“Thank you,” Sherry said. “He really was.” She was a little surprised that she still believed that. He’d been terrible at his job as a defense attorney and had fled his hometown in shame when he’d been found out, had lied to her about his wife, had spoiled his youngest son past the point of no return, and might have mismanaged his business so badly that he hadn’t been able to figure out an extremely serious problem with its operations until it was too late. He’d been kind, though. A weak man, maybe, and an incompetent man, almost certainly. Still, he’d been kind. It was more than you could say for lots of people.
“I’m sorry to bring up gossip at a time like this,” Mary was saying now—though she didn’tlookvery sorry—“but you’d asked me to tell you if I heard anything else about the priest and Mrs. Walker.”
Sherry, who’d been glancing toward the door, perked up immediately. “He’s been back? Did Karen say something to you?”
She nodded. “She said it was the strangest thing. For years now Mrs. Walker has only ever asked people over in the afternoon to sit by her bed and have tea. But two weeks ago she apparently was up and about trying on some of her nice old dresses, and then she told Karen that she was having a guest over for dinner on Saturday night and she wanted a full dinner like she used to have for guests with courses and wine. It was the priest. He came over at seven, and Karen said that he stayed for hours. She went to bed at almost eleven and he was still there. Mrs. Walker practically banished her from theroom after she was done serving, but Karen could hear her just laughing away until late. She was talking about what a wonderful time she had with him for days afterward. Isn’t that strange? A priest coming to visit an old lady is one thing, but laughing and drinking wine with her until midnight?”
“Very strange,” Sherry agreed. Another piece of the puzzle nestled right into its proper spot. “Thank you very much for telling me. That was very helpful.” Then she left, hurrying on to her next destination.
The key to Alan’s house was, remarkably, still under the gnome.
It really did seem as if some responsible person should have removed it by now. There it still was, though, glinting gold in the late afternoon sun. She let herself in, then started to search. She was much more systematic about it this time, now that she knew what she was looking for. First, she went to his expansive bookshelves and hunted through them for a while—Alan was very tidy, but he had absolutely no organizational system in place for his books—until she found the art books he’d checked out from the library. She pulled them out to look through them. No notes detailing his worries, alas, but lots of scraps of paper stuck between various pages to mark his place. This artist or that one. There was no clear pattern that Sherry could see. That didn’t make it any less suggestive, in Sherry’s mind. He hadn’t just been trying to inform himself about art appraisal in general. It seemed to her that he had very specific things that he was trying to look up.
Next, his living room wall. The cowboy drawing. She took it down from its hook and looked at it more closely. Nothing immediately struck her, until the name in the cramped signature in the lower right corner caught her eye. The same as oneof the names Alan had bookmarked. He’d been wondering about the provenance of his beloved new piece of art, just before he died. She checked the book again: the artist himself had died decades earlier.
She gave the drawing a gentle shake. Nothing. She turned it over to examine the frame. It was clearly very new, with fresh paper covering the back. No sticker from the shop that had done the framing work. Corey’s work, most likely. She was picking delicately at the paper with a fingernail to see if it would come off when a shadow went past the window.
Sherry, absurdly, hit the floor. A moment later someone knocked on the door and called out, “Is someone in there? I’m calling the police!”
Sherry cursed quietly to herself and waited for the neighbor—she was fairly certain that this must be the same neighbor who had recorded her crimes on his security camera—to leave. Once he’d walked off, she shoved the library books and the drawing into her enormous bag and headed for the back porch. She’d be able to escape more discreetly that way. She was passing through the porch when something caught her eye, and she paused. Alan kept some of his outdoor things back here. A couple of cheap plastic sleds that his grandchildren played with when they came to visit. His snowshoes, two pairs: one old-fashioned wood-and-leather pair that he’d told her that he mostly kept for sentimental reasons—they were heavy and bulky to use—and the modern aluminum-and-plastic set that she knew he used regularly for his long winter tromps through the woods. Next to the snowshoes were two pairs of skis and one pair of ski boots.
Odd.
She leaned down and, as quickly as she could, tried to fitone of the boots into the bindings for each pair of skis. One clicked into place almost immediately. The other wouldn’t, no matter how much she wiggled it.
She straightened and looked around. There were no other ski boots on the porch. There was no more time to hunt for the missing pair, though: she had to go. She hurried back toward the library. It was after five now, so it would be closed, and if Sheriff Brown was looking for her, he’d look for her at home first. That gave her a little extra time. She felt as if finally she was in her element again, as if her brain was working right, as if she was, once more, the kind of amateur detective that she liked to read about in books.
She got to the library, let herself in, and went straight back into the computer room. She made a few last checks and took notes of what she found. She needed to be sure that she wasn’t missing anything or mixing anything up. She took apart the picture frame, just to confirm exactly what she’d already been convinced was true, and put it back together again. She was about to try to pull off something ridiculous, something outrageous, something that she’d never done before. Something that she was very sure would catch her demon friend’s attention.
She went to the front desk and started making phone calls.
It took her a while. She didn’t have the numbers for everyone she wanted. Alice, first, that was easy. Charlotte and Janine. Father Barry, who had Todd with him. She asked Todd to please contact the Thompsons. She called the diner and asked for Jason, shamelessly pretending that she was more formally associated with the police than she was to make sure that his boss would let him come in. Then she called the actual police.
“Sherry,” Sheriff Brown said. “I was just at your house.”
“I know,” Sherry said. “I thought you might have been. I’m at the library. Could you please come here? In about”—she checked her watch—“thirty minutes?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Why?”
“To make an arrest,” Sherry said.
Another pause. “Of who? You?”
“No,” Sherry said. “Well, maybe, if you want to. For trespassing. But I want you to arrest Alan’s murderer.”
He sighed. It crackled through the receiver. “You’ve found him?”
“I really hope that I have,” Sherry said. “If I haven’t, you’re going to be the least of my problems. Are you going to come?”
“Do I have a choice?” Sheriff Brown asked, and then hung up before she could come up with anything snappy to say in response.
Sherry sat in the comfortable chair near the computer room and tried not to fidget too much. She always got horribly nervous right before she pointed her finger at someone and said, “You.” There was always the same sickening lurch in her gut right as she named her suspect aloud for the first time, like the moments just before the roller coaster went over the first drop, when she inevitably, desperately thought,I wonder if they’ll stop the ride if I scream.
They wouldn’t stop the ride, of course. There were things that you just had to see through once you started them. This thing she was doing tonight was one of them. She’d started it off, and now she had to ride it all the way to the end.
There was a knock on the closed library door. Sherry answered it. It was Janine. God bless Janine. Sherry had been icing her out of the investigation a bit—she was just soskeptical—but of course she was the first to arrive when Sherry needed her. Now, having had the realization that the demon had trapped them all in a strange time warp, Sherry could suddenly recognize why she’d sometimes had the confusing urge to laugh when she saw Janine: while everyone else’s outfits seemed to tend toward the blandly timeless, Janine was purely, delightfully late eighties: today she was wearing enormous white earrings and a turquoise turtleneck under her long white coat. Sherry gave her a big hug. “I think I’ve done something pretty stupid, Janine,” she said into Janine’s shoulder. She smelled like fancy old-fashioned perfume.
Janine hugged her gently back. “What did you do?”
