I had loved my parents, but I’d never really known them. They’d been wrapped up in each other and in their careers for much of my young life, whereas Aunt Helen had loved me from the time I was small with the single-minded ferocity of a tigress. She had, I thought suddenly, readied me for Roz. Or given me the strength to withstand her, at least for a while.
“Is the ranch past tense?”
“Along with the aunt. She died when I was a senior in college, and the ranch was split up and sold—too expensive to pass on. She didn’t want any of us—me or my cousins—tied to it, and she didn’t want us squabbling over it. It’s a cluster of forty-acre ranchettes now, bought up by executives who want to play cowboy now and then on the weekends. I haven’t been back.”
“Paradise lost,” Ben said softly.
After a while, I nodded.
From one horizon to the other, nothing moved save the cars on the interstate, the shimmer of rising heat, and far off at the edge of vision, a bird that might have been an eagle, circling on thermals.
“You don’t call Roz ‘Aunt Roz,’” I said suddenly.
“She didn’t like it,” said Ben, driving with one hand and fiddling through a CD box with the other. “Big country needs big music. U2 or Beethoven?”
“How about a big story?” I countered. Five minutes later, I was talking Ben through Don Quixote to the brooding power of the Eroica symphony.
The main plot was simple enough. In the face of a disbelieving world’s scorn, mad old Don Quixote turns knight errant and rides off across Spain in quest of adventures, his paunchy squire, Sancho Panza, grousing by his side. So far, so good.
The problem with the tale of Cardenio was that it was a subplot, and Don Quixote’s subplots are anything but simple, materializing out of nowhere and then melting away again just when things get interesting. As best I could unravel it, the story of Cardenio went like this: Kept far from home, dancing attendance at the duke’s court, young Cardenio entrusts the wooing of his beloved Lucinda to his friend Ferdinand, the duke’s younger son. One glimpse of Lucinda leaning out at a window by candlelight, however, lures Ferdinand to betray Cardenio and woo the lady for himself.
Returning just in time to witness his beloved stammer “I do” to his best friend, Cardenio leaps between them, sword drawn, but before he can kill anyone, he flees into the mountains, mad with jealousy and grief. At the altar, Lucinda swoons, dropping a dagger and a suicide note. Death denied to her, she retires to a convent.
“Not, on the face of it, very promising for a comedy,” said Ben.
“I haven’t told you the half of it,” I said. “By this point, most storytellers would probably be panting with exhaustion, but Cervantes is just getting started.”
Ben mulled that over for a bit. “What do you think Shakespeare did with it?”
“That’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question, isn’t it?” We had air-conditioning going full blast, and everything not tied down was flapping. The part of me in the breeze was cold; the rest of me was sweating. I peeled myself from the sticky seat and shifted to let the cold wind dry my back. “I just hope he kept in the old knight and his squire.”
“You rate sly comedy over silly romance.”
He hadn’t really asked it as a question, but I answered it anyway. “Pretty much always. But that’s not it entirely.” I gazed out the window, searching for the right words as if they might lie scattered like stones on the desert floor. “Quixote and Sancho…they’re what give the story some philosophical zing…make it something more sturdy than your average soap opera.”
“You like to think Shakespeare didn’t indulge in soap operas?”
I couldn’t tell whether Ben was honestly curious or just needling me. Probably a little of both. He was, after all, related to Roz. “I like to think he recognized brilliance when he saw it. Don Quixote isn’t just a story, or a set of stories, though you can read it that way if you want to and have a good laugh. That alone makes it worth the paper it’s printed on. But it’s also about stories. About their refusal to stay anchored neatly in books.”
I watched Ben as I spoke, wondering whether his eyes would glaze over with boredom or he’d fend off my ideas with some cutting joke. Far from looking bored, he looked unusually intent—an expression so at odds with his lounge-lizard costume that I suddenly found myself smothering giggles.
“Go on,” he said, a little frown furrowing his forehead.
I explained that the way Cervantes tells it, the tale of Cardenio begins with artifacts: a dead mule, still saddled and bridled, and a leather bag full of gold, poetry, and love letters that the knight and his squire stumble upon in the mountains. A goatherd soon ties both mule and bag to tantalizing rumors about a madman in the forest. When Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet the lunatic, those rumors bloom into memoir, as the young man—Cardenio, of course, in a lucid moment—trails sadly through the tale of his lost love and his friend’s betrayal. Finally, Cardenio’s tale shakes free from stories altogether and bursts into present reality (at least from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s point of view), as the knight and his squire cross paths with all the major players at an inn, weeping and shouting, fighting and forgiving. By the time the story reaches its climax, they’re no longer audience; they’re characters caught up in the action.
“That’s really cool,” said Ben. “Did you think that up?”
I laughed. “I wish I had. But we have to chalk that one up to Cervantes. A lot of his stories are like that. Uncontainable somehow.” I twisted the long blond hair of the wig up away from my neck, arching to catch the stream of cold air. “If I can see that maneuver, though, I expect Shakespeare saw it faster and thought through it deeper. He played with similar ideas, after all, long before he got to Cardenio. He made it hilarious in The Taming of the Shrew. Then there was Macbeth. All those weird riddles—”
“A man not born of woman, and the day a forest picks up and moves,” mused Ben, keeping up with my train of thought. “Macbeth thinks those are just metaphors for ‘no one’ and ‘never.’”
I nodded. “But they turn out to be literal. And in Macbeth, the idea of stories—riddles—coming true turns out to be terrifying.” I let the hair slide back down my neck. “I’d like to think that near the end of his life, Shakespeare circled back to the notion that stories coming true could be funny. But I can’t see how you’d do that—not in the tale of Cardenio, anyway—without the knight and his squire as witnesses who walk into the action.”
The flash of recognition hit us both at the same time. I saw Ben’s knuckles go white on the steering wheel even as I felt the blood drain from my face. On the trail of Cardenio—Shakespeare’s Cervantes—Roz had walked out onstage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father and a few hours later, she’d died as old Hamlet had, poison poured in her ear, her green eyes wide with surprise.
But her killer wasn’t just playing Shakespeare. In a way, he was playing Cervantes, too, making himself a cruel twist on proud old Quixote, forcing other people into his favorite fictions, and those fictions into life.
Or death.
And it wasn’t funny at all.
“Do you think he knows the Cervantes connection?” asked Ben quietly.
I shook my head, hoping fervently that he didn’t. “Drive faster.”
19
THE DESERT SLID by in a blur. When the Eroica thundered to its close, I changed the disk to U2, weirdly apropos considering that the tallest living things I’d seen for what seemed like hours were the spare-tufted branches of the agave for which Bono and his band had named The Joshua Tree. “How soon till we come to civilization?” I asked as the music stretched through the car, its sound as wide and lonely as the landscape outside. “I should call Sir Henry.”
“Are you going to accidentally announce our whereabouts?”
“No,” I said with a grimace. “I won’t tell him where we are.”
Ben tossed me his cell phone.
“How come you got to keep yours?” I dem
anded, indignant. “Because it’s a BlackBerry, with all the bells and whistles?”
“There’s that. There’s also the fact that nobody’s looking for the phantom bloke it’s registered to.”
I punched in the number of Sir Henry’s cell, listening impatiently to the double British ring. Answer, damn it.
The line clicked through. “Ah, the Prodigal Daughter,” said Sir Henry. “Except that an intrinsic characteristic of prodigals is that they return. Which you most patently have not. You, reckless child, could not even be bothered to stay put.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Not so much as a text message to let me know you’re alive,” Sir Henry went on reproachfully.
“I’m calling you now.”
“Which means you want something,” he sniffed.
Guilt was an indulgence I had no time for. “The tox screen,” I admitted.
It took several minutes of wheedling before Sir Henry relented enough to tell me what he knew. The police had found something, but he didn’t know what. He’d only deduced that because DCI Sinclair, as he put it, had promoted himself from Inspector Grim to Inspector Grimmer, insisting with suspicious suddenness that he needed to speak to me about Hamlet. When Sinclair had proved rather rude about my unavailability, Sir Henry offered his explanatory services instead. Sinclair had made do, but he’d also made it plain that Sir Henry was no substitute for me, which probably hadn’t helped Sir Henry’s temper any, I reflected. He could be vain as a peacock.
If he couldn’t tell me for sure what the police had found, he knew what the Globe had lost. As he told me about the missing Folio, he was so blatantly trolling for a gasp of astonishment that I found it pettily satisfying to pull one from him instead.
“Harvard’s is missing too,” I said. “As of last night.”
He swore. “What about the copy of Chambers? Did you find that?”
“Yes.”
“Does it look useful?”
“Yes.”
I expected him to ask how, but it turned out to be his turn to surprise me. “Whatever you found, Kate, turn it over to the police. Let them look for the Folios.” When I said nothing, he sighed. “You don’t want the police to find the Folios, do you?”
“Roz didn’t want them to.”
“Roz didn’t know she’d be dead and you’d be in danger.”
Almost as apology, I said, “I’m just following one more lead.”
He sighed. “Try to remember that there’s a killer at the end of this particular rainbow. I don’t like you doing this alone.”
“I’m not.”
Silence billowed from the phone. “Should I be jealous or break out the champagne?” he asked, when he could speak.
“Both, if you like.”
“Then I must assume he is male. Who is he?”
“Somebody useful.”
“I hope that means that he’s a good shot,” said Sir Henry darkly. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything else, and you let me know when you’re coming home. Until then, be safe.” The doubt in his voice was not particularly encouraging. The line clicked off before I could say good-bye.
I handed back the phone, feeling both sad and relieved. Sir Henry had done me favor after favor, and in exchange, I had both let him down and left him in the dark. I wondered, briefly, if that could be labeled disloyalty, but I pushed that thought away. I had not lied, and there would be plenty of time to tell Sir Henry the truth.
If I ever figured out what it was.
“By any chance did you mean me, when you said ‘somebody useful’?” asked Ben.
“Sir Henry said that he hopes you’re a good shot. Are you?”
“When I have to be.”
“How did that happen?”
“Practice.”
“I told you a little about me. Turnabout’s only fair.” He said nothing, so I pressed on alone, adding up what I knew. “You own a high-risk security company, and you say you’re good at tracking and evasion. You’re a good shot by practice, but ‘it wasn’t exactly the army’ you were in. I don’t think you learned your trade as a cop; there’d be no point in being coy about it. Does that mean I get to take my pick between the IRA and the SAS?”
That pinprick spurred a response. “Do I sound Irish?”
“A few hours ago, you sounded like Elvis.”
“Maybe I am Elvis.”
“Ex–British secret service,” I said with a shake of my head. “One of them, at any rate. SAS or MI6? Those are the only two I can name.”
“I ain’t nothing but a hound dog,” he crooned, which sounded terrible up against U2.
Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I told him what Sir Henry had said about the tox screen. Abruptly, he stopped singing. “It makes sense of Sinclair’s need to reel you in,” he mused. “If he knows there’s been one murder, the last thing he’ll want is another. And the second-to-last thing will be some amateur bollixing up his investigation.”
Near the Arizona border, we stopped for gas in the town of Mesquite. I splashed water on my face in the restroom and washed the cut on my hand. At the checkout, I bought a cheap silver necklace (Genuine Handmade Indian). I wanted to wear the brooch, but the clinging fabric of my top wouldn’t hold its weight as a pin, and there was no way I was going back to wearing a jacket. I pinned the brooch around the chain and clasped the chain around my neck. It hung a little crookedly and no doubt spoiled the top’s neckline, but I liked the feel of it hanging there.
We crossed into Arizona, rising through a narrow river gorge carved through limestone. By the time we emerged onto the high desert plateau of southern Utah, the sun had dipped low enough to lengthen shadows and thin the heat.
We had not gone far when the car catapulted around a ramp and rumbled off down a dirt road. We bounced over a cattle guard and came to a stop among some cottonwoods, shielded from the interstate by the hump of a small hill.
“Elvis is ready to leave the building,” said Ben, switching off the ignition and stepping out of the car to rummage through his bag in the backseat. “You hear from Paris, you let me know.” Carrying a pile of clothes, he walked off behind one of the big trees.
For once, I didn’t argue. I found a sundress and some sandals in my suitcase. Walking behind another tree and down a bank into a shallow wash, I pulled off the blond wig and then stripped out of the damp jeans and pink Lycra top. My bra and panties were damp, too, so I shed those as well. For a moment, I stood naked in the late afternoon light, combing through my coppery hair with my hands and feeling the sweet wind spiced with juniper slip across me. Then I heard Ben’s footsteps crunching back toward the car. I wriggled quickly into the dress.
“Aphrodite rises,” said Ben as I scrambled back up the bank.
“Except that we’re not on an ocean,” I said tartly. “And so far as I know, no one’s been caught and castrated, giving me some foam to rise from.”
“You know how to eviscerate a compliment better than any woman I ever met,” he said, sounding amused. “But you still look pretty nice, like it or not.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
Just as evening was leaning into dusk, we came to Cedar City, bunched beneath some red bluffs between Bryce and Zion national parks. Its main street was standard western vintage, an ugly hodgepodge of motels, gas stations, and strip malls. One block off the main drag, though, a small Mormon town spread in orderly rows between streets laid out as Brigham Young had decreed: wide enough to turn a wagon train in. In Boston, I thought wearily, these streets would be four-lane highways thick with eighty-mile-per-hour traffic. Here, they were mostly empty, lined with neat lawns and huge old maple and ash trees. Set well back from the pavement, the houses were Tudor Revival or Craftsman Bungalow in style, wrapped with porches and strewn with climbing roses. Where the streets met the sidewalks, streams diverted from the mountains ran through deep gutters, so that the whole town rang with the quick trill of water.
At the edge of the Southern Utah University campus, w
e pulled into the Shakespearean Festival parking lot. Ben got out of the car slowly, rubbing his eyes as if he didn’t trust what they were showing him: Behind the curve of a sixties-mod auditorium rose the gables of an Elizabethan theater. Its sharply pitched roof was shingled rather than thatched, but it was alive with lamps that streamed yellow light like torches in a breeze.
Banners proclaimed that tonight’s show was Romeo and Juliet. I glanced once at the unburned theater with a twinge of envy and then set off around the auditorium at a trot, heading through a grove of tall spruce. Deep night had already coiled beneath the branches and for a moment I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. But I could hear laughter up ahead. As we emerged from the trees, we saw a crowd filling a wide lawn on the far side of the theater. People sat on benches and sprawled on the grass; some even perched in the trees. Munching on pastries and pies, they watched entranced as a troupe of sprightly actors in green chortled their way through a vaudeville skit about Julius Sneezer, a lost hankie, and a Brute of a head cold. Ignoring the show, wenches in long skirts and lace-up bodices strode through the crowd carrying wide baskets of food and calling, “Hot tarts under the trees!” and “Sweets for your sweetie!”
The skit came to a knee-slapping close. Lapping up whistles and applause, the actors launched into a jig. A trumpet blared from behind, and the troupe danced away through the trees without missing a beat, disappearing into the open gates of the theater. The audience stood, brushed itself off, and followed.
Within minutes, we stood alone on the lawn in the gathering dark. I pointed across a grassy dell to a small house, not so much Tudor Revival as Tudor: an exact replica of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon, right down to the soft mouse color of the walls and the thatch on the roof. “That’s it,” I said to Ben. “The archive.”
It was even more beautiful than I remembered. Stone steps trailed down across the dell, past a small pool and the willow leaning over it. These had not been here before. Nor had the flowers still glowing faintly in the fading light, massed in the way of English cottage gardens, though the plants belonged to the Rocky Mountain west—columbine, Indian paintbrush, and larkspur. At the edge of the pond, I glimpsed a golden flash of koi, mysterious as mermaids, and I stopped.