Mansions Of The Dead (13 page)

Sweeney shook her head. “But feel free to . . . ”

“Come out with me. I don’t feel like being reminded of my leper-like status as one of the last smokers in the free world.”

Sweeney laughed. “All right, since you put it like that. I wouldn’t want to contribute to the further social isolation of a promising young artist.”

He winked at her. “Yes. Who knows what could happen? Giant sculptures of cigarette packs. It would be all your fault.”

They laughed, and she followed him out of the side of the tent. It had grown dark suddenly while they’d been inside and it seemed to Sweeney as though she was stepping off the edge of the earth. She stumbled a little in her heels as they came out onto the grass and Jack reached to steady her. He was taller than Sweeney. His hand quite naturally clasped her upper arm.

“Thanks.” She took off her shoes, the feel of wet grass on her bare feet waking her up, sending blood clanging through her veins, and she looked for him, searching the darkness for his features. They walked down the sloping lawn to a wide stone bench set at the top of the hill and sat down. Jack took a cigarette pack out of his pocket and tapped one out. He put it in his mouth and lit it, then leaned back against the bench with relief and inhaled deeply.

“So how do you know Katie?”

“College. She was on my freshman hall. We were friends, though not really close ones. I was actually surprised I was invited.”

“I think Katie’s one of those people who you think would have a lot of friends, but in fact doesn’t. Not that that’s why you were invited. I mean, I think people are more important to her than they think they are.”

They were silent for a few minutes as he smoked and Sweeney listened to the ocean, crashing far below them.

When he was finished he stood up and tossed his cigarette over the edge. Sweeney stood up too. “I guess we should get back. Toby will be looking for me.”

“Your date?”

“Best friend. He was on our freshman hall too. Actually he and Katie dated briefly, but of course they’ve stayed good friends. Toby has an amazing ability to stay friends with his exes. Not me. I’m usually lucky if they don’t hate me.” They started walking back up the hill.

“Me too,” he said. “I think there are clubs devoted to hating me, peopled by my exes.” When they got to the tent, he said, “Thanks. Maybe I’ll find you for a dance later.”

Sweeney looked up at him and felt her stomach pitch again. He smiled.

“I really am sorry about your brother. I liked him. He was . . . well, he was . . . special. More so than the other kids I taught. I’ll really miss him.”

“He liked you too. I think he had a crush on you, in fact. Now I can see why.” He studied her for a moment. “Hey, you know what? It would mean a lot to all of us if you could come to the memorial service tomorrow. We can’t bury him yet because of the police, but . . . we thought it would be good for everyone. And then we’d love to have you come back to the house afterward.”

“I’d like that,” Sweeney said.

“Good.” He smiled and headed off just as the music stopped and the band leader announced that it was time for everyone to take their seats.

Toby and Sweeney were at a table with Lily, Hallie and her date, and Hannah Allbright and her husband. Hannah and her husband both worked for the
L.A. Times
and, blaming their interest on their occupations, they were asking Toby about Brad Putnam when Sweeney joined them. “It’s big news everywhere,” Hannah was saying. “It’s these kinds of stories that make you search your soul. You know, why is Brad Putnam’s death big news when the five black kids who got killed in Washington, D.C., last week don’t even make the
Post
. Hi, Sweeney.”

Toby gave her a look to make sure she wasn’t still mad, and Sweeney crossed her eyes at him to show she wasn’t.

“So,” Hannah said in a conspiratorial voice. “I saw you talking to Jack Putnam. How do you know him?”

“I don’t, really. Just through this whole thing with Brad Putnam.”

“He was one of her students,” Toby explained to them.

“I grew up with Brad and Jack and the other kids,” Hannah said. “You can’t imagine what a crush I had on Jack when I was ten. He was always kind of
bad
. You know what I mean?” She rubbed her husband’s arm reassuringly. He shrugged in a funny what-am-I-chopped-liver? kind of way that made Sweeney like him.

Since she was sitting next to Lily, Sweeney turned and asked her what she was doing these days.

“I work for a private lab,” Lily said. “It’s interesting work, although I feel like a bit of a sellout. But they’re letting me head up my own division. I do mitochondrial DNA research and it’s a good opportunity. I hope I’ll get back to MIT at some point, though.”

“Mitochondrial DNA?” Sweeney asked, genuinely interested.

“Yeah, there are two kinds of DNA, nuclear and mitochondrial. Nuclear DNA is found in the nucleus, the center, of the cell, and it contains genetic material from both parents. When someone’s raped, or when you’ve got a lot of blood, that’s what they use to identify the person who the material came from.

“Then there’s mitochondrial DNA. That’s what I’m specializing in. Mitochondrial DNA is, in many ways, more promising because it stands up over time better than nuclear DNA. It only links to the mother’s side of the family though, which limits the applications somewhat. But you can find it in more parts of the body. Hair strands with no skin attached for example. I’m working on improving our methods so that we can extract usable samples more easily.”

“What kinds of stuff does the lab do?”

“Oh, these days, half of our work is paternity suits. I swear. You wouldn’t believe the things that people do. There was a case I was
working on where this woman didn’t know who the father of her son was. There were a bunch of likely candidates, but two guys she liked more than the others, and she had decided that if one of them was the father, she would marry whichever guy it was. So she had to get DNA samples from the two men, but without them knowing. She ended up waiting until they were asleep and yanking a handful of hair out of each of their heads. She said they thought she was crazy. But she got it and we figured out who the father was. She even sent me an invitation to the wedding!”

Sweeney laughed.

After the waiters came around with the first course and poured the wine, everyone stopped talking for a while as they watched Katie and Milan dance their first dance. And then there was dinner—filet mignon—and toasts and dancing, and it wasn’t until Katie and Milan had cut the cake that the conversation turned back to the Putnams.

“I just feel so sorry for them,” Hannah was saying. “Losing Petey, and now this.”

“Were you around when Petey died?” Sweeney asked her.

“Yeah. It was the summer, of course. So everyone was around. My parents were pretty good friends with Kitty and Andrew when they were together and they and the Dearbornes and some other friends spent a lot of time up at the house, trying to help them. The police were just awful. They wouldn’t let them alone.”

“What did everyone think about it at the time?” Sweeney asked her. “Did people believe the story about none of the kids remembering anything?”

“I don’t think anybody did. But you know we all felt that there wasn’t any point in trying to figure out who did it. Whoever it was—and I always thought for some reason it must have been Drew, I guess because he was the oldest—but if it was, I kind of felt like it didn’t matter. He must be living with it and he didn’t mean to do it, obviously.”

Sweeney looked up to see who else was listening. Toby was engrossed in a tête-à-tête with Lily and everyone else had gotten up to get cake.

“Anyway,” Hannah said. “I think everyone felt sorry for them, because of the way they’d grown up.”

“What do you mean?” Sweeney asked.

“Well . . . ” Hannah looked down at the table, then back up at Sweeney. “Andrew Putnam was . . . let’s just say he liked to drink. And apparently Kitty had completely stopped dealing with it at some point. And the kids were the ones who had to handle it. All of us who were friends with the Putnams knew about it. At some point you’d be sleeping over and one of the kids would have to take the bottle away from him. Camille was always having to go down and pick him up at some bar or another when they were in Newport. And when he came home, they would have to undress him and put him to bed.”

She looked around, watching the dance floor, where Jack Putnam was dancing with Katie’s mother, who looked pleased and girlish.

“The ironic thing, of course, is that he quit after the accident. Never took a drink again. My parents always thought it was so odd, because that had been the big problem with the marriage. And then he stopped and they split up anyway. I always wondered why she left him then, after everything else that she’d put up with. But of course, there are statistics about that, aren’t there? When a child dies. Most people split up, I think.”

“It’s that people grieve differently. It’s alienating, it makes you feel this chasm between you and the other person, because your experience of grief isn’t the same,” Sweeney said.

“It’s interesting, though, because with Drew and Melissa the accident brought them closer together,” Hannah went on. “They had been kind of off and on and then after the accident they got married right away.”

She changed the subject and was going on about something else, but Sweeney had stopped paying attention. “Hannah,” she said. “I just remembered something I have to do. I’m sorry. It was really good to see you.”

Hannah looked confused. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.I just . . . I have to go.”

She looked around the tent for Jack Putnam. He wasn’t on the dance floor, and when she walked around the perimeter of the tent, checking the tables and the small groups of people smoking outside, she couldn’t find him either. Maybe he’d gone home already. She found Toby and Lily talking—and leaning dangerously close to each other—in a corner of the tent.

“If I leave now, do you think you can get a ride back?”

Toby looked up at her, bewildered. “What . . . ? You can’t leave now. The dancing’s just started. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I just realized something is all. And I need to go talk to the person who it concerns. I . . . it’s too complicated to explain. But I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“I guess. Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Nice to see you again, Lily. See you soon.”

“You too,” Lily said. She and Toby exchanged a glance.

It was almost eleven. One of the teenage valets got the Rabbit and looked disdainfully at the dollar Sweeney gave him when he opened the door for her.

Sweeney opened the windows to feel the night air on her face. She’d had a couple of glasses of champagne, as well as the whiskey. Not enough for her to be drunk, but she felt a little foggy, a little buzzed. She was pretty sure she’d be able to remember where the Putnams’ house was. At night, Ocean Drive was inky, the big houses barely visible high on their bluffs. The air smelled thickly of salt and seawater, the wind was strong, and it seemed to Sweeney as though it blew through to every part of her through the open windows. It was cold and jarring, but it kept her going, kept her awake. She stopped for a moment and got out of the car, turning her face toward the churning surf.

She headed down to Bellevue Avenue and a few minutes later, she pulled into the driveway of Cliff House, relieved that the gate was open and that there wasn’t anyone on duty at the little gatehouse that waited just inside like a squat, stone sentry.

The driveway curved around a flat, green lawn, shadowy and dappled
by moonlight. The house was mostly dark—the only lights were on the first floor, and as she pulled up alongside a station wagon parked at the edge of the circular drive, she was suddenly nervous. From Bellevue Avenue, you had the sense that the house was not that far away, but here, behind the iron gates, it seemed a silent island of privilege.

The dark windows were a cypher. If someone was watching her from inside, she didn’t want to appear furtive. So she strode right up to the front door, knocked loudly, and listened to the frantic barking of dogs from inside. She was expecting the door to be answered by a housekeeper or a butler, but it was Kitty Putnam herself who opened the door.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to scare you, but I need to talk to you about something. Is Jack home yet?”

“No, he’s at a wedding. What is it?” Kitty’s eyes stared and Sweeney had the awful sense that she was reenacting something for this woman. A strange figure coming up the steps at night, disturbing her grief. Of course! She thought Sweeney had come to tell her that someone else had died.

“Everything’s fine,” Sweeney said hurriedly. “I mean . . . I just came to talk to you.” The dogs, three golden retrievers with silky, luxuriantly groomed auburn coats, had stopped barking and now they pushed out the door, trying to nuzzle the visitor.

“I realized something tonight, about Brad,” Sweeney said quickly. She knew she didn’t have much time. “I think that the way he was tied up, well, I think it was familiar to you and I think that you . . . all of you . . . think it was someone in the family, that someone in the family must have done it. Because it was something you used to do, wasn’t it? When your . . . when Mr. Putnam had been drinking, you and the children used to tie his arms loosely to the bed, so that he couldn’t turn over on his back and drown in his own vomit.”

Kitty stared at her and then nodded very slowly. “How did you know?”

“Because I used to do it myself. I used to do it to my mother when I was a child.”