O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,39
transformation, she was in the process of dying, as though he had caught her in a liminal moment. Sweeney took out her notebook and, with frozen hands, jotted down a few notes.
She was turning to go when she saw that the spikes delineating where the body had been were gone, too. The police must have finished up the investigation or taken all the evidence away at any rate. She wandered over and stared down at where her memory told her the body had been. What had Ruth Kimball known? Sweeney felt a surge of anger at herself. Why hadn’t she stayed on the phone another couple of minutes? She had so many questions she wanted to ask her. She walked back over to Mary’s stone.
“I wish you could speak,” she said aloud, and jumped when a voice said, “That’s the thing about the dead, they can’t speak,” and she looked up to find Ian Ball watching her from outside the cemetery fence.
“I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I came through the woods,” he said, gesturing to the line of trees not far from the cemetery gate that stretched back toward the river. “There’s a path that the family takes to get down to the river. It’s longer, but it’s nicely packed down for skiing.”
“Oh.” She tucked the book back into her parka and her notebook back into a pocket. “I got back earlier than I expected, so I thought I’d come down and just . . . look around.”
He asked, “So what would you like Mary Denholm to say?”
“To tell me who made her gravestone, first of all,” Sweeney said.
“Because it’s beautiful?”
“What? Oh.” She was confused, then recalled their conversation from the morning. “Yes. And because I’m curious. It’s what I do, research things, find out about them, find out what their stories are.”
“Well, perhaps it’s nothing very interesting,” he said. “Maybe it was just some local carver who was having a good day.”
“That’s a risk, I guess.” She looked up at the sky, annoyed with him. “It’s getting dark. I think I’ll head back.”
“I’ll go with you. Would you like to head back up through the woods? See some different sights?”
She couldn’t think of a way to say no, so she nodded. She got back into her skis and they took off through a little gap in the trees and along a well-worn path lined with an old stone wall. It looked as though it had once been a road since it was wide and quite smooth, but it was so much darker in the woods that she found she had to go carefully so she didn’t stray into the trees. At one point the path branched off in two directions and Ian explained that one of them led to Herrick Gilmartin’s studio and a swimming spot down by the river. They skied silently, except for the steady huffing of their breath as the path climbed, and by the time they reached the house it was nearly dark.
The silhouette of the house looked sinister in the wintry dusk and when she looked up at the sky, she thought she could pick out a moonstone white cloud, drifting overhead, shaped like a skull and crossbones.
SWEENEY WENT TO her room to read directly after dinner and was about to go to bed when she decided to go down to the second floor and ask Toby about Tennyson. She hadn’t seen him during the day and she wanted to test her response to his presence after last night.
She knocked on his door. There wasn’t any answer, just a muffled thump from inside, so she called out, “Hey Toby, I want to ask you a question about Tennyson,” and went into the room.
It was dark inside and when she heard Toby’s voice say “Hang on” and a muffled female squeal, she realized what she had done and stepped back out into the hallway, shutting the door. She was about to turn and go when she saw a narrow band of light appear above the threshold. “It’s okay, Sweeney, come in,” Toby called, a bit desperately, she thought.
“Oh!” She stepped into the room to find Toby and Rosemary Burgess sitting at opposite sides of the bed, Toby in a bathrobe and Rosemary in jeans and one of his T-shirts. “I didn’t know you were here, Rosemary. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s fine, that’s just fine. Don’t think twice about it.” Rosemary blushed.
“I’ll just uh . . . leave now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Sweeney said, turning toward