Sherry stopped pacing then and turned to face her audience again. “From there, it’s simple. Alice skied down the hill to Alan’s house to talk to him. It would have taken a fraction of the time it would have taken her to walk: maybe only five minutes or so. He invited her in and made her tea, which is exactly the sort of thing that you would do for Alice if she showed up at your house seeming agitated late at night. She was probably pacing around the living room, trying to figure out what she should say to keep her job. He came in with the tea and said something that spooked her. Maybe something about how he was going to have to talk to the police soon. Alan was the protagonist of his story, as well. He was so wrapped up in thinking about Corey that it wouldn’t occur to him that she might think he was threateningher. Whatever he said or did, as he was leaning over with the tea, she grabbed a brass table lamp and hit him on the back of the head.”
Susan Thompson made a small, wounded sound. Sherry swallowed and pressed on. “She probably didn’t mean to kill him. She was probably shocked. She thought quickly, though. She grabbed the account books but left the picture full of cocaine on the wall: she would have had no idea that there was anything special about it. She couldn’t ski back up the hillagain, and carrying the skis back would have slowed her down and made her look suspicious if anyone saw her, so she put her skis with Alan’s so that they blended right in. Then she hurried back up the hill to her house, where she deliberately blew the power out so she’d have an excuse to come over to my house and establish an alibi.”
“I didn’t,” Alice said. Her voice was small and wavering, but she spoke up, anyway. “I didn’t do any of that. You just made it all up. Just because you saw some random skis, and you can’t find some papers from the shop. That’s not proof.”
“She’s right,” Sheriff Brown said. “If it happened like you said, then she’s had days to dump the evidence.”
“I’ve thought about that, yes,” Sherry said. “But there’s a problem. Where would Alice dispose of the evidence? The accounts from the shop could be burned at the kitchen stove, maybe, but then there’s the ski boots. She couldn’t exactly flush them down the toilet. Tossing them into the woods somewhere risks them getting found.”
“Just throw them away,” Sheriff Brown said. “They could be under a foot of trash in the landfill by now.”
“You’d think so,” Sherry said. “But this is Winesap. There aren’t sanitation workers who come to take the garbage away,” she added, for the benefit of the city people present. “You have to drive your trash to the landfill on your own. The problem for me and Alice is that neither of us has a car, so we have to get someone else to do it. I have a guy who I’d hired to take mine away once a week, and when Alice arrived, I just paid him extra to start picking hers up as well. Normally he’d actually have come to get our garbage right about now.”
“But now?” Sheriff Brown asked.
She allowed herself a small smile. “I called an hour ago tocancel the pickup. If Alice tried to throw those boots away, they should still be in a garbage bag sitting next to her mailbox.”
Alice gave a small, despairing groan and buried her face in her hands. “Sherry,” she said. “I thought that we were friends.”
Twenty-six
Somehow, the ordinary mechanisms of reality creaked, groaned, and began to move.
Sheriff Brown was the first to stand up and do something. He called out for his backup—the willing young man in question had apparently been waiting in the other room—and told him to go get Alice’s garbage from where it had been left by her mailbox. The young man asked whether or not he would need a warrant for that, to which the sheriff, not very politely, replied that if you needed a warrant to pick up garbage, they would have to have a judge riding shotgun in all of the great state of New York’s garbage trucks. Then he told Alice that he was bringing her in to the station for questioning. She didn’t fight, didn’t argue. There was a placidity to her. “I have a daughter,” she said, before she was led away. “She’s three. She’s staying with my mom now. If Alan had called the cops on me and I got arrested, there’s no way I could have gotten custody again.”
Sherry didn’t say anything in response. Instead, she watched, silent, as Sheriff Brown led Alice away. She had a plan. There was someone else for her to talk to. Poor, frightened little Alice. Poor everyone in Winesap. All of this had come to them along with Sherry’s arrival in Winesap. She had a chance, tonight, to put it right.
The others, exchanging nervous glances, filed out after her. There was an atmosphere of strained uncertainty in the room. Usually in books and television shows the scene ended after the most dramatic point of confrontation, so no one had to figure out how to gracefully leave a gathering after someone was accused of murder and then marched away in handcuffs. There was a lot of polite, embarrassed mumbling. Jason was the first to leave, his head held high. Eli and Mrs. Thompson flanked Corey as if they were either his jailers or his bodyguards. Sheriff Brown would be visiting him in his bed-and-breakfast soon, Sherry assumed. Not that she cared that much either way. Drugs could cause a murder, but she was only concerned with the murder part. Corey was no longer her problem to solve. Todd left as well, after a brief, tense exchange with his twin. This whole evening, she thought, had managed to profoundly strain more than one family.
She herself didn’t move. She felt lessworn-outby her performance thanenervated, as if it was beyond her to do so much as get up out of the chair she’d dropped into once the sheriff led Alice out. She just watched, still and quiet, as the room emptied out until only her friends were left. Father Barry, Charlotte, and Janine all hovered nearby, watching her as if they expected something else to happen.
She had to rally herself to speak. “You should all go home,” she said. “It must be getting late.”
Janine was frowning. “Only if you come home with me,” she said. “The spare room has clean sheets on the bed.”
“That’s a great idea,” Charlotte said immediately. “You look kind of…gray.”
“Thanks,” Sherry said automatically. “I’m fine. I just—need a minute. Could you all give me a minute? Please?” She wasconscious of begging a little. “I just want a minute alone to…think.” They wouldn’t stoplookingat her. She just needed them to leave her alone. She had a date.
Now they were all frowning. Janine was the first to step in again, in her brisk, no-nonsense way. “Right,” she said. “I’m going to run to the diner to get you a hot chocolate and a grilled cheese sandwich. I’ll bring it back here, you can eat it, and then you can come home with me. Father Barry, Charlotte, maybe the two of you could wait in the other room until I get back, in case Sherry needs something? No, Sherry, don’t argue, I’m sure they’ll be happy to wait for twenty minutes.”
“We will be,” Barry said immediately. “I think we might be able to find something to read if we need to pass the time.”
Sherry made a small snorting noise by way of acknowledging that he had made a joke, then subsided back into just sitting there and staring dully into the air just past her face.Leave, she thought. She dimly noticed her friends exchanging worried glances. Then they retreated, and she was, finally, alone.
“You owe me an explanation,” she said to the air. “A deal’s a deal.”
A portion of the air at the corner of the room began to thicken into something else. Like water or fog. She watched it, feeling her muscles tighten.Run, she thought. She didn’t run. Instead, she waited, until the strange figure in the room with her finished taking shape. A tall woman with thick dark hair down to her waist. A loose green dress. Bare feet. A wide, lovely smile.
“Caroline?” she found herself saying, even though of course it wasn’t. Caroline was much older now, and had never really been this beautiful. This was Caroline as she’d always existedin Sherry’s imagination. Her lovely, charming, bewitching liar of a best friend.
“Of course,” the spirit said. Her voice wasn’t quite Caroline’s, either. The face of the creature looked young, but the voice sounded old. Not old like Sherry was. Old like an abandoned well. “Isn’t it always Caroline with you, Sherry?”
Throughout her entire ridiculous Poirot performance, Sherry had somehow managed to never take off her coat. She was glad she was wearing it now. It was cold. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” she said. Then she said, “Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not who,” the demon said. “I am, only, and have been, and will be, and all I want is a little amusement.”
“What?” Sherry said. She felt like she must be very slow.
