Todd gave a very nice smile and added helpfully, “I learned how to do that in high school. With a paper clip. My parents used to lock me out when I stayed out past curfew, and Barry always slept through it when I threw rocks at his window.”
“I didn’t sleep through it when you threw a rockthroughmy window,” Barry muttered.
Everyone ignored him. Sherry pressed Charlotte. “How about signs of a previous break-in? Did everything look normal to you?”
“Nothing looked too weird,” Charlotte said. “It was a little hard to tell. We didn’t turn the lights on in the shop because people would see it from the street. We turned them on in the back office, though, so we could see to look around. There was a safe, but Alice told us about that ahead of time and said that they kept cash in there for the register, nothing else. We looked through the desk but there was just electric bills and stuff.”
“And I doubt that the accounts would have been in the safe if Alan had been planning on looking at them at home,” Sherry said with a disappointed little sigh. “If he’d forgotten, he would have left them on the desk, not locked them up in the safe. So we’re left with someone having taken them. Either the police or someone who didn’t want them looked at.” Like Alice, who worked for Alan and always seemed desperately short of money. Or like Corey, Alan’s ne’er-do-well son who’d been helping him at the store and always needed money.
Or like Todd, who’d almost certainly slept with Corey at least once, more than two months earlier, had subsequently lied about it, had a previous fraud conviction, and had managed to involve himself in the investigation into Alan’s death from almost the instant he’d arrived in Winesap.
She couldn’t say any of this aloud to this group, of course. Todd had already clearly managed to wedge himself firmly into Charlotte’s life, and he’d been part of Father Barry’s this whole time. For all Sherry knew, Barry had been accidentally slipping him information about the investigation since it first started. Or, she realized with a jolt, Barry could have been sharing informationdeliberately. It wasn’t as if she really, truly knew him that well. He’d just been kind to her when she’d needed help, and she’d immediately started acting as if they’d had years of close friendship. She would have to be more careful from now on. She’d always worked mostly alone, before this bunch came into her life. Starting from this lunch, she needed to play things much more carefully. No more running to her friends for advice and feedback. The demon wantedherto investigate, just her, and it was becoming apparent that she would have to take care of things alone either way.
“Sherry!” Charlotte said in Sherry’s right ear, jolting Sherryout of her reverie. “I have something for you.” The twins appeared to be having some kind of quiet argument; for the moment, she and Charlotte were unobserved.
Sherry sat up straighter in her seat. She did love a present. “Oh! What is it?” she asked, then smiled as Charlotte handed it over, pleased, if a little baffled. “Oh, goodness, it’sbeautiful.”
It was a necklace, the sort of piece of impressive statement jewelry that she always admired on Charlotte but would look silly paired with her own usual modest little department store sweaters and blue jeans. She had no idea why Charlotte would give it to her.
“It’s red branch coral,” Charlotte said, seeming uncharacteristically bashful. “I was trying to come up with something I could do to help out with the demon problems, and I thought about my jewelry collection. Crystals have powers, right? So I called my witch friend and asked, and she said red coral is supposed to protect against evil, like, all over the world, in China and ancient Rome and the Americas and all through history, which I thought would probably cover our bases if our demon here is from, I don’t know, ancient Macedonia or something. So, I picked this out, and she helped me do a blessing over it. It’s vintage, so it’s definitely actual coral. I figure it couldn’t hurt if you wore it, right?”
“According to my cat,” Sherry said, “it’s mostly about whether we believe that it will help. Which I think I do. I think all of those people all over the world must have known something.”
Charlotte looked relieved. “Me, too,” she said, like a confession. “I mean—there’s something about it that feels right.” She cleared her throat. “My friend says to make sure that the coral’s touching your skin. That helps it to work.”
Sherry put on the necklace and tucked it in under her shirt. It was long enough to drape over her heart. The red of the coral was the same red as the berries she’d pulled from the yew branch to make her dagger, which was still tucked safely into her coat pocket. She put her hand into her pocket to touch it, and yelped as a painful surge of heat passed through her fingers and her chest.
“What?” Charlotte asked, clearly startled.
Sherry licked her lips, then smiled. “I think that it’s working already,” she said.
Charlotte didn’t laugh or smile. Instead, she just nodded. “Good.”
Their food arrived, bringing with it a wave of comforting ordinariness that made the strange, ancient power that Sherry was increasingly convinced that she really had managed to cook up out of a roadside shrub and some statement jewelry recede to a more comfortable distance. They all lapsed into eating paired with safe small talk. Todd was surprisingly voluble on the topic of thebest tuna melt in New York, a subject in which he apparently had a particular interest. Sherry picked at her food for a while—uncharacteristically, she didn’t have much of an appetite—then stood. “I have to go,” she said. “Thank you very much for all of your help.”
Charlotte and Todd were, at this point, too wrapped up in giggling with each other to notice her, but Father Barry frowned. “Are you all right, Sherry?”
Oh, he was good. No wonder she’d liked and trusted him so quickly. He could tell the second her mood shifted. “I’m fine,” she said firmly. “Thank you, Barry.” Then she added a quick, apologetic little, “If I need help, I’ll—” She stopped.Call you, she’d been about to say. Call him on the smartphone thatshe now remembered had until recently always been in her purse, and which she could have used to very quickly perform many of the tasks she’d recently performed with endless phone calls and poring over microfiche. Where had all their phones gone? She strained to think, but she couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe they were all neatly piled behind some door in Winesap that everyone knew they weren’t supposed to open.
Barry was looking more worried than ever. She hastily finished her thought. “If I need help, I’ll let you know.”
He nodded. He had a look to him like he knew that something had shifted. “Good luck, Sherry.”
She swallowed, nodded back, and left.
Twenty-two
Sherry had only made it about halfway down the block when Father Barry caught up with her. “Sherry!”
She stopped, letting herself look mildly irritated. She had a long list of things that she needed to getdone. Troublesome loose ends that she needed to stitch back together. First up was Jason and his not particularly convincing alibi. She needed to find out if any of his neighbors had noticed him leaving when he was supposed to be cozily ensconced at home with his lovely wife and daughters. “Yes?”
“You’re shutting me out of what you’re doing because of Todd, aren’t you?”
Her face went warm. “I don’t know him,” she said after a second. Arguing the point seemed like a waste of time.
“But you knowme,” he said. Then he said, “Sherry, I love my brother. But I’m not going to tell him anything that you tell me in confidence. I’m a priest. I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
For good or evil, Sherry thought. She was feeling uncharitable. She said aloud, “Why are you so interested in knowing what I’m doing, then? You weren’t so excited to get involved in my demon problems a few days ago.”
