Sherry squinted blearily at Sheriff Brown, clutching at the front of her bathrobe to try to keep him from getting an eyeful of the stained, worn-out old pajamas she’d gone to bed in. It had given her a quick jolt of unease when she’d seen him on her front step, but he’d greeted her just like he usually would have, without any strange demands or horrible demon voices. He just looked very, very serious, which immediately kicked off a different kind of dread. “Peter? What are you doing here? What happened?” The thought hit her stomach like a gulp of ice water. “Has someone else been killed?”
He gave his head a hard, firm shake. “No. No, nothing like that. Don’t worry. Everything’s been quiet. Not even any kids breaking into garages.” He paused. “I need you to come into the station with me, Sherry.”
Her head gave an involuntary shake of its own. “What? Why?” Then, very stupidly: “But I’m still in my pajamas.”
He gave a sympathetic wince. “I just need to talk to you about a few things relating to Alan’s death. There’s some stuff that we need to sort out.”
She recoiled slightly. “Am I being arrested?”
He shook his head again. “No, no, of course not. We just need you to come in to answer a few questions.”
“So you’re bringing me in for questioning,” she said. “Because I’m a suspect. Well, I knew that, I guess. I had myself on my own suspect list for being the last person to have seen him alive, just in case a demon possessed me and I did it without realizing it or something. Only I couldn’t figure out how I possibly could have gotten down the hill and back up again and back into bed in time, especially once you factored in the time to change in and out of my pajamas—” She stopped. She was babbling. Sheriff Brown was frowning.
“Have you been drinking, Sherry?”
She flushed hot. “I had a few drinks with Charlotte last night. Can I—make some coffee, at least? And get changed?” And make sure that she had all her holy water and crystals and things hidden around her person before she went anywhere with him.
“Sure,” the sheriff said. “I’ll just wait in your living room, if you don’t mind.”
Sherry wanted to ask him what he’d do if she said that she did, in fact, mind. Crab-walk backward up her stairs while screaming in Aramaic, maybe. Just in case he might, she said, “I’ll make coffee,” and showed him inside. She went through the basics of her usual morning routine robotically, hyperconscious of the sheriff’s presence in her private space. Even feeding her cat felt like too intimate a task to perform in front of him. She was grateful when the coffee was ready and she could politely pour him a cup, then escape upstairs for a few minutes of privacy to drink it while she pulled some clean clothes on and ran a comb through her hair, then shoved some anti-demon supplies into her pockets. She checked herself in the mirror. She looked tired and worried. Tired and worried and old and haggard. For the first time in what was probablymonths, she found herself digging through the drawer where she kept her makeup. She put on lipstick, then immediately wiped it off. She looked stupid with it on, like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s high heels. At least her own frustration and embarrassment with herself had brought a little brightness to her eyes and color to her cheeks: she looked marginally less dead and resurrected.
Eventually she couldn’t come up with any more excuses to delay the inevitable, so she dragged herself downstairs and meekly went with Sheriff Brown to ride to the station. He let her sit up front, at least, which was nice of him. At the station, he put her into a room she hadn’t been in before. Once she’d accompanied the frantic daughter of a victim into a different room in the station, because the girl hadn’t wanted to talk without her there. That room had been fairly pleasant and comfortable, like the waiting room in a doctor’s office. This one was gray and spartan, just three chairs and a table that was bolted to the floor. A real interrogation room for a real suspect.
“Sherry,” Sheriff Brown said, “I’d like you to go over everything that you did last Saturday evening after you got off work.”
Sherry did, with as much detail as she could muster. Alan picking her up, deciding against their previous plans, going to pick up Chinese food, his house for dinner and a movie, the drive home and bringing Alice her leftovers. Then going to bed, and being woken up by Alice, and the whole saga of having to go to her house to help her with the fuse box. The wave of relief that passed over her as she talked through that last part took her off guard. “That’s my alibi,” she said aloud. “I’d realized that it was Alice’s alibi, but I didn’t think aboutmyself. She can confirm that she saw me twice, once at about ten thirty and then again at midnight. I couldn’t have walked down to Alan’s house, killed him, and then gotten back up to bed in my house in time.”
Sheriff Brown’s face was expressionless. “You were the last to see him alive. You could have killed him, left his house, walked up, then gone to bed.”
“But that would mean that he was killed at nine,” Sherry said, before immediately realizing her mistake.
Sheriff Brown’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think that he wasn’t?”
“Nothing,” Sherry said quickly. She didn’t want to get the medical examiner in trouble after he’d been willing to speak with her. “I just heard a rumor. That he was killed closer to midnight.”
He didn’t respond to that. Instead, he said, “When did you find out that Mr. Thompson was leaving you his house?”
Sherry’s whole brain stuttered. “What?”
“He left you his house in his will,” Sheriff Brown said. “Including everything inside it, plus two hundred thousand dollars to cover taxes and maintenance. Almost a million dollars’ worth of cash and property in total. He owned a lot of valuable antiques.”
“What?” Sherry said again. She couldn’t process it. Alan’shouse. He had a beautiful house. He also had two beautiful sons, and beautiful grandchildren. “But—why not his sons?”
“A million in cash each,” Sheriff Brown said. “Your boyfriend was a very rich guy. Plenty of reasons for someone to want him dead.”
“I didn’t know,” Sherry said. She could feel her heart in herchest. “I had no idea. We never talked about money. We talked about books we’d been reading.”
“You’re not doing well financially, are you?” the sheriff asked. “They don’t pay you much at the library. Your rent on that little house is pretty high. Doesn’t seem like you have much put away for retirement.”
“So you think I gambled on my boyfriend having left me something in his will andkilledhim?” Sherry said. Her voice sounded too high-pitched. “If I’d wanted to live in his house, why wouldn’t I have just tried tomarryhim?” Her voice broke at the end of the sentence, and, to her horror, she started to cry.
Sheriff Brown leaned across the table just enough to hand her a tissue that he’d pulled out of his pocket. She took it, then just held it in her hand, nervously rolling one corner between two fingertips. He still looked calm. Not like a cartoon mouse at all right now. It seemed strange that she’d ever thought there was anything funny or cartoonish about him. “You wanted to marry him?”
She shrugged and swiped at her eyes. “I didn’t think that I did. I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get married,” the sheriff said. “Nothing strange about being angry when you find out that the guy you want to marry already has a wife.”
It gave her a jolt. She snapped her head up to look at him. She’d never felt slow around Sheriff Brown before. Now she felt as if she’d wandered right into a trap. “I didn’t know that he was married until after he died,” she said. “You can ask anyone. I didn’t know. I only found out when I talked to his friend Greg the other day and he accidentally told me. Alan always told me that he was divorced, and I believed him. Why onearth would I ever think he was still married? It wasn’t a situation where we met at hotels. He told me where he kept his spare key so I could go into his house and water his plants while he was away. Where would he havekepta wife? It never occurred to me for a second, before Greg told me.” Was she saying too much? Overexplaining? There was a camera in the room, she assumed. She had to force herself to keep her head still and not let her eyes dart around to look for it. Would this be the part of the video where the prosecutor paused the tape and asked the jury whethertheybelieved her?
