BEN DROVE FASTER without lights than I would have dared, with the beams on high, plus a few added spotlights as well. After a time, the slope evened off and we skimmed across a flat alpine meadow. Without being asked, I sat scanning the road behind us but saw nothing more than the ghostly forms of lone sentinel trees and boulders.
Then the road tipped back downhill. The trees thinned and shrank and then disappeared altogether. At the base of the mountains, we turned south onto Highway 89 and the traffic picked up, but not by much. Every twenty minutes, a car or semi would appear in the distance, roaring straight for us and at the last instant passing us by. Driving along the base of sheer sandstone cliffs, we seemed to be racing across the floor of some vast sea of darkness. Somewhere to the south, the chasm of the Grand Canyon dropped into darkness even more profound. I saw no further trace of the car that had shadowed us into the mountains.
Somewhere north of Flagstaff, I fell asleep.
I jerked awake to a rattle as the car skidded from pavement to gravel. Ben had turned onto a dirt road, and we were heading into a clump of low hills of bare dirt studded with creosote and prickly pear. The world was filled with pale lemon light.
“Almost there,” he said.
The clock read six. “We’re early.”
“Not that early.”
Neither highway nor interstate was anywhere to be seen. Neither were any other cars. Or buildings, either, for that matter. “Did anyone follow us?”
“Not that I saw.”
Ben stopped the car and got out. Stretching, I hauled myself out after him. We stood in an empty parking area bordered by an old corral fence. On the gate hung a sign in red letters: PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR THE NEXT TOUR. Ben reached over and unlatched the gate.
In front of us, a wide dirt street sloped down and away to the right. Empty buildings, mostly adobe with rusting tin roofs, lined both sides. A few were made of what looked like scrap timber from railroads. At the bottom of the hill, a cluster of buildings cut the street off. Behind them rose a steeple. Presumably, somebody had chosen to hide the town’s church from the sins of its lone street.
Across the way and a little downhill, the largest single building stood alone, a red sign in curlicue letters proclaiming THE STRATFORD HOTEL. Inside, a light was burning. We glanced at each other and headed toward it.
A long, narrow table extended into the dimness within. Overhead, a muslin ceiling was tacked onto beams. Something above scurried away into the rafters at the sound of our footsteps. Whitewash had once brightened the walls, but it had peeled away in chunks, along with the rough plaster. The place smelled of dust and emptiness.
“Billy the Kid washed dishes in the kitchen at the back,” said a husky voice behind us, its accent patrician New England. “Before he learned to like killing.”
I turned to see a small woman, her white hair neatly coiffed, her trim frame tailored into a cream silk suit with bronze buttons shaped like leaves. One glance, and even a fashion novice knew she had not picked up that suit on any ready-to-wear rack, not even at Needless Markup or Saks. It had been built on her in some hushed house of couture in Paris or New York, with a designer fluttering in the background.
“Though maybe it was Shakespeare that taught him life was cheap and death was cheaper,” she went on. “The town, of course. Not the plays.”
She thrust out her hand—the hand of an elderly woman of lifelong wealth, her ivory skin striated with thick blue veins, her nails perfectly manicured in a soft shade of rose. “I’m Athenaide Preston. Please call me Athenaide. And you are Dr. Katharine Stanley.”
“If I am to call you Athenaide, you’ll have to call me Kate.”
“Let’s compromise at Katharine.” Her glance shifted to Ben, whom she appraised as I imagine she might appraise a thoroughbred. “And friend.”
“Ben Pearl,” I said.
“Welcome to Shakespeare, Benjamin Pearl. Let’s see what I can remember of the tour.” She stepped inside, pointing at a corner in the back, with a dark stain still on the wall. “A man named Bean Belly Smith killed the son of the house back there, in a quarrel over an egg. The boy got one for breakfast, with his biscuit and salt pork; Bean Belly didn’t. A few comments on the behavior of the lady of the house led her son to draw, but Bean Belly drew faster, and the boy died with the egg in his stomach well-peppered with lead.” She turned back to us, one meticulously groomed brow arched over a wicked smile. “Are you two hungry?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “If we could just see the Granville papers, we won’t take up any more of your time.”
“I know your work, Katharine. I am quite a fan. And Maxine’s endorsement is a great help. Still, I do not know you. And I do not open my treasure chests to people I do not know.”
I started to protest, but she held up a hand.
“I shall make a bargain with you, Katharine Stanley. I will ask you three questions. Answer them well, and I will show you what you want to see.”
Who did she think she was? A djinn of the desert? My fairy godmother? A Katsina come down from the clouds? Christ Almighty, was I a lunatic magnet? But I nodded.
“Come with me, then.” Stepping back outside, she headed for the ramshackle row of buildings at the end of the street.
Ben set a hand on my shoulder. “Kate. We could be walking straight into an ambush.”
“You said no one followed.”
“I said I saw no one.”
“If you want to consider your contract broken and go, then go. As you told me, that’s the way things are. But I have to see Granville’s papers.” I turned and hurried after Athenaide. Behind me, I heard Ben sigh and follow.
At the bottom of the street, Athenaide veered around the side of the long building, down a path through some mesquite scrub. The desert grew more lush and more sculpted, and the dirt path condensed into a flagged walkway. Suddenly, we rounded a corner and stepped onto a formal terrace scattered with immense terra-cotta pots full of magenta-flowering bougainvillea. Two Italianate fountains filled the air with the soft plash of water.
But it was the view that took my breath away. The terrace fell sharply into a deep arroyo, and the plain below seemed to roll outward and down for fifty miles in a rippling carpet of tan, brown, and pink, tufted here and there with pale, dusty green. Heat already rose shimmering toward a Marian-blue sky. Across the horizon to the north a small row of hills rumbled up through the earth, rising from left to right, as if some immense creature were burrowing up to snatch at the sun.
“Can you tell me where you are?” asked Athenaide. She cocked her head. “The correct answer is not New Mexico.”
I turned and looked at the house. From this side, the building looked nothing like the ramshackle front that we had seen from the street. It was a miniature baroque palace.
“The streetfront is fake, then?”
Athenaide laughed. “The whole town is a fake. Surely you knew that? It was born as Ralston, after the president of the Bank of California, and went bust in a diamond-mine hoax that sent tycoons tumbling from tall windows to the pavement below. A national and international scandal. Colonel William Boyle bought the town in 1879 and renamed it so he could work less spectacular but more steady swindles on eastern public and western miners alike. He wanted a name of class and culture, and he lit upon Shakespeare. Got a little carried away…but, yes, the streetfront of this building is a fake. Though the other buildings along Stratford Avenue are real, if by real you mean originally part of this fraud of a town.”
“Why buy a town that you scorn as a fraud?” asked Ben.
“My parents were costume designers in the golden age of Hollywood. They dressed the great stars, and I used to watch. Bette Davis once told me that every great broad was a fraud.” She spread her hands expansively. “I adore frauds.”
I shut out their chatter and focused on the building. Constructed of finely dressed stone, it seemed to be gazing out at the view through tall windows. Three scalloped gables pierced its steep slate roof. On either end rose turrets of copper gone green in the air. In the middle, what I had originally taken to be a church steeple appeared to be a wedding-cake fantasia of domes and columns and fretwork topped by a spire. Beneath it, an archway led to an inner courtyard flanked by classical statues of Neptune brandishing a trident and Hermes sporting winged sandals.
I closed my eyes. “I know this place.”
“I thought you might,” said Athenaide.
“You’ve been here?” asked Ben.
“No,” said Athenaide, answering for me. “But I’d wager a kingdom she’s been to its namesake.”
I opened my eyes. “Elsinore.”
She smiled. “More properly Kronborg Castle, at Helsingør, on the Øresund.” She rounded and squeezed her Scandinavian vowels like a native.
“Denmark,” I said to Ben.
“The house of Hamlet,” said Athenaide. She walked into the courtyard, and I followed.
“You built a replica of Elsinore in the New Mexico desert?” I squeaked in disbelief.
Stopping before an ornate doorway, standing open, she chuckled. “Not so much a replica as a small hommage.”
“Why?”
“The Danes would not sell the original.” She motioned me inside. “After you.”
Again Ben caught my arm, but I shook him loose and stepped inside.
We stood in a long gallery with marble chessboard floors of white and black. On one side, the stark white walls were hung with immense paintings that looked to be Old Masters at their most voluptuous. On the other side, great expanses of diamond-paned glass were set into deep arches.
“Straight ahead, and around the corner to your right,” directed Athenaide. “Stop,” she said. I turned back to see her standing with her arms crossed, her back to tall double doors. “One down, two to go. Why do you wish to see the personal effects of Jeremy Granville, once of Tombstone, so badly as to drive seven hundred miles through the night, at speeds that no officer of the law would approve?”
What was I to say? Because Roz was interested, and now she’s dead? I cleared my throat. “I’m interested in Hamlets, and he once played Hamlet on a bet.”
“An acceptable, if disingenuous, answer. More than half the reason I bought his things in the first place. I, too, am fascinated by Hamlet. It is not, of course, the reason either of us is interested in them at present. But as an answer, it will do.” Turning around, she pushed the doors open with a grand gesture. “Welcome to the Great Hall.”
Great was, if anything, an understatement, even in a palace. The room was an immense square bisected by a massive arch, its stone cut into a jagged braid. Up near the timbered ceiling, smaller arches opened onto a gallery running all around the perimeter. Golden light poured downward in streams thick as honey. At floor level, more windows pierced the walls, but the windows were narrow and the walls thick, leaving darkness to pool in the spaces between, where tapestries peopled the walls with pale unicorns and ladies in tall pointed hats.
“This is not Elsinore,” I said.
“No.”
Beneath our feet, the polished wood floor was strewn with lavender and rosemary that sent up small bursts of scent with every footstep.
Athenaide stood gazing up at the wall to my right. I turned to see what she was looking at. Over a fireplace large enough to burn a sequoia hung a painting that glowed green and gold in the strange light. A woman in a long brocade gown floated on her back in a high-banked stream, her face pale, the water scattered with red and purple flowers. Ophelia, painted at the moment of her death by Sir John Everett Millais.
It was an oil painting, not a print, and it was exquisite, right down to the oddly shaped and intricately carved gold frame. So exquisite that for a moment I wondered if Athenaide had somehow acquired the original.
“I have always loved this painting.”
I stepped forward, blinking. So had I. She—I always thought of the painting as Ophelia herself—was one of the great masterpieces of Pre-Raphaelite art. But she was supposed to be in the Tate Britain Museum, in London. I knew that. Since beginning Hamlet, I’d gone to see her often, walking through the leafy shade along the Thames, ducking into the long room the color of roses at twilight where she held watery court between two paintings of women in startling blue gowns. Ophelia herself was strangely colorless, already fading to transparency, but the world in which she floated shone a brilliant, defiant green.
Off to the side, I heard a door open. I turned in surprise; I had seen no door save the main entrance. The tapestries swayed, and a heavyset Hispanic woman appeared from behind them, carrying a tray laden with a silver coffee service.
“Ah, Graciela,” said Athenaide. “Bearing gifts.”
Graciela stumped across the room and set her tray down on the table. Then she turned, her right arm raised, pointing straight at me. Looking like a child’s toy in her huge hand was a small black snub-nosed pistol.
I blinked. Ben, too, had pulled his gun. But he was not aiming at Graciela; his pistol was pointed straight at Athenaide’s chest.
“Put down your weapon, Mr. Pearl,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“Testosterone.” Athenaide sighed. “Such a boring hormone. Estrogen, now: You can never tell what that will trigger. I’m afraid I am holding a Glock 22 to Katharine’s kidneys.”
With a look of disgust, Ben slowly bent down and set his pistol on the floor.
“Thank you,” said Athenaide. Graciela picked up the gun. And then Athenaide asked her third question.
“Did you kill Maxine Tom?”