“Well,” Father Barry said after a long moment. “No. But that might not be…a demon problem. Exactly.” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes he ignores my calls.”
“Barry,” Charlotte said. “Did youpiss off the bishop? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” said Father Barry. “I mean—I think I might have frustrated him a few times by mixing up my heresies. And I might have called him a little often when I first got here. But I needed advice! And there’s also, uh.” He cleared his throat again. “Todd.”
Charlotte looked like a woman watching her new favorite reality show. “Ooh,Todd?” she asked. “Who’sTodd?”
“My brother,” said Father Barry, with a nearly imperceptible sigh. “I introduced him to the bishop’s niece, and he brought her to Cancún. She apparently had a really good time.”
Everyone in the room except for Charlotte winced. Charlotte looked delighted. “You have a brother who takes nice Catholic girls to Cancún? Older or younger?”
“Twenty minutes younger,” Father Barry said. “And yes, before you ask, we’re opposites but still close, just like the twins on TV. We talk on the phone almost every day. He’s not abad guy. He’s, uh. Figuring things out.”
“Oh my God,” Charlotte said. “Identical?”
Father Barry looked pained. “Yes. Can we please stop talking about Todd?”
“We don’t have to talk about Todd,” Sherry said. “Listen, I have an idea. How about wealltry to contact someone from outside of Winesap to ask for help? It would be killing two birds with one stone. If none of them get back to us or can make it here, then we can probably assume that Charlotte’s right about this being likeThe Truman Show, and we’ll knowthat we have to figure this out on our own. If they do get back to us, then we’ll have some extra help, which will be even better.”
Janine was frowning. “Won’t the sheriff object to you bringing in a bunch of outsiders, Sherry?”
Sherry’s cheeks warmed slightly. “We don’t have to tell him,” she said. “And he’s kicked me off of the case. Or at least—he’s gone back and forth between screaming at me to investigate and telling me to stay away from him, so I’ve decided to investigate independently for now.” She lifted her chin a little. “If you don’t feel comfortable with that, then you don’t have to help.”
“I don’t feel comfortable withanyof this,” Janine said, and then sighed. “I’ll call some colleagues.”
“I’ve got a friend who’s a witch,” Charlotte said. “Just as a side hustle, I mean, not full-time in a cottage in the woods. She’s a project manager for a management consulting firm. I could call her and see if she knows anything about evil spirits.”
“She probably knows a lot of them in management consulting,” Sherry said.
“I don’t know how I feel about working with awitch,” Father Barry said. “I’m sure that your friend is, uh, agoodwitch, but it’s all dabbling with the same bad stuff, isn’t it?”
“Oh, come on, like the Catholic Church has this amazing record of not being evil,” Charlotte said. “She’s not going to open up a gate to hell or something. As far as I know, she mostly just burns herbs in people’s apartments after they get dumped to get rid of the bad ex-boyfriend energy.”
“She sounds like a lovely young lady,” Sherry said firmly. “You should call her. It’s all hands on deck in a crisis, Father. And I’ll…keep investigating. That’s what the…spirit thingwants me to do, and I don’t want to push it too much. It got a bit…threatening the other night.” She suppressed a shiver. For all that she’d been sassy at her cat—it was just acat, for God’s sake—she couldn’t erase the memory of how she’d felt while she was hiding in her bathroom and listening to that monstrous voice howling just outside her door.
“Don’t you have anyone to call, Sherry?” Janine asked.
“No,” Sherry said, and then blinked. “Well—maybe. I’ll think about it.” She didn’t know anyone with expertise in evil spirits, but the question had made her think of one person who owed her an extremely major favor. She didn’t want to call her, though. Her stomach tightened up from guilt just thinking about it. She drank some more of her fancy coffee and took a big bite of her doughnut. Then Charlotte piped up again.
“I think that we should all be equipped with stuff to protect ourselves,” she said, which launched the whole group into a fairly spirited discussion of rosaries, holy water, garlic, salt, rowan wands, et cetera, until even Janine was lobbying in favor of the usefulness of her collection of anti-evil-eye charms brought back from Grecian vacations. This devolved, over the next few minutes, into discussion of vacations in general. Father Barry, unsurprisingly, had spent a lot of time in Italy.
Sherry drank her coffee and ate her doughnut, letting the sound of the conversation wash over her. It was comforting, for a second, to be able to imagine that a group of competent adults had taken over and would solve everything for her. Then she finished her cappuccino, licked the last fleck of chocolate off her thumb, and stood up. “I should go,” she said. “I have to keep investigating. Thank you all so much for meeting with me.”
“Wait,” Father Barry said. He fidgeted slightly in his chair.“I know the coroner. I could ask him to meet you. In case there’s anything that you need to know about the body. About Alan’s body, I mean.”
Sherry flushed. Alan was dead, but it still felt indecent to talk about his body. “Thank you, Father,” she said. Then she said her goodbyes and left. She needed to go to Alan’s house.
Ten
Months ago, Alan had gone away on a trip to visit a new baby granddaughter and asked Sherry to water his plants for him while he was away. He’d told her that he kept a spare key under the garden gnome that his younger son had given to him for Christmas when he was nine. The gnome in question—a battered, faded object that had accompanied Alan for twenty years and through multiple moves—had the normal white beard and red cheeks, et cetera, but was wearing a Red Sox cap instead of the traditional pointy hat. It was the tackiest thing that Alan owned, and so obviously hadn’t matched Alan’s otherwise completely unremarkable and un-whimsical front yard that Sherry had thought that it would probably be the first place that anyone would look for a spare key. Alan had shrugged at that and smiled dotingly down at the gnome. “He’s been guarding my keys for twenty years. He’s done a fine job so far.”
The sweet gnome-gifting younger son, Corey, had apparently grown up to be a bit of a ne’er-do-well. He had, according to Alan, fallen in with the wrong crowd, though the sort ofwrongthat would be more likely to get Corey featured in the gossip pages as a factor in a nasty society divorce than to get him killed as a factor in a drug deal gone wrong. The type ofpeople whose money papered over their vices. Maybe the gnome was a reminder of happier times, or at least times when Corey was less likely to call his father from a bar in Tribeca to drunkenly ask for yet another cash infusion. Alan had apparently recently charged him with using his wealthy New York and European connections to source antiques for Alan to sell in his shop. He had, it seemed, been successful at it. He’d gone to art school and ran in very wealthy social circles, and had a knack for finding prints and sketches by previously underappreciated artists that Alan could then turn around in his shop for a substantial markup. Alan himself didn’t know very much about fine art—his expertise was weighted more toward historical memorabilia, autographs, and furniture—so Corey’s contribution was useful for diversifying his offerings. Alan had relayed this to her with relief: he sometimes seemed mildly concerned that his younger son would never find a career to settle into, but now it looked as if he might want to take over the shop one day. Or at least, ithadlooked like that, for a while.
She found the key underneath the gnome, exactly where Alan must have left it last. It was cold and gritty from the ground. She wiped it off on her blue jeans, leaving a dirty smear, and let herself in.
She’d expected it to seem different inside. There should have been a smell of bleach or blood. Instead it was cold and slightly stuffy. It smelled like he’d eaten Chinese food, shut everything up, locked the door, and gone away. Fried garlic and a few days of settling dust. The entryway was as it always was, neat and tidy, his bulkier coats and snow-drenched boots and skis and similar items banished to the back porch, where guests couldn’t trip on them. To the right was a small sidetable with two books about World War II stacked on it, marked with a Post-it note on which he’d written neatly,Return to Greg. He always did that, with things that someone had lent him or left at his house: everything was marked with a reminder and placed in the hall to be promptly returned. It made her throat go tight.
She went to the living room, where she’d eaten dinner with him a few nights before. The crime scene. She kept her eyes away from the discolored spot on the rug and tried to pay attention to the details of the room and compare them to what had been there before.
