Sherry kept her company for another hour or so. Charlotte put on some music, some Spanish guitar by a man whom, she said, she had met in a little bar in the West Village a few years ago. Charlotte was the sort of woman who had an interesting story to explain every part of herself. It made Sherry feel self-conscious about her own self, her own life, which was mostly all secondhand: experiences she’d had only through novels, places she’d seen on television, pieces of art she’d found at the Goodwill.
“You should go,” Charlotte said. “I’ve kept you for too long.”
“If you’re sure,” Sherry said, though her long absencewasat this point probably severely straining the patience of the library staff. “Do you have anything to distract yourself with?”
Charlotte nodded. “I think I’ll paint my nails,” she said. “I usually do them every Friday. I know it sounds silly, but it always feels sort of…I don’t know.Meditative.” Then she winced. “God, now I’m thinking about whether or not anything I do other than lying on the couch crying will make me look like an evil witch who just murdered her husband for the insurance money.”
“Wear something unflattering while you paint them,” Sherry suggested. “Like flannel pajamas. And keep drinking tea from a mug.” If Charlotte was a glamorous murderess onColumbo, she would wear a marabou robe and probably not even own a mug. Also, she wouldn’t paint her own nails. Sherry felt oddly guilty for having assumed that Charlotte must have paid someone a fortune to make her look so lovely all the time, when it seemed that she was actually just an artistic young woman with extremely steady hands. “Don’t, under any circumstances, buy a bottle of champagne.”
For a moment Charlotte appeared to be taking this all in as if it were legal advice. Then she huffed out a small laugh and shook her head. “Or a pink convertible.”
They made eye contact, and Sherry felt suddenly as if she and Charlotte had been regularly having tea and Oreos under the watchful gaze of the poor, cold, naked women on the walls for years, as if Charlotte had been a very dear friend of hers all along. “I’ll find out who did it,” she said, with a confidence that seemed to come from outside herself. “And you’ll be able to drink all of the champagne that you like without anyone to stop you.” Then she showed herself out and hurried back to the library, where for a few precious hours she would be much too busy to chase any strange, unsettled thoughts about how neatly the recent events of her life reflected clichés that she had watched in rerun a dozen times before.
Three
For the rest of the afternoon, Sherry attempted to behave herself. This meant that she spent several hours helping patrons with their requests, and no time at all investigating homicides. She always felt a bit guilty for allowing the hardworking taxpayers of Winesap, New York, to subsidize her on-the-clock Sherlock Holmesing. She felt a bit less guilty when one of the pages came to her to inform her that someone had thrown up on the floor of the restroom. At that point she thought that she did more than enough work on behalf of the public, really, and the fact that she wasn’t charging them extra for ridding their town of murderers along with helping them with their school assignment about the pyramids was very gracious of her.
Sherry had heard the phrase “The end of the day couldn’t come soon enough.” It didn’t. By the end of the day, she didn’t have nearly enough energy left in her to walk home. Fortunately, she didn’t have to. It was Friday, and every Friday evening Sherry met her friend Janine at the Temperance Tea Shop on Main Street for their traditional Tea and Gossip. At the moment, Sherry was running late. She ought to just send Janine a quick—
The thought fled her head. She tried to grab hold of it, butit was gone, and a moment later she forgot that she’d had it at all.
The ever-prompt Janine was already seated at their usual table, presiding over two steaming pots of tea and a tiered tray full of tea sandwiches and cakes and scones with the associated accoutrements. Sherry felt herself relax. There was something so wonderfully comforting about a whole tiered tray full of miniature sandwiches and petit fours like little pink and brown birthday presents. It was food that defied anxiety. You were never presented with a tray full of tiny cakes in the face of catastrophe. An elaborate afternoon tea was the emotional antithesis to the canned soups of natural disasters or casseroles of recent bereavement.
Janine, for her part, looked as distant from the grim realities of a homicide investigation as the jam and clotted cream. She was wearing a pair of absolutely enormous red earrings and a very soft-looking cream-colored sweater that Sherry couldn’t imagine wearing without immediately covering it in coffee or tomato sauce.
For a moment Sherry found herself wanting to laugh at Janine’s outfit, like it was somehow comically out of style. In the next moment she was left feeling baffled by herself. Janine had always been much more stylish than Sherry, and Sherry really had no standing at all to find her clothing choices humorous. Sherry had no standing to critique Janine in general, when Janine was a complete paragon in most ways that mattered. She was the sort of person who demanded adverbs: she never walked when she could stride briskly, and Sherry had never known her to whisper when she could instead confidently declare. Though she was a very kind and generous person, Janine had the sort of naturally pinched and skeptical facethat looked as if she would tolerate absolutely no homicidal nonsense. In truth, she had the face of the librarian who hushed boisterous children in old movies, while Sherry herself had the face of the nanny who would give the British children currant buns in one of those old books about boarding schools.
Sherry had barely taken her seat before Janine started to look even more pinched than usual. “Oh, no,” Janine said. “Who’s been murdered this time?”
Sherry felt a peculiar sinking sensation in her chest. “Oh, no,” she said, echoing Janine. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
Their eyes met. There was something strange in Janine’s expression. “It is,” she said. “Sherry, there’s something terrible—”
She stopped. Smiled. Her expression had turned as smooth as an eight ball. “Why don’t you tell me about your latest case, Sherry?” she asked, and then poured Sherry a cup of tea and gestured invitingly at the food.
Sherry couldn’t remember what they’d just been talking about. Never mind, then. She took a sandwich. “It was John,” she said. “Charlotte’s husband.”
She explained everything that she’d learned, while Janine drank her tea and listened attentively. Janine worked as a counselor and always listened attentively. She was also an extremely practical person who read mostlyNew York Times–bestselling nonfiction and the occasional Jean M. Auel as a treat, making her an excellent sounding board for murder investigations who onlyvery rarelywent off on a flight of fancy about how some woman’s husband probably had another woman trapped in a secret room in the basement or buried under the peonies in the backyard. She ate a scone with lots ofjam and cream. Then she said, “Do you think that there’s a possible financial motive?”
“I don’t know,” Sherry said. “It’s possible. Even if he didn’t have very much money, he was the sort of guy who liked to give everyone he met the impression that he did.” She considered that while she ate a petit four. “Imagine killing someone for his money and then realizing that he didn’t have any money for you to take.”
“I can’t imagine killing someone for his money to begin with,” Janine said. “Or killing someone for any reason.”
“Hm,” Sherry said noncommittally. She could easily imagine killing someone for any reason. She contemplated murder all the time.
“There’s always sex,” said Janine.
“Hm?” said Sherry, who was selecting her next treat from the tray. She decided on a salmon sandwich. “What about sex?” Sherry wasn’t a prude, exactly, but she always found the mention of sex somewhat jarring out of its proper context.
“As a motive,” Janine said. “You said that there’s been infidelity in the past. People can do strange things when they’re jealous. Or in love.”
“In love with John Jacobs?” Sherry asked, her eyebrows climbing upward. “Mad with jealousy overJohn Jacobs?”
She could tell that Janine was trying not to smile. “Sherry,” she said, admonishingly. “I’m sure that…many women have been wildly in love with John Jacobs. And he’s—hewas—younger than us.”
“I didn’t say that he wasold,” Sherry said, and started spreading clotted cream onto a scone. “A head of wilted iceberg lettuce isn’t as old as us, either.”
Now Janine really did laugh, and then looked guilty about it. “Sherry,” she said. “You’rehorrible.” Janine was one of the only people in the world who knew that Sherry was horrible. “The man was killed this morning and you’re comparing him to wilted lettuce.”
