“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 Léger 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 pronounced 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 pass quickly across Britta’s face.
“It’s very strange,” Britta said. “The burglar doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing or what he wants. It’s as though he’s just collecting glittery things, like one of those birds. What are they called?” She searched nervously for the word.
“Magpies,” said a very crisp, very English voice from the doorway. Sweeney looked up to find a man standing there, listening to them. “It’s magpies that like to pick up glittery things.”
PATCH GOT UP TO make the introductions. “Sweeney, Toby, this is our good friend Ian Ball. Ian’s visiting from London for the holidays. He just arrived in the States today.”
“Hello,” Ian said, sitting down at the table and accepting Britta’s offer of a cup of coffee.
Sweeney was good at placing regional British accents, but couldn’t quite get his, a sort of generic Queen’s English that she hadn’t thought existed outside the BBC. It bothered her and she inspected him for a moment, his deep blue-green eyes, which were inscrutable behind horn-rimmed glasses, and his slightly floppy, waving dark hair. He looked about thirty-five and he had the kind of beaky, intellectual English charm that she had always found attractive. But there was something about the way he watched them, his eyes darting here and there like a bird’s, that put her on guard. He sat down at the table, fiddling with the handle of his coffee cup until he noticed that Sweeney was watching him.
“How has the burglar been getting into the houses?” Toby asked.
“That’s the thing,” Patch answered sheepishly. “None of us ever locked up around here until recently.”
Sweeney asked, “But who would know that? Was it common knowledge in town?”
Britta got up from the kitchen table and went over to the window, where she gazed out at the frozen landscape as though she were looking for someone. “Let’s stop talking about the burglaries,” she said after a moment. “I don’t want to think about them anymore.”
Patch cleared his throat. “Ian runs an auction house in London,” he told Sweeney and Toby, glancing at his wife. “He was coming over the pond for a business trip anyway, so we convinced him to spend the holiday with us. We’ve known each other for years, but he’s never been to Vermont.” Patch turned to Ian. “Sweeney’s an art historian. She studies gravestones.”
“Yes, of course. I enjoyed your book. I’m actually a bit interested in all this stuff myself. I’ve done some cataloging of mourning items and one of my favorite pieces in my own collection is an eighteenth-century broadsheet advertising the funeral of a Londoner named Charles Henley. It’s wonderful stuff, menacing skulls and crossbones, lots of hellfire and brimstone.” He gestured excitedly with his coffee cup as he talked. “Are you working on anything new?”
“Yeah, a book on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stones and monuments. I’m focusing on New England, but I think I’ll have a few chapters on southern stones as well. I’m interested in the iconography and the quality of the carving and the art. Things change a lot during the period and I want to connect it to what was going on socially, culturally. There are certain images that appear on gravestones, like hourglasses and willow trees and death’s heads—or skulls. They also show up on other items, mourning jewelry and even pottery. I’m tracing the way the images develop and were brought to America from Europe.”
“That’s why I thought she’d be interested in Mary Denholm’s gravestone,” Toby told his aunt and uncle. “Apparently it’s completely wrong for the period, very anomalous.” He grinned around at them. “Don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Anyway, she’s probably going to discover that some famous American sculptor actually did it. Isn’t that right, Sweeney?”
She nodded and turned to Patch. “Is it true that no one knows who made the gravestone?”
There was a pause. “Yes, it’s strange actually. For a community as concerned with art and artists as we are. But no one’s ever known.”
“Well, someone must have known at one time because it must have been commissioned at the time of her death. Would you have any records, diaries, things that belonged to your grandfather or other members of the colony that I could look at?”
“We’ve got a very messy attic-full. You can look if you really want to.” Patch got up and took his coffee cup to the sink.
“Anyway, I thought I’d take Sweeney down this afternoon,” Toby said. “So she can see it in the flesh, so to speak.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’ll be able to get in, I mean . . .” Britta seemed flustered.
“We don’t mind blazing a path through the snow,” Toby said cheerily.
“No, what she means . . .” Patch said, with difficulty, looking from his children to Toby and back again. “What she means is that the cemetery may still be roped off. You see, that’s where Ruth Kimball died.”
SIX
PATCH WENTWORTH felt relief slow his blood as he watched Toby and Sweeney disappear across the back field, down toward the cemetery. He stood for a moment, looked across the field in the other direction, toward the other houses, toward one house in particular, and felt a sudden gaping loneliness. He didn’t want to go back inside. He breathed in the cold air for a few moments, like a smoker taking a last drag on the porch, then lifted a load of firewood into his arms and went into the kitchen. The outdoors clung on him like cigarette smoke, a cold, gray smell, of frozen water, deadened nature.
“Brit?”
She was standing at the window, looking out over the white fields rolling down to the river and she started at the sound of his voice. She said nothing, still looking out the window, then carefully tucked a few pieces of her fine blond and gray hair behind her ear. The action was as precise as everything she did, Patch thought, an ordering of the elements that made up her world. He had once found it endearing.
“What do you think of Sweeney?” Patch deposited the wood into the box and then pushed a log into the large woodstove against one wall. It was burning just right, emanating a cozy cloud of heat and warming the huge kitchen. As a child he had liked the kitchen best of all the rooms at Birch Lane. His grandparents had been strict about children running through the house, but in the kitchen he had been allowed to spill out toys on the floor or draw at the big table while the cook and housekeeper worked away at the cookstove they’d had in those days. It was still his favorite room, where the family ate and where the children did their homework when they were all home from school. It
was Britta’s room, he realized. It was here that she seemed happiest and where he had glimpses of what their marriage had once been, what he had thought it might be the first time he brought her to Byzantium.
He watched her for a moment, shocked by how thin she’d become in the last few months. Then he took off his parka and boots, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with the paper. Droplets of melted snow glistened on his blond hair until he ran a hand through it. His face was ruddy from the cold.
“She seems nice,” Britta said finally, turning away from the window and going back to stirring something in a pot on the stove.
“Her father was Paul St. George. You know, the big orange paintings of Arizona or Mexico or somewhere. I asked Toby about it just now, before she came down, and he said not to say anything because she doesn’t like people to know.”
Britta finally turned around and looked at him. “The one who . . .?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that sad. She was pretty young, I guess.” He took a deep breath. “I wish she didn’t have this idea about looking into Mary Denholm’s gravestone. This is hardly the time to be bothering Sherry. Don’t you think it’s kind of inappropriate?”
“I don’t know. It was Toby’s idea.” She gestured at the window. “The police are back. I just saw the car.”
He went to stand behind her, conscious of her thin shoulders, the rigidity of her back. He looked out the window, and saw a state trooper car parked on the road leading to the Kimballs’ driveway.
“Patch, why would they bring the state police in? Wouldn’t Cooper be able to handle it?”
“I’m sure the state cops get involved whenever there’s a death involving a gun,” he said breezily.
Britta took a pan over to the sink and stood there, her back to him, for a few minutes before the metal clattered against the porcelain.
He felt a flash of annoyance. If there was anything that defined his marriage it was that communicative clatter. It was how Britta told him what she wanted these days. “What’s wrong?” he asked finally.
She hesitated, then turned to him. “Patch, they—the police—asked me what everyone was doing during that afternoon. Where we all were.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I said that you were outside stacking wood, but . . .”
He waited and Britta went back to the window. She hesitated again for a long moment before saying quietly, “There’s something . . . See, with everything that was going on. When you . . . well, I was in here and I was listening to the boys shooting and suddenly I felt scared, I don’t know why, and I went to find you and I couldn’t.”
“I went around the corner. I was cutting some brush and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything up against the house, what with all the burglaries. I didn’t want anyone to be able to get in through a window.”
Britta, relieved, turned and smiled at him. “That’s where you were. Of course. I didn’t go around the front. I just looked by the woodpile and . . . that’s where you were, of course.”
“Sweetheart, don’t worry about this. Let’s try and enjoy Christmas.”
“Yes,” she said, going back to the window and looking out as though she expected to see someone there. “Yes. Christmas.”
SEVEN
THE BRIGHT MORNING had turned into a frigid afternoon, the late light thin and sickly on the snow. As they walked down to the cemetery, tiny puffs of mist hovered before them and Sweeney’s lungs ached with the cold.
“So what did you think of la familia?” Toby asked.
“They’re nice. And you seem really happy with them.” She didn’t say anything more. She wasn’t sure what she thought of them yet and people were always sensitive about their own families.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Sweeney asked, “How did your great-grandparents end up here anyway? I thought they were from New York.”
“Well, the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan was the first artist to come to Byzantium,” Toby said. “He built a house up the river a bit called Upper Pastures—I’ll take you up and show you sometime—and then he convinced my great-grandfather, who was quite a bit younger, to buy some land. The story goes that Morgan was an ugly drunk and he and my great-grandfather used to get into these knock-down, drag-out fights, so my great-grandmother said she’d only move to Byzantium if they lived on The Island, so that Morgan wouldn’t be around too much. They built Birch Lane and my grandfather built his studio down near the river.”
He slowed down and Sweeney spotted the river, silvery and wide, snaking away from them beyond the house. “Morgan’s son built over here, too,” Toby went on, “because his father could be such a son-of-bitch when he was drinking. And much later, in the ‘20s, I think, Marcus Granger, another painter, built his house at the other end of The Island. His widow, Electra, still lives here; she’s a great friend of Patch and Britta’s. Her granddaughter is Rosemary. She’s the woman I was hanging out with at Thanksgiving.” He blushed.
“Who are the rest of the neighbors? Are they all colony families?”
“Pretty much. There’s Willow and Anders Fontana. Willow is Morgan’s granddaughter, and she and Anders live in the house her father built. He works in Boston during the week and comes up weekends. You’ll meet Sabina Dodge, too. She used to live with one of the artists. As I said, they’re a pretty tight bunch.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes before Toby said, “Hey. Speak of the devils.” Sweeney looked up to see a small group of walkers approaching them on the path, carrying armfuls of evergreen boughs. With the deep green woods and the white-shrouded Vermont hills all around them, the effect was lovely, as though they’d stepped out of a Christmas card.
“Hello, Toby,” called an elderly woman in a velvet turban, long mink coat and rubber boots. She was a formidable physical presence, nearly three hundred pounds, Sweeney guessed, deciding she’d never seen so much mink in one place in her life.
The large woman wrapped Toby in a furry hug with her free arm when the little group had reached them on the path. “Patch said you were coming for Christmas. How delightful.” She turned to Sweeney. “And you’re the art historian. Patch has told us all about you. Gravestones, he said. How macabre!”
A pretty blond woman behind her gave Toby a hug, too, and Sweeney watched him hang on for a second longer than necessary. Aha. The beloved Rosemary. She flushed slightly when Sweeney met her eyes and Sweeney felt a little flash of humiliation, realizing that Toby had told this woman about her. Stop it, Sweeney, she told herself. Just stop it.
The woman in the mink waved her arm at the little group. “We,” she announced, “are the neighbors.”
More specific introductions ensued. The fur coat-wearing walker was Sabina Dodge. The small, old lady turned out to be Electra Granger. She was a serene-looking person, dressed in a camel hair polo coat, and she had a cloud of fine, white hair half-covered by a pink scarf. Her cataract-clouded blue eyes gazed sightlessly as she shook Sweeney’s hand.
Willow and Anders Fontana and Toby’s Rosemary made up the rest of the walking party.
Willow was attractive and athletic, with short brown hair highlighted with streaks of gold, and a husky voice. Her tall, shapely figure was perfectly covered by a pair of skintight black leggings and a purple ski parka. She was wearing a black headband instead of a hat and she made Sweeney feel overbundled and un-chic. She had the timeless, expensively-cared-for look of a woman who could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty.
Willow’s husband, Anders Fontana, was a jovial, slickly handsome man with a loud laugh and a competitive handshake. Even on the windy winter day, his black hair shone like molded plastic. He slapped Toby on the back and looked Sweeney up and down as Sabina introduced them.
Rosemary Burgess, Electra’s granddaughter, was a petite blond woman around Sweeney’s age, with a glossy cap of pale hair, dark blue eyes and a delicate, butterfly-shaped birthmark on her right cheek. As she spoke in a soft accent that S
weeney guessed was South African, she kept a gentle hand on her grandmother’s elbow and kept smiling at Toby. She was, Sweeney realized, exactly his type, small and cool and quiet, and she made Sweeney feel gawky and over-tall.
“We’re on our way down to the cemetery,” Toby explained, when Sabina asked him where they were walking. “Sweeney’s doing some research on Mary Denholm’s stone.”
“Oh, do you think you’ll be able to . . .? Patch did tell you about the . . .” Willow looked subdued for a second.
“Yeah, it’s awful.” They chatted in hushed, awkward tones for a few minutes about Ruth Kimball’s death. Sweeney just listened.
“Anyway,” Toby told them, “we’re going to go down and see. Maybe they’ll just let us look at the stone.”
“Perhaps. Make sure you watch out for her ghost. She wasn’t a very nice person when she was alive. I doubt she’s improved much in death.” Sabina Dodge winked mischievously.
“Sabina, stop it.” Willow turned to Sweeney. “Don’t let her scare you. We’re all sorry about Ruth Kimball’s death, even if we weren’t exactly on friendly terms.”
“Not on friendly terms?” Sweeney asked innocently. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she caught, out of the corner of her eye, Toby shooting her a suspicious glance.
“It’s just that, shall we say, her loyalty to the colony was in doubt. She didn’t quite appreciate what it means to everybody and how important it is to keep it exactly the way it is.” Sabina nodded, pleased with her choice of words. “Now, we’d better let you go if you’re going to make it before dark. We’ll all be over for dinner on Monday, so we’ll see you then and talk some more.” She wiggled her fingers at them. “Remember what I said about ghosts.”
When they were out of earshot, Sweeney turned to Toby and, trying to keep her voice even and cheery, said, “So, she’s pretty, Toby.”
O’ artful death Page 5
