O’ artful death

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “Do you want a drink?” Charley asked politely.

  “Okay. If it’s not too much trouble.” The girl disappeared silently and came back into the room a couple of minutes later, holding a blue tinted glass filled with cherry Kool-Aid. She handed it to Sweeney, who slipped out of her coat and sat down on the couch.

  “Thank you.” After a few minutes she said, “I’m so sorry about your grandmother.”

  Charley just stared at her. “Is that your real hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sherry has red hair like that, only she buys it in a box and puts it on in the bathroom like shampoo. That’s called dyeing. Not like being dead, but like making something a different color.”

  “I always wished I had a more regular hair color. Blond or a nice brown, like yours.”

  “Really?” Charley sat down on the couch next to Sweeney and stared at her hair some more. Sweeney checked her watch. It had only been five minutes.

  “What grade in school are you in?” Sweeney had another sip of the sweet Kool-Aid.

  “Fourth,” Charley said. “I’m younger than everybody else, though, because my birthday’s in December, but they let me in anyway because I started reading when I was three.”

  “Three? Really?”

  “Yeah. I don’t remember, but Sherry says I started reading newspapers.”

  “This is a nice house.”

  “Yuck.” Charley wrinkled up her nose and looked at Sweeney in disbelief. “No it’s not. Not like the Wentworths’ house. It’s old outside, but new inside. They have a white couch. And they have suits of armor, like the knights of the round table. Gwinny let me touch one once. She’s their daughter. She baby-sits for me sometimes, but next year she’s going to boring school. She’s going to be an actress. Have you ever read Morty Dee Arthur?”

  “Yes,” Sweeney said, trying not to smile. “Actually it’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the death of Arthur.” She pronounced it carefully and Charlie copied her, almost perfectly.

  “Is that what that means? Mort. Death.”

  “Yes,” Sweeney said. “In French. But it’s not in French, Le Morte D’Arthur, I mean.”

  They were silent for a minute.

  “Have you ever read Le Morte D’Arthur?” Sweeney asked, for something to say.

  “No. The librarian at school told me about it. I wanted to read a book about King Arthur, but all they had were baby books, with pictures.”

  “That’s too bad. I bet you could get it at the regular library, though.”

  “Yeah.” She looked up at Sweeney, suddenly accusing. “You were supposed to find out about Mary.”

  “Yes. Did you know about Mary? Did your grandmother talk about her?”

  Charley wandered over to the window and looked out. “I used to go down and look at her gravestone. I liked the poem. All about the man taking her on a trip.”

  God, Sweeney thought, children really are masters of euphemism.

  “Charley?” A tall big-hipped woman with lank hair was coming down the stairs in a nightgown and thick wool socks and when she saw Sweeney she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but her face was pulled down in grief.

  “I’m so sorry to barge in on you,” Sweeney said from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m Sweeney St. George and I, I think I talked to you last week. About Mary Denholm’s gravestone and then I think I talked to you the day after . . . I just wanted to say how sorry I am. I had no idea . . .” She was babbling.

  “No, that’s okay,” Sherry said finally. She came down the stairs and curled up on one of the couches in the living room, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of the crack between a cushion and the side of the couch. On a table by the wall were casserole dishes filled with food, plates of brownies and a couple of pies wrapped in cellophane. One of the pies—cherry from the look of it—had a hole in the middle, as though someone had scooped out the center with a spoon.

  “People keep bringing food,” she said, shaking a cigarette out of the pack and following Sweeney’s gaze. “I don’t know what to do with it.” She lit up and took a long grateful drag.

  Sweeney studied Sherry’s ravaged face, her pockmarked skin red and angry, and she thought about how grieving turned people’s faces inside out, how you could see on their mouths and eyes the machinations of grief as it passed over and through their minds.

  Upstairs, bedsprings creaked.

  “Sherry?” called a male voice. All three of them watched as a man in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt came down the stairs. He was a good-looking guy, with dark hair cut short and muscular arms.

  “That’s Sweeney St. George, Carl,” Sherry said. “Remember? She’s the one that . . .” She looked nervously at her boyfriend.

  “What does she want?” Carl asked. Sweeney watched him.

  “I talked to Mrs. Kimball a few days before she died. She was going to help me with a research project.”

  He looked her up and down, his eyes predatory and chilly.

  “You go back to bed, Carl,” Sherry said, getting up and putting a hand on his arm. “I’ll be right up.” He gave Sweeney another hard look, then turned and disappeared up the stairs.

  “We’ve had all kinds of people here,” Sherry said apologetically, pushing her limp reddish hair away from her face. “Police and insurance people and reporters from the paper. Asking bullshit questions. He’s just tired of talking is all.” She took another drag on her cigarette and studied Sweeney. “So you’re the professor who was going to find out who killed Mary, huh? I’m sorry I hung up on you. Just didn’t feel like talking about it.”

  “Of course. Did your mother tell you about our conversation?”

  “Yeah, she said you might be able to figure out the truth about Mary being murdered and that she was going to tell you what she knew.”

  Charley was sitting on the floor staring up at them with her huge brown eyes.

  “Could we talk somewhere alone?” Sweeney asked Sherry, who looked down at her daughter.

  “Baby, go watch TV in the kitchen, okay? Just for a minute.”

  Charley nodded and did as she was told.

  “I’ve uncovered some stuff about Mary Denholm’s death that makes me think she probably was killed. What did your mother say about it? I guess she told quite a few people in town about her suspicions.”

  “Yeah, although I think a lot of that was to piss off the Wentworths. She thought it was really crappy the way they wanted to stop her making money from the condos.”

  “But where had she gotten the idea that Mary was killed?”

  “Oh, from her grandmother. She always said there was something weird about it.”

  “Do you know if she talked to anyone shortly before her death? Did she tell anyone specific that I was going to be looking into it and that it might come out that one of the artists was a murderer.”

  “I don’t know. She was kind of weird the last few months.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sherry thought for a moment, a few strands of slick hair falling haltingly over her face. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, and Sweeney had the feeling she had been about to say something and decided against it. What she decided to say was, “She was happy . . . it was like she was planning something, you know?”

  “Was it the thing with the condominiums? Could that be what was making her happy?”

  “Maybe. But that wasn’t a sure thing yet. I mean, we weren’t going to get any money until the state gave the okay. And the Wentworths and all them kept fighting it.” She looked quickly up at Sweeney. “To be honest, I don’t hold anything against them. You know, you can disagree about stuff and all, but we’ve been neighbors for a long time.”

  “She wasn’t . . . having a relationship? With a man?”

  Sherry opened her eyes wide. “My mother? No way. She didn’t like my father much, and he was the only man she ever cared about. No, she wasn’t seeing anybody. If she had been, she might have been more under
standing about Carl.” She cast her eyes toward the staircase, where he’d stood a few minutes ago, and lit another cigarette.

  Sweeney picked up the Concentration cards on the coffee table, carefully turning over one that had cherries on the other side, then one with a turtle.

  “I always liked this game,” she said. “I think it’s because I have a really good memory and I always win.”

  “My mother was like that, too. She only had to see something once and she’d remember it forever. She loved playing Concentration with Charley. Had to pretend she didn’t know where they all were, though. Give the kid a chance. She was getting better though. Smart as a whip, Charley.”

  “I’ll get going and leave you alone,” Sweeney said finally, “but there’s just one more thing I want to know. What do you think about this whole thing? Is there a possibility that someone who didn’t want her to tell what she knew about Mary is responsible?”

  Sherry looked up quickly and Sweeney could see tears welling up in her too-old eyes. “I don’t know. I keep thinking that if I can remember what she looked like when I found her, it might tell me something. But then I think about it . . .. She went for a walk at lunchtime. She always did. We used to have a dog and she kind of just got in the habit, so even after the dog died, she always went for a walk then. And it started snowing that day and she didn’t come back and she didn’t come back and I got worried. So I went out and I was yelling for her. I could hear the Wentworth boys shooting in the woods.” She stopped and looked at Sweeney. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t even know you.”

  “It’s okay,” Sweeney said. “I don’t mind.”

  Then suddenly, as though the memory of finding her mother dead in the snow had just come back afresh to her, Sherry began to sob. “Oh God. Oh God. I just keep seeing her lying there, her hair. It’s like a slide that’s stuck and I can’t get rid of it. The police keep coming back here, asking Carl if he did it, but they don’t know what it was like, looking down at her. There’s no way he could have . . .” The cigarette she had balanced in the ashtray was out and she lit another one, holding it with shaky hands up to her mouth. One of the cartoon characters on the TV laughed loudly.

  “She was holding the gun. She was . . . Oh God!” Sherry started sobbing again and Sweeney leaned forward to touch her knee.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Sherry quieted down, the tears falling silently now. “It’s like, I just feel so . . . it’s like everything’s just wrong, that’s all. My whole body is so fidgety. It’s like I can’t ever get comfortable. I can’t get ever get comfortable with the idea that she’s gone, you know.”

  Sweeney flashed back to the days after Colm’s death, when every new minute that passed was like the minute in which she awakened each morning to realize that he was really gone. “I know, I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sherry stared out the window. “I’ll never forget the way I felt walking down there. I didn’t know anything then. It was the last time I . . .”

  “When did you see the hat?”

  “The hat?”

  “Didn’t you find her hat on the porch? Before you found her?”

  “No. What do you mean? Whose hat?”

  “Forget it. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh shit. You’d better go.” Sherry was crying again now, deep, raspy sobs that made Sweeney feel empty and impotent.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “No. I just . . . I ran out of cigarettes.” Sherry laughed, then started sobbing again.

  Sweeney put her coat on and got ready to go. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Listen, if there’s anything that you think of, even something small, I think you should tell me or the police. I’ll be staying up at the Wentworths’ until after Christmas. Is it okay if I stop by tomorrow? There’s something I want to get for Charley, a book that we were talking about.”

  But as it turned out, Sweeney didn’t stop by the next day. Because the next day, after getting a firm identification on Carl Thompson as the man who had pawned a number of the electronic items stolen from colony homes, Chief Cooper got a search warrant for the Kimballs’ home and found, hidden in the basement beneath a tarp, other items that were identified as having been stolen from the Byzantium houses.

  Carl Thompson was arrested and ordered held without bail on suspicion of burglary, a charge the town was sure would soon be changed to murder.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  DECEMBER 20

  SWEENEY HAD RETURNED to Birch Lane and found she could no longer look at the house with the same eyes, knowing as she now did that the man who had created it had played a role in Mary’s death. She had examined a Gilmartin hanging over the reception table, a portrait in whites and grays of a young woman. It was a thing of beauty, the woman’s small, delicate face turned slightly upward in flirtatious supplication, her fair hair silvery in the strange light coming in through a small window over her shoulder. A large gray cat lolled on her lap, his visage ecstatic beneath the woman’s hand. How could a man capable of such monstrosity make something so beautiful? Sweeney had stared at the creation, at the swirls and daubs of oil paint that were the painter’s words and that had always seemed to her like the fingerprints of divinity.

  They spent the next day getting ready for the Christmas party.

  Sweeney found herself in a strange position all that day. From the perspective of everyone else in the house, Ruth Kimball’s murder had been solved, and everything was back to normal. When they had heard—from Willow and Rosemary who had come breathless and excited at lunchtime with the news—Britta had visibly relaxed, her whole face undergoing a transformation, softening and becoming prettier. Toby, who had shot Sweeney a satisfied look as if to say “See?” was positively cheerful, grinning and humming Christmas carols.

  As they decorated the house, hanging evergreen boughs from the staircases and mantels, stringing cranberries on thread for garlands, and trimming the giant tree that Patch and the boys had brought from the woods, Sweeney agonized about what to do.

  She knew that Gilmartin had had a hand in Mary’s death. But there didn’t seem to be an imperative anymore to reveal her knowledge. If that murder had nothing to do with this one, what good did it do anyone to make the truth known? And there was Toby to think about. Revealing the truth about his great-grandfather would hurt him as much as it would hurt the rest of them.

  But she was a scholar. She had made an academic discovery as well as a human one.

  She wondered, too, what to do about Ian. He had been careful with her since she’d been back, hardly looking at her, leaving the room when she entered. He was embarrassed, she decided, but there was something else there, too, something that smacked of self preservation, as though he were afraid to be alone with her.

  She went up to her room right after dinner that night, pleading exhaustion, and after reading for an hour, put on her nightgown and got up to use the bathroom. But when she stepped out into the hallway, Ian was on his way in, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a leather toiletries case.

  “I’m sorry. Did you want to . . .” He looked so completely un-sinister that she had trouble connecting him with the person she’d followed to her house only yesterday.

  “No, that’s fine. You go first.” She ducked back into her room, her heart beating fast. The bathroom shared a wall with her room and she listened to the steady rush of the shower for a few minutes, then the sounds of him getting out, shutting the door of the shower stall and flushing the toilet. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the bathroom open, his footfall in the hall, and his own door shutting behind him.

  She counted to one hundred, then went out into the hall and knocked on his door. When he answered, he was still in his robe.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Yes. Certainly.” He drew the robe more tightly around himself, gestured her into his room and shut the door.

  “Sit down,” he told her politely,
clearing some papers off the chair at the little desk. She sat and looked around the bedroom, which was an almost identical, though more masculine version of her own, its walls a clean white, the trim painted a dark blue that matched the bedding and curtains. The room was neat, the bed made, not a single piece of clothing on the floor. A black suit was draped over the blue and red patchwork quilt.

  “What um . . . what did you want?” he asked. He sat down on the bed, clutching his robe around him. With his wet hair slicked down close to his head, he looked very young.

  Suddenly, she was so embarrassed, she could barely speak. But she’d already started it and there wasn’t any turning back. “I saw you in Boston yesterday,” she announced. “And I know that you lied to us about when you arrived in Vermont. What I want to know is why.”

  Ian stood up and went over to the window. For a couple of minutes he didn’t say anything. Then he turned back to her.

  “I wondered if anyone knew about that. I’m afraid my explanation won’t make much sense to you, but I’ll give it all the same. I had come all the way here and I wanted some time on my own before arriving at Patch and Britta’s. I don’t know, I think it was the idea of Christmas and the children and all the people. Christmas is a bit odd for me, because I’m not with Eloise. I just wanted a few days here to explore, by myself. It’s one of my favorite things, getting to know a new place all on my own. So I stayed at a hotel in Suffolk, a few miles away. I’d heard from Patch and Britta that there were some great antiques in the area. I am, after all, here to buy antiques. So I looked around, went to an auction.”