O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,33

flush. Suddenly, she could hardly look at him. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly. “I’ve got that appointment. With Bennett Dammers. Apparently he’s the go-to man on the Byzantium colony. I’m just going over to ask him some questions. For my research.”

He got out of the car quickly and gathered up her books and notebooks and a small briefcase from the back seat. When he slammed the car door, Sweeney flinched.

“Fine, another time then,” he said smoothly, looking into her eyes before going into the house.

TEN

BENNETT DAMMERS’S HOUSE, Windy Hill, was in the section of the colony that wrapped itself along the curve of the river, stretching north toward town. Sweeney detected a slight difference in the architectural style of Windy Hill and the six or so estates around it. The houses in the “Upper Colony” had been built earlier and they were somehow grander, less eccentric than those on The Island.

Sitting in his study, Sweeney marveled at the small, strange worlds she and her fellow academics came to inhabit. A week ago, she hadn’t known much about the arts colony in Byzantium, Vermont. Now, here she was sitting in front of the undisputed expert on the colony, a man who, more or less, lived back in the world the artists had lived in.

When Bennett Dammers talked about them, it was as though they were old friends. Gilmartin this, Gilmartin that. They might as well have gone to boarding school together.

He even dressed like an Edwardian bohemian, in a floppy bow tie and wrinkled white shirt, a black hat on a stand by the door. In the pictures of picnics and parties in the copy of Dammers’s book in the Wentworths’ library, the artists were mostly wearing the same thing. His fine white hair had thinned down to a cottony tuft over each ear and his eyes were pale robin’s eggs surrounded by spidery red vessels.

She had told herself not to expect too much, that he was quite elderly and his memory may have failed. But except for searching for his glasses on his desktop for five minutes, he seemed as sharp as a man thirty years his junior. She sat back in her chair and looked around the chaotic clutter of the study. Books lined the walls and lay asymmetrically piled on every surface, the great teetering towers balanced precariously. Around his desk were stacks of newspapers a couple of feet high, yellowed with age. A fire burned in the fireplace and in the greenish light from the banker’s lamp on his desk, he regarded her kindly, the rectangular-framed spectacles now on his nose.

“Now, Miss St. George,” Bennett Dammers said finally, his withered hands folded on the desk in front of him, the cardigan sweater he had on over his shirt and tie opened in the heat of the room. “What can I do for you?”

He had the look of a very old human, the shape of his skull showing just beneath his skin and thin hair. When she had leaned in to shake his hand at the door, Sweeney had caught an odor she had come to associate with old age. She got out one of the photographs of Mary’s gravestone and handed it over to him.

“Have you ever seen this?”

He held the photo out in front of him and studied it for a minute. “Oh, yes. Of course,” he said finally. “Someone thought it might be a Morgan, once.”

She pointed to the snapshot. “It’s not Morgan, is it?”

“Goodness, no.” Bennett Dammers continued studying it and then put it down on the desk in front of him. “None of the other Byzantium sculptors either. I’ve always thought it must be one of the students.”

“Students?”

“The old boy ran a kind of studio school. Promising young things from the Pennsylvania Academy or wherever would come up and help him out in the studio for a summer. Mix plaster, build armatures and provide some young blood at cocktail parties. Many of them became colonists themselves and then went on to great things. Have you ever heard of Myra Benton? Frank Bellweather?”

Sweeney said she had. Still, for the next fifteen minutes, he gave her an account of the careers of the two great American sculptors, both trained by Morgan. She had to resist an overwhelming urge to bring him back to Mary’s grave.

“You’re sure you can’t guess at who the artist here might be,” she broke in finally.

He looked at it again. “It reminds me of something,” he said. “But I’m not