O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,110

the world through mirrors got me thinking. And it made me see that I actually knew everything I need to about this. I remembered the painting that I had seen hanging in Sabina’s library and I remembered that the toddler in that painting had a birthmark on her cheek, just like Rosemary. Only it was on the wrong side. It was on the left cheek. And yours”—she pointed to Rosemary’s face—“is on the right. It isn’t the kind of thing you notice, you know. If you remember someone as having had a birthmark, you don’t really remember what side it’s on.

“Rosemary had only recently come to live in Byzantium. In fact, no one had seen her since she was three years old, and the only person who might actually remember what she had looked like was her grandmother—who is nearly blind.”

“Go on,” Rosemary said.

“Her name isn’t Rosemary Burgess,” she said to Gally and Trip, then turned back. “I don’t know what your real name is but I think you must have known Rosemary Burgess in London and when Rosemary died shortly after her parents did—in an accident or maybe not—whoever you are took over Rosemary’s life, having heard stories about the wealthy grandmother. All you had to do was get back in touch with the grandmother, get a fake birthmark, since people would remember that, and show up in Vermont. I don’t know if you just did it for fun, for what you could get out of it, or if you were going to take it all the way and Electra Granger would have died before too long.”

As she talked Sweeney was looking around the room, trying to find a route of escape. There was nothing but the front door, and Trip was standing in front of it, holding the rifle.

“I think you felt that you could trick the grandmother and that there wouldn’t be anybody else who would remember you as such a young child. This is the part I’ve been trying to figure out. I think that you got the birthmark wrong because you had been used to looking at the real Rosemary the same way we look at ourselves in a mirror. You thought of it as being on the right cheek, because that’s what you saw in the mirror, so to speak. But it wasn’t. It was really on Rosemary Burgess’s left cheek.

“You arrived in Byzantium and everything was fine until you realized that you’d gotten it wrong. You could get rid of photographs, but then you discovered that Rosemary had visited the colony as a child and there were paintings. That must have been a shock to you,” she said, looking up at Rosemary, or the woman she knew as Rosemary.

The woman said, “Yes. The first week I was here, my grandmother—Electra—took me up to the attic and showed me a box of photographs of Rosemary as a child. I panicked when I realized I’d gotten it wrong.” She stood up and started pacing around the room. “It was so stupid. And it was just like you said. I had this image of Rosemary, with the birthmark here . . .. It was because it was so last-minute, you know. I didn’t even think I was going to pretend to be her until I was in Boston. I thought that I would just come and meet the grandmother, tell her about Rosemary, you know. And then I was in Boston, and I thought to myself, ‘Why not tell her I’m Rosemary.’

“We became friends in the first place because we looked so much alike. I was dating this guy who knew her from school or something and we were standing next to each other at a party and someone said, ‘You two could be twins.’ She was fun, you know, we always had a good time together, and I liked her, and we would go round and tell people we were twins.

“We moved in together about six months before her parents died. She didn’t even talk to them anymore, hadn’t for years. She was a complete druggie. I didn’t realize it for a while, she was good at hiding it. But like her parents, I started to see signs, and like her parents I realized pretty quickly that there wasn’t anything to do. She was one of the ones who die from it. She was determined to die from it, I think.

“But they died first. I took the call from the police and I sat up