Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Действие происходит в наше время. Героиня бросила аспирантуру у Роз ради карьеры театрального режиссера.

We stopped at the curb, staring across the street at my hotel.
“Is that where you’re staying?” Ben shouted over the din.
I nodded and stepped into the street.
He put his hand on my arm. “Under your own name?”
“Mona Lisa’s,” I snapped, licking dry lips. “Whose do you think?”
“You can’t go back there.”
“The police don’t—”
“We have more to worry about than the police.”
I opened my mouth to retort – and swallowed it. Kate the cursed, the killer had whispered in my ear. He knew my name. If he went looking for me, the Inn at Harvard – the hotel closest to the libraries – would be the first place he’d check. But where else could I go?
“My place,” said Ben.
There was no other real choice. We sped across Mass Ave and swung up Bow Street to Mount Auburn and then across JFK, hurrying across the back end of Harvard Square. He was staying by the river, at the Charles Hotel. An odd mix of airy urban chic and New England farmhouse, the Charles was the most luxurious hotel in Cambridge, the place where royalty and CEOs stayed when they came to visit their children or their doctors at Harvard. A place graduate students could only dream about, squeezed into airless apartments in Somerville. I had never been inside one of the rooms.
Ben didn’t have a room; he had a suite. Stepping inside, I had an impression of purple couches, tall black ladderback chairs standing sentinel around a dining room table covered at one end with a laptop and a scattering of papers. Beyond, a bank of windows looked out over the glitter of the city. The cupolas of the river houses still glowed like lanterns, though silver streaks of dawn were already splintering the eastern sky.
Clasping the book tight, I stood just inside the door. “Why should I trust you,” I asked again.
“You have every reason for doubt,” said Ben. “But if I’d wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it already. Like I said, Roz wanted you protected, and she hired me.
“Anyone could say that.” Somewhere along the line, his pistol had disappeared from view.
Stepping swiftly past me, he closed the door. He was tall, I suddenly realized, and his green eyes were wide-set. He cleared his throat. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
Roz might as well have handed him a letter of introduction. It was her favorite Shakespearean quotation, though she shied from admitting it on the grounds that favorite quotations were, in general, sentimental, bourgeois, and predictable. Nevertheless, that snippet from Julius Caesar summed up the serendipitous philosophy which she lived by and had tried to instill in me. Though when I’d actually lived up to it – grabbing the reins of a fleeting opportunity in the theater – she’d howled in protest, branding my departure from academe as abandonment, cowardice, and betrayal. I’d flung those words from Caesar in her face the night we parted. It was only later that I’d realized who said them in the play: Brutus, the disciple turned assassin.