A Vermont whodunit provides
twists amid the local color
By Kathleen Hennrikus
Boston Globe staff writer
Sweeney St. George is an art historian who researches gravestones. She teaches at Harvard, lives in Somerville, and quotes Shakespeare at Christmas parties. She's still likable. When her perpetual-graduate-student friend, Toby, sends her a picture of an unusually haunting carved gravestone of beautiful Mary Denholm, a Vermont girl who died in 1890, she's intrigued enough to want to go touch it in person. Luckily, Toby has family in the Vermont arts colony known as Byzantium, where Mary is buried, and he has an ulterior motive: for Sweeney to support him as he pursues a romance over Christmas.
Sweeney does a little poking around and discovers that the stone doesn't appear to be signed. What sculptor wouldn't want to leave his mark on such a beautiful piece? She calls a descendant, Ruth Kimball, to see if they can chat about Mary when she gets there. Ruth says her family had always suspected Mary didn't die without a little help.
The relationship between the town and the arts colony, never warm, is turning frosty, along with the weather, as Ruth considers selling her home to a developer. She would make a killing, and it would fatten the bank account she had started for her granddaughter's education. Maybe she can figure out a way to do this without her daughter's no-good boyfriend getting his mitts on it. But Ruth still hasn't come to a decision.
It all looks very Vermonty when Sweeney and Toby arrive in Byzantium: Toby's aunt and uncle and their children are hearty cross-country skiers; there's snow on the ground and the scent of pine in the air. But there's tension beneath the surface, with a series of break-ins making everyone jumpy. Sweeney wants to head right for the graveyard, but Ruth has just been found there, shot to death.
In O' Artful Death, Sarah Stewart Taylor does a nice job creating the closed atmosphere of a rural town. As a freelance journalist, she has an eye for the details of rural New England. It's spooky in the woods, and she teases the details out nicely. The divide between artists and townspeople still rankles; the locals are bitter about working for people who don't have to do the same. Two centuries ago, Mary was a model, but other townsfolk were taking in wash and sweeping out studios. Those lines haven't blurred all that much in the intervening years.
Are the break-ins related to Ruth's murder? It would be comforting to think that an outsider was responsible, but the chill of suspicion blows clearly on town residents. Romantic undercurrents add to the confusion. Maybe Sweeney feels more for Toby than friendship. Maybe she really doesn't want his new romance to succeed. Ian Ball, another houseguest, seems to have a crush on her. This overwhelms Sweeney, who dashes home to Somerville. When she sees Ian in the street outside her house, she's spooked but plows onward. She gets a journal, written by a girl who was in Byzantium the summer Mary died, from a Harvard library.
Ruth's killer is unmasked, but there is a twist that may leave some feeling cheated. Looked at in a certain light, it's oddly comforting, but it is a stretch. Don't let this put you off. Pull up an overstuffed chair and drift away.
O' Artful Death
By Sarah Stewart Taylor
St. Martin's, 304 pp., $23.95
Boston Globe — June 4, 2003
© 2003 Globe Newspaper Company