O' Artful Death Part 20

August 31, 1890If I thought that the events of yesterday were strange, then I was mistaken, for today they grew even stranger. I awoke early, intent on going down to the studio to work for a few hours before breakfast, but when I got there, M. was already there and refused to let me in.I know not whether it was the events of the past days or the snub I had received at the hands of J.L.B., but I found myself seized with a violent storm of anger and I pushed through the door, telling him that he had hired me to do a job and had no right to stop me from doing it. I scolded him for treating me so poorly and said that if he persisted in his behavior, I would a.s.sume that he had something to hide and I would accuse him publicly of murdering Miss Denholm. I blush to think of it now. I was so angry, I did not stop to weigh my words, and I went on at him like a fury, scolding and shrill. I said that I thought it was very strange that J.L.B. had left so suddenly and that I had overheard that conversation between him and G. and J.L.B. and that I had my suspicions about Miss Denholm's death. And then I burst in to the studio and sitting there in the center was the oddest statue I have ever seen.It was a life-sized likeness of Miss Denholm, lying in a shallow boat and looking quite dead. Hovering over her was a horrible figure of Death, leering and grinning and looking down at her as though he were about to seduce her. It was such a strange thing that I gasped and looked up at M., accusing him of terrible things.But he only laughed quietly and told me I had got it all wrong and that he was going to tell me a story but that I musn't ever tell the story to anyone.Quite soon after J.L.B. arrived in Byzantium, he said, he had asked Miss Mary Denholm to sit for him and they had fallen in love. M. said that he knew I wouldn't be so silly as to ask questions about that or about why he hadn't gone to her parents to ask for her hand or something like that. The truth was that they had fallen in love and within a few months, Mary found that she was going to have a child.Now, this was a problem for everyone. People in town would have been horrified, of course, as I was. Mary's parents were against the artists and this would have given them more ammunition against them. But that wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that Mary and J.L.B. announced that they wouldn't just get married and pretend that the baby had been born early. They would be honest, they said, and tell anyone who asked the truth about themselves, because they didn't think there was anything shameful about their love. They were going to tell the truth and run away to Europe, they said.M. hadn't ever gotten along with her parents, but he knew what the news of their daughter running away with an artist would do to their reputation in town. Then there was Ethel Denholm. As much as M. and G.-who had been told of the difficulty as well-disapproved of what they liked to call "our G.o.dd.a.m.ned society's morals" they couldn't be a party to ruining the marriage prospects and reputation of an innocent girl. So M. and G. came up with a plan. They would pretend that Mary Denholm had met with an accident and had died. It would be easy for Gilmartin to report that he had found her body in the river. Dr. Sparr, who was a doctor, after all, and knew all about delicate situations, would do whatever was necessary to make it all right and they would weight the coffin and have a sham funeral. Mary's parents would have to be told, of course, but M. said that he had believed that they would go along with it-it was better than the truth-and they had.It took me some moments to absorb this grand deception and I had many questions that I asked M. about.Then I turned to the fantastic stone and asked him what on earth it was. He smiled and said that Mary and J.L.B. had gone along with the plan, but on one condition. They wanted to be able to make Mary's gravestone. And they wanted to make a gravestone the like of which had never been seen before. J.L.B. and Gilmartin had lately gotten very interested in what they liked to call "drawing the dead," but was really just painting or sculpting people to look as though they were dead. They had gotten the idea from some painters J.L.B. had known in England when he was a boy and they had been mucking about with it all summer, making people pretend they were dead so they could sketch them, and so they could get an idea of how dead limbs fell and how dead skin looked. Gilmartin even had Mary get into a cold tub and waited until her skin was blue and wrinkled before he let her go. She caught a terrible cold and J.L.B. said it was her sacrifice for art.In any case, J.L.B. and Mary decided that this was the stone that was to mark her grave. He had been working feverishly at it for the weeks before they were to leave and toward the end, as he was finis.h.i.+ng it, J.L.B. was in such a hurry that he forgot to sign it.It was such an incredible, fantastical story that by the time I returned to the house, I could scarcely believe it had not been a dream and I sat down immediately to write these words, in order to convince myself.

September 3, 1890Today, Mary Denholm's very odd gravestone was put in place down in the little island cemetery. We were quite an odd party watching its installation and her parents looked embarra.s.sed by it, as though it were a monstrosity. Afterward, I heard G. and Louis Denholm saying something about a piece of land and when I asked M. about it, he said that Louis Denholm had been trying to get G. to buy a worthless strip of land between the two properties for years and that now it looked as though he would have to do it, to secure Mr. Denholm's silence.M. and G. have once again implored me to be silent on the subject of J.L.B. and Miss Mary Denholm and I have decided to tear these pages from my diary in order to keep them from being read by unintended eyes. I shall keep them in a secret hiding spot, should I ever need proof of these events.

"Ruth Kimball didn't know," Sweeney said, thinking out loud. "At least I don't think she did. She believed that one of the artists had killed Mary."

"Ethel might not have known," Ian said.

"You're right. The parents probably wouldn't have told her. But I think she must have picked up on something, thought there was something odd about her cousin's death, and I think she must have talked to her granddaughter, Ruth Kimball, about her suspicions. Why didn't you say something?"

"Well, once I'd figured this all out, I was a bit paralyzed. I thought if I could meet Mrs. Kimball and kind of see what the situation was, it would be easier to figure out what to do next. Then it got complicated, you see. After researching the family at the historical society, I realized that Ethel was a cousin, not a sister, and that Mary was the only direct descendant. I didn't know if they knew this or not and I didn't want them to think I was after their house or something. I don't know. It seems so silly now, but I just thought that I should break it to them more, I don't know, more gently. After Christmas."

"And then Ruth Kimball died."

"Exactly. And there seemed to be some suspicion about whether it was suicide. By then, I couldn't come out with this big announcement, you know 'Surprise! Mary wasn't really dead. h.e.l.lo! I'm your long, lost relative.' "

"G.o.d, it's incredible. So what happened to Mary and Jean Luc? He was so talented. Why haven't we ever heard of him?"

"He was talented. But his career seems to have ended when they moved back to Europe. I always had the idea that she became his art. It was a great love, you know. Unusual in those days. But, of course, they'd married for love, and they'd sacrificed much for it. He came into some family money and they were able to live on that. Mary, I'm afraid, wasn't a very good poet, but they had this little medieval society and they put on plays and made little books and things. I have a few of them. What are we going to tell Patch and Britta?"

"I think we better keep it between us for now," Sweeney said. "It might just muddy the waters."

He nodded and they were both silent for a minute.

"So that's that then," he said. "You know my secret. Have you stopped thinking I'm a murderer?"

"Yes." She smiled. "But what I can't figure out is why you always seemed to be watching me. And why you went to Boston."

"I thought-I think-that you're interesting," he said simply. "I was telling you the truth before. I had to go to Boston anyway and I just ... I just wanted to see where you lived." He was unashamed, and his open face made her shrink back as though she had seen something ugly or predatory there. He saw her do it and he stood up and went over to the fireplace, where he fiddled with a little bra.s.s Buddha sitting on the mantel.

"But what about the murders?" she said, thinking out loud, trying to fill the awkward silence. "Ruth Kimball's death-and Sabina's-they must be related to something else. Unless someone found out that you were related to the Kimb.a.l.l.s and ... But that doesn't make sense."

He took her hand and she found herself terrified, wracked with vertigo and uncertainty. And when he led her upstairs and took her pajamas off, carefully as though he didn't want to wrinkle them, and then lay her down on his bed and kissed her, not quite so carefully this time, she found herself crying, from relief and release and for the sadness of the world, and the futility of knowing what she now knew.

He kissed her face, his lips tasting the saltiness of her tears, and stroked a circle around the nipple of her left breast. He looked into her eyes as she s.h.i.+vered underneath him. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist, kissing him and pus.h.i.+ng down his pajama bottoms so he could move into her. They struggled together on the bed, making love until they remembered what could happen and he pulled away from her just as her body exploded in joy, light breaking through the shadow of death.

THIRTY.

DECEMBER 24.

THAT NEXT MORNING they went out the back door into the fresh air, holding hands, still sleepy and shy with each other. The sun hovered low over the river. The air was cold and dry. A granular layer of new snow had fallen during the night and it lay on top of the frozen crust that had been there, blowing this way and that when the wind came up. they went out the back door into the fresh air, holding hands, still sleepy and shy with each other. The sun hovered low over the river. The air was cold and dry. A granular layer of new snow had fallen during the night and it lay on top of the frozen crust that had been there, blowing this way and that when the wind came up.

"It's lovely this early in the morning," Ian said awkwardly. Her stomach fluttered with nervousness. She felt suddenly panicked. What did he want from her now? What would he expect? She had never felt this way with Colm. There had never been a moment of awkwardness or strangeness after that first pint of Guinness, which had turned into a drunken twenty-four-hour festival of s.e.x, talking and singing after which they had drifted into love and couplehood. It had been impossible to feel awkward around Colm. For one thing, he was always talking, carrying you along on his crazy tide of conversation. They had never been silent together, never been still.

Now, walking along the wooded path to the cemetery, he said, "I dreamt of you last night."

"You did?" Sweeney felt a flash of irritation. If he said, "And then I woke up and there you were," she would scream.

But he said, "Yes. Quite a dirty little scenario, actually. I don't think I'll tell you."

Sweeney laughed. "I'm wondering what was left for your subconscious to imagine, after the actual events of last night."

"My subconscious has quite a good imagination."

When they reached the cemetery, they went to stand in front of Mary's monument-Sweeney realized she would have to stop thinking of it as a gravestone-which had started it all.

"Isn't it odd to think that it doesn't really mark a grave?"

"It is odd," Ian said. "She has a real one, you know. In Suss.e.x. It's a much more typical stone, some flower garlands at the top and her name and dates. She's buried next to Jean Luc."

They turned to the stones of the rest of the Denholm family. "I wonder what it was like for her parents," Ian said. "Never seeing their child again, but knowing that she was alive somewhere, that she had a child they would never see. I suppose if they were proper Victorians, they would have blamed her for being of loose morals and kind of written her off. But it must have been hard."

Sweeney had been rereading the words engraved on Elizabeth Denholm's simple marble stone. "Her mother's stone. Look. I didn't really read read it before." it before."

"O' Artful Death," Ian read. Ian read.

"It's everything I needed to know," Sweeney said softly.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that it's lamenting what they did, I think. Artful Death Artful Death. Lying Death. Mary's death was a lie. Perhaps it reflected Louis's sadness, too. They thought that Death, i.e. Mary going away, would bring them peace, or resolution at least. But that was a lie, too."

Ian turned to Louis Denholm's stone. "Her father's was awfully dark wasn't it? The first time I saw it, I felt quite sorry for Mary."

He cleared some snow away from the stone and read out loud.

Think my friends when this you see How Death's dark deed hath slayed me He is a thief and taketh flight Beneath the cover of the night "It's ..." Sweeney stared at it, confused.

"What?" He had heard the strangeness in her voice.

"Nothing, it's just that it's very odd."

They walked around, looking at some of the other stones. "Is it weird for you to think that you're related to them?" she asked him.

"I suppose it is. I hadn't thought of it like that."

"Will you tell Sherry Kimball? You'll have to."

"I've been thinking about that. I'll have to tell Patch and Britta as well."

"I think Patch may have suspected that there was something wrong anyway," Sweeney said. "I've had the feeling, ever since I got here, that he didn't want me to look into this thing. Do you suppose he suspected that his grandfather had had something to do with Mary's death, the way I did?"

"It's possible. He may also have been nervous about you looking into old family history because of this thing with the land and the condominiums and all."

She looked up at him.

"Sweeney?"

"Yes?"

"What's wrong? You've an odd expression on your face."

"I'd forgotten about the thing with the land. That's all."

"You look as though you'd seen a ghost."

She walked around in a little circle, something that helped her to think. "It's just that I had been a.s.suming that Ruth Kimball and Sabina were murdered because they knew something about Mary's death. But we now know they weren't killed because of Mary. So I have to ask myself why they were killed. And it just occurred to me that I'd forgotten about the whole thing with the land."

"And ...?" He was looking at her with a concerned expression on his face.

"And, it's in the missing diary pages. Remember? Myra Benton asked Morgan about the land and he said that Gilmartin was going to buy it from Louis Denholm."

Sweeney paused. "What did Patch tell you about it?"

Ian hesitated for a moment. "What he told you, I think. That he had always thought he owned the piece of land, but when they went and looked, no deed had ever been recorded and it looked like it was actually still owned by Ruth Kimball. So he decided to fight this condo thing from the angle of its intrinsic historical value. State regulations against development and all that. You were there, weren't you? Sweeney?"

But she had gone back to Louis Denholm's gravestone and now she was standing in front of it and reading the words over and over again to herself. "Come here," she said. "Take a look at this."

She pointed to the words on the stone. "The language is wrong. 'Hath?' 'Taketh?' That's eighteenth century, not nineteenth. It's like he was drawing attention to it. And 'Death's dark deed deed.' Now, I have never in my entire life heard of the physical experience of death described as Death's dark deed deed. It's wrong. It doesn't make sense."

Sweeney took off her right glove and traced four letters with her bare finger. The stone was smooth and cold.

"I'm saying that it's a puzzle. The word deed deed is in there for a reason. Maybe Mary was more her father's daughter than we thought. Maybe he's trying to tell us where that deed is." is in there for a reason. Maybe Mary was more her father's daughter than we thought. Maybe he's trying to tell us where that deed is."

IAN LOOKED SKEPTICAL. "But why would he want people to know where the deed is? Or, what I mean is, why would he hide the deed in the first place?"

Sweeney said honestly, "I don't know. Patch said that his father told him that his grandfather bought the piece of land off Louis Denholm. But when they went to look, the deed was never recorded. Now, according to Patch, if they could find the deed, they could stop the development. So it's important."

"But Louis Denholm wouldn't have known that."

"I know, but I feel I feel like it's important." like it's important."

"Sweeney ..."

"Look, just humor me, okay? I once wrote about a gravestone where the name of the man's wife was spelled out by the first letter of each line of the epitaph," Sweeney said. " 'Bertha.' And the epitaph was framed as a question, asking if anyone knew the name of the 'fiend'-that was the word it used-who was responsible for his death by poisoning. And if you put it together, it says 'Bertha.' So what do the first letters spell, if you put them together?" She took a pencil from her jacket pocket and wrote them down on a sc.r.a.p of paper as she read out loud. " 'T-H-H-B' I don't think that's it."

"All right," Ian said, resigned. "If it is a hidden message, I think you've got the right idea. When I was a boy, I was obsessed with codes. The thing about a code is you have to find the key, the clue to how you're going to decipher the whole thing. So, if it's a nonsense sentence hiding the real message ... Let's see, the first letters don't make a word, but the key could be a particular letter or, how about this ...?"

He wrote something down on the paper and Sweeney, who couldn't see it, said, "What? What? Let me see it."

Ian pushed the paper over to her. "One of the simplest kinds of codes has to do with word placement. 'Deed' is the operative word here and it comes fourth in its sentence," he said. "So if we take all of the third words in their their lines, what do we come up with?" lines, what do we come up with?"

Sweeney turned the paper around and read the words written on it. "When Deed thief of." "What does that mean?"

Ian grinned. "I don't know. I just decipher them."

"What if we start it with 'Deed'? No, that doesn't work either."

She was suddenly dejected. It had seemed so promising. She had been expecting it to tell her that the deed could be found in safety deposit box number 56 at the Byzantium Bank, or in the third drawer of the bureau in the dining room of the Kimb.a.l.l.s' house.

For the next fifteen minutes, Ian worked on the epitaph, trying different combinations of letters or words and coming up with nothing.

"Where would you hide something like a deed?"

"If I didn't want anyone to be able to find it?"

"Well ... no. He did leave the message. If you wanted someone to have to work hard to find it. If you wanted to make a game of it."

"I'd hide it somewhere where it would be safe, maybe in something that would never be thrown away or damaged. Something in plain sight. Something that could be pointed to in the hidden message."

Sweeney stared at him. An idea was beginning to form in her mind. "Ian, you don't think that the burglaries ... Remember how Patch described the burglaries. That the burglar took an a.s.sortment of things, statuettes, knickknacks, but also a variety of paintings."

"You mean that whoever is responsible for the burglaries was looking for the deed. But the only person who wants the deed is Patch."

"I know. But ... actually, that isn't necessarily true. Everyone in the colony wanted to stop Ruth Kimball from selling her land to put up the condos. It could have been anyone. And come to think of it, the Kimb.a.l.l.s had a reason, too. They might have wanted to find it before Patch did. Maybe Carl Thompson was looking for the deed. He was taking things from the houses .... what?"

He looked skeptical. "It just seems kind of far-fetched. And he's been in jail, so we know he didn't kill Sabina."

"You're right. d.a.m.n." They were walking back to the house when Sweeney said, "Look. I just feel like the burglaries are the missing link here. If Carl was responsible for them, then who killed Sabina? And if he wasn't responsible for them, then where did he get the stuff? See, there's got to be someone else involved. Someone from the colony who would know when people were going to be out, who would know what was in the houses."

She thought for a moment. Her thoughts were swimming around madly in her head.

She put a hand in her pocket.

"You okay?" He was watching her, concerned.

"Yeah. Listen, I'll be back at the house soon. There's something I have to go do." She tried not to look at him. She didn't want him to know.

"Well, let me ..."

"No. I want to go on my own." The only way to dissuade him was to be rude.

He flinched and said, "All right. Will you be back soon?"

"I don't know, Ian. Look, just go. I'll be back."