of things very suddenly.
“It’s good, isn’t it?”
She turned around suddenly, the painting still held out in front of her, and found Gally watching her from the doorway.
“Gally, I . . . the door was open and I . . . I’m so sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” he said. “You’re not the one who’s doing something wrong.”
He reached into his pocket and came toward her. Sweeney put the painting down and held her breath.
“I found these in the hallway,” he said. “This morning.”
She reached out to take her earrings, cold and sharp on her palm. As he turned to go, she stammered out “Your Dad said I could look at his work sometime. I . . .”
Gally stopped and turned to look at her. “You don’t understand anything,” he said. And he left her standing there holding the painting, the plastic wrapping around her feet on the floor.
TWENTY-NINE
DECEMBER 23
WHILE THE HOUSEHOLD huddled at breakfast, grief stricken and afraid—Britta and Patch nervous and grim, Gwinny and Trip bickering and Sweeney feeling deserted by Toby who was still at Rosemary and Electra’s—the day was exuberantly beautiful. The sky was the blue of cornflowers or far-away oceans, a summery unseasonable blue. And the sun shone brilliantly down, sparkling in the trees, which seemed to have been decorated by hand with garlands of ice and snow.
Trying to cheer them up, Patch and Ian made pancakes and sausage, but no one was very hungry and as soon as she could, Sweeney said that she needed to pick up some things at the drugstore and headed for town.
She had not been able to get the image of Sabina’s bare library wall out of her head as she’d tried to sleep the night before. And her conversation with Cooper only intensified her curiosity. He had seemed very interested in the fact that the relief was gone and she knew that he was wondering if whoever had killed Sabina had taken the relief, if it was related to Ruth Kimball’s death and the other burglaries in the colony after all.
She had not thought of the burglaries as being very important—other than as a motive for Carl to kill Ruth Kimball—because there had not actually been one at the Kimballs’ house, but the fact that Sabina’s house had been burgled had to have significance.
“We close at noon, you know,” the librarian told her as she came in the front door of the library. If she recognized Sweeney from town gossip, she didn’t let on.
“That’s fine,” Sweeney said. “I’ve just got a couple of things to do.”
“Okay. Can I help you with anything?”
“You showed me where the older papers were a few days ago. Do you have more recent editions? I was interested in looking at the last year.”
“Go downstairs and take a left into the first room you see. They should be stacked in chronological order, but sometimes people mess them up. I’m afraid they aren’t indexed.”
Sweeney thanked her and went down to the dank basement.
The newspapers were stacked in a case that ran the length of the wall and had compartments into which the issues for each month were kept going back about fifteen years. She took out the papers for July through December of the current year, and sat down at an unstable metal table in the middle of the room.
There was nothing in the first paper, except for strange little stories about small town life that she found delightful even if she didn’t really have time to read them all. “Mega Squash Wins First Prize!” proclaimed one headline. “Lucky Pooch Escapes From House Fire,” was another, with a dramatically rendered tale of an Airedale that had hidden himself under the kitchen sink as his family’s home burned and then burst out as firemen were cleaning up the mess.
The next paper, dated July third, however, had an item on the second page about the ongoing investigation into a burglary a few days earlier at the home of George Farnsworth in Byzantium. “Carl Thompson of Byzantium was questioned by the police, according to confidential sources. Stolen from the house were an assortment of books, electronic equipment and artwork. According to police, an original sculpture by Byzantium colonist Bryn Davies Morgan was also among the items taken.”
She read aloud. “Thompson has prior convictions for burglary, possession of an illegal substance and possession with intent to distribute. Reached at his home Tuesday, he denied any involvement with the burglary. There was another blurry picture, this one of Carl standing in front