Mansions Of The Dead (3 page)

She finished her egg salad sandwich and got up to go. There was work to do in the office, tomorrow’s lecture on mourning and the decorative arts to prepare for her senior seminar, and a pile of seminar papers to read so she could get them back to the class tomorrow.

As she slipped through the gate, she listened to her cell phone message, from the department secretary. “Sweeney?” Mrs. Pitman’s hesitant
voice came over the phone. “This is kind of strange, but the Cambridge police just called. A Detective Quinn. They need to talk to someone who knows about mourning jewelry. I thought of you of course and they said they want to talk to you as soon as possible. Even though it’s Sunday. I . . . here’s the number they left.” Sweeney listened and her good memory immediately had it. The phone had barely rung when she heard a youngish male voice answer “Quinn. 6345.”

“Yes, my name’s Sweeney St. George. I got a message that someone there wanted to talk to me about mourning jewelry.” In the background she could hear phones ringing and a low hum of activity.

“Hey, I got her. The professor,” Quinn called out to someone. “Thanks for calling back, Ms. St. George. I’m wondering if you could come down to the station. We have what I think is some mourning jewelry down here. It’s been, well . . . uh, connected with a crime. And we’re just looking for any information you can give us about it.” He had a classic Boston accent, his R’s disappearing into the ether. Quinn. A good Irish boy from Dorchester or Revere, Sweeney said to herself. Everybody was proud when he became a cop.

“Okay. When should I . . . ?”

“I’m here now, so whenever it’s good for you.” When-evah. “If there’s a problem . . . Do you know where the station is?”

“Yeah. The Central Square one, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me some more about the jewelry? Should I bring anything with me?”

He hesitated. “I’d think we’d prefer that you just come down and take a look. If there’s anything you need, you can get it later.” He hesitated again and then said, “I’ll see you soon.”

THE CAMBRIDGE POLICE DEPARTMENT
headquarters were located on Western Avenue, just off Central Square, almost directly across from Cambridge City Hall. The building was decrepit-looking from the outside, faced with beige bricks, and suggesting a Victorian prison or reform school. As she walked from her car to the front entrance, Sweeney passed two men about her age, dressed in jeans and leather jackets, conferring secretively next to a car. They stopped talking as she walked by.

The lobby, up a short staircase from street level, smelled of creosote and after announcing herself to a young female police officer through a glass window, she wandered over to look at a series of photographs mounted on a far wall. At a distance, she thought they must be honored policemen, but when she stepped closer, she saw the pictures were of missing children, row upon row of them, the jaunty school portraits and family pictures revealing nothing of warring parents or unhappy homes. She stared into the eyes of a ten-year-old girl named Soriah Diaz, missing for six years now and believed to be kidnapped by her stepfather, and then stepped away from the wall.

There was nothing to read, so she took a pamphlet from a plastic holder on the wall.

Personal Safety Plan
, it read.
You Have a Right to Be Safe
. Inside were a list of do’s and don’ts for victims of domestic violence:
Safety During an Explosive Incident
. “If an argument seems unavoidable, try to have it in a room or area where you have access to an exit. Try to stay away from the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, or anywhere else where weapons might be available.”

She was reading about how to stay safe after taking out a protective order when a voice said, “Ms. St. George?” and she looked up to find a good-looking guy wearing a crisp blue plaid cotton shirt and khakis and looking very, very surprised to see her.

His crispness made her suddenly conscious of her wildly curly red hair, her ratty pair of overalls and sweatshirt Jackson-Pollocked with the side effects of painting her living room walls.

“I’m Detective Quinn,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

Detective Tim Quinn was as young-looking as he’d sounded on the phone, hardly more than a teenager, but when he looked up at Sweeney, the harsh overhead lighting illuminating lines around his eyes and circles beneath them, she saw that he was probably closer to her age than she’d thought. He had dirty blond hair, cut short, thinning a little on top, and blue eyes set in a conventionally handsome face. And she noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. His good looks were those she associated with frat houses and beach parties, a blond girlfriend in a bikini. The wedding ring seemed incongruous.

“Thanks for coming down here on such short notice,” he said. Once again, she heard the broad Boston in his voice—”he-ah” for “here,” “sho-ut” for “short.”

“If you’ll just follow me . . . ” They went through a set of doors, out into a hallway. Another set of doors led into a small empty room furnished with filing cabinets, a low table, and a couple of chairs.

“Sorry about the room. It’s just that I wanted you to have a quiet place to look at the . . . at the objects.” He shut the door behind them and gestured for her to sit down at the table. “Can I get you a cup of coffee or anything?” he asked. “It’s from one of those machines. Frankly I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you really need the caffeine . . . ”

“No thanks. I’m fine.”

“I called the MFA after I got back here,” he said, unsmiling. “Just to see if there was anyone else they would recommend to look at this stuff. They said I should call you. Spoke very highly of your work.”

“Oh . . . Thanks.”

He opened up a manila envelope that had been sitting on the table and took out a plastic bag. Inside were four pieces of mourning jewelry, each in its own smaller Ziploc bag, each dangling a little white tag with a number on it. Sweeney did a quick inventory—a hair-work necklace, a locket, and two brooches.

“The jewelry was connected with a crime scene we responded to this morning,” Quinn said. “It’s mourning jewelry, isn’t it?”

Sweeney took the bag from him and turned it over in her hands. “Yup. This is an interesting little collection. Especially that one brooch. Earlier than a lot of the stuff you see outside of Britain. Can I . . . ”

He nodded and she took the individual pieces out to look at them, carefully examining them through the plastic. “If you had a magnifying glass—oh, and some paper and a pencil—that would be helpful,” she said. Quinn punched a number into the phone on the table and passed on the request.

“Okay, so this is a classic hair-work necklace,” she said, showing him the first piece, which was made of twenty intricate balls of woven dark brown hair, threaded together with a piece of cord and fastened with a distinctive three-part clasp. “When I get the magnifying glass, I can tell you some more about how old it is, although you may need to ask a jeweler who specializes in antique pieces for details. But from the style of the clasp and the pattern of the braiding, my guess would be mid-1800s. That’s just a guess, though.”

“I’m sorry, did you say
hair
?” She looked up to find Detective Quinn looking slightly pale under his tan. “I assumed it was some type of cloth or fiber.”

“Oh no. It’s made of human hair. Hair-work jewelry was popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. People would save the hair of a loved one who had died and have it made into these
braided necklaces and bracelets. Or they’d do it themselves. It became a popular pastime for well-bred ladies. This one would have been made by weaving the hair around a little wooden mold to form the balls, and then sewing them together and stringing them on the cord so the necklace wouldn’t stretch too much.”

He still looked a little stunned, so she went on. “I know it sounds kind of weird to us. We don’t have as much intimate and regular contact with death anymore, but back then it was very much a part of life. Children died all the time, people lost their spouses at much younger ages. Mourning was an important part of subscribed social etiquette. There were rules about what you could wear and when you could wear it.

“Anyway, the idea was that hair is the part of the human body that doesn’t decay, so it became a lasting reminder of the person you’d lost.” Sweeney examined the necklace again as a young woman in a uniform brought in a magnifying glass and a notebook and pencil. Sweeney swiveled the glass over the necklace’s large, three-part clasp. “There we go. There’s a little inscription. ‘Beloved Husband. January 3, 1809—April 2, 1863.’ So this would have belonged to a woman whose husband died on April 2, 1863. She would have saved his hair and braided it or had it braided. It makes sense that she chose the pattern she did. Most men wouldn’t have had hair long enough to make a single coil. Then she would have worn it to keep a piece of her husband close to her and present a proper face of mourning to the world.”

Sweeney picked up one of the brooches and looked at it carefully under the magnifying glass. Then she held it out so Quinn could do the same.

“Now this piece is a little more unusual. It’s also Victorian, but about twenty years later than the necklace.” The brooch was milk glass with a gold frame and painted on the milk glass was an intricately detailed scene of a woman standing over an urn in a graveyard with a weeping willow in the background. The weeping willow and the woman’s hair and dress were constructed of light brown hair, knotted and scrolled, and painted delicately below the scene were the words “Beloved Son, Edmund.”

“It’s a pretty common mourning scene. See, it’s painted on milk glass and then the hairwork was added as embellishment.”

Quinn looked at the brooch. “ ‘Beloved Son, Edmund,’ ” he read aloud. “So it belonged to this Edmund’s mother?”

“Probably.”

“Would this and the necklace have belonged to the same person? To a woman who lost her husband and then her son?” Quinn handed the brooch back to Sweeney.

“I don’t know. It depends on where the collection came from. If you knew its provenance, you could figure out who Edmund was and probably the woman too.” She turned the brooch over and placed it on the table. “Now this is the really interesting thing. The dates of this Edmund’s life are on the back of the brooch, see? Inscribed on the gold backing. ‘March 4, 1864–June 23, 1888.’ “

She pointed to the lettering so Quinn could see it.

“It’s interesting to compare this brooch with the other one, which is earlier, probably 1850 or so.” She looked at it for a few minutes, carefully inspecting the engraving and the initials. It was a small window of blond hair arranged in a basketweave and on the frame it was inscribed “B.C. R.I.P.”

“Same collection?”

“No way of knowing. But it was common for members of the upper classes to have mourning jewelry commemorating the lives of more than one family member, so that’s what this could be, I suppose.”

Quinn didn’t say anything and Sweeney went on. “The history of mourning or
memento mori
jewelry is really interesting. In Europe, since medieval times, wars and plagues had made death very much a part of life, and people wore
memento mori
—which means ‘Remember death’ or ‘Remember that you must die’—jewelry, pieces like rings with skull’s heads on them. The idea was that you had to remember death was always near in order to be prepared.

“Anyway, in the seventeenth century, Europeans started wearing jewelry made of hair. Frequently a piece of the deceased’s hair would be woven and placed on a panel. It might be decorated with initials
or a little gold design and covered with glass. The designs were usually something specifically representing death—a skeleton, an hourglass. But as time went on, the iconography of death changed. We start to see symbols such as urns or willow trees, or sheaves of wheat.”

“So are you saying that this stuff is from Europe?”

“No, not at all. In fact, I would say all this was made right in Boston. Jewelers here, and in Philadelphia and New York, started making hair-work jewelry in the late 1700s and early 1800s. There are people who could tell you exactly where this was made. I could take it to a woman I know, if you want.”

“Maybe.” He was about to say something when a cell phone rang and he reached for his pocket. He looked at the phone, glanced at Sweeney, and answered it as he crossed to the other side of the room, turning his back to her. “Yeah? What? Is she okay?” she heard him ask in a whisper.

Sweeney picked up the other brooch and looked at it again through the plastic, tracing a finger over the intricately etched willow tree.

“No, I can’t really talk now,” she heard him whisper. “Just see if she wants to . . . okay, yeah, call the doctor. Let me know. Okay, bye.”

He sat down across from her again and said, “Sorry about that,” laying the phone down on the table and reaching up to rub his eyes with his fingertips. “Okay, so what about the locket?”

Sweeney picked it up. “It doesn’t have any markings, so I can’t date it with any confidence, but it looks like some Civil War–era ones I’ve seen. Have you opened it up?”