O' Artful Death Part 10

"I want you to understand the possible seriousness of the situation. If there is anything that comes to your attention, I would appreciate it if you came to me. We wouldn't want anyone else to get hurt."

There was something threatening in his words and Sweeney found she didn't have it in her to do anything but nod.

"Okay. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting." He got up and led her out into the lobby. "You know where we are. If you need us."

Again, his words were ominous rather than comforting.

SABINA DODGE'S HOUSE, decidedly New England on the outside, had the feel of a Moroccan palace on the inside. When she answered the door, she took Sweeney's hands in hers and kissed her once on each cheek, then led her into a little room off the front hallway and told her to sit down on a low red couch. The walls of the room were covered with tapestries and red and black rugs. Giant pillows were scattered around on the couch. A few large cus.h.i.+ons were arranged around a low table, where a giant, obscenely pink amaryllis bloomed in a low dish. A fire was blazing in the fireplace and the warmth and closeness of the room made Sweeney feel sleepy. She was still reeling from her conversation with Cooper.

"It's so nice to see you," Sabina Dodge said. "Electra's going to be joining us in a moment, but why don't I get you some tea. Milk and sugar?" She was wearing another voluminous caftan, this one the pink of poached salmon, and a black velvet turban from under which a few tufts of white hair had escaped. Her gray eyes twinkled at Sweeney from the big, fleshy, moon-shaped face. Her hands, when Sweeney looked down at them, sparkled with diamond and sapphire rings.

"Just plain, thanks." Sweeney tried to lean back on the couch and found that she sank into it. A bell sounded and Sabina went to get it, leaving Sweeney alone in the room. There was a small table over against one wall and on it were a group of sterling silver picture frames with photographs in them. Sweeney went over to look at them.

One showed a group of people standing in front of Upper Pastures. Since most of the women had on dropped-waist flapper-style dresses, she a.s.sumed it had been taken sometime in the '20s. She recognized Marcus Granger from other pictures she'd seen, but other than that, no one looked familiar.

Another picture was of a girl-upon close examination Sweeney saw that it was a much younger Sabina-with her arm around a gray-haired woman. A German Shepherd sat at their feet. There were a couple of photographs of children and one had an inscription at the bottom that read. "To Aunt Gilda, with all my love-Bitty."

"Hi, Sweeney," Rosemary said from behind her. Sweeney turned around quickly and found Rosemary standing next to her grandmother.

"Are you sure you can't stay, Rosemary?" Sabina asked, coming into the room with a tea tray.

"No. Toby and I are going skiing today. I'm sorry." She blushed a little.

"Of course we understand, dear," beamed Electra Granger. Next to Sabina, she was a tiny, elegant imp. They were, Sweeney decided, a study in opposites. Where Sabina was rotund and bright and showy, Electra Granger was a small, quiet presence, dressed in a camel-colored suit, dark pantyhose and a brown silk scarf. Her sightless eyes settled pleasantly on something over Sweeney's shoulder as Rosemary said her good-byes and told her grandmother she'd be home later in the afternoon.

"Tell us more about your work," Sabina said, once they had settled down with tea and cuc.u.mber sandwiches. "It sounds so interesting. Gravestones, Patch said."

"Yes," Electra murmured. "Gravestones. How fascinating fascinating."

Gravestones carried them through tea and sandwiches.

"What about you, Sabina?" Sweeney asked when they were done. "How did you come to the colony?"

"I came when I was eighteen, believe it or not, and I've never really left. That was in the '40s. Gilda asked me to stay and I came for the weekend and that was it. Gilda, of course, had been here for ages. She was twenty-five years older than me."

Sweeney looked confused until Sabina explained, "Gilda Donetti."

"Oh yes." Gilda Donetti had been one of the few successful Byzantium women and Sweeney remembered there had been a show of her work at the MFA recently-walls of her pastel interiors and landscapes, the colors was.h.i.+ng over paper and canvas like the sea.

"I was in art school and Gilda kind of swept me up and brought me here. And I just fell completely in love with Byzantium and everything about it. It was glamorously primitive in those days. No one had indoor plumbing until you and Marcus came, Electra, but we would have these marvelous c.o.c.ktail parties. Oh! It was such fun. I wish you could have been here. Herrick Gilmartin was still the life of the party, even though he was almost eighty."

A giant silver Persian cat had come into the room and was rubbing against Sweeney's legs. It mewled and crossed the floor to its mistress.

"What was Gilmartin like? It's amazing to be staying in his house. I keep imagining him sitting where I'm sitting or eating where I'm eating, and wondering what kind of a person he was."

Sabina glanced over at Electra. "Well, he wasn't a nice person, if that's what you mean. I mean, he was terrific company, but he was such a devil. Patch won't let anyone talk about it, but Gilmartin slept with nearly everyone. Liked to seduce all his models."

"Really?"

"Oh yes." Sabina leaned forward. "He lived in his studio for an entire summer. With a Parisian model someone brought from Chicago. The servants had to bring them food and water." Sabina grinned. "Don't look so shocked, dear. I don't know what your generation thinks we were all doing doing anyway. Herrick was an old goat. Wasn't he, Electra?" anyway. Herrick was an old goat. Wasn't he, Electra?"

"He was. Herrick was terrible." Electra smiled mysteriously.

"Who were his models? Did you know any of them?"

"Both he and Marcus used a lot of local girls. We all kind of helped out now and then, too. That, for example," Sabina pointed to a nude on the wall over the fireplace, "is me in all my G.o.d-given glory. I was much younger then."

"What about Mary Denholm? I guess she modeled for him, too," Sweeney asked innocently.

"Before my time, of course, and Gilda's, too. But she did model for Herrick. It's funny actually, but Gilda always got the feeling there was something strange about Mary's death."

Sweeney put her teacup down on the table with a clatter. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, she told me once she wondered if Herrick or one of the other men hadn't done it in a jealous rage or something. He was terribly possessive of his conquests. It was an idea she'd gotten, from a servant, I think." Sabina thought for a moment and then said, "Ruth Kimball was always going on about it, getting up at meetings and telling people one of the artists had killed her ancestor."

Sweeney's heart was pounding, but she forced herself to stay calm. "I thought Mary drowned."

"Of course she did, but Gilda had this idea in her head. I wish I could remember exactly what it was she said. It wasn't anything definite, just a sort of feeling. I think the housekeeper or someone said there was something not right about the girl's death. Didn't change the way she felt about Herrick, though. In fact, I think the little bit of mystery about that death made him seem more interesting to her. They were fast friends, smoked pipes together. He called her his Sapphic Sister. In those days no one bothered about two women. Called us a 'Boston marriage.' Have you ever heard that term?"

Sweeney shook her head.

"People don't use it anymore," Sabina said. "What do you remember about Herrick, Electra?"

"Well, he was quite elderly elderly by the time we arrived here, of course, but there was something about him that people were always drawn to. He by the time we arrived here, of course, but there was something about him that people were always drawn to. He twinkled twinkled, if you know what I mean. Always up to something. Patch reminds me of him. Patch was a very naughty little boy. Always getting into sc.r.a.pes. And he had a real temper. Used to fly off the handle at people if they didn't do what he wanted. It's funny, he and Willow were both like that as children. Willow once punched a little boy in the face. Broke his nose."

"I'd forgotten that Willow grew up coming here, too."

"Oh yes, she and Patch were fast friends. Although, as I say, they both had tempers and they used to have terrible fights. They went together for a while when they were teenagers, and everyone thought they would get married eventually, although in those days n.o.body seemed to get married. It was all sleeping together and living together back then.

"But then they went to college and Patch met Britta and, of course, Willow lived in Italy for all those years," Electra Granger went on. "So that was that. We all thought Britta was so sweet. Such a nice girl. I'll never forget how pretty she was the first time she came to Byzantium, with that blond hair, wearing a blue sundress. She was so fragile, I thought I would break her hand when I shook it. We all liked her. So that was okay."

But Sweeney got the feeling that it had not been okay, and she began to understand what it must have been like for Britta, coming into this strange, close-knit community, the barely tolerated outsider.

"Now," Sabina announced. "May I show you my house?" Electra said that she would stay on the couch and listen to the radio and Sabina rose and offered Sweeney her hand. "I love to show people my house."

Besides the room they'd been in, the downstairs included a living room, dining room, library and giant kitchen, where copper pots dangled from a rack and another amaryllis was blooming on the kitchen table. "I force them," Sabina explained to Sweeney. "If you put them in the freezer, you can have them all year 'round."

"That was the morning room you were in," she went on, leading the way into a room lined with bookshelves, "and this is the library."

The walls of the room were painted a pale salmon that matched Sabina's outfit. A giant blue and gold oriental rug covered the floor and paintings crowded on the walls, making a colorful collage. Sweeney looked through the books in the cases.

"You like Dorothy Sayers, too," she said, perusing the t.i.tles. "Austen, Josephine Tey, Marsh, Chandler, Shakespeare. I think we have the same taste in books."

"You're welcome to borrow anything you want," Sabina said. "Now here's something you might be interested in." She pointed to an oil portrait hanging over the fireplace mantel. It was a simple portrait of a plain, fair girl in a high-necked lace blouse, her pale skin melting into the milky background. "That's a Gilmartin of Ruth Kimball's grandmother Ethel. It was Gilda's, and we've always had it hanging here. But a couple of years ago, Ruth Kimball claimed she'd found a letter from Gilmartin indicating that he'd wanted her grandmother to have it. She kept threatening she was going to get a lawyer and fight me for it. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but she was a very combative woman. This is the place it should be. It's always been here."

Sweeney took in Sabina's words and decided that if she'd discovered a letter indicating a portrait was meant to go to her grandmother, she might want to fight for it, too. She looked around at the other art in the room.

A more contemporary oil of two teenage girls playing with a small child caught her eye. It was a lovely composition-the child faced a shelf to the left edge of the canvas, one side of her face buried in one of the older girl's blouse. Nearly identical, the girls looked out from the canvas with controlled, Mona Lisa smiles. They were wearing dark clothes that set off the blue of the child's eyes.

The signature, Sweeney saw when she leaned down to look, was Gilda Donetti and the date was 1969. It wasn't anything special, really, just a pretty little painting.

"Who's that?" she asked, pointing at it.

"Oh, those are Patch's twin aunts, Violet and Barbara. They were a good bit younger than his mother. Change of life babies. And that," she pointed to the small girl, "is Rosemary. It was the summer she and her parents came to visit Marcus and Electra and I think Violet and Barbara baby-sat for her a lot. I've just gotten this down so I haven't had a chance to show it to her yet. I like to switch them around."

Sweeney looked closer and saw that the child in the painting was indeed Rosemary. The small, b.u.t.terfly birthmark on the cheek was the same.

"I thought her parents were estranged from the Grangers."

"Oh they were, but there was a summer before they moved to Europe that they came up. Before they had the big falling out with Marcus."

"What happened?" Sweeney asked.

"It had to do with Rosemary's father. He was a real '60s radical, the authentic article, and when they were in Byzantium that summer he said some things about the colony and about the way everyone lived here that were really unforgivable. And then when the war was heating up they fled to England and then I guess later to South Africa. We didn't learn that part of it until Rosemary arrived, though." Sabina lowered her voice. "I think that Electra and Marcus would have forgiven it, but Emily had this idea that they wouldn't, that they condemned her for leaving the country. It went from there and they never spoke again. If Electra were a different sort of person, she might have made overtures. But she was so proud. Still is. Shall we go?"

As Sweeney followed her out of the room, she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of a piece of sculpture, a child sitting in a chair, hanging on a far wall. There was something familiar about the snowy white relief, the careful lines of the boy's thick locks of hair.

"Isn't that a lovely little relief? I've just brought that out as well."

Sweeney went closer and saw, down in the right-hand corner, a signature. "J.L.B." it said, in flowing, cursive script.

"Who's J.L.B.?" She had to stop herself from grabbing Sabina by the shoulders and shaking the answer out of her.

"J.L.B?" She went over and peered at the signature. "Oh, I see. I don't know. Gilda always thought a student of Morgan's. Such a pretty little thing. I think Gilda found it lying around the studio and asked if she could have it. I've always kept it. Why?"

Sweeney stared at the relief. The style was the same as Mary's stone. It had to be the same artist. Bennett Dammers had been right that it was a student. But which student had it been?

"Just wondering," Sweeney said. "It's really lovely."

Sabina showed her around the s.p.a.cious upstairs rooms, including the one that had been Gilda's studio. It seemed to have been preserved exactly the way it had been left, an easel still set up in a corner, with an unfinished canvas on it. Sweeney went over to look at it. A winter landscape, much like the one just outside the window, was emerging from the white of the canvas. Bottles of turpentine and tubes of paint were scattered on a low table. A smock hung from a peg and a couple of finished Gilda Donetti canvases were piled against a wall.

Sabina pointed to a small pottery urn on the mantel. "That's her," she said. "I know I should have given her a proper gravestone, but I'm selfish. I wanted her here. You must disapprove."

"A gravestone is for the living, not the dead. I think it should be up to you," Sweeney said kindly. But she s.h.i.+vered. There was something creepy about the shrine.

"Are you cold? I can get you a sweater."

"No, I'm okay." Sweeney went over to the window and looked out at the white emptiness. "I loved seeing your house, but I suppose I should really get going. I think they're expecting me back at the Wentworths'. I can walk Electra back if you'd like."

"That would be wonderful." Sabina shut off the light and closed the door behind them. "It's a huge house for one person, but I can't bear to sell it. I feel somehow as though I would lose her if I did." Downstairs, she helped Sweeney and Electra into their coats.

"It's silly," she continued saying as she showed them out. "But I haven't really moved on, I guess. Sometimes you don't. Or can't. We live so much in the past here. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes," Sweeney said. "I think I do. I liked hearing your stories."

"Well. Come again. You'll be at the party?"

"Oh yes, the party. Sat.u.r.day, right?"

"Yes. We look forward to it all year around here, though it's such hard work for Patch and Britta. If I think of it, I'll look through Gilda's things for notes on the relief."

SWEENEY AND ELECTRA stepped out into the cold. It felt good to be out of the close atmosphere of the house. stepped out into the cold. It felt good to be out of the close atmosphere of the house.

"There was a lovely portrait of Rosemary upstairs," Sweeney said as they walked arm in arm along the snow-covered road. "It was fun to see it. She seems so much a part of things here."

"Yes. She does seem to fit right in, doesn't she. She's like her grandfather, I think. Has a real love for Byzantium. Emily-my daughter and Rosemary's mother-always hated it, found it stifling, couldn't wait to get away."

"It must have been hard having Marcus Granger for a father." Sweeney had been reading about the career of Marcus Granger. Though he had resisted the century's move away from realism and landscape painting, he had made quite a name for himself as a stalwart realist and larger-than-life personality. Bennett Dammers's book was full of stories about his famous temper.

Electra smiled flatly. "Yes. But I think it went beyond that for Emily. I think she found all of us hard, I think it was the colony."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I think what I mean is that almost all of the colony children have had trouble of some sort. We thought we were giving them the best possible life, culture and interesting people and art and more art, and it turned out what they wanted was some kind of midwestern suburban life they could reject in the end."

They walked in silence for a few minutes, Electra leaning against Sweeney's proffered arm.

"It seems like Ruth Kimball must have been a nice woman," Sweeney said awkwardly.

"Well, you know, Ruth Kimball also had a difficult time with all of us, I think. I feel badly about it now. We all do, despite our appalling show at dinner the other night. But she didn't like us much, had this idea that the colony had exploited her ancestors or something. I really feel so sad sad about what happened to her, that we were the last people she saw. Poor Ruth. She was so about what happened to her, that we were the last people she saw. Poor Ruth. She was so strange strange that last day that we saw her." that last day that we saw her."

"What do you mean, strange? What was it about her that was strange?"

"Well, of course we didn't actually talk to her, but Rosemary spotted her across the field, walking toward the cemetery. And then we realized that she had dropped her hat. Most unlike her, really. She wasn't the sort of person who dropped things. So I thought that she must have been hurrying or quite worried about something to have dropped it. We called out after her, but she was too far away to hear. It was quite inconvenient for us. The weather had gotten bad, and Rosemary had to go leave the hat on the back porch, so it wouldn't get buried by the snow. We almost got caught out in the storm. Of course, it all made sense later when we heard what had happened."

Sweeney was pondering this as they arrived at the front door of Electra Granger's big, federal-style house. Sweeney got her safely inside and was about to go when she looked down into the older woman's empty eyes and saw an unguarded nervousness pa.s.s across the pale, lined face. She wondered suddenly if blind people, unable to see emotions flit across other faces, sometimes forget to check their own facial reactions.

"My dear. I wonder if I couldn't give you a word of advice? Before you go?"

"Of course."

"We're very proud of our past here. Too proud sometimes, I think. We're also very protective of it. Be careful as you look around for skeletons in closets."

Sweeney was trying to think what to say when Electra Granger smiled, her face placid again. Then she raised her eyebrows impishly as she said, "It was lovely to chat with you. I'll see you Sat.u.r.day at the Christmas party, when the Byzantium colonists come out in all their glory."

SEVENTEEN.