Read Judgment of the Grave Online
Authors: Sarah Stewart Taylor
After Quinn picked Megan up, Sweeney went down to the lounge for a drink in front of the fire before dinner. She was sipping a cognac when her cell phone vibrated in her bag. It was Ian.
“Hey,” she said, taking the phone outside and sitting down on the porch swing to talk.
“Hello,” he said. There was something cheerful in his voice.
“You found something?”
“I certainly did.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes. It was kind of fun, actually, looking through all these old letters. A lot of them were very pompous stuff about how well this lieutenant or that lieutenant was managing his command. Anyway, your friend was very accommodating and helped me find the ones that had been written right around April of 1775. There weren’t many, really, and it didn’t take me that long to sort through them. A lot of them were letters written when ships arrived in Boston or Plymouth, letting his lordship know that all was well, that sort of thing. Then I found one talking about April nineteenth. It’s funny. He doesn’t even mention what happened at Lexington. He just writes that the troops went out to Concord to confiscate munitions and were ‘successful in that task.’ But then he goes on about what happened afterward. That’s when things get interesting.
‘The Rebels’ treachery knows no bounds. As the grenadiers and Light Infantry returned to Boston, the Rebels hid themselves behind stone walls and inside houses so as to have the advantage. They killed a number of our men, but so many of ours as might be expected. The cowards wou’d not attack in the open.
‘The most treacherous act I saw that day, tho, was of one Rebel upon another. On the return journey, while under enemy fire, I and a young lieutenant went into one of the houses along the road to slake our thirst. It had been a good many hours since we had access to water. We meant no harm to the good woman of the house, but immediately upon entering, two of the Rebels also entered and forced the lady to go to the cellar of the house.
‘Martin called the man by name, “Whiting” it was, and spoke a few words to him, and the coward turned and with a great cry, he bayoneted Martin through the heart, killing him instantly so I was never able to discover what was the nature of the acquaintance between them. But the most extraordinary thing I saw that day was yet to follow. The other Rebel who had entered the house suddenly turned on this Whiting and the two of them took off in a great rush.
I followed and observed them mounting their horses and one taking off in pursuit of the other. The one in the lead, the killer of Lt. Martin, had a lead as his fellow Rebel’s horse had wandered some distance off and I had to wait for him to pursue unnoticed. ‘I followed, seeing it my duty to track and kill the killer of Lt. Martin, and so I followed in pursuit until we entered a wood, near the bridge where the Rebels fired at us only that morning. I followed behind silently so they would not see me, and watched as the second man caught up to the first in a small clearing. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but there were many loud exclamations and at once, the second man took his musket in hand and put the bayonet through the chest of young Martin’s cold-blooded killer. I watched as he stood over the body and then made to hide the body in a bush by the side of the bridal path. I watched until I was certain that poor Martin’s killer had been dispatched and then returned to the melee.
‘These Rebels must be put down, your lordship. They are savages, willing to kill even one of their own in cold blood.’”
“Holy shit! Baker lied!” Sweeney said. “That proves that Baker lied. You are amazing! I can’t believe you found it.”
“It wasn’t very hard,” Ian said modestly. “Is it what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” she said. “Although I don’t know exactly what it means. It proves Baker lied and that he killed Whiting, but the question is why?”
“It sounds like it was something that was said in the conversation between Whiting and Martin.”
“Yeah, which would support the idea of Whiting being a spy. Maybe he and this Martin had met before and Martin was referencing it. Anyway, thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Sweeney,” he said. “I have a late client dinner, so I should go, but I’ll talk to you later tonight or tomorrow. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She threw on a jacket and walked along Lexington Road to the Minuteman Museum. It was six, so she might have missed Cecily Whiting, but she figured it was worth a shot and was rewarded when she saw the slim, brown-clad figure locking the front door and heading toward her car.
“Cecily,” Sweeney called out. “Can I talk to you for a second?” Cecily turned around, and Sweeney saw annoyance pass across her face before she smiled.
“What’s up?” she called back. Sweeney walked over to the blue Honda. Cecily got into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. “What can I help you with?”
“I know you probably want to get home, but really quickly, I just wanted to know if Kenneth Churchill ever mentioned anything to you about Josiah Whiting’s possibly having spied for the British and John Baker’s having lied about what happened to Josiah Whiting on April nineteenth.”
The look of surprise that Sweeney had expected wasn’t there. Instead, Cecily smiled sarcastically and said, “He asked me about that. It was ridiculous, of course. I don’t know where he got the idea. There wasn’t any evidence to suggest it. It was just an idea he had. I think he thought it would have made a better book.”
Sweeney hesitated, not sure if she should tell Cecily about the British officer’s letter.
But Cecily decided for her. “Was that all? I need to get home to Pres.” She started the car.
Sweeney smiled. “Oh, yes. Thanks.” She watched Cecily drive away, then walked back to the inn and sat down on the porch swing, thinking about what she had learned. The most crucial point was that Baker had lied in his deposition, so everything that historians thought they knew about him and Whiting was based on a falsehood. Baker had also killed Whiting. She turned and saw Will Baker through the window, speaking to a guest. What would he say if he knew that his beloved ancestor had murdered his best friend?
She planted her feet on the floor and pushed herself back and forth a few times on the swing, feeling like she’d lost control of her project. It had seemed like such a good idea, a simple paper on the evolution of an eighteenth-century stonecutter’s designs. But it had gotten all mixed up with people, with Pres and Quinn and Cecily Whiting. It was a mess. She was planning to head into Boston tomorrow to try to find some of the probate records for Josiah Whiting’s stone, and she found she was looking forward to getting out of town. And Toby was going to come out for dinner tomorrow night. It would be good to see Toby. Then she would finish up her research and head home to write the paper.
Maybe she would just pretend she’d never heard anything about Josiah Whiting’s being a spy.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 20
Quinn lay on the bed in his room, listening to Megan sleep. It was late afternoon and he was exhausted, though he didn’t have much to show for it. He’d told Andy he needed to spend the day with Megan and had taken her to a pumpkin farm in Lincoln, then to a playground he spotted on the way back, and then out for lunch. Now she was sleeping and he was exhausted.
It struck him that this was how Maura had felt all the time. Was that why she had killed herself? The shrink that Havrilek had made him see once before going back to work told him that many spouses of suicide victims never really know why they had done what they’d done. “You have to come to accept that you may never know why. You have to come to accept the action itself.”
That was bullshit. Quinn hadn’t accepted it. He didn’t want to accept it. It had been fucking selfish, is what it had been. To go and leave him with Megan. He loved Megan—of course, he loved Megan—but Jesus Christ. He could feel himself spiraling down into the anger that he knew was there. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t have loved him. Couldn’t have loved Megan, to do what she did.
Megan made one of the small whimpering sounds she made in her sleep, and Quinn got up to make sure she was warm enough.
Stop it, Quinny, he told himself, lying back down on the bed. Think about the case. Just think about the case.
He took a deep breath.
The last known sighting of Churchill, the last one without doubt, had been Chris Wright’s sighting on the Sunday morning after the encampment. That was all they knew for sure. He looked back at his notes on the interview with Cecily Whiting. She had expected him to call that weekend of the encampment, but he hadn’t. His wife had expected him to come home after the weekend, but he hadn’t. He was supposed to show up to teach his classes, and he hadn’t. But no one had assumed at first that anything had happened to him. They had all assumed he was just off on his own. It struck Quinn that Kenneth Churchill was an extremely unreliable person. He didn’t seem to do what he was supposed to do, ever. This seemed an important detail.
He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, thinking about Beverly Churchill. He still hadn’t figured her out, and while he couldn’t see how she had had anything to do with her husband’s disappearance, he also was pretty sure that she was lying to him about something.
He closed his eyes. Just for a minute, he’d nap for just a minute, and then he’d wake Megan up so she would go down tonight. He lay there, conscious of his even breathing.
He was thinking about Josiah Whiting and then suddenly he was on a battlefield, a musket under his arm and a row of Redcoats approaching him across the field. He hoisted the musket up to his shoulder, but it wasn’t like any gun he’d ever used and he didn’t know how to load it. He pulled the trigger and nothing happened, and then the gun was heavy, so heavy he could barely lift it, and he sank to the ground, knowing the Redcoats were coming at him.
He slept on, and an image of Beverly Churchill’s face came to him unbidden. He had noticed her breasts beneath her thin sweater the last time he’d seen her. They were full and her nipples had been tantalizing shadows beneath the fabric.
Suddenly they were standing in a field and he was moving toward her. Her blouse fell away and she took his hand and put it on her breast. He held it and leaned in to kiss her. Her tongue was warm and wet in his mouth…. Then he looked up, and over her shoulder he saw Marcus Churchill, watching them. He tried to get away, but she clung to him and he kissed her again, her mouth melting into his….
He started awake, sweating and aroused, and he jumped up from the bed and rushed into the bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror. What was with him? It was dark outside, and back in the bedroom he checked the clock. It was almost seven. They’d slept for three hours. He’d never get Megan to go down tonight. He leaned over the playpen and shook her awake. She screamed and he picked her up and walked her around the room, soothing her.
“Are you hungry, little girl? You want to go out to dinner with your daddy? Huh?”
Megan just cried.
“That’s no way to accept a dinner invitation,” he said. “Come on now.”
Downstairs, the dining room was full and Will Baker found a high chair and seated them at a table near the window. Quinn gave Megan some Cheerios and asked Baker to bring her some mashed potatoes immediately. “I’ll order in a minute,” he said.
As he bowed his head to look at the menu, he saw Beverly Churchill coming into the dining room out of the corner of his eye. Embarrassed about his dream, he kept his head down, but she saw him and came over to the table. “Hi,” she said. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Of course not.” He stood up and pulled out the chair for her.
She smiled and sat down. “Marcus decided to ‘go out.’ I don’t know where he went. It’s not like he knows anybody here. I tried to force him to have dinner with me and at some point, it’s just, like, do you really want to wrestle with a fifteen-year-old boy? Who’s twice as strong as you are? He’s hardly ever home anymore, so I shouldn’t be surprised exactly. You’re lucky. When they’re that age, they don’t have any option but to do what you want.” She leaned over and smiled at Megan in her high chair.
“Well, I don’t know about that exactly.” He leaned over and smiled at Megan. “You pretty much do what you want, don’t you?”
“Are you a single parent?” she asked after they had ordered their food. “I ask because it seems like you always have your daughter with you.”
“Yeah.” He took a long drink of his water. “My wife passed away.”
She looked horrified. “I’m so sorry. It must be very hard for you. Taking care of her on your own.”
“We do fine.” He picked up the bottle of wine that Will Baker had brought and topped off her glass.
She took a sip and said thoughtfully, “When I think about it, I’ve been a single parent for a long time now. That’s the thing that…if Kenneth comes back, I feel like I finally see things for what they really are. I’ll probably leave him.”
Quinn was suddenly uncomfortable. “Well, you’ll have to see how you feel when the time comes.”
“No,” she said, a little too loudly. “It was having to tell you about it that did it for me. I mean, normal husbands don’t just go off for weeks at a time. Somehow he was always able to convince me that there was a good reason for it. But when I saw the look on your face, I knew how crazy it sounded. And I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to take this anymore.’”
Quinn didn’t know what to say. At some point, he was going to have to tell her about Cecily Whiting, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.
Their food came and for the next ten minutes they ate, Quinn feeding Megan mashed potatoes and mashed-up pieces of his cod. They talked a little bit about the inn, and Quinn told Beverly what he knew about its history. She finished her glass of wine quickly and poured herself another.
“Kenneth always said he stayed at some mediocre place when he came out here,” she said with a falsely cheery laugh. “What a liar! I’m sure he didn’t tell me how nice it is so I wouldn’t want to come with him.”
Quinn decided that if she was going to get drunk, he’d better get drunk too. He had another glass of wine, finishing off the bottle as they finished their meal. When Will Baker asked them about dessert, Beverly said she’d like a piece of cheesecake and Quinn had to wait while she finished it. He was intensely uncomfortable without being exactly sure why, and when she had finished and Will Baker brought the bill for them to sign to their rooms, he stood up gratefully, extricating Megan from the high chair.
They were leaving the dining room when he saw Sweeney sitting at a table near the fireplace. Across the table from her was a man with dark, curly hair. Sweeney saw him before he could slip by, and she waved him over. Beverly Churchill followed.
“Hi.” She stood up. “Tim Quinn, this is my friend Toby DiMarco. Toby came out for dinner,” she said, as though she needed to explain something to Quinn. He realized he hadn’t seen her dressed up before. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress made of some kind of old-looking velvet and her arms were skinnier than he’d thought they would be. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head with just a few curly pieces coming down, and it made her seem older and more serious.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Toby said. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but there was something about him that put Quinn off. He was wearing a leather jacket that looked like it probably cost as much as Quinn’s car, and he seemed a little too friendly. Quinn wondered if Sweeney had told him about Maura. “Oh,” he said, uncomfortable, “and this is Mrs…. Beverly Churchill.”
Sweeney’s eyes were wide for a minute and then she recovered and said, “It’s very nice to meet you. Sweeney St. George.” Beverly Churchill shook her hand.
“Well, enjoy your dinner,” Quinn said. He felt hot and flushed all of a sudden. He wasn’t used to drinking anymore, and the wine had been a bit too much.
Out in the lobby, he turned to Beverly Churchill. “I think I’m going to take Megan for a little walk,” he said. “She took a three hour nap this afternoon and I have a feeling that it’s going to be hard to get her down. The cool air helps.”
She hesitated for a minute, then said, “Do you mind if I come with you? Marcus is still out and I hate being alone in hotel rooms.”
He tried to think of a way out of it and couldn’t. “No, of course not.”
She held the door open for him to push the stroller through and they walked out into the night.
“I love the fall,” she said. “I love the way it smells.” He heard her take a deep breath and, just for the hell of it, he did the same. The air was cold and damp and smelled of mold and something sweet—apples, maybe. He found a sweater in Megan’s diaper bag and wriggled her into it.
“It will be winter soon,” Beverly Churchill said. “It seems like it was just winter, and here it is winter again.” They walked in silence for a minute and then she said, “So, is Sweeney a friend of yours?”
“In a way. She’s an art historian. I got to know her through another case I was working on. Then it turned out that she’s writing something about Josiah Whiting. Different from what your husband was doing, though. She’s looking at his gravestones. Hey,” he said after a minute, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about. I didn’t find anything related to his work in his office that day. But it looked like the desk had been cleaned off. Did Kenneth do that? Do you think he might have put the notes somewhere else?”
She didn’t say anything, and he had the distinct sense that she was buying time. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll look around.”
They came to Monument Square and Beverly Churchill said, “Look at that. She went to sleep.”
Quinn checked and, sure enough, Megan was asleep. “I should probably wake her up,” he said. “But I can’t quite bring myself to do it.”
“I remember worrying so much about Marcus sleeping and at some point I realized that I should just let him sleep when he wanted to sleep. Eventually they get used to a sleep rhythm.”
Quinn sat down on a bench in the square and she joined him. They were silent for a few minutes and then Quinn got up his nerve. “That day that I interviewed you at your house,” he said. “I asked you if your husband was having an affair. You seemed like you were just about to say something and then your son came in and you didn’t. Was there anything you were going to say to me?”
To his surprise, Beverly Churchill laughed. “Of course he was having an affair. He’d been having affairs for years. You’re right that I didn’t want my son to know, though. And I didn’t think it would matter since he’d done it so many times before and he’d never gone off with any of them. I didn’t think that could have anything to do with it.”
Quinn was silent and she said, “Ah, but you know who it is, don’t you? You were trying to figure out a way of telling me?”
He nodded and she laughed again. It was an ugly laugh and he didn’t like it. It made him nervous, put him on edge. “Who was she?”
“She owns a museum down here, where he was doing his research.”
She turned to look at him, her eyes wide. “Not Cecily Whiting?”
“You know her?”
“That bastard.”
“I’m sorry, do you know her?”
She turned to look at him, and in the light from the street-lights, he could see that she was crying.
“He talked about her. He told me about her son being sick and about how her husband left her for someone else. I didn’t think that…I didn’t think he would…” She reached up to wipe the tears away from her cheeks.
In his hesitation, she could hear his question. “I know it sounds crazy, but all of the…all of the other women were just people he met. Waitresses, graduate students. He never talked about them. But he talked about her.” She was sobbing now, and Quinn knew he had lost control of the situation. “He
talked
about her. What did he think, that he could just talk about her that way and then…” She slumped against him, sobbing nonsense words, and he lamely put his arm around her. She moved closer, her body shaking. “I don’t even care anymore,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I did. I don’t care. I’ll tell you.”
Quinn had once been calmly interviewing a murder suspect when the kid had started crying and admitted his crime while Quinn held him like a baby. He had a sense of déjà vu, but instead of telling him that she’d killed her husband and hidden him in a closet, she sat up suddenly and straightened her sweater, taking a Kleenex from the pocket of her coat and wiping her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot. What were you going to tell me?”
“Oh.” She stood up and in a second, she was gone. He watched her light-colored coat float across the green, across the road, and up into the cemetery. Struggling, he pushed Megan to the top of the hill and left the stroller anchored by a tree before following the ghostly glow of the coat among the trees. He was angry now, and when he reached her, he took her arm and turned her to face him. “What’s going on? What were you going to tell me?”