He sighed. “I don’twantto get involved. But I can’t just let an old—I can’t just let a woman go talk to murderers by herself without telling anyone where she is. You could be lying dead somewhere and none of your friends would have any idea.”
“You were going to sayan old lady, weren’t you?” Sherry asked, pleased to be able to score a point in the face of Father Barry’s otherwise honestly fairly reasonable argument. He went slightly red again, which felt like enough of an admission of error that she could make a concession of her own. “I’m going to talk to Jason Martinez’s neighbors first, to see if anyone can confirm or dispute his alibi. He says that he was home all night.”
“Then let me go with you,” Father Barry said. “He’s one of my parishioners. If I ask about him, it will be less suspicious.”
“It will be if you ask the questions that I want the answers to,” Sherry said, though she had to admit to herself that it wasn’t a completely terrible idea. She still wasn’t sure that she wanted him tagging along. “If a priest showed up at my house and started asking questions about my neighbor’s movements at night, I’d think that either he was a robber dressed up as a priest to case the joint, or that the priest was some kind of weird pervert.”
“I would make it sound good,” he said. “I’d say—that I was expecting to meet him that evening after dinner to counsel him about something, but I haven’t seen him since, and I’ve been concerned about him. Then I could take it from there.”
She considered that. “That sounds like a lot of lying, for a priest. We’ll split the difference. I’ll say that I’m involved in the investigation, and you wanted to come along as his spiritual adviser in case he’s in crisis. Everyone knows I work with the police, and I’ll have you for backup in case they don’t wantthings to get back to the cops.” That decided, she started marching toward the lake again, allowing Father Barry to trot along if he saw fit. She didn’t want to wait any longer.
It was a pleasant walk down to the lake, at least, on the sort of glass-clear spring day when the air felt sharp enough to cut and the light glittered bright enough to dazzle on the water. The little houses that clustered around the lake looked shabbier than usual on this sort of day, with no leafy trees or flattering lighting to soften their flaws. They walked past one house with a collection of weather-faded plastic flowers and pinwheels sticking out of planters by the front door and a listing bathtub near the mailbox; one with peeling siding and a basketball hoop that had lost its basket; and a third that looked sleek and shiny and new, with a bright-red front door and neatly trimmed hedges. New money in town, maybe: young professionals who commuted into one of the nearby cities. In a few more years maybe all the plastic pinwheels would be gone forever.
It wasn’t hard to find Jason’s house: his rusty pickup was parked prominently out front, and she could see a pink plastic playhouse in the yard half-buried in the snow. Sherry nudged Father Barry to keep up and walked briskly as she passed the house, swinging her arms like a woman out for some afternoon exercise in the cold. Then she doubled back to knock on the neighbor’s door.
No one was home. She tried a few more, until finally someone answered: a lady who might have been in her eighties bundled up in a big warm sweater with appliquéd flowers on the front. She gave Sherry the polite, fixed smile of someone who thinks that they’re about to be asked to make a donation to something. “Can I help you?” Then she spotted Father Barryand beamed. “Oh! Good afternoon, Father! What a lovely surprise!”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Sherman,” Father Barry said. “It’s so nice to see you. How’s that ankle doing?”
Sherry tried not to look as impressed as she felt. He was still new in town and had probably about a hundred parishioners: most people wouldn’t have been able to match one old lady’s face to the right name and medical complaint this early in their tenure as parish priest. That is, if he had matched the right face to the correct failing joint, which it appeared he had: Mrs. Sherman was still smiling. “Oh, just about the same,” she said. “Would you like to come in for a coffee?”
“I don’t know if we have time today, Mrs. Sherman,” Barry said. “We just wanted to stop by because I’m helping my friend Sherry look into something.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Sherman said, and directed a slightly suspicious glance toward Sherry. “You’re the one who does the murders.”
Sherry winced. “Iinvestigatemurders,” she said. She didn’tdothem. She wasn’t that sort of lady.
“We wanted to ask about one of your fellow parishioners,” Barry said hurriedly. “Your neighbor, Jason Martinez. It seems like the police might be looking at him for Alan Thompson’s murder, and I was hoping that one of his neighbors might be able to say whether or not they noticed him leaving home that night. I want to be able to tell the police that I don’t think he possibly could have done it with a clear conscience.” He was blushing slightly, but that somehow just made him look even more wholesome and sincere than he usually did. Sherry was impressed all over again. He hadn’t even really technicallylied.
Mrs. Sherman had the look of a woman who was fulsomelyappreciating an extremely sincere, wholesome, and square-jawed young priest. “How nice of you, Father,” she said. “I don’t know if I can help, though. I don’t think I know Mr. Martinez.”
“He’s one of your across-the-street neighbors,” Sherry put in. “A few doors down. The family with the two little girls and the playhouse in the front yard.”
“Oh, him!” Mrs. Sherman said. “I know him and his wife to wave to, but I don’t reallyknowthem. He’s in trouble? They seem like such a nice family.”
“We hope that he isn’t going to be in any trouble,” Barry said soothingly.
“We were wondering if you might have noticed him coming and going from the house the Saturday night before last,” Sherry said. “It would have probably been between nine and midnight.”
Mrs. Sherman was already shaking her head. “I went to bed very early that night. I’d been woken up at four in the morning by the neighbor’s dog barking, so I was completely dead to the world by nine. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”
Father Barry looked somewhat crestfallen but quickly recovered himself. “Oh, no, don’t apologize,” he said. “I knew it was a long shot that anyone would have noticed anything. People don’t just watch their neighbors all night long. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us!”
Mrs. Sherman indicated that it was nothing and that she’d be more than happy for Father Barry to drop by anytime. Sherry cleared her throat. “Just one more thing,” she said, and immediately felt self-conscious. She should have come with a raincoat and a cigar. “The dog that woke you up. Does it do that often?”
“All the time,” Mrs. Sherman said. “It’s awful. It’s one ofthose little ones, the little things that look like rats. It goes absolutely berserk every time anyone walks past the house. It hates pedestrians. I think it thinks they’re all mailmen. There’snothingit hates more than the mailman. Once after a big storm he came to deliver the mail on skis and the thing nearly launched itself straight through a window to get at him. If it wasn’t such a tiny dog I’d be scared for the poor man. That dog ismalevolent.”
“Like a miniature Cujo,” Sherry said. “I hope you got a good night’s sleep on Saturday, at least.”
“I did. Like I said, I passed out at nine and slept through until morning, which is unusual for me. Usually I’m up and down all night. Things like wind and the birds wake me up.”
Sherry said a few polite things about how difficult that must be and how she sometimes struggled to get enough sleep herself, then shamelessly promised Mrs. Sherman, without consulting Barry, that Father Barry would be coming by for coffee soon, which allowed them to leave Mrs. Sherman feeling happy about the whole strange conversation. As they walked away, Sherry could hear muffled, high-pitched yaps coming from inside the house next door.
“Well,” Sherry said eventually, “at least we know that Jason didn’twalkto kill Alan.”
“How?” Father Barry asked. “Wait, don’t tell me. Because of the dog? It would have barked if someone walked past the house, and that would have woken up Mrs. Sherman?”
“Right,” Sherry said. “Because the dog hates pedestrians. I didn’t think that Jason would have walked to Alan’s, anyway, though. He has a limp. I don’t see why a man who’s unsteady on his feet would choose a night with heavy snow falling to walk almost a mile to confront someone who betrayed histrust decades earlier, kill him, and then make history’s slowest getaway. It would have been a stupid thing to do, and it would have set off the horrible dog, so it probably didn’t happen. If he did it, he would have driven there.”
