O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,11
book, literally. He lives up there now, you know. Probably in the phone book.”
“Bennett Dammers?” She wrote it down. “Thanks, Jamie. Have a great holiday if I don’t see you before.”
“You too. And let me know when you’re ready to talk. I’m intrigued by your project.”
It was intriguing, Sweeney thought after she hung up the phone. And Toby was right. If there was anything in it, it could be a chapter in the book on American gravestone art she was working on. It was intoxicating stuff, a young girl killed by a famous artist and memorialized in a stone that used anachronistic gravestone iconography. Who was the anonymous artist? Why had he chosen those symbols?
But she was getting ahead of herself.
She went into the kitchen and tipped the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red above her emptied glass, enjoying the pleasing gurgle of liquid filling the tumbler, then curled up on the couch again and dialed Ruth Kimball’s number.
The voice that answered this time sounded younger and when Sweeney asked if she could talk to Ruth Kimball, the woman on the other end was silent for a minute and then said, “No, I’m sorry.”
In the background, Sweeney could hear a blaring television set. “My name’s Sweeney St. George. We talked yesterday. She’s expecting my call, actually.”
Again there was a long silence and Sweeney heard, over the background noise, a man’s voice demand to know who was calling.
“No one,” the woman said. “Someone for Ma.” Her slightly deep voice was weak and full of emotion.
Sweeney waited, and after another few moments of silence, she said, “Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes,” the woman said very softly. “Listen, I’m her daughter. Sherry. You can’t . . . I mean she’s . . . dead. She died yesterday.”
Sweeney took a quick swig of her scotch. “I just . . . I’m so sorry. It must have been sudden.”
“Yeah, it was. Were you a friend of hers?”
“No. I’m working on a project and she was going to help me with it. I’m calling from Boston.”
“Oh, yeah. She said. You were going to find out what happened to Mary. She was telling everyone about it.”
“Can I . . . Can I ask how she died?”
But she had gone too far. Sherry Kimball said nothing and then, as static crackled over the phone line, Sweeney heard a sob. “From the bullet in her head,” she said angrily and broke down crying.
“I’m so sorry . . .” But Sherry had put the phone down, leaving Sweeney listening to the insistent dial tone. She put the receiver back in its cradle and sat there for quite a long time, shaken and replaying the conversation over and over in her head. Again she heard Ruth Kimball’s voice saying, They wouldn’t want it to get out, would they? The colony folks, and then her daughter’s, From the bullet in her head.
Guilty and shocked, she stood up and paced around her apartment, thinking. What were the chances that this woman’s death was connected to Sweeney’s questions about the gravestone? Sweeney didn’t even know how she had died. From the bullet in her head. That sounded like someone had shot her. Was it possible . . .?
She sat down again, conscious that a small locus of excitement had begun to radiate out from her stomach. For the past year she had gone about her life within its small boundaries, following her academic pursuits, her little ambitions. She had not felt anything like what she felt now, anything like this need to know, simply put, what had happened. She understood suddenly what people meant by burning curiosity. She felt warm, alive, afire. There was only one way to know.
Somewhere outside a car alarm sounded in the night. Sweeney finished her scotch, dialed Toby’s number, and told him she’d love to spend Christmas in Vermont.
FOUR
DECEMBER 13
LATER, AFTER EVERYTHING that happened, Sweeney would remember that her first impression of Byzantium was of two separate landscapes, competing with each other for her attention. The first was the idyllic New England scene of calendars and magazines: the gentle, dipping hills, the peaked evergreens against the snow, the red barns and white farmhouses like exotic holly berries, nestled amongst the green.
But as she and Toby followed the narrow, drift-lined dirt roads in her old Volkswagen Rabbit, she noticed another landscape. This one was made up of dilapidated ranch-style houses and trailers, paint peeling, aluminum roofing coming away at the edges. As they drove through one small town, a group of sullen