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.