The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Jeremiah Healy A Book of Kells

From Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine

The Irish-American heritage center was located in a red-brick building three blocks off East Broadway in South Boston. Growing up in the neighborhood, I remembered the structure as a public elementary school, but when the city fell on hard times in the seventies, the mayor and council sold a number of municipal properties to keep real-estate taxes from rocketing skyward. As I parked my old Honda at the curb, I got the impression that the Center was doing a lot better by the building than the school department ever had.

The main entrance consisted of three separate doors, the one to the left having a sign in gold calligraphy, reading TRY THIS ONE FIRST, which I thought was a nice touch. Inside the lobby area, the same ornate lettering adorned the walls, including a mural with the homily MAY YOUR TROUBLES BE LESS/YOUR BLESSINGS BE MORE/AND NOTHING BUT HAPPINESS/COME THROUGH YOUR DOOR.

On my right was an office complex, probably where the principal used to hold court. A woman sitting behind a reception counter rose when she saw me.

“John Cuddy,” I said, “here to see Hugh McGlachlin.”

“Oh, yes.” Her expression shifted from concerned to relieved. “Please come in.”

A buzzer sounded. She opened the door nearest her counter and showed me through a second inner door. “Hugh, Mr. Cuddy,” she said.

A voice with just a lick of the brogue said, “Thank you, Grace. And hold any calls, if you would, please.”

Grace nodded and closed the inner door behind me.

The man rising from the other side of the carved teak desk was about five-nine and slight of build, wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and a tie. His hair was gray and short, combed a little forward like a Roman emperor’s. Despite the gray hair, his face was unlined around the blue eyes, and his smile shone brightly enough for a toothpaste commercial.

A woman occupied one of the chairs in front of McGlachlin’s desk, but instead of standing as well, she turned toward me while twisting a lace handkerchief in her lap. I pegged her as middle forties, with florid skin and a rat’s nest of red hair. She wore the drab, baggy clothes of someone catching up on her housework, a canvas tote bag that had seen better days at her feet.

The man came around his desk and extended his right hand. “Hugh McGlachlin, executive director of the Center here. Thanks so much for coming so quickly.”

I shook hands with him, and McGlachlin turned to the seated woman. “This is Mrs. Nora Clooney.”

She swallowed and shook hands with me as well, hers trembling in mine.

“Well,” said McGlachlin, tapping the back of the other chair in front of his desk, “I’m not sure of the protocol, but I think I’d be most comfortable using first names.”

“Fine with me.”

He and I sat down at the same time, and McGlachlin studied me briefly. “I didn’t tell Michael O’Dell why we needed a private investigator,” he said.

O’Dell was a lawyer in Back Bay who’d fed me a lot of cases over the years. “Probably why he didn’t tell me.”

The toothpaste smile again. “Michael is a member of our advisory board. And he assured me you were the soul of discretion and someone to be trusted.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him.”

McGlachlin leaned back in his chair. “I think you may be just the man for the job, John.”

“Which is?”

He pursed his lips. “How much do you know about the Heritage Center?”

“Only what I’ve seen so far this morning.”

Hugh McGlachlin rose again, picking up a manila envelope from the corner of his desk. “In that event, I think a brief tour might prove instructive. Nora?”

Clooney preceded us out the inner door.

“We incorporated as a nonprofit institution in ‘seventy-five,” said McGlachlin, “and moved into this building four years later. I don’t mind telling you, John, the city left it quite the mess.” He made a sweeping gesture with the envelope. “But thanks to some Irish-American tradesmen generously donating their time and talents, we’ve been able to renovate the interior a bit at a time and rejuvenate the community we serve.”

I sensed that the operative word for me was donating.

The three of us were moving down a hallway festooned with the various crests of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, that signature gold calligraphy naming each. On the left, double doors opened onto a large and beautifully rendered country-house room, sporting an exposed-beam ceiling, slate floor, and massive fieldstone fireplace on the shorter wall. In the hearth was a cauldron suspended by metal bars over an unlit fire, an iron milk jug bigger than a beer keg to the side.

I said, “Hugh, what exactly is the Center’s problem?”

McGlachlin just stopped, but Clooney seemed to freeze in her tracks. He looked up at the crests over our heads. “Would you know where your forebears hailed from, John?”

“County Kerry on my father’s side, Cork on my mother’s.”

“Ah.” McGlachlin pointed first to a shield with a white castle and gold harp. “Kerry…” and then to a crest with a galleon sailing between two red towers “… Cork.”

He took a step into the room. “In both places, John, they would have broken their backs hoisting jugs like that one onto a pony cart to carry their cows’ milk to town.” He fixed me with those blue eyes. “ ’Tis a marvelous thing that we who emigrated are more fortunate, don’t you think?”

“Hugh,” I said, “until I know why you called Michael O’Dell — and probably why Mrs. Clooney seems nervous as a wet cat — I won’t be able to tell you whether I can help the Center for free.”

McGlachlin grinned this time, but without showing any teeth, and I had the feeling that despite being six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, I’d hate to meet him in an alley. He said, “Yes, I do believe you’re the man for our job. This way, please.”

We took an elevator to the second floor. As I followed McGlachlin down the hallway, I tried to stay abreast of Clooney. No matter how I adjusted my stride, though, she always stayed a step behind me.

McGlachlin stopped again, this time outside a large classroom where the chairs and tables were shoved against the walls. Perhaps a dozen girls and young women were moving in a circle, their hands joined but held high. “We have step-dancing classes in here,” he said, “though we also host Lithuanian folk dancing for our neighbors of that extraction. The Nimble Thimbles teach needlework over there, and every Wednesday we have instruction in Gaelic.”

I nodded.

Another toothy smile. “All right, then. The next floor is one that concerns us most at the moment.”

“This is our museum, John.”

McGlachlin used a key to open a heavy security door in a corridor filled with construction odds and ends, plaster dust on every surface. The area at the end of the hallway was still just undefined space, only a few wall studs in place.

The security door opened into a large viewing room, glass-faced cases along two walls displaying china in all shapes and sizes, lots of pastel green “icing” on the edges of plates and pitchers.

“Recognize it?” asked McGlachlin.

My mother had a piece she prized. “Belleek.”

“Very good. The finest of Irish porcelain.” He waved a hand at the third wall. “And there’s the loveliest collection of lace you may ever see.”

I took in the white fabric spread on trays of green velvet. “You said downstairs that—”

“—this is the floor that concerns us most right now. Yes, indeed I did.” McGlachlin’s voice dropped to the subdued tone of a devout man entering his church. “Over here, John.”

We went through a doorway into a smaller room with soft, recessed lighting. In the center was a freestanding case about two feet square. Its top, or cover, evidently had been glass, though it was hard to judge further because it was shattered into crumbly crystals lying fairly evenly on the otherwise empty green velvet.

I said, “You’ve had a theft.”

McGlachlin looked my way as Clooney began twisting her hankie again. After glancing at her, he turned back to me. “John, you recognized the Belleek. Would you also know about The Book of Kells?”

“Something Irish monks did back in the Middle Ages?”

“Close enough. During the eighth and ninth centuries, Celtic scribes painstakingly copied each passage of the four Gospels onto ‘paper’ made from the stomach lining of lambs. Every page is an artist’s palette of flowing script and glorious colors, with the original book carefully guarded at Trinity College in Dublin. However, in 1974 some reproductions were permitted — they called them ‘facsimiles.’ Only five hundred copies, but they are works of art themselves, down to the wormholes in the pages.”

I looked at the smashed case. “And you had one of those.”

“The Center purchased its facsimile in 1990 for twenty thousand dollars.”

I thought back to my time as a claims investigator. “You’ve notified your insurance carrier.”

McGlachlin shook his head. “On the collector’s market now, the price is ten times what we paid, but the money is largely irrelevant: Nobody who has a facsimile is willing to part with it.”

“Still, the policy would pay—”

“It’s not a check I want, John. It’s the book itself. There’ll never be any more facsimiles produced, at least not in our lifetime. The Center needs its copy back as a matter of” — another sweeping gesture with the manila envelope — “heritage.”

I looked at him. “Let me save you some time. The Boston police have an excellent—”

“Not yet, John.” McGlachlin seemed pained. “I’m rather hoping this can be resolved without resorting to our insurance company or the police.” He opened the manila envelope and slid a single piece of paper from it. “This was on top of the shards there.”

I stepped sideways so I could read it without touching it. In simple block lettering on white photocopy stock, the words were TAKEN, BUT NOT STOLEN, AND WILL BE RETURNED.

“Who found this?”

“I did, sir,” said Clooney, the first words I’d heard her speak.

McGlachlin cleared his throat. “Nora volunteers her time to clean for us. Given all the plaster dust from the ongoing renovation, it’s no small task.”

I looked at her. “Where was this piece of paper when you first saw it?”

Clooney glanced at her boss. “It was just like Mr. McGlachlin told you. The note was lying atop all the broken glass.” The brogue was woven through her voice much more than her boss’s.

“And the glass hasn’t been disturbed since?”

McGlachlin said, “I’ve kept the room locked since Nora came to me this morning with the news.”

I let my eyes roam around before returning to Clooney. “Do you clean this room the same time every day?”

“First thing in the morning, sir. Eight o’clock. It wouldn’t do for visitors not to be able to see the book for the plaster dust covering its blessed case.”

“And nothing was wrong yesterday at eight?”

“No, sir.” The lace hankie was getting wrung some more.

I glanced around again. “Other than the locked door, what kind of security do you have for this room?”

“None,” said McGlachlin. “We’ve been spending every available penny on the renovations.”

I stared at him. “But what about visitors wandering in?”

“Access to these museum rooms is restricted solely to those of us with a key to that door. As anyone can plainly see, there’s been no attempt to jimmy it or the windows, even assuming the bastard — sorry, Nora — thought to bring a ladder with him to lean against the outside wall.”

I thought about it. “I can see why you haven’t gone to the police.”

McGlachlin sighed. “Exactly so. This had to be — is it still called ‘an inside job’?”

I turned back to Clooney. “So the incident must have occurred sometime between eight A.M. or so yesterday—”

“More like nine, sir, the time I finished in here—”

“To eight this morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

I looked at McGlachlin. “All right, how many people have keys to that door?”

“I do, as executive director. And Nora, for her cleaning and turning.”

“Turning?”

She said, “Every day, sir, I go up to the book and turn a page.”

McGlachlin pointed to the windows. “So the sun fades the ink only a tiny bit, and more or less evenly.”

I looked at the shattered glass. “How did you open it?”

They both stared at me.

“The glass cover, or top. How did you open it to turn the pages?”

“Oh,” said Clooney, and moved to a wall panel. She threw a switch, and the remaining structure of the glass top clicked upward.

McGlachlin went to demonstrate. “You can then lift this—”

“Don’t touch it,” I said. “Fingerprints.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.”

I gestured toward the paper he still held in his hand. “And please don’t let anybody else touch that. As it is, the police will need elimination prints from you, and—”

“Harking back to what I said earlier, John, we hope we won’t be needing the police, thanks to you.”

I waited before asking, “Who else has keys to the security door?”

McGlachlin raised a finger. “The chairman of our advisory board, Conor Donnelly. He’s a professor of Irish studies.” He named the college. Another finger went up. “Conor’s brother, Denis, was a generous contributor to the Center, so he received a key as well.”

“Denis Donnelly, the venture capitalist?”

“The very one.”

“The man kicks in enough, he gets his own key?”

McGlachlin cleared his throat again. “Given the amount of Denis’s contribution, John, that would be an awkward request to deny.”

“Anybody else?”

“Only Sean Kilpatrick. The carpenter donating his time to do our work down the hall.”

I looked around one last time. “These museum rooms look pretty well completed. Why would Kilpatrick need access to them?”

“In the event anything went wrong,” he said. “But, John, Sean’s somebody who’s completely trustworthy.”

“Hugh, at least one somebody with a key obviously isn’t.”

We were back in the executive director’s office, the door closed. “Mr. McGlachlin, will you or Mr. Cuddy be needing me anymore today?”

McGlachlin glanced at me, and I shook my head. “Go home, then, Nora,” he said. “And tell Bill I’ll be by to visit after work.”

After Clooney had picked up her tote bag and left us, I said, “Bill’s her husband?”

“Just so. And a fine, generous man to boot, but suffering from the cancer. You know how that can be.”

Though I figured McGlachlin meant his comment rhetorically, I still pictured my wife, Beth, asleep in her hillside less than a mile away. “I do.”

He shook his head sadly. “They met each other here at one of the Center’s first socials. But then, we’ve sparked a lot of unions from our activities.”

“Who else besides Nora — and you — actually knew how the cover over your Book of Kells opened?”

McGlachlin grew wary. “And what difference would that make, John? The case was smashed.”

“That ‘ransom’ note — it was lying on top of the broken glass. Being a single sheet of paper, it’s pretty light.”

More wary now. “Agreed, but—”

“—so the note wouldn’t have disturbed the broken glass under it very much, if at all.”

McGlachlin seemed to work it through.

To save time, I said, “And since the glass shards were spread almost evenly…”

The executive director closed his eyes, “… the book was probably taken out of the case before the cover was smashed.”

“Somebody wanted you to think that the glass had to be broken in order to take the book. So my question still stands: Who else knew about the cover mechanism?”

McGlachlin fixed me with his blue eyes. “John, I just don’t know. But I do know this. Nora wouldn’t know what to do with our book. And she’s honest as the day is long.”

I filed that with his endorsement of the carpenter, Sean Kilpatrick. “You didn’t mention if Grace, your receptionist, also had a key.”

“She does not. But given where Grace sits, she’s in a position to see who comes and goes.”

“Assuming everyone comes through the main doors.”

“The other outside doors are alarmed, John. And besides, Grace tells me she saw all three of our key holders walk by her yesterday.”

“Both in and out?”

“No, but each of them had either a knapsack or briefcase or toolbox big enough to hold the book.”

“You have any suggestions on where I should start?”

“More a question on how you should start.” McGlachlin paused. “So far, only Nora, Grace, and you know about what’s happened.”

“And given the tenor of that ransom note, you’re hoping the book will be back by the time anyone else has to know?”

“On the button, John. There’s an advisory board meeting here next week — five days hence, to be exact. The members have a tradition of reading a passage from the book — as a benediction, you might say.”

“Meaning the book is taken from the case?”

“No. No, we all troop up to the room, and thanks to Nora’s turning the page each morning, there’re always different passages to choose from.”

“Anything else about this situation you haven’t told me?”

“One of the reasons I’m trying to resolve things quickly.” McGlachlin pursed his lips. “You see, Conor — our board chairman — was asked by his brother, Denis, a few months ago to loan out the book for a party. Denis was giving a la-di-da affair at his home, and he wanted to have our facsimile on display for his guests.”

“And what did Conor say?”

“That he’d have to put it to the Center’s advisory board, which he did. And they voted not to allow the book to leave its case.”

“How did Denis take that?”

“Not well. He stomped in here the next day, gave me holy hell. He thought I could perhaps permit him to borrow the book anyway.”

“For a small… stipend?”

He nodded. “I told him I couldn’t do that.” McGlachlin winced. “You could have heard him yelling all over the building.”

“Denis believed he should have been accommodated because of that large contribution you mentioned?”

“More specific than that, I’m afraid. You see, John, ‘twas Denis’s money that let our Center buy the book in the first place.”

After getting McGlachlin’s home number — “Call, John, any time of the day or night” — I drove from the Center to another repository of memories. Irish-American also, but different. And more personal.

Leaving the Honda on the wide path, I walked through the garden of stones until I found hers. The words ELIZABETH MARY DEVLIN CUDDY have never changed, but they’ve become a little fainter, the freeze/thaw of Boston winters taking their toll even on polished granite.

“I’ve been asked to find a book, Beth.”

A book?

I explained the problem to her. After a pause, she said, I remember seeing an illuminated page from it, in an art-history text, I think.

“That would make sense.”

An incredible collector’s item.

As I nodded at her comment, my eye caught the plodding movement of a lobster boat down in the harbor, chugging along in the light chop of a northeast wind that smelled of rain to come. Its skipper seemed intent on collecting his pots before the storm began to…

John?

I came back to her stone. “Sorry?”

How are you going to approach these three men without tipping them to who you are and what you’re doing?

“It took a while, but coming here has shown me the way.”

I fooled myself into thinking I could hear the confusion in Beth’s next, unspoken question.

Picture the kind of campus that would bring tears of joy to a high school guidance counselor. The classroom and dormitory buildings were a Gothic design like the lower, auxiliary structures tacked onto cathedrals — imposing mullioned windows, ivy winding from the ground nearly to the roof lines.

After stopping three students with enough earrings piercing them to fill a jewelry box, I was directed by the last to a sallow, four-story affair. Inside, red arrows with small signs beneath them directed me to the second floor, and a receptionist swamped by students picking up exams waved me toward the office on her immediate right. The stenciling on the door reminded me of my own office’s pebbled glass, but instead of JOHN FRANCIS CUDDY, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS in black, this one read CONOR DONNELLY, IRISH STUDIES in green.

I knocked and received a “Come,” repeated three times like an oft-intoned litany.

The door opened into a large office with a high ceiling and two banks of fluorescent lights suspended over the bookshelved wall. The opposite wall had five of the multipaned windows throwing as much sunshine as the day was offering onto the head and shoulders of a standing man.

Conor Donnelly scribbled in a loose-leaf notebook lying on one of those breadbox lecterns you can lift onto a table to make a podium. His shoulders were rounded under a V-neck sweater over a flannel shirt. The brown hair was thinned enough that he had resorted to one of those low-part comb-overs, the scalp showing through between the strands that were left. His bushy eyebrows made up a little for the hairline, though. As he stepped toward me, Donnelly had to shuffle around stacks of papers on the floor.

His gray eyes blinked. “You’re not a student.” Brooklyn instead of brogue in his voice.

“No, but I’m hoping you’re Conor Donnelly.”

“A fair assumption, given where you’ve found me.” Donnelly returned to his notebook. “But these are office hours for the students, so I can’t spare you much time, Mr…”

“Francis, John Francis,” I said, which amounted to only one third of a lie. “I’d like to speak with you about The Book of Kells.”

That seemed to catch Donnelly’s interest, because he motioned me toward a captain’s chair across from his desk, though he stayed at the lectern. “We can speak about it, but you’re a good three thousand miles from the original.”

“All right, a Book of Kells, then. I represent a collector who’d very much like to own one of those limited-edition facsimiles, and I understand you have access to such.”

Donnelly cocked his head. “In a functional sense, yes. However, I’m afraid ours at the Heritage Center is not for sale.”

“No matter the money involved?”

Now Donnelly frowned. “Well, as chair of the advisory board, I’d be honor-bound to entertain any serious offer — subject, of course, to board approval.”

“Professor, I’m aware that the going rate for a reproduction is tenfold what the Center paid, and my client is prepared to substantially sweeten even that inflated price. Provided, of course, that you can open that glass cover over the book so she can inspect the item.”

No reaction to my “cover-opening” comment, which told me Donnelly already knew of the mechanism. “Well, Mr. Francis, you’re welcome to submit your offer in writing, but I must inform you, I doubt the board will approve it. We take great pride in our copy of the book, and frankly, I don’t know that any owner not desperate for money would part with one of the facsimiles.”

I decided to explore what might be a gambit from Donnelly. “Would it have to be the technical owner who was desperate for money?”

He looked confused. “I don’t follow you.”

Leaning forward in the captain’s chair and lowering my voice, I said, “Or would a person even have to be desperate for money just to be interested in having himself a little — no, a lot — more of it?”

“Ah,” said Donnelly, “the light dawns. A bribe, eh?”

I shrugged.

Conor Donnelly smiled and returned again to his notebook. “Mr. Francis, get the hell out of my office before I call campus security and have you thrown out.”

His brother’s receptionist, in a lovely office suite overlooking Faneuil Hall, told me politely, if firmly, that Denis Donnelly would not be in that day. Both of Boston’s daily newspapers had run profiles on him, though, and in each story the venture capitalist’s obsession with his home in Weston Hills shone through. It didn’t take long to find the place — read estate — and once I gave the hard-eyed man at the driveway’s security gate two thirds of my name and mentioned The Book of Kells, I was escorted by a younger hard-eyed guard up the drive and into a mansion on a par with the gold-domed statehouse on Beacon Hill.

The second guard watched me admire — without touching — a dozen paintings, sculptures, and vases in the parlorlike anteroom before a pair of gilded doors opened and a man I recognized from his newspaper photos came out from a spectacular atrium to greet me.

The financier was a glossy version of his brother the professor. A hair weave of some kind made this Donnelly look as if a lush bush had been planted in the middle of his head and was spreading symmetrically outward. He’d colored his eyebrows to match the new do, and his gray eyes had that jump in them I associate with race car drivers and serial killers. He wore a silk shirt over his rounded shoulders. A pair of painfully casual, stonewashed jeans ended an inch above some loafers, no benefit of socks.

After we shook hands, Donnelly glanced at his security man. “I’ll be fine with Mr. Francis, Rick,” he said, his brother’s Brooklyn accent on his words too. “But advise Curt no more visitors until I’m done here.”

Rick nodded, gave me a look that said, Don’t make me come back for you, and left us.

Donnelly suggested the Queen Anne loveseat might hold me, while he sank into a leather, brass-studded smoking chair. “So, Mr. Francis, you mentioned to Curt a Book of Kells.”

“Actually, The Book of Kells, but I’m sure we mean the same thing.”

A look of frank appraisal. “You want to buy a facsimile, or sell one?”

“Buy, as intermediary for a client of mine.”

No change of expression. “I’m in and out of the art market quite a bit. I don’t recall anyone with judgment I respect ever mentioning your name.”

“It’s an easy one to forget.”

A grin that you couldn’t exactly call a smile. “You, my friend, are trying to scam me. Why?”

“No scam. My client wants one of the reproductions, and I understand you have a brother with — shall we say — sway over one of them.”

“Hah!” said Donnelly, though it came out more as a bray. “I haven’t so much as spit in Conor’s face for a good two months now.”

I tried to look disappointed. “Why?”

Donnelly lazed back in his chair. “I’m guessing you already know. I’m guessing also that you’re playing me for some reason I can’t figure. But I also can’t see how this bit of information can hurt me. Come along.”

I followed him into the atrium room, even on a dark day spectacularly lit by a rotunda skylight. I couldn’t describe the furnishings if I had an hour to write about them. Except for one piece. It rested on a pedestal in a corner, shielded from potential sunlight by a glass cover that was smoke-colored on top but crystal clear on the sides. Donnelly moved directly toward it, beckoning me.

As I looked down at the large and open book, Donnelly said, “You’ve never seen one before, have you?”

“No,” I said, my voice a little clogged as I took in, up close and personal, the filigreed detail on the capital letter at the top of the left-hand page, the depictions of people and animals — some real, some fantastical — occupying the margins and trailing after the end of paragraphs, even just the calligraphy in the text — some version of Latin, I thought.

“My brother thinks I wanted to borrow his Center’s copy just to show it off for a party here. And I did.” Donnelly’s voice wavered. “But once I got a look at it, even in that pop-top candy case in their museum room, something — a kind of tribal memory, maybe — kicked in. What Conor seemed to forget is that I could have had the Center’s own copy by just buying it for myself ten years ago. And once he and his snotty board turned me down on the party idea, I went out last month and — quietly — bought another one.”

I tore my eyes away from the pages in front of me. “For how many times the twenty thousand you shelled out for the first?”

Donnelly moved over to twin columns extruding from his wall. He pushed a button, and I looked back at the book pedestal, expecting its glass case to open the way the one at the Center had. It was maybe five seconds before the button’s purpose hit me.

I heard a noise behind my back and wheeled around. The two hard-eyed security guys were standing inside the double doors of the atrium, arms folded in front of their chests. Looking a little more critically now at each, I didn’t see any evident weapons.

I said to Donnelly, “That business of ‘no other visitors’ was code for ‘hang close,’ right?”

A nod with the bad grin. “And now, since you’ve obviously wasted my time on some sort of false pretenses, I think I’ll enjoy watching Curt and Rick bounce you around a bit.”

I tilted my head toward the door, my eyes still on Donnelly. “Just the two of them?”

The venture capitalist’s eyes went neon. “Oh, I might jump in at the appropriate time.”

I turned to Rick and Curt. “Denis, you’re one man short.”

Rick, the younger one, stepped up to the plate first. He extended both his hands to push on my chest, just like a demonstration of unarmed defense back in the sawdust pit when I was an MP lieutenant. I danced to Rick’s lead for two steps, then reversed my feet and sent him over with a hip throw. When he landed on the floor, the sound of his lungs purging air was a lot easier on the ears than the gagging and dry-heaving that followed.

Curt was on me before I could turn back, clamping a chokehold across my throat with one of his forearms. I smashed my left heel down hard on his left instep and he cried out, lifting the foot. I hammered back with my left elbow and found his rib cage, feeling some of his cartilage separating as I drove into it.

Curt slid off me and cradled his left side with both hands, eyes squinched shut like a little kid who really doesn’t want to cry but doesn’t see how to avoid it. When I looked at Rick, he was still trying to give himself mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Denis Donnelly said, “So much as touch me, and I’ll sue you and your client for every cent you’ve got.”

I walked up to him, Donnelly apparently forgetting that those twin columns behind him significantly limited his mobility. He tried to kick me in the groin, but I caught his ankle in my right hand, then bent upward until he began to moan.

“Denis, I lift six more inches and you lose at least a hamstring, maybe an achilles tendon as well. We communicating?”

A strangled “Yes.”

“OK. I was never here.”

“Right, right.”

“And I’m never going to have to worry about Rick or Curt or any of their successors trying to find me, am I?”

“No. No, of course not.”

I left him then, but not before taking a last look at Denis Donnelly’s Book of Kells. I’d found one facsimile, but Donnelly’s arrogance seemed more consistent with his trumping story of buying a facsimile for himself than with stealing the copy he had in essence donated to the Center. Which left me just one last key holder to the museum rooms.

It was nearly dark by the time Sean Kilpatrick’s carpentry truck pulled into the driveway across the street from where I was sitting behind the wheel of the Honda. When the pickup approached the garage of the modest ranch, security floods came on, bathing the front yard in a yellow glow. Thanks to the lights, I could see that his truck had a primered front fender and the tailgate was held in place by bungee cords.

As Kilpatrick got out of his vehicle, I got out of mine and began crossing over to him. At the sound of my footsteps, he straightened up and turned to me.

Kilpatrick stood about six feet, with broad shoulders and curly black hair. He was wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits over jeans and work boots. By the time I reached the foot of his driveway, his right hand had a claw hammer in it.

I stopped short of his rear bumper. “Mr. Kilpatrick?”

“And you’d be?” A brogue heavy enough that if you didn’t listen for the rhythm of his cadence, you might not catch the words themselves.

“John Francis. I understand you’re doing some work over at the Heritage Center.”

I’d expected him to tense even more at the mention of the place, but instead he visibly relaxed, tossing the hammer toward the passenger’s seat of his pickup before wiping his right palm on his thigh and approaching me to shake hands. Up close, he had a pleasant face around a genuine smile with crooked front teeth.

“Mr. Francis, pleased to make your acquaintance. What can I do for you?”

Letting go of his hand, I said, “A client of mine is a collector.”

Confusion on the pleasant face. “Collector? You mean of bills, now?”

“No. Art, sculpture, rare… books.”

“And what would that be to me?” Kilpatrick gestured toward the truck. “I’m just a carpenter.”

“But a carpenter with access to the Heritage Center’s museum.”

“Yes.” He actually started to pull out a key ring from his back pocket, the ring itself anchored to his belt by a clasp and coiled cord. “I’ve got—” Kilpatrick reined up short. “Wait a minute, now. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there’s a particularly valuable book under a glass case in one of those museum rooms, and a considerable commission to be earned by the person who obtains it for us.”

Kilpatrick lost the crooked smile, his face now anything but pleasant. “You’re wanting me to steal The Book of Kells?”

“Let’s not say ‘steal.’ Let’s just say you flip open the thing’s glass cover before knocking off one night, and you slip the book itself into a—”

“Boyo, if you’re not out of my sight in ten seconds, I’ll kick every fooking tooth in your head down your fooking throat.”

No need to listen for the rhythm there to know what he meant. “Sorry to have troubled you,” I said.

I turned, half listening for those heavy work boots to come clumping after me. But as I got back into the Honda, Sean Kilpatrick was still standing at the rear of his battered pickup, fists on hips and staring me down.

Even after dark, you can see the dome of the Massachusetts state-house from my office window on Tremont Street. It’s a pretty impressive effect, the gold leaf painstakingly reapplied by artisans a few years ago for what it probably cost the Navy to buy a carrier jet. But the dome also helps me to think, somehow, especially when I’m stuck.

And I was stuck fast that night.

A very valuable reproduction of The Book of Kells disappears from the locked room in which it’s kept, the glass top of its case smashed. Most people with access to the museum know that this top opens to allow Nora Clooney to turn a page each day, but the thief smashes it anyway, maybe to deflect suspicion onto others less informed. Hugh McGlachlin, as executive director of the Center, has a key, though he’s the one calling me into the matter, through a member of the advisory board, Michael O’Dell. On the other hand, reacting immediately and internally like that might be a good cover story for McGlachlin himself. Of the three people he “reluctantly” suspects, none acts suspiciously — or even smugly — about my suggesting the book could be pinched: Professor Conor Donnelly orders me to leave his office, brother Denis wants me beaten up for “scamming” him, and carpenter Sean Kilpatrick stops just short of mayhem himself when I imply he could steal the Center’s copy for me.

Which, according to the note left on the broken glass, wasn’t actually what had happened, anyway. “Taken, but not stolen, and will be returned.” No apparent sarcasm in the words or even a double meaning.

If the one person who’d asked to borrow the book had now apparently acquired a copy for himself, who would need the facsimile only temporarily?

Then, staring at the statehouse dome reminded me of something else I’d seen at the Center. It was a long shot, but worth at least a call to a certain home phone.

After dialing, I got a tentative, “Hello?”

“Hugh, it’s John Cuddy.”

“Ah, John. You’ve found something, then?”

“Maybe, but I need to ask you a question first. Who did all that calligraphy work at the Center?”

The front door to the three-decker in Southie opened only about four inches on its chain inside. The one eye I could see through the crack seemed troubled. “Oh, my. Mr. Cuddy, how could I be helping you at this hour?”

“I’d like to meet with your husband,” I said.

Nora Clooney tried to tough it out. “He’s asleep. Perhaps in the morning?”

I shook my head.

She squeezed her lips to thin lines. “Then let me just pop up there, sir, make sure my Bill hasn’t—”

“Nora, we both know what I’ll see. Can we just get it over with?”

Her head dipping in defeat, she undid the chain on the door. “That’d probably be best, I suppose.”

Terminal cancer has a certain aura to it. Not always a smell, though. More an edge in the air, a sense that something’s very wrong but also irreparable. Bill Clooney’s bedroom projected that aura.

His wife led me into the ten-by-twelve space. There were matching mahogany bureaus with brass handles, and framed photos of a younger couple wearing the clothes and hairstyles of the late seventies. The bed was of mahogany too, a four-poster that I could see newlyweds buying shortly after their ceremony. A set to last a lifetime.

Bill Clooney lay under sheets and a quilt, his head nestled in a cloud of pillows. There were a few wisps of gray hair on top of his head, a patchy fringe around the ears. His eyes were closed, but the mouth was open, a snoring so faint you might lose it in the hum of the electric space heater near one corner of the room. His hands lay atop the quilt, bony and heavily veined.

Centered between Clooney’s throat and waist, a bed tray straddled his torso. A very large book was open on the tray, a couch cushion propping the text at an angle toward his face.

“My Bill was a graphic artist,” said Nora Clooney, her voice barely louder than her husband’s snoring. “He came over from Ireland five years before me, and he was ten years older to start with. The charmer told me he fell in love the moment he laid eyes on me, but I wasn’t sure of him till I saw his wondrous calligraphy, after a social at the Center that very same night. Modest about it though, my Bill was, telling me that I’d not use the word wondrous for his lettering once I saw The Book of Kells.”

I kept my voice low as well. “You wanted to bring the book home so your husband could see it again.”

“See it, yes sir, and touch it and even breathe it as well. But after the terrible row between Mr. McGlachlin and that Mr. Donnelly at the Center, I knew the board would never grant my Bill what it refused a rich man.”

“You took the book out of its case before you broke the glass.”

“Yes, sir.” She made a sign of the cross. “I’d never have forgiven myself if I’d damaged so much as a page of it.”

“And you carried the book out in your tote bag.”

“Brazen, I was. Walked right by Grace behind the reception counter, her not suspecting a thing.”

“Then why did you leave the note?”

She blew out a breath. “I thought it might keep Mr. McGlachlin from calling in the police right away, sir. Buy me the time to let my Bill pore over the book during his last days before I took it back to the Center, unharmed.” She turned toward her husband, and I had the sense that Nora Clooney always looked at him this way, with the same expression. A loving one that went beyond duty and maybe even devotion as well.

“Every morning he was able, my Bill would come to the Center with me. Oh, his eyes would shine, sir, watching me turn that day’s page, him feeling honored as though he was the first modern man to look upon the work of those long-ago scribes.”

I waited a moment before saying, “Nora, I need to make a phone call.”

She closed her eyes and dipped her head again. “The one in the kitchen, please. So we don’t disturb my Bill.”

As I followed her down the stairs, I said, “You wouldn’t know whether Hugh McGlachlin has Caller I.D. on his home phone, would you?”

From the look on her upturned face, I could tell that Nora Clooney thought I was crazy.

In the kitchen, I dialed and got that tentative hello.

“Hugh, John Cuddy again.”

“John, are you calling from the Clooneys, then?”

“No,” I lied, “a pay phone. I’m afraid Nora and Bill couldn’t help me. But listen, Hugh, I’ve traced your Book of Kells.”

“Traced it?” His voice was thick with hope.

“Yes,” I said. “The book’ll be back in the Center before your board meets next week.”

A long pause on the other end. “John, is there something you’re not telling me?”

“There is.”

An even longer pause. “Michael O’Dell said I could trust you.”

“And you can.”

No pause at all now, but a considerable sigh. “Then I will. Good night, John Cuddy, and thank you.”

As I hung up the phone in Nora Clooney’s kitchen, she blinked three times before kissing the pads of the index and middle fingers on her right hand and then touching them to my forehead.