“The books, Miss Eliot,” I asked. “Did you have access to the books?”
“Mercy, yes. We thought the whole place was just a playground for the three of us. Roller-skating down those hallways in the evening, playing hide-and-seek in that great reading room.
“Christmas Day, once, George and our cousins decided to play stickball in the corridor on the third floor,” she went on, rubbing her hands together as she pulled up images from her youth. “He just went into one of the collections-things weren’t all locked up back then-and grabbed the biggest books he could find to be the bases. Turned out they were all important double folios. Rare volumes of prints and such, worth a fortune. George got the whipping of a lifetime for that.”
“George?” Mercer said, trying to keep up with her.
“My older brother was George Eliot,” she said. “Mind you, my mother didn’t even have a high school education. When my father got the job there, she decided to name all her children after writers. She didn’t know George Eliot was a woman until she began to educate herself with all the wonderful treasures under our roof.”
“For whom were you named?” I asked.
“Jane Austen. I’m Jane Austen Eliot. I had a big sister, too. Edith Wharton Eliot. Both my siblings are gone now, but my niece and nephews are very good to me.”
“I can appreciate that-mine are, too,” I said. “Tell us more about the books, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ve always loved books, of course, and that may be because I grew up surrounded by them. They were the center of the universe in our family.”
“Did you have books of your own?”
“Our father made it very clear to us that everything in the library was very special, that none of it belonged to us. But for every holiday the trustees would present us with books. I remember our birthdays in particular. After we returned from school, if it was a birthday, we’d get called to the president’s office, all dressed up in our best, and one of the board members would give us a gift, explaining the importance of the particular book and its author.”
“Sounds like a fine little ceremony.”
“Oh, it really was. I got my first
“The books that were presented to you, Miss Eliot, were they ordinary things you could buy in a store?”
“There’s no such thing as an ordinary book, is there? But these were always particularly unusual. Beautifully bound in Moroccan leather, or fixed up in those-what do you call them?-clamshell boxes, I think. I can still remember how it felt to hold and smell them for the first time.”
“Did you know the trustees?”
“Most of them knew my father well, of course. He was responsible for making sure that their treasures were safe and protected, at least according to the methods available back then. He made sure their great institution ran like a smoothly sailing ship. And my mother catered some of their smaller meetings-everything homemade, right in our kitchen. She was really a saint.”
“These gifts you received,” Mercer asked, “were they new books?”
“Some were, some weren’t, as I recall it.” Jane Eliot put her elbow on the arm of the chair and closed her eyes to think. “Later, as I learned more about these things, I’d have to assume that we got some of the castoffs, either second or third editions of books that were of no value to the great collectors, or copies that had been damaged by tears or discolorations. Still, Alex, they opened the world to me. All the classics, all the great literature you could imagine. The three of us were grateful to have them.”
I could hardly contain my excitement. The perp must have staged this burglary to get at something Jane Eliot owned, something she didn’t even realize was of value.
“The books that you were presented with, Miss Eliot, are they still in your apartment?”
She stretched her right leg and groaned, bending to tug at her hose. “I gave them away ten years ago, maybe more. What’s the use, I thought? I’d read and reread them, when I had my sight. Time to let the next generation enjoy.”
“But you know where they are?” Mercer asked.
“Gone to my great-nieces and-nephews.”
“How lucky they are to have them,” I said. “Is your family here, in the city?”
“Gosh, no. Some of them are upstate in Buffalo, and others are out in Santa Fe. Must be several hundred books, all split up between the relatives.”
I sat back in my chair, as deflated as the burglar must have been to come up empty after ransacking Eliot’s apartment.
“Not a single one that you kept for yourself?” Mercer asked.
“Help me up, Pridgen, will you?” Jane Eliot said. “My joints get all locked tight if I sit too long.”
The sergeant helped her get to her feet.
“Walk with me, please,” she said, linking arms with Mercer and with me as we stood up. She moved toward the door of the room. “There was only one that I kept. Had to keep, actually. Edith’s daughter would have nothing to do with it.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
She winced as she put her weight on her left leg. “My sister, Edith, had a very special book presented to her on her twelfth birthday. I remember so well because I was terribly envious when she brought it back to the apartment.”
“What was it?”
“You may be able to make more sense of what happened than I ever did,” Eliot said. “Because of your job, I mean. Nobody talked about things like that back then. It was a copy of
Mercer and I exchanged glances over Jane Eliot’s head.
“Dazzling?” he asked. “How so? Was it old?”
“Indeed it was-old and wonderfully illustrated with those drawings by John Tenniel that became so famous. The date in it was 1866.”
I thought of the call slip that had been found in Tina Barr’s clothing.
“Did it ever belong to the library?” I asked.
“Not this one, I don’t believe. Most of our gifts were donations from one trustee or another. From time to time, books were quietly deaccessioned from the collections of course, especially if some more desirable copy came along. But we could tell if that were the case. There were markings inside the jackets with the name of the library branch, and those were crossed through to show that the book had been discarded, so we knew we wouldn’t get in any trouble.”
“Edith’s gift sounds very special.”
“Oh, yes. That was obvious. It was bound in the most glorious red leather, with gold lettering on the spine and gilt designs all over the cover. And then there was its size-we’d never had books of our own quite that big.”
Jane Eliot let go of my arm and drew an outline in the air. “You know, sort of double folio, if you’re familiar with that.”
“I’ve seen other copies of the early editions, though, and I never knew any to be oversize,” I said.
“Well, you’re right. The manuscript was of average size, for an illustrated work of that period, I’m sure. But this particular edition had been mounted on larger parchment pages and bound into this folio because it also included a rare set of prints of the photographs that Charles Dodgson-Lewis Carroll, you know-took of young Alice.”
“The photographs were inside the book?” I asked.
“There was a pocket sewn into the back of the book. That’s where the photos were. We could take them out and look at them, spread them out on the living room floor,” she said. “In fact, that’s what got Edith in trouble with Mother.”
Jane Eliot shuffled down the hallway of the hospital, continuing to talk to us.
“Why?” I asked.
“The book wasn’t a problem. We’d all read the story dozens of times. But those photographs? My goodness. Must have been weeks after Edith’s birthday, Mother happened upon the picture of that child dressed as a beggar
