The day after Christmas she would tell Cooper what she thought had happened. She would give them Christmas at least. She would do that for Toby.
Now she was tired. Now she collapsed into the armchair in her bedroom and picked up the first book on the bedside table. She wanted to distract herself with words.
It was the collected Tennyson and she opened to the poem that had started all of this, and read it to herself.
“On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many tower’d Camelot;”
Sweeney found herself thinking of Mary, who had gotten her into this in the first place. Mary, who had fancied herself a kind of Lady of Shalott, pining away on her island until she was rescued by her own Lancelot, Jean Luc Baladin. But unlike the Lady of Shalott, he had taken her away.
“There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:”
She had always liked that line. Shadows of the world appear. It was true, looking at things through a mirror was a misrepresentation. She thought of her mother, who had always put on her makeup for the stage using a double mirror, so as to negate the switching-around effect of looking into a single mirror. It was a common theatrical practice, so you would see yourself exactly as the audience did.
Wait a second.
She dropped the book onto her lap. Her mind was racing. Mirrors, shadows, it all danced around in her head, a dervish of images. There was something . . . a window. Oh God.
She had been stupid. They had all been stupid. She felt a cold fear settle over her shoulders. The figures in the little book. She had thought she knew, but she hadn’t. Not really. This time she really knew.
She read the rest of the poem.
“But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, ‘She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”
She waited, unsure what to do, and paced around the room, trying to put it all into order. After an hour or so she heard Ian come up the stairs, pause outside her room, and then go into his own room, carefully shutting the door.
Then she went and lay down on her bed, where she waited for an excruciating thirty minutes, the numbers rolling over slowly on the digital clock.
Finally, when the house was silent, she got up and put on a heavy sweater and a pair of ski pants over her sweats. She found a hat and gloves, grabbed a flashlight out of her bag, and tiptoed quietly out into the hall. She’d decided that she wouldn’t use the flashlight until she was outside so that she wouldn’t wake anyone up, so she felt her way down the stairs, shushed the dogs when they got up to greet her and stood there in the hall for a moment, gathering her nerve.
Then she took the set of boots and cross-country skis she’d used that first day out of the hall closet and slipped out the back door, shutting it softly behind her. Thankfully, the dogs stayed quiet, watching her for a moment through the glass and then dropping their heads to the kitchen floor.
She’d made it.
She snapped the boots into the skis, switched on the flashlight and looked out into the whirling snow.
THIRTY-THREE
LATER, SHE WASN’T sure how she’d reached the studio. The beam of the flashlight gave her only a foot or so of visibility in the whiteout. Every time she put a ski forward, she feared she was going in the wrong direction, searching for the path through the dark, snow-cloaked trees.
But then the light caught the silvery length of the half-frozen river, and she hugged the bank as much as possible, knowing the path led straight to Gilmartin’s little studio.
It was bitterly cold and the driving snow made its way under the collar of her parka and down into the ski boots. She kept going, pushing her feet forward, even when they began to throb, when the muscles in her arms began screaming for relief.
Just when she thought she was going to collapse, she saw, up ahead, a brown block in all the white. She was there.
Sweeney stepped out of the skis and huddled on the porch for a moment relieved to be out of the driving wind and snow. When she’d recovered, she tried the windows, finding them locked, and pulled fruitlessly at the padlock on the door.
It took her a few minutes to find a rock under the snow, but once she had one in her hand, she wrapped her right arm in her scarf and punched the rock through the glass. Then she used it to break away the shards of glass along the window frame and placed her parka over the rough edges of glass, carefully climbing over the sill. Once she was inside, she put her parka back on and shone the flashlight along the ground and then up the walls. There was no one there.
The studio was a large room with a fireplace against one wall and a row of shelves against another. It was empty of any furniture except for an old easel, covered with splashes of multi-colored oil paint, and an army cot pushed against one wall.
But it wasn’t empty. On the floor in front of the far wall, Sweeney could see an irregularly shaped heap. She went closer and lifted a brown tarp from the pile of stolen artwork.
She quickly found what she was looking for and she piled the paintings up to the side, wrapping them in the plastic garbage bags she’d put in her coat pocket. It wasn’t an ideal way to transport art, but it would have to do. She was wrapping the parcel when she heard footsteps out on the porch and she shut off the flashlight, pressed herself against the wall next to the door, and waited.
After what seemed like an eternity, a figure came through the window. She turned the flashlight on, shining it at where she imagined the face would be.
“Hey.” It was Gally. He squinted at her, holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the light.
She had not expected to see Gally.
“What are you doing here?” She continued shining the light at him. He was wearing a parka and ski pants and his legs and arms were caked with snow.
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I followed you. I want to talk to you.”
She didn’t trust her voice, so she just kept the light on his face.
“How did you figure it out?” he asked her.
“I went to the library,” she said. “I looked at when the burglaries were. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they only happened when you and Trip were home from school. And my earrings. I started to see that there was a pattern. One thing followed another.” He seemed to understand what she was saying.
“I don’t want you to go to the police. I’ll pay them back for it.”
Stay calm, she told herself, just stay calm.
“But what about the other stuff? The stuff that’s been sold already. The stuff that was dumped and that Carl Thompson found and fenced.”
“I’ll figure something out. Look, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s always liked taking stuff. Ever since we were kids. It’s like a sickness. He can’t help it.”
Sweeney stepped a foot closer to him. He was upset, almost crying, and she felt sorry for him.
“I know,” she said.
“He doesn’t know any better,” Gally said, running a hand through his wet hair. “Look, if you’re not a twin, you can’t understand. He’s gotten caught a few times and my parents have had to bail him out. If he gets caught again, he’ll definitely get kicked out of school. He doesn’t even know why he does it. He doesn’t need the stuff. He can afford to pay them b
ack. He has money from my grandparents.”
Sweeney went along, not knowing exactly where it was going to go. “What about the blackmail, and the murders?”
Now Gally looked genuinely surprised. “What do you mean, blackmail? And he didn’t have anything to do with the murders.” Gally looked around the room, desperate, as though he expected someone else to be there.
“Are you sure?” Sweeney watched him think about it.
A motor sounded outside.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Gally turned and looked. “It’s one of the snowmobiles.” Sweeney shut off the flashlight and told him to be quiet and stand with her against the wall. They listened to the footsteps outside, and the sound of a key in the padlock, then the squeaking of the door hinges. And then a light came on.
It was Trip. He was holding one of the hunting rifles, the same one Britta had trained on Sweeney the day she’d arrived in Byzantium. It struck her that this had been the cause of Britta’s fear, the knowledge of what this boy, her son, was capable of.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on here?” He watched them, his eyes wide, his hands shaking.
“She’s not going to the police, Trip,” Gally said. “Don’t worry. She promised she wouldn’t go. We’ll bring back all the stuff and no one will know.” His voice had an edge of desperation.
Sweeney turned to him. “Look, Trip. You’re in big trouble. But if you tell the police about it, you’ll get off easy. You’re a juvenile. You probably won’t even go to jail. Gally thinks you’ve been burglarizing the houses because of your sickness, but if you tell them the truth, if you turn her in, things won’t be as serious.” Trip kept staring at her, the barrel of the long rifle pointed at her forehead.
“What do you mean ‘her’?” Gally asked, turning to his brother. “Trip, what does she mean?”
“Nothing,” Trip said. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“Yes, I do,” Sweeney said. “I know about Rosemary.”
Trip turned and almost dropped the rifle.
“It’s okay, Trip,” Rosemary’s gentle voice came from the porch. She had been standing out there in the snow, listening to them. “Just keep it on them. You’re doing just fine. I can handle this now.”
Then she came around the corner of the door and walked slowly over to Sweeney, her hands in her pockets. “Just relax,” she said again to Trip, as though she were talking to a scared child. “It’s okay.”
Rosemary took off her hat and ran her hands through her hair. Then she got another flashlight out of her coat pocket and shone it around the studio. “You looked through our things,” she said, looking up at Sweeney. Sweeney had expected to see someone else in her eyes, but she looked just the way she had the first time Sweeney had met her, pretty and lithe, her blond hair spiky, her cheeks pink from the cold.
“They’re not your things,” Sweeney said calmly, though she was very afraid. “They don’t belong to you.”
Rosemary stared at her for a moment. “So how did you know?” she asked quietly. “How did you find me out?” She unzipped her heavy parka, which was also caked with snow.
“Rosemary, shut up!” Trip yelled. “Don’t tell her anything.”
“Tell me,” Rosemary said. “Doesn’t seem like it could hurt now.”
Sweeney’s desire to know if she had gotten it right was so overpowering, it felt like a black hole she wanted to sink into. She moved slightly to the side and looked into Rosemary’s very blue eyes, at the pretty little birthmark.
“There was a lot more to this than you and I kept getting confused by other pieces of this, by gravestones and deeds and word puzzles. But once I had boiled it down, I wondered about the burglaries,” Sweeney said simply. “They seemed so random. Britta made a comment about magpies at some point and I thought to myself that it seemed we had a magpie for a thief. It was such a strange combination of items, mementos, keepsakes, then the electronic equipment sometimes. But every time, the paintings. It was stupid of me not to put it together sooner.
“It was strange, though, because no one made a big deal about which paintings were stolen. The names weren’t in the paper and it seemed that they must not have been very valuable or famous paintings. There wasn’t any obvious link. The only thing was that I knew a couple of them had been of you as a child, though I didn’t put it together until tonight.
“I went to have tea with Sabina shortly before she was killed and while I was there, I saw a painting by Gilda Donetti of two teenage girls and a toddler. It was hanging in Sabina’s house when I went to visit her the first time. The date on it was 1969. Sabina said it was a picture of Rosemary at the age of three or four.”
Rosemary was staring at her, her eyes afraid, and Sweeney found it gave her courage. She went on.
“At the Christmas party, Frances Rapacci told me that he had owned a picture of you when you were a child, but that it was one of the ones stolen from his house when it was burgled. It didn’t hit me until tonight that the pictures of Rosemary as a child might be the connection I was looking for in the burglaries.
“Marcus Granger’s daughter had visited the colony once after her marriage, with her young daughter, Rosemary. She—Rosemary, I mean—was a beautiful child and it seemed that at least a few of the artists around the colony painted her that summer. When I started thinking about it, I realized it was possible that Rosemary Burgess was in a number of pictures that had been given as presents to colonists by Gilda or Gilmartin or other artists. There were probably pictures of Rosemary all over the colony. That’s why she had to get them. Or get Trip to get them. I think she had caught Trip taking things from people in the colony, little things, things like my earrings, and I think she knew it must be part of a larger pattern of kleptomania and she told him she would go to the police if he didn’t take the pictures of her from the houses and take other things, too, to make it look like a string of burglaries.”
“I don’t understand,” Gally said, looking from Trip to Rosemary and then back at Sweeney. “Why would she want pictures of herself?”
“That’s what I was wondering. The burglaries coincided with Trip and Gally’s school vacations. At first I thought that Trip had taken them because he was obsessed with her, something like that. But there was something else about the timing. The burglaries only started after Rosemary arrived in Byzantium. I didn’t see that. But then something happened tonight that made me see why Rosemary didn’t want anyone to see a picture of her as a very young child.
“I read The Lady of Shalott tonight and all the stuff about mirrors and seeing the world through mirrors got me thinking. And it made me see that I actually knew everything I need to about this. I remembered the painting that I had seen hanging in Sabina’s library and I remembered that the toddler in that painting had a birthmark on her cheek, just like Rosemary. Only it was on the wrong side. It was on the left cheek. And yours”—she pointed to Rosemary’s face—“is on the right. It isn’t the kind of thing you notice, you know. If you remember someone as having had a birthmark, you don’t really remember what side it’s on.
“Rosemary had only recently come to live in Byzantium. In fact, no one had seen her since she was three years old, and the only person who might actually remember what she had looked like was her grandmother—who is nearly blind.”
“Go on,” Rosemary said.
“Her name isn’t Rosemary Burgess,” she said to Gally and Trip, then turned back. “I don’t know what your real name is but I think you must have known Rosemary Burgess in London and when Rosemary died shortly after her parents did—in an accident or maybe not—whoever you are took over Rosemary’s life, having heard stories about the wealthy grandmother. All you had to do was get back in touch with the grandmother, get a fake birthmark, since people would remember that, and show up in Vermont. I don’t know if you just did it for fun, for what you could get out of it, or if you were going to take it all the way and Electra Granger would have died before too long.”<
br />
As she talked Sweeney was looking around the room, trying to find a route of escape. There was nothing but the front door, and Trip was standing in front of it, holding the rifle.
“I think you felt that you could trick the grandmother and that there wouldn’t be anybody else who would remember you as such a young child. This is the part I’ve been trying to figure out. I think that you got the birthmark wrong because you had been used to looking at the real Rosemary the same way we look at ourselves in a mirror. You thought of it as being on the right cheek, because that’s what you saw in the mirror, so to speak. But it wasn’t. It was really on Rosemary Burgess’s left cheek.
“You arrived in Byzantium and everything was fine until you realized that you’d gotten it wrong. You could get rid of photographs, but then you discovered that Rosemary had visited the colony as a child and there were paintings. That must have been a shock to you,” she said, looking up at Rosemary, or the woman she knew as Rosemary.
The woman said, “Yes. The first week I was here, my grandmother—Electra—took me up to the attic and showed me a box of photographs of Rosemary as a child. I panicked when I realized I’d gotten it wrong.” She stood up and started pacing around the room. “It was so stupid. And it was just like you said. I had this image of Rosemary, with the birthmark here . . .. It was because it was so last-minute, you know. I didn’t even think I was going to pretend to be her until I was in Boston. I thought that I would just come and meet the grandmother, tell her about Rosemary, you know. And then I was in Boston, and I thought to myself, ‘Why not tell her I’m Rosemary.’
“We became friends in the first place because we looked so much alike. I was dating this guy who knew her from school or something and we were standing next to each other at a party and someone said, ‘You two could be twins.’ She was fun, you know, we always had a good time together, and I liked her, and we would go round and tell people we were twins.
O’ artful death Page 26