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

remember who was driving.
    The reporter had written a snide little paragraph about how police were unable to determine the cause of the accident because the Putnams had “tampered with the evidence.” The police had requested that the siblings all submit to blood alcohol tests, but a lawyer had been called and by the time he had spoken to everyone, it was too late.
    There were a few more articles about the police investigation, with a final one about a press conference in which Newport police announced they were closing the case due to the impossibility of determining what had happened.
    Then, about eight months after the accident, there was a small piece about Kitty and Andrew Putnam’s separating and saying that Kitty was living in the family’s Newport house. It mentioned that theirson Peter had died in a car accident the previous summer and listed the names of their surviving children.
    Some earlier articles told Sweeney about Brad’s siblings. A few years before the accident, Drew had been made partner at the family law firm. Camille had decided on public service, and at only twenty-five, had been elected to the state assembly. A more recent piece announced that she was running for Congress. Jack Putnam, Sweeney saw from a series of arts section articles about him, was a sculptor.
    She poured herself another drink and went to sit by her window, which looked toward Davis Square. Every summer of her childhood, she had gone alone to spend five or six weeks with her paternal grandparents in Newport. Their house was an old Victorian, right in town on Narragansett Avenue. It had a back garden, which Sweeney’s grandmother had planted with formal English perennial beds, and from the upper floors you could see the water.
    When she visited her grandparents, Sweeney had always stayed in the room that had been her aunt Anna’s. It was overbearingly feminine, but she had loved it just the same, the pink- and red-rose pattern on the walls, the chenille bedspread, and the canopy bed. The shelves had been filled with books about adventurous girls of the twenties and thirties, with names like Madge and Nan. She remembered lying in Anna’s bed, which always smelled of rose petals, moonlight filtering through the windows. She had looked forward to those summers all year, looked forward to waking up that first morning to the sound of her grandparents moving about downstairs, to the distant sound of classical music on the radio. No other part of her life had that sense of timelessness, of permanence. There was nowhere else she felt as safe.
    Until her mother had fallen out with her grandparents the summer she was sixteen and she hadn’t gone to Newport anymore. After she was in college, she had gotten back in touch with her grandparents, even went down to visit them one summer for a couple of days. But Newport had never again had the same magic for her; it never again looked as beautiful as she remembered it from her childhood.
    She remembered the thick, salty air, the constant rush of the sea.What had it been like for them, the sudden crash, then silence, being out there all alone with their dead brother and one of them—who was it?—responsible for that death.
    Before she got into bed, Sweeney made some quick sketches of the jewelry. Her photographic memory made it easy and she was pleased when they were done, though not quite sure why she’d done them. As she drifted off to sleep, she thought again of Newport, of the night air, and of the Wagoneer, hurtling through the night toward death.

SIX
    IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN by the time Quinn left the station. He was tired, but his brain was moving fast, churning and sifting images and information. It was why so many cops had trouble at home, he’d decided. You couldn’t just turn off your brain at the end of the day, couldn’t just go home and talk about the fact that the furnace needed to be serviced or that your wife needed a new car. He pushed down a wave of guilt. He’d