“I’m not crazy,” she said aloud, to the immediate and obvious alarm of a passing page.
She hung around until the library closed, then went back to the diner. She told herself that she had business there: she’d forgotten to ask about whether anyone had noticed Alan eating there on the day he’d died. Really, she’d do almost anything to avoid having to go home and be alone with Lord Thomas Cromwell. She used to love petting her cat when she was unhappy and in need of comfort, but it wasn’t very pleasant anymore to think that he might sit in her lap and purr.
She’d checked out a Georgette Heyer before she left thelibrary. She tucked herself into a corner booth with the lords and ladies, then ordered a cup of decaf to drink while she read. When the coffee arrived, it came with a very nice-looking slice of cherry pie. “From Jason,” the waitress said. “We all heard about your friend Alan. We’re really sorry.”
Sherry looked up. Jason, the cook, gave her a small smile and a wave from behind the counter. “Thank you,” Sherry called out, touched. He did a different wave, the “it was nothing” kind. Sherry waved back. Then she looked up at the waitress. Jessica, Sherry thought was her name. “Speaking of Alan,” she said. “Do you know if he ate lunch here at the diner this past Saturday?”
Jessica frowned as if she was giving that some thought. “I think so,” she said. “Yeah, I think maybe he did. Holly had the table—she’s new—but I think I remember seeing him, unless I’m getting the day wrong. I’d have to ask Jason which day we had the chicken Florentine.”
“That would be lovely of you, if you could,” Sherry said. “Do you remember if anyone was with him?”
Jessica looked uncomfortable. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s why I noticed him. He was with a woman who wasn’t you, and she didn’t look like she was from around here, so she really stood out.”
“Oh,” Sherry said, and felt her stomach sink in a way that really wasn’t reasonable at all. She’d been insistent about Alan never having been her boyfriend. “Right. Can you describe her?”
“Older,” Jessica said. “I mean, uh. Notold. About Alan’s age.” AboutSherry’sage, she meant. “She had this kind of ashy bob, that kind of transitional color for when you’re trying togrow the gray in gracefully? I used to do hair, so I always notice if someone has a really good or bad dye job.”
“And was this one good or bad?” Sherry asked. She hoped that it was bad.
“Definitely good,” Jessica said immediately. “She probably spent a ton on it. She definitely didn’t get it done around here. I was trying to guess in my head what she was doing up here. I thought maybe some fancy interior design lady who was meeting Alan to buy special antiques from him or something. That’s what she looked like. She was wearing this long camel-colored coat. No one from around here dresses like that. I remember feeling bad that it was touching the floor and probably getting mud on it from people’s snow boots.”
“That does sound memorable,” Sherry said. It was the most neutral thing she could think of to say. “Could you ask Jason about the chicken Florentine? I’m sorry to be a bother.”
“It’s no problem; it’s dead in here, anyway,” Jessica said. Then she lowered her voice slightly. “Are youinvestigating?”
Sherry nodded. “Yes,” she said, lowering her own voice even though there was no one around to possibly overhear. People loved to feel as if they were helping with a murder investigation, and the more dramatic you managed to make it seem, the more they loved it. If there were a seedy dive bar in Winesap, Sherry would arrange to meet all her witnesses there just to take advantage of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, all there was that came close to fitting the bill was a bar and grill next to the gas station that served soggy hot wings and played a constant rotation of Tom Petty’s greatest hits, which wasn’t exactly an environment where you’d expect to see Philip Marlowe meeting with a beautiful young widow. “It really wouldbe a huge help if you could confirm that he had lunch with an unidentified person on the day he was killed.” She managed not to flinch at the phrasethe day he was killed. It was the sort of phrase that she needed to use to get the information that she wanted: people seemed to find it impressive, along withour main suspect, andthe estimated time of death, andmotive and opportunity.
Jessica was already nodding. “I’ll ask,” she said, and trotted off. A moment later it was Jason, not Jessica, who came walking over to Sherry’s table. It took him a while: Jason had a fairly pronounced limp. When people asked him about it, he came up with a different ridiculous story every time: Sherry’s favorite version was that he’d been trampled by a bull in Pamplona. She’d heard that the actual explanation was that he’d fallen off a ladder while working as a roofer in his twenties, but that wasn’t nearly as much fun.
“Thank you for the pie,” Sherry said again.
Jason shrugged this off. “You’re having a bad week,” he said. Jason was a stocky man with warm brown eyes and an easy smile. He’d once told Sherry that he’d moved to New York from Los Angeles as a teenager, and he still wasn’t accustomed to the winters. Now he was in his early forties or so, a relative newcomer to Winesap and the diner, and the proud father of two very polite and princessy little girls who sometimes did their homework sitting on stools at the counter. His much younger and very sweet wife was a Winesap local who worked at the hospital in Schenectady, where they’d met, as a nurse’s aide.
Sherry had gotten to know Jason because, as one of the few regulars who often hung around the diner after the dinner rush on weekday evenings, she’d had the chance to chat withhim when he’d occasionally emerge from the kitchen. He liked Ray Bradbury and Tolkien and was currently working his way throughDune. He drove a rusty red pickup, and she’d deduced from things he’d mentioned to her about his home that he and his family lived in one of the modest little former summer homes around the lake. The lake houses had been built back in the 1920s, when little towns in the nearby countryside were still attractive summer home destinations to the people of Schenectady and Albany. The tourist industry had died for decades and was now being reconstructed by the determined populace, but the lake houses were far too small now to meet the needs of the wealthy vacationers who had once owned them. They were perfect, though, for the ordinary working-class people of Winesap. You could have your own dock with a boat there, as long as you didn’t mind living shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors.
Sherry smiled at him. He was such a nice young man. “I don’t suppose you remember which day this past week you had the chicken Florentine?”
“Saturday,” he said immediately. “I remember because we ran out before noon, but Holly forgot to wipe it off the specials board, so she kept giving me tickets with the Florentine on them until I went out there and erased it myself.”
“Thank you, that’s very helpful,” Sherry said. “Did you happen to notice whether or not Alan Thompson was here? If you’d recognize him, I mean.”
He shook his head. “I know what he looks like, but I only came out of the kitchen long enough to fix the board. We were slammed my whole shift Saturday.”
“I see,” she said. “Thank you, anyway. That was very helpful of you.”
“No problem,” he said, then hesitated before he said, “I was sorry to hear about Alan. I never spoke to him, but he must have been a pretty smart guy, to be a lawyer. I hope you catch who did it.”
“Thank you,” Sherry said, and then Jason went back to the kitchen. It took her until she was halfway through her pie for it to occur to her how odd it was that he’d mentioned Alan being a lawyer, when he’d said that he’d never talked to him, and Alan had retired from the law a few years before Jason came to Winesap. She looked up to see if he was still behind the counter, so that she could maybe ask him, but he’d vanished back into the kitchen again.
Once her pie was finished, there was nothing for her to do but head home. She did so grudgingly, trudging her way up the hill in the cold, the road illuminated only by very rare streetlights and the lights of houses flashing briefly through the bare trees. She jolted at a sudden blast of noise: it sounded like a motorcycle driving through the village. Strange, at this time of year. A few steps later she caught a flash of red in the corner of her eye.Blood, she thought, and turned to look. The red of the yew berries shone dully in the light spilling from the window of a nearby house. She remembered the description from the encyclopedia. It had called the berriesfleshy. They looked fleshy now, like freshly cut beef. She shivered. Then she took a few quick steps toward the bush, reached out to grab hold of a branch, and tugged and twisted until it came off in her hand. Then she hurried off, shoving the branch into her coat pocket the best she could. She’d sweated a little, and now she shivered. It was awfully cold.
She thought longingly of Alan then, of the way that he always seemed to know when she was feeling particularly tiredand beaten down and would pull up in his car to whisk her off to something pleasant. Not today. Not ever again, and wasn’t she selfish for thinking about herself when a good, kind man had been killed? She’d be suspicious of herself if she was someone else. The odd old woman who lived on the outskirts of town and was the last person to have seen the victim. The old woman whose evil cat knew she had something to feel guilty about.
She’d avoided thinking about it for years. She’d left Florida to try to escape from it. Here she was, though, with some—personclaiming to be the devil trying to use what she’d done as leverage.
She was still a few minutes away from home when she decided that she needed to talk to Caroline.
As soon as she arrived, she started stalling, of course. She made herself a cup of tea. She turned the radio on, then turned it off again. She used the bathroom and took a long, hot shower, and bundled herself up in her cozy bathrobe. She poured herself a glass of brandy. Then, with no more delaying tactics available to her, she got out her old address book and found the number she wanted. Even as she dialed, she found herself hoping that it would be a wrong number. They might have moved away. She remembered being in the car with Caroline six years ago, how she’d told her over and over that everything would be all right. She was very good at comforting other people, at tricking them into thinking that she was the wise, protective older sister or mother or grandmother they’d never had, when really she was just as baffled as anyone. She didn’t seem capable of applying the same skill to her own racing heart.
