Judgment of the Grave (11 page)

His face was different. As Sweeney listened to him talk about Kenneth Churchill, she studied him, trying to figure out what it was. She remembered the first time she’d seen him, at the police station, when she’d been called in to look at the jewelry found on Brad Putnam’s body, and she’d disliked him at first, because he had the kind of cocky, athletic good looks that she’d always found off-putting in a man. But as she looked at him now, she saw lines around his blue eyes and his mouth that made his face seem longer and older. He had let his dirty blond hair grow out from the military crew cut she remembered and she saw that his hair was slightly wavy—and shot through with gray. There was something about him that made her sad, and made her remember the last time they’d seen each other.

He was telling her about the investigation. “So, anyway, when we heard that a body had been found, we thought it had to be Churchill, but it’s not and now I’m right back where I started, trying to figure out what happened to the guy, trying to figure out if he had anything to do with this death. I can’t believe you were there when the kid found him.”

“They still don’t know who he is?”

“Apparently not. I’ll get in touch tomorrow and get an update, but they’ve talked to a lot of these reenactment people and no one knows who he is.”

Sweeney sat down in the armchair in his room and watched him unpack Megan’s diaper bag. “How can they not know? There was a reenactment the weekend before up near where the body was found. He must have come from there.”

“You’d think so.” He lay Megan down on the bed and changed her into a red fuzzy sleeper.

“So, you think that his research into Josiah Whiting may have had something to do with his disappearance?” she asked. She’d already told him about her own interest in Josiah Whiting’s gravestones and what she’d learned about his disappearance on April 19.

“Not necessarily. But I’m feeling like if I can retrace his steps down here, I might be able to figure out when he disappeared. He was down here to do research and to participate in the reenactment, so I think it makes sense to figure out what he was looking into. What got you interested in Whiting, anyway?”

Sweeney took her notebook out of her bag and opened it to the page where she’d made sketches of the Josiah Whiting stones. “His death’s-heads are really interesting,” she said, pointing to the pictures. “He’s got this Medusa hair thing going on, for one thing, and so the question is: What did it mean for him? Why did he choose to do it like that? And then if you look at the way they change over time, you have to ask why. Carvers’ work would get better over time, more skilled, but this goes beyond that. His work gets angrier, more tormented. I’m fascinated by that.”

“You would be,” Quinn said.

He’d been holding Megan, who had quietly observed the conversation, but now she squirmed in his arms. Sweeney leaned over and took one of her hands. “Hello, Megan,” she said. “You’re so much bigger than the last time I saw you.” Megan, who now had a head of fine blond hair and a broad, gummy smile, grinned at her accomplishment.

“How old is she now?” Sweeney asked. “I’m terrible at guessing babies’ ages. She could be three or three months, for all I know.”

Quinn grinned and put her down on the throw rug on the wooden floor, where she stood, hanging on to the side of the stroller. “Ten months. She’ll be walking soon. She’s almost there. See how she uses her heels.” Sweeney watched as Megan flexed up and down on her feet, taking little steps while she held on to the stroller.

“That’s really cool,” she said. “I see what you mean. It’s like she’s testing different ways of walking, to see which one works best.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, watching how they pick things up, sounds and little mannerisms and stuff.” Quinn looked embarrassed for a moment, then smiled down at Megan and smoothed her hair.

“So, how are you doing?” Sweeney asked him. She wandered over to the desk and flipped through the tourist pamphlets on top, trying to seem nonchalant in case he didn’t want to talk about it.

Quinn cleared his throat. “We’re doing…we’re doing okay. Having Megan, I kind of had to get it together. That was probably good.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” And she could. If she had had someone else to worry about in those awful weeks after Colm’s death, she might have had to pull it together too. She said impulsively, “I should have called or something, after. I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“It’s okay. It’s hard.”

“Yeah, well…Anyway,” she said, “I don’t know if you knew that there’s a reenactment tomorrow. I was thinking about going. Seems like it might be interesting.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Yeah, I’m going too. I’m going to ask around to see if anybody remembers seeing Churchill that weekend.”

“Hey, maybe we could kind of go together. You’ll need someone else there to help you with Megan. I could take her while you interview people.”

She could see him contemplate that. He glanced at Megan.

“Okay,” he said finally. “What time does it start?”

*   *   *

“He’s the cop I told you about, the one whose wife killed herself,” Sweeney told Ian on the phone that night. She was sitting up in bed with a glass of wine poured from the bottle she’d bought down at the tavern. It wasn’t very good—she hadn’t been willing to go for the $40 bottle—but seeing Quinn had unsettled her somehow and she needed to relax.

“Oh, yes,” Ian said. “Poor man. What an awful thing. How is he doing?”

“It’s hard to tell. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. He had tried to help her, but I think he felt like he should have done more.”

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“But how much can you help someone? I mean, is it possible to help someone if they’re really in that bad a way?”

“I don’t know,” he said simply. “There are probably some people who you can’t help. Some people who are determined and, well, I don’t imagine it’s anybody’s fault.”

He was quiet and she knew he was thinking about her father, wondering if he should say any more.

“So, anyway, I’m going to help him with the baby tomorrow, so he can question people at this encampment.” She wasn’t sure why she felt she needed to tell him about it.

“Oh, right. Sounds like fun.” Was that an edge in his voice? She wasn’t sure.

“I went to the Old North Bridge today,” she said, changing the subject. “That’s where our guys vanquished your guys.”

He laughed and she thought how much she liked his laugh. It was because it was so surprising. She pictured him, his dark, neatly cut hair and nobly shaped head, his eyes, which were serious behind his glasses, and then that laugh. “Yes, we’re very good at getting vanquished by uppity colonials.”

“They have a little memorial to the Redcoats, though. A little plaque that says, ‘They came three thousand miles, and died / To keep the past upon its throne: / Unheard beyond the ocean tide / Their English mother made her moan.’”

“That’s a backhanded tribute if I ever heard one,” Ian said with a little snort.

“I know. It’s true, though.”

“How so?”

“Well, it is kind of sad when you think about it. These young guys who came all the way over here to fight for an outmoded system. Defending a tyrannical regime whose days were numbered, anyway.”

He hesitated. “Well, now. That’s a bit harsh.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Oh, come on, Sweeney. That’s just a kind of patriotic fairy tale. The truth is that the American colonists were getting rich in the New World and they just didn’t want to share the wealth with the Old World. It was all about taxes. If a bunch of rich landowners decided they didn’t want to pay taxes to the government, we wouldn’t call them patriots, we’d call them greedy. Now, I will admit that we were outfoxed by your Minutemen. They knew how to fight. Our men were used to a different kind of war. Should have given themselves more practical uniforms, for one thing.” He said it lightly and Sweeney knew she had the choice of letting it go or following through.

She wanted to let it go, but instead she felt a return of the uncharacteristic national pride she’d felt at the bridge. “That’s ridiculous. It was about much more than taxes. It was about self-determination and freedom. It wasn’t the taxes they objected to, it was that they were taxed and had nothing to say about how their taxes were spent. It was about representation. And about unreasonable invasions of privacy.”

“Sweeney, I’m as cool-eyed about the British empire as the next person. Throughout history we’ve been awful bullies, and colonialism has caused most of the terrible problems in the world, but I’m just saying that you can’t pretend the Revolutionary War wasn’t about the same things all wars are about: money and land, those who have them protecting what they’ve got and those who don’t wanting them.”

Sweeney was fuming, but she didn’t know what to say to him. “Maybe so,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Are you mad? I thought we were just…”

“No, I’m just tired. Anyway, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Sweeney…”

“Good night, Ian.”

She hung up and got ready for bed, still angry but not exactly sure why. She was hardly a blindly passionate patriot. Politically liberal, decidedly pacifist, she was usually among the first to bash American foreign policy overseas. But this had mattered to her. Why? It had to be Concord, she decided. There had been something deeply affecting about being at the bridge today, about seeing the spot where men had died for an idea. Of course Ian was right; it was much more complicated than that. But it was true that men had spilled their blood for an idea.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She lay in bed, thinking of Colm, and was transported back to one of the only moments of her life when she was sure she had really been happy. She and Colm had only known each other for four months or so, but she had already fallen hard. She remembered the sense of anticipation when she knew they were going to see each other, the way she could listen to him talk for hours. It was early spring and they were on their midterm holidays and he had suggested, one night on the way home from a pub, that they go up to the Lake District for a week. “We’ll hike and see the daffodils,” he said. They had driven up the next day and checked into a youth hostel in Windermere that was full of German teenagers.

Sweeney had loved the Lake District. It had been a warm, sunny spring. The weather was glorious and the lambs had all just been born. They were everywhere, the snowy tiny creatures, in singles or in pairs. When they had returned from the holiday, Sweeney had developed her film, only to find three rolls of identical pictures of lambs. Days, they hiked all around the lakes. They visited Wordsworth’s cottage and Beatrix Potter’s and in a little shop near Windermere, Colm had bought her a silver bracelet that had “William Wordsworth” written in script on the inside. Nights, Colm played music and sang, and they cooked odd and incomplete meals in the hostel kitchen.

It had been in the Lake District that they had fallen in love. Hiking high above Lake Windermere, they had stopped for a picnic off the trail, and they had found, finally, a field of daffodils and had stopped to have their picnic among the greens and yellows, then made love as the sweet scent of grass and sun rose up around them. Afterward, she had looked up to find that Colm was crying. At first she had panicked, but then he had grasped her arms as though he were trying to stop her from falling, and he had looked into her eyes and said, “Sweeney, I love you,” in his rough brogue, and then she had been crying and she had said that she loved him too.

In the middle of the night, Sweeney got up to go to the bathroom. Her head was still full of the Lake District and the green-and-yellow fields of daffodils, but when she looked out the window, she remembered that it was fall. It seemed impossible that she’d find those daffodils again. She got into the empty bed and lay down in the place where someone else would sleep, if someone else had been there.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16

George Whiting liked going into the showroom on the weekends. It was quiet and he could look through the mail without Bruce hanging over his shoulder and telling him not to get it messed up. He could sit at the big desk and flip through the catalogs and check things he liked without Bruce saying, “No one’s going to take that. Too big.”

The showroom was dark when he went in, and he left the lights off and stood for a minute in the doorway, his keys in his hand. They hadn’t set a day for his retirement yet, but he found himself wondering if they were going to do something to mark it, if he would hand the keys over to Bruce or something like that. When he’d taken over the business, it had been because his father had died suddenly, in his sleep of a heart attack at fifty-eight. George had been thirty, just married to Lillian, and he remembered going in that next morning and thinking, “It’s mine. The business is mine.” That had been over in the other building, and he had stood in the door and looked around and realized that every little piece of paper, every pen, every tool and file and block of granite now belonged to him.

Bruce wouldn’t feel that way, of course. He’d felt that the place belonged to him for a long time now. Too long a time now. That had been George’s fault, maybe. Bruce had always been so good at dealing with clients that George had kind of let him take over that part of things years ago. And then when Lauren had come along, Bruce had wanted to turn all the bookkeeping over to her. “She’s trained to do it,” he told George. “She can do it on the computer, and everything will be really easy to figure out.”

Somehow, George had persuaded him to leave the bookkeeping as it was, but he knew that as soon as he retired, Lauren was going to love putting everything in the computer and printing out all her little checks. She’d shown him how it worked once, how she wrote the check on the computer and it automatically deducted from the accounts, then printed out on the little blue checks she ordered from a mail-order stationery company. Maybe her way was faster, but he liked the way he’d always done it. He kept everything in a big notebook and he could turn to any page and know what he was looking at.

He sat down at the big desk and used his key to open the bottom drawer of the desk. He supposed he’d have to give it to Bruce eventually. But for now, he was the only one who could get in there.

He took out the notebooks and lay them out on the desk, checking and rechecking the numbers, then got the stack of receipts from the box where Lauren put them and laid them out, entering the numbers carefully with his black pen. It was something he loved to do and usually it made everything seem okay, the numbers adding up and making sense right there on the page.

But today they didn’t. He went over them again to be sure. There was something wrong. He tried again, but they wouldn’t add up. What was it? There was money missing. Quite a lot. He sat back in his chair. There had to be an explanation, but he was damned if he could figure out what it was.

He would just have to try again. Tomorrow, when his mind was fresh. That was what he’d do. That was what he’d done with the tomatoes this year. He’d been battling tomato worms and he hadn’t known what to do. In two nights they’d nearly cleaned him out. He’d gone to bed one night not knowing what to do and then when he’d woken up in the morning, he’d known. Just like that. As though he’d been visited in the night by the garden fairy, he’d known that he needed to use both of the powders, one right after the other, and that was what he had done and it had worked. Look at how his tomatoes had turned out. He had picked a bowlful, probably the final crop, just last week.

He was thinking about his tomatoes when he heard a car engine outside and stood up to look through the plate-glass window. It was Bruce. George gathered up all the notebooks, shoved them in the drawer and locked it, then restacked the receipts in the box and pretended to be flipping through the mail.

“Hey,” Bruce said, coming in the door. “What are you doing here?”

“Just wanted to go over a couple of things.” George didn’t look up at him. “How ’bout you?”

“Oh, I’ve got a family coming in. Ninety-three-year-old mother. She already told them what she wants, so it’s just a matter of putting it all together.”

“Well, good, then. That’s that.”

Bruce studied him. “You okay?”

George didn’t feel the need to dignify that with a response. “Did you see these?” He opened one of the catalogs and pointed to a series of laser-cut memorials made for members of the military. You could add on various symbols and there was some very nice art. George particularly liked one of a lone soldier staring out at a horizon dotted with what looked like fireworks. “We should start carrying these, especially with everything going on over in the Mideast.”

Bruce looked over his shoulder and gave a little snort. “You mean, so we’ll be prepared when the local boys start coming home in body bags?”

George stood up and looked his son in the eye. “Don’t talk to me like that. You know that’s what I mean. What’s wrong with honoring the young men and women who are putting their lives on the line for you and me? What’s wrong with that?”

Normally, Bruce was up for an argument about war, but today he backed off and said, “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it,” picking up the mail George had been looking at and flipping through it, taking out some more catalogs and opening an envelope in his signature way, by tearing off one end.

George wasn’t sure why it made him so mad, but he would have been happier if Bruce had stood up to him. “Then, why do you talk to me like that?” It suddenly occurred to him that he wasn’t just talking about this conversation, he was talking about all the conversations he’d had with Bruce lately.

“Why do I talk to you like what?”

“Like you think I’m pathetic.”

“I don’t think you’re pathetic. I think it’s pathetic that there are kids coming home in body bags, that’s all.”

“They’re not just coming home in body bags. They gave their lives for their country.” George was mad now. “They gave their lives for their country. And you don’t have any right—”

“Any right to what?” Bruce cut in, his fists clenched at his side. George stepped back. He found he was a little afraid of his son all of a sudden. “I have every right.” He stared George down, his face red and angry. “It was just luck I didn’t ‘give my life’ for my country, and you know what? I wasn’t happy to give it, Dad. I wasn’t.”