Still Life With Murder
STILL LIFE
with
MURDER
BY THE AUTHOR
The Nell Sweeney Mysteries by P.B. Ryan
Still Life with Murder
Murder in a Mill Town
Death on Beacon Hill
Murder on Black Friday
Murder in the North End
A Bucket of Ashes
Medieval Romantic Suspense by Patricia Ryan
Falcon’s Fire
Heaven’s Fire
Secret Thunder
Wild Wind
Silken Threads
The Sun and the Moon
Contemporary Women’s Fiction by Patricia Ryan
Pure and Simple
Hale’s Point
A Burning Touch
Non-fiction by Patricia Ryan, aka P.B. Ryan
Writing the Novel They Can’t Put Down
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 Patricia Burford Ryan
All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.
A Hawkley Books ebook.
A mass market paperback edition of this book was published in 2003 by Berkley Prime Crime.
An electronic edition was published in 2010 by Hawkley Books.
The cover art is
Still Life with Salt Tub
by Pieter Claesz, ca. 1644.
ISBN: 9781452406329
For Rich
A guiltie conscience is a worme that bites and neuer ceaseth.
Nicholas Ling,
Wits Commonwealth
, 1597
SEPTEMBER 1864
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
“I
T’S GOING TO BE A
bad one.” Dr. Greaves said it so quietly that Nell, sitting across from him in the Hewitts’ glossy black brougham, almost didn’t hear him.
Nell squeaked an end of her paisley shawl across the foggy side window. Trees writhed against a purpling sky as they rumbled past; raindrops spattered the glass. “The storm, do you mean? Or…” She eyed the flat mahogany surgical kit on the seat next to him, the cracked leather doctor’s satchel by his feet.
“The delivery,” he said. “
And
the storm. Both.” Lightning fluttered across his face, making him look, for one jolting moment, strangely old. She’d never thought of him that way, despite being half his age. Cyril Greaves remained lean in his middle years, and was taking his time in turning gray. And then there were those benevolent eyes, that ready smile.
He wasn’t smiling this evening.
“There must be something terribly amiss for them to have sent that fellow to East Falmouth for me.” Dr. Greaves cocked his head toward the brougham’s front window, through which the Hewitts’ coachman, who’d introduced himself as Brady, was just visible as a smear of black hunched over the reins. “Families like the Hewitts don’t bother with physicians for mere chambermaids. Not for routine births, anyway. It’s only when disaster strikes that they fetch one, and by then it’s usually too late.”
All too true. How Nell dreaded the difficult calls—especially when something went wrong with a birth.
Crossing his arms, Dr. Greaves stared out at the passing countryside as it grew yet murkier and more turbulent. A white-hot rivulet crackled down from the heavens; thunder rattled the carriage. Nell turned to gaze out the other side window, thinking she might draw this landscape tomorrow if she wasn’t too tired after her chores. No, she’d paint it, on a sheet of Dr. Greaves’s best writing paper, in ink—great, bruising stains of it, black for the trees and a near-black wash for the sky.
Brady halted his team at a massive iron gate, which was hauled open for them by two men in Macintoshes. Snapping the reins, he drove the brougham past a shingle-sided gatehouse and up a long, undulating roadway. Nell had all but decided this couldn’t possibly be the Hewitts’ estate; there was just too much of it. But then a pulse of lightning illuminated a building in the distance—a huge, sprawling edifice adorned with turrets and a hodgepodge of steep gambrel roofs.
Her breath came out in an astonished little gust.
Dr. Greaves smiled at last; she often made him smile, but rarely when she meant to. “They call this place Falconwood. The Hewitts spend about six weeks here every summer, usually mid-July to the end of August. I wonder why they’re still here.”
“
Six weeks?
This…
castle
is for one family to live in for six weeks?”
“The Hewitts call it a cottage,” he said, “but it’s got over twenty rooms. Those in back look out on Waquoit Bay. The boathouse is larger than most people’s homes.”
Nell stared at the mansion as they neared it, at the scores of warmly lit windows, picturing the two-room hovel she’d shared with her entire family for the first eleven years of her life.
Her expression must have reflected her thoughts. “Nell,” Dr. Greaves said softly. “You, of all people, should know that life isn’t fair. And yet, somehow, you always manage to muscle through.
Most people follow the path wherever it leads them. Others hack their own way through the brush and always seem to end up on higher ground. You’re of the second sort.”
The clattering of horses’ hooves drew her attention back to the house, which they were circling on a paved path. Like the gatehouse, it was sided in shingles that had weathered to a silvery gray.
“The Hewitts have been summering on the Cape for about twenty years,” said Dr. Greaves as he gathered up his satchel and surgical kit. “Not the most fashionable vacation spot, but I understand they like the solitude. Their main house is in Boston, on a Brahmin enclave they call Colonnade Row—that’s a section of Tremont Street built up with mansions that make Falconwood look like a gardener’s shed.”