Mansions Of The Dead (14 page)

“I KNOW THAT THE
memorial service is tomorrow,” Sweeney said. “And I’m willing to let you go to the police yourselves, when it’s over. If you don’t say anything, though, I’ll have to tell them. Because of the way he was tied up, they think they’re looking for some kind of ritual killer.”

Kitty Putnam had let her into a big mudroom, painted a pretty yellow, and told her to sit on a wide wooden bench against one wall. Sweeney was conscious that she had not been invited into the house, but rather into this in-between room, which nevertheless revealed much about the house’s inhabitant. A pair of rubber Wellington boots, caked with mud, was leaning against the bench, and a muddy pair of overalls hung on a hook on the wall. The tiled floor beneath a high workbench was covered with potting soil. A tray of seedlings, green and spoon-leafed, sat in a window. Next to the door leading on to a long hallway was a bag of recycling that hadn’t quite made it outside.

“Why are you telling me this at all?”

In khakis and a rose-colored T-shirt, Kitty could have been one of the models for a gardening catalog. Her hair was messy and didn’t appear to have been washed in a few days.

“Look, the police have to know about this if they’re going to figure
out who killed Brad. But I’m willing to wait and let you talk to the rest of the family and then go to the police yourselves. I liked Brad a lot and I didn’t want to go to the police and have them kind of, I don’t know, swoop down on you, without making sure I was right.”

Kitty thought about that for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what . . . I’ll talk to them. I don’t know what it could be.” She was genuinely bewildered and Sweeney realized that from the moment she had heard about her son’s death a week ago, she had been holding in her fears over how he had been found.

And then, to Sweeney’s horror, tears began to run from Kitty’s eyes. She wasn’t crying exactly. Instead it was as though something inside her, something that wasn’t grief but rather all the stuff left over from grief, was finding its way out. The tears streamed and she just stood there, as though she were confused by this too.

Embarrassed, Sweeney got up and said, “I was at the wedding too. I saw Jack there and he invited me to the memorial service tomorrow. But if you don’t want me to come, I won’t.”

Kitty ran the sleeve of her T-shirt across her face. “No, no. We’d like you to be there,” she said, nodding. “You were Brad’s favorite professor. You should be there.”

Sweeney wanted to ask about the jewelry, but it seemed so inappropriate all of a sudden that she just let Kitty walk her to the door

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she said as Sweeney stepped out into the cool night. She could smell the sea again.

“Wait, Sweeney.” Kitty’s voice came hesitantly when Sweeney was halfway down the walkway. Sweeney turned around and faced the figure standing in the door.

“Yes?”

Kitty absentmindedly plucked at one of the dogs’ ears, staring out into the darkness.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

When Sweeney had pulled away from the house, she drove slowly along Bellevue Avenue, vacillating up to the moment she actually
jerked the wheel over and turned right onto Narragansett. The Rabbit crawled down the street. It was after midnight, but the house was illuminated from within. An old Volvo—the same one she remembered her aunt Anna having—was the only car in the drive. It was clear she was home and Sweeney turned into the circular driveway, hidden behind a tall hedge.

Her grandparents’ house was a medium-sized—by Newport standards—Victorian only steps from the Cliff Walk and the Bellevue Avenue mansions. It had a small yard and perennial gardens lovingly tended by her grandmother over the years, and a certain homey, well-cared-for feeling inside that Sweeney had identified in other houses, but never quite to the same extent it existed in this one.

It had been a little more than five years since she’d been here. Her grandfather’s funeral, three months after her grandmother’s, had been the last time. The house seemed as she remembered it, though she realized that she had tended to come in the summer during her childhood and remembered the flower beds in full ripeness, the air warm and salty, the streets crowded with tourists. This was a different house, a different time.

She rang the doorbell and listened as footsteps inside padded toward her, as the owner of the footsteps unlocked a series of bolts and swung the big front door open and then stared at her, surprised, for a few long moments before she managed to get out, “Sweeney! What . . . ?”

“I was here for a wedding and I’m too tired to drive back. Is it okay to stay here for the night?”

They didn’t hug, didn’t even touch. Anna didn’t ask any questions, just stepped aside to let Sweeney enter. The house had not been changed except that it seemed emptier, but Sweeney wasn’t sure if that was just the absence of her grandmother or if some of the furniture was in fact gone. It smelled exactly as she remembered it.

“Well, God, come in and sit down.”

The television was on in the little sitting room next to the kitchen. It had been a rather cold, pointless room when Sweeney’s grandparents
had lived here. But it was different now, cluttered and warm, but somehow lonely.

The room had been arranged for one person, a person who did not often receive visitors, and Sweeney thought about a nesting animal pulling cloth and hay around itself. The couch was drawn up close to the fireplace and the two wing chairs that had always sat against one wall were now near the couch—one a footrest for a human, one a bed for the big Maine coon cat who was stretched out there on his back. The cat looked up at Sweeney disinterestedly.

“Sit down, sit down,” Anna said, switching off the television. She had put on weight and she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her steel gray hair cut short, spiky, and boyish. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, I just ate at this wedding.”

“Whose wedding?”

“Katie Swift.”

“Oh, yeah. The huge place up on Ocean Drive. Computers or something, right?”

“I guess. I went to college with her.”

“What can I get you? I have a bottle of wine open in the kitchen. White.”

“Scotch?”

Anna hesitated. “Sure.” She went through to the kitchen and Sweeney heard her moving around in there, opening and closing cupboards. She looked around the room, trying to remember what had been on the walls when her grandparents lived here. Nothing very interesting—fruits and flowers, she thought. It had always bothered her father that his parents didn’t think more about what they put on their walls. “It’s
art
,” he’d tell them. “Not interior decorating, for God’s sake!”

But the fruits and flowers had been removed and Anna had put up framed watercolors of fairy-tale scenes, one a tableau of Little Red Riding Hood tripping through the forest, a wolf—a real wolf, not the
anthropomorphized one Sweeney remembered from her own childhood fairy-tale books—peeking out from behind a tree. The painting was both whimsical and dark. The trees seemed sinister and alive. Red Riding Hood looked almost ridiculously naive, her legs in mid-skip, her eyes lifted to the sky. The other paintings in the room were also fairy-tale scenes: Sleeping Beauty stretched out on an opulent bed, one eye cocked open while a prince climbed through the window; a wicked-looking dwarf watching Snow White from a window.

“Are these yours?” Sweeney asked as Anna came back into the room carrying their drinks.

“Oh . . . Yes. I’ve been doing some children’s book illustrations lately.”

“They’re fantastic. I didn’t know . . . ” There was an awkward silence. Sweeney didn’t know anything about Anna’s life.

Sweeney sipped her scotch and stared into the fireplace. Finally she said, “Well, that’s a first. I never thought Ivy would help me with anything.” It was more sarcastic than she’d meant it.

Anna was baffled. “What?”

“It’s funny. Remember how I used to have to tie her to the bed when she’d been drinking?” Sweeney was conscious that with Anna, she took on a kind of swaggering, challenging aggressiveness. “Well, it may help the police solve a murder.” Anna, who had a quality of not seeming surprised by anything, did not look surprised.

“It’s good to see you, Sweeney,” she said after a minute. “Are you tired? The bed’s made up in my old room. That’s where you used to stay, isn’t it?”

Sweeney nodded. But Anna didn’t get up. She just sat there and stared at Sweeney, as though she knew there was more to be said.

Finally Sweeney said, “Brad Putnam was one of my students.”

“I wondered about that, when they said he was studying art history. Did you know him very well?”

“Pretty well. He was a nice kid, smart, and he liked the class.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Me too.”

“That poor family.” Anna sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“I know.” Sweeney took a long sip of her drink.

“Why does it seem like some families just have bad luck?” Anna asked. “You know what I mean?”

“But they’ve actually had quite good luck, haven’t they? I mean being so rich and all. Maybe they’re being paid back for something, maybe all their good fortune was ill-gotten in some way and the fates are evening the score.”

Anna stared at her for a moment, then grinned. “For someone who proclaims herself an atheist, you have about the most Old Testament sense of justice I’ve ever heard of.”

“That’s not true,” Sweeney said. But it was.

“Have you talked to Ivy lately?” Anna asked innocently. “It was her birthday the other day and for some reason I remembered. It’s funny how those things stick in your mind.”

“No,” Sweeney said. “Not in a year or so.”

The reason hung between them in the air. “I should have come over, back when it happened,” Anna said. “I was so sorry and it was so hard for me to . . . well, you know. I figured that Ivy would be there and I thought you wouldn’t have wanted me. I called a few times and Toby made it sound like everything was under control. But I should have known that Ivy wouldn’t be able to do it. What happened?”

Sweeney took another long drink of her scotch. “I was in the hospital, after . . . after it happened. My back and my arm were burned a little, nothing serious, and I had some cuts on my face. But I was a mess. I kept hearing the nurses whispering about me. ‘Her fiancé,’ they kept saying. ‘The bombing on the tube. She saw it.’ And I lay there in the bed, feeling sorry for this poor girl who had watched her fiancé get blown up on the tube.

“Anyway, Toby came and he was handling things and then he called Ivy. I’d seen her a few times since I’d been in Oxford—she was living down at Summerlands, in a guest cottage or something—and she’d managed to keep it together. But then Toby got her to come up and when she came into the hospital room, I just knew. She was completely
trashed. I don’t know how she even got there. Toby tried to get her sobered up before letting her in to see me because he knew I’d go ballistic, but there wasn’t anything he could do. She came into the room and fell over some piece of machinery at the end of the bed. I told her to get out. I haven’t talked to her since.”

“You’ve always been so
sure
about everybody, Sweeney. When you were a child, you would take against people. Do you remember the man who did gardening. I forget his name. You didn’t like him, refused to be in the same room with him. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, and later we found out he’d molested that kid down the street.” Her own voice sounded young to her, whiny and smug.

“Yes. I guess that’s right. But Ivy’s your mother. How can you just write her off ?” The words sounded hollow even as she said them. Anna had written off more things and people in her life than Sweeney thought she cared to remember.

“I’m fine as far as Ivy is concerned,” Sweeney said stiffly. “I don’t need any advice on that front.”

Anna watched her for a moment. “Oh, Sweeney,” she said. “I haven’t been much of an aunt to you, have I?”

There was a long silence. Sweeney was the first to look away.

Anna took a deep breath. “Why don’t I show you where everything is upstairs.” They rose and Sweeney waited in the hall while she locked the front door and went around turning off lights.

“Why does the house smell the same way it always did?” Sweeney asked, sniffing the air as they climbed the stairs.

“Smell the . . . Oh. It must be the stuff Carla uses to clean.” At the top of the stairs, Anna turned on the lights and opened the door to the bathroom. “It will be cold in there for a bit, but we’ll leave the door open and hopefully it will warm up soon.”

She pushed open the door to the bedroom at the back of the house and Sweeney was overwhelmed by memory. It was the room that her grandmother had always called the girls’ room. It had been Anna’s, and then, once Anna had married and gone to live in New York, it had been Sweeney’s in the summers. It was aggressively feminine,
with faded wallpaper patterned with pink and red roses, a tall canopy bed with a white chenille bedspread, and a sheer white canopy that hung delicately over the pencil posts. It struck Sweeney suddenly how uncomfortable Anna must have been in that room. For Sweeney it had been different. It had only been the summers. In September she had always gone back to wherever she and her mother were living and slept in rooms that were largely generic, shabby, decorated with her own books and posters and whimsical, impractical payday gifts from Ivy. The Newport room had always seemed like a glorious holiday room, available only during those warm, airy summers or at Christmastime.

But all the time, for Anna . . . She was about to ask about it when Anna said gruffly, “I’ve set up a studio in the nursery. If you’d like to see . . . ” and Sweeney looked up to find her smiling shyly and pointing toward the door to the room that had always been known as the “nursery” but in her time had been used for boxes and suitcases.

Anna turned on the light and led the way inside. Sweeney felt she had walked into a room filled with people. Anna’s drawings and water-colors covered the walls, the familiar fairy-tale characters seeming to watch them from their posts above.