Sweeney hesitated for a moment. “Where’d you hear that? She’s supposed to have drowned.”
“Oh, I used to babysit for Charley Kimball sometimes. Mrs. Kimball, the one who died, was always talking about how Mary got murdered and she was going to find out who did it.” Gwinny’s eyes were wide and dark in the late afternoon light coming in through the windows. The foyer was silent, the air cold. Sweeney shivered.
“What was she like? Mrs. Kimball?”
Gwinny frowned. “She was old. You know? She was tired all the time and she got mad a lot. But I think that had a lot to do with Carl. I mean, she didn’t like Carl very much and Sherry was always going out with him and leaving Charley with her.”
“Why didn’t she like Carl?”
“I don’t know. He’s just kind of gross.”
“Was he nice to Sherry?”
“Yeah. I guess. He was always buying her presents, jewelry and stuffed animals and stuff. Charley, too. Hey, you should go down and talk to Sherry. She could tell you about Mary’s stone.”
“That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll do that.”
She was about to go upstairs when Gwinny looked down at her feet and asked, in a low voice, “Was it your boyfriend? The one who died?” Embarrassed, she slid one black Chinese slipper along the gleaming floor.
“Yeah.” She watched Gwinny take that in. If she’d been older, she might have said she was sorry, or said that it must have been awful for Sweeney.
But as Sweeney had a sudden, vivid flash of remembrance of what it was like to be fourteen, to wonder if any member of the opposite sex would ever find her too-tall body and too-bright hair pretty, Gwinny asked, “Was he the first person you were ever in love with?”
“I guess he was. I met him in graduate school, in England, though he was Irish. Yeah, he was the first person.”
“I’ve never been in love with anyone at all,” Gwinny said. “You should feel lucky about that at least, that you were in love. You shouldn’t be sad.”
Sweeney smiled. “I think I’m just a little sad in general. My father isn’t alive anymore and I’ve lost touch with my mother. I guess being around a family at Christmastime is a little weird is all.”
One of the dogs came romping in from the kitchen and Gwinny grabbed it by the collar and made it sit. Then, in a perfectly serious tone of voice, she said, “Don’t think our family’s really great or anything. My parents are always fighting with each other. They had a big fight this afternoon, because Chief Cooper—he’s a policeman—called to say that we all have to go down and tell him what we were doing the day Ruth Kimball died. They were screaming at each other about it. And they’re always yelling at Trip and Gally. Especially Gally. Sometimes I can’t wait to go away to school. I mean, you shouldn’t feel sad about us. We’re pretty pathetic, if you want to know the truth.”
Sweeney smiled again. “Thank you,” she said. “Why do you think Chief Cooper wants to know what everyone was doing?”
Gwinny held up the book she’d been reading, a battered old copy of H.R.F. Keating’s The Perfect Murder. “You know how it is in books,” she said. “When the police ask about alibis, it means they think someone is a murderer.”
SINCE THERE WAS another hour or so of light, Sweeney decided to go back down to the graveyard to have another look at Mary’s stone. Now that she had seen the strange Gilmartin portrait, she wanted to compare the two. She had an idea that there was something similar in them and she wanted to test the idea. So she tucked the book that Bennett Dammers had lent her into her parka and found a pair of cross-country ski boots in her size in the closet in the hall. Britta had found them for her, looking slightly shocked when Sweeney told her her shoe size. “Oh,” she’d said. “You’ll have to wear a pair of Patch’s.”
The skis were out in a barn next to the house and she found the pair that had been assigned to her for her stay. The bindings were much fancier than the ones she had used the last time she’d skied and it took her a couple of minutes to get her boots clipped in and to find a pair of poles that weren’t too short.
It was a nicer day than the one before, and even though the air had cooled as the sun set, the landscape, washed in the pinky, clear light of dusk was somehow cheerier today, less grim. It had been years since she had been on cross-country skis, but she remembered the rhythmic motion of it, right, then left, then right and left again. She skied down over the slope behind the house and reached the cemetery in a little over ten minutes.
The orange tape that had been around the cemetery fence the day before had been removed and she stepped out of her skis and walked in to find much the same scene. The only difference was the lovely light that slanted down across all the stones. It seemed to Sweeney to illuminate the stones from within, to make them glow, and to reveal new facets of their surfaces. It was calming, to be there alone in the strange light, and she looked around her for a moment before walking over to Mary’s stone, the Gilmartin book in hand.
She was struck again by how similar the two works of art were. Both showed the same young woman, wearing the same expression of staring emptiness.
There were differences, though, that she could only see here in front of the monument. Gilmartin’s portrait, with its drab, watery tones and fine, expert lines, showed a young woman devoid of life, yet beautiful. The sculpture on the other hand, showed a young woman who had been full of life, but was now lifeless. Or not lifeless exactly, Sweeney corrected herself, but somehow absent, or in another world.
She thought again of Proserpine. In the sculpture, she realized, Death was ferrying the young woman, Mary, to the underworld. Or heaven or hell or whatever it was that this artist had believed in. But she wasn’t yet dead, rather she was undergoing a transformation, she was in the process of dying, as though he had caught her in a liminal moment. Sweeney took out her notebook and, with frozen hands, jotted down a few notes.
She was turning to go when she saw that the spikes delineating where the body had been were gone, too. The police must have finished up the investigation or taken all the evidence away at any rate. She wandered over and stared down at where her memory told her the body had been. What had Ruth Kimball known? Sweeney felt a surge of anger at herself. Why hadn’t she stayed on the phone another couple of minutes? She had so many questions she wanted to ask her. She walked back over to Mary’s stone.
“I wish you could speak,” she said aloud, and jumped when a voice said, “That’s the thing about the dead, they can’t speak,” and she looked up to find Ian Ball watching her from outside the cemetery fence.
“I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I came through the woods,” he said, gesturing to the line of trees not far from the cemetery gate that stretched back toward the river. “There’s a path that the family takes to get down to the river. It’s longer, but it’s nicely packed down for skiing.”
“Oh.” She tucked the book back into her parka and her notebook back into a pocket. “I got back earlier than I expected, so I thought I’d come down and just . . . look around.”
He asked, “So what would you like Mary Denholm to say?”
“To tell me who made her gravestone, first of all,” Sweeney said.
“Because it’s beautiful?”
“What? Oh.” She was confused, then recalled their conversation from the morning. “Yes. And because I’m curious. It’s what I do, research things, find out about them, find out what their stories are.”
“Well, perhaps it’s nothing very interesting,” he said. “Maybe it was just some local carver who was having a good day.”
“That’s a risk, I guess.” She looked up at the sky, annoyed with him. “It’s getting dark. I think I’ll head back.”
“I’ll go with you. Would you like to head back up through the woods? See some different sights?”
She couldn’t think of a way to say no, so she nodded. She got back into her skis and they took off through a little gap in the trees and along a well-worn path lined wit
h an old stone wall. It looked as though it had once been a road since it was wide and quite smooth, but it was so much darker in the woods that she found she had to go carefully so she didn’t stray into the trees. At one point the path branched off in two directions and Ian explained that one of them led to Herrick Gilmartin’s studio and a swimming spot down by the river. They skied silently, except for the steady huffing of their breath as the path climbed, and by the time they reached the house it was nearly dark.
The silhouette of the house looked sinister in the wintry dusk and when she looked up at the sky, she thought she could pick out a moonstone white cloud, drifting overhead, shaped like a skull and crossbones.
SWEENEY WENT TO her room to read directly after dinner and was about to go to bed when she decided to go down to the second floor and ask Toby about Tennyson. She hadn’t seen him during the day and she wanted to test her response to his presence after last night.
She knocked on his door. There wasn’t any answer, just a muffled thump from inside, so she called out, “Hey Toby, I want to ask you a question about Tennyson,” and went into the room.
It was dark inside and when she heard Toby’s voice say “Hang on” and a muffled female squeal, she realized what she had done and stepped back out into the hallway, shutting the door. She was about to turn and go when she saw a narrow band of light appear above the threshold. “It’s okay, Sweeney, come in,” Toby called, a bit desperately, she thought.
“Oh!” She stepped into the room to find Toby and Rosemary Burgess sitting at opposite sides of the bed, Toby in a bathrobe and Rosemary in jeans and one of his T-shirts. “I didn’t know you were here, Rosemary. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s fine, that’s just fine. Don’t think twice about it.” Rosemary blushed.
“I’ll just uh . . . leave now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Sweeney said, turning toward the door.
“No. Please. If you have to talk to Toby, I can go. I should get home anyway.” Rosemary blushed again.
“No, don’t go,” Toby said. “I really don’t want you go.”
Sweeney turned away so as not to see the look on Toby’s face. She didn’t want to know.
“Darling,” Rosemary said, getting up and putting on her coat. “I really do have to go. I have to get Granny ready for bed. We have to talk to the police tomorrow and I want to make sure she’s rested.” She tousled his hair and put an affectionate hand on Sweeney’s back. “It isn’t you, Sweeney,” she said kindly. “Your friend here has bewitched me into staying much longer than I ought to have.” She gave Toby a kiss goodnight and left them alone.
“Sorry,” Sweeney said quietly. He lay back on his bed, a pillow tucked under his head.
“Spoiler.” He grinned at her, but when he saw the look on her face he said, “What? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine . . .. Listen, The Lady of Shalott. Tell me about it.”
“It’s a Victorian poem.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“All right. Well, you know that Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of the foremost poets of the nineteenth century, and he commonly wrote on Arthurian themes.” She nodded impatiently. “Let’s see. The Lady of Shalott was originally written in the 1830s, I think, and then he revised it later. There was speculation that the character of the Lady of Shalott was based on Malory’s Elaine in the Morte D’Arthur, but I’m pretty sure that Tennyson told someone or other that in fact it was based on an Italian folktale. But then, of course, later he found out about Elaine and wrote some poems about her. It’s funny how that happens, isn’t it? How storylines sort of exist in the collective subconscious. Very Jungian, you know.”
“No scholarly digressions. What else?”
“I don’t know. What else do you want to know? The poem’s about this mysterious woman who lives on an island. Because of some strange curse, she’s doomed to spend her days in a tower, looking at the reflection of the world in the mirror and weaving what she sees. Then one day she sees Sir Lancelot riding by her window and she falls in love with him. But when she turns away from the mirror and looks at life as it is, the mirror cracks, ‘from side to side,’ remember? She leaves the tower and gets into a boat and sails toward Camelot, but before she gets there, she’s killed by the curse.” He watched her for a minute. “Oh, I see. The boat. It’s like Mary’s statue.”
Sweeney nodded. “Yeah. I just can’t figure out why someone used it as the basis for a gravestone.”
His thoughts followed along the same lines hers had in the library. “Hey, Mary lived on an island. Maybe she felt there would be a curse on her if she left. What were her parents like?”
“Strict, from what I can tell.”
“There you go.”
“But she didn’t make her own gravestone.”
“Maybe someone who knew her thought the story resonated. You said yourself that the Pre-Raphaelites often painted literary themes. Ophelia and all that.”
Somewhere, deep down in Sweeney’s consciousness, Ophelia struck a chord.
“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “Did you know that Mary Denholm modeled for your great-grandfather? And he was the one to find her body.”
“No. Who told you that?”
“I discovered it today. When I was doing research.”
“Everybody around here modeled for everybody else.”
“Okay.” She thought for a moment.
“Are you sure you’re really okay?” Toby looked concerned. “You seem kind of weird.”
She looked up at him, but his eyes, when her own eyes met them, were distracted and tired. She forced a smile. “I’m just tired. So I’m going to bed.”
She made it out into the hallway before the tears rushed to her eyes. She rubbed at them angrily with the back of her hand, furious with herself, and as she climbed the staircase to the third floor, she almost ran into Ian coming out of the bathroom, his hair still wet from the shower. He smelled of lemons and cloves. He looked up and saw the tears. “Oh, good night,” he said awkwardly, casting his eyes to the floor.
Embarrassed, Sweeney crossed her arms over the front of her nightgown and nodded at him, then slipped into her room, shaking. She was angry at Toby, at Rosemary, at herself for caring. And most of all, she realized, she was angry at Ian Ball, though she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. It was something about the way he looked at her, as though he was trying to read her, to figure out what was behind the words she said.
She shivered and locked her door. Sweeney’s bedroom, like all the rooms on the top floor, was chilly and she took the comforter from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders as she went to the window. In the moonlight, the snow looked lovely, almost opalescent, and a beam of eerie, pearly light shone in, cutting a swathe across the floor of her room.
There was something about her conversation with Toby that was niggling at her. What was it?
Ophelia. That was it. But what about Ophelia? Something from a long-ago class came back to her. She dug the library books out of her bag and opened the one about the Pre-Raphaelites to the index. She knew that the Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and Arthur Hughes had both created accomplished paintings of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and she flipped through a number of references to the men before she found the one she was looking for on page 126. “When Millais was painting Ophelia, his model, Lizzie Siddal, posed in a bathtub, warmed by small candles. But the candles were allowed to go out and she was numb with cold when she emerged. Later it was said that she almost died.”
Then she opened the book on Gilmartin to the portrait of Mary and she knew what it was that had been bothering her. There was a huge discrepancy between the lush, lively Mary in the historical society photo and the dead, cold one in the painting. How had he achieved the effect?
She stared at the painting for a few minutes, feeling her heart speed up in excitement. She got up and paced around the room, thinking. What if Gilmartin had taken a cue from Millais and things had gone wrong?
&
nbsp; Out of curiosity, Sweeney flipped through the rest of the Gilmartin book. She had looked through the paintings in the car after leaving Bennett Dammers and found a few other portraits that she really liked, but what she hadn’t noticed until now was that the Mary painting was somewhat atypical for Gilmartin’s work. Most of the portraits were more traditionally late-nineteenth-century, with full female figures executed in careful, jewel-colored brush strokes. It was as though Gilmartin had tried something new—or new to him—in 1890, and then quickly given it up. Had his abandonment of the new style been related to Mary’s death?
She took a deep breath. What if Gilmartin had been painting Mary and something had gone wrong? In order to cover up his crime, he could have taken her body down to the river and pretended to find her drowned body there. It would have been that simple. But why the gravestone?
She sat down on the bed, overcome by how far her brain had taken this. If this was true, it had implications for the Wentworths and their neighbors that went far beyond the answer to an academic question. It had implications for Toby . . . for her relationship with him. She had to go carefully here. She would think about this when she was less tired, she would gather some more information. She would keep an open mind.
As she was putting away the books she’d gotten at the library, a slip of paper became dislodged from between them and drifted to the floor. It was a credit card receipt from a restaurant in Suffolk and, she saw, when she inspected it more closely, it was signed by Ian. It must have gotten stuck between her books when he gathered them up from the back seat of his car. She put it into the pocket on the outside of her research bag. She’d have to remember to give it back to him. He was probably putting in for his expenses on this trip.
She got ready for bed and slipped between the sheets, physically exhausted. But her brain failed to stop churning, and she slept only fitfully, dreaming of artists and models and ice cold water.
THIRTEEN
DECEMBER 15
O’ artful death Page 10
