O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,7

back at her from the glass, she stuck out her tongue and wiggled it, watching her reflection.

She found her gloves in the hall closet and yelled out to Carl that she was going for a walk. When she went through to the living room, he was sitting in front of the television, where he’d been for the past two hours, watching talk shows and smoking cigarettes and stubbing them out in one of her favorite Depression glass bowls. It seemed like ever since Sherry had brought him home four months ago and announced that they were engaged, Carl had been sitting in her living room, making her mad. Ruth took the bowl from him and carried it to the kitchen sink, bringing him an old saucer to use instead.

“When’s Sherry getting back from work?”

He looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot. “Don’t know. Five or so.”

“I thought you were going to talk to Hank Anson about a job at the garage.” After she said it, she wished she hadn’t. It never did any good.

“I am,” he said, still watching the television. “Hey, what’s going on with the condos? You hear anything new?”

Ruth was beginning to wish she’d never told Carl and Sherry about her plan to sell the house and land to a local developer who wanted to put up vacation condominiums on it. The developer—a guy from Stowe named Peter Richmond—had approached her back in the summer. At first she’d told him she wasn’t interested. The house had been in her family for 150 years. It didn’t seem right somehow for her to sell. But then he’d looked around at her living room, with its old furniture, the chairs and tables that might have looked like something in an antique shop but just looked old up against her washed-out wallpaper and faded paint. “What do you want for your family, Mrs. Kimball?” he’d asked her. “What things would you like to provide for your granddaughter as she gets older? An education? Travel? Security? She seems like a very bright little girl.” He had written the figures on a piece of paper and handed it over, the way they did when you asked for your account balance at the bank. That had been it.

She’d kept it a secret from Sherry for a long time. But Carl had figured it out almost as soon as he’d moved in. She didn’t know how. He’d probably eavesdropped on one of her phone conversations, or snooped in her desk. Now, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the money, asking her about it every chance he got. Ruth felt her face flush hot with anger. Well, the money wasn’t going to him and it wasn’t going to Sherry while she insisted on bringing Carl into their lives. Ruth had her own plans.

“Don’t know for sure. The state has to approve it before I get any money or anything. The Wentworths are still trying to stop it. We’ll see.”

She’d meant it to sound final, but he went on. “You can’t let ‘em push you around like that. Just because they’re rich and they don’t want their view wrecked doesn’t mean they can tell everybody in this town what to do. You tell ’em that. Tell ’em it’s your land and you can do whatever you want with it.”

Ruth took a deep breath. “Look after Charley, will you? She’s reading upstairs. I’m just going for a walk.”

“Sure.” His eyes were fixed on the TV again, where a teenage girl was telling her mother that she’d been sleeping with the mother’s boyfriend and was going to have his baby.

Ruth glanced at Carl, trying to decide if he was stoned or not, and determined that he was all right to watch Charley. “I’m going,” she said, pulling on her gloves.

It was bitterly cold outside, the sun slanting low across the fields of frozen snow. Ruth took a deep breath of the winter air, her lungs aching as she inhaled. In an architectural style repeated over and over again around rural New England, the farmhouse was connected to the old barn by a breezeway that had been falling in for twenty years. The door that had once led from the warm house directly out into the breezeway and the barn had long since been plastered over, so she headed directly to the barn door. She climbed a few unstable stairs, opened the door and slipped inside to the plaintive mewlings of the barn cats. They gathered around her