morning.”
“Charley Kimball? Did she say what it was?”
“No. Oh, Patch. Don’t throw those away. We can wash those . . ..”
Sweeney, feeling she had been dismissed, got dressed to go. On her way out, she tucked the little bag into the pocket of her parka.
THE WICKEDLY COLD AIR was good for her head, and the headache passed after the first twenty minutes or so of hard walking. Despite the thin layer of new snow that had fallen during the night, she was able to follow the deep tracks left by the runners of the sleigh, and she walked along in them, on the path they had taken last night.
When she was a couple hundred yards from the house, Sweeney took the small bag out of her pocket and retrieved from it a blue, faux leather bankbook, a note paperclipped to the front. The note read, in extremely neat printing, “I thought about it and I thought I should give you this. Love, Charley.” Sweeney folded the note into her pocket, then stopped and held the little book in her hands, turning it over.
She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. The book had Ruth Kimball’s name on the inside cover and listed a balance of $12,762. On a piece of masking tape stuck on the back someone had written, in red pen, “Charley’s College Account.”
The first page was faintly printed with a record of deposits that started in July and went on quite regularly from there. Each one was $1,500. When she flipped through the little book, she found, stuck in the back, a small scrap of paper with some dates jotted on it. They were different from the dates in the book, and didn’t seem to have any significance that Sweeney could identify.
Why had Charley given it to her? It was sweet that her grandmother had established a college account for her, but what could it possibly have to do with Mary Denholm? She slipped the book back into her coat, disappointed, and when she felt the quick twinge in her shoulder, her mind was suddenly back on Maple Hill.
She went over the list of everyone who had been there. Patch, Willow, Toby, Trip, Rosemary, Gally. And Ian, of course. Ian had been there, too.
How had he gotten there so quickly? How had he known where to go? It only made sense if he had pushed her. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became.
He had lied about when he arrived. And he had followed Sweeney to Boston. Kissing her had been a ploy to distract her from the sheer silliness of his stupid excuses.
But why? That was what she kept coming back to. The police were saying that Carl Thompson had killed Ruth Kimball and until she found out differently, Sweeney was going to accept that. So was it possible that Ruth Kimball’s murder had absolutely nothing to do with Mary Denholm’s? Was it possible that Ian had come to make sure that the truth about the older mystery didn’t get out?
Anything was possible, Sweeney told herself sardonically. But not everything was true. She decided she’d head over to Gilmartin’s studio.
She hadn’t seen it yet and it might be inspiring to see the place where he’d carried on his liaisons, the place where Mary’s body had been found.
She took the path through the woods, taking the fork that Ian had pointed out to her that first day in Byzantium. As she came out on a little ridge, she could see the river below her. The morning sun and warmer air had loosed the ice floes a bit and the water ran swiftly by, dark and bottomless. She stood for a moment, looking down at it and gasped when she saw a dark form floating by, the face stretched into a grimace, the flowing hair trailing in the water, the hands folded demurely over the lap.
But it was just a log, a frozen chunk of ice at one end, a plastic bag dragging like hair, icy hands twisted from a few leftover branches at the other. The log bobbed a bit on the water, innocuous now, and Sweeney admonished herself for being so skittish.
The path sloped down to the river and after a few minutes she saw, up ahead in the trees, the small brown form of Herrick Gilmartin’s studio. It was like a little log cabin, built up on stilts. Underneath was piled firewood, and off to one side was