The Book of Illumination Page 19

  Suddenly, I heard a little scream and then another. Then Henry bellowed, “Mama!”

  I was out the door and down the steps in a flash, but I was not fast enough.

  Attracted by the kids’ voices and the flashing lights, Homer had trotted over to get in on the action. Cambridge has a leash law, but we all knew and loved sloppy old Homer, who took his pick of front porches for his afternoon nap. No doubt he was trying to protect the kids when he buried his nose in a bank of hostas and began to bark with gusto. And who could blame them for crowding around, to see what the excitement was all about?

  By the time they figured it out, it was too late. The skunk had been rooted out from its leafy sanctuary and had sprayed them all.

  Homer took the brunt of it. As the perp toddled off, its little white toupee vanishing between the boards of the fence, the dog began to whine and threw himself down into the grass, trying to rub the oily spray off his snout and face. The spray hadn’t gotten into the children’s eyes, and for that I was truly relieved, but they hadn’t escaped lightly. I wouldn’t fully realize until I got them into the house later how bad it was, but when I did, there was absolutely no doubt—it was really, really bad.

  Ellie, who had been sitting in her kitchen, phoned Homer’s owners, a couple in their thirties named Susie and Bud Coughlin, and they came racing over. I was already imagining my bathtub full of tomato juice and trying to figure out how many cans I was going to have to buy to fill it up. I could ask Ellie to stay out in the yard with them while I ran to Star Market in Porter Square. Twenty large cans ought to do it, I figured, wondering briefly if V8 juice would be a better purchase, in case I miscalculated the amount I needed and had a lot left over. I like V8 juice better than tomato.

  Bud and Susie knew better, thank goodness. It wasn’t the first time Homer had been skunked, and apparently there was a magic formula known widely to dog owners, some combination of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dishwashing soap. The mix was miraculous, Bud claimed; it completely killed the odor. Susie was falling all over herself apologizing, clearly believing that Homer was responsible for the whole mess. I didn’t agree. Racing around like banshees with their flashlights, the kids easily could have scared a skunk into spraying, even without Homer’s help. But I was thrilled when Susie offered to hop on her bike and make a quick run to CVS for multiple bottles of hydrogen peroxide, the ingredient we were both missing. Bud took Homer home.

  Having little idea how truly foul they smelled, the kids milked the situation for every bedtime-postponing minute it was worth. Back outside, Henry was stomping around with a stick, proclaiming how he’d really like to “get” that rotten skunk, and while Nell and Delia were initially swept up in his fury and outrage, they soon plopped down on the steps in a desolate little huddle.

  Nell’s lip began to quiver and she put her thumb in her mouth. “I want my mommy,” she said, tears spilling over.

  Delia slid over and put her arm around her little sister. “It’s okay, Nelly-belle,” she said. “Mommy’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Max had appeared at their kitchen door. Wisely, he’d kept his distance during all the high drama, but now he joined the rest of us as we waited on the porch for Susie to get back.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked Nell.

  Nell shook her head and refused to reply.

  “We got sprayed,” Delia explained.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Max said.

  “She wants Mommy,” Delia went on. “They’re in Maine.”

  Max nodded seriously. “She can probably smell you from up there.”

  Nell looked up quickly, instantly snapped out of her self-pity. When she saw Delia begin to giggle, she put on a madder-than-ever face and smacked her sister on the arm. Nell was not going to smile. She was not.

  She flew to her feet and headed toward me.

  “Eee!” I said, scooting away. “No! Get away from me!”

  This brought a smile to her face, as first she, then she and Delia, then she, Delia, and Henry swarmed after me like bees to honey, determined to contaminate me with their skunky stink. I could only dart and swoop for so long before they managed to bring me down with a three-kid tackle. Oh well. At least I had on an old shirt.

  “Why weren’t you in bed, anyway?” Max asked.

  “We wanted a campfire,” Henry said. “We wanted to toast marshmallows, but Mama said no.”

  “How come?” asked Max.

  “Because we might set the trees on fire.”

  Max nodded, surveying the huge, ancient silver maples at the back two corners of the yard.

  He glanced over at me. His look said, What kind of cockamamie excuse was that?

  I shrugged. Surely he wasn’t too old to remember the kind of cockamamie excuses he’d come up with on the spur of the moment and fed to his own gullible children.

  A few minutes later he disappeared inside, and a minute or two after that, he reappeared through the bulkhead to the basement, an entrance we never used. He was dragging a standing charcoal grill, a rusty old relic that looked as though it hadn’t seen the light of day in twenty-five years.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” asked Ellie.

  Max climbed the porch steps, went into the kitchen, and came back out with an armful of wood. He began to pile logs into the grill.

  “I’m building a campfire,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  IT WAS A relief to be back at work. This is one of the dirty little secrets of parenthood: if you have a decent job, one you basically enjoy, it’s often far, far easier to be among grown-ups at your place of employment than home with an utterly dependent and mercurial little person (or in the case of this past weekend, three). Then again, you miss out on all the fun when someone snorts chocolate milk out of his nose.

  The de-skunking had taken until two o’clock on Sunday morning, and when the people in front of us in church—yes, I had to get them all to Mass on Sunday—started peering around and whispering, I realized that the magic formula hadn’t been quite so magical. We were all so inured to the odor that we couldn’t smell it on ourselves. So, after a stop at Verna’s for a consoling box of doughnuts and another at CVS for yet more bottles of hydrogen peroxide, we went at the process all over again. And that took up the rest of the day, between the baths and the hair and the clothes, bumping our plans for a trip to the Children’s Museum into sometime next month.

  They were all good sports. I felt bad, though, as if I had really blown my chance to repay Dec and Kelly and to give the girls a memorable weekend. No, strike that; it would definitely be remembered. But for all the wrong reasons.

  “Believe me, it could just as easily have happened up at the lake,” Kelly insisted. “There are skunks all over the place.”

  Dec just kept shaking his head. I think he found it amusing.

  I had been so happy to be left alone with Henry. We got pizza about six o’clock and ate in the living room watching Pinocchio. I fell so soundly asleep on the couch that Henry put himself to bed. He probably intended to stay up really, really late, with no one pestering him to turn off the light, but I doubt that lasted long. When I woke up at ten fifteen, he was dead to the world.

  Chandler was at a conference in Chicago for the week, so Sylvia and I were spared his glowering omnipresence. All I wanted to do was to reimmerse myself in the orderly calm of the Cicero project, and I was able to do that for most of the day. As Sylvia worked beside me on an eighteenth-century diary, I brought her up to date on Declan’s progress as of Friday and shared the broader outline of my day with Julian, omitting, of course, the details of how it ended. I made no reference to the roses. As soon as I could, I brought the conversation around to the skunk episode.

  The whole day felt awkward, though. The two of us had met Julian at Café Algiers with Sam, both of us single women with an interest in antique books, and Julian had called me. Twice, no less. It was Sylvia’s work with Finny that had brought him into our orbit in the first p
lace, and yet he hadn’t invited her to get together. Also, I was now way more involved with the Winslow family than she was—I was working to help John Grady, I had been out to the Berkshires to Esther’s house, and I was presently awaiting a call from Josie. I felt really torn. Part of me longed to make a clean breast of things, spilling all the details of my encounter with the butler’s ghost and everything that had resulted from that. But another part of me, the stronger part, it seemed, was continuing to hold back. I wasn’t sure why. I hoped I’d understand it soon.

  The monks paid us a visit at about three thirty. They said nothing at first, but their whole demeanor screamed, Well?

  “I haven’t heard back yet,” I said.

  The abbot’s thoughts flew past me. It was something about an excuse and an apron.

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  The Irish rushed by again. This time I caught it.

  Is gaire do bhean leithscéal ná a naprún.

  “An excuse is nearer to a woman than her apron.”

  I took a deep breath as some possible retorts raced through my mind. Did they think I had nothing else to do but worry about their book? Wasn’t it generally considered polite to give a person who was doing you a favor—a monsignor, no less!—a couple of days to get back to you before you started hounding him for results? Hadn’t they heard a word he’d said when he scolded them about the way they were treating me? And anyway, just what century did they think this was, the eleventh?

  It was the look on the young monk’s face that made me pause, that and his helpless shrug and the wry little smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth. His thoughts reached me loudly and clearly: You think you’ve got it rough? Imagine putting up with him for hundreds of years!

  “I was planning to call Monsignor Dolan,” I said quietly. “I just wanted to give him the weekend.”

  “It’s Monday,” the abbot said, punctuating this pushy observation with an upward thrust of his chin.

  “I’m aware of that,” I answered. “Look, I’m doing my level best here. If you could just find it in your heart to drop this sexist—”

  I stopped myself. I was as frustrated as they were, and worn out from the weekend, but losing my temper with these guys wasn’t going to help. I took a deep breath, thinking they probably had no concept of what the word sexist meant, anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me.”

  “Forgiveness may be extended on behalf of Our Heavenly Father,” the abbot pontificated, “but a sin is only forgiven if the sinner is truly penitent.”

  “Yes,” I said, struggling not to rise to the bait. “I know. I made my First Communion. And my Confirmation.”

  “And now?” he sneered.

  “Now, I’m preparing my son to make his,” I shot back. This was stretching the truth a bit. First of all, Henry wasn’t going to make his First Communion for two more years. Second, one of the great advantages of sending a kid to Catholic school was that the teachers did all the heavy lifting as regarded religious instruction. According to one of the third-grade moms, all I would have to do would be to show up at a couple of meetings and buy my child a white suit.

  In any case, I thought I was practicing remarkable self-control, especially given the fact that Sylvia was no help at all. She seemed unable to make a peep.

  “All right,” I said calmly. “I know I’m just a regular person and I’m sure you didn’t have much to do with people like me back in your monastery in Ireland. So I understand how difficult this is. But we do have one thing in common: we both care an awful lot about your book.”

  I couldn’t tell whether this was getting through to them, because at that moment, the abbot began to pace. Since they hadn’t disappeared, though, I forged right ahead.

  “This woman here, you have no idea what she’s been through trying to look out for your manuscript.” Sylvia didn’t seem to enjoy having the attention drawn to her; she shook her head anxiously and took a step back toward the wall. “It could very well have fallen into the wrong hands, and she’s risked her job, if not her entire career, to protect—”

  The abbot wheeled furiously around and bellowed, “Protect? You call that protecting?”

  I glanced at Sylvia. She looked almost as pale as the two robed figures hovering opposite us.

  “Leaving that glorious treasure lying right there on the shelf,” the abbot went on, “to be sliced up and carted off like so many pieces of—”

  A shiver ran through me. “What do you mean, sliced up?”

  The younger monk nodded furiously, and said, “Cut out the pages with a—”

  “A knife!” interrupted his superior.

  “Who?” Sylvia whispered. “When?”

  “And now it’s gone,” the abbot said slowly. “And for that, we have yourself to thank.”

  Sylvia shrunk before his gaze.

  “Now, hold on right there!” I said, rising to Sylvia’s defense. There was no point in uttering another word, though, because he faded before our eyes.

  The younger monk hesitated just a moment longer. “A flint, it was,” he whispered. “A flint was the instrument used.”

  Josie Winslow lived in Cambridge, in a carriage house tucked away behind one of the mansions on Brattle Street. Brattle is one of the prettiest streets I have ever seen, and in Cambridge, it’s one of the quietest. Citing the area’s architectural and historical significance—during the Revolution, George Washington made it his base of operations, after terrified Loyalists abandoned their homes—the residents have succeeded in banning commercial truck traffic from their street, thus forcing the noise and the fumes and the general inconvenience onto their less significant neighbors.

  But as I walked to Josie’s house in the afternoon, I noticed no shortage of large vehicles in the neighborhood. On one stretch of hill linking Huron and Brattle, construction vans lined both sides of the street, the vehicles of landscapers and contractors and masons and roofers and plasterers all apparently readying a house the size of a small hospital for human habitation. I wondered how many people were going to be moving in there. Maybe there was an Olympic-size pool in the basement.

  As I turned down the lane that led to Josie’s house, though, I saw none of the excess in evidence a few streets away. The modest carriage house, brick and shingle and surrounded by bushes of rosy hydrangeas, reminded me a little of Esther’s place in the Berkshires. I wondered what combination of familial or marital forces had turned Tad toward the aesthetic of the single pear and Josie and Esther toward houses like those in which Goldilocks ate the bears’ porridge and slept in their beds.

  The Lexus SUV with the “COEXIST” bumper sticker was parked on the flagstone driveway. I paused for a moment before lifting the brass knocker, remembering with a chill the shrieking and smashing that had frozen my feet to their spots on the Winslow home’s landing just over a week ago. Josie had been nice enough, if a little cool, when she phoned to let me know that she had found the book, and with it, the deed. But as I heard the sound of her footsteps approaching, I fought my urge to cut and run. She opened the door slowly.

  “Anza?”

  I nodded, surprised into silence by the sight of the slender, calm figure damply glowing in her exercise clothes. Could this really be the same person I’d encountered last week?

  “Come in,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I stepped inside. There was no hallway in her residence, so I found myself in an expansive room that apparently served for cooking, dining, and sitting in front of the fireplace. It felt vaguely Southwestern; I noticed Navajo blankets and smooth stones in clay bowls and the startling, bleached skulls of a couple of former desert dwellers. The place seemed peaceful and uncluttered and smelled of eucalyptus, or menthol, or one of those medicinal oils you always smell in spas. Her bedroom had to be somewhere else, probably up where they used to store hay. I’d have bet there was also a room up there devoted to yoga and meditation.

  “Can I get you some tea?” she offered.

&
nbsp; Bitter, watery tea, tea made of boiled twigs, came to mind.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I just had a coffee.”

  She steered me over to one of the chairs by the fireplace, then fetched a book off the dining table. I thought she might hang onto it until I had answered a hundred questions or so, but she handed it right over. She seemed expectant, like a child waiting to be told a story. I glanced down at the book.

  Sure enough, there was the cover that Esther had described: children playing ring-around-the-rosy and butterflies fluttering around an apple tree. The youngsters were appealingly old-fashioned, all wearing little leather shoes, the girls in smocked dresses that tied behind their waists and the boys in short pants held up by suspenders. They were all apple-cheeked and flaxen-haired, healthy, outdoorsy Anglo-Saxons working up hearty appetites in the autumn air.

  “He’ll be so happy,” I said, opening the yellowed envelope I had found tucked inside. This explained why the deed had escaped notice for so long: folded into thirds and again in half, the envelope was smaller than a page of the book. I skimmed it quickly, resolving to read it later. Apart from the offer of tea, Josie had yet to utter a word, so I guessed she was waiting for some kind of explanation.

  “I was at your house,” I began. “The house on Comm. Ave., I mean.”

  She frowned. “Doing what?”

  “I’m a bookbinder. I work with Sylvia Cremaldi. Your brother had some books he wanted appraised and he asked her to stop by. We were walking that way together.”

  She was nodding, so I paused.

  “My sister tells me you’re a psychic,” she said.

  “Depends how you define psychic.”

  “How do you define it?” she asked, sitting down on the couch and pulling her legs up under her.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s one of those words that means different things to different people.”

  “Can you read minds?”

  “Live people’s minds? No.”