“No, nothing. It was gone.”
He recounted the destruction of the Source and the apparent end of the Dark Lord. “I
Cadence let out a slow breath of relief. She felt a quiet, solemn pride in having been a final witness to Ara’s journey. Her tale was gone, but it was enough to know that she had been true to herself.
“What else?” Jess asked.
“Oh, well,” Cadence recovered, “tell me some more about Professor Tolkien. Do you remember some other things about him?”
“Some. Like a handful of snapshots. I remember his long-winded moments, his mumbling, his excitement about the stories he was discovering.”
“But what about the documents, the Elvish.”
“In truth, those memories are fading. I can see him unrolling the scrolls, his hands moving over the symbols, the sense of magical power imbedded there. But now, like the Elvish, it seems to be fading. More like something I read then lived. Maybe that was his point. Once in a while there’s no difference.”
“So what about Osley and the Scissor Sharpener, Grandpa?’
“It’s funny, I know they are, or were, me. But they’re the same way. At some point your past life gets to be like an over-read book. They were as real as the sunshine and breeze where we sit, but now they feel like exotic contrivances — lives I manufactured and dwelt in. Then I shed them. When I went away with the documents, I don’t remember much. I know I stood, naked and wrinkled. Exposed just as myself. Those people, Osley, the Sharpener, they fell away like old skins. They stayed there. They didn’t come back with me. As if all this had scraped me down— to a husk.”
She let the silence unroll, looking at the man that was both less and more than the Osley-slash-Jess she had met. His mask, if he still had one, was just himself.
He broke the interlude. “And one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I finally knew the answer. ‘Do I stay or do I go?’ I finally knew — if I ever got out of there — I would stay. Right here at the Forest with you. As long as you would tolerate me.”
“Sometimes I can’t help but feel that one, or both, of us dreamed all this up. What’ve we got to show from it?”
“Everything. The main thing. You and I sitting here talking.”
He reached part way across the table, his hands browned and purpled with liver spots. “At that pool, the thing that came home to me, finally, was that I couldn’t stand leaving all this unsaid, undone. You can’t make up for the past. But you can own up for it. That’s what kept me going. The rest was like a blur. Men and these gnarly, runty ass-hole creatures came and talked to me. They took the valise, then came back with an executioner. But I had the ace. The Vow! I shook it in their faces! Then I woke up.”
“In Hoboken?”
“I agree it sounds like a dream. A dream that lingers but doesn’t make sense.”
“Forget it, Grandpa. It’s Middle-earth.”
“Yes. But it’s gone now. All the Tolkien documents. All the originals. All the Elvish. Ara. Gone without a trace.”
She hesitated. “Do you think the Dark Elves are gone?” Even as she spoke, the image of weasel eyes and ferret faces in the woods loomed up.
His face darkened, as if a curious, fast-moving thundercloud had swept over a sunny day. She could see him drifting into that long-seeing gaze again as he mused out loud, “They are resourceful, and they want out of Middle- earth. In fact, they covet our world. They are subtle and they definitely don’t work for the Keebler Cookie Company. But … time will tell. Let’s not speak of them.”
The shadow passed, and she asked, “You know what?”
“What?”
“You’re the original, Grandpa. You’re the prize. That’s what I went searching for. However we got here, we got here.”
He laughed. “Like you said, don’t ask. It’s Mirkwood.”
The lunch was over. Birds wheeled above the trees toward a blue sky and puffy white clouds.
“And what about the bills, the foreclosure?”
“Its all on hold. Thanks to you, I’m not an ‘estate’ anymore. So they had to start over. Everett said to wait for a notice in the mail. Something will work out.”
She looked over at the tiny Topanga Post Office, nestled a block away. “Well, stay here, and I’ll get today’s mail.” She hopped up and jogged over to the Post Office. She returned with an armload.
“There’s a lot today.” She pulled up a stack piled high with the usual postal debris of unsolicited catalogs, flyers, penny ad papers, mortgage offers.
They set to the stack like trash-pickers. Hiding at the bottom was a rumpled brown envelope. It was twine- tied, no return address. The stamps upside down and misplaced. It had forklift tracks down one side. The address for the Mirkwood Forest was printed as if by a nervous hostage working in charcoal.
They both stared at it. “You open it, Cadence.”
She undid the twine and pulled at the flap. She didn’t want to put her hand in there. She held it up, open at the bottom, and the contents spilled out: a pile of yellow legal sheets and Algonquin Hotel stationary with intense, familiar scribbles all over them.
And, at the end, out plopped the tooth. Jess stared in disbelief. “Be careful! It could be another trick, maybe from that Barren thing!”
She reached over and picked up the talisman. “I don’t think it’s a trick. I think it’s his way of evening some things up with his former … employer. Barren’s little diss to the Dark Lord by sending all this to us. And the tooth,” she held it up firmly in her hand, “it’s still searching for someone to believe in it, to receive its luck.”
“Well, maybe that’s both of us. And even more important?” He looked at her.
She held up the piles of papers, clutched like a victory trophy. “Ara’s back!”
“And you’ve got something to talk to Mel about.”
Chapter 44
DUCK SALAD
“So, aside from thanking you again for picking up the tab at the Algonquin, that’s pretty much the story.”
Mel listened. His iPhone was silent, resting ceremoniously to his right. It was untouched by his hand, which held one of the Peninsula’s embossed salad forks in mid-air. He finally took a bite.
“Cadence, it’s a sad turn of events, tragic. If I hadn’t experienced one piece of it firsthand, I’d say you made it up (chomp), that it’s all bullshit. But since I can’t dismiss it all, I’ll go along.”
He took another bite of the lunchroom’s signature duck salad, then continued, “Shame. I (chew) had imagined a great meeting.” His other hand swept in the air. “A big, top-floor, teak-lined conference room high above Century City. The publisher, maybe Alrop or Freidken, would be there (gulp), flanked by his VP of Sales. Two or three lawyers. One from an outside firm, maybe Brunson and Cayhill. The others, ‘his people,’ as he might say. Go ahead and eat.”
She started on the salade Nicoise, glad to let him talk.
“We would be there — you, me, some lawyer. Maybe Everett. We would have the upper hand. They’d say, ‘Where’d you get the documents?’ We would tell them, pointing out that they were a gift. They would politely ask questions, testing the edges for ownership. Everett would politely set them straight, then we’d get into some blah- blah about copyright. ‘What copyright?’ Everett would say, ‘It’s fair use in any case, allegory, dogs and cats, all that.’”
He snuck in another bite.
“Then (chew) I would take over. Look the publisher in the eyes, point my index finger down on the table like
