O' Artful Death Part 2

"Bennett Dammers?" She wrote it down. "Thanks, Jamie. Have a great holiday if I don't see you before."

"You too. And let me know when you're ready to talk. I'm intrigued by your project."

It was was intriguing, Sweeney thought after she hung up the phone. And Toby was right. If there was anything in it, it could be a chapter in the book on American gravestone art she was working on. It was intoxicating stuff, a young girl killed by a famous artist and memorialized in a stone that used anachronistic gravestone iconography. Who was the anonymous artist? Why had he chosen those symbols? intriguing, Sweeney thought after she hung up the phone. And Toby was right. If there was anything in it, it could be a chapter in the book on American gravestone art she was working on. It was intoxicating stuff, a young girl killed by a famous artist and memorialized in a stone that used anachronistic gravestone iconography. Who was the anonymous artist? Why had he chosen those symbols?

But she was getting ahead of herself.

She went into the kitchen and tipped the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red above her emptied gla.s.s, enjoying the pleasing gurgle of liquid filling the tumbler, then curled up on the couch again and dialed Ruth Kimball's number.

The voice that answered this time sounded younger and when Sweeney asked if she could talk to Ruth Kimball, the woman on the other end was silent for a minute and then said, "No, I'm sorry."

In the background, Sweeney could hear a blaring television set. "My name's Sweeney St. George. We talked yesterday. She's expecting my call, actually."

Again there was a long silence and Sweeney heard, over the background noise, a man's voice demand to know who was calling.

"No one," the woman said. "Someone for Ma." Her slightly deep voice was weak and full of emotion.

Sweeney waited, and after another few moments of silence, she said, "h.e.l.lo? Are you there?"

"Yes," the woman said very softly. "Listen, I'm her daughter. Sherry. You can't ... I mean she's ... dead. She died yesterday."

Sweeney took a quick swig of her scotch. "I just ... I'm so sorry. It must have been sudden."

"Yeah, it was. Were you a friend of hers?"

"No. I'm working on a project and she was going to help me with it. I'm calling from Boston."

"Oh, yeah. She said. You were going to find out what happened to Mary. She was telling everyone about it."

"Can I ... Can I ask how she died?"

But she had gone too far. Sherry Kimball said nothing and then, as static crackled over the phone line, Sweeney heard a sob. "From the bullet in her head," she said angrily and broke down crying.

"I'm so sorry ..." But Sherry had put the phone down, leaving Sweeney listening to the insistent dial tone. She put the receiver back in its cradle and sat there for quite a long time, shaken and replaying the conversation over and over in her head. Again she heard Ruth Kimball's voice saying, They wouldn't want it to get out, would they? The colony folks They wouldn't want it to get out, would they? The colony folks, and then her daughter's, From the bullet in her head From the bullet in her head.

Guilty and shocked, she stood up and paced around her apartment, thinking. What were the chances that this woman's death was connected to Sweeney's questions about the gravestone? Sweeney didn't even know how she had died. From the bullet in her head From the bullet in her head. That sounded like someone had shot her. Was it possible ...?

She sat down again, conscious that a small locus of excitement had begun to radiate out from her stomach. For the past year she had gone about her life within its small boundaries, following her academic pursuits, her little ambitions. She had not felt anything like what she felt now, anything like this need to know, simply put, what had happened what had happened. She understood suddenly what people meant by burning curiosity. She felt warm, alive, afire. There was only one way to know.

Somewhere outside a car alarm sounded in the night. Sweeney finished her scotch, dialed Toby's number, and told him she'd love to spend Christmas in Vermont.

FOUR.

DECEMBER 13.

LATER, AFTER EVERYTHING that happened, Sweeney would remember that her first impression of Byzantium was of two separate landscapes, competing with each other for her attention. The first was the idyllic New England scene of calendars and magazines: the gentle, dipping hills, the peaked evergreens against the snow, the red barns and white farmhouses like exotic holly berries, nestled amongst the green. that happened, Sweeney would remember that her first impression of Byzantium was of two separate landscapes, competing with each other for her attention. The first was the idyllic New England scene of calendars and magazines: the gentle, dipping hills, the peaked evergreens against the snow, the red barns and white farmhouses like exotic holly berries, nestled amongst the green.

But as she and Toby followed the narrow, drift-lined dirt roads in her old Volkswagen Rabbit, she noticed another landscape. This one was made up of dilapidated ranch-style houses and trailers, paint peeling, aluminum roofing coming away at the edges. As they drove through one small town, a group of sullen teenagers, cigarette smoke curling above their heads, stood glaring at pa.s.sing cars. Sweeney watched them in her rearview mirror until they disappeared.

They had left Boston a little before noon and by two they were almost there. As they pa.s.sed a huge dairy farm, the black-and-white cows turning to watch them disinterestedly, she said, "Tell me about your aunt and uncle. What are they like?"

"What are they like?" He thought for a moment. "When I was a kid, I thought they were the coolest adults I'd ever met. Patch is six years younger than my mom, so he and Britta were still in their early twenties by the time I was aware of them. Compared to all of my mom's hippie friends, they were like movie stars. He was the champion of the Middlebury ski team and had almost been in the Olympics. Britta had this long blond hair that went down to her waist and she was nice to me, always buying me presents and playing with me. There's something very fairy princess about her. I had a huge crush on her, of course. I used to have these elaborate fantasies that Patch had been in a skiing accident and that she and I lived together in Vermont."

"Dirty little boy."

"Well, yeah. Patch was great, too, though, adolescent fantasies aside. The thing I always loved about them when I was a kid was that they made a big deal out of things, you know? Everything was an event. You didn't just have a birthday, Patch would plan a treasure hunt and he and all the neighbors would put on a play for you. They didn't just get a Christmas tree, they organized an expedition into the woods to cut one down and had eggnog and cookies while they put it up."

"What do they do for work? Does Patch help run the auction house?" Toby's grandfather had founded Wentworth Auctioneers, a fine art auction house in Boston.

"Only in the sense that he goes to a few board meetings and writes off his vacations as buying trips. Britta comes from money and Patch always had some from my grandparents. He studied painting after he gave up skiing compet.i.tively and he has a studio in the house, but I'm not sure he's painting all that much these days. I asked him if he was working on anything when I saw him at Thanksgiving and he was kind of weird about it. He always used to talk about writing a novel, too."

"What about your cousins? How old are they?"

"The twins are seventeen and Gwinny's fourteen now, I think. The boys are fun, they're into outdoorsy stuff, hunting and snowmobiling and all that. Gwinny is something. She was the most solemn little child and so beautiful, like some kind of mythical heroine. She's so different from Britta. You'll see what I mean."

Listening to him, Sweeney remembered the moment they'd become friends. On her second night of college, she had been sitting with a group of other freshmen in someone's dorm room, drinking gin and tonics and trading childhoods. She recalled everything about the little party, the damp smell of the dorms, the clean bite of the c.o.c.ktails and the way everyone except for her and Toby had given their resumes in a rush of suburban town names, boarding schools and vacation spots.

She thought suddenly of looking through the prep school yearbook of her roommate on one of those early days. She had been surprised to discover that each graduate had a whole page to himself or herself. The pages were decorated with candid black-and-white photos of wholesome looking teenagers, supplemented by sun-rich snapshots of blond toddlers on eastern beaches, and song lyrics or cryptic messages to friends. Sweeney's own high school yearbook, hidden beneath her warmest winter sweater in her dorm room closet, was from a public high school in Des Moines, Iowa, where Sweeney's mother had been appearing in a production Sweeney could not now remember the name of. She had attended the school for only six months before her graduation, a year early, at seventeen. She recognized almost none of the posed, rigid portraits between those pages, the girls heavily made up, their skin airbrushed to a sheen. Her own picture was embarra.s.sing; she stared out, startled and alone, her hair rising in a bright, frizzy aura around her head, her retouched face devoid of her freckles, or of any life at all.

On that second night, one of the girls on Sweeney's hall had asked Toby where he was from. "Everywhere and nowhere," he'd said. Everyone but Sweeney thought he was being flip. She'd gotten drunk that night and she and Toby exchanged the details of their two strange, itinerant childhoods.

Sweeney's parents, a well-known American painter who had killed himself when Sweeney was thirteen, and a little-known English actress, had never been married. Toby's, a rebellious rich girl and an Italian poet, had stayed married for the first year of his life, then gone their separate ways, the poet back to Italy and the rich girl to a Berkeley commune where Toby had spent parts of his childhood. Both Sweeney and Toby were ecstatic to be at college; when their friends moaned about being homesick or overwhelmed with work, they sought each other out, because it seemed that only they knew the joy of a compact dorm room, the late night silence of the library, an early morning walk beside the river. In the seventeen years she'd been alive to that point, she hadn't had many best friends; her mother had moved them too impulsively around the country for that. Toby's friends.h.i.+p had been a delicious novelty. She remembered the feeling of antic.i.p.ation before seeing him back then, of looking forward to their wild, free-ranging conversations. Looking over at him, she noticed a small, missed patch of whiskers on his right cheek. It touched her somehow and she flushed wildly. Jesus! What was with her lately?

"Hey," she said. "They don't know about my father, do they?"

"No. Do you want me to tell them?"

"Not unless they ask."

They were silent for a few minutes, watching the landscape widen out through the car windows. "That's the Green River," Toby said, pointing to the swathe of frozen water that cut the land in two along the road. On both banks, the land was flat and bare beneath its white frosting, with stubbly stalks of faded corn or dead gra.s.s poking up here and there. But past the flood plain, the land rose quickly, crumpling into gentle hills that, even under snow, reminded Sweeney of Italian landscapes. Beyond were the steeper slopes, shaped by time and man and striped with winding trails. They were in ski country.

"It's beautiful. I almost recognize it from the painting."

"The painting" was a landscape by the Byzantium watercolorist Marcus Granger that Toby had hanging above the bed in his apartment. It was a winter scene, of a stand of bare trees and beyond, the white hills, painted softly in pale lavenders and blues. There was about the painting-and about the landscape that inspired it-something that made Sweeney feel lonely and full of awe.

"Okay, turn here," Toby said. She slowed the car and turned right onto a dirt road. Up ahead was the mouth of a covered bridge. A green sign read "Private Road. No Trespa.s.sing," and next to it was a row of six large, metal mailboxes. The car b.u.mped over the wooden floor of the bridge and it was dark for a moment as they crossed over a wide brook rus.h.i.+ng swiftly beneath them, carrying broken slabs of ice as flotsam.

"We're on The Island now," Toby said when they emerged. "It isn't really an island, it's just that the brook kind of bows out from the river and then comes back in again. The only way on and off is over the bridge. When I was a kid, I loved the idea that we were cut off from everybody. Oh, that's the Kimb.a.l.l.s'." He pointed to a white farmhouse set back from the road. Sweeney turned quickly and had an impression of a ramshackle house, a messy yard filled with old cars. A police car sat in the driveway.

Toby gestured for her to turn onto a driveway flanked by two marble posts and lined with white birch trees, bare of leaves and bending gracefully in the wind.

As they came out of the trees, a large yellow-s.h.i.+ngled mansion came into sight in the distance. It was of typical high Victorian construction, a Queen Anne with slate roofs and a wraparound porch and turrets on the third floor, a confection of lacy trim and b.u.t.tery s.h.i.+ngles. Architecturally, it didn't fit with the colonial farmhouses and federal-style homes she'd seen, and it seemed to Sweeney somehow too fragile for the wild landscape.

They were getting out of the car when three giant Newfoundlands, s.h.a.ggy and black, came bounding around the side of the house, vibrating around Sweeney and Toby's shoulders, barking and jumping and drooling.

"Their names are Sheraton, Chippendale and Hepplewhite. I swear to G.o.d. They're dumber than chairs, too." He handed Sweeney her suitcase so he could fight off one of the dogs. "Well, let's go in and say hi to everyone."

As they climbed the porch stairs, Sweeney looked back for a minute at the dark woods and gray sky. It was still early afternoon, yet there was something about the encroaching trees that made Birch Lane seem vulnerable, as though the darkness was trying to eclipse the golden house. The dogs, lured away by a squirrel darting across the snow-covered lawn and around the back of the house, disappeared, leaving Toby and Sweeney at the front door.

"That's strange. They always used to leave the house open," Toby said, trying the doork.n.o.b. He lifted a giant bra.s.s knocker in the shape of a tragic Greek mask and let it fall with a hollow thump on the s.h.i.+ning black wood. Iron porch furniture, missing its cus.h.i.+ons, was scattered around on the porch and Sweeney found herself imagining what it was like to sit here in the summer, gazing across green fields. Toby knocked again.

n.o.body came.

"I don't know why it's locked," he said. "But I guess we should go around to the kitchen door. The house is so big that it's hard to hear someone at the front."

She followed him around the side of the house, stepping carefully on a path of slate flagstones that had been shoveled of snow. As they climbed the back porch steps, Toby stopped and pointed over the railing, saying "There are the gardens."

Sweeney looked out on a large red barn, a cl.u.s.ter of smaller buildings, and a white patchwork quilt of fields, sloping to the river in the distance. Nearer to the house was a stone patio, leading down to a forlorn, empty fountain. A few tall, dead plants poked out of the snow, and a high evergreen hedge made a kind of lane leading away from the house toward the woods. "You can't see it from here, but that's where the cemetery is," Toby said, "and way beyond, into the woods and down by the river, is my great-grandfather's old studio."

He opened the back door and led the way into a room filled with boots and parkas and sporting equipment. They put the bags down and took off their boots and coats. "Let's say hi first and then we'll take the bags up," he said, opening the door to the kitchen.

Immediately upon entering the huge kitchen they were a.s.saulted by a wave of warmth from the hotly burning woodstove against one wall and the delicious odors of bread and coffee. After the frigid outdoor air and empty, stark landscape, the house was an oasis of sensual bliss. Sweeney followed Toby through an arched doorway into a big entryway at the front of the house.

The foyer, which was bigger than Sweeney's entire one thousand-square-foot apartment, was broken in half by a wide staircase that rose majestically and spread into a railing running around the outside of a hallway on the second floor. Intricately carved dark wood paneling covered the walls of the entryway, surrounding doorways and an enormous fireplace against one wall, and the s.p.a.ce opened into a large living room carpeted in a gaudy Victorian reproduction carpet of cream and rose. The light spots on the carpet were splashed with red, blue, purple and green light filtering through a giant stained gla.s.s window on one wall, and the effect disturbed Sweeney. It looked like spilled wine or blood. Through another doorway, she caught sight of a heavy wooden banquet table and high-backed chairs.

There was an air of Victorian formality about the house, and everywhere she looked, Sweeney found beautiful and strange things, antiques and pottery and paintings, the old mixed with the new. An abstract wash of blues and greens hanging on one wall was mirrored on its opposite by what looked like a Bierstadt. Sweeney stepped up to it. It was a Bierstadt. She rose her eyebrows at Toby and pointed. Then she caught sight of a suit of armor standing at the foot of the staircase.

"That's Sir Brian," Toby whispered. "I forgot to tell you about the family's King Arthur thing. Started with my great-grandfather, who installed poor Brian here when he built the house, but Patch is really gung-ho, named all the kids after Arthurian characters. The twins are Tristram and Galahad, but everyone calls them Trip and Gally. Gwinny's really Guinevere."

In the living room, two more suits of armor flanked the fireplace and a set of crossed swords decorated one wall. When Sweeney stepped up to the stained gla.s.s window, she saw that it depicted the young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. On a small table against one wall was a giant chess set, the pieces exquisitely painted medieval characters, kings and queens and silvery knights. A quarter-finished jigsaw puzzle was spread out on a low coffee table. When Sweeney leaned over it, she picked out a horse and a few spots of s.h.i.+ning armor.

Below the Knights of the Round Table motif, there was a kind of sub-layer of lovely things everywhere Sweeney looked. Venetian gla.s.s paperweights on the coffee table, a menagerie of crystal animals on a bookshelf, antique books piled on every surface. And on the walls were wonderful pieces of art, too much to take in. The cluttered richness made her dizzy.

The scream, when it came, was such a surprise that Sweeney screamed back, then grabbed Toby's arm to keep herself from falling into a side table.

A thin blonde woman stood in the doorway, one hand to her chest, the other one clutching a long rifle. She was flushed and breathing hard. Toby took the gun from her and tried to hug her, but she remained stiff and frozen, looking from Toby to Sweeney and back again.

"It's just us, Brit," he said, reaching behind him to lay the rifle on the floor against a wall. "This is my friend Sweeney."

But Britta Wentworth did not smile and say it was nice to meet Sweeney and apologize for having been startled by their entrance. Instead, she continued to stare at them with her small, hard eyes that reminded Sweeney of sapphires, panting and looking very much like a frightened horse. Her nostrils flared.

"Oh G.o.d," she said. "I thought you were the burglar."

FIVE.

"WE'VE BEEN HAVING these burglaries in the colony," Britta explained, the rifle-an early Christmas present for the boys, she'd told them-stowed safely in the hall closet. The rest of the household had returned from a skiing expedition and they were all sitting around the huge kitchen table hearing about Toby and Sweeney's arrival. "And when I heard the door open, I thought it was ... I thought someone had broken in." these burglaries in the colony," Britta explained, the rifle-an early Christmas present for the boys, she'd told them-stowed safely in the hall closet. The rest of the household had returned from a skiing expedition and they were all sitting around the huge kitchen table hearing about Toby and Sweeney's arrival. "And when I heard the door open, I thought it was ... I thought someone had broken in."

Standing in front of the window, Toby's aunt now reminded Sweeney of a greyhound in her elegant beige fair isle sweater and tan wool pants. Her hair was a precisely highlighted blond bob, her figure thin and flat-chested. Her face would have been pretty but for the way her skin seemed drawn across her bones, her mouth pinched and grim, the lines like scars. Her face seemed startled, as the faces of very pretty women are, by the aging process, Sweeney thought. Her hand, when she had calmed down enough to shake Sweeney's, was like the foot of a small animal, light and fragile. It was so cool, it felt nearly dead.

"Everybody's a little on edge," said Toby's uncle nervously. "We're about the only house that hasn't been broken into." He glanced at his wife. "And then one of our neighbors died last week. Actually you know her, Toby. Ruth Kimball. It's just got everyone a little, well nervous, I guess."

Sweeney met Toby's dark eyes across the table. For reasons she hadn't quite identified, she had decided not to tell him about her conversations with Ruth and Sherry Kimball. She tried to affect a look of shock and turned to Patch Wentworth.

Where his wife seemed frail, Patch had a youthful brawny blondness and a crooked grin that reminded Sweeney a bit of Toby's. Beneath the rolled-up cuffs of his flannel s.h.i.+rt, his forearms were strong and sinewy. His strawberry blond hair was laced with even paler white and his close-cropped beard gave him an earnest, wholesome look. But there was a superficiality about him; he didn't look right at her, but rather over her shoulder and twice he had walked away while Sweeney was in the middle of a sentence.

"Ruth Kimball? That's strange," Toby said. "We were just talking about her. I was telling Sweeney about Mary Denholm's gravestone. What happened?"

"It seems like she probably did it herself. ... It was uh ... with a gun," Britta said quietly, looking over at the children. "But the police aren't entirely sure."

"That's because whenever someone dies of a gunshot wound, they have to investigate it as a possible homicide," Gwinny said authoritatively. "Everybody knows that."

Her father smiled.

Toby's youngest cousin was tall and long-limbed, with fine features and straight light brown hair, streaked with blond and hanging to her waist. She had the lithe model's frame that half of the girls in Sweeney's freshman cla.s.ses seemed to have nowadays, but instead of the ubiquitous jeans and a sweater, hers was draped in a long green velvet dress, embroidered with Celtic designs. She had, Sweeney decided, ironic eyes.

Then there were the boys. As she always did when she met a pair of identical twins, Sweeney thought about how strange it must be not to own your looks. They were very blond, with blue eyes and square faces like Patch. And though they were almost as tall as Sweeney, they seemed somehow like unfinished statues, as though the artist had walked away before completing the musculature. Their faces were identical, but they were easy to tell apart. Gally had his shoulder-length hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing a tie-dyed T-s.h.i.+rt and jeans. Trip was clean-cut, with short hair, and was wearing a neatly ironed b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt. Gally was quiet and hesitant, and Trip struck her as charming and somewhat flirtatious. Their names suited them somehow, Sweeney thought. Or perhaps they had come to suit their names.

When Patch introduced the boys to Sweeney, he had said, "This is Trip, the actor of the family, and Gally here is going to be the archaeologist. Isn't that right, Gal?" Gally had shot his father a look that Sweeney fully expected to wither the Christmas cactus in the middle of the kitchen table.

Toby was still looking shocked. "Why would she kill herself?"

"She's been on her own since her husband died. She had money troubles, we think." Britta stood up suddenly and took her coffee cup over to the sink with an air of finality.

But her answer had gotten Sweeney's attention. "What kind of money troubles?"

Patch said, "Oh, she wanted to sell some of her land and put up condominiums. I don't remember if we told you about it at Thanksgiving, Toby. Anyway, all the neighbors on The Island were against it, of course. Can you imagine? They were going to call it Byzantium Acres or some such nonsense. The colony is the best thing this town has going for it and they wanted to blight the landscape with concrete and steel. The right of way has to be on our land, so at first we thought we were safe, but there was a mix-up with a deed and ... anyway, obviously we were going to fight it." Patch frowned, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners, and Toby turned the conversation back to the burglaries.

"They started in the summer. Just after the Fourth of July," Patch said. "Everyone thought that it must be kids from town fooling around. But they've continued and they only seem to target the colony. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago."

"Anything valuable get taken?" Toby asked.

"Stereos, TVs, things like that, mostly. And a few pieces of art. Our friends the Rapaccis lost six or seven pieces, but nothing really valuable. They had a Leger hanging on the wall right next to this little painting by my grandfather-a not-very-good portrait, worth next to nothing-and the burglars took my grandfather's. He would have been pleased, anyway. He didn't like the French." The joke fell flat.

"Is there any idea about who it is?" Sweeney asked.

"Oh, I think the police know who it is. Sherry, Ruth Kimball's daughter, has this boyfriend. He's got some fairly unsavory characters who are always over at the house."

"Carl," Gwinny said matter-of-factly. "He's a dirtbag."

"Yes. Carl." Her father p.r.o.nounced the name with the same air of distaste. "Anyway, it would be one thing if it were just an epidemic of burglaries but, as I said, it seems like someone's only targeting the houses in the colony. I've lived here off and on since I was a child and so have most of our friends. Now we feel as though someone's trying to run us out of town. There have been some other things that have contributed to it, of course, but it's the burglaries that have everyone up in arms."

Sweeney looked up at her and saw an expression of raw fear pa.s.s quickly across Britta's face.