Mansions Of The Dead (7 page)

As he drifted off to sleep he started awake, sure he had heard Megan crying. But when he sat up in bed, he realized it was only the wind.

THE WARBLER DIDN’T KNOW
she was there. The small form sat atop the branch, the head perfectly still. His feathers were very slightly blurry through her binoculars and she adjusted the focus before they came into crystal-clear view. She watched him for a few minutes, delighting—for a single, miraculous instant—in the way he bobbed on his branch before she lowered the binoculars and turned to check on the dogs.

She had trained them to wait at the top of the cliff for her so they wouldn’t disturb the birds. They were quite good at it now—only Bella sometimes broke the stay, though it was usually just to nose around in the bushes and then lie down again next to Rufus and Ollie.

Now she looked up and saw the three golden heads, watching her, waiting for the release. She climbed back up the path a ways in the early morning light and called, “Okay,” and they came running toward her.

Suddenly, Kitty remembered Brad running toward her down the very same hill. It was as though she’d found a picture, so clear was the memory in her mind. It had been summer and she had been watching birds along the Cliff Walk and had walked back to the house. She’d been coming back up the path when he’d come running with the
dogs—they’d had four goldens then, Rufus and the ones who were dead now, Molly, Sally, and Polly.

Brad was dead now too! It seemed impossible. She decided that if someone had asked her three days ago how she would react if one of her other children were to die, she would have said that she knew what it was like, that she knew exactly how she would feel. But it was not like that at all. This was different, this was Brad. But of course she had felt that way about Petey too. She felt the tears begin to fall again and she stood there stupidly, looking out over the ocean.

“Dogs?” she said, choking on a sob. “Come here, Rufus, Ollie, Bella.” Where were they? She felt suddenly that she needed them, needed the weight of them leaning against her knees. She needed to stroke their silky heads.

She wiped her eyes and looked back up toward the house for them.

Andrew was standing at the top of the path, the dogs leaping delightedly, happy to see him.

“Hello,” he called. “I thought I’d find you here.”

She just stared at him, seeing Brad in his face, and turned away.

She sobbed quietly while he scrambled down to her. He was wearing perfectly pressed trousers and a new pair of loafers, and he slipped a little on the loose earth of the path.

When he reached her, he touched her arm and flinched when she turned away. He put his arms out and pleaded with her, “Kitty, please . . . our son.”

She sobbed once and turned to him, letting him hold her for a minute. When she pulled away, she saw that there were some tourists on the Cliff Walk, looking up at the house. “Let’s go up. I’ll make you a cup of tea or something.”

“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath and following her up the path. “This is one of those times I wish I was still drinking, you know?”

She didn’t smile.

It was odd having him in the house again, after four years. It was her house—she felt this with an intensity that surprised her sometimes, considering she had only begun spending time in it in her adulthood.
In the years of their marriage, the house, in the Putnam family for one hundred years, had grown to be hers, gradually shed its formal wallpaper and carpets and objets d’art and taken on her more relaxed style. But he moved around it assuredly, remembering where everything was, and it made Kitty feel strange and somehow violated, as though the years of freedom had been turned back in the instant he’d entered Cliff House. When the water had boiled, she filled a pot with loose Earl Grey and the hot water, and set it on a tray. She carried everything into the den.

“How are Camille and Jack and Drew?” he asked. “They said they were coming up last night.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked over his shoulder and out the window, where the sea was. He let her be silent for a moment. Through the glass, she could just hear the waves.

“Did they tell you? Did the police tell you? About how he was found?”

He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then he looked at her and nodded. “A bit, the basics. They seemed nervous about telling me too much.”

“What does it mean, Andrew? What does it mean? It can’t have been . . . They wouldn’t.”

“I know, I know. No . . . they wouldn’t. Of course not. It must be something else.”

She stared over his shoulder for a few long moments. “You know how I’ve always hated the way the Putnams sweep in when something goes wrong, how they try to
control
everything?”

He nodded.

“Well, I want someone to control this. I have a bad feeling about what may come out of it. I mean we don’t even know if . . . ”

“I’ll call someone,” he said.

“But, how . . . ?”

“Kitty, don’t worry. I’ll call someone.”

She choked back a sob then and turned away from him, wrapping herself into a ball on the couch. He got up and went to sit next to her,
and she turned away, her sobs coming out in little gasps. The dogs had come in and stretched out on the floor, looking up at her mournfully, confused.

Finally, she turned toward him and let him hold her again, then pulled away after a few minutes, not wanting to let it go too far. She remembered the night Petey had died, how she had been unable to do anything but scream when they told her. They had made love that night—it had surprised her that she would be capable of such a thing—angry, violent love. She had bit his shoulder during the act, drawing blood, and she remembered that he had slapped her as he finished. She hadn’t cared. It hadn’t been enough to make her feel alive. She had screamed when they finished, trying to wear out her voice, wear out her feelings.

Now, she didn’t have the energy to scream, but she kept crying until she was so tired that she couldn’t cry anymore.

BRAD PUTNAM’S DEATH WAS
above-the-fold news in the
Globe
Monday morning and as she drank her coffee, Sweeney read the story slowly, looking for subtext.

“Bradley D. Putnam, the grandson of the late Senator John Putnam and Senator Patrick ‘Paddy’ Sheehan, was found dead in his Cambridge apartment yesterday morning under what police have called suspicious circumstances.” It went on to mention that he had been a history of art major and that he had enjoyed tennis, painting, and hiking, and it quoted Sweeney as well as a number of other students and professors and left the reader with the impression that Brad had been an exceptional scholar. The story didn’t say anything about the way he had been found and, Sweeney was interested to note, didn’t mention the jewelry. The Cambridge police had managed to keep at least that part of the story out of the papers.

There was a sidebar by Paul, sensationally titled
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
, and detailing the Putnam family’s successes and failures over the years.

The story led with an anecdote from Andrew Putnam and Kitty Sheehan’s wedding. Paul quoted an account by a guest who said the wedding was a sort of living embodiment of the city’s political history,
the colonial-era patriarchy on one side of the aisle and the new power elite on the other.

“The children of Andrew Putnam and Kitty Sheehan seemed to thrive on the combination of histories and attributes their parents bequeathed them,” Paul had written.

Then it went on to describe the accident on Ocean Drive. “The ensuing police investigation took on much of the atmosphere of other celebrity scandals, with a well-heeled family putting up roadblocks for the police, though this time there was no determined public demanding justice for the victim. The case was eventually closed and the Newport police were open about the Putnam family’s hostility.

“The remaining Putnam siblings seemed to have moved on from the tragedies of the past. Drew Putnam is a mainstay of the family firm, specializing in real estate law and spearheading a number of development projects. Jack Putnam, a sculptor whose work the
Globe
’s own Jennifer Termino has described as ‘Tragic and lyrical . . . a study in human suffering and human joy,’ is one of ten or twenty artists regularly mentioned as the new generation of young, up-and-coming American painters and sculptors. And Camille Putnam, who made what can only be described as a meteoric rise through the ranks of the state assembly to the Democratic leadership of the state senate, is currently seeking to unseat incumbent Republican Congressman Gerry DiFloria in the Eighth Congressional District. DiFloria won a surprise upset in the heavily Democratic district almost two years ago after Democratic front-runner, Hal McCarty, was forced to drop out of the race when allegations of his involvement in a murder twenty-five years earlier while he was in college, surfaced two weeks before the election. Putnam is vying to upset DiFloria, who has turned out to be a popular congressman in the Democratic district.

“But now tragedy has struck again. And once again the Putnam family is under the microscope.”

There was a picture of Camille, giving a speech. She looked outdoorsy and kind, with short dark hair and large, intelligent eyes in a plain face. And there was a picture of Brad on the inside page that
made Sweeney’s chest contract. He was sitting on the edge of a porch or deck railing, and below him was a wide expanse of ocean. He was grinning—she had never seen him grin that way in life—and he looked tanned and happy and brave.

She ran a fingertip across the photo. When she looked more closely she saw that he was gripping the railing so tightly that the small bones in his hands nearly shone white in the bright sun.

Until she walked into the seminar room later that morning, she hadn’t thought about what she would say to her students. Actively in denial, she had gone over her lecture notes and had planned to swallow her own unease and lecture on mourning objects and the Civil War. She had the slide carousel in her bag and photocopies of instruction on making hair-work jewelry from
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. She had even been looking forward to losing herself in her lecture.

But when she got there and saw the three of them—Jaybee and Becca hadn’t come—sitting around the seminar table, their faces horrified, she knew that it would be impossible to teach the class as though nothing had happened.

“Hi, everyone,” she said, taking off her raincoat. “I know how hard this is for me and I know it must be really awful for you too.”

They stared at her, shocked, and she decided, afraid. She sat down and looked around at what was left of her Mourning Objects class.

Rajiv Patel was a tall, good-looking kid who had grown up outside of Detroit and was apparently quite a good fiction writer. He dressed like a literary wunderkind, in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, and Sweeney had always suspected that his interest in funerary art belied a stronger, more literary interest in death. He had one of the quickest minds she’d ever encountered; it instantly owned new concepts, leaping through contradictions, making connections, resolving outstanding questions. It was a pleasure to watch him think.

The other members of the little group were Ashley Jones and Jennifer Jones.

Ashley was about as improbably an Ashley as Sweeney could imagine. She had a severe bowl cut and dyed her hair a dark, inky black. She liked to wear baggy black trousers and torn black T-shirts with band names scrawled on them in red or pink. She was much pierced, some of the piercings having been abandoned and allowed to scab over, so that her ears and nose seemed gaily chicken-pocked. She was very bright and had an oddly formal writing style that Sweeney enjoyed reading. She also talked openly and loudly about heterosexism—though she was apparently herself heterosexual—and liked to instigate arguments about the morality of marriage.

Jennifer Jones was the daughter of a wealthy international businessman and had grown up all over the world, attending American and British schools in far-flung places that she would bring into their classroom conversation in her careful, slightly accented American English, as in “That’s interesting, because in Indonesia there’s this thing they do where they dig up the bones of the dead and rebury them.” Jennifer had an exotic beauty that belied her English/Welsh roots; it was as though she’d picked up a little something from each country she’d lived in, and she wore expensive, designer clothes that Sweeney coveted. She had a bored, unimpressed way about her that seemed to make people nervous.