Mansions Of The Dead by Sarah Stewart Taylor Read Free Book Online

hate going to those things alone. They always stick you at a table with the teenage cousins or something.”
    “Of course. But don’t wear something weird.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Toby disapproved of Sweeney’s affinity for vintage clothes. “Just what I said. Don’t wear something weird. It’s a wedding. It’s supposed to be a happy occasion.”
    “All right. But I’ll only promise if you promise not to hit on teenagers.” The last time they’d gone to a wedding together, Toby had ended up going home with the bride’s nineteen-year-old sister.
    “Ha,” he said, flicking a palmful of soap bubbles at her. “Ha, ha, ha.”
     

     
    When Toby had gone, Sweeney looked up at the antique mantel clock on her bookshelf. It was only eight. Not too late for reporters’ deadlines. She found the phone book and dialed the main number for the
Boston Globe
.
    “Paul Blum, please.” The secretary put her through. Paul was a friend of Sweeney’s from college and had recently come back to Boston after a stint in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was covering the cops beat now and Sweeney was betting that he’d been put on the Brad Putnam story.
    “Hi, Sweeney,” he said distractedly. “It’s not a great time. I’m on deadline. I’m sure you heard about this thing with the Putnam kid.”
    “I know. I know. Look, he was one of my students and I was thinking I could give you a quote about him. I knew him pretty well. He was a nice kid.”
    “Great. Let me bring up the . . . okay. Go ahead.” Sweeney gave him some very nice words about Brad, about his talents as a scholar and her regard for him. When she was done, Paul said, “Listen, thanks a lot. I’ve been having trouble getting anything like that. That family has a pretty formidable PR operation. I owe you one.”
    “Actually,” Sweeney said, “I was going to see if you could do me a favor. After you’ve filed your story, fax or e-mail me whatever you’ve got on the Putnams. Stuff about the accident, about the family business. Anything recent. I’m just kind of curious, since I knew him and all.”
    “Okay, great. I’ve got it all right here. You can look it up on the archives online if you want, but there’s a charge and it’ll take a lot of searching to find all of it. I’ll fax it. But it’ll be a couple of hours or so. That all right?”
    “Yeah. Thanks.”
    She tried halfheartedly to clean up a bit around the apartment and to not stare at the fax machine. It was just after ten when the fax line rang and the machine began to spit out paper. She poured herself another scotch, and when the machine was finished, took the stack into bed with her and began to read.
    From the printed sheets Paul had sent her, Sweeney surmised that the
Globe
archive only went back to 1979. There were a couple of pieces about the death of Senator John Putnam, a formal obituary and a long story about the star-studded funeral. Sweeney noted that there weren’t any stories about the death of Paddy Sheehan. She had assumed he was dead too but apparently not. He must be at least eighty by now.
    And then there was a piece from five years ago, when Brad was sixteen, about the accident near the family’s Bellevue Avenue home in Newport.
    “Celebration turned to tragedy last night for one of Newport’s most well-known families,” the article started off. As far as she could tell, Brad and his younger brother Peter, fifteen, their older brother Drew, twenty-nine at the time, another older brother named Jack, who had been twenty-five, and their sister Camille, twenty-eight, had been driving home from a Newport bar called Full Fathom Five when the family’s Jeep Wagoneer went off the road and into a ditch. Peter had been thrown out and had been killed instantly. When the police arrived on the scene, the Putnam siblings were trying to resuscitate him. When questioned by police, the Putnam children had all said that they were knocked out directly after the accident and couldn’t