O’ artful death

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  As he came closer, into the halo of light given off by the fixture next to the back door, Sweeney saw that the figure was Patch. She hadn’t heard him go out, and what could he possibly be doing walking around in the woods at almost midnight? Maybe he’d taken the dogs out. Or gone to check on the bridge. That was it, he’d probably gone to check on the bridge.

  She found another comforter in a blanket chest at the foot of her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders before getting back under the covers. It had been a long time since she had dreamed about Colm, and it was awhile before she was able to sleep.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DECEMBER 22

  SWEENEY WOKE UP the next morning piteously hung over, her shoulder throbbing from her fall, and lay in bed for a moment, only partly conscious. From downstairs, she heard the sounds of the household, faint voices calling to each other, a radio blaring hoarsely somewhere. An overwhelming urge to roll over and go back to sleepstarted to take hold, but the clock on her bedside table read 10 and her ears told her that the household was awake. She put on jeans and a sweatshirt and closed her bedroom door behind her.

  “This is awful,” Britta said as Sweeney came down the stairs, one hand to her pounding head. “The house is a mess.” She looked as though she were about to cry and Sweeney murmured something sympathetic as she looked around at the post-party carnage: half-full champagne glasses everywhere, marked with oily lipstick kisses on the rims; plates covered with food scraps, bones and skin and fruit rinds. It made her nauseous and she closed her eyes as the floor rose up to meet her, squeezing her temples to make the throbbing stop.

  Toby and Rosemary were working on the living room, picking up glasses and plates.

  “We just told the caterers to go home because of the bridge,” Britta was saying. “We didn’t even think.”

  The bridge. Sweeney had forgotten about the bridge. “Have they fixed it yet? I was thinking about going downtown for some Christmas presents.”

  “No. But it should be clear soon.” Britta shivered a little. “I hate it. It makes me feel claustrophobic. At least Carl Thompson’s in jail.”

  Patch came in from the kitchen, holding a giant garbage bag. “Okay, let’s do this. I want to get outside this afternoon.”

  “Can I help?” Sweeney asked bleerily.

  “You look like you’re going to be sick,” Toby said. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “Sore. But not as sore as my head.” Sweeney rubbed her temples.

  Patch said, “Why don’t you have some coffee, Sweeney. Brit and I can handle clean-up duty. Everyone else is down by the river, watching the cops try and get rid of the ice. You might want to head down and see what’s going on.”

  “Actually,” Sweeney said. “I think I’ll go for a walk. The cold air will be good for my head.”

  Britta looked as though she wished Sweeney would grab a garbage bag and get working. But she said, “Go ahead. By the way, there’s a paper bag on the table in the hallway. Charley Kimball came up and dropped it off for you this morning.”

  “Charley Kimball? Did she say what it was?”

  “No. Oh, Patch. Don’t throw those away. We can wash those . . ..”

  Sweeney, feeling she had been dismissed, got dressed to go. On her way out, she tucked the little bag into the pocket of her parka.

  THE WICKEDLY COLD AIR was good for her head, and the headache passed after the first twenty minutes or so of hard walking. Despite the thin layer of new snow that had fallen during the night, she was able to follow the deep tracks left by the runners of the sleigh, and she walked along in them, on the path they had taken last night.

  When she was a couple hundred yards from the house, Sweeney took the small bag out of her pocket and retrieved from it a blue, faux leather bankbook, a note paperclipped to the front. The note read, in extremely neat printing, “I thought about it and I thought I should give you this. Love, Charley.” Sweeney folded the note into her pocket, then stopped and held the little book in her hands, turning it over.

  She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. The book had Ruth Kimball’s name on the inside cover and listed a balance of $12,762. On a piece of masking tape stuck on the back someone had written, in red pen, “Charley’s College Account.”

  The first page was faintly printed with a record of deposits that started in July and went on quite regularly from there. Each one was $1,500. When she flipped through the little book, she found, stuck in the back, a small scrap of paper with some dates jotted on it. They were different from the dates in the book, and didn’t seem to have any significance that Sweeney could identify.

  Why had Charley given it to her? It was sweet that her grandmother had established a college account for her, but what could it possibly have to do with Mary Denholm? She slipped the book back into her coat, disappointed, and when she felt the quick twinge in her shoulder, her mind was suddenly back on Maple Hill.

  She went over the list of everyone who had been there. Patch, Willow, Toby, Trip, Rosemary, Gally. And Ian, of course. Ian had been there, too.

  How had he gotten there so quickly? How had he known where to go? It only made sense if he had pushed her. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became.

  He had lied about when he arrived. And he had followed Sweeney to Boston. Kissing her had been a ploy to distract her from the sheer silliness of his stupid excuses.

  But why? That was what she kept coming back to. The police were saying that Carl Thompson had killed Ruth Kimball and until she found out differently, Sweeney was going to accept that. So was it possible that Ruth Kimball’s murder had absolutely nothing to do with Mary Denholm’s? Was it possible that Ian had come to make sure that the truth about the older mystery didn’t get out?

  Anything was possible, Sweeney told herself sardonically. But not everything was true. She decided she’d head over to Gilmartin’s studio.

  She hadn’t seen it yet and it might be inspiring to see the place where he’d carried on his liaisons, the place where Mary’s body had been found.

  She took the path through the woods, taking the fork that Ian had pointed out to her that first day in Byzantium. As she came out on a little ridge, she could see the river below her. The morning sun and warmer air had loosed the ice floes a bit and the water ran swiftly by, dark and bottomless. She stood for a moment, looking down at it and gasped when she saw a dark form floating by, the face stretched into a grimace, the flowing hair trailing in the water, the hands folded demurely over the lap.

  But it was just a log, a frozen chunk of ice at one end, a plastic bag dragging like hair, icy hands twisted from a few leftover branches at the other. The log bobbed a bit on the water, innocuous now, and Sweeney admonished herself for being so skittish.

  The path sloped down to the river and after a few minutes she saw, up ahead in the trees, the small brown form of Herrick Gilmartin’s studio. It was like a little log cabin, built up on stilts. Underneath was piled firewood, and off to one side was a telephone booth-sized structure Sweeney assumed was an outhouse.

  She stood and looked at the little building. It was in a pretty spot, just above the river, with views across to the other bank and a path that led down to what must have been a small beach. In winter, under a thin and unattractive covering of snow and ice, the studio looked a bit forlorn, but she could imagine it surrounded by leafy trees and gardens, the green banks of the sparkling river beckoning a tired artist. She climbed three wooden stairs to the porch and tried the front door, but found it well secured with a shiny padlock. The windows were obscured by curtains and when she stood up on tiptoes to try to look through the narrow pane above the door, she saw only molding, the top of a wall. Darn.

  She climbed down off the porch and studied the building. So this was where he had carried on his affaires de couer, Sweeney thought, or his affairs of something else. It was also where Mary had modeled for Gilmartin on her last day of life.

  The wind blew thr
ough the trees, stirring up the bone-bare limbs, which clacked against each other alarmingly. A branch that had been wedged in a little tree next to the studio flew and skittered down onto the ground. The wind came hurrying through the trees again and she felt suddenly afraid.

  She turned to go. But the outhouse stood there like an unfinished sentence. She would just make sure there wasn’t anything there of interest. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was hoping to find, but it had been Gilmartin’s and who knew, maybe there was some Victorian graffiti scrawled on the walls: “I killed Mary.” “Mary and Herrick forever.” Sweeney allowed herself a small smile.

  She made her way across the little yard between the studio and the outhouse, and stood there, gathering her courage, then strode over and threw the door open.

  She saw blood.

  Red blood, frozen on the wooden floor of the outhouse. Eyes staring lifelessly at nothing, the body stilled in an improbable position.

  She screamed and almost fled, then forced herself to look.

  An unfortunate ermine—she only knew its name because she had studied art and she had seen countless of those snowy white pelts in European portraits of royalty—had retreated here after being attacked by some predator of the woods. Its throat had been opened. The blood had pooled beneath it and frozen. Its white coat was absolutely pristine, though, and its eyes looked somehow peaceful. Sweeney checked to make sure that there wasn’t anything else to see in here, and shut the door.

  She waked quickly back toward the house and felt better as she came out into the sun, her shirt sticky with perspiration inside her layers of winter clothes.

  As she caught sight of Birch Lane, she decided to go visit with Sabina. She had been wanting to ask her about last night, about what she had seen in the window that had scared her so. She walked along the road and in five minutes, she was striding up Sabina’s driveway.

  The door was already open, just a crack, but through the thin aperture, she could see Sabina’s cat. It had one paw around the edge of the door as though she were trying to open it, and she mewed plaintively at Sweeney.

  “Sabina?” Sweeney called out, the door yielding to her gentle pressure. It was very cold in the hallway, probably because the door had been left open, and Sweeney shivered as she called out again. “Sabina? It’s Sweeney. I just wanted to see if you’re okay. You seemed pretty shaken up last night.”

  Silence. Sweeney stepped carefully over the cat, who was rubbing desperately against her legs. As she came into the morning room, she saw that it was very messy. Papers and magazines lay on the floor, and then as she stood there, she realized that it wasn’t just messy, that someone had knocked these things from the coffee table and the bookcases. Paintings and picture frames lay broken and jumbled on the floor. Shards of glass from a broken vase glittered on the oriental carpet.

  “Sabina?” she called again, more desperately this time, going quickly toward the library. “Are you okay?”

  In the moment that she saw Sabina’s body lying on the floor of the library, Sweeney felt as though Death had finally shown his face. He had been stalking her all this time, leaving small clues, titillating her with his mysterious ways. But now here he was, in the flesh. And it was Sweeney he sought. She was sure of that now.

  She went to Sabina’s body and kneeled down beside her to peer at her eyes, which stared heavenward, dead and empty. Her face was purple and around her neck was a red satin cord. Sweeney saw that it had come from the drapes in the morning room, the strands of glossy crimson rope wound together, the silk tassels hanging ridiculously by Sabina’s waist.

  She was wearing only a blue terrycloth bathrobe and it had opened in front to reveal a peek of grotesquely mottled breast, silvery gray hair between her legs.

  Sweeney looked up quickly at the wall where the relief by Jean Luc Baladin had been, and when she saw that it was bare, she got up and she began to run, away from Death, away from the evil that had been done here, away from her chaotic confusion about what it all meant.

  She ran from the house and didn’t stopuntil she reached the bridge.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “SO THE RELIEF WAS MISSING?” It was much later and Sweeney was sitting in Chief Cooper’s office at the police station, curled in a chair, hugging herself as if she could get warm again. One of the state investigators—she didn’t remember his name—sat in a chair at the other end of the room, listening.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. I looked up and the whole wall was bare. It’s definitely gone. I looked around the whole room, after I’d realized she was . . . that there was a body.” She was seeing once more the image of Sabina’s eyes, staring up at her.

  Cooper said nothing. His eyes were tired and his hands, Sweeney noticed, tremored slightly. “Had anything else been taken?”

  She was so tired, she had to fight through a veil of exhaustion in order to focus her eyes on his face. “I don’t know. I’d only been there once. You’d have to ask Willow, or someone who knows. I just don’t . . . I can’t remember.”

  He watched her. “Have you ever seen a body before?” he asked quietly. “It can be very disturbing if you haven’t.”

  The radio on his desk buzzed suddenly and Sweeney listened to a voice say something about securing Sabina’s house after the body had been taken away. “You’d think so, in my line of work. But I haven’t. It was different than I thought it would be, you know? I think I’d always figured that a dead body would look the way they do in horror films. Grotesque. Violated. But it was just a person, it was just her. Except I knew she wasn’t alive anymore.”

  “What made you go and see her?” She had been waiting for him to ask the question and she swallowed hard before telling him about the way Sabina had suddenly stared at the window at the party, and the look of fear that had passed across her face.

  “So you think she must have seen something reflected in the window that scared her?”

  “It’s the only thing I can think. I was going to make sure she was okay and ask her what it was. But someone . . .”

  “Someone got there first.” He met her eyes and she nodded.

  She thought for a moment and said, “It means that it wasn’t Carl, doesn’t it? Because he was in jail.”

  He looked up at her in surprise, then said. “You’re right. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Carl Thompson wasn’t responsible for this.” The state investigator cleared his throat and Sweeney got the idea that Cooper had said something wrong.

  “I don’t know anything about this. She was . . . she was strangled with a cord. From the curtains. I don’t know how it works. Would you have to be strong, to do that? Or would the cord . . .?”

  He raised his eyebrows at her and she could see that he wasn’t going to tell her anything. “Tell me a little bit more about what happened last night. There was an accident?” he said finally.

  She looked up quickly, wondering who had told him. “Yes. But I’m not sure if . . . It was probably just an accident.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. You were coming back from the sleigh ride when I saw you. Is that right?”

  “Yes. You’d just shown up to announce about the bridge.” She saw something flash across his face and in that instant, she understood why he seemed so grim. “I just realized. About the bridge. Don’t you see? It had to be one of us. It had to be someone on The Island.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “It had occurred to me. That’s why we’re trying to pin down what everyone did after the party. You went to bed, I take it?” She nodded. “What about the rest of the household?”

  Sweeney swallowed, remembering Patch’s figure returning home at 4 A.M. “The kids went to bed, too, at least I think they did. I think Britta and Patch went to bed about the same time I did.”

  He must have heard hesitation in her voice because she prompted her with a “And . . .?”

  “And I woke up from a bad dream at four and saw Patch coming home. He was walking.”


  Cooper sat up a little straighter in his chair. “At four, you say?”

  “Yes. I figured he had gone to check on the bridge.”

  Cooper didn’t confirm or deny that. “According to our interviews, your friend Mr. DiMarco took Electra Granger and Rosemary Burgess home. Mrs. Granger says he and Rosemary talked out in the car for a while and that she came back in around one. What time did he get home?”

  “I don’t actually know. I was asleep by then.”

  “What about Ian Ball?”

  “I don’t know. I assume he went to bed, too.”

  “But did you see him? Up on the third floor?”

  Sweeney hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said. “I didn’t see him and his door was closed.”

  IT WAS BRITTA WHO picked her up at the police station. She was waiting in the lobby when Sweeney came out of Cooper’s office, reading a magazine, her right foot tapping out a nervous rhythm on the linoleum. Outside the windows, the twilight sky was the loveliest shade of blue Sweeney had ever seen. A few early stars shone brilliantly above.

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” Sweeney said as they got into the Land Rover.

  Britta had been crying and she looked up and said, “That’s okay. Toby wanted to, but I felt like I just had to get out of the house. I couldn’t stand being strong anymore. For the children.”

  “I’m sure no one expects you to be strong all the time. Sabina was your friend.”

  “I know. There are times I think it’s better for them to know that you don’t stop being scared or weak just because you’re an adult, that I should let them see what our problems are, where all the fissures lie. And there are times when I think the most important thing I can do for them is to let them be scared while we keep things going.”

  “You’re right. I had parents who let me see how weak they were all the time. It was terrifying.”