O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,99
her. “What do you mean?”
“I think I know who you are,” she said again. “I think you’re related to a French sculptor named Jean Luc Baladin.”
He looked so surprised that at first she thought she’d gotten it wrong. But then he smiled a small, sad grin and looked into her eyes. “Yes,” he said simply. “Jean Luc Baladin was my great-grandfather.”
Sweeney stepped back. “But, was there something between him and Mary Denholm? Did you know that . . .” She wasn’t sure now what to ask him. “Did you . . . Did you come here to kill Ruth Kimball?”
“Kill Ruth Kimball?” He looked genuinely shocked. “Why would I . . . Sweeney, Ruth Kimball was my cousin.”
He smiled when he saw her face. “You see, Mary Denholm was my great-grandmother.”
SWEENEY PACED UP and down the room while Ian watched her in the low light, a small smile on his lips. She tried to put it all into order—the stone, and Ruth Kimball’s death, and then Sabina’s—but it refused to fall into place.
She sat down next to him on the couch. “Help me out here. Obviously she had Jean Luc Baladin’s baby before she died. Or wait, did she die? Or did they . . .?”
He said, “No, she didn’t die. She lived to the ripe old age of seventy-eight in England. I think they decided to run away to Europe when she found out she was pregnant and they staged the death so it didn’t cause a scandal. I’m still putting it together myself. But this will explain a lot. This is what brought me here.” He took a manila envelope out of his bathrobe pocket and handed it over. Sweeney opened it and found a stack of handwritten diary pages inside. They had been torn out of a bound book and she recognized the handwriting as Myra Benton’s.
“My father died last year and when I was going through his things I found this. It had been sent to his father—Jean Luc’s son—years before by Myra Benton’s son and I don’t know if he knew what it was or what it meant.
“The way I always heard the story was that Jean Luc swept Mary off her feet during the summer he was invited to Byzantium by Morgan and brought her back to England. That’s where they anglicized the name. For the rest of their lives, they lived between Paris and Sussex.
“There was always this sense of something unexplained when my father talked about his parents and his grandparents. I always felt like there was something there that wasn’t whole, if you know what I mean. Before I found the diary pages, all I knew was that Mary was from New England. But no one ever talked about America, about her family. I’d always been curious. Then when I found these, I figured out part of it. Obviously there were still a lot of unanswered questions. I had been friends with Patch and Britta and after I did a little research into who Myra Benton was, it seemed like such a coincidence that they would be from Byzantium. I arranged an invitation and . . .” He shrugged. That’s why I came early, so I could find out more about the family. I panicked when you said you were looking into it, too.”
Sweeney took out the pages. “I’ve read everything leading up to this,” she said. “You can’t imagine how frustrated I was when I discovered these pages were missing. And all the time you had them . . ..”She began to read aloud.
August 31, 1890
If I thought that the events of yesterday were strange, then I was mistaken, for today they grew even stranger. I awoke early, intent on going down to the studio to work for a few hours before breakfast, but when I got there, M. was already there and refused to let me in.
I know not whether it was the events of the past days or the snub I had received at the hands of J.L.B., but I found myself seized with a violent storm of anger and I pushed through the door, telling him that he had hired me to do a job and had no right to stop me from doing it. I scolded him for treating me so poorly and said that if he persisted in his behavior, I would assume that he had something to hide and I would accuse him publicly of murdering Miss Denholm. I blush to think of it