Mansions Of The Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

suspect.”
    “I would have to know more about the victim, more about the crime,” she said. “I mean, it would be hard to say without knowing who he was. Can you tell me a little bit more?”
    Before Quinn could answer, there was a knock on the door and a heavyset guy came in and waved at Quinn over Sweeney’s head. “You got the stuff from the Brad Putnam case?” he asked. “They’re asking down in the lab.”
    “Can’t they hang on two seconds? This is important. We’re—”
    Sweeney gasped. “Brad Putnam?” The room felt very stuffy all of a sudden. “Brad Putnam?” she asked again, interrupting him.
    Quinn ignored her. “Two seconds. We’re looking at it right now.”
    The guy shut the door.
    “Did he just say Brad Putnam? As in
the
Putnams?”
    Quinn looked surprised. “Yeah. We weren’t going to release the name yet, but the family’s been notified, so I guess the press will get it soon enough.”
    No,” she said again, tears rushing to her eyes. “You don’t understand. I know him. He’s one of my students. We were studying mourning jewelry in my seminar.”
    Quinn nodded slowly. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. I didn’t realize you knew him. He was studying this stuff in your class?”
    “Yes. I . . . ” She was suddenly horrified. “Do you think that’s why he had it?”
    Quinn didn’t say anything.
    “Look, I can look into it for you. I know some people who . . . ”
    “No,” Quinn said sharply. “We don’t want you to talk to anyone about this until we contact you. Okay?”
    Sweeney nodded.
    And then she began to cry.

FIVE
    HE HAD BLUE EYES , the kind of blue eyes that revealed themselves in degrees, greenish blue in one kind of light, turquoisey as a vacation sea when he shifted his head slightly. You
learned
about his eyes, something new each time you looked into them.
    Sweeney had been sitting on the floor of her office, talking to him about death, when she had noticed this.
    She had met Brad Putnam the previous fall, when as a junior he’d enrolled in an intermediate-level art history course she was teaching entitled Looking at Culture; Art and Social History. She hadn’t particularly wanted to teach the class and therefore, she realized now, had focused it around her own interests, talking to them about gravestone art and mourning jewelry, drawing connections between world events and attitudes toward death. It hadn’t been an illegitimate approach to the subject exactly, just a narrow one.
    But for six of the kids in the course, including Brad, it had been a revelation. They had all done well and, she had noticed, begun to hang around together. Sometimes, after class, she’d watch them out the window of her office, meeting up on the sidewalk and chatting for a few minutes before moving away en masse. At the end of the semester, the six of them had presented her with a photograph of a mid-eighteenth-centuryheadstone featuring a skeletal Death holding an hourglass. They had taken it in a cemetery near Lexington, they told her, and she had been surprised and touched that they had made the effort.
    She hadn’t been surprised when all six signed up for her Mourning Objects seminar that spring.
    Brad, she had sensed from the beginning, was the one most seriously interested. He would read widely outside the assigned reading, bringing in photographs he’d taken of gravestones that exemplified a particular style, an unusual iconography. Sweeney had been a little surprised by all the extra effort at first and had wondered if it was personal, if perhaps he had a crush on her. But it hadn’t been anything like that, she’d soon realized. It was just that, like Sweeney, he was really passionate about death. When he had asked her about graduate schools where he could pursue his interest in mourning objects and the decorative arts, she had felt unexpectedly proud.
    And then there had been that strange day in early March when it had warmed unseasonably. All day,