Interred with Their Bones

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “Willing to bet what, exactly?”

  “A trip to Harvard?” I asked. But it wasn’t really a question.

  Sir Henry set his glass down. “Why not just go to the police? They’re a damned sight closer.”

  “And hand it over to some patronizing bastard of a policeman who won’t be able to decipher it in the first place, so he can shove it to the back of some evidence shelf where it’ll rot? No.” I swallowed hard. “Besides, Roz didn’t go to the police. She came to me.”

  “And Roz is dead, Kate.”

  “That’s why I have to go.” I fingered the brooch on my lapel. “I made a promise. And I may be the only one who can follow her trail.”

  Except maybe her killer. The phrase hung unsaid between us.

  Sir Henry sighed. “Inspector Sinclair won’t like that much.”

  “He doesn’t have to know. I’ll fly over, take a look at the book, and come right back.”

  “It would be quicker and safer to ask someone there to do the looking for you. You needn’t say why. Surely Harvard has another Shakespearean scholar or two.”

  I retrieved my glass, swirling the brandy with an impatient shake. Mellifluous of speech, with fluent pen and facile wit, Professor Matthew Morris had arrived at Harvard with tenure and fireworks the year before I left. Undergraduates and journalists adored him; the university treated him like a rock star. But I’d disliked him on sight, and so had Roz. My learned colleague, she used to call him, with silky venom. In her estimation, he represented the worst of modern academics—all wind and no substance. He’d be the last person with whom she’d want me to share any aspect of her secret. On the whole, I thought, I’d rather go to Sinclair.

  In my snifter, the cognac slowed and settled. I shook my head. “My grad-school cohorts have scattered. And Matthew Morris is on sabbatical at the Folger Library in D.C.” Which was, in fact, the case—ironically, since he scorned archival research as plodding and dull—even if it wasn’t my primary reason for skipping over him. “There is no one else I would trust,” I said. That, at least, was unequivocally true.

  On the subject of my journey, Sir Henry had either agreed or capitulated, I wasn’t sure which. But on the question of me going home to pack, he refused to budge. “Your flat’ll be watched,” he said. “Besides, you need some rest. Give me a list, and I’ll have Barnes get you a few things. I promise, we’ll get you off to Heathrow and the first flight out to Boston.”

  “Barnes is not buying me underwear.”

  A pained look crossed his face. “Lingerie, darling. Ever so much more sexy.”

  “Call it whatever you like, but Barnes is not buying it.”

  “We’ll leave that to Mrs. Barnes—an intrepid soul. Not likely to retreat in the face of an army of brassieres.” I’d had no idea there was a Mrs. Barnes, but Sir Henry looked at me in mock horror. “You don’t imagine that I keep my own house, do you?”

  I began to laugh. “You live in another century, Sir Henry.”

  “So does everyone who can afford it,” he said airily, finishing off the cognac.

  As I climbed into a heavily draped bed grand enough for a dozen kings, I heard a clock chime three somewhere in the depths of the house. I curled up tight, clutching the brooch in one hand and Roz’s card in the other, thinking about the shadow I’d glimpsed earlier, in the window of my flat.

  Surely I’d been rattled, had glimpsed some strange angle of curtains and furniture from the wind-scattered street, like seeing wolves or whales in the clouds. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sleeping house.

  I must have drifted off at last. Gradually, my dreams filled with the sound of rushing water. I sat up. The bed had grassed over into a bank beside a moon-silvered stream. Not far off, someone lay asleep amid violets. A gray-haired king with a crown on his brow. I crept toward him. The violets beneath him had all withered on their stems; the man, too, was dead. At least, I’d thought him a man, but as I watched, the face rippled and shifted like a face seen underwater, and I saw that it was Roz.

  In a flash of green, her eyes sprang open. Even as I jumped back, a shadow crept over me from behind, and I heard the hiss of a blade sliding from its sheath.

  I sat bolt upright in bed to find that I’d shoved the pin from the brooch into my hand; it had bled a little onto Sir Henry’s quilt. I rose and cautiously drew back the curtain. In the garden, roses as big as peonies glowed pink and crimson beneath a relentlessly cheery sun. I stood in the window, letting the light stream across my face until it had dissolved both the dream and—more slowly—the fear that lingered in its wake.

  In the dressing room new clothes had been laid out: slim black pants, a scooped-neck top more clinging than I was accustomed to, and a jacket of expensively simple tailoring. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it looked. Nearby stood a small suitcase, already packed. A plane ticket lay on top. My flight was at nine. Dressing in a hurry, I pinned Roz’s brooch to my new jacket and headed downstairs to find Sir Henry.

  “Being chased by paparazzi teaches you more about cunning than the theater ever could,” he said with satisfaction as I entered the breakfast room. The Bentley, it turned out, was on the point of departing for Highgate with the gardener and his granddaughter in the backseat. Not even the dispatch of a diversionary vehicle, though, could stop Sir Henry from fussing over me all through breakfast. “You sure you don’t want company?” he asked, stirring what looked like a pound of sugar into his tea.

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’d attract a lot more attention traveling with a world-famous actor than without.”

  It was a relief, at last, to slip into a Range Rover with Barnes at the wheel. “Take care, Kate,” was all Sir Henry said as he shut the door. But his eyes were full of worry.

  9

  THE FLIGHT WAS a blur. The ticket Sir Henry had bought was first class, so I could at least stretch my legs, though neither sleep nor thought proved possible. At one o’clock in the afternoon, I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport, jumped into a cab, and headed inland to Harvard.

  As the taxi swept around Storrow Drive, I watched the Charles River slide by on my right, deep blue beneath a cloudless sky. At last the maroon, turquoise, and seraphic blue cupolas that topped the redbrick mansions housing Harvard students lurched up on the opposite bank. The road arced over the river, turning back into the bright oven of Cambridge in June. I checked into my hotel—the Inn at Harvard—as quickly as possible. Dumping my suitcase in my room and slinging my black book bag over my shoulder, I ran across Mass. Ave. and into Harvard Yard.

  It was cooler here—the brick buildings lapped by a sea of grass instead of pavement, and sheltered by a groomed and airy forest of tall, smooth-trunked trees. I rounded a corner, and the library rose up before me. Built to memorialize a young graduate who’d sailed to Europe in 1912 to indulge a remarkable taste in fine books and then engaged passage home on the Titanic, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library presided over the eastern half of Harvard Yard, as square, massive, and domineering as the grieving matriarch who’d paid to have it built in the first place.

  I ran up the steps, through doors two stories high and into the cool marble expanse of the entrance hall. Stopping briefly at the privileges office, I acquired the yellow stack-privileges card of a visiting alumna. One door down, I flashed my temporary card at a bored student sitting guard, and entered the stacks through a brightly lit stairwell.

  I stood still for a moment, orienting myself. By means of a ruthlessly written endowment, Mrs. Widener had ensured that her library’s outward appearance would never be altered by so much as a single brick. Its innards, though, were another matter; to these, she’d grudgingly conceded the flexibility to grow and change with the times. Since I’d left, they’d been dragged into the twenty-first century with a multi-million-dollar renovation. I hoped I could still find my way around. A laminated xeroxed map taped to the wall suggested that the basic layout remained the same.

  Following a trail marked on t
he floor with wide red tape, I hastened down four flights to Widener’s lowest dungeon. Threading through dim aisles between shelves of forgotten knowledge, I entered a winding tunnel lined with huge clanking pipes. At its other end, heavy metal doors opened into a hall whose worn orange carpet led to a small elevator that creaked down yet another floor. I stepped into an immense, garishly lit square room purring like a buried spaceship.

  I glanced at a map tacked to the wall by the elevator, and back at Roz’s card. Thr 390.160 was the call number I wanted. The “Thr” section—theater history—lurked in the farthest corner of the room. I set off at a jog-trot, slowing as I came to the Thr’s. Here were the 390s. Crouching down, I ran my finger across the spines of the books: 190, 180, 165, 160.5…and then nothing but a rectangle of empty space. I checked the card in my hand and looked back up at the shelf. Yes, I was in the right place. But just there, where the four volumes should be, was a barren gap. None of the four volumes was on the shelf.

  Damn, damn, damn. It had never occurred to me that the books wouldn’t be here. I hurried back out to a computer glaring balefully from a corner near the elevator. I could recall the books—via the online catalog—from whoever had checked them out, but it’d take a week to ten days to get them back…if I was lucky. If the borrower was on sabbatical, it might take a month. I didn’t have a goddamned week, never mind a month. Swearing silently, I typed the title into the search screen.

  The answer, when it popped up, was still worse. “Not checked out,” the screen insisted. Frustrated, I made my way back out of the basement and up to Circulation, where the student at the desk drawled that I could order a shelf search.

  “A shelf search?” I said in disbelief. “You’re going to send some poor gnome off to search for four volumes gone missing among eleven million?”

  She shrugged. “Only three and half million in this building. But your four won’t turn up, anyway.”

  Whatever Roz had found in The Elizabethan Stage, she’d have marked it. I was sure of that; she was notorious for marking in books. Always in pencil—usually little backward checkmarks—a sort of tic while reading, as unconscious as breathing. Rumor had it that she’d once been ejected from the British Library for marking a manuscript a thousand years old. Not maliciously. Just absentmindedly. Something the Brits, or at least their old-fashioned librarians, could forgive, it seemed, because they’d soon welcomed her back. Occasionally, she’d scribble notes to herself in the margins, and once or twice I’d seen full-blown rants…. I needed the copy she’d consider her own. Widener’s.

  “Thanks,” I managed, signing the order to set the gnomes to work. At the door leading back from Circulation to the entrance hall, I stood on the threshold. Now what?

  I was turning right toward the exit when the grand marble staircase to my left caught my eye. The library was a vast hollow square surrounding a courtyard; in the center of this court, linked to the outer square by a narrow corridor, rose the domed mausoleum dedicated to young Harry Widener. Not the resting place of his bones, but of his books. Hollowed into the dome’s marbled heart was an exact copy of his dark paneled study, with fresh flowers still placed on his desk every morning.

  I trotted up the stairs to an opulent landing of marble pale as parchment. A neoclassical doorway led to a semicircular chamber, also of marble. Across the way, a smaller door opened into the study; I glimpsed dark paneling, books behind glass-fronted shelves, and red carnations only a little droopy. But it was this vaulted foyer that I wanted. Within a glass-topped altar in its center lay two books, facing away from each other. One was the first book ever to be printed: the Gutenberg Bible, with its rhythmic Latin stamped in heavy black letters, its initials painted red and blue. The other, thanks to young Harry’s fine taste and deep pockets, was Harvard’s own copy of the First Folio.

  The room was empty; Harvard students rarely visited the place. The book lay open to the title page with the engraved portrait of Shakespeare, the one that gave him a wandering eye, a Humpty-Dumpty brow, and a head set so awkwardly on his ruff that it looked oddly decapitated, resting on a half halo. “MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES,” large letters proclaimed above the picture. “Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Below the picture, it read “LONDON. Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.”

  I scanned the page. No reader had dared deface it. Maybe Roz had marked some less sacred opening. But even Roz might have balked at deliberately marking up a Folio.

  Chambers was the key. Something in one of The Elizabethan Stage’s four volumes would tell me what to look for. If, that is, I could find Widener’s copies. I started. What if the killer had them? Surely that wasn’t possible. I’d had Roz’s clue wrapped in my hand while the murder happened, and for several hours afterward.

  What if Roz had taken the volumes herself? If she had, she’d likely taken them with her to London. Sir Henry could probably winkle that information out of somebody. But what would I do then? Go back to Sinclair, bat my eyes, and ask to see Professor Howard’s books—no particular reason? I ran back down the stairs and out among the trees.

  At the other end of the Yard, steps rose to a wide platform around Memorial Church. On an evening in May, five years before, with no backdrop but the severe lines of the church, this platform had served as the stage for the first show I’d ever directed: an undergrad performance of Twelfth Night. The dogwoods had bookended the stage in white and pink blossom that day, and laughter had frothed in the canopy of the elms.

  I was still proud of that show. It had been both cheerfully hilarious and darkly twisted, with its central jest of a riddle that went nowhere except to bait the proud, puritanical Malvolio—first into foolishness and then into madness. I sat down on the church steps. Could Roz have laid some similar trick in my path?

  It was not a charitable thought. With a pang, I remembered her lying under the bench in the Globe with her eyes open.

  Hell of an office, she’d said earlier that day.

  Hell of an entrance, I’d replied.

  After all this trouble, Katie, I’d hoped for something a little less mundane. A little more—well, Shakespearean.

  I’d just glared at her. It had been Sir Henry who’d given her what she wanted. “I’ll call thee Hamlet,” he’d said, “King, father, royal Dane.”

  “I’ll call thee Hamlet,” I whispered aloud, and even as I said it, a lock clicked open in some dark corner of my mind. For a moment, I sat still. Then I fumbled for my cell phone and dialed Sir Henry.

  “The needle mark,” I said as he answered, my voice grinding with urgency.

  “Hello to you, too, sweet Kate.”

  “The needle mark they found on Roz. Where was it?”

  “An odd question,” he sniffed. “With an unusual answer. Which I happen to know because I’ve just had another chat with Inspector Sinclair. Magnificently grim fellow—quite Dostoevsky.”

  “Where, Sir Henry?”

  “In the big vein behind her right ear.”

  Far overhead, liquid green light spilled through the canopy of the trees as if plunging into the shallows of a silent sea. By the time it drifted down to me it barely lifted the gloom, and its warmth had long since faded.

  “Kate? Are you still there?”

  “It’s how he died too,” I whispered.

  “Who? Who else has died?”

  “Hamlet’s father. Old Hamlet. It’s how he became a ghost in the first place.”

  Sir Henry let out a long, whistling breath. “In the porches of my ears,” he murmured. “Jesus, Kate, of course. His brother poured poison in his ear while he slept. It all fits…except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “The preliminary tox screen, darling,” he said apologetically. “It came back blank.”

  “There’s no poison? Are you sure?”

  “I’m not sure what they were checking for. Drugs, I think. But, no, not a trace.”

  “Then they’ve missed somet
hing. Can you get Sinclair—”

  “I had it from Inspector Grim himself.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sir Henry,” I snapped. “The ghost of Hamlet’s father is the role Roz showed up in yesterday afternoon. The Globe burned down on the anniversary of its first burning. And the books she sent me after—in code—are missing. Not checked out. Just missing. Can you swallow that much coincidence?”

  An ominous silence stretched through the phone.

  “I’ll go back to Sinclair on one condition,” said Sir Henry stiffly. “You head back to your hotel room, lock the door, and wait for my call. I’m worried about you.”

  “But the Chambers—” I protested.

  “You’ve just said that the books are missing.”

  “But—”

  “Wait for my call, Kate.” He was adamant. “Once we get an answer from Sinclair, we’ll figure out where to go from there. If you’re right—and I’m not saying you are—these are deeper waters than you should be swimming in alone.”

  I hesitated. To stop now was to cut Chambers loose too abruptly; I was sure of it. But I could not afford to lose Sir Henry’s help. “Fine,” I said grudgingly. “I’ll wait.”

  “Good girl. I’ll call you as soon as I hear.”

  I snapped the phone shut. What the hell had Roz gotten herself into? Gotten me—and through me, Sir Henry—into?

  I gazed back across the Yard at the library. From this vantage, its huge columns gave it the imperious air of a classical temple bursting from a demure brick corset. A temple of knowledge, I thought. Home to the most august members of Harvard’s faculty, who were given studies there. Matthew Morris, who disliked libraries as a rule, had one he rarely set foot in, but he refused to give it up. It was a badge of prestige. “My room of secrets,” Roz had called hers, handing me a key the day I became her research assistant. “My house of memory.”