“I know, Greg,” Sherry said. “That’s why I called you. This is Sherry. Pinkwhistle,” she added, just in case he thought he might be speaking to a Sherry he’d known in second grade.
“Sherry,” he said, with evident surprise. Then, in a tone that felt as if it matched Sherry’s own grief in its sheer, miserable bewilderment: “Alan’s dead.”
Sherry’s throat tightened up. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to call you. Do you think we could meet up for dinner and talk?”
“For dinner? Oh—sure. Where? Uh. The diner okay?”
“That would be fine,” Sherry said. As far as she knew, Greg never ate out anywhere other than the diner and the dive bar near the gas station. “Can I meet you at six thirty?”
Greg agreed, and Sherry got off the phone with him and hurried to get bundled up and head down the hill. It was a bit warmer out than it had been the previous evening, which was a relief. Getting in and out of town had been so much easier when Alan was driving her back home every so often. It was so much easier to be stubbornly independent when it was nice outside. It was so much easier to desperately miss someone when you lived alone.
Greg was already at the diner when she arrived, which wasn’t surprising: he lived just two doors down. When she walked in, he peeked at her as if he thought it was rude to look at her too directly, then ducked his head and handed her a menu, only saying hello a beat later. It was a little strange, but so was Greg, and he and Alan had had a strange friendship. Greg was about as far from a retired attorney as he could get: he’d spent twenty years in the army and did odd jobs to make ends meet. He and Alan had met because Alan had needed someone to rewire and repair the old lamps and record playersand things at the shop, and Greg had a special talent when it came to small appliances. He had a special talent when it came to a lot of things. He was also a handyman and a house painter and had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything World War II. He was notorious for asking local landowners if he could set up a deer blind on their properties and then not bothering to bring a gun along with him when he visited; he just liked to sit up there and take pictures of the deer. He was also, according to Alan, an excellent fly fisherman, and the two of them seemed to have formed a friendship on the basis of standing side by side in streams together in nearly unbroken silence.
From what Alan had told her, it wasn’t the sort of friendship that involved the two of them pouring their hearts out to each other. Probably not the most promising ground for mining Alan’s darkest secrets. Still, they did go out and have a beer together from time to time, and Greg was probably Alan’s closest friend who lived here in Winesap. It would be investigative malpractice for Sherry to not at leasttalkto him.
She couldn’t push it, though. Greg was skittish, like the delicate creatures of the wilderness he liked to spy on from his deer blind. Instead, she perused her menu with elaborate care while Greg did the same. When the waitress arrived, Sherry ordered the chicken Parmesan, and Greg ordered a meatball sandwich and a glass of milk. For some reason the order made Sherry’s throat clench up for the second time that evening. Maybe she was just getting old.
Sherry gently nudged Greg into talking to her about fishing until their food arrived, then let the man finish the first half of his meatball sandwich before she said, very quietly, “I miss Alan.”
He ducked his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
“Did he say anything to you?” she asked. “Before he died? Notrightbefore, I mean—did he mention anything that was bothering him?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not really.”
“Not really? So—a little?”
He shrugged. “Everyone worries about something sometimes.”
“I guess so,” Sherry said. “I worry about my cat getting a urinary tract infection. I used to worry about politics. I was wondering if maybe Alan was worried about something more serious than that.”
“He woulda told you if he was, wouldn’t he?” Greg asked. “You were his girlfriend. We were just fishing buddies, mostly.”
Something about the way he said that didn’t settle well atop the chicken Parmesan. Sherry decided to chase after what her gut suggested. “But there are some things that a guy will tell his fishing buddy that he might not tell his girlfriend. Right?”
Greg shifted in his seat, looking deeply uncomfortable. “I know he’s dead,” he said. “But I still don’t like talking about his business.”
“He’s dead because someone killed him,” Sherry said. “If they killed him, they had a motive. I’m trying to figure out who might have wanted Alan dead.”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t think it was that serious,” he said. “Just his wife. Wives’re like that,” he added, with all the authority of a lifelong bachelor. “She wouldn’t leave him alone. It bugged him, that’s all.”
“His ex, you mean? Susan?”
He frowned. “He had an ex, too? Susan was his wife, wasn’t she?”
Part of Sherry already knew where this conversation was headed. One piece after another falling out of the mosaic, the whole image of the man she’d known crumbling to pieces. Another part of her was still busy trying to parse out the individual words Greg was saying. “He only ever had one wife, Susan. They got divorced right before he moved to Winesap.”
“They weren’t divorced, that was the whole problem,” Greg said, and then his face went red again. “Aw, shit, I’m sorry, Sherry—”
“It’s all right,” Sherry said quickly. “It’s all right. I didn’t know. I’m glad that I know now.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. It was a relief, in a way. Rage was a big enough emotion that it managed to almost blot out the sadness. “So Alan was still married. Separated, though, obviously. Unless—he didn’tMr. Rochesterher, did he?”
Greg looked baffled. “What?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sherry said. “I’m being ridiculous. Do you know why they weren’t divorced? What was the holdup?”
“First it was that she didn’t want to get the divorce,” Greg said. “So he just took off, anyway, without bothering to deal with the paperwork. Then she agreed to the divorce, but I guess she wasn’t happy about what he wanted to do with the money. She wanted to split things down the middle, but he wanted to keep the money he’d gotten from his granddad. The store was more a hobby than a moneymaker, and he was using his inheritance to keep it running in his granddad’s memory, kind of, but she wanted to take half of what he had left. From what Alan said, it was getting pretty nasty.”
Sherry’s first thought was,poor Alan. Then she caught herself.Wasit poor Alan, really? Maybe Susan had been awful for years, made his life a misery, refused to let him go, and then tried to take away his retirement nest egg once he finally escaped. Or maybe she was a loving wife and mother who treated Alan like gold for two decades, raised both of his strapping sons to adulthood, and had the rug pulled out from under her when he suddenly decided to run away from his family and leave her with nothing. Sherry didn’t know. She’d never been a part of her boyfriend’s marriage. Assuming that he’d been the wronged party in his dispute with his wife would only mar her judgment when it came to considering her suspects. “Divorces can be so awful,” she said. It was a bland enough thing to say. “Do you know if he saw her often?”
