The outer shell of the carriage house was still the original brick—built in the 1880s by a wealthy textile family in what was then a more rural part of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. It sat back about thirty yards off of the main house and could be accessed either by a flagstone path leading from the back porch, or by a dirt driveway that veered off its paved sister and cut through the trees at the western edge of the heavily wooded property.
The house itself was a rambling, three-story affair graced by a long, circular driveway with a waterless fountain at its center. The “front door” was actually located around the side of the house, facing a line of trees to the east. Hence, most visitors (although there were very few nowadays) climbed the steps leading up to the mud room, which was located just past the library windows that overlooked the driveway.
The Sculptor, however, almost always used the
back
door; for The Sculptor almost always had business to attend to in the carriage house before joining his father in the home of his youth. The Sculptor’s family had lived there since 1975—moved there just after The Sculptor was born. By that time, the carriage house had long since been converted to a two-car garage with a room above it in which the previous owner’s caretaker had lived. And as a boy, The Sculptor would often play alone in the empty loft for hours. Most of the time, however, he would just hide out there when his parents fought, or when his mother got drunk and hit him.
The Sculptor’s mother hit him quite a lot as a boy—when his father was away on business or playing golf at the country club. And when he was
super naughty,
sometimes his mother would fill the bathtub with ice water and hold him under until he started choking. Sometimes she would lock The Sculptor in the bathroom and pour bleach on the floor and make him breathe the fumes. Most of the time, however, she just hit him—always on the back of the head, so the bruises and lumps beneath his curly mane of dark brown hair would not show. The Sculptor’s mother told him that if he ever squealed to anyone she would die and his father would kill himself. And for a long time The Sculptor believed her—after all, The Sculptor loved his mother and his father very much and would do anything to protect them. The Sculptor’s father called him Christian back then—had no trouble remembering his name. But that was a
long, long time ago,
and now Christian’s father
never
called him Christian.
Christian almost never called himself Christian now either; hardly ever thought of himself as having been anything other than The Sculptor—only when it could not be avoided, in public, when he signed for his father’s prescriptions or when he had to purchase medical supplies over the Internet. The Sculptor hated the Internet, but had long ago resigned himself to accepting it as a necessary tool to accomplish his work. And as long as it stayed out back in the carriage house he could tolerate it—for out back in the carriage house was where the technology lived; out back in the carriage house was where
all the work was done.
The Sculptor’s father did not know about his son’s work in the carriage house—did not know much of anything anymore. He spent most of his time in his bedroom—on the second floor, directly above the kitchen—looking out the window at the bird feeders his son had installed many years ago in one of the large oak trees. Sometimes The Sculptor would play music for his father on the old record player—mostly crackly 33–1/3s of classical music, the kind of stuff his father had been fond of before the accident. The Sculptor also installed a CD player inside the shell of an old Philco, jury-rigging it to play recordings of vintage radio shows from the 1930s and ’40s. This seemed to please his father greatly, who in turn would sit smiling at the radio for hours.
Mostly, however, The Sculptor’s father just sat motionless in his wheelchair by the window. He still could turn his head, still had use of his right hand, but he rarely spoke except now and then to ask for someone named “Albert.” For the first few years after the accident, The Sculptor had no idea who Albert was. But after digging into his family’s history, The Sculptor discovered that his father had an older brother named Albert who had committed suicide when his father was just a boy.
As Cathy Hildebrant and Agent Markham turned onto Route 95 on their way to Watch Hill, miles away, The Sculptor was removing an intravenous line from his father’s wrist. He usually fed his father by hand—a mixture of oatmeal and other ingredients that he had researched for optimum nutrition—but found over the years that after a night of barbiturates, this method was more effective to stabilize his father’s system. He had been out for nearly sixteen hours—had been intravenously fed a steady dose of mild sedatives while his son had been away—and now all his father needed was just a little extra TLC to bring him back around.
“That’s it,” said The Sculptor, wiping off the spittle from his father’s chin. He threw the rag into a white bin marked
LINENS
and with one arm lifted his father from his bed to his wheelchair. He turned the steamer beside the bed on to low, for sometimes his father’s nostrils dried out and his nose bled. Indeed, almost everything The Sculptor needed to care for his father was at hand in his father’s bedroom: boxes upon boxes of medical supplies; an adjoining bathroom that had been outfitted with a sit-down shower; a small refrigerator in the corner for his father’s medicines; and three intravenous units—each holding different bags of different liquids for different purposes. And were it not for the red wallpaper, the richly stained woodwork, and the four-poster bed, his father’s bedroom would have looked no different than a hospital ward.
“Time to watch the birdies,” The Sculptor said, parking his father before the large bay window. The Sculptor dropped a record on the turntable—Domenico Scarlatti’s
Sonata in D Minor
—and as the first strains of Baroque guitar washed over the room, The Sculptor headed down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen. There he rinsed his hands and fixed himself a protein drink, gulping it down with a handful of vitamins and supplements. He was hungry,
ravenous
from his work the night before, but resisted the temptation to eat more and stepped out onto the back porch. Yes, he must stick to his diet, must be in tip-top condition for all the hard work ahead of him.
Even back when he was known as Christian, The Sculptor always kept himself in good shape. Six-foot-five since the age of seventeen, before the accident he had lettered in both football and lacrosse for Phillips Exeter Academy. Since the accident, however, he had focused only on building up his body—what he saw from the beginning as a necessary component of caring for his father. The accident had been his mother’s fault. Christian would never know the exact details—had been away at boarding school when it all happened. But from what he could gather, there had been an incident at the country club. His father’s lawyer told Christian a week after the funeral—the same week he turned eighteen and became legal custodian of his family’s fortune—that his mother had been cheating on his father with a young tennis pro not much older than Christian himself. There had been a scene, a fist fight at the country club—Christian’s father laying out the tennis pro and dragging his wife out by the hair. They had just turned onto Route 95 when the semi broadsided them. His mother died instantly, but his father survived—paralyzed from the waist down, his left arm useless, his brain a vegetable soup.
Christian had been granted early acceptance to Brown—had planned on majoring in history like his mother—but after finishing out his final year at Phillips, opted to enroll in nursing school in order to best take care of his father. There had been a lawsuit filed against the trucking company on Christian’s behalf. The driver of the semi had been drinking when he slammed into Christian’s parents, and a settlement was reached out of court awarding Christian both compensation for his mother’s death and enough money to care for his father for the rest of his life. The judgment gave Christian little consolation, as the young man would not have needed the money anyway. No, Christian’s father had earned enough money in his lifetime to care for a dozen invalids a dozen lifetimes over. And at first Christian kept his father in an adult care facility, but after graduating from nursing school, Christian took the burden of caring for his father solely upon himself.
Besides, Christian knew he would never ever have to work for money.
No, Christian’s work would be of a different kind—would serve a different purpose. That purpose had only become clear to him in the last few years, when he fully began to understand why his mother had beaten him and cheated on his father and, consequently, caused him to become the vegetable upstairs. Yes, his own life, his own personal tragedy was only a symptom of a much larger disease. And now that he had become The Sculptor, now that he understood his purpose, the man who once called himself Christian also understood that the disease could be cured; that he could use his insight to help others; and that he was put on this planet to save mankind from its own spiritual destruction. And so, just as he himself had awakened from a lifetime of slumber, The Sculptor would see to it that others would awaken as well.
The Sculptor stepped off the back porch and headed down the flagstone path to the carriage house. He began to giggle, for even though The Sculptor hated the Internet, he could not help feeling excited about what was waiting for him.
Yes, The Sculptor had the utmost faith that his plan would succeed.
And Dr. Catherine Hildebrant would be the one to help him.
“Are you feeling better now?” asked Special Agent Markham.
“Yes, thank you,” Cathy lied, shaken. She had been staring out the window at nothing in particular as row upon row of nameless buildings whizzed past her. Then all at once Cathy realized that, despite the morning’s events, she had been unconsciously searching for the big blue bug on the roof of the New England Pest Control building. Cathy hated that big blue bug—a monstrous, tacky sculpture that appeared to have been built by a four year-old—but always found herself staring up at it, actually looking for it when she headed into Providence from points southward.
“And thank you for the coffee,” she added after a moment.
“Don’t mention it.” The FBI agent had fixed it just the way she liked it—
grande
, nonfat milk, two Sweet’N Lows—and had not even blinked at double parking his black Chevy Trailblazer right outside of Starbucks, right where the GPS navigation system said it would be in the middle of congested Thayer Street.
A job with “perks,”
Cathy thought, then quickly felt ashamed of her private joke at a time like this.
“Do you mind if we ask you a couple of questions, Dr. Hildebrant?” It was the FBI agent in the backseat, a woman by the name of Sullivan—blond, early thirties, with chiseled features that Cathy envied. She was with the Field Office in Boston, Markham told her—had been waiting in the Trailblazer while he was meeting with Cathy.
“Go right ahead,” Cathy said.
Agent Sullivan produced a small, digital recording device from her jacket pocket and held it to her mouth.
“This is Special Agent Rachel Sullivan en route with Markham and Dr. Catherine Hildebrant. The date is Sunday, April 26. The time is 12:20 P.M.”
Sullivan placed the recorder between Markham and Cathy—its red light making Cathy self-conscious.
“Dr. Hildebrant,” Sullivan began, “you’re the author of the book on Michelangelo titled
Slumbering in the Stone
, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Is that your only published work?”
“No, but the only one dedicated solely to Michelangelo’s sculptures—and the only one to cross over from the academic market to reach a more popular audience.”
“It’s sold a lot of copies then?”
“Not a
New York Times
bestseller by any means, no. But, as far as these things go in academia, yes, you could say it’s sold a lot.”
“And what else have you published?”
“I coauthored an introduction to art history textbook with a former colleague of mine from Harvard, as well as publishing the obligatory articles now and then in various academic journals.”
“I see,” said Sullivan.
Cathy did not like her tone. She had none of Markham’s charm, none of his informal directness. No, Special Agent Rachel Sullivan spoke like an attorney on one of those bad spin-offs of a spin-off courtroom drama with which Cathy had become so engrossed as of late—another bit of “mindless entertainment” she once thought she’d never be caught dead watching in a million years.
“But
Slumbering in the Stone
is by far your most important work,” Sullivan continued. “The one that really put you on the map, wouldn’t you say?”
“Relatively speaking, yes.”
“And you require
Slumbering in the Stone
for your classes?”
“Only one—a graduate seminar. Yes.” Cathy suddenly felt defensive—like Sullivan was setting her up for something. She looked around the cabin uncomfortably, her eyes falling on the speedometer. Markham was doing eighty, but held the wheel as if he were coasting through a school zone.
“And when was this book published?”
“About six years ago.”
“Was this before or after your tenure?”
“Just before.”
“And you have been requiring your book for your class for how long now?”
“It’ll be five years next fall.”
“I’d like you to take a moment,” Agent Sullivan said with a calculated change of tone. “Take a moment and ask yourself if you’ve ever had a student during that time—or at any time, for that matter—that struck you as particularly odd. One that said or did or perhaps even wrote something out of the ordinary—something that went beyond a creative extreme into the realm of—well, something
else
. Perhaps a drawing or an essay or even an e-mail that you found particularly disturbing.”
Cathy’s brain began to spin with a kaleidoscope of faces—nameless, dark, and blurry—and the art history professor felt a wave of panic upon realizing she could not recollect even what her current students looked like.
“I can’t think of anyone,” she said finally, her voice tight. “I’m sorry.”
“What about a colleague? Someone in the department? Anybody ever mention to you that they had a student by whom they felt threatened?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Have you ever felt threatened by one of your colleagues in your time at Brown or at Harvard? Anyone with whom you didn’t get along? Perhaps someone who was fired? Someone who may have had a grudge against you?”
“No, not at all.”
“Any of your students ever make a play for you?” asked Agent Markham. Despite the gist of his question, Cathy found his sudden presence in the conversation a welcome relief from the prosecuting attorney behind her. “Any of them ever go beyond what could be termed as innocent flirting? Something that was perhaps a little more aggressive?”
Cathy had always been a bit shy, but never a bit stupid; and even though before her husband she had dated only a handful of men, had only one semi-serious relationship while at Harvard, she was not ignorant to the “vibe” she got from some of her male students. However, in her twelve years at Brown, only two of them ever got up enough nerve to ask her out for a cup of coffee—and both times Steven Rogers’s dutiful wife politely declined.
But then there were the notes.
“Yes,” Cathy began. “About five and a half years ago. At the beginning of the fall semester—just after my mother died—I started receiving some anonymous notes.”
Cathy saw Markham catch his partner’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“Love notes?” Sullivan asked.
“Not really. They were little quotes at first, one-liners that I took to be, well, gestures of encouragement and support in the wake of my mother’s death. Then later on I received the sonnet.”
“A sonnet?” asked Markham. “You mean like a love sonnet? A Shakespearean sonnet?”
“Not a Shakespearean sonnet, no, but one written by Michelangelo.” Markham looked confused. “In addition to being a painter and a sculptor, Michelangelo was an accomplished, albeit second-rate poet. He wrote hundreds of poems on subject matter across the board. However, the most famous of his poems are the sonnets he wrote to a young man with whom he was in love—a young man by the name of Tommaso Cavalieri. The sonnet that I received was originally written for Cavalieri around 1535 I think, during the first couple years of their friendship when Michelangelo was about sixty years old and Cavalieri in his early twenties.”
“So how many notes would you say you received?” asked Sullivan.
“Four—one sonnet and the three little quotes, which were also written by Michelangelo. I got one every other week or so for about a month and a half—at different times, in an envelope under my office door when I was out. Then they just stopped appearing. And I haven’t received another note since.”
“You said the notes were anonymous. Did you ever find out who sent them?”
“No, I did not.”
“Any ideas?”
“The handwriting was feminine. And as Michelangelo’s sonnets to Cavalieri were of a homosexual nature, I assumed that my admirer was a female.”
“A homosexual nature?” asked Markham.
“Yes. It has been well established for some time now that Michelangelo was a homosexual. The only argument thrown around academic circles nowadays is whether or not he was
exclusively
a homosexual.”
“I see,” said Markham. “And, if I may ask—the content of the sonnet you received, did it deal with unrequited love?”
“Sort of. There’s every indication that Cavalieri actually returned Michelangelo’s affection, but the evidence also supports that the two never consummated the relationship. The sonnet therefore dealt with more of an unattainable spiritual love than any sort of carnal desire—the kind of love that could not be pursued or even named in Michelangelo’s time. And even though the two remained the closest of friends, the relationship with Cavalieri caused Michelangelo great anguish until the artist’s death.”
“Do you still have these notes?” asked Markham.
“I kept them for a while,” Cathy said, embarrassed. “But when I showed them to my husband, he asked that I get rid of them. I did. That was foolish of me, I know. I shouldn’t have listened to him.”
If only you didn’t listen to him the night he proposed…
“Do you remember the title of the poem this person sent you? Was it numbered or something like Shakespeare’s sonnets?”
“Scholars have numbered some of them, I think, but not with the kind of agreed upon consistency as Shakespeare’s sonnets. I could be wrong, as it is not really my area of expertise. But I can tell you for sure that there was no number or title on the poem I received. I remember that. If you’d like, I can give you the gist of it and the quotes—”
“But you’d recognize both the poem and the quotes if you saw them?”
“Yes.”
Agent Markham switched off the recorder.
“Sullivan, call your tech-guy down at the crime scene. Make sure he has a laptop online and ready for us so Dr. Hildebrant can conduct a search on the Internet. And see if you can get someone to dig up a hardcopy of Michelangelo’s poetry, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m also going to need class rosters for Dr. Hildebrant and all her colleagues in the History of Art and Architecture Department going back over the last ten years. Hell, get me a roster for every class with art or history in the title. It’s Sunday, but get someone on the go ahead today—so we can be there when the offices open tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sullivan, and began dialing her cell phone.
“Agent Markham,” Cathy said, the discussion about Michelangelo had grounded her, made her feel more like herself. “I realize that, because my name was on the base of that wicked thing, you think I might be somehow connected to this psychopath. But do you really think the person who sent me those notes could be the same person who murdered Tommy Campbell and that little boy? Couldn’t it have been just some nut job who read my book? I mean, do you really think that this person could have been one of my students?”
“I don’t know,” said Markham. “But Tommaso is Italian for Thomas. And I’ll tell you that, at the very least, I think it’s a bizarre coincidence that you were given a poem originally intended for a young man named Tommy, and that you now have a statue of a young man named Tommy dedicated to you as well.”
Cathy suddenly felt afraid; but more so she felt stupid—felt her cheeks go hot for not making the connection between the two names when she first mentioned Cavalieri.
But mostly Cathy felt stupid because Special Agent Sam Markham
had
.