Mansions Of The Dead (10 page)

The rest of the mail was unpromising, credit card come-ons and advertising flyers and Sweeney was about to chuck it all into her mail basket when a slim blue envelope with a London postmark slid out onto the table. Her heart sped up and she stared at it for a few minutes, then propped it up against a vase full of daffodils from the supermarket. The crisp blue paper was richly textured, the black ink a sharp contrast to the pale background. The envelope seemed somehow fraught with danger. She knew who it was from and she knew she couldn’t open it. She’d open it tomorrow. Tomorrow, she thought, with a little charge of excitement and fear.

She left it propped up against the daffodils, then got up to pour herself another drink, and took out the sketches of the jewelry again.

With Brad’s interest in mourning jewelry, it didn’t surprise her that he had gone out and acquired some for the seminar project. After all, he had the money and he certainly had the interest. Why wouldn’t he go out and buy a few pieces? She remembered now that she had told the class about sites on the Internet where you could purchase mourning jewelry. Brad might have bought some jewelry online and then gone to the Blue Carbuncle to make sure it was authentic.

But why had he been wearing it at the time of his death?

It was when she caught sight of the student essays piled on her desk that she remembered Brad’s presentation. Her senior seminar students had been working on semester-long papers. Sweeney liked to have them present their work to the rest of the class during the week they were to turn in their papers. She found her syllabus and saw that Brad had signed up to present his work on mourning jewelry in a couple of weeks. Knowing him, he’d already started writing. Surely his early draft of the paper would offer some clues to the possible significance of
the jewelry, or at least what his concerns had been. So how could she get hold of it? It was something to think about.

She had found out something today, she told herself. She had found out that Brad had acquired the jewelry before his death and that he was concerned about it for some reason.

Should she call Quinn? This new bit of information meant that the police would likely be wasting their time trying to trace the jewelry to a third party. But Quinn had told her not to talk to anyone about it. If she went to him and told him what she now knew, he would be very angry. What could she do? Who would know what Brad’s concerns about the jewelry were? Brad might have told Becca and Jaybee, but it would be awkward to ask them. What about his family? She had no idea if he was close to his family. Would he have talked to them about it? How could she talk to his family about the jewelry?

She decided that the key was finding Brad’s paper. Then she’d have an excuse to call Quinn.

BUT AS IT TURNED
out, Quinn called her first.

She was busy most of the next day and didn’t get his message until she had finished her last class and checked her mailbox in the third-floor department office. Mrs. Pitman had written the message on a pink “While You Were Out” form. They had voice mail in the department, but it was impossible to convince Mrs. Pitman that it was more convenient to be able to listen to the message oneself than to scramble around for the slip of paper.

She dialed the number and when she heard Quinn’s voice, she had a moment of panic. Had he found out somehow that she had gone to the antique stores? Had someone been following her?

But no. He was wondering if she would be willing to come along when he questioned the family about the jewelry that afternoon. The police were going to ask the family if they’d seen the jewelry before and they wanted to have someone present who knew about it, in order to figure out where it might have come from, on the off-chance that it had been known to Brad’s parents or siblings.

“We’ll ask you to keep the details of the conversation confidential,” he said sternly.

Trying to keep the satisfaction out of her voice, she told Quinn that she’d be happy to help out.

She was antsy, so she locked her office door and headed for Mount Auburn Cemetery. The trees were just budding—in a week they’d be covered with blossoms. She’d brought her well-worn map of the cemetery and she perused it as she walked, locating the Putnam family plot on the list of prominent Bostonians buried within Mount Auburn’s walls, and finding it on the map. It was one of the older plots, on Asphodel Path, not far from the main road, but private because it was at the end of the little path.

The plot was surrounded by a low, granite fence that had a finial at each corner and read “Putnam” on either side of the low gates. Sweeney stepped between them into the plot to look around.

The highlight of the plot was the large marble monument that sat in the very center, with the rounded heads of the twenty or so other family stones surrounding it. The monument was in the shape of a tall church tower, with intricately carved columns twined with ivy and roses, and exacting architectural detail. At the bottom were the words, “Charles Danforth Putnam. January 3, 1809, to April 2, 1863. Here he lays his quiet head; Amid the mansions of the dead.”

It was a fairly common epitaph, though you usually saw it on earlier stones. It wasn’t that uncommon, though, for people to choose an epitaph they’d seen on a parent’s stone and use it for themselves or for a family member. The reference was an old one. It appeared in the Greek—Sophocles, Sweeney thought she remembered—and then again and again throughout history. There were a couple of hymns that used the phrase as well.

And she remembered with a start, it appeared in the Robert Blair poem she’d been discussing with Brad.

“And tatter’d coats of arms, send back the sound/Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults,/The mansions of the dead,” she whispered to herself. “Rous’d from their slumbers,/ in grim array the
grizzly spectres rise, Grin horrible, and, obstinately sullen,/Pass and repass, hush’d as the foot of night.”

She looked over her shoulder, feeling cold all of a sudden in the uncertain spring air, and got out her notebook, going to work charting the Putnam family tree from the dates on the stones. The earliest stone marked the graves of Charles Putnam’s parents, who had died in 1845 and 1852. Charles Putnam’s stone was the second oldest and it was surrounded by stones she assumed marked the graves of a brother and sister-in-law, Joshua Putnam and Hannah Danville Putnam. They had died not long after Charles Putnam and their daughter and son-in-law were buried next to them. Sweeney always found it interesting to wonder about how certain family members were invited to be buried in the family plot and others were not.

Then there were a number of later Putnam stones, from the late 1800s and early and mid-1900s, and a series of stones with interesting floral iconography, lilies on one, ivy on another, and ferns on a third. It was common to use a broken-off rosebud as a symbol for a child who had died too young, and lilies were also relatively common, but it was interesting to see the three together. As she walked around the perimeter of the plot, she found Peter Putnam’s stone, a simple black granite rectangle with his name and the dates of life and death: “Peter Sheehan Putnam. August 10, 1983, to July 20, 1998.” Sweeney stood before it for a few minutes, then moved on.

She walked toward the back of the plot and was looking for more synchronous dates when she caught sight of a large marble stone, its top carved to resemble a shroud. Below the folds of thick, rich cloth rendered in marble, the stone read, “Edmund Danforth Putnam. December 4, 1863–June 23, 1888. All Is Bright.”

Edmund! Could it be the Edmund from the brooch?

She went around to the back of the stone but didn’t find any more information. Wait, what was the date of his death? June 23, 1888. It was the same as the one on the brooch. So it had to be the same Edmund. It must be.

Sweeney grinned. That explained how Brad had gotten hold of the
jewelry—it was a family heirloom. She felt a little surge of satisfaction at having figured it out ahead of Quinn. She kneeled down and cleared away some dead grass from the base, reading the epitaph again, then copied the dates and the epitaph into her notebook.

She went through all of the stones again, trying to figure out who Edmund’s mother was. But there wasn’t anyone with the appropriate birth and death dates.

As she was leaving, she noticed the small bouquet of wilted daisies someone had left on the grass to one side, against the fence. And when she went over to look more closely, she noticed that there was a small, white marble statuette of an angel. There were no words or dates of any kind and though the historian in her was bothered by this, she also saw the appeal of the simple anonymous angel. Whose grave marker could it be? Angels often marked the graves of children. But it wasn’t Peter Putnam’s stone, and she didn’t think the Putnams had any other children who had died. And who had put the daisies there?

As she walked back toward campus, she tried to imagine the circumstances under which Brad had acquired the jewelry. Had he had it for a long time? Was that where his interest in mourning objects came from? But if he had had it in his possession for a while, why hadn’t he ever shown it to her? It would have been the natural thing for him to bring the jewelry into class to show everyone. But for some reason, he hadn’t. Why?

SWEENEY SAT IN THE
hallway outside Andrew Putnam’s library, looking up at a very modern wood and metal sculpture of a man reading a book, and listening to the murmur of voices from inside the room.

She would not have thought she’d find a piece of decidedly modern sculpture anywhere in this house. From the outside, it looked like a classic Beacon Hill residence—all brick and imposing angles, a tiny neatly landscaped garden in front planted with a few different varieties of hostas, the shiny leaves shimmering with droplets of water from the spring rain that had fallen during the night. Sweeney had expected to find a formal entryway, lots of oriental carpets and dark wood furniture. But when she’d been shown in by a middle-aged woman with a German accent and told that Detective Quinn would come and get her when he was ready, she had looked around in amazement at an airy, modern foyer, the walls painted a pale blue, a silver-and-blue geometric carpet covering the floor. The walls had simple chrome light fixtures and a few modern paintings in shades of blue and green. Through doorways leading off to other sections of the house, Sweeney could see airy rooms, the walls all cool blues and greens. Wet, spring
light ran into the foyer through a skylight over her head, giving her the feeling of being underwater.

She had been told to sit on a blue silk upholstered love seat in the hallway and so she sat, feeling the lack of a magazine.

Instead, she looked up at the sculpture. She didn’t recognize the artist, but there was something about it that she liked. The human form reminded her of a little wooden artist’s model, and the sculptor had managed to capture the relaxed pose of someone enjoying a good book.

The German woman came out of the room and nodded at Sweeney as she pulled the door closed behind her. It didn’t quite catch and the door swung open very slightly, allowing the voices inside to carry out into the hall.

“. . . need a list of his friends,” a male voice was saying. “Anyone who might have been with him that night, might know what happened.”

“He didn’t have that many friends, actually,” another male voice said. “Jaybee and Becca. The three of them hung around together a lot. There were probably others, but you know how college is. You get to be friends with people, but your family doesn’t necessarily know about it.”

“Jaybee and Becca are who I would say,” a female voice—young, Sweeney thought—said. “They were always hanging around together. There was a girl he dated his freshman year, an Australian girl, I think. Danielle or something like that.”

“Danielle Weedbottom.” A different male voice this time.

“Jack!” The young woman’s voice was exasperated. “It was Weed-man. That’s it. Danielle Weedman. Remember, Mom, he brought her for Easter or something?”

Sweeney rose to shut the door, but as she stood she discovered that she could see into the room from the love seat, that in fact she had quite a good view of a large desk and a half-moon grouping of chairs around it. The library, like the rest of the house, was a clean modern room with pale blue walls, white leather furniture, and slim glass bookshelves,
suspended from the ceiling with wires. It was coolly retro, a tall, summer drink for the soul. Quinn was standing, his arms folded in front of him and his jacket hiked up at the back so she could see the holster on his belt and the silvery gun. Behind the desk was a slim, silver-haired man who she knew must be Andrew Putnam. He had his hands folded on the desk and seemed to be consciously trying to keep his posture in check.