Mansions Of The Dead (20 page)

In the portrait, Belinda Putnam was a woman of about sixty, with brown hair lit with gray. She was sitting on a low sofa, her back ramrod straight, her hands folded in her lap, and she was looking straight out from the painting, her eyes direct and almost challenging.

Sweeney, when she viewed portraits of women, especially upper-crust women, was often struck by the way in which you felt the absence of the woman’s husband. It was a kind of subtle sexism that painters incorporated into their work, Sweeney had always thought. But she had no sense of this looking at Belinda Putnam’s portrait. Instead, she seemed a whole subject in and of herself.

But to Sweeney’s mind, the most remarkable thing about the portrait was the piece of jewelry that Belinda Putnam wore on the bodice of her dress.

It was the mourning brooch.

Sweeney recognized it right away, though in the portrait it was rendered
impressionistically, the little mourning scene blurred and indistinct. She couldn’t read the words “Beloved Son, Edmund,” but Sweeney recognized the shape, as she imagined Brad had if he had ever seen this portrait. Had he? What had Brad found out about the jewelry before his death?

She took some notes on the portrait and made a final stop at the two gravestones on display in the American decorative arts section of the museum. The stones were excellent examples of eighteenth-century American carving and there was a nice little display explaining about the hourglass symbology on one of the stones. All along the walls of the hallway next door were wonderful photographs of stones from the Old Granary and King’s.

But they were doing renovations on the museum and the hallway where the photographs were displayed was dark and lonely, on the edge of the construction site. The room seemed filled with dust, and while the upstairs galleries were filled with people, Sweeney was all alone down here looking at the gravestones.

Typical, Sweeney thought, and sneezed.

MELISSA PUTNAM SAT AT
her dressing table, rubbing night cream into her neck and décolletage. Drew was sitting up in bed, pretending to read the
Globe,
but really watching her in the dressing table mirror, and when she met his eyes, he looked away, embarrassed.

She stood up and slid out of her dressing gown, folding it carefully over the chair and going over to the bed, knowing he was watching her, watching the way her breasts moved against the inside of her silk gown.

“Hi,” she whispered, sliding into bed.

He didn’t say anything, just turned out his bedside light and rolled away from her, making a noisy show of plumping his pillow and finding the right position. She turned off her own light and rolled over, touching his shoulder.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong, Drew?”

She heard him say, “Just go to sleep, Melissa.”

She made a conscious effort to keep her tears in check, counting to ten before she spoke.

“I was thinking . . . ” She stopped, afraid to say it, afraid of his reaction, then went ahead anyway. “I was thinking we could start trying again. The doctor said it was okay. It’s been three months now.”

He started to say something, but the words came out sounding strangled and unintelligible.

“Drew?”

“I don’t think this is the time, Melissa.”

“But I don’t understand. After the last miscarriage we said we were going to keep trying. We . . . ”

“I just lost my brother. I don’t want to . . . Just go to sleep, okay?”

In the dark, she could hear his breathing coming fast, could feel his energy.

“No. You promised we could. Why are you changing your mind?” She could feel the tears start, the hot pressure at the base of her throat building. “It’s the same . . . it’s the same as before. We have to!” She clutched at him, feeling him shrink away from her.

“It’s not the same as before.” He nearly whispered it, the words almost lost in the bedclothes. “My brother’s dead.”

“But it didn’t . . . ” She had been about to say that it hadn’t mattered before, when it had been Petey who was dead, and she knew he knew she’d been about to say it.

In an instant, he was out of bed.

“Where are you going?” She sat up and turned on her light, watching him struggle into a pair of pants and shirt he’d hung over the end of the bed only fifteen minutes ago.

“Nowhere. Go to sleep, Melissa.”

“Drew!” She felt herself losing control, felt something slide inside her. “Don’t go! Come back here! I’ll stop asking, I promise!”

He was hunched over, putting on his shoes.

“Don’t leave,” she screamed at him. “Where are you going? Who are you going to see?”

But he was gone. She heard his footsteps clattering on the stairs.

Sobbing, she got up and went into the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the Jacuzzi and cradling her abdomen as though care could fix what was wrong in there.

She’d had the last miscarriage—her seventh—in January. Just after Christmas. She’d only been a month in, but it had felt different some-how
than the other times. Or maybe, it occurred to her, it was exactly the same. Maybe she had been that hopeful every time. She couldn’t remember now, couldn’t see anything beyond the awful endings, the familiar hand that seized her belly, squeezing so hard she could barely breathe.

What had she done, what had they done, to deserve this horrible penance? Four years had passed in an endless pattern of hope and despair. It had gotten to the point where she saw teenage girls with babies on the street and screamed inwardly, “Idiots! Idiots! Why can’t I have a baby when any idiot can!”

She took a deep breath. The doctor had said that he couldn’t find any reason for the miscarriages, that they should just keep trying. Drew hadn’t meant that he didn’t want to try at all anymore, just not now. And it was understandable. Brad had . . . it had only been a little over a week. She swallowed hard. They were all still grieving. She had to remember that.

She took the bottle of sleeping pills out of the cupboard, popped one into her mouth, and swallowed it with a handful of water from the faucet.

She had to try not to make Drew mad. She had to try to keep things together for him, for the whole family. That was the only way it was going to happen. That was the only way she was going to have her baby.

She lay in bed, saying the words over and over to herself, can’t make Drew mad, can’t make Drew mad. As she drifted off, she heard the front door, and then the low grumbling of a car starting in the driveway.

SWEENEY WAS CHECKING HER
mail in the department office the next day when she caught sight of Jaybee coming out of a colleague’s office.

“Jaybee,” she called out, a bit too enthusiastically, so that Mrs. Pitman looked up and Jaybee himself started.

“Sorry . . . Would you mind just coming into my office for a second? I have something I want to ask you.” He followed her in his good-natured way and she shut the door behind him.

She swallowed hard. “This is . . . so embarrassing. I feel terrible asking you about this, Jaybee. A couple of weeks ago, I lent Brad a couple of library books, taken out on my card. The library’s been calling and I’ve got to get them back, but I don’t want the family to have to worry about it.”

The muscles next to his eyes quivered. “I don’t think I could . . . ”

“I know, I know. I wouldn’t ask you to go back or anything. Look, I was thinking I could just borrow your key. I already asked the police and they said it’s okay, it’s just that they’re always too busy to go over there with me and . . . I know it sounds crazy, worrying about books, but I have to take some other things out and they won’t let me until I return these.”

Jaybee looked as though he was trying to decide what to do. “I don’t have a key, I gave it to the police. But there’s one in a plant next to the door, under the rock. That’s where we kept it, so you could always get in, you know . . . You can just use that if you want.” He looked suspicious, though, and Sweeney searched for something to reassure him.

“Thanks, I really appreciate this. I’ll put it right back. And we can kind of keep it between us, can’t we? Brad’s family might think it was a little, I don’t know, heartless or something.”

“Okay,” he said, still looking at her strangely. “I won’t say a word.”

“No,” Toby said when she dropped by.

“Come on. If there was anyone else I could ask, I would. Please. It’ll take fifteen minutes.”

“No.” He was picking up his apartment, something he frequently did when Sweeney was visiting. Toby wasn’t much of a housekeeper and he only liked to engage in cleaning when he had someone to talk to. He lived in a cluttered, book-filled apartment in an old Victorian a couple of blocks from campus.

“Please.”

“Sweeney, I, of all people, know where your sleuthing can lead. Why would I want to help you?”

She looked up at him, hurt.

“All right. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“Please. I’m not even interested in it as a mystery—not a murder one anyway. It’s the mourning jewelry and the gravestones. It could be an interesting academic problem. See, if the mourning jewelry is correct and the gravestone isn’t, it sets up this interesting thing of the stone as the public face of the death and the jewelry as the private face. You know, it . . . ”

Toby straightened a pile of
New Yorker
s on his coffee table. “I don’t have to go in with you?”

“No, I would never ask you to do that. I just want you to stand out in the hall and let me know if someone’s coming.”

“Do I get to do a birdcall or something?”

“You may use whatever method you choose.”

Toby smiled. “Okay,” he said. “But only because of the birdcall. I’ve always wanted to do that. Shall we say the phoebe? Or the humble chickadee?” He tried both, as Sweeney impatiently got his coat for him.

Brad’s apartment was in a building on Harvard Street that had once been a single-family Victorian home, but had been converted to student apartments sometime in the seventies, to judge by the splashy avocado and sunshine wallpaper that climbed the walls of the dingy stairway. It was a shabby-looking place, but Sweeney, who had tried to find an apartment closer to campus and failed, knew that the rent was probably upward of $1,500 a month.

Brad and Jaybee had lived in number 5, one of two doors on the second floor. Sweeney made Toby wait just outside the door—which was barred with police tape, but not so efficiently that she wouldn’t be able to duck under it. Just as Jaybee had said, there was a big ficus plant in a green plastic planter next to the door. It looked dried out and dying, as though it hadn’t been watered in weeks, but there was a rock half buried in the dry soil and she found the key beneath it. She slipped the key into the lock. It turned easily. Keeping her hand on the doorknob, she replaced the key in the planter, and said to Toby, “Okay, you wait here. If someone comes in and it looks like they’re heading upstairs, just whistle and I’ll come out. We can pretend that we’re going to that other apartment.”

Toby nodded.

Sweeney pulled the door shut behind her and looked around. The apartment reminded her of numerous student accommodations she’d lived in. There was a cramped, uncared-for feeling about it that seemed familiar. The walls were off-white, long unpainted to judge by the streaks of light brown that decorated the walls here and there and cracks had come up at the point where wall and ceiling met. The floors were covered with industrial carpet in an unattractive shade of gray,
but there was a very nice black leather couch and an expensive stereo set. The place looked emptied out, sterile. Sweeney assumed that Jaybee had gotten all of his stuff out as soon as the body had been removed. She wondered to whom it would fall to come and pack up Brad’s belongings.

On an elaborate stand in the living room was an empty aquarium and inside were a filter, a net, a pair of rubber gloves, various bottles that seemed to contain chemicals to fix the aquarium’s pH, and some other aquarium paraphernalia, including a fake plant and a gaudily colored pirate’s ship.

The tiny kitchen looked as though it was rarely used—the refrigerator was empty save for an unopened bottle of champagne and a jar of kosher dill pickles, and the cupboards, when Sweeney opened them, held a few plates and mugs, a pile of mismatched stainless steel silverware, some Tupperware, and about twenty boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.