Mansions Of The Dead (15 page)

“They’re beautiful, Anna,” Sweeney said sincerely, wandering around. “Are you showing them anywhere?”

“I just finished a book and I gave some of the extras to a gallery downtown. They sold pretty quickly so they want some more. I don’t know . . . I don’t want to
have
to produce them, you know.” Sweeney suddenly remembered her father, angrily fielding a call from his agent, who wanted him to send five paintings to a gallery in Los Angeles. “I can’t just go into my studio and find five paintings for you,” he’d yelled.

Anna seemed somehow younger and Sweeney, on impulse, kissed her cheek.

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. Sleep tight.”

Sweeney closed the door to the bedroom and wandered around looking at the familiar photos and knickknacks. There was a collection
of teacups on a shelf above the bed. And on the dressing table were the two photos that Sweeney had always thought of as Anna’s, one of Sweeney’s father, taken when he was in college, and one of Julian, Anna’s husband, who had left her nearly fifteen years ago now.

Why would Anna still have a picture of Julian? The last time Sweeney had seen him had been just before he moved out of the New York apartment and in with the daughter of a good friend of his, another painter. Sweeney remembered his gray beard, his intense gaze. She looked at his picture one more time, then turned out the light.

WHEN SWEENEY CAME DOWNSTAIRS
the next morning, Anna had made coffee and the kitchen smelled of toast and butter. They sat in companionable silence, reading the papers, and then Sweeney said her good-byes and told Anna she was going to go for a walk around town before driving home.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Anna said, and winked.

It was a sunny, moist morning and the sidewalks along Bellevue Avenue were full of people, out early for the papers or breakfast. Sweeney walked down toward Touro Street and Touro Synagogue, then stopped at the Colonial Jewish Cemetery of New England. Founded by settlers fleeing religious oppression, Newport had been uncommonly accepting in its early days and had attracted Jews, Quakers, Seventh Day Baptists, and others unwelcome wherever they had come from.

In the little Trinity Church cemetery, she wandered around reading the old stones, many of which had toppled and lay flat against the ground.

One in particular caught her eye. It belonged to Mary Cranston Gidley, who had died in 1737 at the age of twenty-four:

Great were her ornaments because divine
And in all other virtues she did shine
From hence she’s gone until the Judgement Day
And then her Blessed soul will joine her Clay
To be forever with the Glorious Three
And live with God to all eternity.

As with most cemeteries from the period, a number of the head-stones were half sunk in the ground and many were illegible because of the effects of acid rain and/or time. Sweeney, who had always made gravestone rubbings, now took only photographs because of the deleterious effects of rubbing, especially in well-traveled cemeteries.

She saved the best for last. As a child, she had loved trolling Newport for graveyards and she still remembered when she had discovered St. Joseph’s, popularly known as the Barney Street cemetery. It was a small yard of graves, fenced in with black iron. At the front was a beautiful Celtic cross that had been placed there to honor the early Irish who had settled in Newport. Now it was surrounded by daylilies and other perennials. There had once been a schoolhouse on the site, but it was now a grassy plot with trees shading the little burial ground. Sweeney stood and took in the peaceful atmosphere of the cemetery and then headed for the Cliff Walk.

The walking path that hugged the coastline and passed by most of the Newport mansions as it wound its way around the blunt shape of the coast was empty in the late morning light, a last week or so of peace before the tourists started coming. Sweeney picked it up on Narragansett and walked briskly south, passing Salve Regina and The Breakers, the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the magnificent Rosecliff, and the Marble House, which had belonged to Alva Vanderbilt Belmont.

Sweeney smiled as she walked, remembering many other walks along the Cliff Walk. Her grandmother had been a believer in daily exercise and every morning she had taken her Scottish terriers and gone for her “constitutional” before picking up the newspaper and the doughnuts that Sweeney’s grandfather liked on her way home.

Sweeney walked into the wind, enjoying the salty chill of it washing over her face. She was still weary and the cold air woke her up, woke up her brain, woke up her reasoning abilities. She had been so tired last night that she hadn’t really processed her conversation with Kitty Putnam. What did it mean that Kitty knew one of her family members had likely tied Brad up the night he’d been killed? And for that matter, what did it mean that Brad had been concerned about the jewelry in the weeks before he’d died? And that he’d been wearing the jewelry when he was murdered?

He’d talked about the jewelry that day in her office. She had asked him how his project was going. What had he said? That it was coming along okay, she remembered. She had offered to go over it with him, if that would help. He had thanked her, but then he had asked her that strange question, about whether he should reveal a piece of information.

She struggled to remember something more about what he’d said—I was wondering if you ever, when you’re doing research on a gravestone or something, if you ever come across information that could maybe hurt someone, but that could be important. That was it; he’d wanted to know if he should reveal a piece of information that could hurt someone.

He’d said, “Maybe” when she’d asked if it had to do with gravestone research, so perhaps it was something that had come up in his research into the jewelry.

Had he been trying to tell her something? And had she let him down by not figuring out what it was that he wanted?

She was approaching the Tea House, on the grounds of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s Marble House. The Chinese pagoda had been built for tea parties and receptions, including meetings of Alva Vanderbilt’s suffragist societies, and it had always been one of Sweeney’s favorite parts of the Cliff Walk. Just below the pagoda was the spot in the Cliff Walk where the first of two tunnels cut through the rock. Inside the first, which was stone-lined with aluminum, the sunlight was almost completely blocked out. She shivered in the cold air.

Sweeney was almost through when she heard something behind
her, footsteps on the gravel. She wheeled to confront whoever or whatever it was. But there was no one there. She was alone in the tunnel. It had just been her own footfalls echoing on the walls.

But she was spooked. Trying to keep calm, she walked very quickly toward the sunlight and back into the bright day. The ocean was blue and cheery-looking once again and she could see people walking up ahead of her on the path. The Cliff Walk was just the Cliff Walk again, nothing sinister or scary about it at all.

So why had she gotten so nervous?

It was because of Brad. It was because she had realized that Brad could have been killed because he knew something about the jewelry, that he had scared someone, whoever it was, enough to kill.

Perhaps she should leave it alone. She had a sudden flashback to Vermont, the cold blanket of the river rising up to meet her, the thin shape of a rifle coming out of the fog, the certainty that she was going to die there. She knew better than most the lengths to which determined people were willing to go in order to keep their secrets.

But then she saw Brad’s eyes and she knew she had to figure out what it was that he had wanted from her. She owed him that much at least.

BECCA LAY IN
a small pool of light coming through the window of her bedroom and looked at Jaybee’s back. He still had the vestiges of a farmer’s tan, left over from a summer of landscaping on the Cape. With her index finger, she traced the melting line at the top of his back and the matching ones on the backs of his arms. There were old acne scars set across his back like lace, the darker splotches a kind of map for her to follow with her fingers. He didn’t stir.

He was a hard sleeper, she’d discovered. The morning after that first night she had rolled over and rearranged her body next to his and she had been afraid for an irrational moment that he was dead. That was how still he was, his body unmoving in unconsciousness.

It was hard to believe it had only been a month since that first night. They had been out with a group of classmates, people from the Mourning Objects class and some others, and had ended up back at Jaybee and Brad’s apartment. They all sat around drinking and she had fallen asleep on the couch. Much later she had awakened to darkness and disorientation, and it had taken her a few minutes to remember where she was.

She had become slowly aware that someone was watching her and as her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized it was Jaybee. He was sitting in
the leather armchair across from the couch, wrapped in a blanket.

“Is everything okay?” she’d asked him. He had given her the feeling that something was wrong, staring at her like that, as though he were willing her to wake up.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I guess it is.”

She sat up on the couch. “What?”

He had gotten up from the chair and come over to sit next to her on the couch. She had been so sleepy that it had taken her a moment to tune in to the panic in his eyes. He turned to face her and he said, “Bec, I . . . for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about things and I think I . . . ”

She’d been suddenly awake, looking into his eyes, knowing what he was going to say. She’d felt it too, the last few weeks, something different in their relationship, an edge to their friendly banter. She’d caught him watching her once in class and when she had looked at him quizzically, he’d blushed, something she’d never seen him do.

She hadn’t said a word. So how had it happened, how had they silently agreed on the kiss, each of them leaning forward, then coming together in the middle of the couch, breathing hard, overwhelmed by feeling? Jaybee had held her face for a moment after the kiss, then said quietly, “We can’t tell Brad.”

“No.” They both knew how Brad felt about Becca. It hadn’t been something they’d needed to discuss. Though later, she’d realized that it was Brad’s feelings for Jaybee that needed to be spared too. She had never quite understood their friendship, secretive and long-standing as it was. Once, she had walked into the apartment and found them lying on the couch together watching TV, their limbs entwined, Brad’s hand resting on Jaybee’s head. She had wondered about that, continued wondering after that night, after they had begun to lie to Brad about where they were and what they were doing.

They had kept everything a secret from Brad. Until that night . . . She pushed the memory away. They just had to get through the memorial service tomorrow . . . or today, she realized. Then they could go back to the way it had been.

She stroked his arm, felt him shift slightly in response to the touch. Since they’d been sleeping together, Jaybee had seemed somehow older to her. Before, she had thought of him the way she thought of her brothers, someone whose sexuality was theoretical, but beyond understanding; now she gazed at him and was overwhelmed at his
manliness
, his long back and the short hair that grew at the base of his neck. She felt suddenly that she had discovered something about the universe, that she understood something of what made people do the things they did.

Was it possible that other people had felt this, this
pull
? Surely, Becca’s parents hadn’t felt it. Whatever it was that had kept them together for twenty-seven years, it couldn’t be this melding of bodies, this
wanting
.

For some reason, she thought about Sweeney. Everyone knew that Sweeney’s husband had died and Becca wondered, Had Sweeney felt
this
for her fiancé? How was it possible for her to go on. How could she? How could she?

She stroked his back again. “Jaybee?” she whispered. “Jaybee?”