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

he checked his phone for messages. There were three, two of them from alarm companies asking for details of his home and whether it was “prewired” for a security system. Thomas wasn’t sure what that meant but called them back and said it probably wasn’t. That would raise the costs, they said. He told them that was okay and set up an appointment for both companies to come by over the weekend.
    The third message was from Polinski requesting that he call her back. He did so and, this time, got her on the first ring.
    “This is Thomas Knight,” he said.
    “You have some information for me,” she said, businesslike.
    “I’m not really sure,” said Thomas. “It’s pretty flimsy. More of an odd coincidence really . . .”
    “Go ahead,” she said.
    He told her everything: Escolme’s call, their meeting at the Drake, his panic at the lost Shakespeare play, and his claim that it had belonged to the novelist who had been killed at Thomas’s window. There was a momentary silence when he finished, and Thomas waited, half expecting a polite thanks and tacit dismissal.
    “Can you spell that name for me? Escolme?”
    He did so, and there was another pause.
    “A lost Shakespeare play?” she said. “Does that seem likely to you?”
    “Not really, no,” said Thomas. “I don’t know that much about it.”
    “Seems like he thinks otherwise,” she said. “Anything else?”
    “I think that’s everything.”
    “I’ll be in touch,” said Polinski, and then she was gone.
    In the teachers’ lounge, he unfolded his Tribune and stared at it. Periodically he turned the pages, looking vaguely for anything about the murder. His eye snagged on a single word in the headline for a small story in the Living section: SHAKESPEARE.
    His unease seemed to surge, then stilled as he focused. Seconds later, he relaxed. It was nothing. Apparently the National Shakespeare Conference was taking place right here in Chicago. Eight hundred or more Shakespeare professors from all over the world gathering to lecture and debate. Thomas grinned bleakly. He had attended this conference when it came to Boston in his graduate school days, and he had found it by turns impressive, daunting, and absurd.
    It was nonsense, of course, to think that the conference was in any way relevant to what had just happened. It would have been arranged months, even years before. Thomas hadn’t been a part of that world for more than a decade, had not, in fact, ever really been a part of it since he had abandoned his doctoral dissertation before it was a quarter complete. Yet, as an English teacher, he had never been able to let go of Shakespeare completely, though sometimes he felt as if it were Shakespeare who would not let go of him. Now the conference was arcing back into his city, into his life, and Thomas couldn’t help feeling that it was significant. Somehow.
    He looked up, frowning, and decided. He would leave school as early as his classes would permit and head over to the conference. He looked back to the paper to see where the meeting was being held and caught his breath.
    The conference was at the Drake.
    Naturally . . .

CHAPTER 12
    Thomas arrived at the hotel having heard from neither the police nor Escolme, but he had barely thought about either since lunch. The idea of attending the Shakespeare conference had filled him with an excited curiosity. There would surely be people he knew there, by name if not by face, though the latter wasn’t out of the question. There would be the dinosaurs still plugging away at scholarship everyone else had abandoned thirty years ago, the hotshot theory heads with their jargon, the Bardolators (often stray actors) and those who treated them as unthinking fans. More to the point, he would be immersed again in all that old energy, the crackle of intelligent debate, the thrill of discovery, but also the nitpicking and bluster, the intellectual outrageousness and pedantry, the stupefying political correctness worn