The Forger's Daughter by Bradford Morrow

Author:Bradford Morrow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780802149251
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-08-21T19:03:09+00:00

I knew the authorities would have taken the body away. What I hadn’t anticipated was that no evidence remained of its ever having lain there in the first place, stiff as a sculpture. No yellow police tape dangled from nearby branches. No dried blood discolored the ground or grass. As I looked farther up the road toward the guardrail where I’d been standing when the incident happened, a wave of hope passed through me. There was a fair to middling chance the driver might not, after all, have seen me from this vantage where he’d briefly parked. Not only was the distance greater than I had originally thought, but the trees there cast heavy dappled shade over the terrain. Maybe, just maybe, I’d blended into the shadowy scenery, inconspicuous, unseen.

Breathing a tentative sigh of relief, I drove to the end of the road, where I proceeded to turn around. I sat with my arms crossed and replayed the incident in my mind. On the radio, a Saturday morning opera was airing, a Benjamin Britten work unfamiliar to me. Lots of atonality and jagged rhythms gave the music an overarching mood of angst. Appropriate, maybe, but I was already struggling with plenty of atonal notes in my own inner soundtrack and hadn’t any patience for music this morning.

I cut the engine, and with it the radio, so all I could hear were the same families of untroubled birds as before and, faintly, that nearby rippling brook. Arms crossed again, I recalled sunlight glancing off the Chevy’s windshield, which further buttressed my growing conviction that I’d been an unseen witness to the grotesque, coldhearted act. Not that this necessarily exonerated me or lessened my feelings of guilt. But what it did mean was that my original reason for leaving Maisie and Nicole at the kitchen table, more or less on the spur of the moment before Will came out to join us, seemed no longer tenable. My nebulous plan had been to come here, confirm for myself that Slader had done what he did to intimidate me into silence—just as everything he’d done since reentering our lives was meant to threaten us into cooperation—then go straight to the police to confess I’d lied, and let the chips fall where they may.

Now that plan collapsed. Maybe Will was on the right path after all. Do what Slader wanted as a kind of long final farewell before getting our own lives back on track.

So, yes, the man on the road did exist, or had. But that didn’t mean I did, or had. While somebody may have spotted a minivan in the area, my excuse for having been here was tight as piano string. I’d heard criminals often revisited the scenes of their crimes, and while I didn’t consider myself a criminal, I did realize it behooved me to get out of here, never to return. As before, I covered my tracks at home with a domestic excuse, one I’d already planted with Nicole.

“Where the hell have you been?” Will demanded, when I walked in the door.

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