O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,9

pristine and untouched and as she swung open the gate, she felt a pang of regret that her bootprints would mar the perfect whiteness. She strode purposefully across the yard to Mary’s stone, standing in front of it and staring at the strange sculpture, the coiling hair and perfect face, the smooth marble, old secrets buried in its pale depths.

She came here whenever she was unsettled about something and for reasons she’d never quite figured out, the gravestone calmed her. Strange, that professor getting wind of it. Ruth thought of her grandmother, a small, old person in her primitive wig and characteristic shawl. “Those artists killed Mary,” she’d told Ruth more than once. “They were a bad lot, free loving. I was just a girl, but I always knew there was something wrong with it. The worst of it is that her parents knew and they didn’t say anything.”

Well, maybe now it would all come out into the open.

Ruth stood in front of Mary’s stone for a few more moments before going over to see Choke. She remembered picking out his stone, on a hot summer afternoon. Sherry had been with her. “He wouldn’t want you to spend too much, Ma,” she’d said. She was right and so they’d gone for the simplest one, yet Ruth felt guilty about it sometimes.

“Hello,” called out a voice, breaking the silence as violently as the gunshots. Ruth started and turned to see a winter-clothed figure running through the snow toward her. She waved tentatively, waiting. The silence seemed overpowering suddenly.

“Hi,” she called back. “Everything okay?” The figure came closer and Ruth felt her stomach flip-flop like a dying fish gasping for air.

This was why she’d wanted the gun, she realized suddenly. This was who she’d been afraid of. The figure came into the cemetery and Ruth stepped back against the fence, trying to appear relaxed.

“What is it?” she asked. But the figure just stood there, looking terrified, hands in pockets. Ruth thought suddenly of Dwight, of the way he’d looked when he’d done something naughty. She’d always known when he’d been up to mischief, just as her father had always known about her. You couldn’t hide what was in your heart on your face.

And then Ruth Kimball looked down and saw her father’s Colt pistol, just as she’d remembered it, and she thought of him, of his hands and the way he laughed, the way he’d always told her she was pretty, even though they both knew she wasn’t. She heard a shot. This time it wasn’t from the woods, but right in front of her. In the instant before she fell to the snow, she thought of her father’s eyes, staring blankly at the ceiling at the funeral home. She had known then that he wasn’t anywhere, that he was just dead, and she knew that there wasn’t anything else, no light, no grace, no heaven. There was just life. And then there was nothing.

THREE

DECEMBER 10

IT SNOWED IN CAMBRIDGE the next day, a heavy, wet, slippery snow that made the old brick structures around the Yard—which Sweeney had liked as gingerbread castles—now resemble over-decorated wedding cakes, smothered in thick, white frosting.

Even her short commute home that day was perilous and slow, and it was nearly six by the time she got to Somerville and found a parking spot. She took a hot-as-she-could-stand-it shower and wrapped herself in her favorite silk kimono, leaving her hair turbaned in a towel to dry. While friends and lovers found her mane of bright orange curls bewitching and somehow just right for her personality, Sweeney was always fighting against its tendency to become unmanageably frizzy when left to its own devices. She rummaged through the mail, adding a new stack of unopened bills to the pile on her kitchen counter, promised herself she’d open them soon, and poured herself a scotch, straight up. She hadn’t thought as far ahead as dinner. Sweeney, who loved to cook, disapproved of fast food and could usually put together something respectable from the staples she kept in her cupboards. But it had been a busy end of the semester and her cupboards were bare except for a few cans of soup. She opened an uninspiring lentil concoction and dumped it into a saucepan and turned the knob beneath the gas burner. Nothing happened—the pilot light was out—so she struck a match and held it to the burner pan.

The gas had built up and it exploded with a whoosh. Sweeney jumped, her