cupping both palms against my eyes.

  “Shall we leave?” he proposed, and accompanied me from the relative darkness of the pub into the evening, whose ravishing sunset lights of citron and cinnamon lit the high clouds overhead. The bustle of pedestrians, blessedly indifferent to my worries, brought things back into scale. I knew what needed to be done. And it had nothing to do with admissions or accusations. Sophie had made the book discovery of her lifetime earlier today, regardless of how it came into her hands, and I grasped, my heart sinking, the sole path out of the quagmires surrounding that discovery. I felt like a thrown rock.

  Having gotten Maisie off for her first day of school next morning, we returned to the shop, where Cal and Eliot were combing through the collection on the off chance more treasures, author letters or postcards, rare ephemera perhaps, had been hidden away in other books. A handwritten grocery list dating back to the turn of the last century was ferreted out of an anthology of Emerson essays—parsnips and coffee were on the tally, along with “beef meat”—but no further Tamerlane, or Al Aaraaf, or other Poe gems surfaced. Which in many ways was for the best. Tamerlane was headache enough.

  In consultation with Will and Sophie, I decided to show it to the powers that be at the auction house where my husband worked. We had a long-established relationship with them, and while my assistants wondered if we should solicit proposals from other venues, it made sense not to break with tradition, at least until we’d listened to their experts’ thoughts. Nor did it particularly surprise me that when specialists from both their literature and autograph departments, along with the genial president of the firm, came to examine the book and letter—again under the express agreement that the discovery remain under wraps—they were appropriately impressed.

  As fate would have it, or maybe as canny Slader had long since foreseen, they’d scheduled an Americana sale right around the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death. While it was mostly devoted to historical documents and rare tomes by political figures rather than literature, it was agreed that the Tamerlane, once vetted and verified, would make enough of a fit to work in the context. Along with the Poe letter, it would, in fact, be the auction’s crowning lot, and could be a separate special addition to the catalog. As a preemptive measure to quash our going elsewhere, they waived charging us any commission and instead would make all of their money on the buyer’s premium. Papers were to be drawn up within the week. I was both dazzled and dazed by how swiftly all this happened. Nothing about the process comforted me other than the hope that it meant everything would soon be over and done with.

  Regarding the issue of authenticity, we agreed it was best that they invite outside Poe experts to view the items before the sale was even announced. As this would be the only surviving Tamerlane with Poe’s signature as well as the only known accompanying letter, corroboration was essential. Indeed, if the consensus was that the title-page autograph had been penciled at a later date by someone other than Poe, that would be important to establish too. Will and his colleagues recalled the brouhaha at Sotheby’s in London two years earlier when, not long before the sale was to go off, a Beethoven manuscript purported to have been penned by the composer himself was questioned by one of the composer’s most prominent contemporary biographers. Estimated to bring £200,000, it had be
en personally examined by world-renowned experts, who’d verified it, but after a cloud of doubt had been publicly cast over the score—not as a forgery, but an early copy in a hand not Beethoven’s own—the lot failed to sell. Even I remembered hearing about the matter on one of my radio broadcasts, though as for the music itself I remained an unwavering fan of the Allegretto in B minor for String Quartet. It was imperative Tamerlane not meet that fate.

  Much as I hated admitting it to myself, an odd relief passed over me, like an eerie breeze on an otherwise airless day, when Will’s associates left my office. Maybe I was feeling a false sense of safety in numbers. Or maybe I was assuaged by the simple act of opening the Pandora’s box that Tamerlane represented, guardedly optimistic that, as in the fable itself, an ending that included hope lay ahead. Or maybe I had simply lost my moral compass, and what passed for relief was just so much wishful thinking. No matter, it couldn’t and didn’t last.

  Unable to fall asleep that night, and hearing Will tossing in bed, I softly asked if he was awake enough to answer a question that had been keeping me up.

  “What’s on your mind?” he said with a yawn, turning toward me in the ambient light that filtered in from the streetlamp below.

  “Do you think there’s a chance Slader has set all of us up for a fall here?”

  Now awake, he said, “Talking with Atticus, it seems more likely he’s set himself up. But no. He’s not that noble.”

  “Noble?” I almost laughed.

  “Yeah, noble. That level of revenge, going through all this just in order to destroy us, would involve a kind of purity, of nobility, that’s not in his character. Vengeance of the kind you’re talking about, horrible and destructive as it may be, isn’t consistent with such an unprincipled person as Slader.”

  A dog started barking down in the street, a small one, judging by the high pitch of its yaps. Who, I wondered, would walk their dog at this hour?

  “Slader’s motivated by a simpler reward,” Will said. “Think green. The last thing he wants is to see you or any of us take a fall. He wants us to succeed because it helps him.”

  He leaned over, kissed me, turned on his side again, and soon enough his breathing slowed and he was asleep. Myself, I continued to lie on my back, watching lights flit across our bedroom ceiling whenever a car passed by outside. That dog stopped barking, which had the odd effect of bringing Ripley to mind. I decided that next time we were upstate I was going to be more attentive to her than I’d been in the past. Try to brush her maybe, or get her to play with a length of yarn. She was, in her feral way, family. And I needed all the family I could surround myself with, one with matted marmalade fur and a life shrouded in natural mystery included.

  Once the discovery had become public knowledge, Tamerlane and its companion letter were moved to a locked vitrine at my auction house, where they could be examined in a secure environment with staff assistance. Because of the relatively short time between the official announcement of the find and its upcoming appearance on the block, there was a constant stream of interested scholars, librarians, and bona fide collectors, not to mention high-powered booksellers who came to examine the book and letter for well-heeled clients. Without breathing so much as a syllable, Nicole and I read each other’s mind, both fully aware that this vetting process could produce a catastrophe at any juncture. All it would take was enough skeptical Poe experts to discredit the lot, and matters would get dicey. It was easy to imagine questions stacking up like so many poker chips in an adversary’s pile. Why would Poe sign a book he’d published anonymously? Why were there no other examples of a cover letter for Tamerlane? Why was there no record of the recipient working at any prominent review during that era? Where was the envelope that would provide evidence as to what journal the author had submitted his pamphlet? To my mind, these queries were answerable. Yet much as I wished otherwise, I wasn’t the final arbiter.

  Before the deluge, I did have some control over who was invited to the bookshop to examine the items and offer private assessments. Being prudent, I proposed that Meghan bring in three respected authorities with whom we’d had friendly dealings in the past. Not shills. But not antagonistic either. Each was paid a modest honorarium, though not so much that they could fairly be accused of having been bought off.

  Tamerlane itself was unanimously declared the real deal. A personal adage that I’d always adored—It takes a lot of truth to tell a lie—was in full play, with the Black Tulip serving admirably as the underlying truth in the equation. All were also persuaded by the physical letter, although Theodore Johnston was unknown to them. Naturally, I couldn’t share that I myself had tried researching Thomas Johnson’s prototype and, having come up with exactly nothing, had taken a chance that my Thomas was every bit as viable as Poe’s Theodore. I nodded, sympathetically frowning, and said nothing, while wondering, was there really any difference between an unrecorded critic and an imaginary one? Any forger worth his or her salt could answer that without a moment’s thought. History is mercurial, subjective, arbitrary, even amnesiac half the time. Hell, most of the time. It wasn’t that my Thomas Johnson was any less real than Theodore Johnston. He was equally elusive. I was relieved that this trio of pundits essentially agreed.

  Only one of our appraisers harbored any serious concerns, though he did sign off on the discovery with what might be described as dour excitement, stating that it might even lead to the unearthing of further specimens.

  “In other words, publicity could prod another out of the woodwork,” Sophie commented.

  He nodded, telling a story about how, after an article by the popular columnist and bibliophile Vincent Starrett, “Have You a Tamerlane in Your Attic?,” was published in the Saturday Evening Post back in 1925—rhapsodizing about the book’s rarity and value even as it denigrated the poem as “a stupid tale of a stupid monarch”—people all over the country scoured their attics in search of literary gold.

  “A woman named Ada Dodd,” the appraiser went on, “was spurred to action by Starrett’s piece and actually found a copy in her house in Worcester, Mass. After circulating through a couple of other owners, it’s now in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library.”

  Sophie quipped, “If another surfaces, let’s hope it comes to us.”

  “Hear, hear,” I seconded.

  What this expert didn’t like was the pencil signature on the pamphlet’s title page.

  “It’s not Poe for half a dozen reasons from Sunday,” he warranted, his nose all but pressed to the page. “Why pencil, not pen? Poe’s manuscripts from the period are mostly in ink, if I’m not mistaken. Why just the autograph, without an inscription to this Johnston fellow? Why legitimize a book that Poe himself claimed, just two years later, had been ‘suppressed through circumstances of a private nature’? I’m sorry, but for me it’s whys and more whys.”

  “Does it hurt the value?” Meg asked him.

  He shrugged, crossed his arms. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit that, finally, it’s impossible to truly authenticate anything. All one can do is fail to disprove its authenticity, and I’m afraid that’s all I’ve accomplished. With respect to this autograph, just consider me a doubting Thomas.”

  In many ways, I was grateful for his skepticism. Were all three authenticators fully on board, without hesitations, the whole exercise would look like an inside job, a snow job. As it was, Meghan and I were able to take their reports to the auction house and from there arrange the next steps.

  During the interim between discovery and sale, Meg seemed to have steeled herself to soldiering forward, though her doubts—her whys—about the whole enterprise ran far deeper than those of any expert. When she privately confronted me about which Tamerlane was which, asking, “If this one’s authentic, where is the other that you and Nicky worked on last month?” I told her the facsimile copy had been returned to the owner, blurring as best I could the illicitness of the switch. Tu
cking her hair behind her ear, she said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, for the sake of our daughter if no one else,” then turned away.

  I took, or willfully mistook, her warning as a reprieve and moved on to other parental responsibilities. Maisie’s fall term was in full swing and, Poe aside, Meg and I needed to be present and supportive. Nicole’s semester was upon her, though I noticed she was spending more time with me than she had since her childhood. She got it in her head to design a new logo for our letterpress outfit and made a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of the Shrubberies stone circle in Kenmare, with its ellipse of boulders around an egg-shaped dolmen. We decided to get dies fabricated in several sizes to use on the title pages of future projects. Life needed to press ahead despite the upcoming auction, we all seemed tacitly to agree, knowing from our different vantages just how rarely it did so in predictable, untroubled ways. Young as she was, even Maisie understood that the most polished coin must soon enough tarnish.

  Third week of September. We’d been back to the house upstate once already and found nothing awry. On arriving for a second weekend, we saw that some maples were already displaying autumn’s blush, and the planted row of burning bushes along the side of the garage was beginning to redden. Faithful Ripley arrived at the back porch on cue to greet us, and Meg’s Swiss chard still thrived in the garden. For a few blessed hours, it was as if we hadn’t a problem in the world. Saturday afternoon, when Meg and Maisie had driven out to visit local farm stands to check on the status of early apples, I spent time with Nicky in the print studio, where we were mortified to discover that the Tamerlane plates were still where we’d left them, in two boxes beside the Vandercook. How could we have forgotten? How could Slader, who’d otherwise been so diabolically meticulous? Unhinged, for sure, but detail oriented.

  Taking shovels down into the woods at the bottom of the field, we were driven by shared guilt, or so I supposed, to dig a far deeper hole than necessary—not easy, given the array of roots and jagged rocks in the ground. After we finished, we tossed in the printing plates and buried them. Not knowing what to say to each other during this unsavory exercise, we worked in uneasy silence. After masking the hole with leaves, fallen sticks, lichened stones, whatever lay on the surrounding forest floor, I finally spoke.