“You sure?”
He nodded. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Babysitting my sister.”
“Call me if you need anything,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “How did it go in Virginia Beach?”
He smiled ruefully. “Okay, I guess. Bonita ran into some friends she knew from around here. She wanted to stay and party with them, so she’s still there. I came back alone. She’s catching a ride back later tonight with some guy she used to date.”
“Oh.” I studied him. “Everything all right with you two?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason. Thanks for the reprieve on cleaning up. I owe you.”
“No, you don’t. See you tomorrow.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “With everything that happened, I’ve been holding off telling you. But you need to know. We heard from Belcher.”
The EPA verdict. “How bad?”
“A fine. We got off easy, considering. They’re going to throw the book at Lambert Chemical, though.” He handed me the paper. “I’m glad it’s over with. This thing with your sister. Georgia. Randy. Maybe now we can start moving on.”
“Yes,” I said, “now all I can think about is whether Mia is going to jail or not.”
He looked at me sadly. “Aw, honey. You poor kid. Go home and get some rest.”
I drove back to the house, completely confused. Was he leaving or wasn’t he? He never said, one way or the other.
I found Mia stretched out on the glider, drinking something straw-colored and thumbing through the book of prints I’d bought from Mac.
“What is that?” I hadn’t meant to sound sharp, but it looked like Chardonnay.
“Apple juice. I swear. Want to try?” She held up the glass.
“No, it’s okay. Sorry I snapped at you. But be careful you don’t slosh anything on that book while you’re lying there. It cost six hundred dollars. I think some of those prints will make nice labels for the new wines. If they get wet they’ll be ruined.”
She sat up and swung her long tanned legs around so her feet were on the floor. “Six hundred?” She looked stunned. “You paid six hundred dollars for a damaged book?”
My turn to be surprised. “Damaged how?”
“It’s got missing pages.”
I sat down next to her and the glider rocked back and forth. “Show me.”
She opened the book to the flyleaf. “Here. Looks like maybe one page was cut out.” Then she flipped to the back. “And here. Two pages. See those tiny edges? If you’re going to cannibalize it, I guess it doesn’t matter. Where’d you get it?”
“From Mac Macdonald. Someone bought it, then returned it. Mac knew I was looking for wildflower prints.”
Mia sipped her apple juice. “Probably whoever returned it found the cut pages after they bought it.”
Or maybe that person was responsible for the damage. “Wonder what was on those pages,” I said.
“Nothing. They were probably the blank pages at the beginning and end of a book. I bet there was an inscription or some notes on them and somebody decided to remove them.”
I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to call Mac and ask him about that.”
I got through to the antique store a minute after five p.m. and the phone immediately went to the answering machine. I hung up without leaving a message.
Mia was hungry for the first time all day and I’d been too distracted to remember to bring anything back from Dominique’s reception. I fixed her bacon and eggs in the kitchen while she sat at the old pine table and read the comics, like she used to do as a kid.
“Boy,” she said gloomily, “my horoscope’s dead right. ‘Sitting on hold is frustrating.’ Too bad I couldn’t have Mom’s. Taurus always has good ones. ‘Out of your efforts springs something magical.’”
“What’s mine?”
“Cancer. The crab.” She looked up and grinned. “‘Push yourself to do the very thing you don’t want to do.’ Ring any bells?”
“Too many,” I said. “Put that away.”
She went to bed after dinner. I cleaned up and threw the newspaper in the recycling bin. But not before I read the rest of my horoscope. “A great deal is accomplished alone and in silence.”
I got the book of prints and went to the library, which had been Leland’s office until the fire destroyed most of it. His extensive collection of books on Thomas Jefferson had literally gone up in smoke and none of the furniture had been salvageable. My mother had once gone tartan-mad in decorating the room—heavy doses of red and green plaid on a heathery purple background, the colors of our modern tartan. It had always seemed a bit eye-popping and agitated to me and I didn’t spend much time there.
After the fire I knew I wanted the original floor-to-ceiling bookshelves rebuilt and then, in honor of my clan —my family, my history—I again used the Montgomery colors, though this time opting for our ancient tartan in the calmer shades of sage green and Wedgwood blue. I sat in a tartan-covered wing chair by the fireplace and turned on the three-way reading lamp to its full wattage. Not that I needed it.
The uneasiness that had been haunting me all evening had bloomed to real fear. And anger. Mac wouldn’t have lied to me about the condition of the book. He was an eccentric businessman, but he was an honest one. I flipped through the pages one more time. I’d seen that distinctive thick cream paper somewhere else.
The letter Jefferson Davis wrote to Judah Benjamin.
If Ross had cut out the pages before returning the book to Mac, then to whom had he given them so that person had been able to forge the letter? Had he done it himself? The forgery had obviously been good enough to fool some expert analyst who believed it was genuine. Meaning the forger had to be a real master at what he did.
I left the book in the library and got a bottle of one of our best Chardonnays from the wine cellar. This time I went to the summer-house.
Ross told me once that in medical school he’d been taught to diagnose disease and illness by their own version of Occam’s razor—that usually there is a common, logical, and easily understandable diagnosis for a patient’s symptoms. When you hear hoof beats, first think horses, not zebras. Assume the easiest and most obvious explanation.
But as I sat there watching the stars for the second time in two nights, wishing Quinn were here with his telescope to distract me, I couldn’t help myself. There were exceptions to every theory. And God help me, this time I did not think horses.
I thought zebras.
Chapter 25
I finally fell asleep in one of the Adirondack chairs. When I woke at daylight it felt as though I had a crushing weight on my chest and then I remembered all of it. Mia’s accident and everything that lay ahead for her. And Ross.
By now I was positive that the Jefferson Davis letter had been written on a page excised from my book. The paper would be the right age, for one thing. But did Ross forge the letter himself, or did he obtain the paper for someone else?
Either way, why had he done it? He didn’t need the money. Was it for the thrill of trying to get away with something this audacious?
I finished most of a pot of coffee after a shower and breakfast as I watched the layered Blue Ridge change from gray to heathery blue as the sun rose in the sky. Quinn would wonder where I was. Finally I called him.
“Sorry, I overslept,” I lied. “And something’s come up. I’ll be in after lunch.”
