Mansions Of The Dead (24 page)

“OKAY, CAMMIE, TRY IT
again from the top.”

Someone flicked on the stage lights and Camille Putnam stepped up to the podium. They were practicing for the debate in the gym of a suburban high school that someone had secured because it was about the size of the stage they’d be using for the real debate. She pressed her palms to the tops of her thighs to calm herself. It was a trick she’d learned long ago to get her hands to stop shaking.

“Who’s DiFloria this time?” she asked.

“I’ll do it,” called out Lawrence Freeburn, her campaign manager. “And Roberta will be the moderator.”

“Okay. Got it. Let’s go.” She took a deep breath and raised her hands to rest them on the podium. After the last run through they’d gotten after her for keeping her hands folded throughout the practice debate.

“Use them for emphasis,” Roberta had said. “Use them to punctuate. Gestures are the icing on the cake of your speech.” Camille had resisted the urge to roll her eyes at Lawrence. Roberta was a debate coach someone had brought in from D.C. She was a small, heavily made-up woman who had obviously had her colors done at some point and took her palette with her every time she went shopping. Camille
still had the little plastic “Winter” envelope that she’d gotten when she was elected to her house seat. “It’ll make dressing easier,” the woman who’d done her colors had told her. The experience had left Camille with a few unflattering jewel-toned silk blouses hanging in her closet and a new dedication to her plain black or navy blue suits and cotton broadcloth shirts from Brooks Brothers or Land’s End.

But it seemed to have stayed with Roberta, who wore identically made suits in various pastel shades all firmly within the “Spring” palette, and accessorized with nearly identical scarves to coordinate with the suits. Today it was a lavender skirt and jacket, with a yellow scarf at her neck.

Camille found her incredibly annoying. But everybody said she knew what she was doing. She’d last worked with a successful U.S. Senate candidate in California, and she’d made Camille watch a video of his last debate. Camille remembered lots of gesturing. The guy had practically decapitated his opponent, chopping his hands through the air when he got to an important point.

“We must bring fiscal responsibility back to the federal government,” Camille muttered under her breath, chopping the air at “must.” She’d give ‘em some gestures.

“Okay, we’re just about ready to go. We’re taping this one,” Roberta was saying. “So we’re not going to stop for anything. I want you to pretend that this is the real thing. If you screw up, we’re going to keep going, so you better think of some creative ways of dealing with screw-ups. Then we’ll watch and see how it worked. Got it?”

She nodded.

Lawrence, looking nervous, stepped forward. “Oh, one more thing, Cammie. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve thrown in a question about your brother’s death. We want to be prepared in case DiFloria . . . ”

“What do you mean?” She felt fear wash over her all of a sudden.

“I mean DiFloria likes to hit below the belt. He’s running scared right now. You’re up in the polls and he may take desperate measures. Mentioning Brad might be his way of referencing your family’s history.
He’s already been referring to you as ‘Paddy Sheehan’s granddaughter’ to try to bring up all the baggage about Paddy’s drinking and womanizing. He may try to do the same thing here.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Look, I doubt he’ll do it. It would make him look like a jerk. But the last thing I want is for you to get up there and be surprised if he does bring it up, okay? All you have to do is say that your family is mourning your brother and that you’re certain the police are doing all they can to find out who killed him and that you’re grateful for the prayers of the people of Massachusetts at this difficult time. Got it?”

Camille grabbed the podium to steady herself. Then she leaned forward, willing herself to stay calm, though she could feel the fear and anger bubbling up inside, looking for a place to escape.

“If he so much as says my brother’s name,” she shouted at Lawrence, “I will personally walk over to his podium and take off his fucking head. Got it?” She chopped the air so hard with her hand that she thought she heard it whistle through the air.

Lawrence looked shocked, but Roberta broke out in a wide grin.

“Hey, Cammie,” she called out. “Great hand gestures.”

THE NEXT MORNING, SWEENEY
took her coffee out on the balcony and watched one of her neighbors hanging laundry in her little backyard. It was early still and the sun hung low on the horizon over a foreground of rooflines. The air was wet and chilled and there was something soothing about the repetitive task, the way the woman bent and straightened, bent and straightened, the sheets and nightgowns and blouses colorful banners on the line.

In the early, rising light she had been staring at the photograph she’d taken from Brad’s room, but it hadn’t offered up any more clues. It had clearly been taken in a cemetery at night and while Raj’s face was the only one she could see, she could sense the presence of other beings in the patterns of light and dark outlined on the print. Peering into the darkness of the photograph, she thought she could make out a shadowy profile here, the outline of a leg or an arm there.

She remembered a class a few weeks ago. She had been running late and coming in she had said, “Hey, everyone, how was your weekend?”

No one had said anything and, trying to buy herself a few minutes to collect her thoughts, she’d persisted. “Come on. Let me live vicariously through you for once. What do you do on the weekend anyway? Parties? Or do you stay in the library and study?”

When she’d looked around at them, she’d sensed an undercurrent of something, sensed that they’d all been thinking about the exact same thing at that moment.

“We went to—” Brad started to say, but Rajiv broke in.

“If we told you,” he’d said, looking up at Sweeney with an ironic smile, “we’d have to kill you.”

She’d laughed, and the exchange had given her the couple of minutes she needed to arrange her notes. She’d let it go and hadn’t thought about it until just now.

But it presented some interesting possibilities.

Sweeney took her coffee cup inside and found her class rosters. She always asked students to write down their phone numbers and addresses on the first day of class, in case she needed to contact them, and she was grateful for the practice as she scanned down the list for her Mourning Objects class and found Rajiv’s dorm and room number. She had classes all morning, but she’d get him later that afternoon.

Raj lived in one of the older dorms on campus, one she’d lived in her sophomore year. She remembered a lot of concrete and orange shag, but when she looked in the glass window next to the front door, she saw that it had been renovated in pale wood and a more subtle gray all-weather carpeting. She lurked around the entrance for a few minutes before two girls came out, engrossed in a conversation about a friend who seemed to be dating one of her professors. Sweeney pushed aside the urge to follow them to continue eavesdropping and caught the door. Raj’s room was on the fourth floor, so she took the elevator up and found room number 423.

She knocked a few times, and when she got no answer, she settled down on the floor to wait. She was reading the
Globe
when he came around the corner a half hour later, carrying his own newspaper, rolled under his arm.

“Sweeney! What are you doing here?” She searched his face. Was he nervous? She couldn’t tell. But he was back to his usual dapper
mode of dress and he looked cool and elegant in khakis and a French blue shirt.

“I wanted to ask you about something. Something about Brad.”

Now he was nervous. “Well, okay. Do you want to come in? I’ve got class at four, but that’s not for an hour and a half.”

She nodded and he unlocked the door and stepped aside to let her enter the room first. It was one of the more pleasant dorm rooms she’d ever been in, she decided. It had a sort of English country house feel, with decent furniture and books on the walls. He even had, she saw, a little rolling bar, with a bottle of sherry and a couple of bottles of scotch.

“Nice place.”

“Thanks. I find living in a dorm room very distasteful, but I figure I can at least change my environment.”

She took the picture out of her bag and handed it to him. For a few moments, he just looked at it and then he handed it back. “Brad took it.”

“Where?”

“Concord.”

“When?”

“A month or so ago.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“What’s there to tell? We went out to Concord one night and hung out in the cemetery and I guess Brad took some pictures.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You know, the class.”

“The class? But why?”

He cleared his throat. “To study the stones. You should be proud of your didactic abilities. We got interested enough to go do some extracurricular study.” He gave her a disarming smile.

“Raj, I spend a lot of time in graveyards, but even I don’t hang out in them at night. It makes it kind of hard to study the iconography.”

He went over to a little table next to his bar and found a cannister of coffee. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

“Raj.”

“I’m going to tell you. I’d just like a cup of coffee first.”

“All right. Fine.”

“Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk please.”

While he made coffee, Sweeney picked up a copy of the
Atlantic Monthly
on his coffee table and leafed through it. Raj fiddled around with a stove-top espresso maker and then poured it out into matching blue china cups.

“Okay,” he said, handing her one of the steaming cups. “We went to cemeteries at night sometimes. To, you know, kind of hang out with the dead or whatever. Brad was really into it.”

“What do you mean, ‘hang out with the dead’?”

“I mean we had séances and things. I didn’t really believe in it. I don’t think Becca or Jaybee or Jennifer did either, but I was interested in why Brad and Ashley were so into it.”

“Is that why Ashley got so mad at me the other day?”

Raj nodded.

“How did it start?”

“You had us do that cemetery cataloging project for class last semester and we all decided to go together. It was kind of fun, so we did it again and then Ashley got kind of obsessed. She’d been doing all this reading about pagan holidays and last fall there was one where the boundaries between the living and the dead were supposed to be broken down or whatever so she got us to go that night.”

“Samhain,” Sweeney said.

“That’s right,” Raj said, pronouncing it carefully. “Sow-wen. That’s what it was. Anyway, we went, and we had this sort of weird experience. I can’t describe it, but it did feel like there were some people there with us. Ashley claimed that she was communicating with them telepathically.”

“You guys just scared yourselves,” Sweeney said. “The imagination is an amazing thing. What about Brad? What was the attraction for him, do you think?”

Raj hesitated and when Sweeney looked up at him, his brown eyes
were direct and serious. “It was his brother, I think. He wanted to talk to his brother.”

Sweeney stared at him. “What do you mean he wanted to talk to his brother?”

“His brother died. Like five years ago or something.”

“I know that, but what do you mean he wanted to talk to him?”

Raj got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He was defensive now. “Look, I told you that I didn’t believe in this stuff, but we were doing the Ouija board in a Concord cemetery a couple of months ago and this guy came on and said that his name was Pete.”

Sweeney was looking dumbfounded and Raj said, “Haven’t you ever done the Ouija board?”

“Yeah, of course. It’s just been a while.”

The last time Sweeney had played with a Ouija board had been in college. She’d stuck around campus over the Thanksgiving break and one night, on her way home from a solitary movie, she’d run into a couple of girls from a group she and Toby had always referred to as the Euro Kids, the wealthy, fish-out-of-water children of Saudi sheiks, English lords, or upper-caste Indian or Pakistani lawyers. These two, an Englishwoman named Violet and a beautiful Spanish girl, whose name Sweeney couldn’t remember, had told her they’d just bought a Ouija board and asked her to come up to play it with them.

Lonely and bored—Toby was in California visiting his mom—she had agreed and they had drunk wine coolers and talked to “spirits.” Sweeney remembered that they had conversed for a long time with someone who said she was a Scottish witch who had been burned at the stake in the eleventh century and urged them to go out and kill a heifer for her. It had been eerie at the time—she remembered feeling deeply shaken and sleeping with the light on for days—but later she was embarrassed to realize how much her subconscious had been directing the whole thing. She had been reading something about the Salem witch trials for a class and learned how livestock deaths in medieval Europe were blamed on witches. Obviously her brain had mixed it all together and directed her hands. Afterward, someone had
explained to her that there was a psychological explanation for the phenomenon of spiritual appearances on Ouija boards: when one person moved their hands on the marker very slightly, toward a particular letter, the others followed suit. The Ouija board created a kind of collective subconscious action.