What Time Devours Read online

  Whatever skepticism Thomas might have felt about the status of the missing pages themselves, he guessed Escolme was right. If the play was legitimate, it would be a diamond mine for far more than literary academia. But he didn’t know what he was supposed to do to help or why Escolme had called him in the first place.

  “It’s not about who owns the original,” Escolme concluded. “That will be worth money, but it’s nothing to what will be made by whoever gets this thing in print first. That’s the issue. That’s the problem. Daniella Blackstone could still have some perfect Renaissance quarto version sitting in a safe-deposit box somewhere that she’ll be able to sell for a nice little nest egg, but the real money is in the first modern edition and everything that flows from it. The only way she can control that is by making sure no one sees it except in her copyrighted printing. Do you see now, Mr. Knight? We had control of the thing and we lost it. I lost it, and with it, the kind of money you can’t begin to imagine.”

  Thomas said nothing for a moment. All this talk about money was distracting him, but even if Escolme was right, it didn’t change the question that had been in Thomas’s mind since their first conversation on the phone.

  “Why did you call me?” he demanded. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”

  “I wanted you to read it,” said Escolme. “Tell me what you thought. Whether it was real.”

  “I’m a high school English teacher!” Thomas exclaimed. “You need experts. Academics. Those guys who run word choices and spelling variants through computers so they can figure out who wrote what. That’s an entire field of study that I know nothing about. Even if you had the thing in front of you I couldn’t begin to help. I never even finished my doctorate, David!” Thomas said, getting to his feet. This had gone on long enough. “I’m sorry. This has been a very strange day. I’m glad to see you again, David, but I’m not the person you need.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Thomas Knight returned home to 1247 Sycamore Street, the Skokie end of Evanston—Escolme’s business card tucked into his breast pocket—baffled, frustrated, and with a sense of failure he knew was wholly unreasonable. It wasn’t Thomas who had lost the manuscript, after all, nor could any reasonable person expect him to aid significantly in recovering it.

  If it had ever existed.

  And that was another part of the deflation. Like all teachers, Thomas had been proud of his former student’s success, however much Escolme wore it like a peacock wears its tail. But if Escolme was just a scam artist, or—worse—deluded, then all that success amounted to nothing at all.

  The alternative—that he was telling the truth—was no better. If Escolme really had found a lost play by Shakespeare, any glory he might have achieved would be wiped out by his losing it again—and then some. It was a nasty irony that the moment he had re-entered Thomas’s life, the peacock agent was in the process of having his feathers rudely plucked. Thomas couldn’t decide which would have been worse, to have never heard from Escolme again, or to be invited into the agent’s confidence in time to have a ringside view as his former student’s life went down the toilet.

  Assuming all this is real.

  That reference to “The Naval Treaty” bothered him. Escolme was right that the Sherlock Holmes story was similar: a valuable manuscript disappearing from a locked room so that suspicion fell on the man charged with its safety. Holmes stood by the suspect, proved his innocence, and discovered the manuscript.

  All very tidy.

  Which was why it bothered him that Escolme had referred to it. It too neatly made him the aggrieved party. But what if that was a blind? The evening had felt so strange, and not just because of this tale of the missing play. It felt like Thomas had walked into a play when it was halfway through, that the ravaged hotel room was no more than a set. What had Escolme said about being involved in theater in college? Was it possible that all his anguish and panic was no more than a performance, and if so, why?

  Still, he thought, imagine finding a lost play by William Shakespeare!

  It was an exhilarating idea, however preposterous. Sure, it would be worth money, whatever the legal issues of copyright, but just the thought of bringing such a thing to light, sharing it with the world . . .

  Thomas Knight, graduate school dropout, makes the single greatest discovery in the history of Shakespeare scholarship . . .

  Wouldn’t that be something? He considered this as he poured himself one of the two drinks he permitted himself a night. He rarely indulged in the second, but tonight he would.

  I think we’ll make exceptions for days that begin with corpses at your kitchen window, he thought.

  Beginning tomorrow, he would be mired in final papers from his English classes, so he would be on the wagon till the weekend whether he liked the idea or not.

  It was the first week of June and the kids could smell the summer vacation, redolent with the aroma of barbecues on the shores of the great lake, suntan lotion, and the cordite edge of fireworks. They just had to fight their way through his palisade of essays and exams, and they’d be free. Thomas could almost remember the scent of it himself, and the infinite expanse of glorious school-less days that it heralded, all those end-of-year hurdles like a crossing of the river Styx to the Elysian fields beyond.

  These days the summer brought little change in his daily rhythms, beyond giving him more time to read. He had hoped to see Kumi, but he doubted he could afford the flight, and she was likely to be tied up at work even if he made it out there. He sipped his whisky and savored the aroma of peat, smoke, and the tang of seaweed, then took his glass out to the back porch where he could sit and listen to the night.

  Thomas had a small yard, a square of unruly lawn edged with ancient rosebushes that had been there when he moved in, and hedged from the neighbors with privet and holly. It was private and still. From the rickety deck he could sit, glass in hand, and listen for the screech owl that roosted in his prize elm at the bottom of the yard. Back here in the green, cool shade, the city could be a thousand miles away. He suspected he longed for these moments like his students longed for summer.

  God, he thought. What a day.

  It seemed impossible that everything—the dead woman, the memorial service, Escolme and his bizarre assertions—had all happened in the last twenty-four hours. Less, actually. It was surreal and exhausting.

  One day, one normal, ordinary day, Kumi will come, and we will sit together in the silence and watch for the owl. Then on Saturday morning we’ll take the L into the city and go to Lula’s for breakfast. She will have the strada, like she always used to, and we’ll talk about the books we are reading, then we’ll go for a walk along the shore . . .

  He didn’t pay attention to the sound until he realized that he had heard it at least three times. It was faint, a short, ringing clink like a tiny bell. He listened for a second and it came again.

  A neighbor’s wind chime?

  Not unless it had just been put up, and besides, the night was still.

  He tried to focus his hearing to place the sound. It came again and he realized two things at once: it came from the passage between the hedge and the house, and it was the sound of footsteps. He didn’t know why they rang like that, but that was what they were.

  He put his glass down very slowly. The sound had stopped. He stood up slowly, listening.

  Nothing.

  Thomas’s body was tense, his breath held, his head cocked, listening.

  Still nothing.

  Then it came again, muted this time but just as close. If it was footsteps, whoever was back there was being careful. Perhaps they knew he was here.

  The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He looked around the porch. There was nothing out here but his old rocker and a faded wooden table he had started to strip down and never finished. The closest thing to a weapon he had was his whisky glass.

  Oh yes, he thought, that’ll work. Because a killer returning to the scene of the crime will burst from the shrubs brandishi
ng a brandy snifter . . .

  Shut up. Listen.

  The sound came again, a shrill metallic ping, this time close enough that he could hear the other sounds that came with it; the shifting of fabric, the infinitesimal creak of shoe leather, the faintest hint of breath.

  It was getting closer.

  If he could get into the kitchen he could reach for the phone. Or a knife. Slowly, his eyes locked on the dark tangle of green where the passage down the side of the house began only fifteen feet away, he took a step sideways toward the kitchen door. Then another.

  He checked the kitchen door. It was open, but the screen was closed to keep the bugs out of the house. He took a step toward it, then returned his stare to the passage. The porch light gave him nothing beyond the deck itself. Whoever had crept down the side of the house could probably step out into the yard and still be largely invisible. Thomas stared at a shape beside the hedge, a dark bulge about the height of a man, unsure if it had been there before. He found himself inventorying the plants that grew along the hedge, trying to remember if anything was big enough to create that shadow.

  Another sound. This time not the ring of metal but the crunch of grit beneath a shoe.

  Thomas took another step toward the kitchen. The phone was no longer good enough. Whatever help it brought would be too slow by far. He needed a weapon. His left hand found the mesh of the screen door and fumbled for the latch. It was stiff, had needed oiling for weeks. He pressed it, his eyes still on the mounding shape beside the hedge. For a moment it wouldn’t budge, and then it gave with a snap and the door juddered and creaked as it swung open.

  Thomas winced at the noise. In the yard there was a sudden and absolute silence, then came that ting again, louder and crisper this time, followed rapidly by another, then another.

  Whoever it was, he was running away.

  Thomas released the door handle and sprang down from the porch. In two long strides he was turning into the passage at a full run.

  If the yard had been dark, the passage, screened by the house and shrouded by the overgrown shrubbery, was almost completely black. The sound of his own echoing footsteps drowned out any sound the intruder might be making, and Thomas was too full of nervous energy and anger to process what happened next. He heard one more tiny metallic ring, then realized too late that the figure in the dark had stopped running, had turned to meet him.

  As Thomas barreled into him he was caught with a hard roundhouse punch to his jaw, a punch he never saw coming, a punch he ran into with such force that his head snapped back and the night went white as lightning. It took a real punch to stop a man as big as Thomas in his tracks, but this one did just that. He stumbled into the wall and as he fought to stabilize himself, he was kicked hard in the stomach. Through the shock and the pain he heard the tiny ring of metal as the shoe connected, and then he was slumping to the ground, trying to breathe, silently shouting with panic as the air refused to come. He collapsed to the ground, his lungs empty, unaware of anything but the desperation of his body.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was probably only a matter of seconds that he spent huddled breathless on the concrete path, just time enough for his attacker to get away without having to run. Thomas heard the jangling steps as he walked and felt only a dumb fury at his incapacity. Later he would feel relief that the killer—if that was indeed who it was—had not come back and done to him what he had done to the woman. Thomas, after all, would not have been able to stop him.

  He phoned the police and, when a uniformed officer arrived, told him what had happened. There was precious little to report, and the only significant detail he could offer—that his assailant wore bells on his shoes—made little impression on the policeman.

  “People think they hear all kinds of weird noises when they’re under stress,” he said. “Especially if they’ve been drinking.”

  “Just make a note of it, will you?” said Thomas.

  “Bells. On. His. Shoes,” wrote the policeman. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Thomas, knowing the detail was useless, unless they were going to broadcast an APB for one of Santa’s elves.

  He also knew the police had their work cut out for them and that his minimal report wasn’t helping, but he still felt frustrated and, if he was honest with himself, a little scared. It seemed likely that his attacker was connected to the dead woman with the strange eyes, and if so, then who was to say the man wouldn’t come back?

  Thomas tried to sleep but kept waking up, sure he had heard something. At five, exhausted and frustrated, he abandoned the attempt, showered, read, and made it over to the Dominick’s on Green Bay Road by a little after six. It was quiet, which he liked. He liked grocery shopping, or at least he did when he knew the store’s layout as he did this one. He had two modes in shopping and usually did both in sequence on each visit. The first was swift, businesslike and faintly Zen, the stocking of the cart with the staples he did not have to search for or consider—milk, juice, eggs, bread, and so forth. That done, he relaxed into the fun part, the inspection of meat and vegetables and the imaginary arrangement of menus and recipes in his head as he planned his dinners for the next few days. His fridge and freezer were not as large as he would have liked, so the process took discipline as well as imagination.

  Thomas liked food, though he was not what some would call a “foodie,” and not solely because he loathed the word. He had, he liked to think, an eclectic palate, and could appreciate a fast-food burger for what it was, even if he’d rather be dining on oven-roasted pork shoulder with spigarello, patty-pan squash, and chickpea barigoule at Avec on Chicago’s Randolph Street. He was not a gourmet, just an enthusiast.

  He picked over a few ears of corn. Supply was apparently depleted, though whether by drought or flooding (there had been a lot of both lately) he couldn’t say. He chose a pork loin that was on special, which he would roast with rosemary and thyme from the garden, and chose a suitable beer. He had a poor palate for wine and couldn’t afford to educate it. Beer, he knew. He picked up some chicken, navy beans, and coarse sausage for a cassoulet, and chose from the fruit selection. The peaches and nectarines seemed best, so he added several of each. Then salad greens, tomatoes, pine nuts, and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil (how can anything be EXTRA virgin? ), and he was done. And, more important than filling his shopping bags, he had rebuilt some version of normalcy.

  He was home by seven and was just about done unloading the car when he caught the strobing flare of blue lights through the living room window and was on his way to the front door when the bell rang. Even though he had glimpsed the cop car, the sound made him jump.

  He opened the door and found a policewoman standing with her back to him, looking casually across the street. She turned to him, pale and smileless. Lieutenant Polinski. She had a long oval face, a thin broad mouth, and a mane of unruly black hair. She was probably in her midthirties but had the eyes and complexion of an older woman.

  “Good morning, Mr. Knight,” she said. “Can I come in for a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sounds like you had an eventful evening. You okay?”

  “Kind of,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He did, though there wasn’t much to tell, and when he finished she just nodded seriously and said, “Going after him wasn’t real smart, especially if you thought he might have been the killer.”

  “I know,” said Thomas. “I was just . . . Someone was sneaking around my yard. I don’t know. I was angry.”

  “Still, it was a reckless thing to do.”

  “That’s me.” Thomas grinned. “Mr. Reckless.”

  She gave him a hard look.

  “This isn’t a game, Mr. Knight. This is a murder inquiry and you could have gotten yourself into serious trouble. The kind of trouble you don’t wake up from. You hear what I’m saying? Let’s try to be a little more careful—and by that I mean smart—in the future, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said.r />
  Polinski gave him another look, sure he wasn’t really getting it, then shrugged.

  “There are several officers going door to door to see if anyone might have seen anything. They started yesterday.”

  “Oh,” said Thomas, unsure of what to say. “Right. I haven’t remembered anything else, I’m afraid. But I’m glad to have them around. After last night, I mean.”

  “And you are still sure you didn’t know the woman?”

  “Sure.”

  “Right,” she said. She seemed unusually watchful, and Thomas wondered why the officer in charge of the investigation was talking to him, when uniforms were deemed sufficient for the shoe-leather work at his neighbors’ houses. “Does the name Daniella Blackstone mean anything to you?”

  Thomas stared at her.

  “The novelist? That’s who the dead woman was?”

  “That’s right,” said Polinski, her gaze steady. “You knew her?”

  For a moment Thomas did not know what to say.

  “Only through her books,” he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  It wasn’t an adequate answer, he knew, and though he had been able for a moment to convince himself that it was an honest answer in a very limited sense of the word, he knew that it was also an evasion. Polinski had sensed something in his hesitation, and though she had left, he knew she’d be back. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Daniella Blackstone had died outside his house, not with his address in her pocket, not when her agent was a former student of his.

  What had been strange and scary in the way dreams can be scary before you get out of them, suddenly became a good deal darker, more alarming. Because what had seemed like a series of weird but unconnected events—the dead woman, Escolme’s mad obsession, the nocturnal stalker—now felt uncannily like parts of a whole.