Mansions Of The Dead (4 page)

He shook his head.

“There may be something inside that would give you a clue to who owned it. I could do it through the plastic, I think.” She fiddled with the clasp for a moment, then the locket clicked open. “Oh, there’s a lock of hair in here. It’s about the same color as the necklace, so it could be that it was a lock of hair left over. The dates are right.” The small brown lock of hair was tied with a red ribbon and nestled comfortably in the bowl of the locket. Sweeney clicked it closed again.

Quinn thought for a moment, as though he was choosing words. “Would this . . . this jewelry have any kind of a sexual significance?”

Sweeney looked up at him. “Well, we could get into a discussion about sex and death and sexual climax as a kind of death. The Victorians were quite—”

He blushed, and she felt guilty for having embarrassed him. “No, no . . . what I mean is . . . what would you say if I told you that this jewelry was involved in a crime with uh . . . possibly . . . sexual, uh, aspects to it.”

Sweeney’s eyes widened. “I don’t know. It seems unlikely that it would have significance, but you never know.” Quinn blushed again. “Can you tell me some more about it, I mean, what kind of a crime?”

“I can tell you what the press will get,” he said. “But you have to promise you won’t talk about the jewelry.” She nodded and he went on. “It was found on a guy who was murdered sometime last night or early this morning. There was nothing to indicate why it was there or whether or not it belonged to the dead man. He was found in a . . . in a position that leads us to believe there may have been a sexual element to the crime, or at least some kind of dominance. That’s all I can tell you. Obviously we want to keep the information about the jewelry secret. It could point to . . . ”

But Sweeney was leaning forward, staring at him. “You think that this is some kind of ritual killer, don’t you?” The idea was strangely fascinating. A murderer who left mourning jewelry as his signature?

“Not necessarily. But we want to explore all the possibilities, you know? What’s your feeling on that? Is there something about the jewelry that could mean something for someone? I’m not even sure what I’m asking here. If there is a chance that this was some kind of ritual crime, we would want to start looking for likely people right away. And in any case, we’re going to want your help tracking down the jewelry. If we can figure out where it came from, it may lead us to a suspect.”

“I would have to know more about the victim, more about the crime,” she said. “I mean, it would be hard to say without knowing who he was. Can you tell me a little bit more?”

Before Quinn could answer, there was a knock on the door and a heavyset guy came in and waved at Quinn over Sweeney’s head. “You got the stuff from the Brad Putnam case?” he asked. “They’re asking down in the lab.”

“Can’t they hang on two seconds? This is important. We’re—”

Sweeney gasped. “Brad Putnam?” The room felt very stuffy all of a sudden. “Brad Putnam?” she asked again, interrupting him.

Quinn ignored her. “Two seconds. We’re looking at it right now.”

The guy shut the door.

“Did he just say Brad Putnam? As in
the
Putnams?”

Quinn looked surprised. “Yeah. We weren’t going to release the name yet, but the family’s been notified, so I guess the press will get it soon enough.”

No,” she said again, tears rushing to her eyes. “You don’t understand. I know him. He’s one of my students. We were studying mourning jewelry in my seminar.”

Quinn nodded slowly. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. I didn’t realize you knew him. He was studying this stuff in your class?”

“Yes. I . . . ” She was suddenly horrified. “Do you think that’s why he had it?”

Quinn didn’t say anything.

“Look, I can look into it for you. I know some people who . . . ”

“No,” Quinn said sharply. “We don’t want you to talk to anyone about this until we contact you. Okay?”

Sweeney nodded.

And then she began to cry.

HE HAD BLUE EYES
, the kind of blue eyes that revealed themselves in degrees, greenish blue in one kind of light, turquoisey as a vacation sea when he shifted his head slightly. You
learned
about his eyes, something new each time you looked into them.

Sweeney had been sitting on the floor of her office, talking to him about death, when she had noticed this.

She had met Brad Putnam the previous fall, when as a junior he’d enrolled in an intermediate-level art history course she was teaching entitled Looking at Culture; Art and Social History. She hadn’t particularly wanted to teach the class and therefore, she realized now, had focused it around her own interests, talking to them about gravestone art and mourning jewelry, drawing connections between world events and attitudes toward death. It hadn’t been an illegitimate approach to the subject exactly, just a narrow one.

But for six of the kids in the course, including Brad, it had been a revelation. They had all done well and, she had noticed, begun to hang around together. Sometimes, after class, she’d watch them out the window of her office, meeting up on the sidewalk and chatting for a few minutes before moving away en masse. At the end of the semester, the six of them had presented her with a photograph of a mid-eighteenth-century
headstone featuring a skeletal Death holding an hourglass. They had taken it in a cemetery near Lexington, they told her, and she had been surprised and touched that they had made the effort.

She hadn’t been surprised when all six signed up for her Mourning Objects seminar that spring.

Brad, she had sensed from the beginning, was the one most seriously interested. He would read widely outside the assigned reading, bringing in photographs he’d taken of gravestones that exemplified a particular style, an unusual iconography. Sweeney had been a little surprised by all the extra effort at first and had wondered if it was personal, if perhaps he had a crush on her. But it hadn’t been anything like that, she’d soon realized. It was just that, like Sweeney, he was really passionate about death. When he had asked her about graduate schools where he could pursue his interest in mourning objects and the decorative arts, she had felt unexpectedly proud.

And then there had been that strange day in early March when it had warmed unseasonably. All day, there was a strange heaviness in the air. Sweeney had pulled her car around and parked illegally in the lot behind the museum where she had her office, leaving the engine running and the hazards blinking madly to scare away the campus cops. She was carrying a box of books, as well as the backpack for her laptop and teaching materials, and she had put a foot up on the car and balanced the box on her knee so she could open the driver’s side door of her ancient Rabbit. But she must have had slushy snow on the bottom of her shoe because she slipped, sending the box of books tumbling into a snowbank. At that moment, the elastic band holding her hair back broke, shooting off into a puddle in the parking lot, and as she had bent to retrieve the now sodden books, she’d slipped on a patch of ice and fallen. Her nearly six-foot frame did not topple easily and she banged her knee on the sidewalk as she fell.

“Um . . . do you need any help, Sweeney?” She had felt him standing there on the sidewalk and had looked up to find Brad trying not to smile.

There had been nothing for it but to burst out laughing. He had
laughed too and helped her pick up the books, put them back in the box, and load it into the back of the Rabbit.

“Do you want a ride somewhere?” she’d asked, after thanking him for his help.

“I don’t have far to go,” he’d said. “I can walk.”

“No. Get in. It looks like it’s going to rain.”

Well mannered, he had accepted gracefully and slid into the passenger seat, looking around at her messy car as though it were an interesting museum exhibit.

“Don’t tell me you have a really neat car,” she’d said.

“Yeah, I’m a little anal actually. But I respect people who are messy. It probably means you’re creative. Something like that.” He’d grinned and she remembered being surprised at how natural he was with her.

They had been almost to his apartment—on Harvard Street, he’d told her—when Sweeney had remembered she’d been planning to go back and pick up a second box of books from her office. In the confusion of her fall, and then running into Brad, she’d completely forgotten that she’d left her office door open, the box of books still on the floor. “Shit.” She slammed her hand against the steering wheel.

What?” He’d looked startled.

“I was going to get another box of books. I left my office door open and I just completely forgot. That’s all right. I’ll drop you off and then go back for them.”

“But if you drop me, it’s one way, and you’ll have to go all the way around again. If you take a right up here you can just swing back to the museum and I can help you carry the box out,” he’d said sensibly.

“You sure? You don’t have to be anywhere?”

“Nope.”

The skies had opened just as she’d pulled up in the lot again, and they’d run cursing from the car to the back door of the museum, then stood for a minute in the stairwell to the upper-floor offices.

“I’m so sorry,” Sweeney said. “Jeez, we’re soaked.”

Upstairs she had found everyone gone and her office door still open. She looked out the window and saw that the rain was coming
down in planes, violently pounding the pavement. “I think we should just wait a minute, see if it slows down. I don’t want these books to get wet too. Oh God, I’m soaked. And you’re leaking.” He was standing in the hallway and a puddle was forming beneath him. “Here, you want a cup of coffee or something? I have an electric kettle and a French press in my file cabinet, the sign of a true addict.”

“I thought professors were supposed to have bottles of bourbon in their file cabinets.”

“Well, I’ve got one of those too, but I think the administration might frown on me offering it to you.”

She’d made coffee and they had sat on the floor of her office, so they wouldn’t drip on the chairs, and talked about the class.

“You did a really good job on those samplers,” she’d told him. His first paper for the seminar had been on mourning samplers and he’d drawn some interesting conclusions about how the process of cross-stitching a sampler helped girls—for it was girls who sewed the interesting little mourning items, complete with epitaphs and the name and date of the deceased—come to terms with death at a time when their own chances of eventually dying in childbirth were pretty high.

“Thanks,” he’d said, embarrassed.

“How’s the mourning jewelry one going?” He’d been working on Civil War–era mourning jewelry for his final paper and Sweeney had been looking forward to reading it.

“Okay. There are a couple of things I’m trying to figure out, but . . . ”He’d stopped as though he was deciding whether or not to tell her something.

“Let me know if you want to hash anything out before you start writing.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” He’d looked around at her walls—the office was so small that there wasn’t room for much. But she had posters from a few exhibits and photographs of gravestones and cemeteries. She’d typed a fragment of poetry from Robert Blair’s “The Grave” and pasted it onto a moody black-and-white photo of an English churchyard.

Brad read aloud.

“Well do I know thee by thy trusty Yew,/ Cheerless, unoficial Plant! that loves to dwell/’Midst sculls and coffins, Epitaphs and Worms: Where light-heel’d Ghosts, and visionary Shades,/ Beneath the wan cold Moon (as Fame reports)/Embody’d, thick, perform their mystick Rounds./No other merriment, Dull Tree! is thine.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty grim.”

“Didn’t I have you guys read some of the Graveyard Poets?” He’d shaken his head. “Hmmm. I’m falling behind. Next week. Anyway, that’s Robert Blair. He’s pretty interesting.”

He read it again, thoughtfully, then he’d asked, “What do you think death is like?”

“I don’t think it’s like anything,” Sweeney had said. “It’s unconsciousness.”

“So you don’t believe in heaven or Judgment Day or anything like that? I thought that . . . ”

“That because I spend so much time studying religious responses to Death, I must believe in the premises on which all that art is based? Nope. I’m a good old atheist. I think heaven is for children’s bedtime prayers. What I’m interested in, though, is why human beings need a heaven.”

“I think we need it because when someone you love dies, it’s just hard to believe that they’re not
somewhere
. You know?” He’d looked almost wistful.

“I think you’re right.” Suddenly she’d panicked. “I’m not offending you, am I?”

“No. My dad always says we’re Episcopatheists.”

“Ha.” She’d laughed. “I like that. Episcopatheists. I come from a long line of Episcopatheists myself.”

“But I believe in heaven,” he’d said. “Or something anyway. I believe that there’s something else, after.”

Sweeney had felt she’d been cruel and she’d blushed before saying, “You’re lucky, then.”

He had been quiet for a moment, then he’d said, “Can I ask you something?”