O’ artful death Read online

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way, which poor member of the Smith class of 1945 gave up her clothes for the cause?” He cast a disapproving look at her outfit.

  “What?” She looked down at her pleated skirt and belted jacket. “Don’t you think it’s cool? I think it’s a Balenciaga knockoff.”

  Toby didn’t say anything. He tended to date girls who wore fashions that could be found in current fashion magazines.

  “And what’s that around your neck?”

  “Oh, look.” She showed him the small gold and black coffin, inhabited by a skeleton and hanging on a chain around her neck. It was a museum reproduction of an Elizabethan pendant and a recent purchase.

  “You’re weird.”

  “Thanks a lot. To what do I owe the honor?” She pointed to a chair and they sat down.

  “What are you doing for Christmas again? Something fun like spending it completely alone with a bottle of scotch and some thirty-two-hour BBC costume drama?”

  “Shut up.” She kicked his chair. “I like having Christmas by myself. And besides, I’m on an old Italian movie kick right now.” She said it lightly, but his words had bitten a little.

  “Well, if you can drag yourself away from Marcello Mastroianni long enough to come to Vermont with me, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “What kind of proposition?”

  “A gravestone. To be precise, the gravestone in the photographs that were here when you came into the room.” Leave it to Toby, with his flair for the dramatic, to leave the unlabeled photos, knowing they would spark her interest.

  “You? I couldn’t figure out where they came from.” She retrieved the prints from her bookbag and spread them out on the table.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I’m intrigued.” She found the close-up of the tablet and read the bizarre epitaph in its entirety this time.

  Death resides in my garden, with his hands wrapped ‘round my throat

  He beckons me to follow and I step lightly in his boat.

  All around us summer withers, blossoms drop and rot,

  And Death bids me to follow, his arrow in my heart.

  We sail away on his ocean, and the garden falls away

  where life and death are neighbors, and night never turns to day.

  A wind comes up on the water, Death’s sails are full and proud

  My love I will go with thee, dressed in a funeral shroud.

  Now her tomb lies quiet, the shroud is turned to stone

  And where Death had been standing, is only the grave of her bones.

  “Hmmm.”

  “I know, the poem’s not very good,” Toby said. “But I think you’ll be interested anyway.”

  “All right. Tell me more.”

  “You knew I went to Vermont for Thanksgiving, right? To stay with Patch and Britta?”

  Sweeney nodded. Patch and Britta Wentworth were Toby’s aunt and uncle on what Sweeney liked to call the “grand branch” of his family. They lived with their children in the former arts colony in Byzantium, Vermont, in a house called Birch Lane that had been built by Toby’s great-grandfather. The great-grandfather was Herrick Gilmartin, a famous landscape and portrait painter from the 1880s on. Gilmartin, the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan and a host of other well-known American artists had summered or lived off-and-on in the colony at Byzantium for most of their working lives. Sweeney didn’t know much about the colony, but she’d once heard a colleague say that for a time, Byzantium and a handful of other New England artists’ communities had contained the greatest concentration of artistic talent in the United States.

  “Well, while I was up there, I was looking around in the little cemetery near Patch and Britta’s and remembered that there’s always been some question about that stone. It’s pretty strange for the time period, right?”

  Sweeney nodded. “Really strange. The girl would be a very typical Victorian monument, if she were standing and draped over a grave or something, but the figure of Death is incredibly weird, very un-Victorian actually. And it’s clearly by a real artist, a sculptor. Any idea who it was?”

  “I don’t think anybody knows. The assumption is that it was by someone who was a member of the colony or someone who visited, but it isn’t signed.”

  “Who was the girl? Mary Denholm.”

  “Just a local girl. The family lived down below my great-grandparents’ house and one of the Denholm descendants still lives in the house. Ruth Kimball. I’ve known her all my life.”

  Sweeney studied the photographs while he talked.

  “So what’s the proposition?”

  “Come up to Vermont with me for Christmas. I already asked Patch and Britta and they said they’d love to have you. You can look into this stone a little, maybe get a chapter for your book about an anomalous, heretofore-unidentified masterpiece, have some fun for a change. Christmas is great up there, lots of skiing and wassailing. Whatever wassailing is. And they have this giant party every year, a couple of days before the twenty-fifth. You’ll love it.”

  There was a note of desperation in his voice that made her ask, a little slyly, “Why do you want to go back up to Vermont again so soon after Thanksgiving? You could go spend Christmas with your mom in California.”

  He blushed. “Well, there’s this really cool woman who’s the granddaughter of one of Patch and Britta’s friends. She just moved back to the colony and I met her at Thanksgiving.”

  Sweeney felt a tiny, unwelcome stab of jealousy. Why hadn’t he told her about it before? “So why do you want me along? For female companionship if things crash and burn with the granddaughter?”

  He grinned at her. “No, it’ll just be more fun.”

  “I don’t know, Toby . . .” she said, still staring at the photographs. “I’m so exhausted from finishing up this thing for European Art Criticism. And you know how I feel about staying with people. I’m always tiptoeing around and cleaning up the bathroom as soon as I’m done. I’ll probably spill a beer on the Persian carpet or something. I’d rather just be alone. Christmas is a weird time for me.”

  “Come on, Sweeney. It’s been a year since you got back from England. All you’ve done since then is work. You spend too much time by yourself.”

  When she looked up at him, he glanced away, embarrassed. She could feel her face flush, her heart catch with hurt. But I’ve been successful, she wanted to cry out, her own shrill voice echoing in her head. I’ve seen the dividends of my emotional exile.

  “Look, just sleep on it, okay? I know this stone is up your alley.” He kissed her good-bye and, reluctantly, Sweeney met his eyes. He was right, of course. The prospect of her planned holiday stretched out in front of her now, wan and depressing.

  “Okay,” she said, still aware of that small, ugly pang of jealous discomfort. “I’ll think about it.”

  SWEENEY WAS ONE OF those Scroogeish souls for whom bright store windows and the inevitable round of Christmas parties and gifts inspired only dread and a longing for the empty, short days of early January, when winter is finally left to get on with it in earnest.

  There were good reasons for this. Like many people who dislike December, she had no warm family memories to associate with the holidays. Her father had committed suicide when she was thirteen. She had some vague memories from before the defining event; emotionally complicated, largely silent dinners at her father’s parents’ big house in Newport; her father’s last minute presents, flashlights or batteries from gas stations, wrapped in the ancient Christmas paper her grandmother had kept in a desk drawer in the study. After, she and her mother had gotten through the holidays rather than celebrated them and her Yule-tide associations ran to unclean motel rooms in second-rate resort cities or take-out turkey eaten at the table of whatever house or apartment they happened to be living in.

  Another reason was her occupation. Spending her days amongst gravestones, skeletons and images of the dead, Sweeney could not imagine the tiny baby
Jesus, tucked into the manger and wrapped in maternal adoration, without picturing the other Jesus, bleeding, dying in agony on the cross. Christmas seemed only a precursor of worse things to come.

  But while she stewed inwardly, the rest of the world seemed intent on happiness. Passing through the department’s second floor warren of cubicles on the way to her own tiny closet of an office, Sweeney watched students leaving for vacation hugging each other and dropping off presents for professors and Mrs. Pitman, the motherly department secretary.

  After returning a couple of phone calls and sending off a quick e-mail to a journal editor interested in her article on a family of Massachusetts stonecarvers, Sweeney took Toby’s photographs out again and laid them on her desk.

  Then she took down from her bookshelf some volumes on New England stones, particularly from the late nineteenth century. Her office was so small that there was only room for her most essential texts, her desk and chair, and an extra seat for student conferences. She spread the books out on her desk and after an hour and a half of reading, she was convinced her first impression had been correct.

  The stone was completely, weirdly anomalous.

  But before she trekked all the way to Vermont, she wanted to make sure there wasn’t some kind of obvious explanation. There were all kinds of ways she could go about finding out, but the simplest option presented itself as she thought about her conversation with Toby. Why not call the descendant? What was her name? Something Kimball . . .

  Sweeney looked over the notes she’d jotted down. Ruth. That was it. Ruth Kimball. It would be much too easy if Ruth Kimball could just explain the whole thing, but years of research had taught her that sometimes the obvious route to an answer was the best one.

  She got the number from information and then tried to decide what to do. She had discovered over the years that people sometimes got angry when asked about long-dead ancestors. There was often enmity and resentment buried deep among the roots of family trees. She could write a letter, but something in her wanted to know now.

  The phone rang six times before a woman answered with a gruff, “Yup?”

  “Oh, yes. I was looking for Ruth Kimball. Is she available?”

  “Yup?”

  “I’m sorry. Are you Ruth Kimball?”

  “I said I was. What do you want?”

  Sweeney took a deep breath, picturing an annoyed older woman, scowling down the phone. “Oh, I’m so sorry. My name is Sweeney St. George and I’m a professor down here in Boston. My area of specialty is funerary art, gravestones and things like that and well, the gravestone of an ancestor of yours, a Mary Denholm, was recently brought to my attention.” Good God, she was going on. Get to the point, Sweeney. “Anyway, I found it really intriguing and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, yes. What I was wondering was . . .” She had forgotten her questions. “I mean, I’m looking for any information about the artist who created the stone. It’s very strange, for the time period and for the region.”

  “I don’t know who did it. I don’t think anybody around here does anymore. Probably one of the artists from the Byzantium colony. You know about the colony?” She pronounced the word “colony” with an air of distaste. The woman’s accent was unlike any Sweeney had heard before, somewhere between Boston and London, a salty, almost colonial burr, as though her settler relatives had passed it down, barely adulterated by two hundred years in the New World. She pronounced the name of her hometown Bisantum, the way Toby did.

  “Yes,” Sweeney said. “You mean the Byzantium Arts Colony?”

  “That’s right. One of the artists, I think.”

  “Oh. Well, could I ask you how Mary Denholm died? She was very young and it might have a bearing on who created the stone and why they chose such a large monument.” Sweeney was thinking about Victorian monuments made to commemorate children who had died in large scale tragedies like apartment fires or mine disasters.

  Then she heard a child’s voice in the background and Ruth Kimball told her to hold on for a moment, calling out a muffled warning. “Well,” she said when she was back on the phone, “she was supposed to have drowned, you know. That was the story that was got about. But, my grandmother Ethel, who grew up with Mary, always said she’d been killed by one of the Byzantium artists and the whole thing was hushed up.”

  “Killed? You mean murdered?”

  “Yeah, murdered. That’s what my grandmother always said. No one around here thinks there’s anything to it but, well, they wouldn’t want it to get out, would they? The colony folks.”

  “No, I suppose they wouldn’t. I . . .” There was a knock on her open office door and Brendan Freeman came in. Damn, she’d forgotten she had an appointment with him. “Oh, hold on, Mrs. Kimball.” She held up a finger, letting Brendan know she’d be off in a second. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kimball. I have to go. Could I call you tonight perhaps, so we could talk at more length?”

  “Got bingo tonight. I’ll be around tomorrow, though. My daughter Sherry’s working and I’m watching Charley. That’s my granddaughter.”

  “Okay, fine. Thank you. Tomorrow evening then.”

  She jotted down some notes as she gestured to Brendan to sit down.

  Toby’s gravestone was getting even more interesting.

  TWO

  RUTH KIMBALL WAS NOT a beautiful woman. She had not been a beautiful girl or a beautiful young woman and at sixty-seven, she was not a beautiful older woman.

  But there was something about her face that pleased her as she looked into the hall mirror to adjust her hat. Her skin was lined, but clear and pink, as though she’d just been out in the cold. And her eyes, which had always been her best feature, were still a pale, icy blue, the color of forget-me-nots. “You look at people too much,” her mother had always said. “It’s not ladylike. You make them think you can see right through them.”

  Pretending it was her mother looking back at her from the glass, she stuck out her tongue and wiggled it, watching her reflection.

  She found her gloves in the hall closet and yelled out to Carl that she was going for a walk. When she went through to the living room, he was sitting in front of the television, where he’d been for the past two hours, watching talk shows and smoking cigarettes and stubbing them out in one of her favorite Depression glass bowls. It seemed like ever since Sherry had brought him home four months ago and announced that they were engaged, Carl had been sitting in her living room, making her mad. Ruth took the bowl from him and carried it to the kitchen sink, bringing him an old saucer to use instead.

  “When’s Sherry getting back from work?”

  He looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot. “Don’t know. Five or so.”

  “I thought you were going to talk to Hank Anson about a job at the garage.” After she said it, she wished she hadn’t. It never did any good.

  “I am,” he said, still watching the television. “Hey, what’s going on with the condos? You hear anything new?”

  Ruth was beginning to wish she’d never told Carl and Sherry about her plan to sell the house and land to a local developer who wanted to put up vacation condominiums on it. The developer—a guy from Stowe named Peter Richmond—had approached her back in the summer. At first she’d told him she wasn’t interested. The house had been in her family for 150 years. It didn’t seem right somehow for her to sell. But then he’d looked around at her living room, with its old furniture, the chairs and tables that might have looked like something in an antique shop but just looked old up against her washed-out wallpaper and faded paint. “What do you want for your family, Mrs. Kimball?” he’d asked her. “What things would you like to provide for your granddaughter as she gets older? An education? Travel? Security? She seems like a very bright little girl.” He had written the figures on a piece of paper and handed it over, the way they did when you asked for your account balance at the bank. That had been it.

  She’d kept it a secret
from Sherry for a long time. But Carl had figured it out almost as soon as he’d moved in. She didn’t know how. He’d probably eavesdropped on one of her phone conversations, or snooped in her desk. Now, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the money, asking her about it every chance he got. Ruth felt her face flush hot with anger. Well, the money wasn’t going to him and it wasn’t going to Sherry while she insisted on bringing Carl into their lives. Ruth had her own plans.

  “Don’t know for sure. The state has to approve it before I get any money or anything. The Wentworths are still trying to stop it. We’ll see.”

  She’d meant it to sound final, but he went on. “You can’t let ‘em push you around like that. Just because they’re rich and they don’t want their view wrecked doesn’t mean they can tell everybody in this town what to do. You tell ’em that. Tell ’em it’s your land and you can do whatever you want with it.”

  Ruth took a deep breath. “Look after Charley, will you? She’s reading upstairs. I’m just going for a walk.”

  “Sure.” His eyes were fixed on the TV again, where a teenage girl was telling her mother that she’d been sleeping with the mother’s boyfriend and was going to have his baby.

  Ruth glanced at Carl, trying to decide if he was stoned or not, and determined that he was all right to watch Charley. “I’m going,” she said, pulling on her gloves.

  It was bitterly cold outside, the sun slanting low across the fields of frozen snow. Ruth took a deep breath of the winter air, her lungs aching as she inhaled. In an architectural style repeated over and over again around rural New England, the farmhouse was connected to the old barn by a breezeway that had been falling in for twenty years. The door that had once led from the warm house directly out into the breezeway and the barn had long since been plastered over, so she headed directly to the barn door. She climbed a few unstable stairs, opened the door and slipped inside to the plaintive mewlings of the barn cats. They gathered around her legs as she scooped dry food out of a metal garbage can and shared it out amongst the five grubby bowls lining a wall. Her favorite of the cats, a big marmalade-colored tom, had fresh scratches on his nose and she stooped to make sure he was okay before going through to the old milking parlor to get the pistol.