heart racing, and turned away from the stove. Her scotch was sitting on the counter and she gulped it, trying to clear the flames from her memory, trying to erase the awful sound of the explosion, the fire sucking at the air, the sickening rush of heat. She drained her glass and poured another drink.
When her nerves had calmed, she settled down on the couch with the telephone.
She had lived on the top floor of the rundown, pumpkin-colored Victorian triple-decker near Davis Square since returning from England almost a year ago and even after she’d published her book and gotten the teaching job, she’d stayed at the Russell Street apartment out of laziness. Though her building was still something of a monstrosity—the paint peeled and the roofline sagged, giving it the look of a haunted house—the rest of the street was undergoing a remarkably swift gentrification and the neighborhood had gotten safer and more desirable. But her rent had stayed the same, a condition of her continued residence since her bank account ebbed and flowed depending on the time of the month. Waiting for doctors or hairdressers to see her, Sweeney picked up women’s magazines with articles about retirement planning or the necessity of emergency savings and put them down again, guilty and afraid.
The apartment had a large bedroom and minuscule kitchen—ironic, she thought, considering the condition of her social life. The living room/dining room was airy and bright, the walls painted a clean ivory, the floors shiny oak. She had reproductions of Holbein’s The Dance of Death framed and hanging on the walls and black and white pillows were scattered on the black slipcovered couch. The floors were covered with handwoven rugs, skeletal black death’s heads woven into creamy white wool. Above her desk, which was tucked into a nook at the top of the stairs, were framed black-and-white photographs she’d taken in cemeteries around the world; a bleak New England landscape of simple stones; aboveground New Orleans monuments; a romantic line of mausoleums at Pére Lachaise in Paris. Against one wall of the living room was propped a plaster replica of an eighteenth-century gravestone Sweeney had found in a Boston shop that also made gargoyles.
She sipped her scotch and got out a pencil and the notebook into which she’d copied Ruth Kimball’s phone number. A little buzz of excitement had lodged in her stomach at the prospect of finding out more about Mary Denholm, but she’d resolved she would talk to Jamie Benedetto before she called Ruth Kimball again.
Jamie, a colleague in the Fine Arts Department, was the undisputed expert on turn-of-the-century American painting. She knew he was also interested in American arts colonies, and she’d spent a couple of hours in the library that afternoon poring over some of his articles about colonies in New England.
She reread the opening of one piece she’d photocopied.
The American arts colony was, in many ways, the direct descendant of the French Plein-Air movement, the idea that colors were truer when painted in nature, that painting or sculpting away from the hustle and bustle of the city could inject new life into an artist’s work. American artists like the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan found rural paradises outside of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, bringing with them their friends, students and associates. Morgan founded the well-known colony in the aptly named Byzantium, Vermont, which, like many of the colonies, enjoyed a somewhat Roman fate. The artists brought friends so there would be things to do—the parties and gala theatrical productions at Byzantium were famous for their excess and for their debauchery. But eventually, many of the artists who had sought out colony life abandoned it, complaining that the country felt just like the city.
All very interesting, but it was on another subject that she wanted Jamie’s expertise.
“So, Sweeney,” he said after they’d made small talk about holiday plans and his three-year-old son. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got kind of a strange question. At some point I’ll explain the whole thing, but right now I just need to know if any of the artists associated with the Byzantium colony were ever arrested or involved in any crimes or scandals that you know of. Back around the turn of the century?”
“Hmmm. Off the top of my head I’d say no, but the person you really ought to talk to is Bennett Dammers. He was at Williams for many years and he’s the point man on Byzantium. Quite elderly now, but he wrote the