a skeleton and hanging on a chain around her neck. It was a museum reproduction of an Elizabethan pendant and a recent purchase.
“You’re weird.”
“Thanks a lot. To what do I owe the honor?” She pointed to a chair and they sat down.
“What are you doing for Christmas again? Something fun like spending it completely alone with a bottle of scotch and some thirty-two-hour BBC costume drama?”
“Shut up.” She kicked his chair. “I like having Christmas by myself. And besides, I’m on an old Italian movie kick right now.” She said it lightly, but his words had bitten a little.
“Well, if you can drag yourself away from Marcello Mastroianni long enough to come to Vermont with me, I’ve got a proposition for you.”
She raised her eyebrows. “What kind of proposition?”
“A gravestone. To be precise, the gravestone in the photographs that were here when you came into the room.” Leave it to Toby, with his flair for the dramatic, to leave the unlabeled photos, knowing they would spark her interest.
“You? I couldn’t figure out where they came from.” She retrieved the prints from her bookbag and spread them out on the table.
“So what do you think?”
“I’m intrigued.” She found the close-up of the tablet and read the bizarre epitaph in its entirety this time.
Death resides in my garden, with his hands wrapped ‘round my throat
He beckons me to follow and I step lightly in his boat.
All around us summer withers, blossoms drop and rot,
And Death bids me to follow, his arrow in my heart.
We sail away on his ocean, and the garden falls away
where life and death are neighbors, and night never turns to day.
A wind comes up on the water, Death’s sails are full and proud
My love I will go with thee, dressed in a funeral shroud.
Now her tomb lies quiet, the shroud is turned to stone
And where Death had been standing, is only the grave of her bones.
“Hmmm.”
“I know, the poem’s not very good,” Toby said. “But I think you’ll be interested anyway.”
“All right. Tell me more.”
“You knew I went to Vermont for Thanksgiving, right? To stay with Patch and Britta?”
Sweeney nodded. Patch and Britta Wentworth were Toby’s aunt and uncle on what Sweeney liked to call the “grand branch” of his family. They lived with their children in the former arts colony in Byzantium, Vermont, in a house called Birch Lane that had been built by Toby’s great-grandfather. The great-grandfather was Herrick Gilmartin, a famous landscape and portrait painter from the 1880s on. Gilmartin, the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan and a host of other well-known American artists had summered or lived off-and-on in the colony at Byzantium for most of their working lives. Sweeney didn’t know much about the colony, but she’d once heard a colleague say that for a time, Byzantium and a handful of other New England artists’ communities had contained the greatest concentration of artistic talent in the United States.
“Well, while I was up there, I was looking around in the little cemetery near Patch and Britta’s and remembered that there’s always been some question about that stone. It’s pretty strange for the time period, right?”
Sweeney nodded. “Really strange. The girl would be a very typical Victorian monument, if she were standing and draped over a grave or something, but the figure of Death is incredibly weird, very un-Victorian actually. And it’s clearly by a real artist, a sculptor. Any idea who it was?”
“I don’t think anybody knows. The assumption is that it was by someone who was a member of the colony or someone who visited, but it isn’t signed.”
“Who was the girl? Mary Denholm.”
“Just a local girl. The family lived down below my great-grandparents’ house and one of the Denholm descendants still lives in the house. Ruth Kimball. I’ve known her all my life.”
Sweeney studied the photographs while he talked.
“So what’s the proposition?”
“Come up to Vermont with me for Christmas. I already asked Patch and Britta and they said they’d love to have you. You can look into this stone a little, maybe get a chapter for your book about an anomalous, heretofore-unidentified masterpiece, have some fun for a change. Christmas is great up there, lots of skiing and wassailing. Whatever wassailing is. And they have this giant party every year, a couple of days before the twenty-fifth. You’ll love it.”
There was a note of desperation in his voice that made her ask, a little slyly, “Why do you want to go back up to Vermont again so soon after Thanksgiving? You could go