Judgment of the Grave (27 page)

“I didn’t want to ask how sick he is,” she told Ian when she got back from the hospital later that night. “I think I was afraid to find out how far the leukemia’s gone.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“It’s funny,” she said. “I haven’t known him very long, but I feel as though I won’t be able to stand it if he dies. It’s so damned unfair. He’s twelve years old.”

“It’s awful,” he said. “It’s really awful.”

She felt the tears coming and at first she tried to stop them, but then she couldn’t and she cried, letting him hear her, letting him hear every sob. He listened to her.

“I wish you were here,” she said when she had stopped. And at once, she knew she meant it. She did. She wanted him there, she wanted to find out what they were. Suddenly she wanted it more than anything.

“Sweeney,” Ian said. “I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t entirely honest when I said that I could come for a visit. Look, the thing is, we’d been thinking of opening a Boston branch of the auction house for years now, even before I met you. It means I would be over there for six months or so, getting things up and running and, well, I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it. But I realized that I need to just put my cards on the table and tell you that I want to try to see what’s here.

“Listen, I hope you don’t think that this is really presumptuous. I can—”

“No, no. You’re right,” Sweeney said. “I want you to come. I think you’re right that we need to, you know…find out what’s here. I think it will be a good thing.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

His voice was warm over the phone lines. “Good.”

Spent and nervous, she poured herself a glass of wine after they hung up, and took out all of her notes on Josiah Whiting to try to figure out what she could possibly write about him. She didn’t have absolute proof that Whiting had been a spy, so she couldn’t put his evolving designs down to that. She could just write about the designs. It might not be very intellectually honest, but she was too exhausted for intellectual honesty.

The copies of Churchill’s notebook were lying on the desk and she paged through them again, looking for anything she’d missed. What insights had Churchill gained into the gravestones? Maybe that was a good place to start. She came to his sketches of the stones and read his little question to himself in the margin.

She’d been assuming that he was referring to the death’s-head designs as masks—it was an alternate term, as in “death masks,” but
mask
had another meaning too. Hadn’t Pres been telling her about how his mother had made a mask for him, one in the shape of a heart through which he could read coded letters? During the Revolution, some spies had used masks to send coded messages. They were nothing more complicated than a shape cut out of a piece of paper to form a window. You held the letter up behind the mask, and the real message would be revealed. But it didn’t seem to have any relevance here. She didn’t have any letters Josiah Whiting had written to the British administration. She had never even heard that such letters existed, and as far as she knew, no one had ever found anything even vaguely resembling a mask among his belongings.

No, the only letters she’d ever heard of in connection with Josiah Whiting were the family letters. Her heart sank. She’d never be able to prove that Whiting had been a spy and she’d never be able to assert that the evolution in his death’s-head designs was related to his betrayal of the cause. And Quinn would never be able to prove that Kenneth Churchill’s work on Whiting had anything to do with his death.

She took out the family letters and looked through them again, stopping to re-read the undated letter from Whiting to his wife. It hadn’t made any sense to her when she’d read it before, and it still didn’t. It seemed an odd sort of letter for a man to write to his wife, and it reminded her of something. She flipped through her notebooks and came to the notes she’d taken during her visit to the Minuteman Museum, realizing what it was. Josiah Whiting’s letter reminded her of a letter Cecily Whiting had on display at the museum. It had been written by a Boston shoemaker who had done some low-level spying for the British. Sweeney hadn’t written down the exact words, but she remembered that the letter was fairly nonsensical until you placed it behind the mask—she had been fascinated to see that it was in the shape of a shoemaker’s mold viewed from above, a form readily accessible to that particular spy.

It was an ingenious method. Even if the letter fell into the wrong hands and it was noticed that the letter read strangely, it would be impossible to understand its true meaning without the particular mask that went with it. The mask could be destroyed as soon as the letter was read, keeping it safe from prying eyes.

She flipped through her notes again. She’d found the idea of masks so interesting that she had jotted some sketches of the various forms described in the exhibit, and now she looked at them, not sure why they seemed so familiar. It wasn’t until she flipped ahead and caught sight of one her gravestone sketches that she saw the similarity between the masks and the ornately carved gravestones made by Josiah Whiting.

Could it be…? It was an interesting idea. The shoemaker had used the form best known to him. Didn’t it follow that a gravestone maker would do the same? Josiah Whiting would have the dimensions for his stones committed to memory. What could be easier than writing a letter that could be read only when viewed behind the mask of a gravestone?

She took out the letter and spread it out on the desk.

It didn’t seem very likely that there was important secret information contained in the letter—there didn’t seem to be enough words, for one thing—but maybe Josiah Whiting had written a personal letter to his wife, a personal letter he didn’t want anyone else to read. Maybe, before he was killed by Baker, he had found the time to write this short letter and put it somewhere she would be sure to find it. Sweeney couldn’t begin to imagine how he would have pulled it off, but perhaps he had.

Now her task was to figure out which gravestone had been used as the mask. She could take the letter to all the cemeteries she’d visited, but that would take forever. She looked over her sketches of the gravestones. Which one would he have chosen? It would have to be one that was familiar to his wife and one that was near to hand. He couldn’t have expected her to travel to Lincoln or Lexington to read the letter. So it was one of the Concord ones, then. But which one?

She looked through her sketches, and the answer came to her quickly. Of course, that had to be it. Sweeney folded the copy of the letter, tucked it safely into the pocket of her jeans, and found a flashlight in her backpack. Then she put on her warmest coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck.

It was dark outside and the sidewalks were nearly empty, only a few pedestrians walking back from dinner. Sweeney walked along Lexington Road and looked both ways before crossing into the Hill Cemetery. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but people might find it suspicious that she was going into the graveyard at this time of night.

She turned on the flashlight and climbed the hill, making her way between the stones to the Whiting family plot and fixing the flashlight’s beam on the stone of Josiah Whiting’s dead daughter.

Of course it was Lucy’s stone. It was the one that Becky Whiting knew best, the one she visited, the one she had touched and prayed and wept over. Sweeney took out the letter and unfolded it, smoothing out the wrinkles and placing it carefully behind the stone.

The words were right there, had been there all along.
I did it for John. I love you
. John? Who was John? There was John Baker, of course, but then she remembered another John. She picked up the other letters. Of course. Whiting had a son named John, a son who was sickly, who had a bad leg. That must be it! He had mentioned treatment. How would he have paid for treatment? He must have gotten money in exchange for spying. Hadn’t Henrietta Hall said that Sweeney should look into whether the family’s fortunes had changed?

Sweeney replaced the letter in her pocket and shone the light on Rebecca Whiting’s gravestone. Had she known to come here to read her husband’s letter? Had the letter even reached her? Had she known what it was? Sweeney might never know.

She walked back to the inn and knocked on Quinn’s door.

“Hey,” he said. “Megan’s asleep and I don’t want to wake her up. Come in, but we should whisper.” She followed him in and sat down on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s late. It’s just that I was so excited and I needed to tell someone.” She held up the letter and told him about the gravestone mask. “I was looking for proof that he was a spy, and I think this it,” she said. “He was explaining to his wife why he did it, but he coded it in case it fell into someone else’s hands. He did it for is son, because he needed the money to help his son.”

“He spied for money? That’s all it was about? Somehow that’s kind of disappointing,” Quinn said.

Sweeney looked down at the letter in her hand. “I know, but it wasn’t just for the money. It was for his son, to try to heal his son. The money was just a way to do that. I think that when it came down to it, he was probably pretty idealistic. I think he believed in all that stuff he was fighting for, but when it came down to it, his son was just more important.”

Quinn was staring at her, and when she met his eyes, she blushed and looked away. There was something there that she couldn’t read.

“Sweeney,” he said.

“Yeah?” What was wrong with him? He just kept staring at her. And then he grabbed his coat from the desk chair and put it on.

“I need you to watch Megan,” he said. “I think I’ve figured this out.”

“But, where are you…? What do you mean?”

“I realized,” he said. “That it’s all about fathers and sons. That’s the whole thing. It’s as simple as that.”

And then he was gone. Confused, Sweeney sat on the bed and turned on the TV. She tried halfheartedly to watch an old movie about two sisters on a cruise, but she was too distracted and kept staring at the letter. What had Quinn seen that had made him take off? What did he mean by “fathers and sons”? And where was he going?

She read the letter through again.
I did it for John. I love you.
What could that possibly have suggested to him? Sweeney wasn’t sure. Josiah Whiting had betrayed his principles for his son. That was what the letter meant, didn’t it? Reading the letter, she felt a sympathy for Whiting that she hadn’t felt before. He had done it because his child was sick. He had needed the money so badly that he had been willing to betray the cause to which he had pledged his life, to which he had seemed willing to give his life on April 19. But you couldn’t blame him, could you? People who had children would do anything for their children. Sweeney looked over at Megan, sleeping in the playpen. Quinn would do anything for her. Sweeney had seen that the day he had raced up the stairs to get Megan before he was even sure whether Maura was dead. She had seen on his face that raw protectiveness that Sweeney had seen on his face since then, that she had seen on Cecily Whiting’s face and on Bruce Whiting’s face too.

Sweeney sat up. She had an image in her head now, an image she couldn’t get rid of, and she used Quinn’s room phone to dial Toby’s number. “Toby,” she said when he answered. “I need you to come out to Concord. Right now. It’s a huge favor, but I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need you to do it.”

“What’s going on?” he asked her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“So why do you need me to come out to Concord?”

“I need you to babysit.”

When he left the inn, he’d known where he was going, but once he got in the car, Quinn was suddenly unsure how to handle it. He knew he ought to call for backup, but he wasn’t sure he was right and he didn’t like the idea of calling out Andy and half the state troopers in the county on a hunch. So he just drove for a good ten minutes, out Monument Street and then back and out Lowell Road, planning it out.

He had been thinking he would go to the house, but as he drove by the monument company, he saw that there was a light on somewhere in the back. He pulled in, found his service revolver in the glove compartment, and tucked it into his waistband, then turned off the car and got out, striding up to the main door. It was locked, so he went around to the side and found one of the loading entrances open. He could hear the sound of machinery from inside, and he walked in and tried to get his bearings, following the noise around a corner. He tried the side door and, finding it unlocked, slipped in, one hand on his back in case he needed the gun.

It took him a minute to adjust to the bright light in the workroom and he didn’t see the figure, dressed in a leather smock and wearing safety glasses, until the figure had seen him. The loud buzz of some kind of sander halted and the figure tipped the goggles up onto his head.

He had been engraving a tall black granite stone. It had a delicate scallop shape at the top and Quinn was struck by how beautiful it was, how Sweeney was right that gravestones could be works of art.

“What do you want?” Bruce Whiting asked angrily. “It’s very late, Detective Quinn, and my son went into the hospital today.”

“It’s Pres I wanted to talk about,” Quinn said. “I wanted to talk to you about what you did for him.”

“And what was that?” Whiting was suddenly wary, and Quinn watched him put down the sanding tool and inch his hand along the top of the workbench. He was going for something, and Quinn pulled out his gun and trained it on him. Whiting blinked and dropped both of his hands in front of him.

“I think you know,” Quinn said. “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you crazy, coming in here and pointing a gun at me? You can’t do that. I’m going to call Chief Tyler and see what he has to say about it.”

But he didn’t move and Quinn just kept the gun on him.

“I think I know how you must have felt,” he said. “You found out that your ex-wife and Kenneth Churchill were seeing each other. You weren’t jealous for yourself. You didn’t have any feelings for your ex-wife anymore, but you were jealous on behalf of your son. I think I understand. You wanted the best for him. You knew about Churchill. You told me you didn’t, but your wife told me that you had found out by accident. I wondered why you’d lied about it.”

Whiting laughed. “I saw him one day when I was dropping off Pres. We were early and he was just leaving the house, but I didn’t know who he was. Then a couple of weeks later, I went to Cecily’s to pick up Pres and there was this car waiting at the end of the road. It was weird. As I drove away, it started up and pulled into her driveway. I watched it in my rearview mirror and I remembered the car and what the guy looked like. And then as I was driving away, I figured out who he was. He’d been in to interview me a couple of months before. Said he was writing a book about Josiah Whiting and he wanted to ask me some questions. The thing was, he had this little grin the whole time, like he knew something about me, or he had some kind of little secret, and at the time I didn’t get it, but later, when I figured out who it was, I was pissed off. And I knew he did the reenactments with my dad.”

“Tell me what happened. The day Kenneth Churchill and Tucker Beloit were killed.”

Bruce Whiting looked at the gun and at Quinn. “I don’t think you’re allowed to force confessions like that, Detective Quinn.”

“Tell me.” Quinn let his hand shake a little, just for good measure.

“Okay, okay. That was in the papers, wasn’t it? That his name was Tucker Beloit. Homeless, they said. I didn’t know that, of course. He was just there…I saw him, watching us, and I couldn’t let him go and tell. I couldn’t do that to Pres.”

“Tell me what happened.” Quinn tried to keep his voice very quiet, very steady, very soothing. “How did you run into Churchill?”

“He was at the clubhouse. I was out in the woods, just walking, you know. It was Sunday morning and I was here, like I told you, though my dad wasn’t. I don’t know where he was. I left a little earlier than I told you. It was a beautiful day, and so on my way home, I stopped at the bridge and I decided I’d walk up through the woods. And I thought I’d go to the old clubhouse. It had been ages since I’d gone to see it. And when I got there, he was there. He must have heard my footsteps because he called out, ‘Cecily?’ and then he came out and saw me.

“‘This is awkward,’ he said when he saw who it was, but he had this grin on his face, like he was glad he’d gotten caught. He was all dressed up in his stupid costume and he had this musket with him, with a bayonet on it, and I remember wondering if it was real.

“I asked him if he and Cecily were still seeing each other, and he smiled and said he thought they were. I told him that her son was very sick, that he needed her right now, and that he was a distraction I didn’t want her to have. He just looked at me. I can’t explain it, it was like he saw through me or something, and he said, ‘I don’t think you have any right to talk to Cecily about distractions. She is an excellent mother, with no help from you, and she’s also an adult and she has the right to make her own decisions.’ He was so…he was so fucking proud of it. I said, ‘Don’t you know my son is very sick? Don’t you know he might die?’ And he just looked at me and he said he loved Cecily and he was going to leave his wife for her and he would help her get through this thing with Pres. ‘This thing with Pres!’ Like he was already dead! He said he loved her. He said he would do anything for her.”

“Why couldn’t she be in love?”

“Because I know what it’s like. I know what it is to be in love. That’s what happened with Lauren. I couldn’t…I just couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I neglected Pres and Cecily. Pres didn’t…” He was distraught now, his hands shaking. “Cecily always said that it was the reason he got sick. That it was my fault. And maybe she’s right. So, you see, I couldn’t let that man take her away from him too. The only reason I even felt okay about leaving them was because I knew that she’d take care of him. But he was going to take her away too.”

“So what happened?”

“I told him to stay away from her, to let her be Pres’s mother while she still could. But he kind of laughed and said I couldn’t stop love. ‘The heart wants what the heart wants,’ he said. He laughed at me. He said something about how it wasn’t enough for me to be happy, I wanted Cecily to be unhappy. I don’t know what happened. I just…I went for him. I thought I’d beat him up, but he came after me with his musket, with the bayonet. I don’t really remember this part. I took it from him and I stuck it in him. Something took over in me, something from a long time ago. I didn’t know I still had the ability to kill someone, but I did. Self-preservation, or whatever you want to call it. It just kicked in. It was awful. I didn’t mean to, but one minute he was standing there and the next he was lying on the ground and he was bleeding. And that was when I looked up and saw that guy, that other guy, watching us. He was wearing a uniform too, and I assumed he was from the reenactment. He’d seen the whole thing. I could tell from his eyes. And the only thing I could think of was that I had to stop him from telling because Pres couldn’t know. He couldn’t find out, he just couldn’t. So I chased him down and I…I killed him too. It was so surreal. He was standing there in this British uniform and he was just staring at me. He wouldn’t stop staring at me. It was easy that time, you know. It just all came back, combat, killing quickly, efficiently.

“I didn’t know what to do after that. They were lying there, and I knew someone would find them and I might have been seen going into the woods, so I knew I had to move the bodies. But then I realized that Cecily might be coming to the clubhouse, so I hid and waited for an hour just to make sure, but she never turned up. Then I remembered about the reenactment and figured Churchill’s car must still be up in the field, so I found the keys in his pocket.”

“What about the hat? Did you take it off Churchill’s body?”

“How did you know about the hat?”

“That was what gave me the idea,” Quinn said. “I was thinking about how people can look similar from a distance. Someone said he saw Kenneth Churchill walking back to his car on Sunday morning, but he didn’t see Kenneth Churchill, he saw someone who looked like him, wearing his tricorner hat. You, your father, and Will Baker all resemble Churchill in a superficial way. You’re all tall men. But it wasn’t one of them, it was you.”

Whiting said, “It had fallen off during the struggle. I was afraid someone would see me getting the car, so I put it on. I didn’t think anyone would notice, but there were some guys around and they saw me getting into his car and they waved at me from far off, so I waved back. I drove his car as far up the path as I could.

“Then I dragged Churchill’s body over and got it in the trunk. I was going to put both of them in there and take the car somewhere. But by the time I got back, the other guy was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I swear to God, I was so out of it, I thought maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing with the other guy, so I drove Churchill in his car up to the farm and left him there. I walked home and waited for them to come arrest me. It was weird, waiting and not hearing anything, and then when they found the body, I realized that the guy must have dragged himself around by the clubhouse and died there. There wasn’t anything to tie him to me. Everyone thought he was a reenactor. I felt like I’d been spared.” He looked at Quinn as though he wanted sympathy. “But I wasn’t.”

He was silent for a minute and Quinn thought he was finished, but he wasn’t. “That’s the thing about war,” he said in a very quiet voice. “You think it’s over, but it never is. It comes back to get you; sometimes I think everything about my life has been punishment for what I did over there in the jungle. Take my father. He’s a rah-rah soldier, patriotic as they come, and what does he tell me the other night but that he helped kill a guy when he was in Italy, all those years ago. It was someone who was helping the Allies, but he drank too much and he’d become a liability, and George and another guy had to kill him. Smothered him while he slept, just like that. He’s been living with it all these years.”

He started walking toward Quinn. “You think you can get away from it,” he said in a low voice. “But you can’t.”