“If you’re sure,” Janine said after a short pause. “Maybe I could bring you some lunch tomorrow?”
“All right,” Sherry said. Maybe if she agreed, Janine would leave her alone.
“Are there any suspects yet?” Janine asked.
“I don’t know,” Sherry said. Maybe she was going to throw up.
“But aren’t you investigating?” Janine asked.
“No,” Sherry said. She was going to throw up. “Janine, it’sAlan, I couldn’t—do you want me to go look at the crime scene? I was just there last night, we—”
“But youwillinvestigate, won’t you?” Janine’s voice sounded strange. Not flat. The opposite of that, like an actor in a local Winesap production of a too-ambitious modern play. The emotion was spread on too thickly.
“No,” Sherry said. “Andpleasestop asking. My boyfriend justdied, Janine.” She’d never called Alan her boyfriend before. It was too late to matter now. Too late, too late—
“But you’re sogoodat it,” Janine said. “Aren’t you worried about finding his killer? Don’t you want justice? Didn’t you love him?” She sounded even less like herself now, harsh and loud and shrill. There was a strange metallic quality to her voice that Sherry didn’t think was coming from the speaker of Sherry’s old telephone.
“Stop,” Sherry said. “Stop, you’re beingcruel—” Andhadshe loved him, really? Could she have loved him, if she’d let herself? She couldn’t anyway now, it was too late, it was too late for Alan, Sherry could solve a murder but shecouldn’t fucking well stop one—
“You have to investigate, Sherry,” Janine said. Her voice shrieked like glass breaking and metal tearing. Like a car crash. “You have to, you have toinvestigate the crime, your job is tosolve the murder,you have to investigate the murder—”
Sherry hung up on her. Then she dashed to the bathroom to throw up until there was nothing left in her stomach.
Seven
Sherry had barely gotten herself cleaned up when the phone rang again.
At first she tried to ignore it again, but it went just like it had earlier: the phone rang, then stopped, then started ringing again. She forced herself off the bathroom floor and down the hall to answer it.
“Sherry,” said Sheriff Brown. “I was just wondering whether you’d thought at all about who might have a motive to kill Alan.”
“I’m not investigating,” she said, and slammed the phone down so hard that it bounced off the receiver and dangled pathetically at the end of the cord. She hung up again, more carefully this time, then went back to bed. Lord Thomas jumped onto the bed, and purred, and made himself into a ball on her pillow right next to her head. She petted him and cried into his fur until she fell asleep.
She woke up, for the second time in the past twenty-four hours, to the sound of someone pounding on her door. She jolted automatically out of bed, sending Lord Thomas skittering across the room and into the hall, and then staggered downstairs and to the door, all while harboring the completelyunsubstantiated conviction that the person outside was Alice. Needing her help with something, probably. She was working herself into a state of grievance over this idea—How dare Alice always be needing things from her, when Sherry felt so horribly defeated and frightened and sad? Shouldn’t Alice have been told about Alan by now? Why did none of their other neighbors bother to check in on Alice and make sure that she had enough to eat and that the electricity was turned on?—when she peeked through the curtains out of habit and saw that it wasn’t Alice at all. It was Sheriff Brown pounding on the door with his fist as if he was planning on breaking it down. When Sherry pushed the curtains aside, his gaze shot straight to her as if he’d expected it. She froze for a moment, then instinctively stepped backward, letting the curtains drop back into place.
“Sherry!” he called out. “Sherry, I know you’re in there!”
She stepped farther away from the door and the windows. Sheriff Brown kept knocking. “Sherry!” he called out. His voice sounded like ice groaning and gravel crunching. Not like the voice of the man she knew at all. “You have to investigate, Sherry! You have to investigate the crime, your job is to solve the murder, you have to investigate the murder—”
It was just what Janine had said, Sherry realized, with an abrupt twist in her gut. Word for word.
Sherry didn’t answer the door. She went back up to her bedroom and locked the door behind her, then shoved a chair under the door handle the way she’d seen people do on TV. She dug the old rosary out of her bedside table that she hadn’t touched in years. She didn’t pray, exactly. She held it as if it was a gun. She wished that she’d gone into the kitchen to geta bulb of garlic before she’d come up here to hide. She listened to Sheriff Brown screaming for her outside the door in his inhuman new voice for a long time, for far too long, until the sun started to set. Then, finally, everything went quiet.
Sherry waited for another hour or so, just to be safe. Then she went downstairs, looked up the number for the rectory, and called Father Barry.
•••
“This is going to sound like I’ve lost my mind,” Sherry said.
“I doubt it,” Father Barry said. It was seven a.m. and he was sitting across from her in a booth in the Main Street Diner looking as bright-eyed and sun-kissed as a man who’d stepped straight out of an orange juice commercial. “Usually when someone says something that really worries me about their mental health, they don’t start off with apologizing for how crazy the story is going to sound. Usually that’s the sort of thing that people say when they’re about to tell me that they’re in trouble.” He leaned in a little closer. “Are you in trouble, Sherry?”
She bristled instinctively at the use of her name. The way he used it made her feel as if he’d been reading books about how to win friends and influence people. Then she tried to rein in her suspiciousness. She’d called the poor man and asked him to meet her so she could ask him whether or not he thought that the small town he’d only just moved to was gripped by some sort of mass-murderous madness or dark supernatural influence: the least she could do was refrain from judging the authenticity of his concern because he hadtoo many social graces.
“No,” she said finally, in response to his question. Then shepaused. “Well, maybe. Yes.” She paused again. “It really will sound crazy.”
“I’ll bet that I’ve heard crazier,” he said. “Just try me.”
She tried him. She did her best to keep things to the facts, which made everything sound a lot less frightening than it had felt. It was difficult to really communicate something likehis voice sounded like what an iceberg would sound like if icebergs could scream. “Maybe it was nothing,” she said finally.
