Mansions Of The Dead (21 page)

Two closed doors flanked the small bathroom, and she was able to tell which one was Brad’s bedroom from the police tape across the door. She pushed it open, ducking under the tape, then shut the door behind her, just in case someone came in.

She had been nervous about seeing the place where Brad had died, but the bedroom was innocuous in the bright sunlight coming in the unshaded window. These walls were freshly painted a pleasing pale blue and it was where Brad had clearly focused his decorating energy. The bed was oak, with four low posts at each corner—Sweeney shuddered, thinking of his thin arms tied to those—and covered now with a blue sheet. Presumably the police had taken all of the bedclothes that had been there.

Sweeney smiled when she saw that he had covered his walls with framed photographs of gravestones.

She recognized many of the stones from Boston and Cambridge graveyards, including a couple from Mount Auburn. Brad had obviously been there, seen his family’s stones. Had he wondered about the same things she had?

He had possessed a good eye. The stones he’d chosen all had unusual features or rare iconography. One in particular caught her attention. It had been taken at night and it showed a group of people sitting in a cemetery and holding candles. It was quite beautiful, the light from the candles showing up a few of the stones in relief.

She looked more carefully. She couldn’t distinguish all of the people, but one face jumped out at her.

It was Raj.

That was strange. She had known that Brad and Raj were friends, but this suggested a much closer relationship, didn’t it? Confused, she turned to Brad’s work space.

His desk was Mission style, with an ergonomic chair that must have cost a couple thousand dollars. There was a brand-new Mac on the desk, but little clutter, and while she turned it on and waited for it to boot up, she went through the rolling, wooden file cabinets on the floor next to the desk. Brad had labeled everything neatly—Sweeney felt a small glow of pride at his developing skills as a scholar.

She found a file labeled “Seminar/Professor St. George—final project” and took it out, laying it on the floor and going through the papers. There were a few notes on early mourning objects in general that Sweeney recognized from a class a month or so ago, but not much else.

She flipped through the rest of the files, finding research related to other classes and a few fat file folders filled with financial documents and records. She looked through them quickly. He seemed to have a trust fund that paid out about $4,000 a month, along with a number of inherited IRA’s and a few other accounts from which he had interest and income. There were itemized statements from a couple of different trust funds with names like the “John C. Putnam Trust” and the “Andrew B. Putnam Living Trust.” She flipped through the lists. “Payout from sale of IBM stock, Proceeds—sale of property in Cambridge, Massachusetts Home and Life payout.” Brad had a pretty complicated financial life for a twenty-one-year-old.

The computer was warmed up and ready to go. Sweeney, wanting to
save time, tried to look at the files on his hard drive by date, so she could see the ones most recently viewed. But everything on the computer had been opened the day after Brad’s death—the police, she decided.

So she searched for key words like “mourning jewelry” and “hair-work” to see if there was anything that might relate to the jewelry. There were a couple of files—one was a paper Brad had already handed in and the other was the beginning of his paper for his final project. Sweeney read the first few pages. It was good, very good, but there wasn’t anything in there that she didn’t know about the jewelry.

She had just shut the computer down when she heard the door open. She jumped and held her breath until Toby’s head appeared over the police tape. “Are you almost done? People keep coming in and out and I’m starting to feel really nervous about this,” he whispered. “Can you hurry up?”

“Yeah, yeah. Let me just look through one more file cabinet.”

She was opening it when they heard footsteps in the hall and then someone fumbling at the door.

Toby raised his eyebrows in alarm and Sweeney motioned for him to come into the bedroom. He shut the door and she saw the closet just as they heard a key turn in the lock. It was a small closet, but someone had taken the clothes out and there was just room for the two of them to crowd in and pull the door closed behind them. They had to embrace in order to fit and as she mashed her face against Toby’s neck, Sweeney could smell soap—Irish Spring—and cigarettes. He’d been smoking again. The only place to put her arm was around his neck and she could feel blood pumping through his veins.

The bedroom door opened and they heard footsteps, then the door shutting again. Sweeney’s heart sped up and she buried her face in Toby’s shoulder. Whoever it was stood silently for a few long minutes before walking across the floor—away from the closet, it sounded like, and toward the bed—and stopping there for a few minutes. She tried to decipher the footfalls. Couldn’t blind people tell who was approaching just by the footsteps of that person? Something to do with the fact that everyone had a unique weight, a unique way of walking. But they
just sounded like any other footsteps to Sweeney—she could tell the person wasn’t wearing high heels, for example, or rubber boots. But beyond that, she couldn’t tell much from the “flunk, flunk” of his or her footwear on the carpet.

Toby’s breathing seemed awfully loud to her and she had a sudden urge to kiss his neck.

Whoever it was didn’t spend long in the room. In a few minutes, she heard the footsteps go out into the hall and into the other bedroom. It wasn’t more than twenty seconds before she heard footsteps in the living room again and then the door to the apartment open and shut.

Toby shifted his body and Sweeney whispered, “Stay there.” She slipped out of the closet and over to the window. At first she didn’t see anyone on the street, but after a couple of seconds the front door of the building opened and a man in a tweed jacket came out, looked in either direction down the sidewalk, and crossed the street. He looked up at the windows of the apartment and Sweeney stepped away from the glass and tried to memorize his plain face, his close-cropped beard, and little round glasses. When she looked again, he was disappearing down Harvard Street toward the square.

“Who was it?” Toby whispered.

“I don’t know. A guy. It wasn’t anyone I know. Damn. If only he’d gotten into a car, I could have gotten the license plate.”

“What do you think he was doing?”

“Didn’t it seem like he was looking for something?”

“Yeah. Do you think he found it?”

“I don’t know . . . He wasn’t in here very long.”

As they were leaving the bedroom, she bent down and opened the last file cabinet. The white label on the front read “Personal.”

“What are you doing?” Toby asked nervously.

“Hold on . . . transcripts, correspondence, tax . . . ” She read the titles on the folders aloud. “Yes! ‘Putnam Family History.’ ” She took it, and for good measure, the rest of the files in the drawer.

“Sweeney! Won’t they notice they’re gone?”

“Yeah, but they’ll think the police took them. Don’t worry, I’ll bring them back.”

She was on her way out of the room when she saw again the photograph on the wall of Raj and decided to take that too. Then she followed Toby out of the apartment, locking the door carefully behind her.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said, once they were out on the sidewalk.

Toby just rolled his eyes.

The whole way home, Sweeney was antsy. “Tell me not to pull over and look at them right now.”

“Don’t pull over and look at them right now.”

“Okay, okay.” She found parking on Russell Street, and as she and Toby were walking toward her building, she said, “Let me just see it.”

“No,” Toby said maddeningly. “You’re always going on and on about the sanctity of research materials. You can wait.” He held the files close to his chest.

Once inside her apartment, Toby handed them to her and she sat down at the kitchen table and started reading. Toby started a pot of coffee, and by the time it was ready, she was pretty sure that Brad had had some of the same realizations she had. He had drawn a crude family tree that looked almost exactly like hers.

And he had circled his ancestor Edmund Putnam and written the two birth dates—the one on his gravestone and the one on the mourning brooch.

“Toby, do you see what this means? Brad had the same questions that I did about the jewelry. He realized that there was a discrepancy.”

“I don’t understand. What is it that you think is so scandalous about this mourning jewelry? What was it Brad was hiding?”

“Toby! Don’t you see? Look.” She got out her drawings of the mourning jewelry and spread them out on the kitchen table. “This mourning brooch was owned by Belinda Putnam. She would have gotten it when her son Edmund died in 1888.

“The brooch lists the date of his birth as March 4, 1864. But when
I went to Mount Auburn, I saw his gravestone and it lists his birth date as December 4, 1863.”

“Yeah?”

“Toby! Charles Putnam died in April 1863. April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March.” She counted on her fingers. “If the date on the mourning brooch is correct, there’s no way that Charles Putnam was Edmund’s father. He had to be illegitimate.”

“And you think Brad figured this out?”

“He must have. Because he was asking about the jewelry. He knew there was something wrong with it. Or that there was something wrong with the dates.”

“But even if he did know about it, what could it possibly have to do with his murder?” Toby sat back in his chair. “You think someone was so scandalized by an illegitimate birth a gazillion years ago that they couldn’t bear the idea of it getting out? That’s crazy.”

“When you say it like that, it does sound kind of ridiculous.”

“Although . . . ”

“Although what?”

“Although that guy did break into the apartment earlier. Maybe he was looking for proof of all this, or . . . ”

“Toby, you said I was being crazy.”

“Yeah, but . . . what if Edmund Putnam
were
illegitimate? What would it mean?”

“Well, maybe that the family’s whole claim to its wealth is in doubt. Right?”

“But it would depend on a lot of things, wouldn’t it? Besides, if someone killed Brad to stop the truth about the mourning jewelry from getting out, why would they leave the jewelry on him? Wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d hide?”

He had a point. Sweeney went over to the couch and stretched out, hoping that Toby would come over and, without being asked, give her a back rub. But he sat at the table and fiddled around with her mail. He picked up the envelope from Ian and turned it over in his hands.
“What’s this? A UK postmark, the elegantly embossed return address of one I. V. Ball. Who could it be?” He made as if to open it and Sweeney jumped up and took it from him. He looked as though he were thinking about wrestling her for it, but settled for crossing his arms. “Why didn’t you tell me you heard from Ian? What’s the letter say?”

“It’s really nice,” she said, blushing. “And I didn’t tell you because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”

“What do you mean? You write him back. Pen, paper. You know the routine. It’s a very old tradition. You could even call him if you were feeling crazy.”

“No. I mean, I don’t think I should write him back unless I’m really serious about it.”

“Sweeney, I presume he didn’t ask you to marry him. Maybe he just wants to be your pen pal for a while, get to know you better.”

She crossed her eyes at him. “What about you and Lily? Are you going to see her again?”

“I think so. I kind of like her.”

“That’s great.” She was quiet for a moment.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Just that, since the wedding, I’ve been thinking about marriage. Have you ever thought about getting married? In an abstract sense, I mean?”

“Other than to you?” There was a time when he wouldn’t have been able to look at her while saying it, but now his eyes were steady.

She blushed.

“Not really. I figure we’ve got lots of time,” he said.

“Maybe we don’t. I mean, we’re almost thirty. If you want to have kids, you have to start thinking about it pretty soon. At least I do.”

“I thought you didn’t want to have kids.”

“I don’t know. I thought I didn’t. But maybe that was just because Colm didn’t.” Sweeney remembered Colm—who had been one of
twelve—ranting on the subject. “Children are an instrument of female oppression. As long as you’re a mother, you can’t ever be equal in this society.”

“You’ve got lots of time,” Toby said, looking at her strangely.

She watched him. “But haven’t you ever felt like you
wanted
a child? Do men feel that? When you see a baby on the street? I mean, you’re the one who’s always been so gung-ho about having kids.”

“Yeah, but I think it’s more theoretical. I want to have kids someday, but I don’t think of it as something I have to do right away. And it changes your life a lot. I haven’t thought a whole lot about that.”

“Arggh. That’s exactly the thing!” Sweeney flashed him a glare. “If I want to have kids I have to plan ahead so I’m not too old, and I have to think about how I’m going to rearrange my life and everything. And you can just say ‘Oh yeah, it would be cool to have kids someday.’ Maybe Colm was right. Maybe women can never be truly free as long as they fulfill their biological imperative.”

Toby just looked perplexed, as though he was trying to figure out where the conversation had gotten away from him.

“I have to tell you something,” Sweeney said after a minute. “When we were in the closet, I wanted to kiss your neck.”

Toby laughed. “That’s because I’m irresistible,” he said. “But I’ll admit something. I was pretty turned on too.”

“It was because we were in danger,” Sweeney said.

“Yeah. Danger’s kind of a big turn on.”

Sweeney, thinking of Jack Putnam, told herself to remember that.