It had been her father’s, from World War II, and after he got back, he’d kept it in a box in this room, the ammunition beside it in a small leather pouch. She wasn’t sure why he’d kept it out there—people didn’t worry about children and guns in those days—except that she’d always suspected it reminded him of the war and he’d wanted to keep it out of sight and out of mind. But Ruth and her mother had known where it was in case they needed it. It occurred to her then that the gun hadn’t been cleaned in years. “You have to take care of your things,” her father had liked to say. “Or they won’t be there when you need them.”
Standing there, she had a sudden flash of recall—winter evenings, her father and brothers bent over the Holsteins, the cows’ nostrils encircled by halos of steam in the cold air. There was the scent of sweet manure and woodsmoke and the creamy, warm milk as the boys dumped full buckets into the tank. Sometimes, when she wasn’t needed in the house, Ruth had come out and watched them milk, listened to their talk. She found the things the men said to each other out here much more interesting than what the women were saying inside.
Her brothers had all died young and, after her parents were gone, the house and farm had gone to Ruth and her husband, Choke. Choke wasn’t from a farm family; he’d grown up in town. But he’d picked up the milking all right, as long as Ruth was on hand to tell him what order everything had to be done in those first few months. The kids had helped, too, Sherry and Dwight, before his accident. They had gotten along all right. Then in the ‘70s, when a lot of farms in Vermont had gone under, Choke sold the cows and Ruth got a job as a secretary in an insurance office. They’d hardly known what to do with each other after that. Ruth realized that her marriage had been based on the rhythms of farm life. They had talked easily about finances and children and world events while they worked together on cold mornings and evenings in the barn. But sitting across the dinner table from each other or watching television, they’d been strangers. Choke had been dead for twenty years now. She’d almost forgotten what he looked like.
Now, she opened the box and slipped her hand under the pile of rags that the gun had always been wrapped in. It wasn’t there. Frantically, she searched the shelf, thinking it might have fallen out. She’d checked for it just a few days ago, when she’d started to feel afraid. It was an insurance policy of sorts, the idea that she had it, that if anything happened, she could go get it. There was a rifle in the house, but she had never felt like it would be much use if she needed it. Too bulky, not very quick. The one time she’d used it—to shoot a raccoon that was going after the chickens—had taught her that.
As far as she knew, nobody knew where the pistol was kept, except for Sherry and Charley. Charley had probably talked about it, told Carl. That’s where it was. Carl had taken it. She’d bet her life on it. Well, she’d get it back from him. That was the only thing to do.
As she stepped out of the barn again, a single shot sounded in the frigid air. Then another came, and another. Ruth stopped and listened. The shots were coming from the woods behind the cemetery. It was the Wentworth boys. Target-shooting again. They’d been at it for a few days. Patch must have gotten them new .22s for Christmas. She stood and listened for another moment, then took off through the snow. A few minutes later, the shots ceased and silence hovered in the cold air. The boys must have gotten cold, she thought, must have gone back inside. She walked out into the frozen field.
TEN MINUTES LATER, she came into the cemetery. The snow was pristine and untouched and as she swung open the gate, she felt a pang of regret that her bootprints would mar the perfect whiteness. She strode purposefully across the yard to Mary’s stone, standing in front of it and staring at the strange sculpture, the coiling hair and perfect face, the smooth marble, old secrets buried in its pale depths.
She came here whenever she was unsettled about something and for reasons she’d never quite figured out, the gravestone calmed her. Strange, that professor getting wind of it. Ruth thought of her grandmother, a small, old person in her primitive wig and characteristic shawl. “Those artists killed Mary,” she’d told Ruth more than once. “They were a bad lot, free loving. I was just a girl, but I always knew there was something wrong with it. The worst of it is that her parents knew and they didn’t say anything.”
Well, maybe now it would all come out into the open.
Ruth stood in front of Mary’s stone for a few more moments before going over to see Choke. She remembered picking out his stone, on a hot summer afternoon. Sherry had been with her. “He wouldn’t want you to spend too much, Ma,” she’d said. She was right and so they’d gone for the simplest one, yet Ruth felt guilty about it sometimes.
“Hello,” called out a voice, breaking the silence as violently as the gunshots. Ruth started and turned to see a winter-clothed figure running through the snow toward her. She waved tentatively, waiting. The silence seemed overpowering suddenly.
“Hi,” she called back. “Everything okay?” The figure came closer and Ruth felt her stomach flip-flop like a dying fish gasping for air.
This was why she’d wanted the gun, she realized suddenly. This was who she’d been afraid of. The figure came into the cemetery and Ruth stepped back against the fence, trying to appear relaxed.
“What is it?” she asked. But the figure just stood there, looking terrified, hands in pockets. Ruth thought suddenly of Dwight, of the way he’d looked when he’d done something naughty. She’d always known when he’d been up to mischief, just as her father had always known about her. You couldn’t hide what was in your heart on your face.
And then Ruth Kimball looked down and saw her father’s Colt pistol, just as she’d remembered it, and she thought of him, of his hands and the way he laughed, the way he’d always told her she was pretty, even though they both knew she wasn’t. She heard a shot. This time it wasn’t from the woods, but right in front of her. In the instant before she fell to the snow, she thought of her father’s eyes, staring blankly at the ceiling at the funeral home. She had known then that he wasn’t anywhere, that he was just dead, and she knew that there wasn’t anything else, no light, no grace, no heaven. There was just life. And then there was nothing.
THREE
DECEMBER 10
IT SNOWED IN CAMBRIDGE the next day, a heavy, wet, slippery snow that made the old brick structures around the Yard—which Sweeney had liked as gingerbread castles—now resemble over-decorated wedding cakes, smothered in thick, white frosting.
Even her short commute home that day was perilous and slow, and it was nearly six by the time she got to Somerville and found a parking spot. She took a hot-as-she-could-stand-it shower and wrapped herself in her favorite silk kimono, leaving her hair turbaned in a towel to dry. While friends and lovers found her mane of bright orange curls bewitching and somehow just right for her personality, Sweeney was always fighting against its tendency to become unmanageably frizzy when left to its own devices. She rummaged through the mail, adding a new stack of unopened bills to the pile on her kitchen counter, promised herself she’d open them soon, and poured herself a scotch, straight up. She hadn’t thought as far ahead as dinner. Sweeney, who loved to cook, disapproved of fast food and could usually put together something respectable from the staples she kept in her cupboards. But it had been a busy end of the semester and her cupboards were bare except for a few cans of soup. She opened an uninspiring lentil concoction and dumped it into a saucepan and turned the knob beneath the gas burner. Nothing happened—the pilot light was out—so she struck a match and held it to the burner pan.
The gas had built up and it exploded with a whoosh. Sweeney jumped, her heart racing, and turned away from the stove. Her scotch was sitting on the counter and she gulped it, trying to clear the flames from her memory, trying to erase the awful sound of the explosion, the fire sucking at the air, the sickening rush of heat. She drained her glass and poured another drink.
When her nerves had calmed, she settled down on the couch with the telephone.
She had lived on the top floor of the rundown, pumpkin-colored Victorian triple-decker near Davis Square since returning from England almost a year ago and even after she’d published her book and gotten the teaching job, she’d stayed at the Russell Street apartment out of laziness. Though her building was still something of a monstrosity—the paint peeled and the roofline sagged, giving it the look of a haunted house—the rest of the street was undergoing a remarkably swift gentrification and the neighborhood had gotten safer and more desirable. But her rent had stayed the same, a condition of her continued residence since her bank account ebbed and flowed depending on the time of the month. Waiting for doctors or hairdressers to see her, Sweeney picked up women’s magazines with articles about retirement planning or the necessity of emergency savings and put them down again, guilty and afraid.
The apartment had a large bedroom and minuscule kitchen—ironic, she thought, considering the condition of her social life. The living room/dining room was airy and bright, the walls painted a clean ivory, the floors shiny oak. She had reproductions of Holbein’s The Dance of Death framed and hanging on the walls and black and white pillows were scattered on the black slipcovered couch. The floors were covered with handwoven rugs, skeletal black death’s heads woven into creamy white wool. Above her desk, which was tucked into a nook at the top of the stairs, were framed black-and-white photographs she’d taken in cemeteries around the world; a bleak New England landscape of simple stones; aboveground New Orleans monuments; a romantic line of mausoleums at Pére Lachaise in Paris. Against one wall of the living room was propped a plaster replica of an eighteenth-century gravestone Sweeney had found in a Boston shop that also made gargoyles.
She sipped her scotch and got out a pencil and the notebook into which she’d copied Ruth Kimball’s phone number. A little buzz of excitement had lodged in her stomach at the prospect of finding out more about Mary Denholm, but she’d resolved she would talk to Jamie Benedetto before she called Ruth Kimball again.
Jamie, a colleague in the Fine Arts Department, was the undisputed expert on turn-of-the-century American painting. She knew he was also interested in American arts colonies, and she’d spent a couple of hours in the library that afternoon poring over some of his articles about colonies in New England.
She reread the opening of one piece she’d photocopied.
The American arts colony was, in many ways, the direct descendant of the French Plein-Air movement, the idea that colors were truer when painted in nature, that painting or sculpting away from the hustle and bustle of the city could inject new life into an artist’s work. American artists like the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan found rural paradises outside of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, bringing with them their friends, students and associates. Morgan founded the well-known colony in the aptly named Byzantium, Vermont, which, like many of the colonies, enjoyed a somewhat Roman fate. The artists brought friends so there would be things to do—the parties and gala theatrical productions at Byzantium were famous for their excess and for their debauchery. But eventually, many of the artists who had sought out colony life abandoned it, complaining that the country felt just like the city.
All very interesting, but it was on another subject that she wanted Jamie’s expertise.
“So, Sweeney,” he said after they’d made small talk about holiday plans and his three-year-old son. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got kind of a strange question. At some point I’ll explain the whole thing, but right now I just need to know if any of the artists associated with the Byzantium colony were ever arrested or involved in any crimes or scandals that you know of. Back around the turn of the century?”
“Hmmm. Off the top of my head I’d say no, but the person you really ought to talk to is Bennett Dammers. He was at Williams for many years and he’s the point man on Byzantium. Quite elderly now, but he wrote the book, literally. He lives up there now, you know. Probably in the phone book.”
“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 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 glass, 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, “Hello? 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, and then her daughter’s, 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. 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. 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.
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 passing 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 passed 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.”
O’ artful death Page 3
