Greg shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she was supposed to come up here and see him, though. He was hoping that she was ready to, you know, agree on how the money would get split up.”
“And do you know if they ever actually met?”
He shook his head again. “No. He never said.”
“Okay,” Sherry said. They had, of course: Susan had been seen in the diner. The question was whether or not she’d gone home after that meeting to sleep peacefully in her own bed. “Thank you, Greg. You’ve been really helpful.” She paused. “You were a really great friend to him, you know. He talked about you all the time.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, finally, he said, “He talked about you, too.”
He was a nice man, she thought, even if he was a little odd. Maybe nicer than Alan had been. She’d always thought before that Alan was being very kind to spend so much time withhim. Now she thought that maybe the charity had been extended in the other direction.
They finished eating. Sherry insisted on paying over Greg’s protestations, then dawdled over coffee and a slice of pie after he left. She was dreading the idea of going home. The walk back up the hill, the quiet in her house, the fear of the voices that might come out of the dark. All of it. She stillintendedto go home, though, once the staff in the diner started pointedly putting the chairs up onto the tables and mopping the floors. The plan was to go home. Instead, she found herself walking toward the church, trying the door—it was unlocked—and slipping into one of the back pews. There was someone praying near the altar, but she left after twenty minutes or so, leaving Sherry alone.
The quality of the silence felt different here than it did at home. The church seemed to wear the quiet more comfortably than Sherry’s little cottage did, like an old married couple who no longer felt the need to fill in the gaps in the conversation. The smell of old wood and incense was comforting, and the air had a cave-like coolness to it that felt the same now in April as it usually did in August. She’d just planned on sitting there, for a moment, until she worked up the energy and courage to walk back home. Then she realized how tired she was and thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she lay down in the pew for a while to rest. She could remember thinking about how badly she’d wanted to do that sometimes as a bored child on Sunday mornings, still groggy after having been dragged out of bed bright and early for mass. She lay down and remembered more of those childhood Sunday mornings: the atonal drone of the parishioners trudging their way through a hymn, the low buzz of their parish priest giving his homily,the slow churn of the ceiling fans stirring through the thick air of the room, her mother grabbing at her knee to make her stop wriggling. She was thinking about all that when she fell asleep.
“Obviously you’re always welcome here,” Father Barry was saying. “But a pew can’t be a comfortable place to sleep.”
For one strange, unsettling moment, Sherry thought that she had somehow fallen asleep in the middle of confession. Then she remembered that she hadn’t been to confession in several decades, and a moment later the rest of the strange previous evening dropped into her head in a solid clump. She jolted upright, groaning as her body registered displeasure at having spent the night—and ithadbeen the whole night; there was light streaming in through the stained-glass windows—on a hard wooden pew and then noticed that Father Barry was holding two coffee cups. She took the one he held out to her, blushing hot. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to lie down for a minute before I walked back home.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Father Barry said. He looked odd. It took her a few seconds too long to realize that it was because he was wearing blue jeans and a Notre Dame sweatshirt, no clerical collar to be found. It felt a little like seeing him in the nude. “There’s a cot in the vestry, though. You could sleep on that next time.” He paused. “Is it because of your haunted cat?”
“No,” she said, then winced. “Partly. I don’t know. I think I’m just…tired.”
“That would make sense,” he said, and looked at her for a moment in an annoyingly thoughtful, priestly sort of way. “Janine told me that she offered you her friend’s vacation home, and you turned her down.”
Sherry blushed again. “You’ve beendiscussingme?”
“Janine’s worried about you,” he said. He took a sip of his own coffee. “I think I would have said no, too. But it’s my job to look out for my—flock.” He said the wordflockas if he felt slightly self-conscious about it, the way that some newly married men hesitated over the phrasemy wife. “But you didn’t make any vows when you became a librarian. If things get too bad, I don’t think anyone would judge you for making a break for it.”
“Wouldn’t they?” she asked. “It sounds like something the villain of a novel would do. Run away like a coward as soon as things get scary.”
“Sure,” he said after a second. “People talk like they’d be prepared to die for the cause when most of them won’t even take half a Saturday to volunteer for it. They’re just doing…backseat heroism. Maybe theywouldjudge you, but that doesn’t mean that if we start getting demons pouring through the windows that you shouldn’t get in the car and get out of Winesap. You never signed up for this. It’s not your job to sacrifice yourself for everyone else just because the devil thinks you should. Or whatever that thing is that’s been bothering you. You don’t have to believe in the devil to believe that maybe whatever it is might not have your best interests at heart. I think you should reserve the right to walk away from this and enjoy a nice peaceful retirement somewhere.”
She blinked at him for a second, taken aback. Then she swallowed. “Thanks, Father,” she said. “That’s really”—her voice cracked—“nice of you.”
He smiled at that, as if he was pleased to have had his success at his pastoral duties recognized, then visibly caughthimself and made his expression go graver. “I’m still always here if you need to talk.”
Part of her wanted to laugh at him. He seemed particularly young when he said things like that. Instead she just thanked him again for the kind words and the coffee and finally set off on the long walk back home.
Sixteen
She was greeted at the door by Lord Thomas Cromwell, and her initial reaction was to respond to him with the same level of suspicion that she usually leveled at strange men on her doorstep wearing matching short-sleeved button-downs. She fed him his breakfast, anyway, maintaining a wary distance the whole time, until finally he started winding around her ankles and purring and she was forced to scoop him up and give him a cuddle. “I missed you being your usual self,” she told him, whereupon he gave an almighty wriggle and jumped down to the floor. He’d never been very patient about being carried around like a baby.
While she took her shower and got ready for the day, she contemplated how completely unnerving it was to live with someone who might, at any moment, be someone else. She’d never experienced anything quite like it before. Her ex-husband, despite his flaws, had been resolutely the same person every single day that she’d known him. The closest she’d ever come to this had been with Caroline. She’d had a strange habit of sometimes, when they were out in public, pretending to be someone else. One particular favorite was a bohemian heiress named Phoebe. Sherry had taken it as a harmless quirk back then, just as something funny that Caroline liked to dosometimes. It was only much later that it had started to feel sinister. As if what Caroline had enjoyed about it wasn’t the fantasy but the part where she got other people to truly believe in her lies.
Once she was thoroughly washed, dressed, and hastily fed on a breakfast of slightly stale cornflakes, she gave Lord Thomas one last pat and headed down to the library. She felt more refreshed than she probably ought to be after a night of sleep in a pew. Then, after she arrived at the library, she had another turn of good luck: there was a small stack of papers waiting for her on her desk, with a Post-it note from Connie stuck on top.For you from Schenect. PL.
Sherry sat down to read what the intern had dug up. The first few pages were nothing special: Alan’s name popping up in his father’s obituary and his own wedding announcement, or in a brief and very old piece about his having advanced to the state high school wrestling championship. A few brief references to his having been the defense attorney in cases of minor note, in particular a local official who’d eventually been convicted of embezzlement. Sherry checked the dates: the man in question would be in his nineties now. If he was still alive, he was unlikely to have the energy and upper-body strength to travel to his former attorney’s house and bash his head in.
Then, at the bottom, something that looked important. The article was three decades old, and the events it described had apparently made enough of a splash to merit a front-page headline.orellana ruling overturned.Sherry read on to learn that the name in the headline referred to a teenager named Salvador Orellana, who had been convicted in a homicide case five years earlier. He had appealed the conviction onthe basis of ineffective assistance of counsel, and his appeal had been successful.
His defense attorney had been Alan Thompson.
Sherry sucked in a quick breath and let it out slowly. She’d already felt a little frustrated with how the suspects with good motives kept piling up, but this might be the strongest suspect yet. It had all been a long time ago now, but five years in prison for a crime that you hadn’t committed might be a rare example of something that almost anyone could stew over for thirty years. At the very least, she needed to try to track down Salvador Orellana, if only so she could conclusively rule him out as a suspect.
There was a photo at the top of the article of two men standing in front of a courthouse. Orellana and his new attorney smiling jubilantly toward the camera. It was dark and blurry, a copy of a copy of an antique newspaper. Sherry couldn’t make much of it. Orellana was just a small, indistinct figure in an oversized suit, with a face that could have belonged to any number of vaguely nice-looking young men. It felt impossible to imagine such a lifeless little picture as being something connected to Alan’s murder.
She folded the relevant page up and slipped it into her pocket, just as Connie walked in to open up the library for the day. Sherry felt oddly as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “Good morning,” she said, a little too loudly. “Thank you for the faxes.”
