O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,36

her, but Sweeney could see he wanted her to go.

“You’ve been so helpful,” she said, shutting the book. “But I won’t take any more of your time. Thank you. And thank you for the book.”

“I’ll keep the gravestone in mind,” he said. “I want to look through my files again and see if anything rings a bell.”

“Of course. I’d appreciate that. If anything comes up, try me at the Wentworths’.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m a nosy old coot,” he said, studying her. “But I’m wondering how a lovely girl like you came to be interested in all this doom and gloom. You don’t think I’m a chauvinist, do you?”

Sweeney laughed. “No,” she said, honestly. “I remember seeing an English woodcut when I was about ten, of Death looking over the shoulder of a woman lying in a bed, surrounded by weeping relatives. I was fascinated by the idea that Death was an actual person, that people needed to think of all death as a kind of murder, that they made art in order to understand it, to come to terms with human mortality.”

“Do you understand it, Miss St. George? Have you come to terms with it?”

He was thinking about how young she was and wondering how much of death she’d seen. Though she hated being condescended to, she wanted even less to embarrass him. What could she say? Actually my father killed himself when I was thirteen and my fiancé died in a violent accident a year ago.

“No,” she said.

“Neither have I. Even at my advanced age.” He looked sad all of a sudden. “I beg your pardon. Good luck with your mystery.”

ELEVEN

BYZANTIUM’S CHIEF OF POLICE, Jonas Cooper, sat in the truck watching the mouth of The Island bridge and holding his gloved hands over the heater vents, trying to get warm. He’d been there for over an hour, supposedly doing speed checks on Route 20, but actually waiting to see who was driving on and off The Island today. In his experience, there was a lot to be learned from watching what people did in the days after a suspicious death. He had once caught a murderer that way, when he was still in Boston working homicide. The guy had sat stony-faced through an interview about his wife’s death and then hopped in his truck and driven off to his girlfriend’s house, where Cooper, having followed at a discreet distance, watched him burn a pair of pants in the driveway.

But so far, the traffic over the bridge had been pretty thin. A couple of the state crime guys had come out and waved cheerily at him, causing Cooper, who was trying to be inconspicuous, to curse under his breath. Other than that, nothing. He was annoyed, a mood, he realized, left over from this morning, when one of the state investigators had asked him where he was from when he’d suggested they look at the pattern of burn marks the pistol had made against the victim’s skin. “We know our job,” he’d replied simply when Cooper told him he was from Boston, but lived in Byzantium now.

He had come up to take the job three years ago, but Cooper still felt like a city slicker at least once a day. He remembered the former chief, a tall, blond, ex-basketball player from somewhere in the Midwest telling him, “It’s funny about these people up here. You’re either from here or you aren’t. It really matters to them. They don’t like to tell you things if you’re not a native.”

When Cooper had asked about the townspeople, the departing chief had said, “There seem to be three types. The ones whose families have lived here for generations, the colony people who have been here for a while but are in a slightly different category, and then the flatlanders—newcomers who have moved up from Boston or New York. You’ll find you don’t really fit in anywhere.” Cooper had discovered the basketball player was right.

But there was something about the town and about Vermont that was starting to grow on him. Though he was constantly reminded of his outsider status, Cooper felt more and more that if it didn’t accept him, the town had come to respect him. That was good enough, for now.

Just as he was starting to wonder whether he should head back to the station to see what was going on, a Volkswagen Rabbit, going just a little too fast, came down the road and turned onto the bridge. When