“Yeah, great,” Charlotte said. “See you in half an hour?”
“Perfect,” Sherry said, and hung up, then took her leisurely time getting her things together and then ambling down the road to the restaurant. She was there early, so, in honor of the oddly rebellious mood she was in, she ordered a predinner martini. By the time Charlotte arrived, she was already starting to feel comfortably detached from her surroundings.
“You won’t believe this,” Charlotte said, before she was even fully seated. “My witch friend I told you about? The onewho was supposed to come up to help out? She got into an accident basically the second she pulled out of the rental lot. Now she’s in the hospital in Yonkers. That’s two out of two for people trying to visit me up here and having some sort of horrible accident happen.”
“So we can’t get out, and they still can’t get in,” Sherry said, the alcohol making it feel more interesting than terrifying. She briefly explained to Charlotte about how an enormous tree had abruptly ended her attempt to drive to Schenectady the day before, though she left out the bit with the ghosts. Then she said, with a bit of dramatic flair, “And after all that, guess who came to visit me at the library today?”
“The angel Gabriel?”
“Alan’swife!” Sherry said, triumphantly. “Not hisex, hiswife!”
“Hiswhat?” Charlotte said, with a gratifying display of shock and horror.
Sherry backed up then and told her everything that had happened since they’d last met, which carried them through another order of drinks and a round of shared appetizers. Charlotte, as usual, was an excellent audience for a long and extremely bizarre story. By the time Sherry’d gotten her up to date through the Thompson infestation at the library, Charlotte was shaking her head. “First of all,” she said, “how bad is it that I’m feeling kind of relieved that Alan was an asshole, too? Like, I was feeling like a dumbass for picking John, but I guess some guys will just cheat until they die, no matter what.”
Sherry winced, then took another bite of arancini. “I think that’s the sort of thing that everyone thinks but you’re not supposed to say out loud,” she said. “Like how right now I’mfeeling better about having trusted Alan because you reminded me of how badJohnwas.”
Charlotte gave a restrained little cackle of a laugh. “Cheers to schadenfreude,” she said. “The only thing getting us through this mess.”
“Cheers,” Sherry said, and clinked glasses with her. When she shifted in her chair she felt her pocket crinkle. “Oh! Would you like to look at that article I told you about?”
“About the guy who got out of prison? Sure,” Charlotte said.
Sherry handed the now slightly crumpled article across the table. Charlotte looked at it for a moment, then frowned. “Does he look familiar to you?”
Sherry frowned, too, and leaned in closer. “Who? Orellana?”
“Yeah,” Charlotte said, and brought the picture up closer to her face. “I swear I know him.” Then her eyes went wide. “Oh my God. Isn’t thatJason?”
Seventeen
Sherry felt her own eyes widen. “JasonMartinez?OurJason? From the diner? Are you sure? I don’t think that they look that much alike, do you? Could it be just that they’re both…”
“I can tell two Hispanic guys apart, Sherry,” Charlotte said. “Once I dated a Guatemalan DJ with four brothers who all got their hair cut at the same place; that could have gottencrazy. And yeah, I think it’s him. The picture’s blurry, but look at his ear.” She stabbed at the photo with a fingertip. “Ears never change. I notice ears. They’re hard to draw. Jason’s have this funny fold thing at the top. It’s him.”
“Jason,” Sherry repeated, truly gobsmacked. “It can’t be him, though. He’s such a sweet young man.”
“He’s got to be in his forties,” Charlotte said. She was still squinting at the picture. “And, anyway, the conviction was overturned.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Sherry said. “I meant—can you imagine Jason whacking Alan over the head with a lamp?”
Charlotte put the article down. “No,” she admitted. “But I can’t really imagine anyone I know doing it. It seems like such a dramatic way to kill someone.”
“How wouldyoukill someone?” Sherry asked, curious.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. On TV, pushing people down the stairs works really well to avoid suspicion, but on TV, everyone seems to fall down a few steps and then die instantly. In real life I think they’re more likely to just sprain their wrist or something, unless they’re about ninety years old. You’d probably have to push them down the stairs once a day for a month until you got lucky and they banged their head at the right angle, and that woulddefinitelylook suspicious. Or I thought about hiring a hit man, but then you have to rely on the guy you hire not being either completely incompetent or an undercover FBI agent. Really, I think the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to buy an unlicensed gun from a criminal, wear gloves while you shoot a stranger in the middle of the night, and then throw the gun into the Hudson. It would have to be a stranger because as soon as you have a decent motive, you’re a suspect. But I wouldn’t have any reason towantto kill a stranger, so now there’s no point to killing someone in the first place. You might as well skip the whole thing.”
“Youhavethought about this,” Sherry said, impressed. “And you’re right. It’s the motive that always catches people out. That’s why serial killers who get away with it aren’t particularly impressive. Killing poor ladies of the evening who you’ve never met before and no one cares about isn’t much of a trick, when there’s nothing to connect the two of you and no one’s hounding the police to solve the case, anyway. A woman who tells everyone about how much she hates her middle-class husband, kills him, clears out the bank accounts, and gets away free and clear,that’ssmart.” An image of Caroline flitted through her head. Caroline, crying over her husband’s cruelty, shedding what looked like real tears. Sherry blinkedthe thought away. “The diner’s still open,” she said abruptly. “Should we go talk to him?”
Charlotte looked skeptical. “Talk toJason? Like an interrogation? Would that be safe?”
“We’re not going to cuff him to a table and shine a light in his eyes,” Sherry said. “Just talk to him. He won’t murder us in the diner.”
“Hemight,” Charlotte said, and then threw back the rest of her third glass of wine. “All right. Let’s do it.”
They had a brief battle over the check—Sherry won—and then marched off toward the diner in the cold, both giggling a little from the combination of wine and nerves. “If he’s not there, we should get pie,” Charlotte said. “They have great pie.”
“We should get pie either way,” Sherry said firmly. “Or cake. To avoid suspicion.”
