Mansions Of The Dead (25 page)

Raj was saying, “Well, you know, you all put your hands on the thing in the middle and it moves around and spells out words. So it had kind of been all about Ashley. She’s so obsessed with her dead twin—Victoria, her name was—and Victoria kept turning up on the Ouija board and telling Ashley she loved her and all this stuff. Ashley was asking her if she was in a nice place and Victoria was saying it was beautiful and she was so peaceful and everything. Blah, blah, blah. The rest of us were getting a little bored with the whole thing. But then all of a sudden, the Ouija board shifted—I mean, it just kind of jumped—and we said ‘Who’s there?’ the way you’re supposed to, and it started spelling, really fast—it freaked me out, if you want to know the truth—it started spelling out ‘Peter.’

“We all knew about Brad’s brother, so we looked over at him, and he was really scared. He’d taken his hands off the board and he looked like he was about to jump up and run away.

“But we convinced him to put his hands back on it and the thing started spelling out really quickly, ‘You must tell them. You must tell them.’ Over and over again. Brad was almost crying.” Raj, reliving the memory, looked pale and disturbed.

“Did he think that his brother was saying he should tell who had been driving in the accident?” Sweeney almost whispered. She felt suddenly afraid too.

“No, that was the thing. That’s what we all thought,” Raj said. “But then Pete—or whatever it was—started saying ‘Tell about Edmund. Tell about Edmund.’ And Brad literally picked the board up and threw it across the grass. He was so freaked out that he couldn’t talk for a couple of minutes, couldn’t talk at all, and then he said he was going home.”

“Edmund?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ask him who he thought Edmund was?”

“No, he didn’t want to talk about it. He took off. Just got up and ran out of the cemetery and drove his car home. We’d brought two cars and we all had to cram into Ashley’s Honda. I saw him the next day and he seemed okay, but none of us had the nerve to ask him.”

“When did you say this was, Raj?”

He thought for a minute, then got up and found his Filofax. “Like two months ago. It was the weekend of my birthday,” he said, paging back in the calendar. “So it was Saturday the fourth.” Sweeney consulted the calendar too. It had warmed up that next week. She remembered because it had been the week before St. Patrick’s Day.

So only a couple of days after his experience in the Concord cemetery, Brad had sat on the floor of her office and they had talked about the afterlife and whether he should reveal an important piece of information.

Raj replaced the calendar and came back to sit down across from her. “Raj,” she said, “did Brad ever talk to you about his final project for the class?”

“He was doing mourning jewelry, right? Yeah, I think he said it was coming along pretty well. I ran into him in the library and he had a big stack of books about Rhode Island history or something. Maybe it wasn’t for your class. But other than that, we didn’t really talk about it.”

He still looked nervous, so she said, “Did you see Brad the night he died?”

She wasn’t sure if it was surprise or hesitation, but he waited a beat and then said, “No. No. I was at the library.”

“What about everyone else in the class? They didn’t make a cemetery visit that night, did they?”

Again, he hesitated, then looked down at the ground. “No. I don’t think so. They would have told me.”

She didn’t pursue it further. She wasn’t positive he was lying and she didn’t see how she was going to get him to tell the truth if he didn’t want to.

“Okay,” she said, handing him the picture. “You can do whatever you want with it. Thanks for being honest.”

He got up and walked to the door with her.

She was already in the hallway when she thought of something else. “Hey, Raj?”

“Yeah?”

“What did you think about Brad? You were friends with him.”

Raj was thoughtful. “I don’t know if anyone was really friends with him. He didn’t let you, really. It was like he was always afraid he was going to let go and tell you something he didn’t want to tell you. Ever since I knew him, that’s how he was.”

SWEENEY HAD AGREED TO
meet Toby and Lily at a new tapas place on Newbury Street at seven, but by the time she got home from Raj’s, it was already six-thirty. After a quick shower, she took the T to the Back Bay, so she wouldn’t have to worry about parking.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she called out as she got to the restaurant thirty minutes late.

But they didn’t seem to mind. Toby was looking vaguely starry-eyed, and Sweeney noticed that his hand was on Lily’s knee under the table.

“We were just talking about Brad Putnam,” Toby said after Sweeney had kissed Lily on the cheek and sat down at the oddly low table.

“Ow. What’s the story with this table? It’s just the right height for banging my knees.”

“That’s because you’re a giantess.”

Sweeney stuck out her tongue at him.

“I’m completely fixated on the murder investigation,” Lily was saying. “I read the updates every day, even though there isn’t anything new. Why do you think the police are having such a hard time figuring out who killed him?”

“I don’t know,” Sweeney said. “I guess there isn’t any obvious suspect. And a family like that is probably putting up a whole bunch of roadblocks.”

“You don’t think it’s someone in the family?” Lily looked horrified.

“No.” Sweeney realized she had to be careful here. “It’s just that the police are probably having a hard time getting basic information about who Brad was friends with, stuff like that.”

“I wonder how the Putnams are doing?” Lily asked. “You know them, don’t you, Sweeney?”

“A little. I don’t know how they’re really doing, though. I think with a family like that it’s hard to know what they’re thinking about anything. They’ve lived in the public eye for so long.”

“I was thinking that when you told me about the funeral,” Toby said. “How awful to have
reporters
there.”

Toby and Lily had already ordered and when the waiter brought over little plates of tapas, they all fell to eating. Sweeney was munching on pickled white asparagus when she thought of something.

“Lily, remember how you were telling me about your work with DNA? Well, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever tested anything really old? Say, a piece of hair from someone who’s been dead for a while? Is that possible, hypothetically speaking?”

“What’s a while?”

“I’d say 150 years or so.”

“I’ve worked with a few samples that old. It’s kind of iffy, though. Would you have the root of the hair, hypothetically speaking?” Lily gave her a sly little smile.

“I don’t know,” Sweeney said.

“Well, if you don’t have the root, we could try mitochondrial DNA testing. But it’s only good for tracing the maternal line.”

“What if I’m trying to establish a link through the father’s side of the family?”

“Well, then you’d have to have the root and it has to have been
stored under pretty good conditions. Even then, it’s a question of the integrity of the material. I’d probably give you fifty-fifty odds.”

“What would affect the integrity of a hair sample?”

“Heat, moisture, that kind of thing. It’s hard to know.”

Toby looked at Sweeney suspiciously. “You’re not thinking of . . . ”

“No. I’m just curious,” Sweeney said as a second round of sangrias came and they talked about other things.

Toby and Lily were going to a movie and though they invited Sweeney to come along, she wasn’t in the mood to be the third wheel. As she strolled back to the T station, she mingled with the crowds enjoying the balmy evening and thought about the jewelry. She now knew that it was possible there was a way of finding out whether Charles Putnam was Edmund Putnam’s father. But what were the chances that the hair in either the necklace or the locket had been pulled out by the root? Probably pretty slim. And even slimmer were the chances that it had been kept under the right conditions all these years. It was probably unlikely that it would work. And anyway, she would have to get access to the jewelry somehow and that meant asking Quinn. It seemed impossible.

She was walking along Newbury Street when she saw, high up in the window of a second-story gallery, a line of painted words reading
JACK PUTNAM. WORKS IN WOOD AND METAL AT THE DAVIS GALLERY
. She could see people milling around up in the window. It was only nine and there was something about the warming air that made Sweeney not want to go home. So she climbed the stairs to the second floor and found herself in an airy gallery filled with graceful sculptures made of pale wood, the components bracketed together in gracefully human forms calling up people dancing and embracing.

Sweeney wandered around, putting off the gallery worker’s question about whether she needed help with a friendly, “Just looking thanks.”

She was standing in front of a disturbing sculpture of a vaguely human form curled into a fetal ball when she felt someone come up behind her. “Very strange, isn’t it? Kind of makes you wonder about the artist.”

Sweeney turned around and grinned. “Absolutely. I’m ready to call the crazy artist police and order a psychological examination.”

Jack’s hair was wet from the shower and he was wearing a black leather jacket. He had a pale blue sweater tied around his neck like a scarf and it made his eyes look a lighter shade of blue.

“Are you checking up on the work?” Sweeney asked him. She wasn’t sure why, but she was embarrassed that he had found her here, embarrassed that he knew she had gone to the trouble of finding out more about him, and embarrassed by how attracted to him she was. “Making sure it’s selling?”

“I wish. Actually the gallery called because someone stuck a piece of gum on one of my pieces.”

“No!”

“Yes. I had to scrape it off. They were afraid to touch it.”

“That’s horrible.” Sweeney was secretly sort of delighted with the idea of someone sticking a piece of gum on a sculpture in a high-end gallery. Had they been registering protest or merely caught without a tissue?

“I know.” He looked around and then down at her. He was pale, and thinner than the last time she’d seen him, she noticed, as though he’d been sick. They stood for a moment staring at the piece and Sweeney had the sense that he was reliving emotions he had felt while making it. It was a powerful work, and it made Sweeney monumentally sad. She had an image of herself lying on a bed in the days after Colm’s death, wrapped into a ball, trying to get beyond all feeling, trying to return to a state beyond all sense.

“I hadn’t seen your work before,” Sweeney said. “I really like it. They remind me of those little wooden sculptor’s models that you can move into different positions. But that sounds terrible . . . I didn’t mean . . . I love them.”

“No. No. That’s where they came from. I was taking a figurative sculpture class in grad school and I was working with one of those little guys—I named him Pablo. And I kind of got more interested in Pablo than in the piece I was working on. I’d always been into wood-working
and I decided to make my own model, but I couldn’t figure out the scale and I made a huge one. There was something about it that I really liked and I got some more wood and I just kept at them.”

Sweeney wandered over toward a tall male figure standing and looking up at the sky, his hands behind his back.

“That one reminds me of a Giacometti,” she said. There was something about the way the long-legged figure stood at attention that called up the sculptor’s loping, melancholic subjects.

He looked pleased. “You’ve made me blush. Giacometti is one of my heroes.”

“How do you make them?”

“I buy blocks of wood and then cut them with a bunch of different table saws I have. Then I’ll carve the different components to get the finer details, sand them down and stain and varnish them. Then I put them together. Hey, you know what? Why don’t I show you my studio. You can see for yourself, and I can probably even rustle up a drink. I’m literally around the corner.”

“Well . . . ”

“Come on, I’m a bit depressed after the gum incident.”

Sweeney laughed. “I guess I can’t just leave you in a state of gum-induced depression. All right.”

“Great.” He grinned and they waved good-bye to the gallery workers and then walked along Newbury Street and down Fairfield to Commonwealth Avenue.

They crossed, walked along the mall, and stopped in front of a large brick Beaux Arts mansion. “It looks pretty nondescript on the outside, I know,” he said. “I wanted to put in a wall of glass on the side and paint it blue, but they’re pretty strict about historic preservation. Wait until you see the inside, though.”

They entered through a street-level door painted red. “The house has been in the family for years and my dad gave it to me a couple of years ago,” Jack said. “I’ve been working away on it. The second and third floors are where I live and I gutted the first floor and turned it into the studio. I have a lot of really heavy equipment, saws and
sanders and stuff, so I had to keep it all as close to the foundation as possible.”