The first thing she noticed was something that was missing: the documents that Alan had left on the side table were no longer there. He would have moved them to the kitchen table to work on them, probably: she’d check there later. The next thing she noticed was the mugs. When Sherry had left Alan’s place, the coffee table had still been covered with the detritus left over from their dinner: greasy napkins, paper cartons, splintered disposable chopsticks propped up against the rims of dirty plates. Now the table was clean and wiped down, cleared of everything except two still-full mugs with the tags of teabags dangling off their sides. The wood of the table was stained white in an uneven patch around the mugs, as if tea had splashed onto the table and soaked into the varnish.
Sherry considered that. Alan was a devoted coffee drinker who had offered her a cup of after-dinner decaf more than once. He sometimes also had a glass of whiskey before bed. She’d never seen him drink tea. So, after she’d left or in the early hours of the morning, another guest had arrived, someone whom Alan had been friendly enough with to let into hishome and settle onto his sofa, someone for whom he’d dug into the back of his cabinet to find a lone box of tea. Someone who needed sobering up, maybe, or calming down. Possibly someone with a bit of a drinking problem or someone already very agitated. Or, perhaps, someone who wouldn’t strike him as a whiskey drinker due to age, sex, or ill health.
She moved on, looking for anything that struck her as out of place. The murder weapon was obvious: the brass lamp that usually sat on the end table was missing, probably taken away as evidence, and there was a scratch on the wood floor behind the couch where something heavy might have been dropped. Sherry took a moment to try to imagine what it must have looked like. Alan’s guest would have been standing behind the couch. They’d been pacing around the room, maybe. Alan had come back from the kitchen with the mugs and stood in front of the couch to carefully put them down. As he bent over, the guest had grabbed the lamp and swung it hard down onto his head, causing the tea to slosh out onto the table before Alan fell to the floor and died. Sherry swallowed back nausea. If she spoke to the coroner, she would know whether or not her theory was correct. If it was, then the killer really could be anyone Alan knew well. You wouldn’t need to be a strong, tall man to bring a heavy lamp down hard onto the back of the head of someone who was leaning over and vulnerable. Sherry could have easily done it. Maybe not hard enough to kill him immediately, but possibly hard enough to stun him, to send him to the floor, where he’d slowly die, alone in his living room, with the tea he’d made for someone he’d trusted cooling a foot or so above him.
She forced herself to step away, to move on. She went to the side table that held Alan’s phone and answering machine. Fora moment she felt a flash of something strange and vertiginous, as if something was deeply out of step with the way it was supposed to be. Then the feeling vanished and she could focus again. She checked the answering machine. No messages. Not surprising, she supposed: a message that saidHello, this is Karl, I’ll be by in fifteen minutes to murder youwould have been a bit too much to hope for. She made a circuit through the living room, but there wasn’t much else of note, besides all of Alan’s books and tasteful art photography prints and other things that made her chest clamp up from missing him.
She went into the kitchen. No documents. Taken away by the police, maybe. The kettle was still on the stove, but it looked like he’d had time to wash up the plates from their dinner. The trash can contained nothing but ordinary trash. She put the lid back on quickly—it stank—and then noticed that he’d written a note on the pad on the refrigerator.Call Susan.She frowned. Susan, she knew, was his ex-wife, but she had thought they weren’t in contact. He hadn’t written down her number on the note. She set out to search through the rest of the house for anything else out of place, hoping that she might also find some sort of little black book. She moved quickly through his bedroom and bathroom: there was nothing obviously strange in either of them, and they made her too sad to linger in for too long. She was making another loop of the living room—were those library books?—when a photo caught her eye. Alan from two summers ago, in costume for a community theater production ofThe Pirates of Penzance. She smiled reflexively at it, charmed by the sight of him looking so happy in his eye patch and red bandanna, surrounded by aging light-opera enthusiasts. Then the little Alan in thepicture shifted his face, looked Sherry in the eye, and opened his mouth in a silent, agonized scream.
Sherry stumbled backward a few steps, her hand shooting up to cover her mouth. Her heart was pounding. The picture was still now, as if nothing had happened at all. Just a normal photo. She wiped her sweaty palms off on her jeans. Then she left as quickly as she could, barely remembering to lock up and hide the key under the gnome again as she fled. It hadn’t really been Alan. Itcouldn’thave been Alan. It was like her cat talking. It was magic, or the devil playing tricks. Kind, smart, gentle Alan wasn’t trapped somewhere in agony. He couldn’t be.
Maybe it was all in her head.
She walked home. Almost jogged home, really, trying to move fast enough to make her heart pound from exercise instead of from fear. By the time she got close to her house, she was still so full of nervous energy that she had the abrupt impulse to turn around and walk back to town. The idea of going home to be alone was unbearable. Instead, she took a hard right and headed up the driveway to Alice’s house.
She could easily rationalize it to herself, at least: Alice had been Alan’s only full-time employee at the antiques store. It was at least conceivable that she might have noticed something odd going on with Alan, or that he might have mentioned something to her that could serve as a clue. Maybe the ne’er-do-well young Corey had been dipping into the company accounts, or maybe Alan himself had been pulling some creative accounting. Technically, she supposed, Alice could even be a suspect, though that seemed unlikely. For one thing, Alan’s death had put the potentially cash-strapped Alice out of a job. For another, Alice was small, timid, and had no motivethat Sherry could think of to kill a man who had only ever been kind to her. Still, there was a chance. That chamomile tea was exactly the sort of thing that people in general tended to feel compelled to offer to Alice. It was within the realm of possibility that Alice had, for some reason, gone to visit Alan that evening and something had gone terribly wrong. Sherry tried to imagine the scene. Alice, weeping over her financial woes in Alan’s living room. What might he have done? Sherry winced at her first thought: an offer of a raise, his mouth near her ear, his hand on her thin, fragile thigh.
She wouldn’t expect that from Alan, but people were endlessly surprising. Something like that might have been enough to set off a terrible turn of events. The death had all the trappings of the usual sort of stupid, sad, spontaneous killing: a split-second decision after an argument, not an elaborate plot. She couldn’t let all the ghoulies and ghosties distract her from the very simple basics of the case: the person most likely to have killed Alan was the person who, even for a split second, had the strongest reason to want him dead. Sherry sighed as she mounted the steps to Alice’s front porch. This was the worst sort of case to try to crack. Very few people would deliberately plan a murder, but given the right moment, the right degree of rage, and a heavy enough object within arm’s reach, almost anyone could find themselves a murderer.
The first thing she noticed when she got to Alice’s house was that Alice had tidied up her entryway a bit. The useless cat carrier was gone, along with most of the other clutter. Alice’s winter boots were lined up neatly next to the door instead of lying on their sides exactly where guests would be most likely to trip over them. The relative tidiness of the entryway made for an odd contrast with Alice herself when she finallyappeared in the doorway after Sherry knocked. She looked even more flustered and bedraggled than usual, in a stained T-shirt with her hair unbrushed. “Oh my God, Sherry, I’m so sorry,” she said the second she opened the door. Then she burst into tears.
Sherry held her and patted her back as she cried, trying not to feel affronted by what felt like a bit of a reversal of their proper roles.Sherrywas the grieving girlfriend, not Alice.Grieving employeewasn’t a position generally accepted as worthy of consideration by wider society. That seemed rude to point out, though, so Sherry made comforting sounds and waited for Alice to pull herself together, which she did eventually. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I’m making this all about me, I’m theworst. I’m just—I’mreallysorry. Would you like to come in? I could make coffee?”
“If you don’t mind,” Sherry said, choosing not to engage with theI’m making this all about me. “I was hoping that we could talk.” She followed Alice inside. The tidying efforts had apparently not made it past the entryway: the living room was as messy as ever. Alice spent a few seconds dashing around to clear the clutter off the coffee table and move it onto the dining room table, which was so covered in stuff—books, unopened mail, half-drunk bottles of Diet Coke, coffee mugs, et cetera—that Alice would really be better off giving up on the table concept altogether and replacing it with some nice open shelving. “Your porch looks nice,” Sherry offered.
“I was trying to get organized,” Alice said. “Before I found out, I mean.” Her voice wobbled. “I’ll make coffee,” she added, and vanished into the hidden realm beyond the dining table clutter mountain.
As soon as Alice was out of sight, Sherry got up to do aquick snoop around the room. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly, and there wasn’t much to see, anyway. It wasn’t a very nice room, and Alice hadn’t added much in the way of personal touches. There were the white walls and ugly sailboat prints that had been there when Alice had first moved in, and there was the kind of clutter that tended to build up in the homes of poor people who were nervous about throwing anything away just in case they’d have to eventually buy a replacement. Pens and notepads from banks and plastic water bottles given away at street fairs. Some of the mail on the table looked like past-due bills. Nothing that made Sherry feel particularly good about herself when she went creeping around and peeking at it. The purr and crackle of the coffee pot started up from the kitchen, and she retreated to the ugly maroon couch to wait for Alice to come back into the room.
Eventually Alice reappeared with a mug of coffee in each hand. “I was going to ask if you wanted milk for it,” she said. “But I’m out.”
“Black is fine,” Sherry said, and took the mug that Alice offered in both hands. It felt comforting to hold it. She took a sip and suppressed a wince: it was both watery and full of some awful artificial flavoring. Hazelnut, maybe. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about what happened?”
Alice shook her head. “I don’t know anything, though,” she said. “I mean—I just went to work and opened the shop like normal. I only found out what happened when the cops showed up.” Her voice was wobbling again.
“That’s all right,” Sherry said. “That’s fine. Have the police talked to you already?”
Alice nodded, then sniffed. “Yeah.”
“Then maybe you could just tell me what you told them,”Sherry said. She was doing her best to be calm and patient. “Can you tell me what your day was like on Saturday?”
“Nothing,” Alice said. “It wasn’t like anything. Just a normal day. Not too busy. The only weird thing was that Alan got a personal call at the shop. That’s never happened before.”
Eleven
“A personal call?” Sherry repeated, and sat up a bit straighter. “Did he say who from?”
Alice grimaced slightly. “The cops kept asking that, too. But like, it really wasn’t a big deal, I don’t think. I mean, I barely even noticed it when it happened; it wasn’t some big dramatic thing. He talked for maybe five minutes, and then he came back out of the office and talked to a customer about an old French lamp. He didn’t act weird or upset or anything. Justnormal.”
“And he didn’t mention who he’d been talking to?”
“No, and she didn’t say who she was when I picked up, either,” Alice said.
Sherry blinked. “You were the one who picked up the phone?”
Alice did something that looked like an eye roll that hadn’t quite made it out of its larval stage before she squashed it. “Yeah, that’s how I knew that it was a personal call. She called the shop and asked for Alan, then said it was personal when I asked if I could help her instead. I told him that he had a call and he said he’d pick up in the office. That’s it. Nothing else happened.”
“I see,” Sherry said. “Did you notice anything unusualabout her voice?” As soon as she said it, she felt ridiculous. Likewhat? A thick Russian accent?
