A man be but a speck of dust, begot
By dust that breathed before, but dust that lives
Again, when dust itself hath turned to dust.
Beneath it, he wrote, “No man would say this after a night in which he had known the joy of love’s labors.”
“S
O,” SAID
Peter Fallon, “what do you know about commonplace books?”
“Nothing,” answered Orson Lunt, “until I’ve had coffee.”
“Bernice!” Peter called out the door of his office.
“Yeah, yeah. Coffee. Hold your horses.” Bernice O’Boyle came in with two cups. She was in her mid-sixties, a little heavy in the thighs, a little grouchy in the morning, wearing a Talbots suit that made her look a little more stylish than her South Boston accent made her sound. She also had a license to carry . . . and did.
“Peter,” she said, “I don’t know what you and this old antique’d do without me.”
“It’s
antiquarian,
” said Orson.
“Okay.
Antique
antiquarian.”
Peter took a sip of the coffee. “Perfect. As always.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said over her shoulder, “you’re welcome.”
“Do you think she has any idea of how wonderful her job is?” asked Orson in a loud voice. “Sitting out there in a display room that looks like a private library, lined with bookcases containing everything from a second edition of the
Bay Psalm Book
to the collected works of Sir Winston Churchill in full vellum to a first edition of
Catcher in the Rye
in the original dust jacket. And she still takes—”
“Yeah. Yeah. I still take
Reader’s Digest
on the subway.” She sat at her desk, just beyond Peter’s door. “You wouldn’t want me ridin’ the Red Line with some ten-thousand-dollar book on my lap, would you, you silly bastard?”
Orson looked at Peter. “A dangerous precedent to hire your aunt.”
“My father hired her. She used to smoke. Now she talks back. So . . . commonplace books . . . blank pages to be filled with literary quotes, meditations, musings . . .”
“In a time and place where books were scarce, if you read something you liked, you copied it into your commonplace book,” said Orson. “Not many survived. Those that did aren’t worth a lot because, as you say, they’re mostly brain droppings. The one that’s best known belonged to John Leverett, a Harvard tutor who became college president. That’s at the Massachusetts Historical Society.”
“Do we know if any of these commonplace books mention Shakespeare?”
“Peter, I’m brilliant, not encyclopedic.” Orson went out to the display room and came back with Morison’s
The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England,
1933 edition. He flipped pages until he found what he wanted. “Morison says the only reference to Shakespeare in any commonplace book that survived is a bit from
Venus and Adonis
.”
“But that’s a poem,” said Peter. “Not a play.”
“Never a play. The Puritans took their devils seriously. They slaughtered their Indian devils. They hanged their witchy devils. They banned their playwright devils.”
“
All
playwrights?”
“Not the Greeks and Romans, but . . .” Orson went out again and came back with a slipcased two-volume
Diary of Samuel Sewall.
He turned to the back of volume two. “You’ll find no mention in this index of Shakespeare, Marlowe, or any Restoration playwright, even though the frontispiece shows Sewall before his congregation, making ‘public repentance for his action in the witchcraft trials.’ For all his tolerance and erudition, in forty-five years of diaries, Sewall never mentions a play and only one playwright.”
“Who?”
“Ben Jonson. He stumbled across a folio of Jonson’s plays in a tavern in Rhode Island in 1706. A tavern! Rhode Island was always more tolerant, but—”
Peter heard a knock at the outer door, then heard Bernice push away from her desk, “Yeah. Yeah. Hold your horses.”
Fallon Antiquaria occupied an L-shaped space on the third floor of a Newbury Street bowfront, above an art gallery that was above a restaurant. The display room was in the long section of the L, Peter’s office in the tail. And it was strictly “by appointment only.”
Fallon glanced at his datebook: no appointments. Probably a delivery. So he kept his attention on Orson.
“The first mention of Shakespeare’s work in a Harvard library is the 1709 Rowe edition, referenced in the catalog of 1723, and—” Orson stopped talking and looked to the doorway.
In an instant, Peter smelled Shalimar, turned, and almost fell off his chair.
Evangeline Carrington was standing there. “Hello, boys. How’s books?”
“Books are great,” said Peter. “How’s magazines?”
“I keep writing. Now that I’m divorced, I have to.”
“Books, magazines, divorces . . . You two will have a lot to talk about.” Orson got up and gave Evangeline a kiss on the cheek. “Wonderful to see you again, dear.”
“He’s right,” said Peter. “You look wonderful.”
She’d been married to a plastic surgeon, but her beauty was natural. A few honest subtle crow’s-feet around the eyes, subtle lines around the mouth, but nothing sagging under that strong jaw. She’d given her hair just enough frosting to cover any gray. And she’d always known how to dress: a tweed jacket over a starched white shirt with open collar, a quarter-inch gold chain at her neck, discreet gold hoops in her ears, jeans tight enough to show that she still worked out, and a nice pair of oxblood cowboy boots.
“I was expecting you tomorrow,” said Peter.
“They pushed up my deadline. An article on Cape Cod guesthouses in autumn. So it’s lunch with Ridley Royce today, Cape Cod with my grandmother tomorrow.”
“How’s your grandmother?” asked Peter. “She must be over a hundred.”
“She is, and right now, I’ll take the company of a female centenarian to any man I know.” She sat in Orson’s chair. “But if you’re offering, I’ll take a ride up to Royce’s.”
Bernice brought Evangeline a cup of coffee. “Nice to see you, darlin’.”
“Bernice, you look great,” said Evangeline. “Do you still have your Beretta?”
“Fits in a purse. Nice and ladylike.”
“I could’ve used it when I found out my husband liked other women’s wrinkled flesh more than mine.”
“You want to shoot him, call me.” Then Bernice asked Peter, “Open or closed?”
“What?”
“The door. Open or closed? Once you wipe that silly grin off your face, you two will have a lot to talk about.”
“Everybody keeps saying that.” Evangeline cast a smile at Fallon. “Of course, we decided about eighteen years ago that we’d run out of things to talk about.”
“I’ll leave the door open, then,” said Bernice, “and if you want to shoot
him . . .”
Peter grabbed his jacket and told Evangeline, “Let’s go for that ride.”
It was true. They did have a lot to talk about, but they started on something easy: Peter’s son. Peter was a father, so he bragged. Evangeline seemed to enjoy it.
Then they moved on to their work . . . another easy topic.
Evangeline said that people were always interested in reading about interesting places. If the economy was good, they read because they were making plans and looking for pointers, and if the economy was bad, they read to fantasize.
Peter said that the trend in the antiquarian business was mostly up, good economy or bad, because rare books grew only rarer as the years went by. But it wasn’t always a gentleman’s business. “I’m still paying off a mistake a few years ago. I had a seller, always honest, delivered books with great provenance. Told me that he had a Shakespeare Second Folio in red morocco. Very rare. I paid him two hundred and fifty thousand for it.”
“Not in cash, I hope.”
“Cashier’s check. Just as bad. But I had a buyer who’d pay five hundred.”
“A nice profit.”
“Not as nice as I would have had if I’d put the book up for auction. But in my business, you nurture clients. If a trustworthy seller wants a cashier’s check, you deliver. And you never gouge the buyer who’s always there. So . . . I was making the seller happy with his check, and the buyer with a nice deal, and myself with a nice profit. Win-win-win. Except that I’d been set up. The Folio had been stolen from a private library in Illinois. By the time we figured it out, the seller had disappeared and I was a quarter million in the hole.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I cried a lot. Orson, too. Even Danny cried. And Bernice, she just cussed me out. Two years ago, we saw no profits whatsoever, and a few fire-sale prices on some very rare items, just to pay the rent. . . . You know, you’re the first person I’ve told about that outside of the office.”
“I’m flattered . . . I guess.”
From there, it was almost easy to move on to talk about divorce.
His first, well behind him now. “And all for the best,” he lied.
She showed him how well she knew him by telling him she didn’t believe him.
So he said, “All right. Mine was bad. Tell me the truth about yours.”
But she wouldn’t say much, except that it had been messy, and she was still raw.
So he said, “Sounds like what you need is a little distraction.”
And she laughed for the first time. “Peter, when some men say that, they mean, ‘Maybe you should go to a chick flick and have a good cry.’ When
you
say that, it means, ‘I’m going on a treasure hunt. Come along, if you know how to handle dynamite.’”
“That makes me sound more interesting than most guys.”
She gave him a look from the corner of her eye. He knew it well. It said:
Dream on . . . Not a chance . . . And don’t even think of it . . . All at once. Then she said, “Ridley Royce has invited me to lunch. He’s all the distraction I need right now, thanks.”
“Would you be surprised to know that Ridley has started me on another treasure hunt?”
“I was afraid of that.”
They drove into a fogbank around Rockport, a town famous for its granite coastline, for seaside mansions owned by stockbrokers who commuted on the 8:10 to Boston, and for Motif #1, the fisherman’s shack that had been painted and photographed more times than any other scene in America.
Ridley lived in one of the mansions, which had been in his family for generations and looked as though it hadn’t been painted in generations. The shingles that weren’t split were paper-thin, the paint was curling from the crimson trim, the windows needed glazing. And Ridley didn’t answer the door.
“Ring the bell again,” said Evangeline.
“He may be ducking me,” said Peter. “Probably wants to talk to you alone. He likes to play all the angles. . . . Ridley! Hey, Ridley!”
Peter’s voice was swallowed up by the fog. And no answer.
Evangeline peered in a window. “I only agreed to have lunch with him because he got me tickets to
The Lion King
once when I wanted to impress my ex-husband’s niece.”
Peter walked over and looked in the garage window. “The car’s still here. . . . Ridley! Hello, Ridley.”
No answer.
Evangeline followed Peter around the side of the house. “He wanted to see my grandmother, too. He said my ancestors could have information that might have tremendous impact on world theater.”
“Ridley Riddles,” muttered Peter.
“I told him that the last time I let someone dig into my ancestry, it was you,” she said, “and it was nothing but trouble. Sometimes Ridley strikes me as a little strange.”
“And sometimes a little drunk. Hey, Ridley!”
The back lawn sloped a hundred feet down to the granite rocks and the ocean below. The lawn was mostly crabgrass, the ocean mostly covered in fog, and the house just as deserted in back as in the front. The only sounds were the gentle wash of the waves on the rocks and the drone of an outboard somewhere in the fog.
Peter reached under the back steps. “He told me he kept a key—”
“Peter.” Evangeline took a few steps toward the water. “Look.”
About two hundred yards out, a boat was appearing. But it did not come toward them. Instead, it disappeared again into the fog. A moment later, it reappeared, came a little closer, cut a curving line in the water, and disappeared. When it came out of the fog again, it was closer still . . . cut another curving line . . . disappeared.
“That boat’s just going in circles, Peter.”
“Corkscrew circles, like the helm’s thrown over, but nobody’s driving.”
When the boat emerged again, Peter saw the brand name on the hull:
Grady White.
“I think that’s Ridley’s boat.”
“Well, if he’s drunk, he must be passed out, because he’s going to corkscrew right into the rocks.”
Peter saw a Zodiac tied to Ridley’s mooring about twenty feet from shore. He kicked off his shoes and socks, pulled off his turtleneck and trousers, and said, “Call nine-one-one.”
“Peter, that water’s forty degrees. You’ll freeze to death.”
“Why do you think I want you to call nine-one-one?”
It was like jumping into a snowbank . . . in your shorts. If Peter had been able to focus on pain, rather than shock, he might have noticed that his testicles had retracted toward his liver, but he couldn’t feel anything, so he swam as hard as he could, grabbed the side of the Zodiac, and flipped himself into the rubber boat.
The little outboard kicked over, and in a cold instant, Peter shot out to the Grady, bumped against the hull, and called Ridley again.
No answer.
He put the outboard in neutral and wrapped a line around a cleat on the port quarter, which took up enough of his attention that it wasn’t until he had jumped onto the Grady that he realized there was no Ridley there, either.
The harbormaster found Ridley’s body two hours later, floating out near the breakwater, about a mile offshore.
By the time he brought the body back to the wharf, Peter Fallon was dressed and waiting, along with Evangeline and a state police detective.
“Can you make the I.D. for us?” asked the detective.