It wasn’t the right time to think about Caroline, and the things that Sherry was almost certain that she’d helped Caroline do.
She just drove for a while, slowly and carefully enough that she annoyed a few people who got stuck behind her and ended up huffily passing her on the narrow country road. She couldn’t stop thinking about the chance that she could get intoan accident. That had happened on that night with Caroline. Only a fender bender, really, but it had been a nasty shock: someone rolling through a stop sign and not seeing Sherry’s car through the rain. Sherry had wanted to wait for the police, but Caroline had insisted that they had to go, that she had a plane to catch, that she couldn’t miss it, that she wouldn’t be safe if she had to wait any longer. Sherry had done what Caroline had wanted.
Sherry was so wrapped up in thinking about Caroline that at first she didn’t notice the body in the road.
Fourteen
Sherry slammed on the brakes instinctively when she saw the body, and there was a horrible, heart-stopping moment when the car skidded out before rolling to a stop a few inches from the drainage ditch. A moment after the car stopped moving, there was a terrible, creaking groan, and a massive oak tree came crashing down across the road just a foot or so in front of Janine’s car, some of the branches close enough to brush against the windshield. Sherry just sat there in the car for a few moments, her heart pounding and her brain taking up a nasty, spiteful chant.It happened because you got in the car, you shouldn’t have done it, you shouldn’t have done it. You lost the right to drive yourself. This is payback for what you did.An iced-over twig from the tree dragged itself back and forth across the windshield with a soft hiss.
She took a few deep breaths. Then she turned the car off and got out to look for the body. There was nothing there, nothing at all where she’d seen it lying just a few moments before. She squatted down to try to peer under the tree, on the stray, awful chance that the body had been flattened underneath it. Nothing. Then she peered into the woods, with the vague notion that there might be someone out there, someonewho’d dragged the body out of the road or made the tree fall down to cover it. Some sort of top-hatted villain holding a saw and cackling. There was nobody, though. Just snow, and ice, and then, out of the corner of her eye, movement. She turned to look. A man. Alan.
It couldn’t be him. It wasn’t possible. It was him. He wasn’t dressed the way he’d been the night he’d died. He was wearing the outfit he’d worn when they’d gone snowshoeing together last winter, bundled up in a big puffy jacket and waterproof pants with thick, woolly socks pulled up over the cuffs, like a little boy whose mother had sent him out to go play in the snow. His face was pink from the cold. There were icicles in his mustache. She’d laughed at that, last time. He’d had to break them off before they went inside for hot chocolate.
“Sherry,” he said. “You can’t leave town.”
He didn’t sound like a ghost. He wasn’t wailing and moaning. He just sounded like Alan. Kind, gentle. Maybe a little tired.
“Hi, Alan,” she said. Her throat had gone tight. “I really miss you. I wanted to go to the library in Schenectady to see if I could find out anything about your old cases. How come you never told me that you were a public defender?”
He just shook his head. “You can’t go, Sherry. You have to stay in town.”
“Butwhy?” Sherry asked, wanting Alan to help her, to explain what was going on, even though sheknew, rationally, that this wasn’t Alan. This couldn’t be Alan. Either this was another trick from whatever…force was causing all the strange things to happen in town, or she was losing her mind. Or both. Maybe all of this had been in her imagination. Maybe she was the evil thing that had come to Winesap.
“You justcan’t,” Alan said, but even as he spoke, his face was shifting, changing, the mustache fading away, his whole body growing shorter and wider, a double chin ballooning under his face, his eyes turning pale and suspicious, his blue beanie transformed into a big floppy velvet thing, until—
“Oh,no,” Sherry said. “Go away.Leave me alone!”
“I wouldn’t have to appear if you would only do as you’re told, woman,” Lord Thomas Cromwell said. “It isn’t in the spirit of the thing for you to leave the field before the tourney has been completed.Shewon’t allow it.”
“What a stupid metaphor,” Sherry said. “I really wish I could have imagined a better ghost to bother me all the time. You talk like a twelfth grader is playing you at a seasonal haunted house. I’ll bet that hat was rented from a costume warehouse.”
He sputtered at her for a moment, which she found satisfying. She knew that she shouldn’t antagonize him, but in this particular moment it felt like the only thing in the world that she was capable of actually doing right.
“You’re a fractious, hardheaded creature,” he said. “And you won’t leave this place before she’s had her satisfaction.” His expression shifted then. He looked her in the eye. “She’s a stronger thing than either of us, and she likes her game to be played by the rules. You’d best stop trying to bend them, before you risk worse than a fright on a country road.” Then he vanished, all at once, and the winter silence filled in the space where he’d been.
Sherry got back into the car, where she shivered pathetically for a while before it occurred to her that she would be less cold if she turned the engine on. She did that. Then, eventually, she managed to convince herself to turn around anddrive back toward town. To the grocery store. She had promised to do Janine’s grocery shopping.
She made her way systematically through the grocery store, back and forth through every single aisle, picking up everything on Janine’s list as she came to it without trying to rush straight to it. It was nice. Comforting. She liked looking at all the colorful packages lined up in orderly rows on the shelves. She liked watching the nice young couple in the spice section trying to decide whether it would be better to buy a jar of mixed Italian herbs or to get the basil and oregano separately. She liked the terrible music piped in through the speakers. When she checked out, the youth and disinterested politeness of the pimply teenager at the register nearly made her cry. It would be nice, she thought, to be a pimply teenage girl who worked at a supermarket and hadn’t yet had the chance to do a dozen things that she would regret for the next thirty years.
She drove back to Janine’s house, parked, and carried the groceries to Janine’s porch. When Janine answered the door, she looked baffled. “Sherry? What are you doing back already? I thought you were going to Schenectady.”
“I couldn’t,” Sherry said. “There was a body in the road.”
Janine blanched. “Oh my God. Abody? Whose body? Did you call the police?”
“It disappeared,” Sherry said. It felt as if her mouth was doing the talking without her consent. “Then a giant tree fell across the road.”
“What?” Janine said. “Sherry—what?”
A hysterical little giggle bubbled up out of Sherry’s chest. “Alan’s ghost appeared and started telling me that I couldn’tleave town,” she said. “Then he turned into the ghost of Lord Thomas Cromwell. He’sinsufferable.”
“Sherry,” Janine said, and took the bags of groceries from her. She was frowning. “I think you should come in and sit down.”
Sherry followed her inside, obedient, and sat placidly on Janine’s expensive cream-colored sofa to wait for her to finish up in the kitchen. She didn’t think about anything in particular, just soaked in the comfort of sitting in a nice, tidy, well-appointed room with no ghosts or demons evident. Then Janine appeared again, with a lovely tray with tea and teacups and chocolate chip cookies, and after she’d settled in with everything and Sherry had had her first sip of tea, she looked at Sherry over the rim of her own cup and said, with enormous seriousness, “I’m afraid that you’re losing it.”
Sherry choked on her tea, which was unfortunate, because it was some of Janine’s very fancy Russian Caravan that she stocked up on once a year at that expensive little shop in Manhattan. When she’d finished hacking, she said, “Is that your professional opinion?”
“No,” Janine said. “It’s just my unprofessional opinion as your best friend that I think you’re stressed-out and mourning your boyfriend, and that you’re losing it a little. I think you need to get out of Winesap for a while, Sherry. My friend Kathy has that little place in Key West that I told you about, and it’s just standing empty right now. I’m sure she’d let you stay there for a few weeks.”
