Mansions Of The Dead by Sarah Stewart Taylor Page A

opening at the Davis Gallery a couple of months ago.”
    Quinn cleared his throat. “Okay, we’ll leave you folks for now. Thank you for your help.” He put the photograph away.
    Sweeney looked up quickly at him. “But there are a lot more—”
    “I’ll walk you out,” he said firmly. Jack looked up at Sweeney and raised his eyebrows.
    Camille said quickly, “It was nice to finally meet you. Brad loved your class, you know.”
    Sweeney, confused, looked around at them. “It was nice to meet you too,” she said. “And again, I’m so sorry.”
    Out in the hallway, Quinn said, “Thanks so much. You were a big help. And we found out where it came from anyway. So we don’t have to go looking for a third party.” His accent seemed stronger to Sweeney—he said “thuud” for “third.” “That’s great—”
    “But there are a lot more questions I’d like to ask them,” Sweeney cut in. “We need to know what he was interested in about the jewelry, how long he’d had it.” Why he’d been asking Bob Philips at the Blue Carbuncle about it, she almost said, and then caught herself.
    “Yes, we’ll take care of that,” he said distractedly. He looked very tired, his blue eyes bloodshot and shadowed.
    “But you can’t just let it go! You said you wanted to know about the jewelry. There are so many more questions.”
    “Ms. St. George, you helped us determine that the jewelry wasn’t brought into the apartment from the outside, that it was in fact in Mr. Putnam’s possession before he was killed. That’s what we were trying to figure out. So again, thank you.” He leaned over slightly, trying to emphasize his height advantage. But he only had an inch on her and she leaned forward too, forcing him to step back.
    “But . . . I think he was suspicious about it for some reason. There are a number of really interesting possibilities for why he might have been.”
    “Ms. St. George, we can take it from here. I’ve got to go back in now.”
    “I don’t think you understand what this could mean for—”
    “Good-bye.” He went back into the room and shut the door behind him.
     
    Still furious by the time she got home, she stripped off her clothes, throwing them against her bedroom wall, and padded through to the bathroom to start a bath.
    One of Sweeney’s favorite features in her apartment was the old, claw-footed tub in the otherwise unremarkable bathroom. She did some of her best thinking lying in a tubful of slightly too-hot water. She sprinted naked—having forgotten to close the drapes in the living room—through to the kitchen to pour herself a scotch, and just as she was preparing her dash back to the bathroom, saw the thin, blue letter propped against the now tired-looking daffodils. On impulse, she took it too.
    The tub was almost full and she lowered herself into the scalding water gratefully, then sipped her scotch and sank down into the water with a long sigh.
    She lay there for a good ten minutes, letting her anger seep out of her into the water before she reached over to pick up the envelope she’d left on the window ledge. She turned it over in her hands. It had been a long time since she had received a letter, a real letter—she had often thought of future scholars looking for the epistolary remnants of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What would they find? Files on computer hard drives?
    She used a nail file to slit the top and pulled out the sheet of thick, expensive blue paper. As she stared at the careful handwriting, her eyes dropped to the signature, “Yours, Ian,” written in a slightly more flamboyant version of the writing that spelled out, at the top of the letter, “Dear Sweeney.” The writing reminded her of him, careful, neat, but with more of an edge to him than it had seemed at first. Ian! She had managed to put him mostly out of her mind since that strange and horrible Christmas in Vermont. Except for a few guilty flashbacks—half-dreamed