Still As Death (28 page)

“There are a couple of Philipses in town. Do you mean Harold or Charlie?” The girl’s large green eyes were open, helpful.

“I don’t know, actually,” Sweeney said. “I’m looking for the parents of Karen Philips. She died when she was quite young, probably before you were even born, but I’m hoping I can talk to her parents.”

The girl didn’t bat an eye. “Oh, it’s Harold you want. You’re out of luck, then. They’re both dead.” Sweeney resisted an urge to ask her why she had offered Harold as an option if he was no longer around.

“Oh. Well, thanks anyway,” she said.

She started on her waffles, trying not to feel too disappointed. She hadn’t called ahead, so she wasn’t sure why she should have felt any certainty about finding Karen Philips’s family. She’d finish eating, then maybe ask around a bit. See if she could find anything.

She was up at the front counter paying for her meal when the waitress with the remarkable eyes came out from the kitchen and said, a little furtively, “You know, I was just thinking. There’s Diana. She lives out on the County Road. You can’t miss it, it’s a big yellow farmhouse. Says Sturgeon on the mailbox.”

“Oh, thank you,” Sweeney said, adding to her tip by a dollar. “Was she a friend of Karen’s?”

The waitress looked at Sweeney like she was an idiot. “No, she’s Karen’s sister. That’s the house where Karen grew up.”

County Road wound its way out of town up a gently rising hill. At first the houses were built quite close together, a series of colonials and saltboxes interspersed with trailers. As she kept going, the houses were farther apart and there were more old barns and farmhouses. Finally she saw up ahead a large yellow house with a couple of barns around it and a large black mailbox that said STURGEON. Sweeney pulled in, and two graying black Labs came rushing out to meet her car, barking ferociously but wagging their tails. When she got out of the car, she looked up to find a large woman with short gray hair coming out of the house. She was wearing a long flowered skirt, ruffled at the bottom like a can-can dancer’s petticoats.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Sweeney started. “But I was hoping to talk to you about your sister.”

“About Karen? Whatever for?” Diana Sturgeon didn’t seem angry, just curious.

Sweeney nodded. She had come up with a story in the car, one that wasn’t strictly a lie if it came to it. “I teach at the university and I’ve gotten very interested in coeducation. I’m interested in stories of women at the university at various points in history. I’m sorry, my name’s Sweeney St. George.” She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

Diana Sturgeon smiled back, her face open and trusting in a way that made Sweeney feel just a little bit guilty. “I’m happy to talk about Karen,” she said. “Why don’t you come in where it’s cool.”

Sweeney followed her into the house, which was indeed cool and smelled of stones and wet dog. It was shabby and comfortable, with a number of colorful quilts hanging on the walls and draped over the couch and chairs.

“Are these yours?” The quilts filled the room with color, red and blue and yellow calicoes and ginghams.

“It’s my hobby. I make them for friends and sell them at a few of the craft fairs.” Without asking if Sweeney wanted it, she handed her a glass of ice water. Sweeney gulped it gratefully.

“Well, they’re beautiful.”

“So what did you want to know?” Diana asked. “It’s funny, I was thinking about her today. It’ll be the anniversary of her death in March.”

Sweeney decided to go right for the meat of it. “It seems like she must have been under pressure of some kind, to do what she did. I talked to a woman who knew her, and she said that Karen seemed depressed in the months leading up to her suicide.”

Sweeney decided that Diana Sturgeon was perhaps the most peaceful person she had ever met. She considered Sweeney placidly. “I’m not entirely convinced that it was suicide, to tell you the truth. We never were, Mom and Dad and me.”

Sweeney sat up in her chair. “What do you mean?”

“It’s so hard to explain. Maybe everyone feels like this when a family member commits suicide, but it just wasn’t like her. I can’t explain it any other way. It wasn’t like her.”

“Did you ever say anything, to the police?”

“No. I didn’t have anything to go on, just what I knew about Karen, and whatever had happened, we knew it wasn’t going to bring her back. It wasn’t like we were Catholic or anything. I mean, suicide, if that’s what it was, doesn’t particularly bother me. I respect someone’s right to choose how she goes out of this world. So I didn’t feel like I had to set the record straight. If the record wasn’t straight to begin with, that is.” She smiled. “I didn’t
know
. I just thought. I’m a big believer in intuition, in feeling things. But the legal system isn’t. So there you go.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“I have no idea. Obviously it wasn’t an accident, so it would have to be homicide. The reasons for homicide are fairly pedestrian, aren’t they? Greed, jealousy, that kind of thing.”

Sweeney wasn’t quite sure what to do in the face of such matter-of-factness. “So you don’t think she was under any kind of pressure?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. She was working very hard because she was hoping to go to graduate school for art history. She was worried about how she was going to pay for it. And I know her responsibilities at the museum were weighing on her mind and she hadn’t been sleeping or eating well, because of the work, I suppose. Even when she was younger, Karen would have these periods where she would just get really stressed about things, a little depressed, I guess.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“She came home for Christmas that year. I was still in high school and I remember that I was so happy to see her and then she slept for almost all of Christmas Eve. I remember that like it was yesterday. I was asleep when she arrived home, and the next morning I waited and waited and waited for her to get up. We had always been close, you see, and when she went away to college, I was absolutely destitute. I had been fantasizing for months about how she would come home and I would tell her about my first boyfriend.” She laughed. “I don’t even remember his last name now, but at the time it seemed so very important. When she finally woke up, she took a shower and went straight over to her best friend’s house. I was so mad. I cried in my room for hours.” She smiled. “You feel things so deeply at that age.”

“Did she ever talk to you about what she was going through?”

“A little. She came to my room the day after Christmas and we talked for a long time, but it was mostly me telling her about my life. I think my mother had told Karen how upset I was and she was trying to make it up to me. She was good like that.

“I asked her if she had a boyfriend at college and I remember she told me that she didn’t trust men anymore and that the last thing she wanted or needed was a boyfriend. It surprised me, because Karen had always liked boys and usually had a couple she was interested in at any one time.”

“Do you think she could have been depressed about a guy? That makes it sound like someone broke her heart.”

“Yeah, except she was more angry than depressed about it. Those can be the same things, I know, but … I had the sense that her exhaustion was more about how much work she had to do. Our family wasn’t … well, we weren’t particularly academic. Karen’s going to the university was a big deal, and I think she felt a lot of pressure to succeed there.”

“Did she say that?”

Diana considered. “She was working on her thesis about Egyptian jewelry. And she had all these books with her that she was studying the whole time she was home. I remember being so resentful. I wasn’t much of a student and I didn’t understand.”

“Do you know what she was studying?”

“Something about the tombs at Darfur or Darshur.”

“Dahshur?”

“That’s right. I guess there were these princesses buried there, and there was some wonderful jewelry found near their tombs. Karen had seen it when she was in Cairo that summer before her death. She tried to explain to us what it was that made these particular necklaces so special. They were pretty, but they didn’t seem so, I don’t know,
important
to me. But she said that they were the most beautiful things made in Egypt at the time. She said people had lost their lives digging for just this kind of treasure in the Egyptian desert. She said that things like the necklaces made people do bad things, dishonest things. I almost had the feeling she thought there was a kind of curse on the jewelry, but maybe I was imagining it.”

“Did Karen talk to you about the robbery at the museum, that fall before she died?”

“She didn’t want to talk much about it. We knew that she’d been tied up, but she seemed, I don’t know, like she’d just blocked the whole thing out. It wasn’t that important to her.”

“So that wasn’t why she was so upset?”

“I didn’t think so at the time.”

The dogs started barking madly, running to the window to look out at the road. “That’s Joe, my husband,” Diana said, going to the window. “We’ve been married for twenty years this Christmas.” She turned to smile at Sweeney. “I still get fluttery when I hear his car in the driveway.”

A tall, bearded man carrying a brown paper grocery bag under each arm came in through the front door, covered in the barking dogs. “Hi, darling,” he said, looking quizzically at Sweeney. Diana introduced them, and Sweeney took that as her cue to say she needed to get going.

“Hey,” she said. “I was just thinking. Maybe I could talk to Karen’s best friend. The one who she went to see that last Christmas?”

“Gerry? I guess so. She lives just up the road.” Diana gave her directions, and she and Joe walked Sweeney out to her car. Sweeney thanked her again.

“No problem. If there’s anything else, just let me know.”

As Sweeney pulled out of the driveway, she looked back to see the two of them standing there, arm in arm, the two bodies leaning toward each other and mirroring the trees leaning toward each other in the late-summer light.

Gerry Tiswell lived only a few houses up the road, and when Sweeney pulled into the driveway of the light blue Cape, a woman who had been sitting in a folding chair on the front lawn stood up to wave. Sweeney waved back, feeling the oppressive heat of the early evening easing just a little, the sun hanging low on the horizon.

“Are you Gerry Tiswell?” she called out, walking toward the porch.

“I am.” She was a large woman, carrying a lot of weight on her small frame, with dark curly hair and very blue eyes. Sweeney introduced herself and explained what she wanted to know.

“Do you remember her coming home that Christmas?”

“Of course I do. It was the last time I saw her. So I remember perfectly.”

“How was she? How did she seem to you?”

“She was different. She’d been different since going away to school in the first place, but it hadn’t affected our friendship. Even though she was so smart and she was doing so well and had all these new friends with money and nice cars and all that, she was still the same. But that last Christmas, I felt like she didn’t have time for me. She was so preoccupied with this project she was doing, this thing with a gold necklace, and she didn’t want to talk about any of the things that we always talked about, boys, or what we were going to do with our lives.” Gerry Tiswell paused. “That was why it hit me so hard, her killing herself. Because we didn’t get along the last time I saw her.” She choked on the words, turning her face away, and Sweeney let her get her composure back. When her eyes met Sweeney’s again, they were full of tears. “I’m sorry. I try not to think about her too much.”

“You said you usually talked about boys, things like that. Did she have a boyfriend?”

“No way. She told me that she hated all men and didn’t ever want to date anyone again as long as she lived. She was going to just concentrate on her work and live like a nun. That’s what she said. Like a nun. She said that men were—what was the word she used?—‘plunderers’ and that they took things from people. She told me about how Egypt had lost all of its treasures due to ‘old white men’ stealing them. She had gotten really radical about it. She said she was rethinking her whole career choice because of what she’d learned about how people got these treasures from Egypt, how they just stole them and took them back to England or whatever.”

“It sounds like someone had broken her heart.”

“If he did, she didn’t tell me.” Gerry Tiswell’s voice sounded impatient now, and Sweeney knew she’d outstayed her welcome.

She thanked her for her time and stood to go.

“The project she was doing,” Sweeney said, almost as an afterthought. “Did she talk about that?”

“Yeah. She said there was a piece of jewelry at the museum that
shouldn’t have been there, that had been taken out of Egypt illegally. And she was going to prove it.”

By now, it was what Sweeney had been expecting. “Did she talk about anyone else at the museum, anyone who might also have known about the jewelry?”

“No.”

Sweeney let the silence surround them for a few minutes, and then she asked Gerry, “You said you were upset because you hadn’t gotten along the last time you’d seen her. But were you surprised she killed herself?”

“It sounds weird, but not really. I can’t explain it, but she just wasn’t herself. It was like someone else had taken over her body and she looked the same and everything, but it wasn’t her. She wrote this weird poetry. You should see if Diana has any of it anymore. She might have some of her research too.” A group of boys on dirt bikes rode along the road, hollering at each other, and Sweeney and Gerry watched them until they were out of sight.

Sweeney said thank you and turned toward her car.

“It’s funny,” Gerry said. “I don’t think I ever got over Karen’s death. I don’t know why, but it seems like nothing really worked out for me ever since then. You know what I mean?”

Sweeney nodded, wanting to get away from the sadness that seemed to surround Gerry Tiswell. “Take care,” she said.

Diana didn’t seem surprised to see Sweeney again. She led her up the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor and opened the door to a staircase leading to the attic. The heat assaulted them as they gained the stairs, filling Sweeney’s nose and lungs with a warm mustiness.