What Time Devours (3 page)

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I’m just feeling . . . melancholy, I guess. I’m thirty-eight, Kumi, you know?
Thirty-eight
. That makes me about halfway through.”

“Halfway through what?”

“Life,” he said. “I mean, given average life expectancy. More than halfway if something happens . . .”

“Oh,
this
is a cheery conversation,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“I’m sorry I’m not there, Tom, but you didn’t want me back before.”

“Not true,” said Thomas. “I did, even if I didn’t know it.”

She laughed at that, and he pressed what he took to be an advantage.

“So how long are we talking? Six months? A year?”

“Tom,” she said, and there was that caution again, that refusal to get caught up in him, in
them
. “I’m not sure. I can’t think about it right now. This project I’m working on is starting to show some real promise. I complain about my job but it’s a part of me. Between you and me, I’m actually pretty good at it, and most of the time, I love it. Let me get this assignment off my desk and then we’ll talk. Promise.”

“Weeks?”

“Two. Maybe three.”

“Okay.”

“Good,” she said. She laughed, a short exhaling sound that blew the tension out of her chest, a noise so familiar he could almost see it, and he knew what it meant. It was relief, joyous and grateful, and he knew she had been steeling herself to tell him she wasn’t coming yet, wasn’t even ready to discuss it, long before he had called.

“Okay,” he said again, wondering when he would see her next, wondering also why these calls always made him feel like a contestant on a game show, the one who comes in second and goes home with the kinds of consolation prizes you either already have or never wanted. “I just want you here again.”

“Soon,” she said. “Promise.”

CHAPTER 4

Thomas was clearing out the book-filled lumber room that he mockingly called his library when the phone rang. He read novels obsessively all year round. Even after hours of grading papers he would curl up in a corner with a glass of something and a book, till he could barely keep his eyes open. It was what he did. He read slowly, weighing each phrase in his mind no matter how pulpy the genre, and always finished, even if it took weeks, regardless of how bad the book was. Every third book was, he decided, a waste of his time, and though he could usually predict which those would be inside a few pages—as he could usually predict what grade a student paper would get inside the first paragraph—he couldn’t put them aside. It was, he thought, as he set down a stack of pristine paperbacks and went looking for the phone, a fault of which he was secretly and absurdly proud.

“So how’ve you been, Mr. Knight?”

The voice was odd.

“Fine,” said Thomas, reflexively. “Who’s this?”

“It’s David Escolme. You’ve probably forgotten me.”

“Not at all, David,” said Thomas, thinking that he had, in fact, forgotten him right up to the moment the phone rang.

David Escolme had been a student of his, what? Ten years ago? Something like that. Before Ben Williams for sure. And unlike Williams, Escolme had been a geeky, acne-faced kid, unathletic, socially awkward, and a bit too clever for his own good. They had talked about music, what used to be called alternative rock and its various forebears, from grunge to those older, quirky, tough-to-categorize bands like XTC. In fact, Escolme had been the one to introduce Thomas to some of those groups, and had made a gift of one of XTC’s albums to him when he left school. Thomas still played it from time to time.

As if hearing his thoughts, Escolme said, “You still listening to music?”

“Some,” said Thomas. “I’m a bit out of touch these days. Still playing the same stuff I did when you were here, probably.”

“And reading Sherlock Holmes? You introduced me to him, remember?”

Thomas didn’t remember, and hadn’t read Conan Doyle for years. Escolme didn’t wait to hear his answer but quoted in a ludicrous British accent.

“
You see but you do not observe!
Great stuff. Do you remember the TV version with Jeremy Brett? Awesome.”

“They were good,” agreed Thomas.

It was more than a surprise to hear from Escolme after all these years. There was something strange about it. Underneath the young man’s hurried explanations about how he had come to look up his old high school English teacher, behind the amiable banter about the years since last they spoke, there was something calculated. He sounded like he was working from a script, not with the bored detachment of the telemarketer, but with a studied nonchalance, like an actor trying to pass off as spontaneous what was actually memorized.

“Did you know Ben Williams?” Thomas asked.

“No,” said Escolme. “Read about him last week. It was the memorial today, right?”

“Right.”

“Tough break.”

The inadequacy of the remark irritated Thomas, and he decided to press the conversation to a close.

“Was there something particular on your mind, David?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a funny thing,” the voice was saying over what seemed to be a cell phone line, smiling as if it really
were
funny, though Thomas didn’t believe him. “I didn’t really know who else to turn to. I know it’s been years, and we’ve sort of lost touch, but I mean . . . Who else do I know who reads Shakespeare?”

Thomas frowned.

“Shakespeare?” he said.

“Yes,” he said. “I need a little help with Shakespeare.”

He was almost giggling at the obvious absurdity of the request, and Thomas wondered for a moment if the whole thing was some kind of practical joke. Maybe there were a bunch of them, fresh from the memorial, huddled around a phone trying not to explode with laughter as they prank-called their old teacher . . .

“You must know other people who read Shakespeare, David,” said Thomas.

“Maybe,” said Escolme, not even bothering to dodge, “but you were doing a doctorate on him, right? I remember that. That’s why you were such a good teacher.”

Thomas smiled at the non sequitur.

“I never finished,” he said, “and that was all a long time ago. Why don’t you talk to someone in the English department at . . . Where did you go to school again?”

“BU!” he said, momentarily genuine in his surprise. “You helped get me in, remember?”

“Of course,” said Thomas. Boston University: his old alma mater, from which he had finally fled to teach high school back in Chicago, trying to shut out his professors’ mutterings about wasted talent as he had shut out the groaning fault line on which his marriage sat.

That was a long time ago
.

And the ground beneath his marriage had stopped shifting. For now. Thomas’s mind went back to the conversation he had had with Kumi, and he wondered vaguely when he would see her again.

“Anyway,” Escolme was saying, “I didn’t get real friendly with the faculty there.”

“What about Randall Dagenhart?” said Thomas. “Is he still there?”

“I guess,” said Escolme, a little too quickly. “I had a class with him but it was one of those huge lectures. He didn’t even grade my papers. In the end, I spent more time with the theater guys. Anyway, I
trust
you.”

There it was again, that edgy nervousness. Thomas didn’t like it.

“Thanks, but . . . ,” he began.

“I’m serious,” said Escolme. “
This
is serious.”

And then he inserted a little autobiographical news to prove it was serious. Escolme’s news—that he had since completed a master’s degree in English, then worked for a boutique literary agency before being head-hunted into one of the largest literary management companies in the country—was surprising only because it made clear what such conversations always made clear, that the time had slipped unnoticed away. Thomas knew nothing about the world of publishing, but he had heard of Vernon Fredericks Literary, if only for their movie division whose agents were routinely thanked on Oscar night.

“I don’t understand what that has to do with Shakespeare,” said Thomas. “Or with me, frankly.”

“Mr. Knight,” he said. “I promise. This is not like anything you’ve dealt with before. Honestly. I want it to be you.”

Thomas paused.

“To do what?” he said.

“I have to show you. I’m at the Drake. Room 304.”

Thomas suddenly felt weary beyond words. He wanted to say that he had spent a miserable and horrific day dealing with the corpse he had found propped up against his kitchen window, but even the idea of saying such things made him want to forget them. He paused and then said simply,

“When?”

CHAPTER 5

As soon as he had hung up, he Googled “Escolme, Vernon Fredericks Literary.” Thomas wasn’t sure what he expected to find: a story in the
Tribune
, perhaps, local boy makes good. Something like that. What he found was a professional-looking website, all cool blues and grays, surrounding a similarly professional blurb about the literary awards won by its (unnamed) “talent” along with a set of submission guidelines. At the bottom of the page, it listed VFL’s locations: New York, London, Beverly Hills, Tokyo, and Nashville. No Chicago branch. Thomas clicked the New York link and found a roster of agents.

David Escolme was two-thirds down the list.

There was a picture. The boy Thomas had known was still recognizable, but only just. The acne was gone, the eighties glasses had been replaced by sleek black frames with oblong lenses, and the boy was now a man, smiling confidently into the camera. He looked comfortable in his elegant suit, a man for whom the slings and arrows of adolescence had long since glanced off and been forgotten, a man immune to the future. It was the face of a businessman.

Nothing wrong with that
, he reminded himself.
And let’s see if we can spare him your tiresome lectures on the state of the arts in America, shall we?

He grinned sheepishly to himself and his gaze fell on the kitchen window. The evening light was dwindling fast and the window was like a hole into the swelling night, a picture frame whose canvas had been slit out. For a second he saw the dead woman’s face as clearly as if she was still there, her staring eyes (one green, one violet) turned blank upon him.

He turned abruptly away and checked his watch. He had time for one of his slow, pounding runs around Evanston’s twilit streets before going on to meet Escolme. Anything to get that face out of his mind.

His phone rang once and he snatched it up.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Knight, this is Lieutenant Polinski. We spoke this morning. You have a second?”

“Sure.”

“We’re still trying to get an ID on the victim, but I need to ask you again if you’re sure you didn’t know her.”

“I’m sure. I wouldn’t forget.”
Those eyes
. “Why?” he asked.

“You keep your garbage by the kitchen door?”

“Yes.”

“And it gets collected when?”

“Wednesday morning, from the front.”

“The crime scene guys turned up a piece of paper—actually, a yellow Post-it note—in a bush a few yards from the body. It could just be garbage, but it seems unlikely that it’s been lying out there for almost a week, particularly since we had that rain over the weekend.”

“What did it say?”

“It just had your name and address written on it in pencil. Have you thrown anything like that out recently?”

“No. I already know where I live.”

“Right,” said Polinski. “That’s what I figured. When we know who she is we’ll be trying to match the handwriting, but for now we’re working on the assumption that the note was hers.”

“Which means . . . ?”

“That she was coming to see you. You sure you didn’t know her?”

Thomas stared blankly at the wall and she had to prompt him before he said, again, “I’m sure.”

It was only after he hung up that he began to wonder if that was true.

CHAPTER 6

It was hardly surprising that Escolme was staying at the Drake. Thomas took the Red Line to Chicago and State and walked down to where the Magnificent Mile began. The hotel itself—muted Deco elegance outside and red-carpeted opulence inside—always reminded Thomas of some fine old English theater, some place built by Henry Irving where you might find a young John Gielgud having a quick smoke by the stage door. It wasn’t squeaky clean like most of the glass-and-chrome high-rises, and its prestige lay in a certain gilded shabbiness that spoke, in so far as Chicago could, of venerable age. Thomas liked it, but he felt like an impostor.

He walked quickly under the paneled ceilings and overwrought chandeliers, dodging vast floral arrangements set up like defensive gun casements, till he found the reception desk where he brandished Escolme’s room number as if he were claiming sanctuary. The uniformed black man pointed the way to brass-doored elevators flanked by potted palms.

Thomas was wearing faded jeans and a flannel shirt with a leather jacket, and when he caught a woman in a Chanel suit looking at him skeptically, he gave her a defiant look that set her fiddling with her purse.

The defiance was bravado. Places like this always left him tucking his shirt in and standing up straight as if he were trying—vainly, of course—to blend in, or worse, to impress someone. He felt a flush of irritation that Escolme had insisted they meet here, as if the agent were rubbing his former mentor’s nose in his success.

But that didn’t feel right either. Escolme had been a good kid. Quirky, perhaps, a bit neurotic, but neither arrogant nor mean spirited.

The elevator door opened and Thomas stepped out, checked the room numbers, and moved down a hallway till he reached 304. The door was a rich heavy timber that might have been teak—more the door of a family home than a hotel room—and was fitted with a similarly heavy brass knocker.