Judgment of the Grave (7 page)

“You’re like Scheherezade,” she said. “Keeping me on the hook.”

“Who’s that?”

“
The Arabian Nights
? Don’t you know about Scherezade? She married a sultan who said he would kill her, so she started telling him a story, except that every night, she said she had to tell him more the next day. That’s like you.”

“That man,” Pres said after a minute. “He smelled pretty bad, but other than that, it wasn’t that gross. He was like a big pile of rags or something. You could tell he was just…dead. Do you think that’s what being dead is? Just being a pile of rags and not moving or smiling or talking or anything? Not even knowing?”

“It may be.” Sweeney wanted to touch him, to put an arm around him or pull him into her lap or something, but she knew she shouldn’t. “I don’t know.”

He nodded, then said, “I was thinking. I know a lot about gravestones. I could help you maybe, kind of be your assistant, you know? I can take pictures and maybe you could give me assignments, like, to go and find a certain gravestone.” He looked up at her, afraid she was going to say no, and added, “You wouldn’t even have to pay me. I could do it for free.”

Sweeney picked up his hat from the ground and put it on his head. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Sweeney had dinner in town and was back at the inn by eight. Tired from her long day outside, she put on her pajamas, got into bed, and took out the stack of books she’d brought with her about Massachusetts stonecarvers.

Gravestone making in Colonial New England had evolved from a necessary function for public health into a sophisticated art. The earliest grave markers most likely had been made of wood. They had long ago disintegrated, but references to these gravestones as “rayles” in some probate documents led historians to believe they resembled fence rails or crosses.

As the early settlers of Massachusetts started using locally mined slate to mark the graves of their dead, the stonecutter became an important person in the community.

He was very often a farmer or housewright who also carved hearthstones and other stone products, and he was usually chosen for his profession because he had a rudimentary education that allowed him to carve names and dates and compose epitaphs. Sometimes a minister or teacher might be the only literate member of the community and would learn to carve.

The first chapter of one study detailed the lives and times of the Woodbury family of carvers. The first Woodbury had come over from Kent in the 1660s and settled in the Concord area, finding work as a stonemason. In the 1750s, a descendant named John Woodbury began carving gravestones for his neighbors, and the book detailed a series of probate payments made to Woodbury for amounts between £1 and £5.

There were a series of photographs of stones that had definitely been carved by John Woodbury, and Sweeney noted the unusual style of his lettering, the serifs scrolled and curlicued, the top ones to the left and the bottom ones to the right. She also began to see a pattern in the way he carved his numbers, the 5s oddly formed, with a straight spine, and the spine of the 7s extending far below the line. She had always been interested in the way that gravestone carvers tried to put their personal stamp on their pieces. The particular pattern of shapes and figures that a carver made when he put chisel to stone reflected the carver’s background, training, and developing aesthetic.

Most of Woodbury’s earlier epitaphs began with the words “Here Lyeth the Remains of…,” the use of “
lye
th” rather than “
lies
” being common until the later 1750s. After that, Woodbury began employing the new usage, and most of the stones had the rather unimaginative epitaph “Here lies the body of…who departed this life…”

The Woodbury family was distinguished by its simple triangular faces that reminded Sweeney of African masks. There were actually a surprising number of these mask-like faces on early New England stones. It had always been a puzzle to her, and she remembered wondering, when she first encountered them in college, if there had somehow been contact between these early stonecutters and the African artists who made their famous ceremonial masks.

She was reading along when a particular line of text caught her eye. “Woodbury’s death’s-heads are somewhat similar to the early work of another Massachusetts stonecutter, Josiah Whiting, who worked in the Concord area in the 1760s and 1770s. Whiting’s work shows signs of sophistication and remarkable potential, but it has not been determined whether he finished any gravestones after 1775.” Not been determined? Sweeney looked through the rest of the chapter for another mention of him, but there wasn’t one.

She read on. “Whiting’s sons continued in the stonecutting business and there are a series of later Whiting family stones in Concord-area cemeteries.” Sweeney took some notes and checked the index for other references to the family. But there weren’t any.

She wrote Josiah Whiting’s name down in her notebook. In a lot of ways, he was just what she was looking for. Someone obscure who hadn’t been written about a lot, yet someone who had a lot of work in the Concord area. The Woodburys had already been done, but Whiting was hers to discover. And she was fascinated by the three stones she’d seen already. Why had Whiting’s style changed so dramatically between the 1760s and 1770s?

There was also the fact that she now had a connection to the family. There was a lot she could find out from Pres and his father and grandfather. Did they see themselves as continuing the family tradition, or had they fallen into the mass-produced monument industry?

So, Josiah Whiting it was. She had chosen. Though it was almost, Sweeney thought, as though he had chosen her.

She checked the clock next to her bed. It was only a little after eight, but in London it was past midnight. Sure enough, her cell phone rang and she picked it up, saying, “You’re up late.”

“I am,” Ian Ball said, his precise English pronunciation familiar to her now. “Late night at the office and then an interminable client dinner. Really awful.”

“I’m sorry.” Sweeney put the books aside and leaned back against the pillows. She had met Ian Ball in Vermont nearly a year ago and they had had a short…she didn’t know what they had had in Vermont. It hadn’t been a fling exactly. It was more than that, but she hadn’t been able to figure out yet what it had meant to her and what she might want it to mean in the future. She had resisted getting in touch with him for some months, but ever since she had broken down and called him back in the spring, the late-night transatlantic phone conversations had become a part of her routine. At first it had been maybe once a week, then twice a week, and then every other night. Lately it had been almost every night, and Sweeney felt that they had reached some kind of crossroads. They talked about their childhoods, about his daughter, about books and movies and music and traffic and food and money. They did not talk about their feelings for each other, about the fact that they talked so often and had not seen each other since that Christmas in Vermont, when they had been thrown together.

Every once in a while, there would be a long silence and one of them hurried to fill it. But somehow they had wordlessly agreed to talk more frequently, and Sweeney now thought of their relationship—or whatever it was—as a series of infinitesimal gestures that moved things inexorably forward. It was like that game where you built a tower of little blocks of wood and then removed one at a time, hoping not to topple the whole thing.

But where was it all leading? She was conscious that Ian deliberately held back with her, afraid to spook her by getting too serious, by suggesting that they see each other, by telling her how he felt.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called you back,” she said. “I’ve had quite an eventful couple of days.” She told him about meeting Pres and finding the body in the woods, and about her decision to spend some time in Concord. “So, anyway, I ran into Pres again today. He’s offered to be my assistant. He’s such a funny kid. At times he seems younger than twelve and other times he might as well be forty. He was so matter-of-fact when he told me about his parents’ divorce, like he could understand why it’s better that they’re not together anymore, but I couldn’t help being mad at them. Why do people have kids with people they’re not sure they want to be with?” It took her only a minute to realize what she had said. Ian was divorced from his daughter’s mother. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Ian. I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” he said. And his voice sounded like it was. “If I could choose a life for my daughter, it wouldn’t be this one, but we manage. And I can’t really think about what-ifs, because this is what our reality is.”

“God, that sounds so
healthy
.”

He laughed. “Well, that’s on a good day. Then she calls me and says she hates Mummy’s new boyfriend and she’s miserable, when are we going to get back together, and I want to die.”

She pictured him holding the phone, his dark hair and the aristocratic lines of his face. Those dark blue eyes that she had found too probing, too eager to see into her.

They chatted about his work for a few minutes and then she said she’d better let him get to bed.

He hesitated as though he was going to say something else. She could hear him breathing. “Sweeney?” he said suddenly.

Sweeney took a deep breath. “What?”

Again, she could hear him hesitate. “Good night,” he said finally, a note of discouragement in his voice.

She switched off her phone and checked the clock next to her bed. It was only nine. She read halfheartedly for another couple of minutes, then turned out the light and slid down between the freshly laundered sheets. There was a particular pleasure to clean sheets. When she and Colm had lived together, she had never been able to get him to launder the bed linens, despite all of his socialist ranting about men and women sharing household chores equally. She had a sudden memory of their bed in the Oxford flat, a huge king-size futon, the sheets rumpled and wrinkled and stained. Colm had liked to sleep right up against her at night and he had a way of pulling out even the most carefully tucked sheets, leaving them worn-looking the morning after they’d been washed. One of the worst things about going back to their flat after his death had been facing the sheets that still smelled of him.

She inhaled the faint scent of lavender from the cotton and tried to imagine the room with someone else in it, a pair of men’s shoes marring the empty floor, a dark sweater thrown across the end of the bed, another suitcase lying next to hers.

And then, because the vision disturbed her too much, she pulled the covers over her head and tried for lavender-scented oblivion.

The fire was really going now, the sticks and newspapers she’d used to start it nearly crumbled away and the three birch logs blackened all around with orange embers glowing away in their center.

Beverly Churchill sat back and enjoyed the heat from the fire for a moment. It had been ages since they’d made one. When they had bought the house, she remembered telling Kenneth that she wanted to have a fire every night. It had seemed such a luxury, the wide, old fireplace with the ornately carved Victorian mantel and the stack of pristine birch logs that the previous owners had left behind. But somehow they hadn’t used it much. A few times at Christmas or when they had company, and that had been it. For the past few years, Kenneth hadn’t been home much in the evenings, and it seemed sad somehow for her to make a fire just for herself.

But it hadn’t stopped her tonight. She hadn’t been able to find the matches and she’d finally rolled up a piece of newspaper and held it to the gas burner on the stove, then carried it, flaming, into the living room.

Now, for the tenth time in as many minutes, she checked the clock over the doorway. It was eleven. Where the hell was Marcus? He’d promised her that he’d be home by ten, if you could call his muttered “yeah” on the way out the door a promise, but Marcus’s promises didn’t mean a lot these days. He had turned fifteen and become someone else. His grades had dipped, and he had started going out at night, shrugging and disappearing upstairs when she asked him where he’d gone. She had bought some parenting books to try and figure out how to set limits for him, but it sounded so much easier than it was. “Let your child know what is expected of him or her and things will go much more smoothly.” Yeah, right. She had let Marcus know she expected him to be home by ten over and over and over again, but it didn’t make any difference. He just stared at her and mumbled words she couldn’t understand, and by the time she had said, “What did you say?” he was gone, out the door in a cloud of cigarette smoke and acne soap.

She threw more paper onto the fire, strangely satisfied by the way each sheet shivered for a moment when it hit the heat, the way the flames licked at the corners and then whisked it away altogether. It was amazing how quickly the paper was gone, turned to ash. In five minutes, she was done. She sat for a moment watching the charred wood glow, the wispy bits of black paper fluttering around them, then got up and went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. There was a bottle of Syrah that she had opened the night before and she was surprised to find it nearly gone. She’d had only a glass. It must have been Marcus. She checked the microwave clock. He was now more than an hour late.

She took her wine back into the living room and watched as the fire burned hotly. For the past few days, she had been trying to keep as busy as she could, but suddenly she found she had nothing to do and she was terrified. She and Kenneth didn’t have a lot of friends in Cambridge. When they had moved into the house, she’d imagined herself having tea with women in the neighborhood, becoming best friends with the mothers of Marcus’s friends. But it hadn’t ever happened. For one thing, none of their neighbors ever seemed to be around, and the few she had met at neighborhood parties or out walking their dogs seemed too busy for friendship.

She heard a car on the street, then an idling engine. A car door slammed and she jumped up, trying to get a glimpse of it. But by the time she got to the window, the car was disappearing around the corner and all she saw was a silvery bumper. A key turned in the lock and Marcus came through the front door.

She didn’t know what to say, so she just watched him as he shrugged off his denim jacket and draped it over the chair next to the front door. She wasn’t even sure he’d seen her until he said, “Hey,” in such a soft voice that she could barely hear him.

“You’re over an hour late,” she said.

He kept his eyes on the floor and murmured, “Yeah, sorry.”

Beverly strode over to him and lifted the brim of his hat so she could see his eyes. He refused to look at her, though, and she couldn’t tell whether they were red or not. After a moment, he turned away, leaving the baseball hat in her hand, then started up the stairs.

“I don’t know what to do, Marcus,” she said finally, hanging the hat on the hat rack and going to sit on the couch. Marcus inched a foot up to the first stair, staring ahead, as though there were someone up on the landing. Beverly could hear her voice getting high and tight. “We’re going through a tough time right now and I need you to be a little more thoughtful. I thought something had happened to you. Don’t you see? I can’t lose both of you!” And suddenly she was crying. She didn’t want to cry, didn’t want Marcus to see her crying, but there was nothing she could do. She wiped her eyes on the back of her bathrobe. She stared at the side of his face, the tears running down her face. How could he just look up the stairs like that without saying anything? It was like he wasn’t even human.

She turned away and sat down on the couch, using a tissue from the box on the side table to wipe her face. Marcus looked even more uncomfortable, inching another foot up the stairs as though she wouldn’t notice if he disappeared.

“Marcus!” she said, her composure back now. “This is ridiculous. Did you take some of the wine that was in kitchen?” He inched a foot up to the next step. “Well, did you?”

“Sorry,” he said, still staring straight ahead.

“Sorry? Why did you take it? Do you have a drinking problem? What is going on?”

“I just wanted to try some. What’s the big deal? In France kids my age drink wine all the time. It’s practically required.” It was funny, she thought, how he always seemed younger when he opened his mouth. Surly, silent, she hardly knew him. But making his argument, she remembered him as a little boy, the stubborn way he always made her do exactly what he wanted.

“Go to bed. I’m too tired to talk about this. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

Silently, he climbed the stairs and vanished, as though he’d never been there at all.

She lay back on the couch. Damn Kenneth. Damn him! Why should she have to do this all by herself? It wasn’t as though he’d been much help with Marcus over the past year, but at least she’d been able to use him as leverage. She took a photograph of Kenneth and herself off the side table and studied it. It had been in New York, three years ago. They had been to see a play, and on impulse she had asked a passerby to take a photo of them. It was November and they had been wearing coats and scarves. Behind them, Broadway glowed red and green. They were grinning and Kenneth’s arm was wrapped around her shoulders. You could see his gloved hand gripping her upper arm. She had always liked the picture because it brought back what she remembered of the trip, their breath in the cold air, taking a taxi back to their hotel at midnight.

She held the picture high above the stone hearth in front of the fireplace, then dropped it and watched the glass shatter, the tiny fragments so broken as to be hardly recognizable as glass.