Mansions Of The Dead (45 page)

MARINO AND A NEWPORT
cop took Drew to the police station to get a statement from him about the hit-and-run and Quinn said that they would be getting statements from all of them the next day.

“For now, you can try to get some rest. The hospital will be calling soon.”

Jack walked her out to Quinn’s car and Quinn, after looking confused at the way Jack looked at Sweeney, figured it out and said, “I’ll just . . . I have a phone call to make. I’ll wait in the car.”

“Where are you staying tonight?” Jack reached for her hand and she let him take it.

“I don’t know. Probably at Anna’s.”

“My dad’s coming down here to stay for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Isn’t that something? They’re going to try to put things back together.”

“That’s great,” Sweeney said. “I’m really happy for you.”

“Yeah.” He smiled and for a moment he looked like a small boy, before his mouth straightened and she could see how tired he was, how sad he was.

“So after this is all over, can I call you?”

Sweeney took a deep breath of the moist, spring air and stood for a moment, watching him.

“I don’t know, Jack.”

He pulled her toward him and she saw that his eyes were red with drink and wakefulness. She could smell the tangy staleness of his breath. “Look. This wasn’t exactly the optimum way to start a relationship but I feel like there might be something here and I don’t want to regret not finding out what it is.”

Sweeney looked out into the darkness. She could smell the sea air.

“Jack, why do you think you’re interested in me?”

“Because you’re beautiful and smart and because I’m attracted to you, which by the way doesn’t necessarily follow beautiful and smart. But in this case it does.”

“I’m not fishing for compliments. I really want to know.”

“I don’t know.” He looked confused. “Do I have to be able to explain it?”

“I think you’re interested in me because I’m a drinker,” she said, withdrawing her hand from his.

He tried to give a charming smile. “Well, is there anything wrong with that?”

She studied him in the dark, but he was a ghost. “I have to go.”

“But—” She turned away from him and got into the car and nodded to Quinn. They were gone before he could stop them and Sweeney imagined him standing in the drive, the yard dropping away behind him.

“Do you want me to take you to your aunt’s house to get your car?” Quinn asked once they were out on Bellevue Avenue.

Sweeney was silent for a moment. “I want to get back to Somerville. I feel like I just want to get out of here, you know? But I’m too tired to drive.” And though she didn’t say it, she didn’t want to be alone.

“Why don’t I drive you back to the house and make us some breakfast,” he said after a minute. “Then I’ll take you home. You can get someone to bring you back for your car.”

She smiled up at him gratefully. “Thanks.”

They drove for a few minutes in silence before she said, “Do you want to know about the jewelry?”

Quinn turned to look at her. “What do you mean? We found out about the jewelry. The brooch must have been wrong.”

“No, the brooch was right.”

“But the test is foolproof. My friend said that . . . ”

“The test was right too,” she said. “It was the hair that was wrong.”

“The hair . . . ? What do you mean?”

“I mean the hair in the locket wasn’t Charles Putnam’s. I assumed that it was because it was the same color as the hair in the necklace. But there was no reason that Belinda Putnam, if she had a sweetheart in those months after her husband died, a secret sweetheart, that she shouldn’t have asked him for a lock of his hair. Perhaps they were somewhere where she didn’t have any scissors, so he reached up and he pulled some hair from his head and he gave it to her and she put it in her locket. Locks of hair were used for mourning objects, but they were also used for sentimental jewelry. Sweethearts gave each other locks of their hair to remember each other by. And I think that’s what that locket was.”

“And he was the father of the baby. So of course that would make sense that the test would match,” Quinn said. “But who was he?”

“We don’t really have any way of knowing. But I have this idea about that. I was trying to think where she could have met someone. In those days it was quite common for widows to visit their husbands’ graves. Remember what I was saying about how Mount Auburn represented a switch in the way that people thought about death. It was a lead-in, in many ways, to the Victorian preoccupation with death, the sort of sentimental attitude about the deceased. I was thinking that it was probably the only time in her day that she was alone. And I was thinking that maybe she met someone at the cemetery. A workman, or perhaps a fellow mourner. I don’t know. I have no way of proving this, of course. But it’s what I think must have happened.”

“Are you going to tell them?”

“I don’t think we need to,” Sweeney said after a moment. “It doesn’t matter to them, really. It doesn’t matter to anyone.”

The sun was coming up, hesitantly, the light gradually changing from purple to blue to gray as they headed north.

He called his wife from the car. Sweeney watched the sky out the window and listened to him say softly, “Yeah. I’ll be home in forty-five minutes or so. I’m going to bring Sweeney for breakfast. No, no. Don’t worry. I’ll make something when I get there. How are you? Yeah? Did she sleep okay? Yeah, love you too.”

Sweeney turned to watch his face as he hung up the phone.

“She’s expecting us,” he said, trying to smile.

“How is she?”

“Much better. Her sister went home and she seems much more even. The doctors said it was just a matter of time.”

The house was perfectly silent when they came in, and it struck Sweeney that it had been cleaned. There was a vase of daisies on the coffee table and someone had been baking. The air was filled with a chocolatey sweetness.

“Maura?” Quinn called out, dropping his coat on the couch. “We’re back.” There was something false in his voice. Still, the house was eerily, emptily silent.

Sweeney stood there looking around the room. She wasn’t sure why, but her heart was thumping. Later, she wasn’t sure if she saw the white rectangle first or if he did, but they were both staring at it.

“Timmy,” it said, in clear, black letters.

“Do you want me to . . . ?” she asked, gesturing at the door. She’s left him, she thought. “I can take the T home.”

Quinn didn’t say anything, he just stepped forward and picked up the letter and stared at it for a moment, turning it over in his hands as though he recognized it, as though it were an object he knew very well.

Wordlessly, he handed it to her.

“Are you sure . . . ?”

“Please.” It came out in a sob.

Sweeney opened the envelope.

“Darling Timmy,” the note read. “By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. I’m in the bathroom, but please don’t come up. I don’t want you to see me. I have fed Megan and she has gone to sleep. I kissed her. I don’t know what I feel for her, but of course you have to lie and tell her that I loved her when she is older and can’t remember me.

“I can’t explain to you why. I’m a danger to you, to you and Megan. I’ve been having bad thoughts these last few weeks and it is a relief to have made this decision. You can’t know what sweet relief it is. ‘Easeful Death.’ You said that to me once. I don’t remember what it’s from, but that’s how it feels. When you found me in Mrs. M’s garden that day, I knew what I was going to do. It will be fine.

“I love you. And I am sorry.”

She looked up to find him racing up the stairs.

“Don’t!” she called out. “She doesn’t want you to . . . ” And she followed him up the stairs, dropping the letter on the floor. She felt that she would do anything she could to stop him from seeing her. But when she gained the landing on the second floor, she found him holding Megan, who was bewildered and had begun to whimper.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” He held the baby to his chest, almost crushing her and Sweeney couldn’t think of anything to do but to rub his arm. He moved away from her as though he couldn’t stand the touch, burying his head in the baby’s soft, sparse hair, rubbing his lips against her face. Megan looked up at Sweeney and gave an enigmatic smile.

“I don’t know. She wrote that she was going to. Should I . . . ?”

“No, no,” he said.

Strange things occurred to her. There was a wedding photo of them in the hall, Maura in a too-puffy dress and odd-looking white headband decorated with beads and crystals, and it struck her that Quinn’s hair was too short, that he looked nearly bald in the photo.

“I knew,” he whispered, still rubbing his face against the baby’s. “I knew as soon as we came in.”

Sweeney went downstairs to call 911.

It was a couple of days later that she took out her address book and sat at the kitchen table. Toby had brought her a bouquet of peonies and she leaned forward to inhale their sweet, spicy scent.

She thought of Ivy. Ivy had always loved peonies. She liked to tuck one behind her ear or in the buttonhole of her dress, pink ones or red ones, to set off her hair, the scent of them trailing behind her as she walked.

Sweeney thought too of Ian, of the words that would have to be answered.

The grass is newly green and everywhere there was a sense of life trickling back into things, of that sweet syrup that runs through all living beings. There were daffodils everywhere I looked, daffodils that not so much fluttered and waved at me as bowed. The fruit trees were in full flower, the branches of the cherry trees like lamb’s tails with their heavy flowers.

She turned to the “I’s,” found the number for Ivy at Summerlands, and copied it out onto a slip of paper. Then she turned the B’s, where she’d tucked the business card onto which Ian had written his home phone number all those months ago. She hadn’t copied it into her book yet. She wrote that number down on another slip of paper and put it next to the other one.

For a long time she sat staring at the numbers. Finally she crumpled one of the pieces of paper and dropped it into an empty sugar bowl in the middle of the table, next to the peonies.

Sweeney picked up the phone and dialed the code for the United Kingdom, then the number, imagining her voice going out across the air, vibrating along some cables—did they even have cables anymore?—below the vast ocean, carrying out her message, irrevocable.

“Hello?” The voice came clear and loud.

“Hi. It’s Sweeney,” she said. She pictured the sand shifting with the weight of her words, setting to motion the softly undulating seaweed. It rippled and danced. It would never fall back in the same pattern again.

I ask the forgiveness of the residents of the city of Boston for saddling them with a troublesome and fictitious public works project so soon after a real one.

A number of books were very helpful in my research into Mount Auburn Cemetery and the history of Newport, Rhode Island. Among them were
Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery
by Blanche Linden-Ward;
Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870–1930
by Myra Beth Young Armstead; and
Newport: A Short History
by C. P. B. Jefferys, and
The Collectors Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry
by C. Jeanenne Bell.

For help with information about their areas of expertise, thanks to Christine Ashcroft of Genelex Laboratories and Frank Pasquarello of the Cambridge Police Department.

I can’t express how much I appreciate the dedication and friendship of my agent, Lynn Whittaker, and the help of everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Kelley Ragland is an author’s editor, and I am grateful for the assistance of Benjamin Sevier, Linda McFall, Rachel Ekstrom, and Carly Einstein.

And for support, commiseration, friendship, and for providing fun, I send grateful thanks to my friends: Kara McKeever, for chicken wrangling and many other things; Kathy Burge and Rich Barlow; Margaret Miller; Rachel Gross and James Sturm; Jennifer Hauck; Susan Edsall; Vendela Vida and Ali Flynn. A huge thanks to Victoria
Kuskowski for design and friendship. And thanks especially to my family, Tom, Sue, and David Taylor, for all of their support, and to my wonderful husband, Matt Dunne, to whom this book quite literally owes its existence.