What Time Devours by A. J. Hartley Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Escolme had set him up. He must have. He had given the woman his name. She had wanted to get some outside authority to confirm the identity of the play, someone who wouldn’t try to muscle in on her ownership of it as a way of making a name for himself as an academic, and Escolme had sent her to him. As a result she had been killed on his doorstep, and Escolme had hidden the fact that he knew she was dead, and that he had already implicated Thomas. Maybe he had hidden more than that, worse.
    “Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story, doesn’t it?” Escolme had said . “Locked rooms and missing papers. ‘The Naval Treaty.’ ”
    “ ‘Naval Treaty’ my ass,” Thomas muttered. The whole thing had been a shell game. He just had to find out why.
    He called the Drake.
    “I’d like to connect to a guest room,” he said. “David Escolme.”
    “Can you spell that please, sir?”
    Irritably, Thomas did, and waited for the ring of the room phone. What he got instead was the receptionist again.
    “I’m afraid we have no one of that name staying here,” he said.
    His irritation spiked, touched now with something like apprehension.
    He hung up, and forced himself to stop staring at the clock.
    None of this felt right. He put his coffee down, crossed the room quickly, and went out the front door.
    Polisnki and the other cop were nowhere to be seen, and whatever crime scene work had started in the small hours had apparently been completed. The patch of sidewalk up the block was still taped off, but no one was there now. Thomas fished in his pocket for Polinski’s card and went back into the house.
    She didn’t answer her phone, and he didn’t take the automated service up on being connected to another officer. Instead, he waited for the recording to start and said, “This is Thomas Knight from 1247 Sycamore. We spoke briefly this morning. I have something to say about the Blackstone murder. It’s probably not important, but please give me a call.”
    He left his number and hung up.
    It was, he knew, more backpedaling, more inadequacy. He was playing it down because he didn’t want to be involved, not because it would be somehow inconvenient to be caught up in a police investigation, but because he hated the idea that he or someone he had once taught could be responsible—however indirectly—for a woman’s death.
    He then called five different home-security companies and inquired about installation costs. He had never had an alarm system before, had never seen the need. Suddenly he wanted one, and soon.

CHAPTER 11
    He was fractionally late getting to school, and his students were restless. He did his best to marshal his thoughts and their attention, but he couldn’t focus and found himself relying on the very teacher’s book that he usually referred to—rather pompously—as the “Antidote to Learning.” Okay, now that we’ve worked out some answers of our own, let us consult the Antidote to Learning . . . At the end of his first class he apologized for his distraction and promised the students to be his usual self the following day. They nodded solemnly and exchanged significant looks.
    They know you’ve been talking to the police. They may even know why.
    Sometimes Thomas wished that there were a national exam that would test the kids’ capacity to get to the heart of secrets and mysteries involving the faculty. They’d all ace it.
    At lunchtime