The Book of Illumination (17 page)

Sylvia had showed me a copy of the article. One perfect pear had sat on a black square plate in the middle of a poured-concrete dining table, beside a slim black vase holding exactly one calla lily. A jumble of old books would have really messed things up.

Esther, Tad’s younger sister, had chosen several volumes from her father’s collection. She had already taken what she wanted from the various bookcases scattered throughout the house when she moved to the Berkshires a few years ago. She insisted that she didn’t want any more books, valuable or not. She barely had room for the books she already owned, and her basement out there was damp, so she couldn’t even store things without worrying about mold and mildew. She was fine with whatever Tad wanted to do with their father’s books and thought that making a gift of them to the Athenaeum was a great idea.

Tad and Josie, his older sister, had not been on speaking terms—something to do with a boat—when all the decisions were being made. Tad had apparently sent her a registered letter giving her a deadline to claim anything she wanted from the family manse. When she blew it off, Tad moved forward as executor. He hired a Harvard student to pack up the boxes of books and drop them off at the Athenaeum.

At the moment, Sylvia appeared to have a slight advantage: Tad seemed kind of fuzzy on which books he had actually given away.

“I logged in all the volumes myself,” Sylvia said. “Did Amanda go through my list?”

“It wasn’t there,” Tad said curtly.

“What was the book?” Sylvia asked.

“Something on …”Tad stumbled. “A book on … illuminating.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

“You mean, like … lighting?” Sylvia asked. “Like stage lighting, or lighting design?”

“I’m really not sure,” Tad went on. “All I know is that it’s a very valuable book and it’s missing.”

“And it was on lighting,” Sylvia said, seeming to rack her brain for anything she could remember on the subject.

“What about Gorham’s history of the Tiffany lamp,” I suggested. “Or that treatise on Caravaggio—what was that called?
Shadow and Light?
Did he have anything like that?”

Sylvia shook her head.

“No, no,” Tad broke in. “It was something to do with the Catholic Church. And old. Really old.”

“There was that book on Brunelleschi churches,” I said.

“No,” he said angrily, springing to his feet.

“Do
you
remember anything like that?” Sylvia asked.

“Of course I don’t,” he snapped. “If I did, I wouldn’t have had to call you, would I?”

Sylvia didn’t rise to the bait. “I definitely didn’t log in anything on lighting or lamps or the use of light in the design of Catholic churches—nothing like that.”

“Did ever
see
a book like that?” he demanded. “When you were working for my father?”

“No,” she answered. “But then again, I only came in contact with a small fraction of the books your father owned—just the ones he wanted re-bound. You’d have a better idea than I do of whether he ever owned … something like that.”

“How the hell would I know?” he barked, his patience expiring. Sylvia and I exchanged glances.

“Well,” she said, slowly and carefully. “You
are
the person who donated the books.”

He looked flushed and angry. If he had been in a cartoon, two cones of steam would have been whistling out of his ears.

The cell phone in his pocket began to ring. He fished it out and glanced at the name that came up on the screen. “I have to take this,” he said curtly. “Thank you for coming. I’ll figure it out when I get back from Europe.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Have a good trip,” Sylvia said as Tad stood up and hurried out of the room.

I had an almost uncontrollable urge to bolt. I imagined us walking calmly to the front door, closing it behind us, and then hightailing it down the steps and up Commonwealth Avenue, two of the Three Stooges in one of those “Yip, yip, yip!” moments, tripping over each other trying to scramble away from the scene of a fiasco.

Sylvia let out a sigh of relief.

“Not bad,” I said.

“I was shaking. Could you tell?”

I shook my head.

“I just want to say hi to Mrs. Martin,” she continued. “I know you have to go, so …Thanks for coming.”

“No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

John Grady had not moved in the past ten minutes. I glanced over to let him know that I had not forgotten my promise.

“I’ll just use the ladies’ room before I go,” I said.

“There’s one down the hall,” Sylvia replied.

“I have an idea,” I whispered as I approached the ghost of the butler. I opened the heavy mahogany door to the bathroom, stepped inside, and waited for him to follow. He didn’t; his posture remained rigid and his gaze downcast. He shook his head slowly.

“We can’t talk out there,” I said quietly. “Tad or Mrs. Martin might hear us. Or rather, hear me.”

“No, no, I … I couldn’t, ma’am,” he said shyly.

I understood his embarrassment at the prospect of coming into the bathroom with me. But something much larger was at stake. This just wasn’t the time for butlery propriety.

“Please,” I said. “I really want to help you find that deed. But I have to leave in a minute. I have to go pick up my son.”

He looked up at me, took a deep breath, and appeared to steel himself. He stepped gingerly inside, and I closed the door softly behind him. I leaned against the edge of the marble sink. He could barely meet my gaze.

“You said that Mrs. Martin leaves at six,” I began.

“She does,” the ghost replied.

“Every day?”

“Every day,” he answered.

“I assume that the house has an alarm system.”

He nodded. “Mrs. Martin puts in the code before she leaves at night.”

“Is there anyone else besides Tad who’s in and out?”

“No, Miss …”

“My name is Anza. Please—it feels really weird to be called ‘Miss’ or ‘ma’am.’”

“I beg your pardon,” he said politely. “Then you must call me Johnny.”

“All right,” I said, “
Johnny.”

“
Anza,”
he said sweetly, bowing. “Pleasure.”

“You know that Tad is going to London?” I asked. “I was thinking that if you could disable the alarm system, I could come back some night and try to help you find your book.”

Ghosts, being comprised of pure energy, can really muck up an electronic burglar alarm. He would only have to stand right beside or in front of the primary control panel for the signal waves to be completely disrupted, effectively disabling the system.

He frowned slightly. “I don’t know if I can.”

“You can, trust me.”

“Now, I wouldn’t want to be putting you in any danger,” he said. “That wouldn’t be right.”

“You wouldn’t be,” I said. “As long as nobody’s here.”

He nodded vaguely. Something about this plan made him uneasy.

“Look, you’re not doing anything wrong. That deed is yours. It’s just … lost.”

He looked up searchingly.

“And if you don’t find it now—” I broke off.

“I never will,” he concluded sadly. “I know that.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

There was a moment of companionable silence. We could hear Mrs. Martin and Sylvia talking in the kitchen, but through the centuries-old walls, their words were just a low rumble. Tad’s leather soles were clunking back and forth on the floorboards just above us, and a road crew somewhere within hearing distance seemed to be jack hammering up concrete.

“I can’t come tomorrow night,” I offered, “but I could come on Wednesday. We should probably wait until after dark, say nine thirty or so. I’ll come in the back way.”

He nodded.

“The alarm. What do I do?”

“Do you know where the main control panel is?”

He nodded.

“At nine thirty, you go and stand as close to it as you can. Right up in front of it. You’ll see—the little red light will go off, or turn green, depending on what type of system it is. I’ll wait a few minutes and then I’ll come in the back way. I’ll figure out the lock somehow.”

What I meant was, I would figure out a way to break in.

“You come down and get me. All right?”

“What will you tell your husband?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t have one. Only a son.” I smiled.

“How old is he?”

“Five.”

“What’s his name?” Johnny inquired.

“Henry. Henry Owen O’Malley.”

“Owen was my father’s name,” Johnny said softly.

“And mine,” I replied.

“You know it’s the Irish for John,” he continued. “As is Sean, of course.”

“I do,” I said.

The social event of the fall, in Henry’s kindergarten class, was to be the marriage of
Q
and
U
.

“You’ll get a letter,” my son informed me, crumbling a stack of Ritz crackers into his cream of tomato soup. He brushed the crumbs off his palms and stirred the crackers into a thick, tomato mush. I hoped he would eventually eat some of this, and some of the grilled cheese sandwich that was getting cold beside his bowl, but with Henry, you never knew. He might finish it all and ask for seconds or eat three bites and beg to be excused.

“It’s a real wedding,” he insisted. “With a cake. It’ll come in the mail.”

“The cake?” I was teasing.

“The
letter,”
he said.

“Who’s it from?” I asked.

“Me. And Miss O. And the other kids.”

I nodded. Henry took a bite of tomato mush. And then another. I decided to add some Ritz to my soup. “When is this?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

“Soon? Or in a while?”

“In a while,” Henry said.

Details of the event emerged at a glacial pace. They were doing two letters a week. This week’s letters were
m
and n. Didn’t I remember? He
told
me they had had mmmmmuffins on Monday. That was because
mmmmmuffin
was an m-word. Miss O. had made the muffins. Blueberry, but Melanie couldn’t have one, because she was allergic to blueberries. And peanuts. If she ate one peanut she would die. So Miss O. had a needle for a shot. In case by mistake she ate a peanut. Melanie, not Miss O. Miss O. wasn’t allergic to peanuts, but she didn’t like them, so she didn’t ever eat them.

My eyes were beginning to glaze over. I had to break into this stream of consciousness or we would be here until midnight.

“What are you doing for
n?”
I asked.

Friday was going to be Nnnnnnight Day, Henry informed me. Didn’t I think that was funny? Night Day?

“
Very
funny,” I said, falsely cheerful.

“But not knight like a knight in shining armor,” he informed me, biting into his sandwich and pulling it away to create a long loopy string of mozzarella. “
That’s
a
k
word, but you don’t say the
k
, like ‘kuh-night’—you just say ‘night.’”

“Hmm,” I said. “There’s a
k
in
knight?
I never knew that.”

Henry nodded, pleased with his superior knowledge.

“What are you doing for Night Day?” I asked. “Going to school in your pajamas?”

“No! But after lunch it’s going to be Night. Miss O.’s going to turn off all the lights and pull down the shades and she’s going to read us two books with a flashlight.”

“Which books? Do you know?”

“
In the Night Kitchen,”
Henry answered. “Which she said is a little scary. And
Goodnight Moon.”

“Which isn’t.”

“No,” Henry said. “But I wouldn’t be scared anyway.”

“Not you,” I said. “You’re not the type to get scared.”

“Nope,” he said, concentrating now on his sandwich. The information stream had apparently trickled into a dry bed.

“Sweetie,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite get the
wedding
part.”

He gave me a look I expected I would see a lot in his teenage years, a look that said,
How can you possibly be so dense?

He took a deep breath and pushed his bowl aside. This was serious.

“Okay. You know letters make up words, right?” I nodded.

“Do you know what a vowel is?”

“I do.”