That recollection stirred another. What is it? I’d demanded, at a much more recent encounter. “’Tis in my memory locked,” she’d replied, “and you yourself shall keep the key of it.”
At the time, I’d thought that she meant the golden box, but now it occurred to me that I had a literal key as well. I fished my key chain out of the side pocket in my bag. Five keys lay in my hand, one longer, heavier, and darker than the others. The key to Roz’s study. I’d had it when I walked away from this place; for three years, I’d kept it, telling myself that I’d return it when she asked for it. She never had.
Suddenly, I understood. I looked up. Her trail ran right through that study.
Sinclair, with his clipboards and grim efficiency, had surely contacted the Harvard police, asking that her office be sealed as a crime scene; her English Department office almost certainly had been. But her library study might—just might—have been overlooked. This was Widener, after all, where time passed in odd sideways skitters. Professors slouched into their studies to hide from the constant plucking of the university and indulge in the treasure hunt of scholarship. Very likely, no one in the English Department even knew where Roz’s Widener study was.
But after her death became public as murder, the authorities would remember its existence, sooner or later. With Sinclair breathing down their backs, probably sooner. I had no more than a brief window of opportunity, and it was closing.
With a silent apology to Sir Henry, I picked up my bag, ran across the Yard, and skimmed up the steep flight of stairs into Widener.
10
FLASHING MY CARD, I ducked into the stacks once more—not the basement extension, but the library proper, which had ten labyrinthine floors, six of them aboveground. Roz’s was on the fifth. I sped upstairs, stepped out of the stairwell, and stopped.
I’d forgotten the power of the stacks. It had nothing in common with the pomp of the more public halls and reading rooms—still less with the barren glare of the basement. An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with an acrid scent—a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in a slow, inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust.
Setting my shoulders, I hurried down toward the southern wing of the library, where ranks of iron and steel shelves turned a corner and marched into the distance. There weren’t many people about on a warm summer afternoon. Even so, I could see two or three earnest students hunched over their work. I did not have the place to myself.
If I acted as if I had a right to be here, I’d likely be granted that right without much thought. Turning up an aisle, I headed back toward the inner corridor that emptied out right in front of Roz’s door. Its half-window, like all the others, was a tease of frosted glass.
The key still fit. The door opened, and I walked in.
Almost everything was exactly as I remembered it. On three walls, the shelves were still stacked floor to ceiling with books, broken only by the tall cabinet of her card catalog on one wall, and her desk opposite. On the desk, a long pair of earrings—silver and turquoise Navajo work that I’d given her long ago—draped coyly by the keyboard, next to a silvery framed photo of Virginia Woolf. A bust of Shakespeare held a pile of papers in place. Tacked to the wall above was a large map of Britain; next to it was another, a copy of one drawn in Shakespeare’s day. On the floor, the same ancient Oriental carpet showed the same frayed place, where she rolled her chair back and forth. A wingback chair of threadbare chintz lurked in the far corner between the shelves and the windows.
It was the two windows that were different. Roz had adamantly refused to have curtains or shades; she would not give up so much as an inch of her view to the sky, she said. That much was the same. But the last time I’d been here, the windows looked down into the library’s bleak central courtyard, accessible only to birds and stray bits of windblown trash. Now, they looked down into a brilliantly lit room littered with readers. I remembered, then, one of the feats of the renovations. The university had proudly roofed the courtyard around the central dome with translucent glass, transforming the space beneath into two luxurious reading rooms.
Standing in the center of the study, I was visible to any reader who looked up. Swearing under my breath, I crossed to the desk. I set my book bag down on the floor and dropped into Roz’s chair, thinking furiously.
It would look normal enough, to anyone glancing up from below, if I sat here and read. I could probably search the computer as well. No one would think twice about a professor hiring an assistant to work in her office. Especially Roz, who didn’t care much for computers; she wrote out the first one or two drafts of her books and articles longhand, and then passed them to a secretary. Unless news of her death was already public, I’d be fine at her computer.
But I needed to search her books, and these presented more of a problem. She kept them as eccentrically as ever, stacked two-deep all around the room. Most people who stack books two-deep keep the more used copies in front, but Roz did the opposite. She’d never liked the idea, she’d said, of other eyes snooping through her unborn thoughts. As a result, the outer layer of her shelves stonewalled curious visitors with works by her colleagues and friends, as well as newer work by the rising stars of Shakespearean scholarship.
What appeared to be missing was any book even hinting at the unpredictable course of Roz’s mind. Not missing, I sighed, just buried. To find The Elizabethan Stage, I’d have to pull every book off every shelf in the room. Which would look odd, to say the least, to anyone looking up, and take long enough to make the chances of being seen pretty high.
Among the pens and pencils stuck in a jar by the computer stood a small Maglite. I picked it up. Widener still closed at ten o’clock. The librarians and janitors would all be gone by eleven—twelve at the outside. That left six or seven hours free from spying eyes—till workers began returning the next morning to open the place at eight. I smiled at Mrs. Woolf’s wide, sad eyes. What I could not do by the bright light of day, I’d have to do in the dark. All I had to do was to get myself locked in. Leaning up against Roz’s computer screen stood a modern facsimile of the First Folio. Picking it up, I stood, took my bag, and walked back out of the office.
I took a seat in one of the carrels and opened the Folio. During the long wait, I checked every last page of that facsimile, but there wasn’t a single mark anywhere.
At nine thirty, I finally heard the man with the megaphone. “The Circulation Desk will close in fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes, the Circ. Desk will be closed.” At nine forty-five, the lights flickered and the few remaining patrons left. I waited until I heard the megaphone man calling two floors beneath me. At last, I stood and stretched, stiff with exhaustion. It was nearly three in the morning, London time, but I still had hours to go before I could sleep. I looked both ways down the long row of carrels. This wing had been sparsely populated before. Now it was empty.
I shut the book and crossed back to Roz’s study. The key shook a little as I let myself in. Opening the door as narrowly as possible, I slipped inside. The reading room below was also empty, the librarian no longer at her desk. Ducking out from under my bag, I dropped down next to it on the floor. Pulling out my phone, I switched it off. Then, for an hour, I sat listening to sound drain away from the library as a longing for Roz swelled inside me.
At last the lights in the corridor winked out, save for a dim bulb every twenty or thirty feet. A leaden sleepiness settled in the room. My chin hit my chest. I shook myself awake, but again my head nodded and my eyes drifted closed.
I jerked back awake. Something had startled me, but what? Beyond the study, the darkness had thickened to velvet. I crept to the door and listened but I heard nothing.
I switched on the flashlight and moved to the desk. Sliding the Folio back where I’d found it, I removed the papers from beneath the bust of Shakespeare, stacked them up, and shoved them into my bag. Then I turned to face the shelves. “I’m sorry,” I whispered—to the books? To the st
udy? To Roz?—and then I set my shoulders and went to work.
Moving methodically through the shelves in a way Roz would have approved, I pulled out the front layer of books section by section and shone the flashlight into the dark tunnel behind. Her interests were diverse, to say the least. I came across a small section on Cervantes and Don Quixote, and then another on Delia Bacon, a nineteenth-century New England bluestocking whose obsession with Shakespeare had led first to brilliance and then to madness. Delia had been my territory, once upon a time. What had sparked Roz’s interest? I stifled a yawn and moved on. A longish section on Shakespeare in the American West looked to be left over from Roz’s last book. All in all, it looked like a collage pulled at random from the stacks outside. None of what she’d hidden added up to a coherent new project. More to the point, The Elizabethan Stage was nowhere to be found.
Twenty minutes later, on my knees and near despair, I glimpsed what I was looking for deep within the bottom shelf by the window. Four books in faded red cloth bindings. A pale gleam of gold on the spines announced in shorthand: Elizabethan Stage. Chambers.
I bent closer. Near the back of one of the volumes a slip of paper stuck up like a tiny flag. Pulling the book out, I eased back to sit on the edge of the wingback chair and opened to the marked page: 488. “Plays and Playwrights,” read the heading, the title of a long chapter that listed, playwright by playwright, every known printed edition and manuscript copy of every play written in the English Renaissance. A mind-boggling work of scholarship.
Page 488 started in the middle of a section on Othello. Followed by Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra…on down through The Tempest and Henry VIII on the facing page. Shakespeare’s late plays. His Jacobean magnum opuses. I shone the flashlight’s pale yellow circle along the margins. Which play had been her quarry?
But once more, I found not a single mark on the opening. I sat back. The trail couldn’t end here. It just couldn’t. I pulled Roz’s card back out of my jacket pocket and read her note once more. I turned it over, fiddling with the hole punched in the bottom. After all the trouble she’d taken to get these cards, there was no way that Roz would toss one away on something as ephemeral as a birthday card. Whatever I was supposed to look for, it had to have something to do with these books.
Not the books, I thought. Not the books at all. I was used to thinking of these cards as pointers. But Roz meant for me to pay attention to the card itself. I rose and crossed to the cabinet in which she’d kept these cards—one of the old Widener cabinets—setting the still-open book down on top. Running the flashlight’s beam down the small drawers, each neatly marked in Roz’s handwriting, I came to one labeled “Cecil–Charles II.”
I drew it open and flipped through the cards until I reached “Chambers, E. K.” The first title was Arthur of Britain. Then Early English Lyrics, followed by The English Folk-Play. Too far. I flipped back one card and pushed the cards apart. There, near the bottom, my light caught the edge of a small slip of paper folded in half. Carefully, I drew it out.
“For Kate,” it read in blue pencil.
At that instant, the lights in the hall—dim to begin with—flickered and went out. I shoved the paper into the book. Hugging the volume to my chest, I switched off the flashlight and tiptoed to the door. As far as I could see, every light had died; the entire library lay in darkness. A background hum I had barely registered seemed to deepen and slow, and then fade to nothingness, as if the building were a great living beast sighing its last breath.
I was turning back to my work when I heard, in the silence, a squeak, and a small sighing swish. I froze. It was a sound I knew well: the fire doors in the narrow ship-gray stairwells at either end of the corridor along the studies. The door at the eastern end had opened and was closing. Someone else was inside the building.
I slipped out of the office again, but this time, I pulled the door almost closed—though not enough for the lock to click—and darted across the corridor. Just as I slipped back into the stacks, a figure darker than the surrounding darkness drifted around the corner by the stairs.
A security guard, surely, or a Harvard University police officer responding to the blackout. But the notion that it was the same dark presence that I’d glimpsed in my window, drawn by some dark link to Roz’s gift, refused to leave my mind. Covering the brooch with my palm, I shrank back between the aisles.
Up at the end, patches of moonlight lay along the corridor. The shadowy shape of a man glided into view, but before I could make out more than a vague outline, he passed on. I breathed a soundless sigh of relief. But a few paces down, he stopped. He moved back two steps, and then a third. Back at Roz’s door, he paused again, and I glimpsed the metallic glitter of a key. But Roz’s door was not locked. It was not even closed. At his touch it opened with a faint sigh. For an instant, he went still.
Suddenly, he spun. I ducked and ran; he sprang down the aisle after me. Turning left at the carrels, I sped three aisles down and skidded back up toward the studies. At the head of the aisle, shielded by the cast-iron end of a bookshelf, I stopped, listening for him through the thundering of my heart. Nothing. Widener was a labyrinth of short corridors, unexpected turns, and odd cubbyholes, and now it was cloaked in darkness. If he didn’t know his way through the maze as well as I did—and if the renovation had not rerouted what I knew—I had a fighting chance to escape.
A whisper of footfalls along the outer corridor told me where my stalker was. A few aisles away, he turned and began slipping back up toward the studies. The closer he came, the deeper I withdrew back among the shelves. I had, at all costs, to keep bookshelves between him and me. Clutching the volume of Chambers with one hand, with the other I felt along a shelf just above my head. A couple of yards in, my hand came to a gap. I reached in. Yes, standing on tiptoe, I could just touch the inner sides of the books shelved in the next aisle over. With a great heave, I pushed a line of books down into the next aisle over.
He veered into that aisle, toward the noise; even as he did, I sprinted in the other direction, heading for the stairs at the near end of the corridor, only ten feet away. How long would the mound of books on the floor hold him? I reached the stairwell and yanked open the door leading down—and an angry metallic squeal twisted through the darkness. I looked around. The stair leading up was unobstructed by any tattling door. I turned and raced up instead.
At the top, I slipped back into the stacks. Footsteps reached the stairs below just as the door whooshed closed. They paused, and then the door squealed open again. The footsteps pattered quietly downward.
I waited. He might be creeping back up, having guessed my maneuver, waiting for me to show myself. Or maybe he’d gone to lie in wait by the main exit. No. There it was: the faint squeak of a shoe on the stair. I tensed, ready to run, but heard nothing else. The books themselves seemed to be holding their breath.
After a long time, I eased slowly back out toward the inner wall of the western wing. Tall windows looked down into the same reading room visible from Roz’s study; kitty-corner from where I stood, I could see the march of windows that marked the studies. I was turning to leave when a small streak of red light shone through one of them. I looked closer. One floor down, and three windows across. Roz’s window.
He’d gone back.
Skimming back down the stairs and across the corridor along the studies, I eased through the stacks to the outer corridor. I could not stop him from pawing through Roz’s things, maybe, not here and now, alone in the dark. But I might glean some clue as to who he was.
I came to the aisle that led straight back to Roz’s study. Peering around the stacks, I saw a glimmer of red light through Roz’s window. He was still there.
Slipping the note from Chambers’s book, I shoved the folded paper into my pocket. One aisle over, I slid the book into a gap on a low shelf, memorizing its place, six books in. If I had to, I could come back for it tomorrow morning; the odds of anyone else finding it, mislaid among the millions, were in
finitesimal. Meanwhile, it would be safe.
Easing around the corner, I took one step forward, and then another, creeping my way down the aisle. As Roz’s door came into view, I stopped. Nothing. I took one more step, and the high-pitched screech of an alarm cracked the silence. Before I could pull back, a dark shape lunged out the door and leapt at me, twisting one arm up behind my back. Barely audible through the squeal of the alarm, a whisper rasped in my ear: “Plain Kate, and bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the cursed.”
My name! He knew my name. I squirmed, trying to get a look at my attacker’s face, but he jerked my arm up so hard that I gasped in pain.
He laughed, a sound without mirth or warmth of any kind. “But as another denizen of Shakespeare said, ‘What’s in a name?’…Roz changed hers, you know. To old Hamlet.”
Ice needled across my skin. I’d been right. I struggled again. Something glinted, and the thin cold blade of a knife pressed against my throat. “Maybe we should also change yours.” I could feel the dampness of his breath on my neck. “Run, Kate,” he taunted. And then, as if he’d winked out in the shrieking darkness, he was no longer there.
Terror ripping toward me, I ran toward the outer corridor lined with study carrels. I looked right and left. There was nowhere to go, and only one place to hide. I ducked beneath one of the carrels. Where had he gone? What had happened? He must have protected his flank with some kind of motion-sensitive alarm. Which meant that he’d expected me to come back.
The squealing went silent. If he’d switched it off, he wasn’t far away.
Stealthy footfalls came through the stacks toward the carrels. Leave, I willed with all the force of my mind. Please leave.
But he turned in my direction, his steps slow and deliberate, pausing at every carrel. Checking beneath each one, probably. Looking for me.
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