She began in Nuala’s studio.

Three hours later, grimy from the dust of cabinets and countertops that had been cluttered and jammed with stiffened paint brushes, dried-up tubes of oils, paint rags, and small easels, Maggie had an impressive number of tagged trash bags lined up in a corner of the room.

And even though she had only made a start, just that much clearing up changed the appearance of the room for the better. Loyally, she reminded herself that Police Chief Brower had told her this space had been thoroughly ransacked. It was obvious that the cleaning service had not bothered to do more than shove as many items as possible back into the cabinets, and the spillover had been left on the countertops. The result was a sense of chaos that Maggie found disconcerting.

But the room itself was quite impressive. The floor-to-ceiling windows that seemed to be the only major alteration made in the house must let in wonderful northern light, Maggie thought. When Nuala had urged her to bring her sculpting materials with her, she had promised that she would find the long refectory table a perfect work area. Even though she was sure she wouldn’t use them, to please Nuala she had brought along a fifty-pound tub of wet clay, several armatures, the frameworks on which the figures would be constructed, and her modeling tools.

Maggie paused for a minute, wondering. On that table she could make a portrait head of Nuala. There were plenty of recent pictures of her around to use as models. As though I need them, Maggie thought. It seemed to her that Nuala’s face would be forever imprinted in her mind. Except for visiting Greta and clearing out the house, she had no real plans. As long as I know I’m staying until a week from Sunday, it would be nice to have a project, she told herself, and what better subject than Nuala?

The visit to Latham Manor and the time she had spent with Greta Shipley had served to convince her that the uneasiness she thought she had perceived in Nuala was simply the result of her concern over the effects of radically changing her life by selling the house and moving to the residence. There doesn’t seem to have been anything else weighing on her, she thought. At least, not that I can see.

She sighed. I guess there’s no way I can be sure. But if it was a random break-in, wasn’t it risky to kill Nuala, then take time to search the house? Whoever was here could smell the food cooking and see that the table was set for company. It would make sense that the killer would be terrified that someone might arrive while he was ransacking the house, she told herself. Unless that someone already knew dinner was scheduled for eight o’clock, and that I wouldn’t be arriving until nearly that time.

A window of opportunity, she reasoned. There certainly had been one for a person who knew the plans for the evening- perhaps was even part of them.

“Nuala wasn’t killed by a random thief,” Maggie said aloud. Mentally she reviewed the people who had been expected at the dinner. What did she know about any of them? Nothing, really.

Except for Liam; he was the only one she really knew. It was only because of him that she had run into Nuala again, and for that she always would be grateful. I’m also glad he felt the way I did about his cousin Earl, she thought. His showing up here really gave me the creeps.

The next time she and Liam talked, she wanted to ask him about Malcolm and Janice Norton. Even in that quick moment this morning, when she had greeted Janice at Latham Manor, she could detect something amiss in the woman’s expression. It looked like anger. Because of the canceled sale? Maggie wondered. But surely there were plenty of other houses like this one available in Newport. It couldn’t be that.

Maggie walked over to the trestle table and sat down. She looked at her folded hands and realized they were itching for the feel of clay. Whenever she was trying to think something through, she found working in clay helped her to find the answer, or at least come to some kind of conclusion.

Something had bothered her today, something she had noticed subconsciously. It had registered mentally but had not made an impression at the moment. What could it have been? she asked herself. Moment by moment, she retraced her day from the time she got up, to the cursory inspection of the downstairs floor at Latham Manor and her appointment with Dr. Lane, to the drive with Greta Shipley to the cemeteries.

The cemeteries! Maggie sat up. That was it! She thought. That last grave they went to, of the Rhinelander woman, who died two weeks ago-I noticed something.

But what? Try as she might, she could not conceive of what had troubled her there.

In the morning, I’ll go back to the cemeteries and look around, she decided. I’ll take my camera, and if I don’t see exactly what it is, I’ll take pictures. Maybe whatever it is that’s nagging at me will show up when I develop them.

It had been a long day. She decided to bathe, scramble an egg, then go to bed and read more of the books about Newport.

On the way downstairs, she realized that the phone in Nuala’s bedroom was ringing. She hurried to answer it but was rewarded by a decisive click at the other end.

Whoever it was probably didn’t hear me, she thought, but it doesn’t matter. There was no one with whom she wanted to talk right now.

The closet door in the bedroom was open, and the light from the hallway revealed the blue cocktail suit Nuala had worn to the reunion party at the Four Seasons. It was haphazardly draped over a hanger, as though carelessly put away.

The suit was expensive. A sense that it might be damaged if left that way made Maggie go over to the closet to rehang it properly.

In the course of straightening the fabric, she thought she heard a soft thud, as though something had dropped on the floor. She looked down into the cluttered array of boots and shoes in the closet bottom and decided that if something had fallen, it would just have to wait.

She closed the closet door and left the room, headed for her bath. The solitude she enjoyed on many evenings in her New York apartment was not appealing in this house with flimsy locks and dark corners, in this house where a murder had been committed-perhaps by someone whom Nuala had counted as a friend.

23

Earl Bateman had not intended to drive to Newport on Tuesday evening. It was while preparing for a lecture he would be delivering the following Friday that he realized that for illustrative purposes he needed some of the slides he kept in the museum on the grounds of the Bateman Funeral Home. The home of his great-great-grandfather, the narrow Victorian house and the acre it stood on had been separated from the main house and property ten years earlier.

Technically the museum was private and not open to the public. It could only be visited by written request, and Earl personally escorted the few visitors through it. In response to the derisive humor heaped on him by his cousins whenever they discussed “Death Valley”-as they called his little museum-his icy and knowingly humorless retort was that, historically, people of all cultures and breeding attached great importance to the rituals surrounding death.

Over the years, he had gathered an impressive array of materials, all having to do with death: slides and films; recorded funeral dirges; Greek epic poems; paintings and prints, such as the apotheosis picture of Lincoln being received into heaven; scale reproductions of the Taj Mahal and the pyramids; native mausoleums of brass-trimmed hardwood; Indian funeral pyres; present-day caskets; replicas of drums; conch shells, umbrellas, and swords; statues of riderless horses with reversed stirrups; and examples of mourning attire throughout the ages.

“Mourning Attire” was the subject of the lecture he was to deliver to members of a reading group that had just finished discussing an assortment of books on death rituals. For the occasion, he wanted to show them slides of the costumes in the museum.