“Key West,” Sherry repeated. It sounded insane. Like Janine was proposing that she climb into a rocket ship and head to her vacation home on Neptune. “How am I supposed to make it to Key West when I can’t go toSchenectady?”
Janine made a face. It was subtle, but definitely aface. Then she smoothed out that expression like someone running a spatula over a badly frosted cake. “I don’t know that youcan’tgo to Schenectady, Sherry.”
Sherry didn’t think of herself as a person who got angry easily. The opposite, really. She’d put up with a lot before she got angry. She was angry now, though, in a sudden hot rush that felt moreexcitingthan unpleasant or uncomfortable. There was a sort of power in feeling righteously outraged. “I know that I can’t,” she said. “I know what happened to me. I know what I saw. And I think that you’re being ridiculous. You’re so scared of admitting that something strange is going on that you won’t admit thatsomething strange is going on. I’m notcrazy, Janine.”
Janine was holding her hands in the air. “Sherry,” she said. She kept using Sherry’s name over and over in that infuriating way. They probably taught them to do that in therapist school. “I don’t think that you’re crazy. Ipromisethat I don’t think that you’re crazy.” The way that she was holding her hands up as if she expected Sherry to reach out and smack her only made Sherry angrier. She’d never hit anyone in her life.
“That’s justsemantics, though, isn’t it?” she said. “You probably say that to all of the crazy people because it’s offensive to call people crazy. I don’t want you to say that you don’t think I’m crazy, I want you totake me seriously. And stop acting like you think I’m going to hit you!”
Janine sighed and folded her hands in her lap with what looked like a certain amount of conscious effort. “I promise that I’m taking you seriously,” she said. “I’m not talking about how crazy you are behind your back. I believe that you’ve been experiencing things that you can’t explain. It’s justhard. Youunderstand, don’t you? Haven’t you ever tried very hard to believe in something but not been able to believe in it, anyway?”
It was exactly the thing to say to smack Sherry’s rising dudgeon right back down into the dirt. “I went to Catholic school,” she said after a moment. “For a while I couldn’t believe but still thought I was going to go to hell for not believing. I used to pray to a God I couldn’t believe in tomakeme believe in him. Iwantedto believe. But now I’m starting to believe in all kinds of things that I don’t want to believe in at all. As soon as you start believing in demons and things, then you have to worry about them coming after you. And theyare. I swear that they are. They won’tleave me alone.”
Janine didn’t say anything. She just leaned forward, took Sherry’s hand in hers, and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Sherry burst into tears.
She stayed there for a while longer, letting Janine hold her hand and pat her knee and feed her cookies and comfort. Then she left, trudging back up through the snow to her lonely, haunted house. She was beginning to hate being alone in her own home. She hated that she hated it. Lord Thomas came to wind around her ankles and purr. She eyed him suspiciously and hated that she felt suspicious of a creature who lived in fear of the vacuum cleaner. She gave a sudden, furious scream into the quiet of the house, as loudly as she could for as long as she could. When she was finished she didn’t feel any better. She just felt like a very silly woman with a sore throat. Lord Thomas, the poor thing, who seemed as if he really was just a cat again at the moment, was hiding under the sofa in a state of fairly reasonable terror.
The screaming having not worked to make Sherry feel anybetter, she resolved to do some sleuthing instead. So she couldn’t go to Schenectady. Fine. She could still get things done. She poured herself a big glass of bourbon and put on a strange old record of Gregorian chants she’d bought at a yard sale a few years earlier, on the theory that it might remind Thomas Cromwell of Thomas More and keep him hiding under the sofa for a bit longer out of remorse.
It was strange. She’d never particularly liked Gregorian chants—did anyone? She supposed thatsomeonemust, and they probably threw extremely strange dinner parties—but the sound of them now seemed to soothe her into a sort of trance. She found herself going to the table where she’d abandoned the yew branch, picking the branch up, and carrying it to the kitchen table with her bourbon. Then she fetched the sharpest paring knife in the kitchen and set to whittling. It was nice. Meditative. She drank her bourbon. She prayed. Not any prayer in particular, just half-formed thoughts and phrases that tumbled around and around in her brain—I believe, world without end, have mercy on us, now until the hour of our death, deliver us from evil. At the last phrase she felt herself, as if from a distance, shiver. “Deliver us from evil,” she said aloud. Then: “Deliver us.” She didn’t know whom she was speaking to. To the God she’d prayed to as a child, maybe. Maybe to someone else.Hear me, protect us, deliver us.The chanting rose around her like a warm blanket. “Protect us,” she said, as the wood took shape under her hands. She’d had to cut away a lot of the branch for being too thin and whippy to be useful. It still didn’t look like much of a stake. It was only about the size and shape of a chopstick. A very sharp chopstick. It would have to work. The chanting was still playing. She went to the shopping bag that held all the things she’dbought in the New Age shop and pulled out something she’d bought on impulse. Now she thought that maybe it had the right sort of resonance. Oil of frankincense. She rubbed it into the wood. “Protect us,” she said aloud. “Deliver us.” The smell of it was heady. For a moment she felt as if there were other people in the room, gathering around her, sitting by her side, kneeling. Then the record ended. Sherry blinked. Her little weapon sat on her kitchen table, looking like nothing but a bit of scrap wood you’d find in someone’s shed. It looked like that, but it looked like more than that, too. Sherry stared at it. She let herself see that it gleamed.
“Thank you,” she said aloud, and lifted it to kiss it. She didn’t let herself feel silly. She carried it in both hands to tuck it carefully into her coat pocket. Then she sat again and gulped down the rest of her bourbon. The sudden silence was oppressive. There was the quiet of the very early morning in the room, even though it was only about three in the afternoon. She double-checked the time. Early enough to get more work done, and the need to get work done was the excuse she needed to justify how desperately she wanted to hear another human voice right now. She took a deep, steadying breath, trying to shake off the strangeness of the last hour. Then she called up one of her favorite regular library patrons.
Lois picked up on the second ring, as brisk and alert-sounding as ever. “Feldman residence, Lois speaking!”
“Hi, Louie,” Sherry said. Lois wasLouieto her friends and had bestowed this honor upon Sherry a year earlier, after a spirited chat on the relative merits of Ian Rankin versus Patricia Cornwell. Louie was almost ninety years old, preferred her detectives hard-boiled, and was the chief editor—and only full-time reporter—of theWinesap Herald. She refused toretire on the grounds that if she did, no one else would be willing to run a newspaper in a little town like Winesap, which Sherry had to admit was probably an accurate assessment of the case. “It’s Sherry Pinkwhistle.”
“Oh, Sherry!” Lois said. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Did you get the flowers?”
“I think so,” Sherry said vaguely. Therewereflowers piling up in her entryway: she’d just been bringing them in off the porch whenever she saw them. There might also be a casserole or two out there. It was a wonder that Lord Thomas hadn’t eaten one of them and gotten sick all over the living room rug. “Thank you, it was very kind of you.” There must, she thought, be an appropriate and delicate segue between receiving condolences over her boyfriend’s—even if he hadn’t really been her boyfriend—death and making indelicate inquiries about him. If there was, she wasn’t a sensitive enough person to know it. “I actually wanted to ask you some questions about Alan.”
“Oh?” Lois said, with an increased perkiness to her tone that made Sherry smile despite herself. “You’re not investigating, are you?” There was nothing Lois liked more than a good murder investigation, except for, possibly, aserialmurder investigation.
“I’m afraid that I am,” Sherry said. “I was hoping that you could help me.”
“I’ll certainly do my best,” Lois said with relish. “What questions did you have?”
“They’re not very specific,” Sherry admitted, already feeling a little foolish. Lois was the sort of person who always knew exactly what questions she was going to ask in advance. Sherry was positive that back when she was a young reporteron the mean streets of New York City, Lois hadn’t basedherinvestigations ona funny feeling I had about why he never mentioned his old job. “I just found out that Alan was a public defender in Schenectady for a while. He’d never mentioned it. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”
“Not a thing,” Lois said. “Thatisa little strange, isn’t it?”
“That he never mentioned it?”
“Well, that, too, I guess. But I was thinking more that it’s an unusual choice of career for a guy with that kind of family background. Maybe it was his way of being rebellious.”
Sherry felt a little as if she was watching a foreign film with badly translated captions. “His family? His father was a doctor, wasn’t he? Not a cop.” A public defender from a family of copswouldhave been unusual and rebellious, though probably not motive for murder.
“Oh, no,” Lois said. “I meant how wealthy they were. His grandfather was an executive for GE, left Alan a small fortune in his will. He was the one who got Alan interested in antiques in the first place. Alan told me about him when I wrote about the shop opening way back when. Anyway, in my experience, when dad’s a doctor and granddad’s an executive, they usually want to see junior making more money than he would as a public defender in Schenectady, at least back when Alan was a kid. These days they probably want their kids to go to fashion design school so they can send expensive sneakers to poor African villagers who never asked for new shoes to start with. Kids like that are like racehorses: if you can afford one, everyone knows you’rereallyrich.”
“Oh,” Sherry said in response to all that. She felt—she wasn’t sure. Odd. It wasn’t as if Alan would have been obligated to tell her that he was sitting on a pile of inheritedwealth. They weren’tmarried, for God’s sake. They’d never even formally dated, if such a thing was really possible at their ages. They lived in separate houses and kept fully separate accounts. It just felt…odd. Another tile falling out of a once-familiar mosaic. A former defense attorney. An heir to a fortune. A bunch of bits and pieces that she couldn’t make fit together with the image of a man she’d thought she’d known as well as she knew anyone.
As well as she’d thought she’d known Caroline.
She cleared her throat. “How much money are we talking about, exactly? That Alan inherited from his grandfather, I mean.”
“I don’t have an exact number,” Lois said. “If he told me how much, I’ve forgotten. But if you’re wondering if it was enough for someone to kill for, then I’d say you’ve found one hell of a motive.”
