Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

“Oh, it really was. I got my first Pride and Prejudice that way. They were always heavy on Austen for me, of course. I’ve had a lifetime of pleasure because of those gifts, Alex. It made the loss of my vision even more painful.”

“The books that were presented to you, Miss Eliot, were they ordinary things you could buy in a store?”

“There’s no such thing as an ordinary book, is there? But these were always particularly unusual. Beautifully bound in Moroccan leather, or fixed up in those-what do you call them?-clamshell boxes, I think. I can still remember how it felt to hold and smell them for the first time.”

“Did you know the trustees?”

“Most of them knew my father well, of course. He was responsible for making sure that their treasures were safe and protected, at least according to the methods available back then. He made sure their great institution ran like a smoothly sailing ship. And my mother catered some of their smaller meetings-everything homemade, right in our kitchen. She was really a saint.”

“These gifts you received,” Mercer asked, “were they new books?”

“Some were, some weren’t, as I recall it.” Jane Eliot put her elbow on the arm of the chair and closed her eyes to think. “Later, as I learned more about these things, I’d have to assume that we got some of the castoffs, either second or third editions of books that were of no value to the great collectors, or copies that had been damaged by tears or discolorations. Still, Alex, they opened the world to me. All the classics, all the great literature you could imagine. The three of us were grateful to have them.”

I could hardly contain my excitement. The perp must have staged this burglary to get at something Jane Eliot owned, something she didn’t even realize was of value.

“The books that you were presented with, Miss Eliot, are they still in your apartment?”

She stretched her right leg and groaned, bending to tug at her hose. “I gave them away ten years ago, maybe more. What’s the use, I thought? I’d read and reread them, when I had my sight. Time to let the next generation enjoy.”

“But you know where they are?” Mercer asked.

“Gone to my great-nieces and-nephews.”

“How lucky they are to have them,” I said. “Is your family here, in the city?”

“Gosh, no. Some of them are upstate in Buffalo, and others are out in Santa Fe. Must be several hundred books, all split up between the relatives.”

I sat back in my chair, as deflated as the burglar must have been to come up empty after ransacking Eliot’s apartment.

“Not a single one that you kept for yourself?” Mercer asked.

“Help me up, Pridgen, will you?” Jane Eliot said. “My joints get all locked tight if I sit too long.”

The sergeant helped her get to her feet.

“Walk with me, please,” she said, linking arms with Mercer and with me as we stood up. She moved toward the door of the room. “There was only one that I kept. Had to keep, actually. Edith’s daughter would have nothing to do with it.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She winced as she put her weight on her left leg. “My sister, Edith, had a very special book presented to her on her twelfth birthday. I remember so well because I was terribly envious when she brought it back to the apartment.”

“What was it?”

“You may be able to make more sense of what happened than I ever did,” Eliot said. “Because of your job, I mean. Nobody talked about things like that back then. It was a copy of Alice in Wonderland . Quite a dazzling one.”

Mercer and I exchanged glances over Jane Eliot’s head.

“Dazzling?” he asked. “How so? Was it old?”

“Indeed it was-old and wonderfully illustrated with those drawings by John Tenniel that became so famous. The date in it was 1866.”

I thought of the call slip that had been found in Tina Barr’s clothing.

“Did it ever belong to the library?” I asked.

“Not this one, I don’t believe. Most of our gifts were donations from one trustee or another. From time to time, books were quietly deaccessioned from the collections of course, especially if some more desirable copy came along. But we could tell if that were the case. There were markings inside the jackets with the name of the library branch, and those were crossed through to show that the book had been discarded, so we knew we wouldn’t get in any trouble.”

“Edith’s gift sounds very special.”

“Oh, yes. That was obvious. It was bound in the most glorious red leather, with gold lettering on the spine and gilt designs all over the cover. And then there was its size-we’d never had books of our own quite that big.”

Jane Eliot let go of my arm and drew an outline in the air. “You know, sort of double folio, if you’re familiar with that.”

“I’ve seen other copies of the early editions, though, and I never knew any to be oversize,” I said.

“Well, you’re right. The manuscript was of average size, for an illustrated work of that period, I’m sure. But this particular edition had been mounted on larger parchment pages and bound into this folio because it also included a rare set of prints of the photographs that Charles Dodgson-Lewis Carroll, you know-took of young Alice.”

“The photographs were inside the book?” I asked.

“There was a pocket sewn into the back of the book. That’s where the photos were. We could take them out and look at them, spread them out on the living room floor,” she said. “In fact, that’s what got Edith in trouble with Mother.”

Jane Eliot shuffled down the hallway of the hospital, continuing to talk to us.

“Why?” I asked.

“The book wasn’t a problem. We’d all read the story dozens of times. But those photographs? My goodness. Must have been weeks after Edith’s birthday, Mother happened upon the picture of that child dressed as a beggar maid, with her bare shoulders-you know the one I mean?”

“Yes, Miss Eliot. It’s a very famous image.”

“Well, it convinced my mother that Dodgson was a pedophile. She wouldn’t have us looking at a little girl displaying herself that way.”

“Alex was just telling me that story about him,” Mercer said. “I’d never heard it before.”

“What did your mother do?” I asked.

“That was the last we saw of the book, until she lay on her deathbed. She forbade Edith to have it, which created its own stir at the time. Then Mother asked one of the curators in the children’s collection to do some research about Dodgson. What she learned was that Alice Liddell’s mother had a big falling out with him. Tore up all the correspondence that he’d had with Alice. That inflamed my mother even more.”

Mercer tried to frame a question. “Because she thought he’d been…?”

“Inappropriate, sir. That’s as explicit as we got in those days,” Eliot said. “It seems Mrs. Liddell found every letter the man sent to her daughter-mind you, she was only eleven or twelve at the time, and he was a grown man-and she ripped them to shreds. That’s a fact. And then, when Dodgson died, he left thirteen volumes of diaries. A record of his entire life. But someone in his family was worried enough about the contents to destroy the four years-every page of them-that detailed his friendship with Alice.”

“So your mother confiscated the book,” I said.

“First thing she did. Poor Edith-the girl had a tantrum over that. I can still hear her screams. The next thing was, my mother had it in her head to go after the trustee who’d given my sister the book. She found some letters he’d written to Edith after the day he met her, telling her how proud he was of her school grades.”

“How did he know about them?” Mercer asked.