Once she got there, unfortunately, she realized that she still hadn’t learned what the correct thing to say or do was for a person at that particular stage of grief. Charlotte was no longer crying—she’d moved on to looking quietly and horribly stunned—so tissues were no longer needed, but there wasn’t time to bake her a casserole. Sherry took a moment to engage in something akin to prayer.What would Miss Marple do?she thought. Then the answer came to her. “Charlotte,” she said, her voice very soft. “Why don’t we go up to your apartment, and I’ll fix you a nice cup of tea, and you can make any phone calls that you need to make.” The bit about the phone calls probably wouldn’t have been in a Miss Marple story. Sherry was improvising.
Charlotte looked at her for a moment as if she’d never seen Sherry before in her life. Then she nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s just—this way.” She gestured toward the other room, where a door markedprivateled to the stairway to Charlotte and her now late husband’s apartment.
Sherry had been in Charlotte’s apartment once before, for a cocktail party. She’d gotten a little tipsy and talked very animatedly about fashionable novels with Charlotte’s fashionable friends, and not taken note of the décor. She took note now. There were lots of beautiful rugs and vases and interesting African sculptures, oddly juxtaposed with large prints of harshly lit photographs of very young-looking women’s very cold-looking naked bodies. Sherry recognized the style of thephotographs. There had been an exhibition of them at the gallery a year ago, and Sherry had noticed Charlotte’s eyes sliding off them in the same way that Sherry tried to politely look away from other women in changing rooms. Not Charlotte’s choice, Sherry thought, to put these particular pictures on her walls.
Sherry herded Charlotte to one of the wingback chairs in the living room before heading into the kitchen to look for a teakettle. She found one on the back of the stove, filled it, and put it on. She heard Charlotte say, “Mom?” and then start to cry. She was making those phone calls, then. Sherry took her time in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil and then for the tea to steep. She found milk and sugar and containers for them, and then plates and some cookies. Oreos. The Oreos felt somehow out of place in this particular scene, like a boom mike drifting into the shot. She assembled everything onto a tray and carried it into the next room, where Charlotte was sitting quietly in her chair again, gazing into some spot between her face and the wall.
“Tea,” Sherry said, pointlessly. Charlotte could see perfectly well that it wastea. She was grieving, not recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Sherry set the tray onto an extremely modern glass-and-metal coffee table. The table looked almost as ill at ease in the room as the naked-women photographs and Sherry.
“He was an asshole,” Charlotte said. “That’s what my mother just said. And it’strue, hewasan asshole. He was cheating on me, back in the city. With his ex-wife. And spending money we didn’t have. We had to sell our apartment. That’s why I agreed to move out here to the middle of nowhere, to make a fresh start away from all of that temptation.He wasawful, sometimes, but I still—” She started to well up again.
“Oh,” Sherry said, and sat down on the low sofa on the other side of the coffee table, barely taking a moment to contemplate the fact that she would almost certainly struggle to get up again. “I always thought he seemed as if he’d married up. You’d like to think that they could be more appreciative.” Bythey, Sherry meantmen. “You think that John might have been cheating on you now? Or taking on debt?” These might, she realized belatedly, be deeply inappropriate questions to ask a freshly bereaved young woman. On the other hand, Charlotte had brought it up first. Sherry poured tea. It was something to do.
Charlotte took the mug that Sherry offered her, cradling it in her hands as if she’d just come in from the snow and was trying to warm herself up. “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was steady. “It’s possible. Do you think that’s what the police are thinking? That I murdered him because of the cheating? That I—killed him in a jealous rage, or something like that, or…for the insurance money? I don’t know if he evenhadlife insurance.” A few minutes ago, she’d looked lost, stunned. Now she looked half nervous and half like she wanted to laugh. It was fortunate, Sherry thought, that Sheriff Brown wasn’t in the room.
“I don’t know,” Sherry said honestly. “They might. They always look at the spouse first. I assume that he doesn’t conveniently have a special will that leaves everything to an animal shelter? When was the last time you saw him alive?” Then she winced. “I’m sorry. I’m not being very comforting, am I?”
“Not really,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know if he even had a will. We never talked about it. Oh, God, we never talked aboutanythinglike that. I don’t even know if he wanted to be buried or cremated.”
“Well, I don’t think that he’ll care either way now,” Sherry said briskly, and then nearly slapped a hand over her mouth.
Charlotte was staring at her. “You’re really not how I thought you were,” she said, after a pause so long that Sherry could practically hear it creaking.
“I’m sorry,” Sherry said, truly contrite. She was sometimes shocked by herself, too. She spent so much time pretending to be a nice old lady from a book that her actual, somewhat strange and ghoulish personality tended to take her by surprise.
“No,” Charlotte said, “I don’t mind.” Then she very deliberately selected an Oreo from the plate and ate the whole thing in one enormous bite.
Neither of them spoke. Charlotte chewed and swallowed. Then she said, “Do you think I’m a monster?”
“I don’t think so,” Sherry said. “Unless you killed your husband, which I don’t think you did.” Not that she had a reason to trust Charlotte, exactly. It was just that Sherry was pretty sure that Charlotte was much too intelligent and modern a woman to go to the risk of murdering her husband for cheating on her when she could easily divorce him instead. However much Charlotte was about to inherit, Sherry highly doubted it would be worth killing a man for, even if it was a man as obnoxious as John had been.
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, with what sounded like complete sincerity, “for not thinking that I murdered my husband.”
Their eyes met, and the entire conversation suddenly struck Sherry as so completely surreal that it made her giggle. For half an instant she was utterly horrified by herself, andthen it registered that Charlotte was giggling, too. Sherry started giggling harder. They kept on like that for a while, each of them setting the other one off again whenever they started to calm down a little. Charlotte was the first to sober and clear her throat. “If the police were here, they probably would have arrested me right away for that,” she said. “It’s not funny, I know it’s not. It just—it feels like I was cast in a bad movie without knowing it.”
“Lucky that the police aren’t here, then,” Sherry said. “I don’t think that they train them to be sensitive about the different ways that people grieve. Not in Winesap, at least.” Sherry didn’t know ifshewas sensitive about things like that, exactly. It was more that she could watch someone crying or laughing or rocking back and forth in a corner and feel curiosity instead of either suspicion or sympathy.
“You’re better than the police,” Charlotte said, with so much confidence that Sherry felt intimidated by the highly accomplished detective Charlotte was speaking to. “You’ll help, won’t you? With finding out who did it.”
“Of course I will.” Sherry took a sip of her tea, suddenly feeling too aware of the sound of her own voice. She always felt a little silly when she had to say very detective-y things out loud. Every phrase always sounded perfectly professional in her head but turned into lines from a very badly written TV show between the time they left her mouth and the time they hit her ears. It helped if she imagined herself as one of her favorite fictional detectives, none of whom would ever feel bashful about their detective-ing. She imagined herself with an enormous mustache, for self-confidence. “You’ll have to be completely honest with me, you know. Sometimes people hide things because they’re embarrassed or afraid that I’ll tattle onthem to the police, and I end up running around in circles for no real reason.”
“Istattlethe professional term?” Charlotte asked, and then gave a very elegant little shrug. Sherry had never been to France, or even met a French person, but she’d always imagined the French people in books shrugging like Charlotte did. “I think you’d have to be an idiot to be more worried about local gossip than being arrested for a murder. I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re definitely not,” Sherry said. “You’re a very intelligent woman.”
For a fraction of a second, Charlotte’s face took on the expression of a precocious little girl who’d just been praised by a teacher. Then the look vanished and she gave another of those shrugs. “I’ll cooperate,” she said. “I’ll be honest. But I don’t know if I’ll have much to tell you. I have no idea who could possibly want to kill John.”
“You do, though,” Sherry said. “At least, you very likely do, in my experience. You just haven’t realized that you know it yet.” She set down her teacup. “I should leave. Give you your privacy.”
“Please don’t,” Charlotte said in a rush. “My mom won’t be able to get here until tomorrow morning, and none of my friends will be here for hours. Just— God, I’m sorry, have you even eaten lunch?”
In all the excitement Sherry had completely forgotten about her egg salad sandwich. Now that she’d been reminded, she felt desperately hungry. “No,” she admitted. “I’d just unwrapped my sandwich when you came into the library.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said, and looked lost again for a moment before she brightened. “Do you like onigiri?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Sherry said. “But I’m sure that I love it.”
Charlotte smiled at her and went into the kitchen, then emerged again with a platter of food and a garnish of explanation, a soft flow of chatter about how she’d made these for lunch this morning, how her first roommate in New York had been from Japan and taught her how to cook, and how her mom had never gotten over Charlotte having been willing to learn to cook from a near stranger from a foreign country and not from her own mother. “She wasn’t a stranger, though,” Charlotte said. “She was my friend. We’re still friends.” She took a bite of one of the rice balls. Then she started to cry again.
