“So we don’t know any more than we did before,” Father Barry said.
“Sure we do,” Sherry said. “We know that Jason definitely didn’t leave his neighborhood on foot, which means that if he was involved, someone might have seen a red pickup near the murder scene. That’s something.”
Barry seemed unconvinced. They knocked on a few more doors, anyway. Only three more people answered: one young man who’d been at work at a bar in Saratoga at the time, a stay-at-home mother to a toddler who’d been asleep on the living room couch while her husband contentedly ignored the toddler dumping an entire bottle of chocolate syrup onto the living room floor, and a furtive-looking teen girl who’d been listening to music in her bedroom for most of the evening and hadn’t seen or heard a thing until Barry mentioned that it was connected to a murder investigation, at which point she’ddefinitelyheard someone screaming. By the time they decided to give up and head back to the village, Father Barry was looking a little downcast. “Cheer up, Father,” Sherry said. She was feeling surprisingly high-spirited herself. Just being out and about and asking questions made her feel a little more in control. “It’s never as easy as you hope it’s going to be, but you always end up knowing more than when you started.”
“Very philosophical of you,” Father Barry said.
“I think so, too,” Sherry said modestly. “I have a few more things that I need to look into this afternoon. Will you be tagging along this whole time?”
Father Barry frowned. “Will it involve more interrogating strangers?”
“No,” Sherry said. “It will mostly involve the internet.”
“The what?” Father Barry asked, and Sherry distracted him by darting toward Jason’s pickup truck, which they were currently walking past. Something had just occurred to her. She was crouching down in the snow behind the truck when Father Barry caught up to her. “Sherry,” he hissed. “He’s going to look out the window and see you!”
Sherry popped up again, beaming all over her face. She felt triumphant. “That’s fine,” she said. “If he comes charging out of the house to confront me, I’ll just tell him—”
She stopped. Caught herself short. She’d agreed to Barry coming along with her on this particular fact-finding mission, but she wasn’t sure how much information she should continue to share. She didn’t think that he would intentionally disrupt her investigation, but there was still the problem of Todd to consider. Until she was sure of where she stood with the disreputable Todd, she would have to be careful about what she said to his twin brother.
“What?” Barry asked. “You’ll tell him what?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I mean—I might be wrong. I’ll tell you later.” Then she took off walking again. Father Barry only badgered her about it very briefly before he gave up. When they arrived back on Main Street, he hesitated. “Are you going to talk to more people?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to the library to do some more research.” She was going to go rooting around on social media some more, but it didn’t seem wise to bring that up when it seemed that Father Barry still couldn’t remember what the internet was. She also planned on going straight from thelibrary to Alan’s house so that she could illegally break and enter it again, a plan that seemed somewhat more likely to get her in trouble than spending all afternoon in the library computer room. She thought that she could save Father Barry the worry of having to hear about that part.
“Oh,” he said, his shoulders relaxing. “That should be safe, shouldn’t it be? I need to work on my homily. I put it off until the weekend last week and was up most of Saturday night trying to finish it before mass. I think people might have been able to tell. It wasn’t very good.” He looked very anxious at the thought.
Sherry wasn’t usually the sort of person who gave spontaneous hugs, but in that moment, she really did want to hug Father Barry. “I’m sure I’ll be safe,” she said. “Go work on your homily. I’ll see you soon.”
They went their separate ways. Sherry went straight to the library and walked past a few browsing patrons to enter the computer lab. As soon as she reached the door, they all snapped their faces away in unison, toward a book or a shelf or the floor, anywhere but the door that led to the computers. It was as if the director had shouted, “Action,” and they all had to look away from the camera. It made Sherry’s skin itch.
Once she was safely established at a computer with the door closed firmly behind her, she was delighted to discover that Todd had accepted her fake account’s friend request on Instagram. She scrolled through his posts. It took a while to get through them: he generally didn’t stay inactive for longer than a few days. There was enough information available for Sherry to form what she thought might be a fairly accurate picture of Todd’s life. A handsome, charming man with a large social circle but not many close friends. A string of what mightbe boyfriends or girlfriends, none of them lasting longer than a month or so. Lots of pictures from nightclubs, parks, nice restaurants, charming city streets, and the beautiful homes where he attended dinner parties. No pictures of his own home, which she suspected would be quite modest. No ostentatious displays of expensive purchases. No pictures that showed much of his body except when his being shirtless was appropriate for the occasion: here he was in a candid shot on the beach looking casually gorgeous while laughing with a friend. All very calculated and curated for effect: all very tasteful and pointedly not desperate. Nothing referencing his parents, though occasionally Barry would feature in childhood pictures of the two of them together with captions like,Heading upstate to see this guyorBest friends since before birth. It seemed that Barry’s loyalty to his brother was genuinely mutual. There was even one picture of them as adults, with Barry in his priest’s collar, with the captionBarry and his evil twin. The comments below were very heavy on the jokes about kneeling, confessing sins, et cetera. Poor Barry: he was like a vegan who was constantly being offered free filets.
She kept digging through the posts. Corey’s apartment featured in one, as did the man himself in a group shot taken at some gallery opening from six months earlier. She clicked through to the profiles of the other people tagged in the picture. Nobody stuck out as particularly relevant, until she hit one well-dressed older gentleman with receding silver hair and an impressive set of white teeth. His profile contained a link to his website. MikeKaminskiAntiques.com.
Mike Kaminski, the antiques dealer who had seen Alan on his last day alive.
Twenty-three
Sherry frowned at the screen. It wasn’t such amassivecoincidence, really. Todd knew Corey. Corey was Alan’s son and did some work purchasing art for his antiques store. Mike Kaminski was a regular customer at said store, and both of them were involved in the wider world of art and antiques in New York. It was reasonable to think that they could have met at some point, running in such similar circles. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of normal social behavior that Corey could have brought Todd to a party where Mike Kaminski also happened to be in attendance.
It wasn’t amassivecoincidence, but it was still a striking coincidence.
She clicked through Mr. Kaminski’s website for a while, not really sure what she expected to find. A section of the shop for murder weapons, maybe. Something that would clarify things a little. Instead, all she found was a niggling sense of unease that she was forgetting something. It bothered her. She frowned her way through a few more sections of the website. She was scrolling crankily past first a selection of rewired midcentury table lamps, followed by some admittedly nice-looking area rugs, when it hit her.
The website didn’t feature a single figurative drawing.
It was, yet again, far from damning. There were a fairly limited number of items on the website, clearly far from Mr. Kaminski’s entire inventory, and the fine art selection was particularly slim. Still, on reflection, it was strange. Mr. Kaminski had a very clear personal sense of taste that came through in what he was offering for sale: lots of bold geometric shapes and saturated colors, and everything on a scale that would fit into only the largest of Hudson Valley summer homes. Here was an enormous Bakelite and chrome ceiling lamp, and there was an abstract impressionist canvas selling for almost five thousand dollars that would take up the better part of Sherry’s living room wall. Nowhere was there anything like the modest little charcoal drawing that Alan had liked enough to bring home from the shop and hang on his own living room wall. Which was strange, because Alice had specifically mentioned Mr. Kaminski being annoyed that the set of drawings was missing one picture.
Sherry pulled out a notebook from her bag, returned to Instagram, opened up the profiles for each of the three men, and carefully noted down their movements on the days directly surrounding Alan’s murder. Then she carefully checked for any other social media accounts and did the same, before scrolling further through the accounts to confirm that certain details lined up correctly. She followed links from profile to profile, googled names, and looked up records. An hour passed, then two. She was beginning to feel as if she had an idea of how it all fit together.
Next, she looked up the telephone numbers for several restaurants and bars in New York City, introduced herself as working with the Winesap Sheriff’s Office, and asked if theycould confirm that certain groups and individuals had been in their restaurants at the times in question. Finally, she called Mike Kaminski himself. He remembered her and was as helpful as ever, readily providing her with the names and numbers of some of the friends he’d been with on Saturday night and emailing her a picture of his receipt. That seemed to settle his location on the night in question but did nothing at all to clear him of involvement in whatever else the three of them might have been up to. She had a suspicion that there was a very neat explanation to many of the odd coincidences she’d been running into, but there was only one way for her to know for certain.
She really hoped she wasn’t going to get arrested for breaking into what was technically now her own house.
Sherry had successfully left the computer room without accidentally causing a break in the fabric of reality—the library patrons all looked away again when she exited, as if she’d left the bathroom not only with her fly down but also with snakes for hair—and headed to the circulation desk. There was one last thing that she wanted to check before she headed to Alan’s house, and it was in the file of cards for books that were currently checked out. She went immediately to the 700s, the arts-related section, and hit what she was looking for almost immediately: Alan had checked out multiple books on fine arts and art appraisal before he died, including one hefty encyclopedia of American artists of the twentieth century.
She wrote down the names of the books in her notebook, then headed for the exit. She’d almost made it out when she was waylaid by Mary, her elderly volunteer and favorite gossip provider. “Sherry,” she said. “I’msosorry about Alan. He wassuch a wonderful man.” Mary and Alan had both been involved with the local historical society, and Mary had known Alan for longer than Sherry had.
