What Time Devours (43 page)

He broke off, but not because he was overwhelmed. Despite the tears, there was a deadness in his face that corresponded with Church’s.

“When did they find out it was you?” Thomas asked. “The mothers, I mean.”

“Almost immediately,” he said. “I told them, actually.”

“And they didn’t take you to the police?”

“They did not,” said Dagenhart, and he sounded utterly miserable, as if he wished for nothing more than to have been brought to justice. “They could see what it had done to me, and a part of Daniella still felt something for me. We came to an agreement. They buried the play, and I went away, back to my hateful job and my hateful wife with her hateful cancer.”

“Cancer?” said Thomas, brought up short by the word, stung by it.

Dagenhart blinked and looked at him, as if confused.

“So?” he said.

“I knew she was sick for a long time, but . . .”

“She’s dead now,” he said, flat. “At last. The final act, at last.”

For a second Thomas was confused and silent and the three of them sat there, still as the stones, till he pressed the point again.

“But why do you have to destroy the play?”

“Because,” croaked Elsbeth Church, speaking for the first time in a level voice that sounded like it had said these words a thousand times before, “if it survives, people will profit from it: profit from my Pippa’s death. My child was thrown into the fire. That will not make a penny for anyone.”

“But your daughter loved the play!” said Thomas. “She wanted to bring it out into the world.”

“She was sixteen,” said Dagenhart. “She wasn’t old enough to see it for what it was.”

“And what was it?”

“A lie,” said Dagenhart.

Thomas looked at him.

“A lie?” he said.

Here it comes,
he thought
. The secret they want buried.

He waited for what seemed like a minute and then prompted again: “What lie?”

“Happiness. Comedy. Love, the greatest lie of them all,” said Dagenhart. “
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is life. Death, misery, work, disappointment, fruitlessness, emptiness. The tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” He paused, and looked at the little book. “But when love triumphs, when its labors are won, when the couples ride off in wedded bliss, healthy and full of joy, then, Mr. Knight, we are in a fiction, a fiction that can build only disappointment. The world has too much Shakespeare as it is. It needs no more lies about the power of love.”

Thomas couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“That’s it?” he exclaimed. “That’s what this has all been about? That’s the big secret you want to keep buried because you don’t agree with it? That
Love’s Labour’s Won
has a happy ending?”

“Not that the
play
ends happily,” said Dagenhart. “That
life
ends happily. That love fixes everything.”

“This is nuts,” Thomas said. He was shouting now, suddenly angrier than he could have imagined. “It’s a love story with a happy ending, and you want to destroy it because yours didn’t? Literature isn’t there merely to confirm what you already believe. It’s there to challenge, open up new possibilities . . .”

“Don’t lecture me, Thomas,” said Dagenhart.“And don’t suggest mine is just one jaundiced view. Love cools, friendship falls off. Everyone knows that. We just pretend not to because the writers and the moviemakers and the goddamned greeting card manufacturers have told us that there’s something better out there: Mr. or Mrs. Right, the soul mate who will take your shitty little life and make it all better. Except that they won’t. You’ll get bored of each other, irritated. Maybe you’ll slap each other around or—more likely—you’ll just stop talking: two people merely coexisting, blots on each other’s consciousness. Maybe she loses her job, or you can’t sell your house, or one of you is struck down by some hellish, ravaging disease. Either way, life intervenes, and love can do nothing about it except make it all worse.

“You ever noticed, Thomas, how Shakespeare is only interested in love till the couple get married?” he continued. “That’s where the comedy ends and the tragedy begins. Romeo and Juliet are fine till they get together. Think of the comedies.
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night
. Once they get to the altar, the story has to stop, because Shakespeare—with his second-best bed in Stratford and his London exile—knew what his comedies pretend not to: that love is unsustainable, that it is all wild hope and impossible expectation, and that it drags misery and despair and futility after it like a great chain, each link a poem, a film, a play . . .”

“And you think that destroying this text will change that?” said Thomas.

“No,” said Dagenhart. “But I refuse to add to the chain.”

He reached behind him and picked up the corroded gasoline can. As he fumbled in his pocket for a lighter, Elsbeth Church unwrapped the play.

She laid it on one of the fallen stones like some Druid priest preparing a sacrifice, backing away from it, eyes down.

Thomas got to his feet. The book was small and brown and nondescript.

“Let me read it!” he said on impulse.

Dagenhart looked at him, then took a step toward the stone where the play rested.

“You’re an addict, Knight, you know that?” he said. “Cut it out of your life and see the world as it is.”

He unscrewed the cap off the can and, like a priest sprinkling holy water, he splashed the book with gasoline. The scent of it filled the air.

“Now, Mr. Knight,” said Dagenhart. “Step back.”

Thomas thought for a second and was beginning to move forward when something heavy and pointed tapped the back of his head. He clutched the back of his skull and turned to see Elsbeth Church leaning into him, her eyes wide, the mattock grasped tightly in both hands.

But as he stared at her he caught movement between the standing stones. Someone was there. Someone whose head was strangely distorted and oversized in the darkness.

CHAPTER 90

There was space between the trees, and the moonlit field showed his silhouette as he crossed between the sarsen stones, else Thomas would never have seen him. He moved easily and silently, and Thomas knew him at once as the man who had shot him through the shoulder back in Chicago, but now he also knew whose face was under the night vision goggles. For a split second, before the adrenaline kicked in, before the dread of how it would all end got a foothold in his mind, before all the panic and the terror, he felt a momentary pang of sadness and wondered if Dagenhart was right after all.

Church and Dagenhart didn’t know the masked man was there, and Thomas said nothing. It was like he was waiting for something decisive to happen before taking action, something that would justify whatever brutal force he might have to use.

But then there was a snap and the stone circle suddenly flickered with the candleglow of Dagenhart’s cigarette lighter, and by the time Thomas had started to move and shout, it was too late. There was another light—this time momentary and brilliant. It came from the edge of the circle and was followed by an explosive crack like a tree riven by lightning. It was loud and flat and short, so that it was gone before he had a chance to respond to it, and Thomas was still wincing away from the sound of the gunshot when he realized that Dagenhart was crumpling to the earth.

The lighter flame died before he hit the ground. As Elsbeth Church spun toward the stones where the shot had been fired, Thomas turned and stooped to Dagenhart. It was dark now, too dark to see much of anything with the trees shading out the moon and none of that urban glow in the sky that he was used to on the darkest nights in Evanston. So it was with his hands and his ears that Thomas discovered that Dagenhart had been shot through the chest and was quite dead.

CHAPTER 91

“The next person to make so much as a movement toward that play will go the same way as Dagenhart,” said the man with the gun in his hands. “And Miss Church, put the pickax down.”

Thomas heard her do so.

The gunman’s voice was even and just unfamiliar enough in its composure that Thomas wondered if he had been wrong after all, but he knew he only thought that because he wanted it to be true.

“Put the gun down, Taylor,” said Thomas. There was a momentary silence.

“You expected me?” said Taylor Bradley.

“Yes.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of David Escolme,” said Thomas. He was stalling. “He said he gave some names to Daniella Blackstone. People who could help her authenticate the play quietly. I was one of them because I had been his high school teacher. Dagenhart was another, but he was the last person Daniella wanted to involve in her plans for the play. I couldn’t think who else David would have known, but then I remembered that David would have been in Dagenhart’s lecture class, a class that always had graduate student teaching assistants . . .”

“Okay,” said Taylor. “Yes, very clever. I was Escolme’s TA and he came to me because Daniella had told him not to go to Dagenhart.”

“Come on, Taylor,” said Thomas. “Put the gun down. More killings will only make it worse.”

“Really?” said Taylor Bradley. “What’s that Macbeth line? ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ I’ve racked up quite the tally, Thomas, and without being caught. I spared you in Evanston for old times’ sake. But you’ve made things difficult. I have nothing to gain by sparing you this time, and a good deal to lose.”

“You know how else I knew it was you?” said Thomas. “You never asked why I was here. I told you about Kumi, remember? We were in the Dirty Duck and I told you about . . . all of it, and you
knew
her. You knew us as a couple. But you never said, ‘Hey, Tom, why don’t you go be with her?’ It struck me as weird even then. ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to pry,’ I thought, ‘But still . . . Why doesn’t he tell me to go to Japan or have me take her back to the States?’ But you wanted me here. Back in Chicago, you were prepared to kill me because you thought I already had the play, but once you realized it was still hidden you wanted me pottering around, seeing if I could turn it up.
Then
you would kill me, but not before. So you never suggested I should go be with my wife while they cut her open to take out her cancer.”

He had started speaking just to keep him talking, a conventional ruse borrowed from just about every murder mystery he had ever read, but as he framed the words something had happened. The realization he had carried in his head had settled in his bones and made him angry.

Bradley didn’t seem to hear it. He moved to the center of the barrow and stooped to the play, shaking off drops of gasoline as he picked it up.

“Why do you want it so badly?” said Thomas.

“Oh come on now, Thomas,” said Bradley. “We’re not going to play that Agatha Christie crap. You know why I want it. I’m a badly paid assistant professor at a tiny school with barely literate students, with a four-four teaching load, and a third-year review that says that if I don’t generate a ‘significant scholarly achievement’ in the next two years, I won’t get tenure. Can you believe that?
A significant scholarly achievement!
They mean, of course, a book. There’s no one on the staff who could understand the damned book if I did write it, and my students are too busy texting each other and plagiarizing their papers from the Internet to know we even have a library, let alone consult its books. But a book is what they want, and my theater work is not considered ‘reviewable academic product.’ ”

“Discovering a lost play saves you from having to write a book?” said Thomas. “That’s why all those people died?”

“It will keep me in the classroom and in the theater, which is where the real work of Shakespearean academia is done. They want treatises on obscure Renaissance fishing manuals and deconstructive essays that we only read so we can footnote them in our own pointless essays. It’s insane. They call it research, like it’s going to save lives or build fuel-efficient cars, or something, but it’s really just the profession’s secret handshake. It has no connection to real education, and it has nothing to do with what these plays originally were. Yes, I’ll publish the play, which will get me tenure, and probably move me to a better school where the kids give a rat’s ass, but I’ll also get to stage it, show it to the world as it was meant to be seen, as a piece of performed art, not the raw material used by scholars to further their own careers by parading their cleverness.”

“You are going to stage it?”

It was Elsbeth Church’s voice, and underneath the blankness was something else, something dark and wrathful.

“Of course, I’m going to stage it,” said Bradley. “It’s a play. It’s supposed to be seen in the theater, not read in some study armchair . . .”

Church flew at him, fingers splayed. The speed and wildness of the attack caught him off guard, and she was almost upon him when the first shot rang out.

CHAPTER 92

Thomas ducked as he heard the bullet careen off the standing stone to his right, dropping almost to the ground. His knuckles brushed the haft of the mattock Church and Dagenhart had used to unearth the lost play, and he grabbed it as another shot tore the night apart.

It was followed by a keening wail.

Elsbeth Church had been hit. There was a silence, and then Thomas could hear her fighting for breath where she lay.

Taylor Bradley had been knocked onto his back, the night vision goggles wrenched from his face by Elsbeth’s ravenous nails, but he still had the gun, and he was already scrambling to his feet.

Instinctively, Thomas rolled right, moving fast and low past one stone, then another.

Bradley, sensing the movement, fired twice, behind him.