“You are crafting something,” the cat said. “You know that you are.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sherry said, but looked again at the stick. It looked like a stick. Or like— “Can you stop a demon by driving a stake through its heart?”
The cat tilted its head to the side. “Canyou?”
“That’s what I’masking,” said Sherry, with a small flare of temper. “I don’t know how it works, I’m notVan Helsing. Can you just answer the question?”
Lord Thomas remained annoyingly unruffled. His fur lay smooth across his back. “I asked you a question in return. You spoke of the demon’sheart. She is a heartless creature. To have a heart she must take human shape. When she takes a shape, she takes that of a mortal. She rides a mortal body like a hunter spurring on his horse. Here, she will pick someone she finds at hand to ride. One of the people of your little village.Canyou look one you know in the eye and drive a stake of yew into their beating heart, Mistress Pinkwhistle?”
Sherry swallowed. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said, but even as she said it, she felt her hand tightening around the stick. No. No, of course not. But— “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. If I had to.”
“Very well,” the cat said. “If you had to. If your need was great enough. If your conviction was strong enough. If you looked your friend in the eye and drove the stake home with the intent of banishing her back to her cold home—then yes. I think that she might accept this as a killing blow, and leave you, at least for a time. She is a gameswoman and a lover of tales. She does not attend to any human law, but certain rules and rituals are older than even she. But you must enter into the spirit of what you plan to do. You must act without detachment, without doubt or irony. There can be no hesitation in your hand.”
Sherry nodded. She had already entered into the spirit of the thing, she thought. Her ability to be flip and ironic felt as if it had long since run out. “If I craft it,” she said, “with intent. If I sharpen it alone and quietly, and rub it with some sort of sacred oil and—” She swallowed again. “Should I pray?”
The cat’s eyes gleamed. It didn’t look stupid at all. “Yes, Mistress Pinkwhistle. You should most certainly pray. To whatever god will have you, you should pray.”
Sherry nodded. She thought,Enter into the spirit of it.Then she bowed. “Thank you, sir, for your counsel.”
He inclined his head. “You are most welcome, mistress.”
Sherry went to bed and had strange dreams. She dreamed that she was waiting in a stand of huge white trees, in the middle of a circle of hooded figures whom she knew were druids. Beside her was a masked figure tied to a stone altar. One of the druids handed her a wooden dagger. “Strike true,” he said.
“I don’t think I can,” Sherry told him.
“You must,” the druid said, “or she will eat your heart.”
She was in a ballroom then, wearing a velvet gown. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned. It was a man in a black cap, with a beaked nose and dark, sad eyes.
“You’re Thomas More,” she said.
“Pray,” he said. His breath was horrible. “Pray to whatever god will have you.”
She woke up with a jolt and checked the time. Just after four. She stayed awake, not moving, her eyes on the window, waiting for the dawn. At about five there was the thump of her cat jumping onto her bed. She scratched his ears and let him push his little head into her palm. “You were right,” she said, “about his halitosis.”
Lord Cromwell purred smugly. Sherry closed her eyes and tried to pray.
An hour later Sherry woke up with the sense that she had just gone on a very, very long walk and was still tired from the journey. She knew that she ought to call Caroline, or work on what she’d started to think of as her yew dagger. Instead she made excuses to herself about how it was too early for a potentially emotional conversationorfor any kind of ancient ritual magic. Then she gulped down some coffee before pouring the rest into a thermos, tromping her way down into town, and letting herself into the library an hour before it would usually open. It had occurred to her over the past few days that there were more things about Alan that she didn’t know than she had realized. Maybe the records in the library would be able to fill in the gaps.
The Winesap Library, though small, was an absolute treasure trove when it came to any sort of local history. Every issue of theHerald, its predecessors, and every other publication and periodical that optimistic locals had launched before their inevitable folding a few months later had been duly collected, cataloged, and stored on microfiche. Still, trying to dig up some theoretical scrap of information that might possibly be relevant in some way to a current murder case would take some time, particularly when there was no guarantee that there would be anything at all to find.
Sherry tried to be methodical about it. She remembered that Alan had had a fifth-anniversary sale at the shop the previous autumn, which meant that the grand opening would have been in September or October—she couldn’t remember which—five years earlier. A new shop opening up in the village was exactly the sort of thing that their tiny local press corps covered in lavish detail. She pulled all the issues of theHeraldfrom the relevant time frame, plus the ill-fated regional alternative weekly based in Albany that had been in print at the time and then folded not long after Sherry had moved to town. She went straight to the Life and Style section in each paper, working under the assumption that the opening of an antiques shop would be there and not under Business.
She’d skimmed her way through a month’s worth of papers when she found it. It was a nice long article, with a picture of a smiling Alan in front of his shop, and the excessively alliterative headline,local lawyer launches lifelong dream shop. It included all the bits that Sherry had expected: Alan’s years of drawing up wills and doing other essential legal work as the only lawyer in little Winesap, and his childhood interest in antiques spurred on by a grandfather who was an ardentcollector of Revolutionary War artifacts. Then, something that startled her: “After leaving his first legal job as a public defender in Schenectady…”
Sherry frowned. She’d known that Alan had grown up in Schenectady and gotten his degree from Albany Law before he’d moved down to the city for a few years to work in some sort of financial law, but he’d never once mentioned having been a public defender. That immediately struck her as something that might matter. People tended to talk about their first jobs, especially if it was something as inherently worth talking about as defending people who’d been accused of crimes. If anything, it would have come up while Sherry was talking to him about her cases. She felt her face go slightly warm. He must have known things that she didn’t, and he never said. She must have sounded like an absolute idiot sometimes. She couldn’t help but feel embarrassed, despite the fact that he was gone now and no one else would ever know. “Sorry, Alan,” she said aloud.
Once she was over her embarrassment, she could focus on this new twist in the case. This, finally, might be a fruitful direction for her investigation. There were probably few occupations that were richer soil for making dangerous enemies than criminal defense attorney. He could have gotten someone off after they’d sinned against someone with a violent temper and a long memory. More likely, she thought, given the time frame, was someone Alan hadfailedto get off blaming him for the many years that they’d spent locked up. That would fit perfectly well: Alan’s former client tracking him down after his release and appearing unexpectedly at his home. Alan, wanting to be kind or perhaps truly feeling some sense of guilt or responsibility, had invited him in and madehim tea; possibly because the man—in Sherry’s imagination this person was certainly a man—had been drunk, or because Alan knew that his former client was supposed to be on the wagon. Maybe the former client had been agitated: maybe he’d demanded an apology for a perceived wrong or asked Alan for money or a place to stay. Maybe they’d argued, or Alan had gently refused his request. Then a terrible, stupid, impulsive moment: a flash of rage, grabbing the lamp, bringing it down onto the back of Alan’s head.
It fit. It fit perfectly. It also presented a problem. Alan had been a defense attorneydecadesago, and he wasn’t around to ask about which of his former clients might have a grudge against him. She was, unfortunately, going to have to do some actual detective work, so far as she was capable of such a thing. Lately she’d grown skeptical of her own abilities in that quarter. If a murder wasn’t really a murder if the devil made you do it, surely the same principle held true for a murder investigation.
She pulled out her notebook then, and drew a small chart to organize her thoughts.
