as his tanned, hairless chest—there was the strap!—passed slowly across the screen to his belly.
Only then did Tommy Campbell understand.
“This can’t be happening,” he whimpered—the merciless, deafening war drum in his chest a brutal herald of what lay over the horizon, of what he knew he was about to see. “I must be dreaming!”
“No, my Bacchus,” said the voice in the darkness. “You are finally awake.”
And as Tommy Campbell began to convulse, upon the terror of his confirmation, the young man’s heart all at once stopped beating forever.
EXHIBIT ONE
Bacchus
Chapter 1
Furious, Dr. Catherine Hildebrant threw the student’s cell phone out the window—watched it explode in a puff of smoke on the lawn outside the List Art Center.
“Another cell phone goes off in my class and you’ll be taken out back and shot!”
Then Cathy stopped.
There’s no lawn outside my window, she said to herself. No window in my classroom either.
The cell phone kept ringing—Beethoven, Für Elise.
“Miss Hildebrant?”
Cathy turned to face her art history class, who behind her back had changed to her classmates from the third grade at Eden Park Elementary School. Mrs. Miller was staring at her impatiently—show and tell, Cathy’s turn, anger at once replaced by panic. Cathy’s classmates began to snicker at her with whispers of “Ching-chong, ching-chong!” She could feel the fear tightening in her chest as the room brightened, as she stared down at the smooth white blob in her hands.
What is this? What did I bring for show and tell today?
Amidst the laughter and the cat-calls, the white blob suddenly burst outward into snow as Cathy’s classroom dissolved into the morning sun of her bedroom—her cell phone Für Elise–ing on the nightstand beside her.
She opened it.
“Hello?”
“Hildy?” It was her boss, Dr. Janet Polk, Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University—the only person in Providence who dared call Catherine Hildebrant “Hildy” to her face.
“Hey, Jan,” Cathy yawned. “Christ, what time is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
“My God, that wine must have been roofied. Was up late last night grading those final—”
“Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Hil, but did that FBI guy call you yet?”
“Who?”
“I think he said his name was Markham, or maybe it was Peckham. I’m not sure. Was kind of flustered by the whole thing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He just left here not five minutes ago—caught me and Dan turning the flower beds out back. He said that he was looking for information in connection with the disappearance of that football player.”
“Tommy Campbell?” Cathy asked, sitting up.
Although she was an attractive woman, Cathy could not deny that she had been a nerd all her life—never had a taste for sports; would much rather have listened to a lecture on Donatello than be caught dead at a football game in college. However, even she had become smitten with Rhode Island’s favorite son—that dashing, blond-haired, blue-eyed lightning bolt that nobody in the NFL could seem to catch. And more and more last season Cathy found herself doing something she had never dreamed of: sitting in front of a television watching football on a Sunday.
“Yes,” Janet said. “That’s him. Tommy Campbell—the one who disappeared back in January.”
“Why did the FBI want to talk to you?”
“He actually wanted to talk to you, Hildy. Said he needed to talk to an expert on Renaissance art—Italian Renaissance, to be exact.”
“Let me guess. They found him on a beach somewhere with a stolen Botticelli?”
Since Tommy Campbell had vanished without a trace nearly four months earlier, since the Boston Rebels had lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants in early February, theories about what had happened to the wide receiver were as numerous as the Rebel fans themselves—from his drowning in the waters of Foster Cove to his having been kidnapped by the coach of a rival team to his simply disappearing into anonymity à la Elvis Presley. Cathy had always suspected the latter, for she saw something of herself in the modest, soft-spoken “Mama’s boy” who the tabloids claimed still visited his parents whenever he got the chance—that desire not for fame and fortune, but just to live his life with those he loved, in obscurity, doing what made him happy.
“The FBI agent wouldn’t say anything more about it,” Janet sighed. “When I told him that it wasn’t my area, that you were our go-to-gal for the Italian thing, he said he knew that. He asked me where he could find you. Said he’d been by your office and your house already but you weren’t