“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 competitively 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 cocktails and the way everyone except for her and Toby had given their résumés 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 embarrassing; 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 friendship had been a delicious novelty. She remembered the feeling of anticipation 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 grass 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 Trespassing,” and next to it was a row of six large, metal mailboxes. The car bumped over the wooden floor of the bridge and it was dark for a moment as they crossed over a wide brook rushing 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 Kimballs’.” 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-shingled 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 buttery shingles. 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, shaggy 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 God. 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 doorknob. He lifted a giant brass knocker in the shape of a tragic Greek mask and let it fall with a hollow thump on the shining black wood. Iron porch fu
rniture, missing its cushions, 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.
Nobody 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 cluster 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 assaulted 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 space 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 glass 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 glass 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 shining armor.
Below the Knights of the Round Table motif, there was a kind of sub-layer of lovely things everywhere Sweeney looked. Venetian glass 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 God,” 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.”
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 shirt, 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 classes 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-shirt and jeans. Trip was clean-cut, with short hair, and was wearing a neatly ironed button-down shirt. 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.
O’ artful death Page 4
