the party.”
“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” Sweeney said nervously. “It’s just that if I don’t have this meeting, I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it again. And there are a couple of errands I need to do while I’m down there. I suddenly realized I don’t have anything to wear to the party.” She gulped her coffee and tried to smile. Everyone else was still in their pajamas around the kitchen table, but thinking it would make it harder for them to argue with her announcement that she was going home for a day, she’d come down dressed and ready to go.
“If it’s just the dress, you’d be welcome to borrow something,” Britta said looking confused.
“Oh no, it’s really this meeting. I know I’ll be able to enjoy Christmas more if I can get it out of the way.”
“Who is it you’re meeting with?” Toby asked slyly. He knew her too well not to be suspicious.
“Oh, um, John Philips.” John Philips taught Modern Art and though she couldn’t think of a single good reason she’d have to meet with him seven days before Christmas, his was the first name that came to mind.
Toby looked skeptical.
“Well as long as you promise you’ll be back for the party,” Patch said. “You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Byzantium Christmas party.”
“I promise.” She took her coffee cup to the sink and rinsed it out. “See you all tomorrow.”
Ian nodded at her as she went out the door and she nodded back, embarrassed.
The day was a good one for driving, the sun bright and clean on the white snow and as she headed south, past rest stops and gas stations and fast food restaurants, Vermont and the events of the past few days began to recede. The colony seemed suddenly a distant, rich dream from another time, hardly relevant.
Murder! Detection! It sounded silly now that she was speeding along, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on the tape player doing Can’t We Be Friends. Ruth Kimball had killed herself. In the bright light of day, the act seemed commonplace, like the ones you read about on the inside pages of the newspaper.
But yet . . . But yet, she felt she had to follow the string that had been offered to her when the librarian at the Historical Society had told her Myra Benton’s journal was in Boston. Maybe it was the academic researcher inside her that was driving her on, but she felt compelled to follow the trail and it was just possible that there was something in the journal that might lead her to the truth. Something about Herrick Gilmartin, something about the unnamed J.L.B. She had called Bennett Dammers the night before, while everyone was getting ready for dinner and asked him if he had ever heard of a student with those initials.
“No, I don’t think so,” he had said in his quavering voice. “He’s not in my book, you said? No. If you knew the name . . .”
But, of course, that was the whole problem. She didn’t know the name.
She reached Medford by eleven and, after getting on 28, made it through Somerville and into Cambridge in good time since there wasn’t much traffic.
The yard and the rest of the campus were peaceful with most of the students gone and Sweeney parked just off Quincy Street and found Marlise, her favorite Fine Arts Library librarian, sitting at the front desk looking bored.
“Hi, Marlise,” she whispered. “How are you?” Marlise had dred-locks and a tiny pink gemstone in the side of her nose.
“Hey, Sweeney, I thought you were gone for Christmas.”
“Yeah, I am. Sort of. It’s a long story. Anyway, I’m trying to get hold of a collection of family papers donated to the library by Piers Benton. It would have been in 1960, somewhere around there. His mother was the sculptor Myra Benton. It’s mostly her stuff.”
“Hang on.” Marlise tapped at the keys of her computer, and peered at the screen. “Oh yeah. Here it is—456778. Why don’t you go sit down and I’ll bring it over to you. It’s a big box.”
Sweeney sat down in her regular spot, a table tucked into an alcove under a big skylight, and spread out her notebook and a few new pens, ready for the ritual of research.
“Okay, this is it,” Marlise said a few minutes later, leaving a large box on the table. “You’ve got . . .” She checked her watch. “An hour-and-a-half. Vacation hours.”
“Oh, that’s right.