O' Artful Death Part 5

Under "Denholm," Mary's family name, there was only one notation: "See 234871.x." But there wasn't any such entry in the file cabinet and she decided that it probably referred to a catalog of artwork. She had done some research in a family library once where the .x referred to paintings and drawings and the plain numbers represented letters and doc.u.ments. She'd have to ask Patch about it.

The problem, she decided after a few more minutes of halfhearted searching, was that she didn't know what to look for. She didn't know anything about Mary Denholm and her family, didn't really know anything about the Byzantium sculptors or the other gravestones in the cemetery.

Its creator might be right under her nose.

NINE.

DECEMBER 14.

AT BREAKFAST, Sweeney announced that she was going to spend the morning at the historical society.

"I'll give you a lift," Ian Ball said, looking up from his coffee. "I'm talking to this chap at an antiques place called the Emporium. I think it's just near the historical society."

Sweeney thought fast. "Thanks, but I have to get back this afternoon. I wouldn't want you to have to rush. I've got an appointment with Bennett Dammers. He's going to help me with my research." She had found the Byzantium scholar's name in the phone book and called him earlier that morning. "I'm afraid you may find me very old," he'd said and then chuckled in a raspy voice. But he'd agreed to see her that afternoon at his home.

"That's all right. I've got some things I want to do here this afternoon anyway. I'll be ready to leave when you are."

Sweeney, seeing no other way, reluctantly told him she'd go get her bag and see him outside.

Five minutes later they were in his little rental car, speeding toward town.

The day was slightly overcast, giving the snow piled along the side of the road a lavender cast. Sweeney thought about the impressionists and how they had been pilloried for making snow lavender. It was was lavender, the essence of it in this exact moment in time. She looked over at Ian's hands gripped on the steering wheel. They were the hands of a piano player, long-fingered and slender. She wondered suddenly who his favorite painter was. lavender, the essence of it in this exact moment in time. She looked over at Ian's hands gripped on the steering wheel. They were the hands of a piano player, long-fingered and slender. She wondered suddenly who his favorite painter was.

The landscape opened up as they neared town. They drove on past a couple of neatly kept trailers, one with a big pond in front and an enormous sign that read "Daddy's Li'l Slice of Heaven."

Across the road was a stretch of field and a farm with a big white house and lots of red barns. "Van d.y.k.e's Goat Farm," a sign in front read. "La Manchas, milk, cheese." Sweeney had a sudden vision of Don Quixote perched on a goat, tilting at windmills.

Ian smiled.

"What?"

"Nothing, it's just that farm. I had this image of Don Quixote riding a goat."

"I was thinking the exact same thing. With a little Van d.y.k.e beard," Sweeney said. They both laughed.

"I forgot about how the English smirk."

"We don't smirk. We smile inside." He relaxed and released his death grip on the steering wheel. He really was handsome. It had taken her awhile to see it. But there was something stiff and on guard about him that she didn't find attractive.

She raised her eyebrows and nodded.

"So tell me about this research you're doing," he said after a few minutes. "An exploration into the past shenanigans of Byzantium's artists?"

"I'm just trying to find out some more about the gravestone, who might have done it, why it's so strange." She decided not to say anything about Ruth Kimball's death. After all, she had absolutely no proof that it had anything to do with Mary Denholm and her gravestone.

"And why is it so strange?"

"It's just unlike any other Victorian stone I've ever seen. n.o.body was putting figures of Death on stones in the late 1800s. In fact, it would have been considered very odd. And also ..." She hesitated.

"What?"

"Well, it's beautiful. I guess that's why I'm interested. I just want to know who made this beautiful sculpture."

"It is is beautiful," he said as they drove into town. beautiful," he said as they drove into town.

The couple hundred yards of downtown Byzantium consisted of rows of colonial and federal houses, some empty and some well-preserved and converted into shops and restaurants for tourists. It was a pretty little strip, but there were discrepancies between the rarefied atmosphere of the colony and the village: a McDonald's on one corner, a rusting car abandoned in the driveway of an old gas station. Ian drove slowly down the main drag, then turned down a side street and pulled up in front of a small, yellow colonial with a sign out front reading "Byzantium Historical Society."

Sweeney got out and thanked him for the ride.

"So, I'll be back here at one," he said distractedly. "Good luck."

She slung her bag over her shoulder and was about to slam the door with her hip when she thought of something. How had he known where the Historical Society was?

He looked up at her questioningly and she shut the door.

Following the directions on a little calligraphy sign on the door, she lifted the bra.s.s knocker next to it and let it fall with a wooden thump.

Inside, footsteps padded toward her and when the door swung open, there was a tall, skinny young man with thinning blond hair and horn-rimmed gla.s.ses standing there.

"Can I help you?" he asked in a proper voice.

"Yes. I was interested in looking at some old family records."

"Of course. Follow me."

He led her through a narrow hallway and small room beyond, both lined with bookshelves and filing cabinets. The air smelled of stale paper and woodsmoke.

But the interior was very neat, with dust-free filing cabinets against one wall and old black-and-white pictures of town life in times past in gleaming gla.s.s frames along another. A poster above the desk showed an open book and cartoon characters of George Was.h.i.+ngton, Abe Lincoln and Paul Revere popping out. "Pick up a book about history. You never know what you'll find," it proclaimed.

"We have genealogical and historical files compiled for prominent town citizens, families that have been in town for a long time," he said, lifting up the pen with which he'd been writing, and pointing it at a stack of photocopied request slips. "Just fill out one of those with the name of the family and I'll get it for you. Oh, and please sign our guest book. We depend upon the generosity of the town taxpayers for our funding and it's nice to be able to demonstrate how many people are using our resources."

Sweeney handed him a completed request form and signed her name in the guest book. Under "area of interest," she just wrote "Byzantium Arts Colony." While the librarian went to get the files, she flipped back through the book, wanting to see who else had been here recently. Her curiosity was rewarded when she saw that Ruth Kimball had been to the Historical Society back in July. She had signed her name, but left the "area of interest" column blank.

"Here we are," the historical society librarian was saying as he handed over a stack of manila folders and pointed toward a doorway on the far wall. "There are tables through there."

"Thanks." She took them into the next room and settled down at one of the three round reading tables. There were four Denholm files: "Elizabeth," "Ethel," "Louis," and, finally, "Mary."

Each had a neatly typed sheet of paper with the name, birth date and death date of the subject. In Ethel's folder, there was a photocopy of a short newspaper piece announcing that Miss Ethel Denholm, of Byzantium, was to be married to Mr. Asa Hurd, of Manchester. The file indicated that she had given birth to a son and a daughter; the son had been Ruth Kimball's father. A note in the file also mentioned that Ethel had actually been a cousin of Mary's rather than a sister, though she'd been brought up in the family.

Elizabeth's file was even more spare, filled by just the paper with her essentials. She died in 1902, Sweeney noticed, twelve years after her eldest daughter.

Her husband's, on the other hand, was much more interesting. Louis Denholm, Sweeney discovered from his file, had owned one of the more prosperous farms in town. He'd had sheep until the 1890s and then dairy cows.

Also in the file were thirty or so photocopied pages of a book. Someone had handwritten at the top, "Byzantium's Places and Faces." From the typeface and the writing style, Sweeney decided it was a locally produced history book and settled back in her seat to read the pages. The first part of the section detailed Louis's status as a pillar of the Byzantium Congregational Church. A deacon for twenty-eight years, he had helped build an addition to the church in 1875 and had been a devoted member of the "Men's Faith Club," whatever that was. The pages also recounted an anecdote about an argument at the General Store between Louis Denholm and Herrick Gilmartin about the goings-on at the Gilmartin house.

"Mr. Denholm was upset about the colony and women on the lawn during the parties, and told Mr. Gilmartin that he was corrupting his daughters," the author noted, "but William Hohrmann, the storekeeper, stepped in and the argument was soon resolved." Sweeney felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Mary and Ethel, growing up under the thumb of such a father. The history went on to say that Ethel's son Geoffrey had inherited the family's home by the river and that his daughter Ruth now lived in it with her husband William "Choke" Kimball. The book, Sweeney saw on the last photocopied page, had been published in 1971.

Also in Louis Denholm's file was a faded, yellow-tinted photo of the man himself, suited up in formal dress, with a large belly and a walrus mustache, and wearing a pair of thin spectacles. From the sheet, she saw that he had lived to be eighty-four.

Sweeney had saved Mary's file for last and as she opened it, she prepared herself to be disappointed, because it was very thin. But as she turned the front leaf, it revealed an old photograph lying on top of the papers.

It was a traditional Victorian portrait of two girls and on the back, written in a spidery hand, it said "E. Denholm and M. Denholm, ages 10 and 17."

Sweeney sat up in her chair. The gravestone had without a doubt been modeled on the real Mary Denholm. In the photo, Mary's dark, waving hair was styled up on top of her head, and she had on a dark, high-necked dress, but the strong lines of her face were unmistakable.

Ethel, who was dressed in a white dress and had her fair hair cut in a tomboyish page boy, seemed somehow contained, not a hair out of place, her dress perfectly pressed. But Mary was different. Though her hair was put up neatly, a few coiling tendrils had managed to escape and hung down around her face. There was something wild about her eyes and a feyness about the set of her mouth. She was a strangely, hauntingly beautiful young woman.

Sweeney looked through the rest of the file. The last item was another stapled sheaf of photocopied pages from the local history book. This chapter was ent.i.tled "Byzantium Tragedies-Past and Present" and included a macabre listing of the untimely deaths of scores of Byzantium residents. On the fourth page of the section was a highlighted paragraph and a poorly rendered drawing of Mary Denholm's gravestone.

"Perhaps one of the most terrible tragedies of the 1890s was the untimely death of Miss Mary Denholm, a local girl who worked as a maid and housekeeper for many of the Byzantium colonists. On a hot summer day in August, 1890, Miss Denholm was swimming in the Green River below her house on The Island when she was pulled under the water and drowned. Her body was found later that day, and she was returned to her home, where she was buried later that week. An unusual gravestone, a monument to Miss Denholm's grace and beauty (artist unknown) stands in the Denholm family cemetery on The Island."

There wasn't anything else in Mary's file, just a handwritten note saying that researchers interested in more information about Mary Denholm could find references in the journal of the Byzantium sculptor Myra Benton.

Sweeney took it up to the front desk, where the librarian was now typing circulation cards at an old electric typewriter. She handed him the files and he placed her request slip on a stack of other slips. Then she told him about the note in Mary's file. "I was interested in having a look at that journal," she said. "Is it something you've got here?"

"It should be here." He sniffed. "But it's in a collection of personal papers down in Cambridge. Benton had a son-illegitimate, all very scandalous back then, you know. Anyway, the son went to the University and when his mother died, he left them all of her papers. We've tried to get copies for our files, but they're pretty possessive down there."

"Oh." Sweeney tried to hide her disappointment. She could see it when she got home, of course, but she wanted to look at it now. It was only eleven and Ian wasn't coming back until one. d.a.m.n. But then she looked down the quiet street and saw a squat brick building with a sign over the door reading "Harpett Memorial Library." Her spirits lifted. There was nothing she liked better than a new and unknown library, the stores of old novels and art books yet to be discovered.

The little library was cluttered, but cheery. A fire burned in a high fireplace taking up a wall of the lobby and a couple of big leather armchairs were set around a circular oak table. In the middle of the table was a pile of books-Gaudy Night, Sweeney saw-and a placard reading "University of Vermont Community Reading Series. Dorothy L. Sayers, Theologian and Shamus."

She decided to sit down and work on the poem for a bit.

An academic problem-such as Sweeney's task of explaining the poem and relief on Mary's gravestone and figuring out who might have done them-had to be approached from a couple of different angles right at the beginning. Otherwise, you risked going off in the wrong direction and wasting a lot of time.

So she went to the stacks and took down books on a wide range of subjects related to the poem. Then she got out her copy and read it over again.

Death resides in my garden, with his hands wrapped 'round my throat He beckons me to follow and I step lightly in his boat.

All around us summer withers, blossoms drop and rot, And Death bids me to follow, his arrow in my heart.

We sail away on his ocean, and the garden falls away where life and death are neighbors, and night never turns to day.

A wind comes up on the water, Death's sails are full and proud My love I will go with thee, dressed in a funeral shroud.

Now her tomb lies quiet, the shroud is turned to stone And where Death had been standing, is only the grave of her bones.

The reference to Death's arrow was very strange. A number of early American stones featured Death or his imps holding darts or arrows over the p.r.o.ne figure of the hapless human who was buried beneath the stone. Sweeney had once written a paper about the iconography of the dart or arrow and she remembered how medieval peoples had a.s.sumed that Death plunged it into the hearts of his victims, since no matter what it was the victim had been suffering from, he always died when his heart stopped. But the image was hardly used by the early nineteenth century, much less by 1890.

Then there was the reference to Proserpine. She opened Bulfinch's Age of Fable Age of Fable. Sometimes it was good to go back to basics.

In the vale of Enna there is a lake embowered in woods, which screen it from the fervid rays of the sun, while the moist ground is covered with flowers, and Spring reigns perpetual. Here Proserpine was playing with her companions, gathering lilies and violets, and filling her basket and her ap.r.o.n with them, when Pluto saw her, loved her and carried her off. She screamed for help to her mother and her companions; and when in her fright she dropped the corners of her ap.r.o.n and let the flowers fall, childlike she felt the loss of them as an addition to her grief.

She thought of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine, her crimped black hair like coal, the flowing peac.o.c.k-colored robe and red lips.

It seemed likely that the stone had been made by someone who was a later, much younger member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or someone who wasn't a contemporary but was sympathetic to their philosophy and tastes. Mary had died in 1890. The unnamed artist must have been a young protege who left England and settled in Byzantium, or an American who had adopted the Brotherhood's themes.

Bryn Davies Morgan was the most famous Byzantium sculptor. Sweeney knew that he had immigrated from Wales. It was very possible that he had lived in London for a while and taken up with the Pre-Raphaelites in his younger years. She found a copy of Bennett Dammers's biography of Morgan in the library's small but well-stocked art section and searched for references to the Pre-Raphaelites. There was nothing. And when she looked through photographs of his works, she knew she was wrong. It didn't take her Ph.D. in art history to see that Morgan hadn't done Mary's stone. It had to be someone else.

So she went and found the library's only book on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and reviewed the history of the group of English painters, poets, journalists, and hangers-on who, in the mid-1800s, had reacted against what they saw as the overly mannered approach of most artists since Raphael had painted in the early 1500s.

She looked up the one Pre-Raphaelite sculptor she did know about-Thomas Woolner. Woolner had emigrated to Australia, though, and from what Sweeney could tell, the gravestone wasn't his. But still, it seemed such a Pre-Raphaelite subject.

Her heart beating a little faster, she got out the photographs of the stone. The boat. The boat was referenced in the poem. She hadn't taken it any further than that. But surely the boat was also a reference to another favorite Pre-Raphaelite subject-"The Lady of Shalott," the famous piece of verse by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson that had always been one of her favorites. She went back to the bookshelves and got down a copy of Tennyson's collected works.

On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Round an island there below, The island of Shalott.

Sweeney s.h.i.+vered a little. It was almost as if the poet were describing The Island.

But the Lady of Shalott hadn't been murdered. She had sat in her tower, weaving as she looked at the world in her mirror and had brought death upon herself when she fell in love with Lancelot and left her tower.

Had Mary tried to leave her island?

Sweeney was sitting there wondering when she caught sight of a newspaper sitting on a table next to hers. "Local Woman Dead of Apparent Suicide," the headline read, and in smaller letters, "Police Say Investigation Continuing."

She began to read. "A local woman was found dead Tuesday, apparently killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Community members recalled a committed local volunteer and lifelong Byzantium resident this week as state and local police continued the investigation.

"Sources say that Ruth Kimball, 72, of Byzantium, went for a walk in the early afternoon. Kimball's daughter, Sherry Kimball, 35, also of Byzantium, discovered the body at about 5:30 PM in a cemetery near the family's home."

Sweeney scanned the rest of the article. State police weren't saying much, just that it looked like suicide, but that they always investigated carefully whenever firearms were involved, just as Gwinny had said. She was interested to read that the police had questioned Trip and Gally Wentworth at first since they had been target shooting nearby at the time of the murder. But, the reporter noted, a police source said that the boys had been shooting with brand-new .22 caliber hunting rifles, while Ruth Kimball had been killed with a World War II-era service pistol. Police refused to identify the weapon used or to say whether it had been owned by the dead woman, but they had reiterated that the Wentworth twins were not suspects, it was just that the possibility of an accident had to be eliminated. Sweeney thought of Britta Wentworth's drawn face. No wonder she'd been upset.

A number of community members were quoted as saying that Ruth Kimball had been a model citizen and that she hadn't seemed at all the type to do something like this. She was survived, Sweeney noticed, by her daughter Sherry and granddaughter Charley, both of Byzantium, and had been predeceased by her husband and son.

It hadn't helped much, but it had given her an idea.

"DO YOU KEEP old newspapers on hand?" Sweeney asked the librarian. "I was actually interested in really old papers, from the 1890s." old newspapers on hand?" Sweeney asked the librarian. "I was actually interested in really old papers, from the 1890s."

"We've got the Gazette Gazette and copies of the and copies of the Watertown Herald Watertown Herald for that period as well," the woman said. "They're in bound volumes downstairs. First door on the right. We're trying to get them all on microfilm, but it's expensive." for that period as well," the woman said. "They're in bound volumes downstairs. First door on the right. We're trying to get them all on microfilm, but it's expensive."

"Thanks. I hate microfilm anyway."

The bound volumes of both papers were stored chronologically and it was easy to find the ones marked 1890. Sweeney decided to start with the Gazette Gazette. She flipped through June and July and finally came to the August papers, which appeared to come out two or sometimes three times a week. Finally, after her eyes were nearly exhausted by the tiny type, she found the article she was looking for, on an inside page of the August thirty-first edition. "Tragic Drowning Accident" read the headline. But the piece contained exactly the same information as the Xeroxed book excerpts in Mary's file.

It wasn't until she hunted down the Herald's Herald's version of the same story that Sweeney hit paydirt. "Miss Denholm's body was found on the afternoon of the 28th by Mr. Herrick Gilmartin of Byzantium." version of the same story that Sweeney hit paydirt. "Miss Denholm's body was found on the afternoon of the 28th by Mr. Herrick Gilmartin of Byzantium."

Now that was interesting.