O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,109

coat pocket and shone it around the studio. “You looked through our things,” she said, looking up at Sweeney. Sweeney had expected to see someone else in her eyes, but she looked just the way she had the first time Sweeney had met her, pretty and lithe, her blond hair spiky, her cheeks pink from the cold.

“They’re not your things,” Sweeney said calmly, though she was very afraid. “They don’t belong to you.”

Rosemary stared at her for a moment. “So how did you know?” she asked quietly. “How did you find me out?” She unzipped her heavy parka, which was also caked with snow.

“Rosemary, shut up!” Trip yelled. “Don’t tell her anything.”

“Tell me,” Rosemary said. “Doesn’t seem like it could hurt now.”

Sweeney’s desire to know if she had gotten it right was so overpowering, it felt like a black hole she wanted to sink into. She moved slightly to the side and looked into Rosemary’s very blue eyes, at the pretty little birthmark.

“There was a lot more to this than you and I kept getting confused by other pieces of this, by gravestones and deeds and word puzzles. But once I had boiled it down, I wondered about the burglaries,” Sweeney said simply. “They seemed so random. Britta made a comment about magpies at some point and I thought to myself that it seemed we had a magpie for a thief. It was such a strange combination of items, mementos, keepsakes, then the electronic equipment sometimes. But every time, the paintings. It was stupid of me not to put it together sooner.

“It was strange, though, because no one made a big deal about which paintings were stolen. The names weren’t in the paper and it seemed that they must not have been very valuable or famous paintings. There wasn’t any obvious link. The only thing was that I knew a couple of them had been of you as a child, though I didn’t put it together until tonight.

“I went to have tea with Sabina shortly before she was killed and while I was there, I saw a painting by Gilda Donetti of two teenage girls and a toddler. It was hanging in Sabina’s house when I went to visit her the first time. The date on it was 1969. Sabina said it was a picture of Rosemary at the age of three or four.”

Rosemary was staring at her, her eyes afraid, and Sweeney found it gave her courage. She went on.

“At the Christmas party, Frances Rapacci told me that he had owned a picture of you when you were a child, but that it was one of the ones stolen from his house when it was burgled. It didn’t hit me until tonight that the pictures of Rosemary as a child might be the connection I was looking for in the burglaries.

“Marcus Granger’s daughter had visited the colony once after her marriage, with her young daughter, Rosemary. She—Rosemary, I mean—was a beautiful child and it seemed that at least a few of the artists around the colony painted her that summer. When I started thinking about it, I realized it was possible that Rosemary Burgess was in a number of pictures that had been given as presents to colonists by Gilda or Gilmartin or other artists. There were probably pictures of Rosemary all over the colony. That’s why she had to get them. Or get Trip to get them. I think she had caught Trip taking things from people in the colony, little things, things like my earrings, and I think she knew it must be part of a larger pattern of kleptomania and she told him she would go to the police if he didn’t take the pictures of her from the houses and take other things, too, to make it look like a string of burglaries.”

“I don’t understand,” Gally said, looking from Trip to Rosemary and then back at Sweeney. “Why would she want pictures of herself?”

“That’s what I was wondering. The burglaries coincided with Trip and Gally’s school vacations. At first I thought that Trip had taken them because he was obsessed with her, something like that. But there was something else about the timing. The burglaries only started after Rosemary arrived in Byzantium. I didn’t see that. But then something happened tonight that made me see why Rosemary didn’t want anyone to see a picture of her as a very young child.

“I read The Lady of Shalott tonight and all the stuff about mirrors and seeing