She rushed through getting ready and writing a check for Alice, shoved the check through Alice’s mail slot, and made it to the diner just after six. Then she took an awkward moment to scan the room for the medical examiner. Despite her having run into him in passing a few times before in the course of her sleuthing, she always imagined him as a man in a black tailcoat, which was definitely an image from Dickens and wrong both for the job and for the century. The disappointing reality was a tall, lanky, balding man who was usually wearing either a baggy sport coat or tight running gear that made him look even more Gumby-like than he otherwise would. He spotted her first and did one of those awkward half-stand-and-waves that people did when greeting an acquaintance who’d just walked into a restaurant.
She approached the booth, and he jolted back up into an uncomfortable booth-constrained crouch to shake her hand. “Good morning, Sherry,” he said.
“Good morning,” Sherry said, and slithered her way into the other side of the booth. “It’s so nice of you to meet me.”There were already two menus on the table. It seemed rude to launch directly into questions about the dead-people business. Besides, she wanted to order some coffee. She tried to catch the waitress’s eye. “I was so impressed when Father Barry said that he bumped into you on a run this morning,” she tried. “I could never be that disciplined! Don’t you get cold, running so early in the winter?”
“No,” he said. “I just layer. I leave for my run every morning at four, then come here at six. It’s not hard if you go to bed early. The priest said that you wanted to talk about the Thompson case?”
Matt McGuire, it seemed, wanted nothing more than to talk about his dead-body business before Sherry had had the chance to put her coffee order in. The waitress, whom Sherry had never seen before—Sherry had never in her life gone to a diner before eight a.m.—saved her by coming over with the carafe of her own accord. “Coffee?” she asked. Then, after Sherry had answered in the affirmative, “Youknowwhatyouwant, hon?”
Sherry took half a second to panic over this unanticipated demand for her to make a decision. Then she said, “Baconeggencheese,” with the confidence she’d developed from shouting her order at the surly owner of her local bodega during her brief sojourn in New York City. Then she tacked on a more polite, “Please.”
“Be right up,” the waitress said, and ambled off.
Sherry blinked at McGuire. “Did you want to—”
“She knows what I want,” he said. “I always get the same order.” Then he said, “Alan Thompson died of an epidural hemorrhage following blows to the frontal and parietal bones.”
Sherry flinched. She couldn’t help it. She prided herself on being unflappable, but she was unmistakably flapped.Alan.Poor Alan. She took a sip of coffee and tried to gather herself. Multiple blows didn’t square with what she’d imagined when she looked at the scene. “The frontal and parietal bones?”
“The front and upper back of the head,” McGuire said, and indicated with a finger where he meant on his own head.
She frowned. “So someone hit him from the back, then ran around and hit him in the front as well?”
“No,” he said. “The pattern of injury was consistent with his having been struck on the back of the head with a blunt instrument, then hitting his head again on another object as he fell forward.”
“A blunt instrument like a brass table lamp, and another object like a coffee table?”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable making that determination,” McGuire said. “But yes, possibly.”
“Right,” Sherry said. That squared perfectly: she just hadn’t factored in that coffee table. The back of her mind whispered,Poor Alan.“Right,” she said again. “Do you have a time of death?”
“I’ve put it at sometime between ten p.m. and midnight,” he said.
“Ten thirty,” Sherry said absently.
He frowned. “What?”
“He dropped me off at my house after ten,” Sherry said. “I didn’t check my watch when we arrived, but I remember noticing that it was almost ten before we left his house. Then he needed time to drive back home, greet a guest, and make two cups of tea before he was killed. It probably couldn’t have beenbefore ten thirty.” An hour and a half was a nice, tight time frame for her to work with, much better than cases she’d dealt with where the victim was long since cold. Just a neat, tidy hour and a half or so to account for, and not whole days or weeks or longer in which people had a dispiriting tendency to not remember where they’d been or who they’d seen or what they’d had for dinner.
The new timeline also took care of one of Sherry’s few suspects. Alice had been home when Sherry went across the road to give her the leftover Chinese food, and they’d chatted until about ten thirty. She’d still been home at just after midnight when she’d walked to Sherry’s house to ask for help when her power had gone out. Alice didn’t own a car, which meant that in order for her to have killed Alan within McGuire’s estimated time of death, she would have had to walk all the way to Alan’s house in a raging blizzard in the dark, knock on his door to be invited in for tea, kill him, walk back, and then go to Sherry’s house to ask for help, all in under an hour and a half. The walk to Alan’s house in good weather took forty-five minutes at least, and the walk back up the hill to Alice’s took longer. In a blizzard, Sherry was fairly sure that making it to Alan’s house, killing him, and then getting back up to Sherry’s in time to ask for help with her electrical problems would be beyond the capacities of one skinny little retail assistant. Besides, Alice still didn’t have a motive. Sherry was pleased with this realization for the moment it took her to register that she now didn’t really have any suspects at all. A mysterious woman who might have been Alan’s ex-wife. Some perfectly pleasant antiques dealer. Then it hit her, and she blanched. She didn’t have any suspects. But to the police—to any uninterested observer—the most likely suspect was the last personwho had seen him alive, and the only person who could testify that he’d still been alive for any time between ten and midnight.
It wasn’t just because of the demons that Sherry would have to solve this one quickly.
Twelve
Their food came then, and Sherry and McGuire ate their breakfasts in a silence that was less companiable than it was forged out of a mutual understanding that neither of them was remotely interested in chitchat. Then she went straight to the library and to her favorite enormous old encyclopedia, which she kept partially just as a decoration—it was one of those nice leatherbound sets—and pulled out the volume forY. She looked upyewand read the description. Evergreens with fleshy red fruits.
Bright red, standing out against the snow.
Sherry stared at the black-and-white illustration. The shape of the berry was right, too. This was exactly the plant that had been tugging at her attention lately on her walks.
The back of her neck went spiky. The cat had gone on aboutresonances. Well, maybe. Maybe there was something to it, though she didn’t know exactly what. She put the encyclopedia away, still feeling vaguely uneasy. It was an hour before the library would usually open, and she was technically on leave. She started vacuuming. Some strange, wild corner of her brain felt convinced that, if she was a good and responsible librarian who kept the place clean and organized, the police wouldn’t suspect her of murder. She hung around for the restof the day, even, ignoring the baffled looks and timid questions of the staff members who’d clearly been told not to expect her. Everything went smoothly and utterly comfortingly until a little boy came up to the desk with several books of Greek mythology to check out.
“Oh, these look interesting,” she said encouragingly. She always felt a sort of kinship with small children who checked out big dry books on the sorts of topics that peculiar, uncoordinated children tended to be interested in, like wild horses and dinosaurs and ancient Rome.
The little boy looked up at her. “Sherry,” he said, in Alan Thompson’s voice. “Please, God,help me.”
Sherry gave a muffled, strangled scream and stumbled backward, then frantically grabbed for her purse to try to fumble for the spray bottle full of holy water. It was too late, though: by the time she’d found it and looked up again, the boy was gone. He’d left his books behind. Sherry placed her hand on the pile as if she was swearing on a Bible, right over Athena’s breastplate on the cover. The books were real. It was all real.
