The Devils Teardrop

place, paneled in teak, carpeted in forest-green pile. On the walls were framed documents—the less valuable items in Parker’s collection. Letters from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Bobby Kennedy, the Old West artist Charles Russell. Many others. On one wall was a rogues’ gallery—forgeries Parker had come across in his work.
    Parker’s favorite wall, though, was the one opposite the stool he sat on. This wall contained his children’s drawings and poems, going back over the past eightyears. From scrawls and illegible block letters to samples of their cursive writing. He often paused in his work and looked at them. Doing so had given him the idea about writing a book on how handwriting mirrors children’s development.
    He now sat on the comfortable stool at an immaculate white examination table. The room was silent. Normally he’d have the radio on, listening to jazz or classical music. But there’d been a terrible shooting in the District and all the stations were having special reports on the slaughter. Parker didn’t want Robby to hear the stories, especially after the boy’s flashback to the Boatman.
    He hunched over the letter, eagerly, the way a jeweler appraises a beautiful yellow stone, ready to declare it false if that’s how he saw it but secretly hoping that it will turn out to be rare topaz.
    “What’s that?” Robby asked, standing and looking at the letter.
    “It’s what came in the truck yesterday,” Parker said, squinting as he checked out an uppercase K , which can be written a number of different ways and therefore is very useful in handwriting analysis.
    “Oh, the armored car. That was neat.”
    It was neat. But it didn’t answer the boy’s question. Parker continued. “You know Thomas Jefferson?”
    “Third president. Oh, and he lived in Virginia. Like us.”
    “Good. This’s a letter that somebody thinks he wrote. They want me to check it and make sure.”
    One of the more difficult conversations he’d had with Robby and Stephie was explaining what he did for a living. Not the technical part of being a questioned document examiner. But that people would forge letters and documents and try to claim they were real.
    “What’s it say?” the boy asked.
    Parker didn’t answer right away. Oh, answers were important to him. He was, after all, a puzzle master—his lifelong hobby was riddles and word games and brain-teasers. He believed in answers and he tried never to defer responding to his children’s questions. When a mother or father said, “Later,” it was usually for their convenience, hoping the child would forget the question. But the content of this letter made him hedge. After a moment he said, “It’s a letter Jefferson wrote to his oldest daughter.” This much was true. But Parker didn’t go on and tell the boy that the subject of the letter was Mary—his second daughter—who had died of complications from childbirth, as had Jefferson’s wife some years before. He read:
    Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback and running along the porch in good-natured defiance of my prescriptions to her to exercise more caution. . . .
    Parker, certified document examiner, struggled to ignore the sadness he felt reading those words. Concentrate, he told himself, though the terrible image of a father being deprived of one of his children kept intruding.
    A sorrowful pall . . .
    Concentrate.
    He observed that the girl’s nickname in the letter was what Jefferson would have used—born “Mary,” the girl was called “Polly” by her family—and that the punctuation-sparse style was typically Jeffersonian. Theseattested to authenticity. So did some of the events that the letter referred to; they had in fact occurred in Jefferson’s life and had done so around the time the letter had purportedly been written.
    Yes, textually at least, the letter seemed real.
    But that was only half the game. Document examiners are not only linguists and historians, they are scientists too. Parker still had to perform the physical examination of the letter.
    As he was about to slip it under one of his Bausch & Lomb compound microscopes the doorbell rang again.
    Oh, no . . . Parker closed his eyes. It was Joan. He knew it. She’d picked up her dogs and returned to complicate his life further. Maybe she had the social worker with her now. A surprise commando raid . . .
    “I’ll get it,” Robby said.
    “No,”