“I probably would be, too,” Charlotte said. “If a guy who’d screwed me over that badly suddenly showed up dead, I’d be practicing my lines in the mirror.”
“You’re right,” Sherry said, after a moment of reflection. “He’s not stupid, is he? It would be the smart thing to do to practice a bit.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “All the same. A strong motive and a weak alibi.”
“A really awful alibi,” Charlotte agreed. “Kind of embarrassing.” She ate a few more French fries. “What are you going to do?”
“Let the police know, I suppose,” Sherry said. “Let them follow up. They’ll be able to do things like check—” She paused, and blinked. There was something that the police should be able to check, something that might be able to confirm whether or not Jason really had spent all night at home, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She huffed out a frustrated breath. “I forgot what I was just about to say. Anyway, I think that with a lead this strong I really should hand it over to them.”
“Hm,” Charlotte said, after a pause.
Sherry frowned. “What?”
“Nothing,” Charlotte said. “I was just thinking about how it doesn’t feel right.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Jason being the killer,” Charlotte said. “It just feels wrong. Narratively, I guess.”
“Narratively,” Sherry repeated.
“Yeah. I mean, think about it. This demon’s been freaking out for ages about how you have to investigate, you need to investigate. So you poke around a little, and the librarian in Schenectady sends you that article, and I recognize Jason in the picture. Then we come over here, and he’s pretty polite over the whole thing, and you decide you want to tell the cops and let them sort it out. It just feels kind of…”
“Anticlimactic?” Sherry suggested. She was thinking about it, too, now.
“Right.I took a class on short story writing a while ago. There was this guy who wanted to write noir stories in the class. He got the vibe right, with the detectives and the dames and everything, but the plots all went like that. Like, the guy looks around for a while and then he finds who did it. No twist.”
“But we’re not in a book,” Sherry said. “There’s not always a twist in real life. Most murders are straightforward.” Even as she said it she knew that she was kidding herself. Murders were never straightforward in Winesap.
It was as if Charlotte had read her mind. “Not in Winesap,” she said. “And now we know that there’s something supernatural involved. I don’t know, I just think it doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re right,” Sherry said. “It doesn’t work, narratively speaking. I wasn’t particularly necessary. Why badger me into investigating when the whole thing could easily unravel on its own?” She paused. “Maybe the demon’s like your classmate who wrote the bad noirs. Like a sort of—scriptwriter, for all of these deaths and investigations.” She bit her cheek again.“That would make sense, wouldn’t it? If what it’s after is the investigation itself, and not the person being caught at the end. But why?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “Maybe it’s about the”—she waved her hand through the air—“energy. You know? Someone dying, and then all of this energy goes into catching whoever did it, or not getting caught.”
Sherry blinked. It sounded oddly plausible. Plausible in a context in which they’d already established that they were suffering from an acute case of demon problems, at least. “That makes a lot of sense,” she said. “As much as anything, at least. Too bad your witch friend can’t come to test the theory. She does energy things, didn’t you say that? With crystals? I don’t think poor Father Barry would know how.”
“Poor Father Barry,” Charlotte said. “He always seems so stressed-out. So is the twin hot?”
Sherry squirmed slightly. “Todd? He looks like Father Barry,” she said. “But more…fashionable.”
“Oh, God, heishot,” Charlotte said. “Barry’s so hot. They should have rules about that, for priests. They should have to have lazy eyes or something. If Barry was my priest I’d go to church just to sin in my heart the whole time.”
“Charlotte,” Sherry said reprovingly, even though she really wanted to laugh. “Don’t say that around Father Barry, the poor thing would probably have a heart attack.”
“I wonder if he’s a virgin,” Charlotte said, a little dreamily. “Too bad Todd’s gay.”
“Charlotte!” Sherry said, truly somewhat scandalized this time. Speculating about a priest’s virginity! “That’s his private business. And, anyway, I don’t know if Todd is gay. I just thought he looked like he was being very flirtatious withCorey. He could just be…friendly. Or diverse in his interests.” Somehow, speculating on whether or not a priest’s twin brother might be bisexual felt inappropriate by proxy.
“Diverse in his interests,” Charlotte repeated. “That sounds like one of those old euphemisms.He appreciates Grecian marbles.”
“I’m just trying to be respectful,” Sherry said. Her cheeks felt warm. “Why don’t we talk aboutyou. How have you been feeling? Have you decided what you want to do with the gallery?”
“Run it,” Charlotte said promptly. “Which is going to be hard if I can’t leave town. I need to go down to the city and talk to some of the people I know there. I’ve been thinking, I have all of this extra space in the building, and there’s that little kitchen downstairs in the studio. I could set it up as an apartment and bring artists in to do residencies.”
Sherry expressed interest—she really was interested—and just let Charlotte talk for a while, prompting her with more questions whenever the conversation lagged. It felt almost possible to be optimistic about the state of Winesap and the world at large when she was eating coconut cake and listening to Charlotte being very enthusiastic and charming about her plans for art exhibitions. By the time she’d finished the last bits of her cake, the sleepiness from the drinks they’d had earlier had caught up to both of them. They paid and left, then hugged at the door before they went their separate ways.
Sherry trudged back up the hill to home, the evening feeling even darker and quieter than it usually did, the silence broken only by the sound of a motorcycle driving through the village. The lights from the streetlamps and the few other houses seemed muted, as if everyone on her street hadcollectively decided to turn off the lights and go to bed early. It made her uneasy. Her home didn’t feel any stranger, at least, and the cat’s demands were of the usual cat variety. She dedicated five minutes to petting him, then brushed her teeth twice—she knew her breath would smell like alcohol in the morning—drank a big glass of water, and went to bed. She expected to wake up in the middle of the night with the start of a hangover. She didn’t expect to be woken up at eight in the morning by the police knocking on her door.
Eighteen
