The Book of Illumination (8 page)

I checked for a phone message, but it was too soon. Normally I’d be steering Henry toward the tub at this point, but his hour-long nap had revived him, so I decided to let him play while I cleaned up the kitchen. Junk mail had been piling up, offers from credit card companies and hopeful postcards from local Realtors, who had obviously bought the wrong mailing list. The phone rang again. I picked it up.

“Anza!” someone said, but I couldn’t tell who. There was a little series of sobs, and then a whisper so low I could hardly hear. “The book,” I heard her say. I recognized the voice: it was Sylvia’s.

“The manuscript! It’s gone.”

M
AX AND ELLIE
had just finished supper when I knocked on their door. Ellie was about to leave, already late for a class she was taking, something to do with home organization and freeing your spirit by getting rid of clutter. I hoped she didn’t get rid of too much; I loved her eccentric arrangements of shells and stones, the tables strewn with old magazines and dishes of hard candy, postcards and photos propped against the books on the bookshelves, and her kitchen, which seemed not to have two matching anything, each plate and cup apparently a lone survivor of a set an aunt or a friend had formerly owned.

Max was more than happy to have company, so I hustled Henry into the tub, extracting from him a promise that he would go to bed without any drama if nine o’clock came and I still wasn’t home.

Max was setting up the chessboard when we arrived. Henry pulled over his favorite chair, piling it up with the pillows he needed to be able to see the board. A package of Oreos, two glasses, and a quart of milk were on the table. I bit my tongue, thanked Max again, and promised to be back as quickly as I could.

“Don’t hurry,” Max said.

“Yeah,” Henry chimed in.

It took me half an hour to get to Sylvia’s. I’d been stunned to hear that the manuscript had disappeared from her apartment, not the bindery, but that was all I knew so far. I had convinced her not to touch anything or to call anyone—not the police, not the Athenaeum, nobody—until I got there. Having a detective in the family, at least
sort of
in the family, can be handy. My plan was to get in touch with Declan as soon as I got the lay of the land.

Sylvia lives in a well-kept brick building near Cleveland Circle in Brookline, on a street lined with elegant postwar apartment buildings. In the downstairs lobby, unlocked from the street, were eight brass doorbells and mailboxes. Anyone could walk right in and follow a resident into the inner stairwell, or even be buzzed inside by a careless resident of one of the other apartments. I pressed her button, waiting on the polished-granite landing until I heard her buzz me in. I paused inside to see if the inner door closed all the way on its own. It did.

I climbed to the fourth floor, where Sylvia stood in her doorway. She launched right in as she led me into her living room, a floral, feminine nest that looked out onto the treetops.

“My door was locked, like nothing was wrong,” she began. “I must have been home for half an hour before I realized something had happened. I can’t believe it. I feel sick.”

She sat down on the sofa, looking pasty and distraught.

“It’s okay,” I said. “My … son’s dad is a Boston cop, a detective.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “I’ll call him in a minute. Just tell me what happened.”

I sat down beside her. She closed her eyes, as though trying to collect her thoughts.

“I don’t know where to start,” she finally admitted. “I’m just—”

“I thought the book was at the Athenaeum,” I interrupted.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “After you left on Tuesday, I went back to talk to Amanda. Let her know you were going to be starting.”

“Who were those people she was showing around?”

“Two guys from Oxford and a rare books dealer from Sussex. And a
viscount
. Lord Brisley or Risley or something.” Sylvia shrugged. “They’re in town for a conference at Harvard.”

“The same one?”

She gave me a puzzled look.

“The same what?”

“The symposium at Harvard? The reason James Wescott said he was coming over.”

Her expression went blank and she let out a deep sigh. “Oh my God. I never put it together. Maybe that’s where Sam’s been.”

“You’re losing me. Back up.”

“Sorry.” She took another breath and started over. “I worked in the bindery until about five thirty. Chandler was there all afternoon, so I couldn’t get the manuscript out of the back room. He’s so nosy; he would have been all over me. I had to wait until he left, which he did, at about six o’clock. I figured he was gone for the night, but I took the book up to my office, just to be safe. That thing Paola Moretti said about the knot pattern in the borders? I wanted to see if I could find it.”

I nodded. In the letter Tad had given Sylvia, Paola Moretti had described a variation on the classic Celtic knot: a rare symmetrical pattern in which the four knots forming the painted symbol point toward the center of the illustration. The presence of this variation in Sylvia’s manuscript could help to establish the time and place of its creation.

“I found them. In seven or eight places. They were
so
beautiful. Anyway, about an hour later, I took the book back downstairs, but when I got off the elevator, I saw Chandler unlocking the
bindery door. He had a Starbucks and a shopping bag from DeLuca’s—”

“So he was settling in for the night,” I concluded.

“Lately, he’s there when I get to work in the morning and he’s there when I leave. Sometimes I wonder if he even goes home. I don’t know what’s going on in his personal life—”

“Not much, apparently,” I commented.

“Right, which is why I decided to bring the book home with me and take it over to Sam’s. Who knows what Chandler does when he gets bored? I could easily see him poking around late at night and finding it.”

“Couldn’t you have left it in your office?”

“The cleaners come in every night, plus the temperature’s always up and down. I knew Sam would be really excited about the letter, and I knew I could talk him into keeping the book for me. But I couldn’t get in touch with him. I called the house four or five times. I even drove down there.”

“Doesn’t he have a cell phone?” I asked.

“He doesn’t even have an answering machine,” she said.

She paused, leaned forward, and straightened some magazines that were already straight. She didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Finally she looked over.

“Could the ghosts have taken it? The monks?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?”

“They probably didn’t even know it was here. Ghosts are like people that way: they only know about what they’ve actually seen and heard.”

Sylvia looked completely baffled.

“They’re not omniscient. They don’t see and know everything that happens in the world just because they’re—in the air. If they didn’t actually
see
you take the book out of the bindery, carry it to
your office, and then bring it here, they wouldn’t have any idea where it went. We’ll probably hear from them on Monday, when they suddenly notice it’s missing.”

“Thank God you’re going to be there.”

“Yeah, lucky me.” I smiled and glanced around the room. My apartment had been broken into once when I lived on Commonwealth Avenue. It had been easy for the thief, or thieves; the building’s outer doors didn’t lock properly, and the lock to my apartment was loose and old. They just popped the bolt with a screwdriver, scooped up a bag of my stuff, and were out the door in a couple of minutes. The only thing that shattered me was losing my mother’s engagement ring.

“What else did they take?” I asked Sylvia gently, remembering the sorrowful task of making a list for the police, who acted as though the break-in was my own fault, for being so lax about the locks.

“That’s the thing,” she said urgently. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Only the book?”

Sylvia buried her face in her hands and let out a little moan.

Declan was there within the hour. I try to keep my mind on business when he’s in detective mode, but it’s hard. He just smells so … he seems so … Okay, I am
not
going down that road.

The book had been taken from Sylvia’s bedroom. On Tuesday, the same day she and I read the letters from James Wescott and Paola Moretti, she’d taken the book home and placed it on a shelf in her closet. Arriving home from work today, she’d gone into the kitchen, where everything seemed fine. She poured herself a glass of wine and went into the living room to read the
Globe
. After ten or fifteen minutes, she was cold, so she went into the bedroom to get a sweater.

Her closet door was open, and her bedroom had been messed up, but pretty halfheartedly, when you looked at things closely. A couple of drawers had been pulled out and their contents casually tossed, and a jewelry box was tipped over on the bureau, spilling pins and necklaces onto the floor. But it was the sight of a gold bracelet and a pair of expensive emerald earrings, worn to a family dinner over the weekend and lying in plain sight on a bedside table, that sent Sylvia flying to the closet.

That, she told me, was when she first suspected that the thief or thieves weren’t after jewelry or money. In the panicked moments after realizing the manuscript was gone, she said, she’d wandered through the apartment in a state of shock. They hadn’t touched the PowerBook on her desk. The rose-gold flute on her music stand was just where she had left it. Whoever broke in had been after one thing, and only one thing. And they had gotten it.

I’d related these details to Declan over the phone, and now he was making a thorough inspection of Sylvia’s doors and windows. The door to her back hallway had been locked, and was still locked, from the inside. So was the window opening onto her fire escape, the only one accessible from the street. That left only her front door, made of solid oak, which locked by itself when you closed it. There was a second deadbolt, which Sylvia admitted to being casual about locking, as the main lock seemed so secure, but she was absolutely sure she had locked it every morning since Wednesday of this week, being mindful that she was leaving the book inside.

“Who has keys to the place?” Declan asked, examining the area around the doorknob. The finish was undamaged; it seemed pretty unlikely that access had been gained by crowbar or screwdriver.

“My parents,” Sylvia said. “They live in Providence. And my brother in Medford. And a friend of mine from San Francisco.
She stayed with me last summer and took them home with her by mistake.”

Declan glanced at me, then back at Sylvia. “Any … other visitors?”

“You mean men?”

“Not necessarily,” Declan said, open-mindedly.

She shook her head. He nodded and wrote something on his notepad.

“Have you had any work done in here lately?” he went on. “Painting or carpentry? Anyone in to fix anything?”

Sylvia shook her head and let out a little sigh.

“Window washers?”

She glanced at me. I suspected she was getting impatient. We all knew this wasn’t a crime of opportunity. There were plenty of valuable items in sight, objects easily tucked into a pocket or a backpack and sold for quick cash.

Declan must have read her mind. He stopped short of asking her if she’d noticed suspicious cars idling in the street or spooky strangers hanging around in the halls. He put down his notepad.

“I’d say he picked the lock. Cheeky bastard.” Dec shook his head and gave Sylvia his lopsided grin, which, together with his tone and inflection, had the effect of entirely transforming the atmosphere in the room. Suddenly we weren’t dealing with a frightening villain, someone potentially capable of murder or rape. We were dealing with …a burglar! The cheeky kind. The brilliant and ingenious kind. The kind who wore a funny black half mask and quiet slipper shoes and who swung from a rope, scaling the wall like a cat. It might not be true, but we sure felt better.

Sylvia let out a surprised little laugh. Her gaze went from Declan, to me, then back to him. A flush of color rose to her cheeks.