Mansions Of The Dead (28 page)

He poured the hot water over the tea bag in a mug and let it sit for a few minutes before taking the bag out and adding milk. The warm mug felt good in his hand. It was one of the first things he’d noticed at AA meetings, the steaming cups of coffee or tea, the compulsive little knots of people smoking outside before the meetings started. Alcoholics replaced one ritual with another, one addiction with a less harmful one. But the gurgle of hot water into a mug was a poor substitute for the sharp rattle of ice in a cocktail shaker.

He took his tea into the study and sat down at his desk.

And then, for what must have been the fortieth time that day, he reached for the phone to call Kitty.

Kitty. He had seen her more in the last two weeks than he had in the last two years and he felt almost guilty when he realized how welcome it had been. When he had gone down to Newport right after he had heard about Brad, he had almost wondered if she felt the way he did, but she was able to shut him out so quickly. It was like getting a glimpse of a distant vista through a window and then having the curtain drawn before you could really see it. Kitty. She had let him hold her for a second and he had felt that old pull, the base urge that had never really waned, even when everything else had been shit. He knew that she had been thinking about it too in the moment before she pulled away, the night Petey had died.

In spite of himself, he found that he was aroused, and he picked up the hot mug of tea for something to do. But it was much too weak and he put it down again, the pale taste lingering on his tongue. He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he took out Drew’s plans for the Back Bay town house development.

Andrew had always liked looking at architectural plans. There was something so promising about a project when it existed only as a series of small lines on paper. Drew had been talking for a while about renovating the unoccupied Back Bay residences and he’d finally asked the architects to go ahead and come up with some design ideas. The town houses would be designed for young single professionals, with large master bedrooms and offices, plus space for entertaining. Drew wanted to call it Commonwealth Place and incorporate a courtyard with a pool, exercise room, and outdoor barbecue area into the design. Andrew had an image of a bunch of well-dressed young Bostonians milling around on a roof.

It looked fine and Drew said it was the best use for the property. In truth Andrew didn’t care much about the development side of things. He didn’t care much about any of the things people said he was supposed to care about. When he was twenty-three, his father had taken
him out to lunch. “Andrew, what do you love to do?” he’d asked. “Now that you have your law degree, you have a great many options in terms of what you will spend your time doing within the firm.”

When Andrew hadn’t been able to come up with anything, his father had seemed furious. Finally, just for something to say, he had blurted out, “I always liked the idea of buying and selling houses.”

It had been something of a dream for him, to buy a house and work on it, sand the floors and paint the walls cool, soothing colors, replace the heavy, old Victorian fixtures with clean, modern ones, then sell it to someone else and perhaps buy another one. He had always liked woodworking and thought he could do some of the work himself. He had built Kitty a chest for Christmas and had been pleased with how it had come out.

But his father had misunderstood.

“Excellent. Real estate law,” he had said. “I’ve been thinking that we ought to develop our real estate holdings. If you can become expert in the areas of the law that apply to our work, we could have quite a nice little thing going here.”

Andrew had put a good face on it, but he wasn’t much good at the business and everybody knew it. Gradually, they had hired lawyers younger than him to do the work and he had found that he could go home by two or three every day.

But he hadn’t been bored. He had loved being there when the kids got home from school and he had enjoyed just being in the house with Kitty. It hadn’t been good for his drinking, of course, the empty afternoons. It had taken five years of psychoanalysis for him to figure that part of it out. He had gotten into the habit of having a drink or two when he came home and then more throughout the afternoon as the hours stretched on.

Again, he reached for the phone, and this time he allowed himself to pick it up, dial the familiar number.

It took her eight rings to answer. They had often fought about her unwillingness to install additional phone extensions in the Newport
house. It was ridiculous! The house was huge. If you were on the second floor and the phone rang downstairs, it was almost impossible to reach it in time.

But it was one of the things about Kitty that he’d never been able to change. She’d grown up in a modest suburban house in Brookline, where she and her five brothers played rough and tumble games and their Irish setters wrecked the furniture, and she’d never much liked the business of houses, the redecorating and improving and changing that had been so important to his mother.

When they’d first started going to Newport as a young married couple, she had been stiff and uncomfortable in his parents’ house, retreating outside for swims or walks along the Cliff Walk whenever she could. But after his parents were gone, and the house was theirs, he’d noticed that she’d gradually settled into it, making it hers. His parents’ things had slowly disappeared, vases and figurines and silk pillows put away up in the attic, replaced by her birding books and bags of potting soil. She’d had beige canvas slipcovers made for the furniture, and the dogs left mats of golden hair on them. When they’d split up, she’d said she wanted to stay there and it had been fine with him. He hadn’t been able to stand being in Newport anymore. Too many memories of Petey, too many memories period.

“Hello,” she finally said into the phone.

“Hi.”

“Andrew.” She said it quietly, a warning to herself about what was coming.

“How are you?”

“All right. I guess. Considering.” He couldn’t tell if it was annoyance or exhaustion, but her voice sounded flat.

“I’m sorry to call . . . I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“No, that’s okay. I was just outside with the dogs. I’m not sure what to do with myself.”

“I know. I’m sitting here looking at Drew’s architectural plans. Wouldn’t he be happy if he knew?”

She laughed. A short, bitter laugh. “So, how are
you
doing?” They both knew what she meant.

“Okay. I’ve got a wicked tea habit going, though. Greta bought something like a case of it before she left. Even so, I think I’ll have to restock.”

“Have you heard anything from the police?”

“No, except I wish they’d lay off poor Jack.”

“I know. Well, I’m going to go.” She sounded suddenly as though she were going to cry. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

“Kitty, can I . . . can I come down?”

“No. No, that’s not going to help anything.”

“Of course it isn’t, but if I could just . . . Please. I don’t want to be alone.”

She hesitated, but finally said, “No, I’m tired. I’m sorry.” He heard a last sound, the start of a sob, before she hung up the phone.

He listened to the dial tone for a few moments, then looked up at the clock. It was almost nine, too early to go to bed. The old sense of restlessness had taken over. He wanted a drink. It wasn’t the kind of urgent want he’d known when he first quit. Then, the wanting had been a kind of question. He had never known the answer until he’d made it through the evening or the afternoon. Now he knew its shape, its arc. He knew where it began and ended. He knew from experience that he could handle the craving. He knew what he had to do.

His head buzzing with the start of a headache, he got up, took his keys from the key rack in the hall, and went out into the night.

SWEENEY WAS COMING OUT
of the shower the next morning when she heard about the accident. She liked to listen to the morning news while she was getting ready and she had left the overperky TV host talking about Mother’s Day crafts projects.

But as she toweled her hair, she heard the cheery voice coming through from the living room. “University officials and students are this morning mourning the death of student Alison Cope, a junior who was killed in a hit-and-run accident last night near her Cambridge apartment. There were no witnesses to the accident, which occurred sometime between one and two A.M. this morning. Cope’s body was spotted by a passing cabdriver who tried to resuscitate her at the scene. Cambridge police are asking anyone who may have been near the scene of the accident to call the CPD hotline. Cope, twenty, was from Minneapolis and was majoring in Biology. University officials expressed sympathy for Cope’s family and said that the university community, already in mourning after the recent and still unsolved murder of student Brad Putnam, would be greatly affected by this second death.”

Sweeney toweled her hair and watched the footage of the accident scene. Alison Cope. The name didn’t ring a bell. Sweeney didn’t think
she’d ever met her. But it was strange, a second death—a homicide, really, though it was likely an unintentional one—in three weeks.

“Cope’s family has flown in from Minneapolis,” the anchor was continuing, as a picture of a blond girl in a high school graduation cap and gown flashed on the screen. Sweeney stared. She had met Alison Cope after all. Her good memory had it immediately.

Alison Cope was the girl who had been at the Putnams’ house after Brad’s memorial service. Alison Cope was the girl who had angered Jaybee by coming to the Putnams’ house and pretending that she had been friends with Brad.

As she walked through the yard to her office, Sweeney was aware of an oppressive sort of nervous tension. Students stood around talking in small groups. As she unloaded her bag onto her desk, she looked out the window and saw two girls crying and hugging each other on Quincy Street. She wasn’t teaching today, but she had a pile of papers to grade and she’d been planning on cleaning off her desk when the phone rang.

It was Quinn.

“I heard about the accident,” she said, once he had identified himself. “Do you know what happened?”

“Not yet,” he said. “I was calling because—”

But Sweeney cut him off. “Wait, you may know this, but she was at Brad’s memorial service. I don’t think they knew each other very well, but she was there, which means they knew each other a little.”

“We’ll look into that, of course.” He sounded distant, distracted. In the background, Sweeney heard someone laughing.

“But she was there . . . Don’t you think that it’s strange that she was connected with him at all?”

“Right now, it looks like it was a straightforward hit-and-run. There’s no reason to believe it was anything like that. But we’ll look into it.”

“But—”

“I said we’ll look into it,” he said, closing off the line of conversation. “Look, you were right about Jack Putnam not being the one who tied Brad up. It was Camille. They made up the story about Jack doing it because they realized what the press could do to her campaign. They seemed kind of relieved to get the truth out actually.”

“So what about that phone call to Jack?”

Quinn hesitated. “He claims that it went straight into his voice mail and he got the message later that night. It was Brad, obviously drunk, and he was going on about how Jack was a great brother and he really loved him.

“And Drew didn’t come out with any revelations?”

“No. Hold on.”

She heard him talking to someone for a few seconds. “Sorry,” he said, when he was back on the phone. “Anyway, the main reason I called is that I took the jewelry down to the forensics lab this morning and talked to my friend. It turns out that the necklace isn’t going to yield anything. The hair was trimmed and had been treated and there weren’t any intact roots. But the locket is actually pretty promising, my friend thinks. The sample had been pulled rather than cut, which is kind of odd, but anyway, he said that it had been extremely well preserved in the locket all these years and that he found a couple of intact roots for testing. So he thinks he might be able to do something with it, but before I tell him to go ahead, I think I’d like to see the gravestone. I’m certainly not doubting you on the dates, but I’m kind of calling in a favor here and I’d like to see it for myself.”

“Absolutely,” Sweeney said. “I’d be glad to show it to you.”

They agreed to meet at the main gates of the cemetery later that afternoon.