O' Artful Death Part 9

Sweeney's hand sprang up to her head. "Thanks." She wasn't sure if she should laugh or blush. What was he doing? Was he flirting with her? "What are you guys up to?"

"Oh nothing, just watching movies upstairs." He stared at her for a moment, then brushed past her. When he was directly behind her, he reached up to touch her hand, which was still on her hair. He left it there for a moment, then kept walking. "Bye," he said without looking over his shoulder.

When she sat down again at the table the conversation had turned back to Toby's ethical dilemma.

"I still think it's an interesting question," he said. "Which works of art would be worth killing for? Is it the most aesthetically pleasing? Or the rarest? Or the most historically interesting? Which books, or symphonies, for that matter?"

Ian took a long sip of his wine. "Personally, I've always wished someone would knock off that chap who puts cows in fish tanks."

"Or Magritte," Toby nearly shouted, enjoying the exchange. "Why didn't anybody kill Magritte?" He and Ian laughed.

Rosemary turned to him, her eyes wide and angry. "The only thing worth a life is another life in danger. You can't say that a human life is worth the defense of an abstract concept, of something inanimate. I won't accept that."

"I don't know. Do you really think that some people's lives are more worthy of preservation than, say, Guernica? Guernica?" Sweeney knew that deep down he agreed with Rosemary, but he couldn't stop himself when he was playing devil's advocate.

"He's right," Willow said. "I think beauty, the legacy of the colony, its history, all these things are more important than some of the things this country has gone to war for. The thing that our grandparents and great-grandparents made here is something special. It's worth preserving." She took a long swallow of her wine. "Yes, even if someone had to die. I'm not saying any of us did it, but ..."

There was a gasp and Britta stood up quickly from the table. "She killed herself," she almost shouted at them. "She killed herself and I don't know why you're all talking about murder." She pushed back her chair, which teetered for a minute and fell over, and disappeared into the kitchen. Patch glared at Willow, then followed his wife.

"Ooops, darlin'," Anders said. "Looks like you've made a faux pas faux pas."

"Oh, Ian," Willow said loudly, flirting again. "What must you think of us?"

"I think," Electra Granger said quietly, sitting straight up in her chair as though she were chaperoning a roomful of rowdy children, "that it's time to go home."

FIFTEEN.

THE AIR AT MIDNIGHT was so cold that Sweeney felt as though she'd been slapped as she stepped out the back door, looking for Toby. The end of his cigarette was a bright ember against the sky; his dark figure like an ebony statue. She sought him out, her boots crunching on the snow. was so cold that Sweeney felt as though she'd been slapped as she stepped out the back door, looking for Toby. The end of his cigarette was a bright ember against the sky; his dark figure like an ebony statue. She sought him out, her boots crunching on the snow.

"So that was quite a dinner party." Even in her parka and hat and gloves, she had to dance around beside him to keep warm.

"Yeah. I'm sorry about that. Everyone got a little carried away. They'll be best friends again tomorrow." He dragged on the cigarette, staring out across the dark, endless landscape.

"You okay?" she asked him. Toby only smoked when he was upset.

"Yeah, yeah. It's just that things are a little intense around here right now."

"Listen, Toby. There's something I need to talk to you about."

He turned to look at her, holding his cigarette down at his side. "Yeah?"

"I didn't say anything because, well, because I didn't know if it meant anything and well ... the thing is that I knew Ruth Kimball was dead before we came up here. I'd called her to see if I could get any more information about the gravestone. We talked briefly and she told me that she'd always believed that one of the artists killed Mary. Anyway, I didn't know what to make of that. I had to go and I called her back the next day."

Toby was staring at her in disbelief. "And she was dead?"

"And she was dead. I just can't help wondering if there isn't some connection."

"Are you crazy?"

"No, no. Just listen to me. What if they're right and she didn't kill herself? It might be because I was asking questions about Mary's death. If Ruth Kimball knew what she was talking about and Morgan or your great-grandfather or one of the other artists had something to do with it, maybe one of the descendants was responsible for her death."

"You can't be serious. You heard them. It was suicide. And if it was anything other than suicide it was because of the burglaries. What is this, some kind of f.u.c.ked-up Nancy Drew impulse?"

"Toby, all I'm saying is that I'm getting a little nervous about this whole thing. I have to find out if there's anything to what Ruth Kimball told me. If there is, it might indicate that ..."

But Toby didn't let her finish. "This is nuts. I don't know what you're thinking you're going to find out about my great-grandfather, but it isn't there." He dropped the cigarette onto the snow and covered it with his foot.

"Toby ..."

"Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with your father?"

"My father?"

"You don't want to believe Ruth Kimball committed suicide because you don't want to believe your father committed suicide."

"That has nothing nothing to do with it." to do with it."

"Oh yeah?" He looked at her the way he looked at her when he was trying to figure out what she really meant or what was really going on with her. "What's wrong with you anyway? You've been acting like someone else the whole time we've been here."

Sweeney looked into his eyes, trying to decide if she should tell him. He was angry, but she went ahead anyway. "I'm having a hard time with you and Rosemary. I'm feeling, some things for you that I didn't think I was going to feel. I'm all ... I don't know, I'm all mixed up, Toby." She stumbled through the words, almost crying, then looked away.

His reaction was not at all what she thought it would be. Silently he took off his gloves and took another cigarette out of his pocket, hunching over to light it, then replacing his gloves. When he spoke, it was in a tightly controlled voice, angry and grim.

"You know what? I'm really f.u.c.king tired of this. I don't know if I should even believe you. I don't think you know whether you should believe yourself. I like Rosemary a lot and that has to be okay. You can't come in here-out here-and just expect me to ... I don't even know what you expect me to do. What do you want me to say? Jesus!" He threw the barely smoked cigarette down in the snow and stormed inside, leaving Sweeney shaking in the cold.

She looked up at the dark sky, the stars blurred by her tears. She and Toby argued often; they were both strong-willed and there were strong emotions between them. But there was something about this that felt different. She had said the one thing that she was forbidden to say and she realized suddenly how cruel it had been for her to say it. Six months ago, Toby had come to her and told her that he loved her. She had felt nothing for him, nothing for anyone. She had refused to talk to him for weeks. He had almost had to break down her apartment door to get her to talk about it. Now she saw herself plainly, needy and alone; she had come to him only when she was afraid of losing his friends.h.i.+p. She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.

But she didn't want to think about that right now. And he was right of course, that she was meddling in something beyond the scope of her interest or skill.

Curious cats often lose their whiskers.

It was something Sweeney's mother, with her English love of quirky plat.i.tudes, had liked to say, when she caught her snooping in a party guest's purse or holding her mail up to the light to see what was inside. But she hadn't said it when she'd caught fourteen-year-old Sweeney looking through her journal, trying to find out how her father had died.

Her mother's version had been maddeningly incomplete, almost tantalizing. "There was an accident. Down in Mexico," she'd said that cold winter morning fifteen years ago. "Your father won't be coming back to Boston again."

And so she had snooped, in drawers and books and finally in her mother's journal, where she had found a short newspaper clipping, slipped between the pages. "Paul St. George, the painter who became well known in the past decade for his moody, sunburnt images of Mexico and the American Southwest, died on December 2 in Mexico City, an apparent suicide. Police say St. George checked into the Casa Mexico hotel shortly before a gunshot was heard in the early morning hours ..."

That was all she'd read before her mother found her. "So you know," she'd said. "He was a coward. Don't you wish you'd left it alone?"

But she wanted to know the truth, she had told her mother, who replied that the truth was a messy, ugly, overrated thing. And so it was. Life and love had taught her that.

Later there had been more details. As she'd moved up in the department in college, Paul St. George's name had come up more and more frequently in lectures. A woman in Sweeney's cla.s.s had done her senior thesis on his Pueblo Pueblo series. And she'd picked up a magazine in the department office once and read a review of the Toronto retrospective. series. And she'd picked up a magazine in the department office once and read a review of the Toronto retrospective.

"Curiously, this is the first posthumous retrospective for the American painter Paul St. George, who committed suicide in 1988. The result is both fascinating and dismaying. The work as a body seems somewhat incomplete, as though he had begun a transformation, but never completed it, stilling his talent by his own hand .... Particularly moving are the series of pieces featuring handguns and rifles, St. George's chosen method of suicide. In one a Mexican housewife brandishes a shotgun like a talisman against a chaotic, abstract background of swirling color ..." She had felt suddenly numb reading those words. He was as much a mystery to her as he'd apparently been to Sweeney's cla.s.smate, who had t.i.tled her thesis. "The Happy Enigma: Images of Joy in Paul St. George's Pueblo Pueblo Series." Series."

Sweeney had read the thesis, a neat treatment that wrapped the enigmatic elements of her father's work within his background and manic depression.

That was what she liked about academic mysteries, as opposed to human ones. At the end of an academic pursuit there was a satisfying symmetry, complexity to be sure, but an answer that one could hold on to.

What about this mystery, which had started out as a neat little puzzle of a gravestone and was now something else entirely?

She s.h.i.+vered and turned around to go back into the house. But as she turned, she caught, out of the corner of her eye, a movement in one of the upstairs windows. Someone had been watching her. When she searched the rectangular panes of gla.s.s that seemed like rows of judging eyes, each one was empty and dark. Which window had it been?

Suddenly, she was afraid. The wind had come up and the woods surrounding the house seemed sinister, full of evil. The night was so dark she could barely see the path her boots had stamped in the snow. As she turned and started for the house it was all she could do not to break into a run, and when she was finally inside, she closed the back door and locked it before it struck her that the person who'd been watching her was inside inside, and not outside.

But she did feel better being inside the warm house. She left her parka and boots in the mud room and went quietly up to her room. As she pa.s.sed Ian Ball's open door, she looked inside to find the room empty. She was alone on the third floor.

Tiny p.r.i.c.klings of fear started along her spine when she found the door to her bedroom very slightly open, the thin, vertical line of darkness showing against the lighted hallway. She pushed on it. It swung in and alarm rose up through her body. The door had an old-fas.h.i.+oned latch that had to be lifted and then dropped into place and she was sure that she had secured it when she'd come up after dinner to change her clothes.

She slipped inside her room cautiously and flipped the light switch, her heart pounding, then relaxing in grat.i.tude when the bulbs in the antique fixture illuminated only the small room, everything just as she'd left it.

Or almost everything. For when she examined the surface of her dressing table, she discovered that her emerald earrings, which she had left there after dinner, were no longer lying there, glinting in the light.

Sweeney s.h.i.+vered and got into bed.

SIXTEEN.

DECEMBER 16.

While the glamorous young couples of Byzantium provided a certain excitement, it was the old ladies who kept everything running. In 1895, Herrick Gilmartin brought his mother to live at Birch Lane and she immediately took over the role of mistress of ceremonies. Along with Geneva Clarendon, a singer who began spending summers at Byzantium in 1897, Mrs. Gilmartin presided over the social season, planning parties and enthusiastically matchmaking."I was at a c.o.c.ktail party at Upper Pastures and Mrs. Clarendon told me that there was a man she wanted me to meet," Riva Delaney Evans remembered in her 1940 memoir. "And she took me over to this little group of men who were smoking pipes in the garden and one of them stepped out when he saw us coming and smiled at me. It was Paul. We were married a couple of months later and I always said it was because of the old ladies getting together and planning it all out."-Muse of the Hills: The Byzantium Colony, 18601956, BY BENNETT DAMMERS.SWEENEY HAD LEARNED early in life that old ladies liked talking to her. She put this down to her somewhat anachronistic interests and to the string of elderly baby-sitters who had seemed to come out of the woodwork in whatever neighborhood she and her mother had landed in. early in life that old ladies liked talking to her. She put this down to her somewhat anachronistic interests and to the string of elderly baby-sitters who had seemed to come out of the woodwork in whatever neighborhood she and her mother had landed in.

While other children had daytime caretakers, busy with hordes of children, she had spent evenings alone with the old ladies while her mother was on the stage or working at whatever job she had resorted to. She had loved those nights in front of ancient televisions, eating frozen dinners or grilled cheese sandwiches served on good china, with cloth napkins. They had watched Masterpiece Theatre and talked about books, dead husbands, long-ago loves, children who had moved away. She had always felt she had more in common with the elderly women than with her bewildering peers. She only felt at ease in those prim, well-heated living rooms.

So she wasn't expecting she'd have any trouble getting Sabina Dodge and Electra Granger to talk about the colony over lunch. She wasn't sure exactly what it was she was after-though a few juicy morsels of gossip about Mary Denholm or Ruth Kimball would be nice.

Afraid to see Toby, she had breakfasted early and gone to hide out with a book, but her plans for a quiet couple of hours reading in the Wentworths' library were disrupted when Britta came in to tell her that the police had called. "Chief Cooper would like you to come down to the station this morning," she said nervously, watching Sweeney with slightly mistrustful eyes. "Just for a few minutes. He didn't say what it was about."

Sweeney's mind raced through the list of possibilities. Her apartment had burned down, something awful had happened to one of her students, her hundreds of unpaid parking tickets had finally caught up with her. What could it be? "Right now?"

"That's what he said. I hope it's not about the gravestone." Britta looked genuinely concerned, twisting a dish towel over and over in her hands.

Sweeney put her book down and slipped her clogs back on. "But how would he know about that?"

"Oh, I think you'll find it's a very small town," Britta said quietly. "Everybody knows everybody's business. Half the town must know about you and the gravestone."AS IT TURNED OUT, Britta was right. It was about the gravestone. "Thank you for coming in, Miss St. George. I'm sorry to be so late," Chief Cooper said, introducing himself as he walked into the little room. She had spent the ten minutes she'd been made to wait looking around and deciding it must be used as some sort of a cla.s.sroom. There was a blackboard against one wall, and it was covered with strange notations. "Satis. Conflict Res. Lst. force nec. and fll" read the chalky words.

Chief Cooper was a tall man, taller than Sweeney, and he had reddish brown hair, a stiff auburn mustache and sharp cheekbones. The impression he gave was of a sharp intelligence and bottled-up anger. In his snug-fitting dark green uniform, he looked rangy and western, like a cowboy or a forest ranger.

He was holding a stack of manila folders and when he deposited them on the table before sitting down across from her, Sweeney saw that the top folder had a white sticker with "Kimball, R." written on it in purple marker. When he caught her looking, he turned it over. She decided immediately that she disliked him, disliked his long, sad face, with its reddish nose and cheeks, disliked his thin, strong frame.

"Now, you're probably wondering why you're here."

Sweeney said that she was, but that she a.s.sumed it had something to do with Ruth Kimball's death.

"That's right. It's come to my attention that you were in touch with her shortly before her death. I wondered if you could tell me what it was about."

In the car on the way downtown, Sweeney had decided she would tell him about her conversation with Ruth Kimball and that she had known about her death before coming to Vermont. It was a question of risk-a.s.sessment more than of honesty. Ruth Kimball, after all, had told her daughter about their exchange on the telephone. Chief Cooper probably knew that already. But Sweeney had decided not to tell him about the inquiries she'd made so far. She had very little to go on, after all, just a vague discomfort about Herrick Gilmartin's necrophiliac portrait and a shadowy suspicion that one or more of the colonists knew more about Ruth Kimball's death-and Sweeney's questions-than they were letting on.

When she was finished with her story, Cooper sat back and studied her for a moment before asking, "So she said nothing that would indicate to you that she had any idea about who might have killed her ancestor? If in fact her ancestor was killed?"

"Well, that's the thing. I was going to ask her about who she thought it was the next day, but then when I called ..." She flushed. "I mean that I wondered if ..."

"You wondered if perhaps she hadn't mentioned to someone that she knew who had killed Mary Denholm?"

"No, I mean ... I did wonder, I suppose. But it's really the gravestone I'm interested in. And besides, she killed herself, right? There isn't any question that it was anything else?"

Before he could say anything, the door opened, and another policeman leaned in and said, "Hey, Chief. The A.G.'s in your office. He was in town for the Dadko hearing and he wants to ask about the search thing."

Chief Cooper nodded and got up. "Could you give me a minute, Miss St. George? I'll be right back."

It was after she'd been sitting there for a few minutes, reading over and over a menacing poster on the wall that read, "Never, Never, Never Shake a Baby," that she remembered the manila folder.

There weren't any windows in the little room, but still she looked around as though someone might be watching. Satisfied that there weren't any one-way mirrors or cameras about, she leaned across the table and slowly turned the folder over so that she could see the label with its messy purple writing. After listening to make sure that no one was coming, she swiftly lifted the cover and found a stack of handwritten notes. They were practically illegible, but she flipped through anyway, looking for recognizable names or details. Once she saw "Sherry Kimball" and in another place the name "P. Wentworth." The word "Alibis" popped out at her, scrawled in red marker on another sheet of paper. Cooper, or whoever it was, had written a list of names in a column headed by the word "Insufficient or Susp." There was Patch, Britta, Willow, Anders, Gwinny, Carl Thompson and Sabina Dodge. In another column, this one headed by the word "Firm," were the names Rosemary Burgess, Electra Granger, Gally and Trip Wentworth, Sherry and Charley Kimball. Sweeney thought back to the conversation about alibis at dinner the night before. What was it Sabina had said? Something about how if she'd actually been the murderer, she would have come up with an alibi for herself. Well, she hadn't.

Sweeney listened for a moment, then opened a manila envelope at the back of the folder. Inside was a stack of crime scene photos.

She had seen them in movies, large format, black-and-white pictures shown fleetingly over the shoulders of silver screen detectives.

But nothing had prepared her for these stark images of death. The gray-haired, slightly stocky woman was a dark stain against the snow. Dressed in what looked like a long skirt, boots, and a bulky parka, she lay on her back, legs folded beneath her body. She'd obviously fallen to her knees and then back, her arms outstretched as though she'd been making angels in the snow.

Half clasped in her right hand was a dark object that Sweeney recognized as a handgun. In a close-up, farther down in the pile, the barrel pointed toward the woman's bare head and forced Sweeney's eye to her face, or the dark mess where her face had once been.

For all the time she had spent amongst the dead, she had never seen an undoctored photograph of a body before, much less a real corpse. Her whole being recoiled at the sight of stilled life, and something deep within her wanted to turn away from the picture of the glistening wound. In that instant she remembered everything she'd ever read about superst.i.tions related to corpses, Kenyan tribesmen who refused to be anywhere in the vicinity of a dead body, Egyptian beliefs about preparing corpses. But still she stared, overcome by a combination of repulsion and fascination.

When she heard Cooper at the door, she barely had time to put the photos back and close the folder. As he entered the room, she was busy rooting around in her purse for a stick of gum which, thankfully, she found, a bit mashed, at the very bottom. She slipped it from its wrapper and folded it into her mouth, trying to calm her jangled nerves.

"Sorry," he said, sitting down again. "Where were we? Oh, yes. You were asking me if there was a possibility that Ruth Kimball didn't commit suicide. I'll be frank with you, Miss St. George. It's not as clear-cut as one might think. It's a very simple matter to place a gun in a dead person's hand following a murder, hold it to the head, let the arm fall naturally. The thing that frequently gives such an act away is the absence of fingerprints or the presence of strange ones, but in this case ..."

Sweeney saw where he was going. "She was outside. She was wearing gloves," she finished.

"Exactly. So we look at other aspects of the crime. The angle at which the bullet entered the body, the distance at which the gun was fired." It struck her that he was enjoying explaining the intricacies of police work to her. "I'll get to the point. At eight this morning I heard from the medical examiner. He's calling this shooting a homicide. So now I'm investigating this as a murder and if there's anything you know that you haven't told me, this would be a good time to speak up."

Sweeney, shocked, just looked back at him.