O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,38

though he was Irish. Yeah, he was the first person.”

“I’ve never been in love with anyone at all,” Gwinny said. “You should feel lucky about that at least, that you were in love. You shouldn’t be sad.”

Sweeney smiled. “I think I’m just a little sad in general. My father isn’t alive anymore and I’ve lost touch with my mother. I guess being around a family at Christmastime is a little weird is all.”

One of the dogs came romping in from the kitchen and Gwinny grabbed it by the collar and made it sit. Then, in a perfectly serious tone of voice, she said, “Don’t think our family’s really great or anything. My parents are always fighting with each other. They had a big fight this afternoon, because Chief Cooper—he’s a policeman—called to say that we all have to go down and tell him what we were doing the day Ruth Kimball died. They were screaming at each other about it. And they’re always yelling at Trip and Gally. Especially Gally. Sometimes I can’t wait to go away to school. I mean, you shouldn’t feel sad about us. We’re pretty pathetic, if you want to know the truth.”

Sweeney smiled again. “Thank you,” she said. “Why do you think Chief Cooper wants to know what everyone was doing?”

Gwinny held up the book she’d been reading, a battered old copy of H.R.F. Keating’s The Perfect Murder. “You know how it is in books,” she said. “When the police ask about alibis, it means they think someone is a murderer.”

SINCE THERE WAS another hour or so of light, Sweeney decided to go back down to the graveyard to have another look at Mary’s stone. Now that she had seen the strange Gilmartin portrait, she wanted to compare the two. She had an idea that there was something similar in them and she wanted to test the idea. So she tucked the book that Bennett Dammers had lent her into her parka and found a pair of cross-country ski boots in her size in the closet in the hall. Britta had found them for her, looking slightly shocked when Sweeney told her her shoe size. “Oh,” she’d said. “You’ll have to wear a pair of Patch’s.”

The skis were out in a barn next to the house and she found the pair that had been assigned to her for her stay. The bindings were much fancier than the ones she had used the last time she’d skied and it took her a couple of minutes to get her boots clipped in and to find a pair of poles that weren’t too short.

It was a nicer day than the one before, and even though the air had cooled as the sun set, the landscape, washed in the pinky, clear light of dusk was somehow cheerier today, less grim. It had been years since she had been on cross-country skis, but she remembered the rhythmic motion of it, right, then left, then right and left again. She skied down over the slope behind the house and reached the cemetery in a little over ten minutes.

The orange tape that had been around the cemetery fence the day before had been removed and she stepped out of her skis and walked in to find much the same scene. The only difference was the lovely light that slanted down across all the stones. It seemed to Sweeney to illuminate the stones from within, to make them glow, and to reveal new facets of their surfaces. It was calming, to be there alone in the strange light, and she looked around her for a moment before walking over to Mary’s stone, the Gilmartin book in hand.

She was struck again by how similar the two works of art were. Both showed the same young woman, wearing the same expression of staring emptiness.

There were differences, though, that she could only see here in front of the monument. Gilmartin’s portrait, with its drab, watery tones and fine, expert lines, showed a young woman devoid of life, yet beautiful. The sculpture on the other hand, showed a young woman who had been full of life, but was now lifeless. Or not lifeless exactly, Sweeney corrected herself, but somehow absent, or in another world.

She thought again of Proserpine. In the sculpture, she realized, Death was ferrying the young woman, Mary, to the underworld. Or heaven or hell or whatever it was that this artist had believed in. But she wasn’t yet dead, rather she was undergoing a