O’ artful death

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “It’s lovely this early in the morning,” Ian said awkwardly. Her stomach fluttered with nervousness. She felt suddenly panicked. What did he want from her now? What would he expect? She had never felt this way with Colm. There had never been a moment of awkwardness or strangeness after that first pint of Guinness, which had turned into a drunken twenty-four-hour festival of sex, talking and singing after which they had drifted into love and couplehood. It had been impossible to feel awkward around Colm. For one thing, he was always talking, carrying you along on his crazy tide of conversation. They had never been silent together, never been still.

  Now, walking along the wooded path to the cemetery, he said, “I dreamt of you last night.”

  “You did?” Sweeney felt a flash of irritation. If he said, “And then I woke up and there you were,” she would scream.

  But he said, “Yes. Quite a dirty little scenario, actually. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

  Sweeney laughed. “I’m wondering what was left for your subconscious to imagine, after the actual events of last night.”

  “My subconscious has quite a good imagination.”

  When they reached the cemetery, they went to stand in front of Mary’s monument—Sweeney realized she would have to stop thinking of it as a gravestone—which had started it all.

  “Isn’t it odd to think that it doesn’t really mark a grave?”

  “It is odd,” Ian said. “She has a real one, you know. In Sussex. It’s a much more typical stone, some flower garlands at the top and her name and dates. She’s buried next to Jean Luc.”

  They turned to the stones of the rest of the Denholm family. “I wonder what it was like for her parents,” Ian said. “Never seeing their child again, but knowing that she was alive somewhere, that she had a child they would never see. I suppose if they were proper Victorians, they would have blamed her for being of loose morals and kind of written her off. But it must have been hard.”

  Sweeney had been rereading the words engraved on Elizabeth Denholm’s simple marble stone. “Her mother’s stone. Look. I didn’t really read it before.”

  “O’ Artful Death,” Ian read.

  “It’s everything I needed to know,” Sweeney said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that it’s lamenting what they did, I think. Artful Death. Lying Death. Mary’s death was a lie. Perhaps it reflected Louis’s sadness, too. They thought that Death, i.e. Mary going away, would bring them peace, or resolution at least. But that was a lie, too.”

  Ian turned to Louis Denholm’s stone. “Her father’s was awfully dark wasn’t it? The first time I saw it, I felt quite sorry for Mary.”

  He cleared some snow away from the stone and read out loud.

  Think my friends when this you see

  How Death’s dark deed hath slayed me

  He is a thief and taketh flight

  Beneath the cover of the night

  “It’s . . .” Sweeney stared at it, confused.

  “What?” He had heard the strangeness in her voice.

  “Nothing, it’s just that it’s very odd.”

  They walked around, looking at some of the other stones. “Is it weird for you to think that you’re related to them?” she asked him.

  “I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “Will you tell Sherry Kimball? You’ll have to.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll have to tell Patch and Britta as well.”

  “I think Patch may have suspected that there was something wrong anyway,” Sweeney said. “I’ve had the feeling, ever since I got here, that he didn’t want me to look into this thing. Do you suppose he suspected that his grandfather had had something to do with Mary’s death, the way I did?”

  “It’s possible. He may also have been nervous about you looking into old family history because of this thing with the land and the condominiums and all.”

  She looked up at him.

  “Sweeney?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s wrong? You’ve an odd expression on your face.”

  “I’d forgotten about the thing with the land. That’s all.”

  “You look as though you’d seen a ghost.”

  She walked around in a little circle, something that helped her to think. “It’s just that I had been assuming that Ruth Kimball and Sabina were murdered because they knew something about Mary’s death. But we now know they weren’t killed because of Mary. So I have to ask myself why they were killed. And it just occurred to me that I’d forgotten about the whole thing with the land.”

  “And . . .?” He was looking at her with a concerned expression on his face.

  “And, it’s in the missing diary pages. Remember? Myra Benton asked Morgan about the land and he said that Gilmartin was going to buy it from Louis Denholm.”

  Sweeney paused. “What did Patch tell you about it?”

  Ian hesitated for a moment. “What he told you, I think. That he had always thought he owned the piece of land, but when they went and looked, no deed had ever been recorded and it looked like it was actually still owned by Ruth Kimball. So he decided to fight this condo thing from the angle of its intrinsic historical value. State regulations against development and all that. You were there, weren’t you? Sweeney?”

  But she had gone back to Louis Denholm’s gravestone and now she was standing in front of it and reading the words over and over again to herself. “Come here,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

  She pointed to the words on the stone. “The language is wrong. ‘Hath?’ ‘Taketh?’ That’s eighteenth century, not nineteenth. It’s like he was drawing attention to it. And ‘Death’s dark deed.’ Now, I have never in my entire life heard of the physical experience of death described as Death’s dark deed. It’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Sweeney took off her right glove and traced four letters with her bare finger. The stone was smooth and cold.

  “I’m saying that it’s a puzzle. The word deed is in there for a reason. Maybe Mary was more her father’s daughter than we thought. Maybe he’s trying to tell us where that deed is.”

  IAN LOOKED SKEPTICAL. “But why would he want people to know where the deed is? Or, what I mean is, why would he hide the deed in the first place?”

  Sweeney said honestly, “I don’t know. Patch said that his father told him that his grandfather bought the piece of land off Louis Denholm. But when they went to look, the deed was never recorded. Now, according to Patch, if they could find the deed, they could stop the development. So it’s important.”

  “But Louis Denholm wouldn’t have known that.”

  “I know, but I feel like it’s important.”

  “Sweeney . . .”

  “Look, just humor me, okay? I once wrote about a gravestone where the name of the man’s wife was spelled out by the first letter of each line of the epitaph,” Sweeney said. “ ‘Bertha.’ And the epitaph was framed as a question, asking if anyone knew the name of the ‘fiend’—that was the word it used—who was responsible for his death by poisoning. And if you put it together, it says ‘Bertha.’ So what do the first letters spell, if you put them together?” She took a pencil from her jacket pocket and wrote them down on a scrap of paper as she read out loud. “ ‘T-H-H-B’ I don’t think that’s it.”

  “All right,” Ian said, resigned. “If it is a hidden message, I think you’ve got the right idea. When I was a boy, I was obsessed with codes. The thing about a code is you have to find the key, the clue to how you’re going to decipher the whole thing. So, if it’s a nonsense sentence hiding the real message . . . Let’s see, the first letters don’t make a word, but the key could be a particular letter or, how about this . . .?”

  He wrote something down on the paper and Sweeney, who couldn’t see it, said, “What? What? Let me see it.”

  Ian pushed the paper over to her. “One of the simplest kinds of codes has to do with word placement. ‘Deed’ is the operat
ive word here and it comes fourth in its sentence,” he said. “So if we take all of the third words in their lines, what do we come up with?”

  Sweeney turned the paper around and read the words written on it. “When Deed thief of.” “What does that mean?”

  Ian grinned. “I don’t know. I just decipher them.”

  “What if we start it with ‘Deed’? No, that doesn’t work either.”

  She was suddenly dejected. It had seemed so promising. She had been expecting it to tell her that the deed could be found in safety deposit box number 56 at the Byzantium Bank, or in the third drawer of the bureau in the dining room of the Kimballs’ house.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Ian worked on the epitaph, trying different combinations of letters or words and coming up with nothing.

  “Where would you hide something like a deed?”

  “If I didn’t want anyone to be able to find it?”

  “Well . . . no. He did leave the message. If you wanted someone to have to work hard to find it. If you wanted to make a game of it.”

  “I’d hide it somewhere where it would be safe, maybe in something that would never be thrown away or damaged. Something in plain sight. Something that could be pointed to in the hidden message.”

  Sweeney stared at him. An idea was beginning to form in her mind. “Ian, you don’t think that the burglaries . . . Remember how Patch described the burglaries. That the burglar took an assortment of things, statuettes, knickknacks, but also a variety of paintings.”

  “You mean that whoever is responsible for the burglaries was looking for the deed. But the only person who wants the deed is Patch.”

  “I know. But . . . actually, that isn’t necessarily true. Everyone in the colony wanted to stop Ruth Kimball from selling her land to put up the condos. It could have been anyone. And come to think of it, the Kimballs had a reason, too. They might have wanted to find it before Patch did. Maybe Carl Thompson was looking for the deed. He was taking things from the houses . . .. what?”

  He looked skeptical. “It just seems kind of far-fetched. And he’s been in jail, so we know he didn’t kill Sabina.”

  “You’re right. Damn.” They were walking back to the house when Sweeney said, “Look. I just feel like the burglaries are the missing link here. If Carl was responsible for them, then who killed Sabina? And if he wasn’t responsible for them, then where did he get the stuff? See, there’s got to be someone else involved. Someone from the colony who would know when people were going to be out, who would know what was in the houses.”

  She thought for a moment. Her thoughts were swimming around madly in her head.

  She put a hand in her pocket.

  “You okay?” He was watching her, concerned.

  “Yeah. Listen, I’ll be back at the house soon. There’s something I have to go do.” She tried not to look at him. She didn’t want him to know.

  “Well, let me . . .”

  “No. I want to go on my own.” The only way to dissuade him was to be rude.

  He flinched and said, “All right. Will you be back soon?”

  “I don’t know, Ian. Look, just go. I’ll be back.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  ON HER WAY to the Kimballs’ house, Sweeney took the little bankbook out of her pocket again and looked at the slip of paper that had been stuck between the back cover and the last page. She read the dates to herself. They were scrawled with different pens—one blue and one black—but all in the same hand. “7/1. 8/9. 11/28. 12/10,” the writing read.

  It hadn’t struck her the first time she’d seen them because she hadn’t been to the library yet, but the dates corresponded exactly with when the burglaries in the colony had occurred. Then she looked at the deposit dates. They hadn’t seemed to follow any particular pattern, one in late July, two in August, another two in September, three in October, four in November. But now that she’d compared them with the dates of the burglaries, she could see that they started very soon after the first one and increased in frequency as time went on.

  If it had been physically possible, Sweeney would have kicked herself. Why hadn’t she gone to ask Charley about the book when she had given it to her? She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of leaving it for Sweeney if she didn’t know or at least suspect why it was important. Sweeney was starting to have an idea of what it might be that Charley could have told her.

  Sherry answered the door in her bathrobe. She looked as though she’d just gotten up and her face clouded when she saw who it was.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Sherry, is Charley here? It’s really important that I talk to her.”

  “If you talk to her, are you going to tell the police and get her arrested?” Sherry turned around and went into the house, leaving the door open. Sweeney followed her inside. She had been cleaning. The hallway smelled of lemons; wood surfaces gleamed from a recent dusting.

  “I know it must have looked bad, but all I can tell you is that I had no idea that Carl was going to get arrested. In fact, I don’t think Carl had anything to do with your mother’s death and I think Charley might be able to help me prove it.”

  Sherry looked up at that. “She went for a walk. I got her a puppy, a couple of days ago. Carl had promised her one for Christmas. She took him out for a walk, to get him used to his leash.”

  Sweeney had to resist screaming at her, “Why did you let her go alone?” Instead she said, “I’m going to go out and look for her, okay?”

  Sherry nodded. “She just went for a walk,” she said, as though trying to convince herself.

  She started across the back field, calling out Charley’s name. It was almost noon, and the sun was high above her, offering a little welcome warmth as she ran. She made a wide circle and came out by the cemetery, yelling for Charley all the while. But no one answered back.

  Sweeney was about to turn around when she saw the entrance to the path through the woods. It was steep as you went down to the river. Suppose Charley had been walking and slipped. She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck and started into the woods.

  When she reached the point where the path veered off toward the river in one direction and Birch Lane in the other, she started calling out Charley’s name again. Her voice echoed across the river and back again. “Lee-Lee-Lee-Lee,” it mocked her. A chickadee scolded her from a low-hanging pine tree and she watched it flit across the path, land and scold her again.

  The path was slippery beneath the new layer of snow and she had to go carefully so she didn’t fall. She was almost to the studio when she saw the puppy. It lay on its side about thirty feet below her on the riverbank, its body half-buried in the snow, its head twisted back grotesquely, and she knew it was dead without going down to see.

  It was five or ten minutes before she found the small form, curled into a fetal position beneath a spruce tree, the Christmasy, wonderful smell filling the air. Sweeney saw the red of her coat before she saw that it was Charley and she stopped, afraid to discover what had been done to her. She remembered the way Sabina’s eyes had stared up at her, the unnatural way her body had fallen.

  But when Sweeney leaned over her and touched the bloody gash on her forehead, Charley’s body jerked a little and her eyes opened once, fixed on Sweeney and shut again. She had wrapped Charley in her own jacket and picked her up before she remembered about spinal cord injuries and not moving people who had fallen. Charley’s body was limp, but when Sweeney touched her skin, it was warm and she breathed as though she were sleeping, rhythmically and steadily. Sweeney felt the warm moistness of it against her neck.

  And then she was running—it seemed improbable that she could run carrying the weight of the girl—running over the snow, holding Charley against her body.

  “WHEN SHE WAS BORN, I felt as though she had been given to me so that she could save me,” Sherry Kimball was saying. They were in Charley’s room at the regional hospital in Suffolk, watching her sleep, watching the beeping and whirring of
the machines and the dripping of various liquids into her blood. “I was into all kinds of stuff then, and they said she probably wouldn’t even come out normal, you know. But she did, she came out perfect. More than perfect. And she was mine, although she always made me feel that I didn’t know what I was doing. She always made me feel like I shouldn’t have been trusted with her or something.”

  “I think everyone must feel like that,” Sweeney said. “I bet if you could have asked your mother how she felt when she had you, she would have said almost the same thing.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Sherry stood up and went over to the bed. “I shouldn’t have let her go alone,” she said to Sweeney. “With everything that’s happened. You wouldn’t have let her go, would you?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea what kinds of good or bad choices I would make. But she’s going to be okay, so it doesn’t really matter.” She knew that she should have said something about learning from mistakes, but instead she said, “She’s going to be okay. You get a second chance.” Sherry looked at her, tears in her eyes. Sweeney said it again. “You get a second chance.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The storm of 1890 arrived a couple of days before Christmas, as the colonists who stayed were getting ready for the holiday and those who came north for the parties had just begun to arrive.

  Morgan later said that he could feel in his bones that something was coming, but he didn’t have any idea how bad it was going to be. By the time it had stopped on Christmas Day, it lay as deep as a child or small woman and we told the children not to go outside for fear they would be buried.

  —Muse of the Hills: The Byzantium Colony, 1860–1956,

  BY BENNETT DAMMERS

  THEY DIDN’T CELEBRATE Christmas Eve. Britta had already made oyster stew, and they were all eating halfheartedly when Sweeney came home from the hospital. Ian jumped up and asked her how she was and Toby tried to give her a hug, and get her to sit down, but she couldn’t stand to sit there at the table and she told them she didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed.