O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,107
racing. Mirrors, shadows, it all danced around in her head, a dervish of images. There was something . . . a window. Oh God.
She had been stupid. They had all been stupid. She felt a cold fear settle over her shoulders. The figures in the little book. She had thought she knew, but she hadn’t. Not really. This time she really knew.
She read the rest of the poem.
“But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, ‘She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”
She waited, unsure what to do, and paced around the room, trying to put it all into order. After an hour or so she heard Ian come up the stairs, pause outside her room, and then go into his own room, carefully shutting the door.
Then she went and lay down on her bed, where she waited for an excruciating thirty minutes, the numbers rolling over slowly on the digital clock.
Finally, when the house was silent, she got up and put on a heavy sweater and a pair of ski pants over her sweats. She found a hat and gloves, grabbed a flashlight out of her bag, and tiptoed quietly out into the hall. She’d decided that she wouldn’t use the flashlight until she was outside so that she wouldn’t wake anyone up, so she felt her way down the stairs, shushed the dogs when they got up to greet her and stood there in the hall for a moment, gathering her nerve.
Then she took the set of boots and cross-country skis she’d used that first day out of the hall closet and slipped out the back door, shutting it softly behind her. Thankfully, the dogs stayed quiet, watching her for a moment through the glass and then dropping their heads to the kitchen floor.
She’d made it.
She snapped the boots into the skis, switched on the flashlight and looked out into the whirling snow.
THIRTY-THREE
LATER, SHE WASN’T sure how she’d reached the studio. The beam of the flashlight gave her only a foot or so of visibility in the whiteout. Every time she put a ski forward, she feared she was going in the wrong direction, searching for the path through the dark, snow-cloaked trees.
But then the light caught the silvery length of the half-frozen river, and she hugged the bank as much as possible, knowing the path led straight to Gilmartin’s little studio.
It was bitterly cold and the driving snow made its way under the collar of her parka and down into the ski boots. She kept going, pushing her feet forward, even when they began to throb, when the muscles in her arms began screaming for relief.
Just when she thought she was going to collapse, she saw, up ahead, a brown block in all the white. She was there.
Sweeney stepped out of the skis and huddled on the porch for a moment relieved to be out of the driving wind and snow. When she’d recovered, she tried the windows, finding them locked, and pulled fruitlessly at the padlock on the door.
It took her a few minutes to find a rock under the snow, but once she had one in her hand, she wrapped her right arm in her scarf and punched the rock through the glass. Then she used it to break away the shards of glass along the window frame and placed her parka over the rough edges of glass, carefully climbing over the sill. Once she was inside, she put her parka back on and shone the flashlight along the ground and then up the walls. There was no one there.
The studio was a large room with a fireplace against one wall and a row of shelves against another. It was empty of any furniture except for an old easel, covered with splashes of multi-colored oil paint, and an army cot pushed against one wall.
But it wasn’t empty. On the floor in front of the far wall, Sweeney could see an irregularly shaped heap. She went closer and lifted a brown tarp from the pile of stolen artwork.
She quickly found what she was looking for and she piled the paintings up to the side, wrapping them in the plastic garbage bags she’d put in her coat pocket. It wasn’t an ideal way to transport art, but it would have to do. She was wrapping the parcel when she heard footsteps out on the porch and she shut off the flashlight, pressed herself against the wall next to the door, and waited.