O' Artful Death Part 22

Trip turned and almost dropped the rifle.

"It's okay, Trip," Rosemary's gentle voice came from the porch. She had been standing out there in the snow, listening to them. "Just keep it on them. You're doing just fine. I can handle this now."

Then she came around the corner of the door and walked slowly over to Sweeney, her hands in her pockets. "Just relax," she said again to Trip, as though she were talking to a scared child. "It's okay."

Rosemary took off her hat and ran her hands through her hair. Then she got another flashlight out of her coat pocket and shone it around the studio. "You looked through our things," she said, looking up at Sweeney. Sweeney had expected to see someone else in her eyes, but she looked just the way she had the first time Sweeney had met her, pretty and lithe, her blond hair spiky, her cheeks pink from the cold.

"They're not your things," Sweeney said calmly, though she was very afraid. "They don't belong to you."

Rosemary stared at her for a moment. "So how did you know?" she asked quietly. "How did you find me out?" She unzipped her heavy parka, which was also caked with snow.

"Rosemary, shut up!" Trip yelled. "Don't tell her anything."

"Tell me," Rosemary said. "Doesn't seem like it could hurt now."

Sweeney's desire to know if she had gotten it right was so overpowering, it felt like a black hole she wanted to sink into. She moved slightly to the side and looked into Rosemary's very blue eyes, at the pretty little birthmark.

"There was a lot more to this than you and I kept getting confused by other pieces of this, by gravestones and deeds and word puzzles. But once I had boiled it down, I wondered about the burglaries," Sweeney said simply. "They seemed so random. Britta made a comment about magpies at some point and I thought to myself that it seemed we had a magpie for a thief. It was such a strange combination of items, mementos, keepsakes, then the electronic equipment sometimes. But every time, the paintings. It was stupid of me not to put it together sooner.

"It was strange, though, because no one made a big deal about which paintings were stolen. The names weren't in the paper and it seemed that they must not have been very valuable or famous paintings. There wasn't any obvious link. The only thing was that I knew a couple of them had been of you as a child, though I didn't put it together until tonight.

"I went to have tea with Sabina shortly before she was killed and while I was there, I saw a painting by Gilda Donetti of two teenage girls and a toddler. It was hanging in Sabina's house when I went to visit her the first time. The date on it was 1969. Sabina said it was a picture of Rosemary at the age of three or four."

Rosemary was staring at her, her eyes afraid, and Sweeney found it gave her courage. She went on.

"At the Christmas party, Frances Rapacci told me that he had owned a picture of you when you were a child, but that it was one of the ones stolen from his house when it was burgled. It didn't hit me until tonight that the pictures of Rosemary as a child might be the connection I was looking for in the burglaries.

"Marcus Granger's daughter had visited the colony once after her marriage, with her young daughter, Rosemary. She-Rosemary, I mean-was a beautiful child and it seemed that at least a few of the artists around the colony painted her that summer. When I started thinking about it, I realized it was possible that Rosemary Burgess was in a number of pictures that had been given as presents to colonists by Gilda or Gilmartin or other artists. There were probably pictures of Rosemary all over the colony. That's why she had to get them. Or get Trip to get them. I think she had caught Trip taking things from people in the colony, little things, things like my earrings, and I think she knew it must be part of a larger pattern of kleptomania and she told him she would go to the police if he didn't take the pictures of her from the houses and take other things, too, to make it look like a string of burglaries."

"I don't understand," Gally said, looking from Trip to Rosemary and then back at Sweeney. "Why would she want pictures of herself?"

"That's what I was wondering. The burglaries coincided with Trip and Gally's school vacations. At first I thought that Trip had taken them because he was obsessed with her, something like that. But there was something else about the timing. The burglaries only started after Rosemary arrived in Byzantium The burglaries only started after Rosemary arrived in Byzantium. I didn't see that. But then something happened tonight that made me see why Rosemary didn't want anyone to see a picture of her as a very young child.

"I read The Lady of Shalott The Lady of Shalott tonight and all the stuff about mirrors and seeing the world through mirrors got me thinking. And it made me see that I actually knew everything I need to about this. I remembered the painting that I had seen hanging in Sabina's library and I remembered that the toddler in that painting had a birthmark on her cheek, just like Rosemary. tonight and all the stuff about mirrors and seeing the world through mirrors got me thinking. And it made me see that I actually knew everything I need to about this. I remembered the painting that I had seen hanging in Sabina's library and I remembered that the toddler in that painting had a birthmark on her cheek, just like Rosemary. Only it was on the wrong side Only it was on the wrong side. It was on the left cheek. And yours"-she pointed to Rosemary's face-"is on the right. It isn't the kind of thing you notice, you know. If you remember someone as having had a birthmark, you don't really remember what side it's on.

"Rosemary had only recently come to live in Byzantium. In fact, no one had seen her since she was three years old, and the only person who might actually remember what she had looked like was her grandmother-who is nearly blind."

"Go on," Rosemary said.

"Her name isn't Rosemary Burgess," she said to Gally and Trip, then turned back. "I don't know what your real name is but I think you must have known Rosemary Burgess in London and when Rosemary died shortly after her parents did-in an accident or maybe not-whoever you are took over Rosemary's life, having heard stories about the wealthy grandmother. All you had to do was get back in touch with the grandmother, get a fake birthmark, since people would remember that, and show up in Vermont. I don't know if you just did it for fun, for what you could get out of it, or if you were going to take it all the way and Electra Granger would have died before too long."

As she talked Sweeney was looking around the room, trying to find a route of escape. There was nothing but the front door, and Trip was standing in front of it, holding the rifle.

"I think you felt that you could trick the grandmother and that there wouldn't be anybody else who would remember you as such a young child. This is the part I've been trying to figure out. I think that you got the birthmark wrong because you had been used to looking at the real Rosemary the same way we look at ourselves in a mirror. You thought of it as being on the right cheek, because that's what you saw in the mirror, so to speak. But it wasn't. It was really on Rosemary Burgess's left cheek.

"You arrived in Byzantium and everything was fine until you realized that you'd gotten it wrong. You could get rid of photographs, but then you discovered that Rosemary had visited the colony as a child and there were paintings. That must have been a shock to you," she said, looking up at Rosemary, or the woman she knew as Rosemary.

The woman said, "Yes. The first week I was here, my grandmother-Electra-took me up to the attic and showed me a box of photographs of Rosemary as a child. I panicked when I realized I'd gotten it wrong." She stood up and started pacing around the room. "It was so stupid. And it was just like you said. I had this image of Rosemary, with the birthmark here .... It was because it was so last-minute, you know. I didn't even think I was going to pretend to be her until I was in Boston. I thought that I would just come and meet the grandmother, tell her about Rosemary, you know. And then I was in Boston, and I thought to myself, 'Why not tell her I'm Rosemary.'

"We became friends in the first place because we looked so much alike. I was dating this guy who knew her from school or something and we were standing next to each other at a party and someone said, 'You two could be twins.' She was fun, you know, we always had a good time together, and I liked her, and we would go round and tell people we were twins.

"We moved in together about six months before her parents died. She didn't even talk to them anymore, hadn't for years. She was a complete druggie. I didn't realize it for a while, she was good at hiding it. But like her parents, I started to see signs, and like her parents I realized pretty quickly that there wasn't anything to do. She was one of the ones who die from it. She was determined to die from it, I think.

"But they died first. I took the call from the police and I sat up until she got home and I told her. She seemed okay. But a couple of nights later, I came home from work and I found her in the bathroom. The needle was still in her arm and everything."

"How did you find out about the colony?" Sweeney asked quietly.

"G.o.d, how could I not? She had always talked about the colony, about her grandparents and the beautiful houses and about how her parents had taken her away from it. She had all these books and everything. It was kind of an obsession, but I liked to hear her talk about it. It sounded so nice. Like the kind of place where everyone would treat each other well, where everything would be beautiful."

Trip had started to cry, but the woman seemed not to hear him. She went on.

"She had written a letter to her grandmother, to tell her about the accident. And a couple of weeks after she died, a return letter came from Byzantium. I opened it, because there wasn't anybody else to send her things to, and it was this wonderful letter, a sad letter, asking Rosemary to come and visit."

She looked at them. "I swear. I was just going to come to tell her in person. I didn't see how I could tell her about Rosemary in a letter, or on the phone even, after what she'd been through. And then I started thinking, what if I showed up and said I was Rosemary. I worried about my accent, but then I realized that she wouldn't know where Rosemary had spent her childhood. It was easy to tell the truth about myself, that I'd been born in England and that my father had gotten this crazy idea about having a farm in South Africa. That was easy. And we looked alike. I thought there might be some money in it. And I didn't remember about the birthmark until I was in Boston. I got a little tattoo. It was easy. But then I was so terrified when I saw those pictures. I didn't know what to do."

Sweeney said, "There wasn't anything you could do. You had already met all the neighbors with a birthmark on one side of your face, and you couldn't go and change it."

"That's right. I got rid of the photographs, pretended there'd been a flood in the attic. But then I realized that there were paintings. I hadn't counted on that. I almost left then. But I had started to love Byzantium. And Electra. That was the problem, you see." She looked very sad all of a sudden.

"It wasn't the kind of thing people would notice right away," Sweeney went on for her. "But one day, you'd be standing in someone's living room and they'd realize. You had to get rid of the paintings."

"It would have been fine if it hadn't been for Ruth Kimball," the woman said.

Trip was watching her in horror. "But you didn't kill her," he said. "That was Carl."

Sweeney looked at him and then went on. "Ruth Kimball has a nearly photographic memory. Just like I do. She must have looked at you one day and remembered what you'd looked like as child. Then she went to the Historical Society looking for proof in a book of photographs from the '60s. That confused me. But she must have found a picture of Rosemary as a toddler in the book and shown it to you. And instead of turning you in, she started blackmailing you. I thought she was blackmailing Trip because she knew he was the burglar, but in fact she was blackmailing you because she knew what was behind them. She had made the connection between your arrival and the burglaries and she threatened to go to the police. Instead you paid her. She used the money to set up a college fund for Charley. I think you must have gotten it from your grandmother. You had started handling the household finances and you figured she wouldn't notice."

Sweeney looked into the very blue eyes. "And you killed Sabina because she realized about the painting. At the party. She saw you reflected in the window and she remembered the painting and realized the birthmark was on the wrong side. She must have confronted you about it sometime at the party and so she had to die. But first you had to scare me. You pushed me off the edge of the ridge because you realized that I wasn't satisfied Carl had killed Ruth Kimball. And this morning, you came very close to killing Charley Kimball because she was snooping around down by the studio."

"I didn't know about all of it," Trip said. "I swear to G.o.d. I didn't know she was going to kill anyone. I thought it was just taking things."

"Okay," the woman said. "I think we should go outside now. Hand me the rifle, Trip."

He hesitated and she turned around to look at him.

"No," he said. He was crying. He dropped it to the ground, at Gally's feet. Sweeney watched, aware of every muscle in her body, every pulse of blood through her veins. The woman lunged for the rifle and Trip pushed her away. "Get away, Rosemary," he said. "I just want it to end."

"It will," she said. "This is it." She moved slowly toward him, smiling, her hands out in front of her as though she were approaching a dog.

And in the instant she had turned her attention to Trip, Sweeney pushed past her and through the front door, yelling for Gally to follow her.

She had taken off her hat and gloves while she looked for the paintings and the freezing snow lashed her bare skin as she stumbled into the trees. If she could just find the path, if she could just get on the path, she might make it back. She stopped, but she had lost her bearings and she couldn't find an opening in the trees, couldn't find anything to set one patch of swirling whiteness apart from another. It was disorienting, like being under water, and when the wind died for a moment and she saw the silvery length of river below, she headed for it. If she followed the river, she would be okay.

When she reached the edge of the woods, she sat and slid down the little slope to the riverbank. Out on the river, she could see patches of ice interrupted by the swiftly moving water, dark and oily, and she could smell its peculiar scent. Even half-frozen, it exuded a green, live odor, like some awakening creature, waiting in the storm. The mist that the warmer snow made as it hit the cold water was like the breath of the beast, encircling and hovering.

Sweeney ran, but the snow by the side of the river was deep and it was hard going. She'd gone a few hundred yards when she turned to see if Trip and Gally were behind her. She stopped. The snow whipped at her skin.

All she heard was the howling wind.

And then she saw the rifle, raised, and the small figure standing very straight and still, only twenty yards behind her. Sweeney turned, but the riverbank had started to rise and she kept slipping as she tried to scramble up the bank. She was trapped. The woman was coming at her and the only thing she could think of was the water. She waded in, the iciness climbing her legs as she tried to run in the thin strip of unfrozen water at the river's edge. There was ice on the riverbed too and Sweeny kept slipping.

It was only a couple of seconds before her legs began to go numb. They got heavier and heavier, the way they did in her nightmares, and she slowed, trying to talk herself out of it, but knowing there was nothing she could do.

She stumbled in the water, felt it come up around her like a blanket, and when she turned, she saw the woman, standing on the bank and leveling the rifle at her. Sweeney's waist was tingling. She turned and looked at the dark water as it rose up to meet her. She turned back and waited for the shot.

But out of the storm, a figure came leaping off the riverbank. It was Trip and he landed behind the woman, knocking her off her feet. She fell into the water and he went in after her, struggling for the gun. She regained her balance stood up, then seemed to lose her footing.

Sweeney watched it happen, paralyzed. The woman slipped and screamed. And then the current drew her under the ice. Trip lunged for her as she was sucked under and she grabbed the edge of the ice and Sweeney saw the white of her hands, gripping the dark floe before she let go and disappeared.

Sweeney screamed and her legs gave way as Trip rushed out to catch her. The snow came down and they stumbled from the river.

THIRTY-FOUR.

"BUT HOW DID she do it?" Cooper asked them. "We went over and over the alibis. She was with her grandmother the whole time. I know the old lady's blind, but ..." she do it?" Cooper asked them. "We went over and over the alibis. She was with her grandmother the whole time. I know the old lady's blind, but ..."

It was much later the next morning, Christmas Day, Sweeney realized, and they were sitting by the fire in the Wentworths' living room, drinking hot chocolate. She was wrapped in a wool blanket, trying to get warm. Patch and Britta, after going to make sure that Trip was all right at the police station, had come back and demanded that someone explain to them what had happened.

Slowly, for she was very tired, Sweeney had told them about Rosemary. Toby had not believed her at first, but Cooper and Gally had convinced him and now he was sitting next to Sweeney, looking very sad and very scared. Then, with help from Ian, who was sitting on the floor next to the couch, rubbing Sweeney's frozen feet, she had told them about Mary and Jean Luc and about how she had gotten interested in the murders and the burglaries.

"It was the hat," Sweeney said. "We thought they'd been together the whole time, and in a way they had, but when I was talking to Electra Granger, she said they'd picked up Ruth Kimball's hat and they'd had to go back and drop it off on the porch. I realized that probably she didn't mean that she had run all the way back. She stood in the snow and waited and Rosemary ran back.

"Later I asked Sherry if she had found the hat the day her mother died and she said no, so I a.s.sumed that it had been lost. But there was another possibility that only occurred to me after I realized about the birthmark. What if Rosemary pretended to find it, told her grandmother she was going to return it, and instead ran into the cemetery and shot Ruth Kimball with the gun she'd taken from the Kimb.a.l.l.s' barn earlier, then quickly arranged it to look like a suicide? Trip had told her the twins would be target shooting and she knew that their guns would mask her shot. She took Ruth Kimball's hat. Then she ran back and they continued on their walk."

"But I don't understand how you figured out about the burglaries. And the blackmail," Cooper was saying.

Sweeney took out the little bankbook and showed it to them. "It was a matter of looking at the numbers, at the patterns they made. Ruth Kimball had been keeping track of the burglaries and then she had received consistent amounts of money, increasing in frequency from the time the burglaries started. At first I didn't see it, but then once I'd focused on the burglaries, and realized that they only seemed to happen in the summer and school vacations, I started to think about Trip and Gally. Until I realized about Rosemary, I thought Ruth Kimball had been blackmailing one of the twins. My earrings had been stolen by someone in the house and when Gally returned them to me, I started thinking that he wouldn't have done that if he'd taken them, that it must be Trip."

She looked up at Patch and Britta and then at Ian. "That's why I couldn't say anything to anybody. I didn't want to .... It was Christmas and I needed to know if they'd been responsible for the murders before I did anything."

"But Carl was caught fencing the stuff from the robberies," Patch said. "He must have been involved."

"Trip dumped what Rosemary didn't need and he didn't want in the woods. Carl found it."

"Yes, that's what he told us," Cooper said softly.

"But what about the stolen items that weren't electronics or the paintings? Why did he take that stuff? The pictures that weren't of Rosemary."

"Rosemary told him to take them, so that no one would realize that the paintings of her were the true target of the burglaries. As for why Trip was willing to do it, I think Rosemary had found him taking something out of her bag, or her grandmother's. Something like that. And I think she knew that he had a problem. She used it against him."

She turned to Britta. "Early on, you told me that the burglaries struck you as strange. That the person who was doing it was like a magpie, picking things from here and there. 'They like glittery things,' you said. Did you know then that it was Trip?"

Britta looked up with tired eyes. "There had been a few incidents at the boys' school about a year ago. It didn't surprise me, necessarily. He had been taking things since he was a little boy. But this was the first time it had been outside the family, so to speak. The school wanted to go to the police, but Patch and I were able to keep it quiet. Trip promised that he would never do it again.

"Then when Sweeney's earrings were stolen, I just knew that it was him. They were exactly the kind of thing that he used to take when he was a little boy, glittering, sparkling things. I used to find my own jewelry under his bed, stuffed behind books, stuffed in his pockets. I was terrified that if you figured out it was him, you would go to the police and they would find out about the burglaries."

Gally, who was sitting on the couch with his father, said, "So was I. I used to follow him around when we were playing at other kids' houses and replace the things he'd taken."

"Did you suspect that Trip had anything to do with Ruth Kimball's death?" Cooper asked Britta.

"Maybe, no-I don't know. He's my son. I couldn't have, I don't know, I couldn't have lived in the same house with him if I'd really thought that. But there was a part of me that thought ... I was so afraid." She broke down crying and Sweeney watched Patch lean over to put an awkward arm around her shoulders.

"But I don't understand how Rosemary thought she would get away with it," Patch said after a moment. "Wouldn't Electra have figured it out at some point?"

Cooper said, "We think that she planned to have something happen to Electra. We discovered this morning when we were going through the house that she had begun transferring large quant.i.ties of money into her own account by forging Electra's signature. She knew that she might have had trouble claiming an inheritance because she didn't have any doc.u.ments showing that she was Rosemary Burgess, though she might have been working on that, too. But she had taken over all of the finances for the house and Electra wouldn't have known. All she would have had to do was either wait for her to die or arrange for an accident and disappear with the money.

"I disagree," Sweeney said very quietly. "I think that may have been her intention originally, but I think that once she got here she fell in love with the colony and with her grandmother. I think she would have been very happy to stay here. And I think she had fallen in love with Toby."

"We heard from the authorities in London just now," Cooper added after a moment. "It's just as she told you. The real Rosemary Burgess died of a drug overdose in May. The police got in touch with her landlord and discovered she had been living with a South African woman named Fiona Vierbeck. Immigration and Naturalization confirmed that Vierbeck entered the country back in June on a temporary tourist visa."

"How's Electra doing?" Sweeney asked. She had been thinking about Electra.

"Willow's with her," Britta said. "And we'll be here for her. I worry about her, absorbing something like this. She says she had no idea, that she wanted so much to have her granddaughter back."

Sweeney thought suddenly of Patch's painting of Willow and wondered what would happen between Britta and Patch.

"What about Trip?" Toby asked very quietly.

Cooper said, "It will depend on whether the people whose houses have been burglarized want to press charges. I don't know. As for you." He turned to Sweeney. "I don't understand why you didn't call the police. It was pretty stupid, you know?"

"I know. I know. It was just that it had to do with Toby. And if I'd been wrong, well ... I felt like I had to know before I said anything."

Toby took her hand and squeezed it.

IT WASN'T UNTIL much later that night that they told Patch about Louis Denholm's gravestone. much later that night that they told Patch about Louis Denholm's gravestone.

Patch said, "But why would he hide it?"

Sweeney said, "It's in Myra Benton's journal. After Mary and Jean Luc left for Europe, Gilmartin offered to buy a seemingly worthless piece of land from Louis Denholm for a large sum of money. Louis Denholm had been trying to convince Gilmartin to buy it for a long time and I think that after what had happened, Gilmartin felt that he had no choice. So he paid the money.

"But, of course, Gilmartin didn't care about the land and so he didn't check to make sure that the deed had been recorded. Louis Denholm thought he'd play a trick on him. I think he was that kind of personality-there's something in the journal about him loving puns-and I think he pa.s.sed that love for tricks and puzzles and puns on to Mary. Anyway, he hid the deed in a place that Gilmartin would find entirely appropriate, if he ever went to look for it, and he left a clue to the location on his gravestone."

Sweeney recited aloud.

"Think my friends when this you see How Death's dark deed hath slayed me He is a thief and taketh flight Beneath the cover of the night"

"I always thought that stone was odd," Patch said.

"We thought it was a code," Sweeney told him. "Ian and I. But it isn't. It's a pun. Louis Denholm loved puns. "Beneath the cover of the night with an 'N.' Beneath the cover of the knight with a 'K.' "

They all looked over at Sir Brian, who stood silently at the bottom of the staircase.

"It wasn't very nice, hiding it in Gilmartin's own house. But I think Louis Denholm must have gotten a kick out of that. Can I ..."