Mansions Of The Dead (11 page)

There were eight adults in the room. The small middle-aged woman with short blond hair sitting on the opposite side of the desk had to be Kitty Putnam, and from the newspaper photos, she knew that the tall young woman—whose face she could not see—wearing a not particularly stylish dark-colored jacket and skirt that almost matched her short hair would be Camille Putnam.

The other woman in the room was far more glamorous than either her mother-in-law or sister-in-law. Melissa Putnam struck Sweeney as being very tall, though she was sitting in a chair to the side of the desk. She had a long, equine nose, high cheekbones, and impossibly blond hair. Her long legs were crossed and Sweeney could see that she was wearing high-heeled sandals with her dark trousers. Her toes were a perfectly pedicured scarlet and Sweeney found herself wondering if she’d had them done before Brad’s death or after.

She could only guess about the remaining two men in the room, but she thought that the older and heavier of the two must be Drew Putnam. She could see three-quarters of his beefy, bland face, the rather thickly formed neck that rose out of a white dress shirt, the collar girded by a blue-and-red rep tie. His face was pink and Sweeney couldn’t help but think of a boar. The younger man in the room was sitting with his back to Sweeney, and she saw only a pair of broad shoulders under a black leather jacket, long legs crossed, a head of longish, slightly wavy dark hair. Jack.

“Well, we’d appreciate it if you could put a list together,” Quinn said. “Anyone you can think of. It may not seem important to you, but put it down anyway. Any girlfriends, even someone he may have dated very briefly, may have . . . spent time with.” Quinn cleared his throat.

“I don’t know what your relationship with your family is like, Detective Quinn,” said the man Sweeney guessed was Jack Putnam. “But I doubt you told them about everyone you’ve ever dated or”—he paused and gave the words the sexual innuendo that Quinn had intended but not expressed—”
spent time with
.”

“Well,” Quinn said, embarrassed. “Anything you can think of.” He cleared his throat again and said, “Now I’m going to bring in Ms. St. George. She was, as you know, your son’s—Brad’s—art history professor. We . . . the police, I mean, have asked her to help us track down where the jewelry that was found at the crime scene might have come from and whether it might tell us who killed him. She can answer any questions you might have about it, but we mostly just want to know whether Brad owned it before his death and where it might have come from.”

He came over to the door, opened it all the way, and stuck his head out. Sweeney was looking up at the sculpture again, as though she hadn’t heard a word.

“Hi, thanks for coming,” he said. “You can come on in.”

He held the door for her and she stepped into the room just as the three Putnam men stood up politely to greet her. Quinn introduced her to his partner, Detective Marino, a middle-aged guy who reminded Sweeney of the football coach at a high school she’d gone to in Michigan. When he sat down, his jacket gaped open and she caught the title of the paperback he had tucked into his waistband,
The Rancher’s Daughter
. Sweeney had been right about Jack Putnam and as she shook his hand, she felt a little lurch; her stomach knew that he was good-looking before her brain did.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Andrew Putnam said kindly. “Brad loved your classes and he thought a lot of you. And thank you for the very kind things you said in the paper.”

Jack caught her eye and smiled, making her flush. He had darker hair than Brad and his facial features were similarly angular, only on him they had been arranged more precisely, more perfectly. But the eyes were the same.

Sweeney awkwardly murmured her sympathy and then Quinn told everyone to sit down before taking out a large photograph of the four pieces of jewelry laid out on a white background.

He nodded at Sweeney and she leaned forward to take the photograph from him.

“The first question, I suppose, is have you ever seen these pieces of jewelry before?” Sweeney asked them nervously, feeling that she was performing. “Are they something that Brad had ever shown you or told you about?”

She walked slowly around the room, showing the picture to each of them.

“What are they?” asked Melissa when Sweeney showed it to her. “It’s so strange.” She looked almost childishly curious and Sweeney was struck by her childlike beauty, her large blue eyes and straight, pale hair.

Jack looked up at Sweeney and she felt herself looking back into those familiar chameleon-blue eyes, fringed with thick lashes. “It’s mourning jewelry, isn’t it?” he asked. She nodded. “It looks kind of familiar. Is it . . . Mom?” He motioned for Kitty to come over and she leaned over the photograph.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What? Have you seen any of these pieces before?” Sweeney tried to affect a note of total surprise.

“Yes, of course,” Kitty Putnam said. “They belonged to Andrew’s mother.”

Andrew Putnam came over and looked down at the photograph too. “Oh yes,” he said. “I haven’t seen these in ages. But I think you’re right. I think they were my mother’s.”

“That’s right. You used to have them in your jewelry box, Mom,” Camille said. “Drew and Jack would try to scare me with the necklace, tell me it was the hair of dead people.”

“It
is
the hair of dead people,” Jack pointed out, glancing at Sweeney.

“Had you given the jewelry to Brad?” Sweeney asked Kitty.

“No . . . at least I don’t think so. They must have been in some boxes of stuff up in the attic at the Newport house. Brad was down for the weekend a month or so ago and he asked if he could look around up there. He must have taken them.”

“But he didn’t tell you he’d taken it?” Quinn asked her. “Would that have been strange? For him to just take something that belonged to you and not say anything?”

Kitty looked up at him, impatient. “It wasn’t like that. It was just, you know, old stuff up in the attic. He said he was working on a project for school or something and could he look around up there and see what he could find. I said that of course he was welcome to anything he found up there. It was mostly things belonging to Andrew’s family, anyway.”

“What is it?” Melissa asked again. “Is it really made from hair?”

“Yes,” Sweeney said. “It was very common, particularly in Victorian times, to have jewelry made from the hair of the deceased. It was a way of keeping the person with you always, even after death.”

Melissa’s eyes grew wide.

Sweeney looked around at the rest of the family. “Now that you know where it came from, does it ring any bells? Do you ever remember Brad talking about the jewelry?”

“I don’t think so,” Drew said. He looked around at his siblings and they all shook their heads.

“He was interested in that kind of stuff, though,” Camille said quietly. “He liked graveyards.”

“He did,” Kitty said. “He liked graveyards. When he was little he liked to sit in them. He wasn’t scared at all.” She almost started crying again, and when she looked up at Andrew, Sweeney saw that his eyes brimmed too.

Her eye was caught by a framed family photo on Andrew’s desk and partly because she was interested and partly because she wanted to give him something to do, she said, “What a great picture.”

“Thanks. That was Jack’s opening at the Davis Gallery a couple of months ago.”

Quinn cleared his throat. “Okay, we’ll leave you folks for now. Thank you for your help.” He put the photograph away.

Sweeney looked up quickly at him. “But there are a lot more—”

“I’ll walk you out,” he said firmly. Jack looked up at Sweeney and raised his eyebrows.

Camille said quickly, “It was nice to finally meet you. Brad loved your class, you know.”

Sweeney, confused, looked around at them. “It was nice to meet you too,” she said. “And again, I’m so sorry.”

Out in the hallway, Quinn said, “Thanks so much. You were a big help. And we found out where it came from anyway. So we don’t have to go looking for a third party.” His accent seemed stronger to Sweeney—he said “thuud” for “third.” “That’s great—”

“But there are a lot more questions I’d like to ask them,” Sweeney cut in. “We need to know what he was interested in about the jewelry, how long he’d had it.” Why he’d been asking Bob Philips at the Blue Carbuncle about it, she almost said, and then caught herself.

“Yes, we’ll take care of that,” he said distractedly. He looked very tired, his blue eyes bloodshot and shadowed.

“But you can’t just let it go! You said you wanted to know about the jewelry. There are so many more questions.”

“Ms. St. George, you helped us determine that the jewelry wasn’t brought into the apartment from the outside, that it was in fact in Mr. Putnam’s possession before he was killed. That’s what we were trying to figure out. So again, thank you.” He leaned over slightly, trying to emphasize his height advantage. But he only had an inch on her and she leaned forward too, forcing him to step back.

“But . . . I think he was suspicious about it for some reason. There are a number of really interesting possibilities for why he might have been.”

“Ms. St. George, we can take it from here. I’ve got to go back in now.”

“I don’t think you understand what this could mean for—”

“Good-bye.” He went back into the room and shut the door behind him.

Still furious by the time she got home, she stripped off her clothes, throwing them against her bedroom wall, and padded through to the bathroom to start a bath.

One of Sweeney’s favorite features in her apartment was the old, claw-footed tub in the otherwise unremarkable bathroom. She did some of her best thinking lying in a tubful of slightly too-hot water. She sprinted naked—having forgotten to close the drapes in the living room—through to the kitchen to pour herself a scotch, and just as she was preparing her dash back to the bathroom, saw the thin, blue letter propped against the now tired-looking daffodils. On impulse, she took it too.

The tub was almost full and she lowered herself into the scalding water gratefully, then sipped her scotch and sank down into the water with a long sigh.

She lay there for a good ten minutes, letting her anger seep out of her into the water before she reached over to pick up the envelope she’d left on the window ledge. She turned it over in her hands. It had been a long time since she had received a letter, a real letter—she had often thought of future scholars looking for the epistolary remnants of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What would they find? Files on computer hard drives?

She used a nail file to slit the top and pulled out the sheet of thick, expensive blue paper. As she stared at the careful handwriting, her eyes dropped to the signature, “Yours, Ian,” written in a slightly more flamboyant version of the writing that spelled out, at the top of the letter, “Dear Sweeney.” The writing reminded her of him, careful, neat, but with more of an edge to him than it had seemed at first. Ian! She had managed to put him mostly out of her mind since that strange and horrible Christmas in Vermont. Except for a few guilty flashbacks—
half-dreamed memories of how her body had felt pressed against his—she had tried to forget about Vermont, about the murders, about the way they had revealed Toby’s family’s secrets, about the way they had driven her into the arms of an enigmatic Englishman, divorced, with a small daughter. Someone entirely unsuitable for her. Too far away, too encumbered.

Still, she read on. “I have resisted writing for weeks now. But this morning I woke up and no longer felt like resisting. It was hugely relieving, as you can imagine, to shrug off this great weight and to sit down to, finally, write you a letter. It is only a letter, I told myself. I will be chatty and tell her of the things that I am doing at work, about Eloise and about my life.

“Work has been fine. We’ve taken on three new people at the auction house and while I suspect one of them of being peripherally involved in an international drug ring, he has quite a good eye. Well, well, as long as he doesn’t bring it to work . . . ” Sweeney could almost see his wry smile, the dark eyebrows rising ironically.

“Eloise is well. She has taken up writing, it seems, and sends me letters from school with long stories in French that seem to be more clearly written versions of her favorite fairy tales, Cinderella down to the basics. As for myself, I’ve been working on cataloging the contents of a country house in Devon. I stayed at the local inn and went for long brisk walks each morning out to the house, where I spent my days with various family members, all suspicious of one another and all watching me like proverbial hawks. There was a bit of a mystery while I was there—about a Chinese vase; I can’t really do it justice here—and I thought of you and how you would have enjoyed sleuthing around and finding out the truth about it. But that brings us back to you, doesn’t it, and to me wishing that you were here. So you see, I have tried to write a letter that did not once mention that fact that I wish you were here, but I have failed.

“I returned to London in early January thinking that I would wait for you to contact me. You have been through so much and I didn’t want to complicate things for you. But then I remembered you standing
there in that awful, cold snow, that snow that seemed to compound the losses we had all suffered during those weeks. As we stood there together in the falling snow you said, ‘Maybe I’ll come visit, in the spring.’

“At lunchtime today, I went for a walk in Hyde Park. The grass is newly green and everywhere there was a sense of life trickling back into things, of that sweet syrup that runs through all living beings. There were daffodils everywhere I looked, daffodils that not so much fluttered and waved at me as bowed. The fruit trees were in full flower, the branches of the cherry trees like lamb’s tails with their heavy flowers.”

There was a word crossed out and then, in slightly darker ink, “It is spring, decidedly so. It is spring.”

And as though the beautiful words had given him courage, he had signed his name with a bit of a flourish. “Yours, Ian.”