“Oh, no,” Sherry said—it was the sort of thing that she always seemed to say when people cried: somehow it took her by surprise every time—and emerged from behind the bulletin board to dig some tissues from her purse. She thrust them in Charlotte’s direction, vaguely conscious of the fact that her appearance tended to trick people into thinking that she was being very kind and motherly when internally she was wondering if the expression on her face looked appropriately gentle and concerned. She wondered whether saying “there, there,” was what she should be doing, or if that was just something that authors put into the dialogue to show that someone was being comforting, like when they wrote “harrumph!” to indicate scoffing. She spent half a second in silent contemplationof whether any of the world’s pasty and socially maladjusted bookworms had ever said the wordharrumph!aloud to express indignation. It seemed inevitable that at least one poor soul had.
Charlotte had taken a tissue and was scrubbing at her eyes. Sherry cleared her throat. “John? Is he all right?” John was Charlotte’s husband. Her much older, self-obsessed, and extremely pompous husband. Sherry wouldn’t be particularly surprised to hear that he’d been rushed to the hospital for emergency open-heart surgery after someone expressed a contrarian stance about the works of Damien Hirst in his presence.
Charlotte’s whole body shuddered. “He’sdead,” she said.
An odd feeling passed through Sherry’s chest. Maybe it was guilt for having had uncharitable thoughts about a dead man. Maybe it was unease with her own lack of sadness. John had always struck Sherry as an unpleasant person who didn’t treat his beautiful young wife with enough appreciation or kindness. Maybe, though, what was making her uneasy was the fact that as soon as she’d heard that he was dead she’d thought ofmurder. It didn’t seem quite right that she’d have that thought first, in a nice little town like Winesap, New York. She knew that she had to ask the appropriate question, though. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. Was he sick?”
Charlotte shook her head and took a deep, wobbly breath. “Someone—stabbedhim,” she said, and incredulity flitted across her face before the curtain of shock dropped down again. “And the police are there, and they’re asking questions like they thinkIdid it, and I called my friend who’s a lawyer and she’s driving up from the city but she won’t be here for five hours, and I know thatyouknow about”—she stumbled overthe word as if it was foreign to her—“murders, so I thought that maybe—”
“Of course I’ll come,” Sherry said. “I’ll come with you. Let me just—” She darted off to tell Connie that she would be stepping out for half an hour to deal with an emergency. Then she started to stuff herself back into her winter coat and gloves, trying not to think too deeply about the fact that she was on her way to get herself involved in her second murder in under two weeks.
Two
It was always strange to be in a room that conspicuously lacked a dead body.
Most rooms didn’t have any dead bodies in them, obviously. Even most of the rooms thatSherryspent time in usually weren’t strewn with corpses. Most rooms, though, didn’t feel as if every person in them was revolving around a spot where a dead person had just been. The spot was now occupied by a dark stain, and the stain dragged all the attention in the room toward itself like an exhausted child.
The usual crowd was all there, the people from the state crime lab bustling around while the local beat officers tried to look useful. Sheriff Brown just looked tired. Too tired even, it seemed, to make a show of wanting Sherry to get away from the crime scene. A while ago he’d taken to referring to her as the sheriff’s office’s “researcher and consultant,” and at this point even the people from the state knew her. The photographer gave her a friendly wave. Sherry waved discreetly back, then looked around the gallery to try to get a sense of what might have happened in it.
The studio, at the moment, looked exactly like a crime scene. There were canvases strewn across the room as if someone had been rifling through them in search of something specific. Things had been knocked off the table: a cup of paintbrushes had spewed its contents across a frayed Persian rug. A few paintings had been completely shredded, as if the unknown searcher had at one point taken out their fury on the canvases. The chaos didn’t do much to distract from that stain. “Charlotte,” Sherry said, “do you notice anything missing? Any particular paintings?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. Her eyes moved around the room like a camera panning. “I can’t tell. Everything is—”
“It’s all right,” Sherry said quickly. “You can— I’m sure that there will be plenty of time for you to take an inventory, or—is there an assistant?”
Charlotte was already shaking her head. “Just me,” she said, and then her eyes welled up. Sherry looked away. She always thought that there was something indecent about staring at someone while they tried not to cry.
She decided to give Charlotte a moment to collect herself and wandered sidelong in the direction of Sheriff Brown. He, absurdly, began a sidelong shuffle of his own when he noticed her, as if he wanted to escape her without her noticing that he was trying to escape. They rotated around the stain in the center of the room like they were performing some macabre religious rite. Sherry made a tactical decision and came to a stop to pretend to peer at one of the canvases that had been flung to the floor, which forced Sheriff Brown to continue his rotation in her direction until he couldn’t avoid acknowledging her. “Sherry,” he said.
“Peter,” she said back. She called himPeterout loud, andSheriff Brownin her head, because she appreciated the storybook quality of an actualsheriffbeing someone with whom she sometimes worked to solve mysteries. His coworkers, shethought, ought to be Mortimer Mouse the Mortician and Tommy Turtle the Crime Scene Technician. She had to call Sheriff BrownPeterout loud partly because they’d known each other for long enough that it would seem strange if she didn’t, and partly because if she called himSheriff Brownshe wouldn’t be able to stop imagining him with furry ears and a tail and an oversized ten-gallon hat.
She and Peter (his name would be Peter if he was a storybook mouse, too: Peter Brown, Sheriff of Mousington) eyed each other for a long and uncomfortable moment. He couldn’t, she knew, be the first to askhera question: it would be a way of admitting that he had, at some point over the past few years, lost control over the pursuit of justice in Winesap, New York, and handed the investigative remote control over to an aging librarian who had changed the channel to PBS to watch the latest episode ofPoirot. The metaphor had gotten away from Sherry. She wondered whether Peter ever imaginedheras a storybook animal. If he did, she would probably be a fat old badger in a bonnet.
“I wonder,” she heard herself saying, “why they didn’t take anything from the gallery.”
“Mm?” said Sheriff Brown.
Sherry felt herself retreating into a role. Miss Marple: pink and fluffy and unthreatening. “Oh,” she said, her eyes wide. “I came for the opening last week and heard all about the paintings in the front gallery, and a few of them are by Charlotte’scityfriends, you know, and some of them are quitewell-known, so the paintings areveryexpensive. One of them is on loan to the gallery, and Charlotte said that she was a bit worried about having it here because they don’t have any security to speak of, because who would hire security inWinesap? ButI noticed, as I was coming in, that all of the paintings from the opening were still there, and only some of John’s paintings are missing. John’s paintings”—she dramatically lowered her voice—“aren’t worth very much at all.”
She stepped back slightly to observe how Sheriff Brown had taken that. He looked annoyed, which was a satisfying response. Sheriff Brown always looked annoyed when he thought that she’d done a good bit of deducing. Sherry strongly suspected that Sheriff Brown found her talent for solving murders unendurablyzany. The way that Sheriff Brown looked at her when she identified the perpetrator of a homicide based on a long, quiet conversation over tea and cookies she’d had with the murderer’s mother reminded her of the way that her ex-husband had looked at her when he noticed her enjoying a nice Regency romance novel, as if he was embarrassed just to see her engaging in something so feminine and self-indulgent. Sherry was aware of the fact that anything she did, when done by her, became the sort of thing that matronly ladies who enjoyed Regency romances did. Men, in Sherry’s experience, despised anything relating to matronly ladies who enjoyed Regency romances with a depth of feeling that she privately found a bit silly of them. What was the real harm, after all, in a woman quietly enjoying herself? They ought to feel grateful that the matronly ladies were peacefully reading novels instead of forming guerrilla organizations for throwing paint on antique cars and disrupting professional football games.
“So you think it was personal, then,” Sheriff Brown said. He sounded resigned. “Not a robbery gone wrong.”It’s never a robbery gone wrong in Winesap, Sherry thought. Then she thought,Isn’t it strange that—
The thought darted through Sherry’s mind like a mouse.She tried to look at it more carefully, but it had already disappeared into a hole in a baseboard.
“Exactly,” Sherry said, a moment too late. Then she added, reflectively, “Or a robber who doesn’t know very much about modern art. I don’t imagine that the very well-informed art robbers wouldcometo Winesap, would they?”
“Probably not,” said Sheriff Brown, sounding slightly cheered now. “They’d probably stay inthe city.” Sheriff Brown always pronounced the wordsthe cityas if he were sayingvenereal disease. He, like many citizens of Winesap, thought of New York City as a place populated entirely by people who were all simultaneously wealthy snobs and desperate knife-wielding purse snatchers.Which is ironic, considering that the murder rate in Winesap is—
Into the hole in the baseboard again. Maybe Sherry was going senile. She was too young for it, she thought, but probably everyone who’d ever gone senile thought the same thing.
“So itmightstill be a robbery,” Sheriff Brown said, with what Sherry thought was somewhat touching optimism. Poor Peter. All he wanted were some nice, normal, uncomplicated criminals to arrest. The man wilted from lack of petty larceny.
“It might,” Sherry said agreeably, and then asked, “Do you have a cause of death?” She always felt very intelligent and professional when she asked that sort of question.
Sheriff Brown gave a brief, unattractive grimace. “No,” he said, which could mean eitherNo, we don’t have a cause of deathorNo, I will not tell a Regency-romance-reading senior citizen who doesn’t even work for the sheriff’s department what the cause of death is.
“Oh,” Sherry said, which she was fairly sure that Sheriff Brown knew meant,There’s no use in your being coy: you knowthat I’ll find out eventually. Then they engaged in a long moment of sustained, challenging eye contact before Sherry was struck by an overwhelming urge to giggle, mumbled something about, “Poor Charlotte, I think that I should…” and drifted off in Charlotte’s general direction.
