The Book of Air and Shadows

known in the family, was a skinny red-haired clone of her mother and an ornament of the Legal Aid Society of New York, a friend of the downtrodden, or a bleeding heart who sprung hardened criminals to run wild in the streets, depending on whether you were talking to her mother or her sister, Patsy. She was the youngest daughter, just a year older than Crosetti himself, and had a more than full measure of the middle child’s sense of cosmic injury, the focus of which had been, from the earliest dawn of consciousness, the slightly younger brother, the Irish twin, the object of hatred and resentment, yet also the creature to be defended from all threats, to the last drop of blood. Crosetti felt exactly the same way and was just as inarticulate about it: a perfect stalemate of love.
    Klim introduced himself, shook hands with the rather startled Donna Crosetti, kissed Mary Peg formally on both cheeks, and took his leave.
    “Who was
that
?”
    “That’s the new live-in boyfriend,” said Crosetti.
    “What?” exclaimed The Donna, who had not been consulted.
    “Not,” said Mary Peg.
    “Is too,” said Crosetti. “He drives a hearse.”
    “At night?”
    “Yeah, he says it’s for vampires. How are you, Don?”
    “He’s
not
my live-in boyfriend,” said Mary Peg. “How could you say such a thing, Albert!”
    “He is
too
,” Crosetti insisted, feeling the years slip away in a manner that was unpleasantly quasi-psychotic and comforting at the same time. In a minute Donna would be screaming and chasing him around the kitchen table with a cooking implement in her little fist and their mother would be yelling and trying to stop them and dishing out random smacks and threatening apocalypse when their father got home.
    Donna Crosetti glared at her mother and brother. “No, really…”
    “Really,” said Mary Peg. “He’s a friend of Fanny’s who’s helping us decipher a seventeenth-century letter Allie found. He was working late on it so I offered him Patsy’s room for the night.”
    “Which was three nights ago,” said Crosetti. He wrapped his arms around himself and made kissing noises.
    “Oh, grow up!” said his sister. Crosetti stuck his tongue out at her, she rolled her eyes at him and sat down at the kitchen table. Removing a leather portfolio from her capacious bag, she flipped it open with a businesslike snap and said, “If this guy’s coming at eight, we don’t have much time. Let’s have it, from the beginning.” Crosetti looked at his mother. “I don’t understand why we have to do this,” he grumped.
    “Because you were cheated, and we’re here to see if you have a case against the estate, to make them pay you what the original was really worth, or get it back.”
    “I don’t
want
it back,” said Crosetti, getting sulky as the wine fumes rose from his empty stomach to his head. “I want none of this ever to have happened.
That’s
what I want.”
    “Well, my child,” said Mary Peg, “it’s a little too late for that. This has to be disentangled by a lawyer, and Donna is the lawyer in our family. And I’d think you’d appreciate her volunteering to help, especially since you just shot someone right outside our house-”
    “What!” said the family lawyer. “You
shot
someone? Did you call the-”
    “No, and I’m not going to. A couple of guys tried to kidnap me-”
    “What! Who?”
    “Donna, calm down,” he said, “you’re sounding like an Abbott and Costello act. You want the story or not?”
    Donna took a breath or two and seemed to snap her professional persona into place. It took nearly the whole hour to spin out the tale, what with her questions and the backtracking and prevarications by the little brother, so typical and so maddening, and the elaborate explanations of the ciphers and Klim’s role in the household, and the peculiar case of Carolyn Rolly. By the time Donna was satisfied, the little kitchen was uncomfortably warm and the level in the gallon jug of red wine had descended two inches or more.
    Donna riffled through her pages of notes and checked her watch. “Okay, let’s review a little before this guy gets here. First of all, you have no claim whatever on the Bulstrode estate for any purported swindle, because you had no right to sell that manuscript. Nor had your pal, Rolly. Both of you conspired to steal property rightly belonging to your employer. So the main thing I’m going to have to do is convince this Mishkin to forget the damn thing and