“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing at it.
“Oh, those are Patch’s twin aunts, Violet and Barbara. They were a good bit younger than his mother. Change of life babies. And that,” she pointed to the small girl, “is Rosemary. It was the summer she and her parents came to visit Marcus and Electra and I think Violet and Barbara baby-sat for her a lot. I’ve just gotten this down so I haven’t had a chance to show it to her yet. I like to switch them around.”
Sweeney looked closer and saw that the child in the painting was indeed Rosemary. The small, butterfly birthmark on the cheek was the same.
“I thought her parents were estranged from the Grangers.”
“Oh they were, but there was a summer before they moved to Europe that they came up. Before they had the big falling out with Marcus.”
“What happened?” Sweeney asked.
“It had to do with Rosemary’s father. He was a real ‘60s radical, the authentic article, and when they were in Byzantium that summer he said some things about the colony and about the way everyone lived here that were really unforgivable. And then when the war was heating up they fled to England and then I guess later to South Africa. We didn’t learn that part of it until Rosemary arrived, though.” Sabina lowered her voice. “I think that Electra and Marcus would have forgiven it, but Emily had this idea that they wouldn’t, that they condemned her for leaving the country. It went from there and they never spoke again. If Electra were a different sort of person, she might have made overtures. But she was so proud. Still is. Shall we go?”
As Sweeney followed her out of the room, she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of a piece of sculpture, a child sitting in a chair, hanging on a far wall. There was something familiar about the snowy white relief, the careful lines of the boy’s thick locks of hair.
“Isn’t that a lovely little relief? I’ve just brought that out as well.”
Sweeney went closer and saw, down in the right-hand corner, a signature. “J.L.B.” it said, in flowing, cursive script.
“Who’s J.L.B.?” She had to stop herself from grabbing Sabina by the shoulders and shaking the answer out of her.
“J.L.B?” She went over and peered at the signature. “Oh, I see. I don’t know. Gilda always thought a student of Morgan’s. Such a pretty little thing. I think Gilda found it lying around the studio and asked if she could have it. I’ve always kept it. Why?”
Sweeney stared at the relief. The style was the same as Mary’s stone. It had to be the same artist. Bennett Dammers had been right that it was a student. But which student had it been?
“Just wondering,” Sweeney said. “It’s really lovely.”
Sabina showed her around the spacious upstairs rooms, including the one that had been Gilda’s studio. It seemed to have been preserved exactly the way it had been left, an easel still set up in a corner, with an unfinished canvas on it. Sweeney went over to look at it. A winter landscape, much like the one just outside the window, was emerging from the white of the canvas. Bottles of turpentine and tubes of paint were scattered on a low table. A smock hung from a peg and a couple of finished Gilda Donetti canvases were piled against a wall.
Sabina pointed to a small pottery urn on the mantel. “That’s her,” she said. “I know I should have given her a proper gravestone, but I’m selfish. I wanted her here. You must disapprove.”
“A gravestone is for the living, not the dead. I think it should be up to you,” Sweeney said kindly. But she shivered. There was something creepy about the shrine.
“Are you cold? I can get you a sweater.”
“No, I’m okay.” Sweeney went over to the window and looked out at the white emptiness. “I loved seeing your house, but I suppose I should really get going. I think they’re expecting me back at the Wentworths’. I can walk Electra back if you’d like.”
“That would be wonderful.” Sabina shut off the light and closed the door behind them. “It’s a huge house for one person, but I can’t bear to sell it. I feel somehow as though I would lose her if I did.” Downstairs, she helped Sweeney and Electra into their coats.
“It’s silly,” she continued saying as she showed them out. “But I haven’t really moved on, I guess. Sometimes you don’t. Or can’t. We live so much in the past here. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Sweeney said. “I think I do. I liked hearing your stories.”
“Well. Come again. You’ll be at the party?”
“Oh yes, the party. Saturday, right?”
“Yes. We look forward to it all year around here, though it’s such hard work for Patch and Britta. If I think of it, I’ll look through Gilda’s things for notes on the relief.”
SWEENEY AND ELECTRA stepped out into the cold. It felt good to be out of the close atmosphere of the house.
“There was a lovely portrait of Rosemary upstairs,” Sweeney said as they walked arm in arm along the snow-covered road. “It was fun to see it. She seems so much a part of things here.”
“Yes. She does seem to fit right in, doesn’t she. She’s like her grandfather, I think. Has a real love for Byzantium. Emily—my daughter and Rosemary’s mother—always hated it, found it stifling, couldn’t wait to get away.”
“It must have been hard having Marcus Granger for a father.” Sweeney had been reading about the career of Marcus Granger. Though he had resisted the century’s move away from realism and landscape painting, he had made quite a name for himself as a stalwart realist and larger-than-life personality. Bennett Dammers’s book was full of stories about his famous temper.
Electra smiled flatly. “Yes. But I think it went beyond that for Emily. I think she found all of us hard, I think it was the colony.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think what I mean is that almost all of the colony children have had trouble of some sort. We thought we were giving them the best possible life, culture and interesting people and art and more art, and it turned out what they wanted was some kind of midwestern suburban life they could reject in the end.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, Electra leaning against Sweeney’s proffered arm.
“It seems like Ruth Kimball must have been a nice woman,” Sweeney said awkwardly.
“Well, you know, Ruth Kimball also had a difficult time with all of us, I think. I feel badly about it now. We all do, despite our appalling show at dinner the other night. But she didn’t like us much, had this idea that the colony had exploited her ancestors or something. I really feel so sad about what happened to her, that we were the last people she saw. Poor Ruth. She was so strange that last day that we saw her.”
“What do you mean, strange? What was it about her that was strange?”
“Well, of course we didn’t actually talk to her, but Rosemary spotted her across the field, walking toward the cemetery. And then we realized that she had dropped her hat. Most unlike her, really. She wasn’t the sort of person who dropped things. So I thought that she must have been hurrying or quite worried about something to have dropped it. We called out after her, but she was too far away to hear. It was quite inconvenient for us. The weather had gotten bad, and Rosemary had to go leave the hat on the back porch, so it wouldn’t get buried by the snow. We almost got caught out in the storm. Of course, it all made sense later when we heard what had happened.”
Sweeney was pondering this as they arrived at the front door of Electra Granger’s big, federal-style house. Sweeney got her safely inside and was about to go when she looked down into the older woman’s empty eyes and saw an unguarded nervousness pass across the pale, lined face. She wondered suddenly if blind people, unable to see emotions flit across other faces, sometimes forget to check their own facial reactions.
“My dear. I wonder if I couldn’t give you a word of advice? Before you go?”
“Of course.”
“We’re very proud of our past here. Too proud sometimes, I think. We’re also very protective of it. Be careful as you look around
for skeletons in closets.”
Sweeney was trying to think what to say when Electra Granger smiled, her face placid again. Then she raised her eyebrows impishly as she said, “It was lovely to chat with you. I’ll see you Saturday at the Christmas party, when the Byzantium colonists come out in all their glory.”
SEVENTEEN
SABINA DODGE STOOD at the window in the study, watching Sweeney and Electra walk down the driveway. Nice girl, smart, a bit uptight, but interesting just the same. “Very unique,” Gilda would have said, with a raise of her eyebrows. Unique, pronounced with a bit of a French flourish, had been Gilda’s highest form of praise and indication that she wanted to bring someone into their social circle. There had been a time when Sabina had felt jealous of those new girls, inevitably younger, prettier, breezier, so in awe of Gilda. But after a time, they had ceased to affect her much. She remembered one visit in particular, when a young sculptress had come to stay with them. Gilda had staged a seduction and been rebuffed. Sabina had never felt more powerful than when she had comforted her that night, Gilda had not handled aging particularly well. Anyway, she would have gotten a kick out of Sweeney.
Sabina straightened a bowl on the bookshelf and looked up at the wall. Seeing Gilda’s paintings there calmed her, as though she was right up there, looking down on Sabina, winking the way she always had when they were in public. That private wink. It had been a truth of their relationship that no matter how left behind and ignored Sabina felt at Gilda’s art openings or parties, a wink always brought her back, made her feel loved. She looked up at the wall again. Funny how Sweeney had picked out the relief right away, asked about it.
Sabina pottered around the room, neatening up the surfaces of bookcases and tables. As she was about to go, she looked up at the wall again. There was something strange about it . . . She had never noticed it before, but there was something about the piece of art that made her uneasy. She stared at it for a few moments but couldn’t figure out what it was that bothered her and went into the kitchen to fix herself a drink.
She had fetched the mail earlier and placed it on the kitchen table, and as she sat down to read it, she caught sight of a small, hand-addressed envelope. It was the invitation to the Wentworths’ Christmas party. It went without saying that she was invited, of course, but Britta liked to design the invitations every year. This one was a small red card with raised holly berries and the wording in silver calligraphy: “Please join us for our annual Holiday Fête. Britta and Patch Wentworth.”
She remembered suddenly, with all the retrospective rapture of her advanced age, the first Christmas party she had been to at Birch Lane. She had been eighteen, madly in love but as yet uncertain of what plans Gilda had for her. This would have been, what? 1948. She had worn a new dress, bought and paid for with money she had received as a present upon finishing art school. She had met Gilda that fall at a seminar and had been much too pleased to be invited up for a weekend just before Christmas. Her parents—German immigrants who had been beaten down and diminished in health and spirit by the experience of being foreigners during the war—didn’t pay much attention to what she did. She didn’t suppose they would have had the imagination to think that anything might be wrong with the visit anyway. So she had gone, traveling alone on the train, filled with a rising fear and excitement.
She had not known what Gilda’s intentions were until that night after the party. But before that there had been their magical walk through the snow, and then the house, filled with greenery and light and music. Herrick Gilmartin had kissed her hand and winked at Gilda. She had danced with so many men that night, her eyes locked with Gilda’s. Gilda did not dance.
The parties were different now that Patch and Britta gave them. If she was honest, she had to admit that they seemed less natural, somehow, more staged, more deliberate. But that was Britta, of course. Poor Britta.
She propped the invitation up on the windowsill and sorted through the rest of the mail, then poured herself a gin and tonic. It was the cocktail hour. Outside the kitchen window, the sun was dropping on the horizon. The light was cold. This was the time of day she missed Gilda most, she decided. It was when Gilda had liked to take a break from painting and they would sit in the kitchen, talking or reading the paper, listening to the late afternoon radio news. It was the time of day when it was hardest to be alone.
EIGHTEEN
AFTER WALKING BACK to Sabina’s to get her car, Sweeney drove back to the Wentworths’. As she went to turn into the driveway, she stopped and sat there for a moment with her eyes shut tight. When she opened them she could see through the naked trees the looming yellow house, and she felt suddenly that she couldn’t go back yet. She swung the car around and drove much too fast along the road and over the bridge.
Once she was off The Island, Sweeney took a deep breath. She could go to the library instead, and look up J.L.B., then get a cup of coffee to celebrate this important discovery. A lot had happened. She now knew that Ruth Kimball wasn’t the only one who thought there was something strange about Mary’s death. She also knew that there was a good chance that Herrick Gilmartin, perhaps with the help of the mysterious J.L.B., was involved. She had made progress and she wanted some solitude to process it all.
Byzantium’s downtown was bustling in the early afternoon. Shoppers in hats and heavy winter coats ducked in and out of storefronts, laden with shopping bags and children. There were tiny white lights in all the trees along the sidewalks, and red and green banners hung from the power lines, giving the downtown a festive look.
With the Rabbit safely parked in a lot behind Main Street, Sweeney strolled up to the library and found that it was closed until three. The little sign stared at her and she felt a swelling of frustration.
But then she remembered Ruth Kimball’s name in the guest book at the historical society. At the very least, she could find out what Ruth Kimball had been reading in the months before her death.
There was a different librarian behind the desk today and Sweeney gave a little inward prayer of thanks. She filled out a request form for the Denholm files again and when the librarian—a teenage girl with a nose ring and a platinum crew cut—disappeared into the back room, she grabbed the pile of old request forms and flipped through them, congratulating the historical society for its inefficiency when she found slips from the previous May in the pile. When she reached July, she found Ruth Kimball’s slip and copied down the number of the book she had requested on a new request form.
“Oh, thanks,” she said when the girl came back with her files. “I just realized I need this book, too.”
The girl looked exasperated, but went and retrieved a coffee-table-sized book, which she placed on the counter. Sweeney wanted to grab it and look through it right away, but she forced herself to stay calm and take the book and the files into the reading room.
She set them down on the table. The book, with its brown paper cover, seemed full of promise.
But the title page was a huge disappointment. “A Celebration of The Bicentennial of Byzantium’s Settlement, 1769 to 1969.” The pictures were all of town residents in late ‘60s minidresses and sideburns, celebrating the bicentennial of the town.
She looked through it carefully, but found nothing remotely related to Mary Denholm or the colony. Finally she gathered the materials together and took them back to the counter, then went dejectedly out onto the street.
She spent an hour in and out of the small boutiques and gift shops, buying Christmas presents and browsing. In one, she bought Toby a cashmere scarf and a set of silver bangle bracelets for herself. In a kitchen store, she bought a blue ceramic pitcher for Britta and Patch and mugs for each of the children. The mugs, plain on the outside, had tiny ceramic animals squatting in the bottom and they cheered her somehow, with their grim creature faces.
She found relief in her shopping, and by the time she wandered into the Well Read Bookstore, she was feeling moderately happy and desperate for caffeine. The cafe in the boo
kstore obliged with a passable latte, and she sipped while she read a women’s magazine, an indulgence that felt justified after what she considered a fruitful morning and an even more fruitful afternoon to come.
Finally it was three, and she went back to the library and made a beeline for the art section where she sat down on the floor and flipped madly through the indexes of all the books on Byzantium.
It was only after Sweeney had looked through the indexes of all of the books on the Byzantium Colony that she realized how much she’d been counting on discovering the identity of J.L.B. within their pages. But not a single one of them offered up an artist with those initials. When she looked in Bennett Dammers’s book, under the lists of studio assistants who had served under Morgan, there were only three listed for the summer of 1890. They were Myra Benton, Andrew Lordley, and Franco Quatrelli. No matter how she rearranged their initials, not one of them could be J.L.B.
She’d come to a dead end.
NINETEEN
“DAMN IT, SWEENEY, where have you been?” Toby demanded as she came in through the kitchen to find them all sitting around the table.
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time.” She looked from Patch to Britta. “I decided to go downtown after Sabina’s and before I knew it, it was dark.”
But Toby didn’t let her finish. “How do you think it made us feel when we called Sabina’s and she said you’d left hours ago. In case you haven’t heard, the police are saying now that Ruth Kimball was murdered. What do you think I imagined when you didn’t come back?” His black eyes were furious behind his glasses.
“Toby, Toby, calm down,” Patch said soothingly. “She’s okay. That’s what matters.”
Sweeney looked up to find Ian watching them. She flushed and felt a lump of anger rise up in her throat.
O’ artful death Page 14