Free Mansions Of The Dead by Sarah Stewart Taylor Page A

the couch as though he was afraid of bruising his skin.
    “How’s Dad?” Jack asked.
    “Okay, I guess,” Cammie said. “I offered to stay with him, but he said no.” She turned and went over to the window. “I don’t think we should leave him alone, but he wouldn’t let me stay. If you guys could just kind of check in a couple of times, see if he’s okay.”
    “I’ll go by tonight,” Jack said.
    “Good. Thanks.” She picked up the architectural drawings and looked at the black lines as though they were a map she needed to read, then put them down again on Drew’s desk.
    “How’s Melissa handling all this?” she asked him.
    “Fine, fine.” He didn’t want to talk about Melissa.
    “You sure about that? This must be pretty awful for her.”
    “I know that.”
    “Drew, she’s fragile about this kind of stuff. I’m just saying.” She reached up to scratch her head, messing up her hair. Somehow, Cammie always managed to get bad haircuts.
    “I know,” he snapped, then looked around at them, not sure what to say now.
    They all spoke at once, then laughed nervously.
    “Did either of you . . . ?”
    “Did you . . . ?”
    “What . . . ?”
    “All right,” Drew said. “We need to talk.”

TEN
    AFTER RETURNING SOME E-MAILS in her office and reading a memo from the Dean of Students about how to handle students’ reactions to Brad Putnam’s death (
Do
let students talk about their feelings.
Do
be alert for signs of depression or talk of suicide), Sweeney got out the sketches of the jewelry she’d made the night before, then took a couple of reference works down from her bookshelf.
    In a few minutes she’d found a number of examples very similar to the hair-work necklace and decided that it had probably been made from a pattern in
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. That well-distributed magazine had introduced American women to the art of making hair-work jewelry in the early 1850s.
    Women had little round tables, specially made for the purpose, with holes in the middle. The individual strands of hair were weighted with bobbins and the women would place little paper patterns on the top of the tables and wind locks of hair around a wire according to the instructions on the paper. When the coil was finished, the hair was boiled, baked in an oven, and the wire removed. To make balls like the one in the necklace Brad had been wearing, you had to weave the hair around little wooden forms. Sweeney looked through a dealer’s catalog and discovered that the necklace would be worth anywhere from $400 to $600.
    The two brooches were a little more interesting. The earlier brooch with the basketweave design was very similar to one from the late 1850s in the catalog. The later one was quite typical of the 1880s, and she had been right that the locket was also Civil War–era—there were a couple of examples in her reference book that were almost identical. Altogether, the collection was worth a couple of thousand dollars.
    Where had Brad gotten it? When they’d started talking about mourning jewelry a couple of weeks before, Sweeney had told the class that there were dealers in the Boston area who carried the jewelry and in whose shops they could find examples. The logical thing was to go to some of the stores and see if Brad had bought the jewelry there. That would be useful information.
    The police hadn’t asked her to look into it, of course—in fact, Quinn had told her not to discuss it with anyone—but he had said they might be contacting her for further help. If she found out something more about where the jewelry came from, the police would surely be grateful, she reasoned.
    “Hey, Sweeney.” Sweeney’s colleague Fiona Mathewson rolled past, her motorized wheelchair humming. “Are you doing okay?”
    “Hey, Fiona. I’m hanging in there.”
    “I’m so sorry about Brad Putnam. I know he was one of your favorites.”
    Sweeney thanked her. “Hey,” she said as Fiona headed toward the end of the