What Time Devours (17 page)

“It’s been a while,” said Taylor.

“A decade?”

“Something like.”

“What are you doing here?” said Thomas.

“Other than watching you throw grenades in conferences?”

“God, you were in there?” said Thomas. “Sorry. I just . . .”

“Wanted to screw with that smug son of a bitch,” Taylor completed. “Good for you.”

Taylor Bradley had been in graduate school at BU with Thomas. They had even shared a cramped office on Bay State Road for a semester or two, and had grown acquainted while complaining about the students in their freshman composition classes. Later they had both been in a Renaissance drama seminar together. Thomas hadn’t thought of him in years.

“You still at BU?” he said.

“God, no,” said Bradley. “I got a job.”

“Doing what?”

For a moment Bradley looked confused.

“I finished,” he said. The utterance seemed to embarrass him or, more likely, he feared it embarrassed Thomas. “I mean, I got my dissertation done and went on the job market. Took me a couple of shots but I got a position.”

“Tenure track?”

“Yep,” said Bradley, unable to keep the pride from his voice. “I think they assumed I was related to A.C. Small college, heavy teaching load, but still . . .”

“That’s fantastic,” said Thomas, taking his hand and shaking it.

“Listen,” he said, as if the idea had just struck him, “how long are you in town? I need to get back in there, but maybe we could get a drink or something?”

“Sure,” said Thomas. “That would be great. Tonight?”

“I’m going to see a matinee of
King Lear
at the Courtyard, but we could get together after.”

“Sounds good. Where?”

“The Dirty Duck,” said Bradley. “Say, six?”

“So long as I have time to get the bus back to my B and B.”

“You’re staying in town?”

“In Kenilworth.”

Bradley looked quizzical, but Thomas just shook his head and smiled:
Don’t ask . . .

“See you later,” he said.

Thomas walked away wondering about them all, wondering most about Randall Dagenhart, who had been, he supposed, as much a mentor to him as Thomas had been to David Escolme, wondering also about the old professor’s bitter outburst and what might have motivated it. As he passed a trash can in the hall, he tossed the balled-up sling away.

CHAPTER 31

“Hi, Kumi,” said Thomas.

He had found a public phone booth and was using a phone card he’d bought at a newsstand in the high street. The time difference to Japan was actually more manageable from the U.K., and he figured that—given the absurd hours she put in—she would have just gotten home from work. He wanted to talk to her about his days in graduate school, about Dagenhart’s accusation that he had never had what it took . . .

“Tom?” she said.

Then it started. She was angry and upset. Where the hell had he been? She had called his school when he hadn’t phoned, and the principal had told her he’d been
shot
! She hadn’t believed it at first. She just knew he would have called her. There must have been some mistake. But Peter had insisted, and then she had reached the hospital and they said Thomas
had
been shot but that he was okay now and had
discharged himself
. So she had called his house a thousand times, left a thousand messages, and nothing. Had she even crossed his mind or was he too busy solving mysteries . . . ?

“And now you call me like nothing has happened and tell me you’re in England . . . !?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I kind of lost track of time.”

But that wasn’t going to cut it. She said he was selfish. That she had thought they were past this, but that he clearly wasn’t thinking about her or what she might be going through . . .

He couldn’t think of anything to say, couldn’t even really remember why he hadn’t told her about the shooting.

The call lasted two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and Thomas emerged into the too-bright afternoon light as if he had been holding his breath. Or his tongue. She had a right to be upset and indignant, but there was a fury in her voice he couldn’t fathom, a hurt deeper than the things she had said.

What did that mean? He wondered if there was something she hadn’t said, something beyond her concern for him. After all, the hospital had told her he was okay. She was probably just feeling humiliated that he hadn’t kept her informed, but still, it was not like her . . .

“I didn’t want to worry you,” he had said.

“Nice going, Tom,” she said, with the kind of sarcasm her Japanese colleagues found baffling. “Another study in your communicative genius.”

And she had hung up on him.

He couldn’t really blame her. It might have been better if he’d anticipated her knowing about the shooting, but the truth was that he had had no intention of mentioning it when he called her, so he’d been doubly unprepared. By the end, he had suspected she was biting back tears. The idea bothered him. Kumi did not cry easily.

He wandered down to the canal and watched the narrow boats going through the lock, wondering whether to call her back, but decided to leave it for another day. Right now she wouldn’t answer, or would eat up his phone card with long angry silences.

Let her be mad,
he thought.
She has a right to be. Call tomorrow and talk properly.

He wasn’t sure about the strategy, but once the decision was made, he didn’t reevaluate it. Even so, her anger bothered him.

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” he said aloud.

He fished in his wallet for Polinski’s card and called the Evanston Police Department. It took a moment for the lieutenant to get on the line, and she was cool with him.

“How long do you plan to be out of the country?” she said.

“I’m not sure. I’m still not a suspect, right?”

She seemed to consider that for a second, before saying that he wasn’t, that they didn’t have a suspect yet, and—in answer to his question—that the half brick that had killed Daniella Blackstone had revealed nothing conclusive.

“What about you?” she said. “You doing okay, not getting shot?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Not making much headway.”

“On what?” she said, suspicious again.

“Oh, you know,” said Thomas, backpedaling. “Research. Work stuff.”

“Don’t interfere in police matters, Mr. Knight.”

“Right,” he said.

“But if you find anything useful . . . ,” she added.

“I’ll let you know,” he said.

Since he had learned nothing so far, it was an easy—if dispiriting—promise to make.

CHAPTER 32

Thomas spent the afternoon seeing the sights, or some of them. The town was thick with tourists, and though it was quaint, something about its carefully preserved medieval and Renaissance buildings felt almost implausibly picturesque, so that he thought he’d wandered into some kind of theme park. Shakespeare’s birthplace was a picture-postcard timbered house with an exquisite garden almost too perfectly right for the man who penned
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing
, and
As You Like It
. Inside was a useful exhibition, and helpful people in every room were keen to inform about the market town Stratford had been, the living conditions in the house itself, its structural alterations over time, and—of course—the kind of environment that had shaped its most famous resident. No one wore faux-Elizabethan costume, quoted Shakespeare, or—thank God—affected to actually be four-hundred-year-old residents of the town, quipping about modern technology and scattering
for-sooth
s at the end of every other sentence. In other words, it was not nearly as bad as he had feared, so Thomas was at a loss to see why he felt so unmoved by the place. Perhaps it was the throng of tourists, many of whom would know less about Shakespeare than they did neuroscience. Perhaps it was that air of Colonial Williamsburg—everything a bit too cute and studied—history made shiny, like something you might find in a snow globe. Or perhaps it was that he preferred his history and culture like he preferred his religion: private, and reflective, the still, silent air echoing with uncertainties. More likely it was a residual grumpiness for which he was blaming the town when it was really more to do with his failed call to Kumi.

Down by the Memorial Theatre—currently half demolished and framed with scaffolding and plastic sheets that flapped in the breeze—he ate fish and chips with a dollop of luminous green stuff they said were “mushy peas.” He tasted it cautiously and liked it. He was eating his well-vinegared chips and looking across the Stratford to Birmingham Canal when he became aware of a huddle of tourists to his left, gathered around a smiling elderly man in a worn gray suit that looked like it was made of felt. He was small and balding, but he had a big voice and Thomas could hear isolated phrases: “Love me? Why, it must be requited. I hear how I am censured. They say I will bear myself proudly: happy are they that can hear their detractions and can put them to mending . . .”

One of the tourists shouted “Romeo!” but the old man continued as if he had not heard her. Another shouted “Petruchio,” but with the same result.

“Benedick,” Thomas whispered to himself.

“. . . and wise but for loving me; by my troth, it is no addition to her wit, nor no great argument of her folly . . .”

“What’s his name from
Much Ado
?” said a large woman in a flowered dress. “Benedick!”

The old man bowed low, and there was a little scattered cheering, but by the time he had straightened up, he had started again.

“Look what is done cannot be now amended,” he said. “Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes, which after hours gives leisure to repent . . .”

Some of the crowd stayed, but many had had enough of the game and drifted away. Others replaced them, and Thomas stood and started walking over as someone called “Lady Macbeth.” Again the old man continued as if he had not heard her.

“If I have killed the issue of your womb,” the old man was intoning, “to quicken your increase I will beget mine issue of your blood upon your daughter.”

“Richard the Third,” said Thomas.

Some in the crowd turned toward him, and the old man’s eyes briefly met his, but then he was bowing, and straightening, and starting again.

“What’s he that wishes so?” he demanded. “My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin. If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss, and if to live . . .”

“Henry the Fifth,” said Thomas.

Again the old man bowed, and again he came up talking.

“Anon he finds him striking too short at Greeks . . .”

Thomas nodded and smiled, and turned away. Some of the tourists watched him, impressed, and Thomas felt absurdly pleased with himself.

See
, said a voice in his head.
Dagenhart was right. You’re trying to prove that leaving grad school was a choice, not a failure, that you’re better than all of them.

That’s not true.

That’s why you want to be the one producing
Love’s Labour’s Won
out of your hat like some Vegas magician. So they’ll applaud and say you are The Best Among Them . . .

Not true. Surely not.

He kept walking. Behind him he could still hear the constant stream of the old man’s quotations as he walked across the green. For some reason, the sound bothered him.

The church where Shakespeare was buried was more to his taste, if only because the aura of sanctity about the place shut everyone up. He did what he always liked to do in such places, sitting alone and absorbing the weight of age and seriousness from the carved tombs and airy vaulted chancel. Outside he wandered among the graves through heavy, ancient trees, feeling like a mote on the breezes of time and mortality.

Julia was right
, he thought.
You are an old humanist
.

Maybe so. There were worse things to be. And as if to celebrate the point he wandered down to the river and sat under the lengthening shadows of an old willow to watch the water, thinking vaguely of lines written by a man who could have been recalling this very spot when he wrote them.

 

And so thinking he lay and napped in the sun for an hour, as the swans and ducks dabbled at the shore as they had done for centuries unnumbered.

CHAPTER 33

The Dirty Duck was a Stratford institution. Its official name was The Black Swan—or at least that was the name of its restaurant—and it had been an actor hangout since the days of David Garrick, if his guidebook was to be believed. Thomas was skeptical. Surely, Stratford hadn’t been a theater town in the days of Garrick? Still, the place looked old enough. It overlooked Waterside and the Avon beyond, a brick-and-timbered building like a hundred others he had seen in rural England already, but lit by a Bohemian aura of expectation. Maybe he’d bump into Ian McKellen or Judi Dench having what they might call “a swift half” after the show, or sit where Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Richard Burton had drunk each other under the table . . .

Thomas arrived early and ordered a pint of Old Speckled Hen. He paid with a ten-pound note and received a handful of heavy pound coins as change. His pockets were already full of them as if he was collecting them. He had been spending nothing but notes because they were easier to read, because fumbling with unfamiliar coins made him feel like a tourist, and because everything was so damned expensive that trying to use single pounds seemed pointless.