O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,12
teenagers, cigarette smoke curling above their heads, stood glaring at passing cars. Sweeney watched them in her rearview mirror until they disappeared.
They had left Boston a little before noon and by two they were almost there. As they passed a huge dairy farm, the black-and-white cows turning to watch them disinterestedly, she said, “Tell me about your aunt and uncle. What are they like?”
“What are they like?” He thought for a moment. “When I was a kid, I thought they were the coolest adults I’d ever met. Patch is six years younger than my mom, so he and Britta were still in their early twenties by the time I was aware of them. Compared to all of my mom’s hippie friends, they were like movie stars. He was the champion of the Middlebury ski team and had almost been in the Olympics. Britta had this long blond hair that went down to her waist and she was nice to me, always buying me presents and playing with me. There’s something very fairy princess about her. I had a huge crush on her, of course. I used to have these elaborate fantasies that Patch had been in a skiing accident and that she and I lived together in Vermont.”
“Dirty little boy.”
“Well, yeah. Patch was great, too, though, adolescent fantasies aside. The thing I always loved about them when I was a kid was that they made a big deal out of things, you know? Everything was an event. You didn’t just have a birthday, Patch would plan a treasure hunt and he and all the neighbors would put on a play for you. They didn’t just get a Christmas tree, they organized an expedition into the woods to cut one down and had eggnog and cookies while they put it up.”
“What do they do for work? Does Patch help run the auction house?” Toby’s grandfather had founded Wentworth Auctioneers, a fine art auction house in Boston.
“Only in the sense that he goes to a few board meetings and writes off his vacations as buying trips. Britta comes from money and Patch always had some from my grandparents. He studied painting after he gave up skiing competitively and he has a studio in the house, but I’m not sure he’s painting all that much these days. I asked him if he was working on anything when I saw him at Thanksgiving and he was kind of weird about it. He always used to talk about writing a novel, too.”
“What about your cousins? How old are they?”
“The twins are seventeen and Gwinny’s fourteen now, I think. The boys are fun, they’re into outdoorsy stuff, hunting and snowmobiling and all that. Gwinny is something. She was the most solemn little child and so beautiful, like some kind of mythical heroine. She’s so different from Britta. You’ll see what I mean.”
Listening to him, Sweeney remembered the moment they’d become friends. On her second night of college, she had been sitting with a group of other freshmen in someone’s dorm room, drinking gin and tonics and trading childhoods. She recalled everything about the little party, the damp smell of the dorms, the clean bite of the cocktails and the way everyone except for her and Toby had given their résumés in a rush of suburban town names, boarding schools and vacation spots.
She thought suddenly of looking through the prep school yearbook of her roommate on one of those early days. She had been surprised to discover that each graduate had a whole page to himself or herself. The pages were decorated with candid black-and-white photos of wholesome looking teenagers, supplemented by sun-rich snapshots of blond toddlers on eastern beaches, and song lyrics or cryptic messages to friends. Sweeney’s own high school yearbook, hidden beneath her warmest winter sweater in her dorm room closet, was from a public high school in Des Moines, Iowa, where Sweeney’s mother had been appearing in a production Sweeney could not now remember the name of. She had attended the school for only six months before her graduation, a year early, at seventeen. She recognized almost none of the posed, rigid portraits between those pages, the girls heavily made up, their skin airbrushed to a sheen. Her own picture was embarrassing; she stared out, startled and alone, her hair rising in a bright, frizzy aura around her head, her retouched face devoid of her freckles, or of any life at all.
On that second night, one of the girls on Sweeney’s hall had