O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,111

until she got home and I told her. She seemed okay. But a couple of nights later, I came home from work and I found her in the bathroom. The needle was still in her arm and everything.”

“How did you find out about the colony?” Sweeney asked quietly.

“God, how could I not? She had always talked about the colony, about her grandparents and the beautiful houses and about how her parents had taken her away from it. She had all these books and everything. It was kind of an obsession, but I liked to hear her talk about it. It sounded so nice. Like the kind of place where everyone would treat each other well, where everything would be beautiful.”

Trip had started to cry, but the woman seemed not to hear him. She went on.

“She had written a letter to her grandmother, to tell her about the accident. And a couple of weeks after she died, a return letter came from Byzantium. I opened it, because there wasn’t anybody else to send her things to, and it was this wonderful letter, a sad letter, asking Rosemary to come and visit.”

She looked at them. “I swear. I was just going to come to tell her in person. I didn’t see how I could tell her about Rosemary in a letter, or on the phone even, after what she’d been through. And then I started thinking, what if I showed up and said I was Rosemary. I worried about my accent, but then I realized that she wouldn’t know where Rosemary had spent her childhood. It was easy to tell the truth about myself, that I’d been born in England and that my father had gotten this crazy idea about having a farm in South Africa. That was easy. And we looked alike. I thought there might be some money in it. And I didn’t remember about the birthmark until I was in Boston. I got a little tattoo. It was easy. But then I was so terrified when I saw those pictures. I didn’t know what to do.”

Sweeney said, “There wasn’t anything you could do. You had already met all the neighbors with a birthmark on one side of your face, and you couldn’t go and change it.”

“That’s right. I got rid of the photographs, pretended there’d been a flood in the attic. But then I realized that there were paintings. I hadn’t counted on that. I almost left then. But I had started to love Byzantium. And Electra. That was the problem, you see.” She looked very sad all of a sudden.

“It wasn’t the kind of thing people would notice right away,” Sweeney went on for her. “But one day, you’d be standing in someone’s living room and they’d realize. You had to get rid of the paintings.”

“It would have been fine if it hadn’t been for Ruth Kimball,” the woman said.

Trip was watching her in horror. “But you didn’t kill her,” he said. “That was Carl.”

Sweeney looked at him and then went on. “Ruth Kimball has a nearly photographic memory. Just like I do. She must have looked at you one day and remembered what you’d looked like as child. Then she went to the Historical Society looking for proof in a book of photographs from the ‘60s. That confused me. But she must have found a picture of Rosemary as a toddler in the book and shown it to you. And instead of turning you in, she started blackmailing you. I thought she was blackmailing Trip because she knew he was the burglar, but in fact she was blackmailing you because she knew what was behind them. She had made the connection between your arrival and the burglaries and she threatened to go to the police. Instead you paid her. She used the money to set up a college fund for Charley. I think you must have gotten it from your grandmother. You had started handling the household finances and you figured she wouldn’t notice.”

Sweeney looked into the very blue eyes. “And you killed Sabina because she realized about the painting. At the party. She saw you reflected in the window and she remembered the painting and realized the birthmark was on the wrong side. She must have confronted you about it sometime at the party and so she had to die. But first you had to scare me. You pushed me off the edge of the ridge because you realized that I wasn’t satisfied Carl had killed