“Oh, good,” Sherry said, and gestured for the waiter to order her dessert.
“The paintings?” Alan prompted her once the waiter had left.
“The paintings?” Sherry repeated. “Oh, sorry. It’s nothing too earth-shattering, really. Just me speculating. They could have all been nothing but ugly pictures of sailboats. I just wonder whether the killer might have been worried about leaving their own face at the scene of the crime.”
Four
The next morning was Sunday, generally a day that Sherry would spend contentedly eating toast, drinking tea, and reading bad detective novels one after the other as if she was working her way through a bag of potato chips. This Sunday, though, Sherry had a mission. She was an extremely lapsed Catholic whose very occasional ventures to church reflected her appreciation for organ music and Mrs. McGeary’s excellent homemade doughnuts far more than they did any particular spiritual concerns, but this Sunday was special. Their little church had just gotten a new priest, which was the sort of incredible social upheaval that arrived in Winesap with about the frequency of a townsperson announcing that they’d been the victim of an unwelcome anal probing on board a flying saucer (this had happened exactly once, three years earlier, and had created a local maelstrom of prurient delight that was rivaled only by the more recent discovery of some scratches on a tree in the woods that might, if you squinted at them the right way, look like mysterious runes carved by the members of a dangerous sex cult). Sherry, as a snoop and gossipmonger of above-amateur ability, could do nothing in the face of such excitement but put on her nicest slacks and sweater, add her most enormous rubber-soled winter boots in honor of theslush, envelop the entire ensemble in a parka that hit her ankles, and head straight to mass.
Sacred Heart was a nice-looking old white clapboard church just off Main Street that always smelled pleasantly like incense and lemon-scented floor wax. Tourists liked to take pictures of it. It was also extremely drafty, so Sherry kept her coat and gloves on when she settled into a pew near the back and prepared to shiver her way through the service. Then the choir struck up and the altar boys started processing in, and Sherry got a good look at the new priest and forgot to fret about her rapidly numbing fingertips.
The first thing she noticed about Father Barry—that was, absurdly, how he introduced himself at the beginning of his homily—was how truly, remarkablyyounghe was. He looked like a college student, and not like the sort of scraggle-bearded freshman boy she’d seen desultorily hacky-sacking his way around town on a recent trip to Ithaca. Father Barry looked more like Harvard’s star quarterback as depicted in a Hollywood movie filmed circa 1964. There was a wonderful Eagle Scout earnestness beaming out of his blond, pink-cheeked, square-jawed face. It made Sherry instantly suspicious. It waspossiblethat he really was an improbably handsome, wholesome, and good-hearted young priest. It was also possible that he had, in the week or so since he’d arrived in Winesap, already convinced an elderly parishioner to add him to her will before smothering her in her bed and burying her behind the rectory. In Sherry’s experience, the second option was vastly more likely.
Despite her misgivings, Sherry didn’t hesitate to line up with the rest of the old biddies to meet handsome young Father Barry after mass was over. This made it somewhatfrustrating when Father Barry seemed to be avoiding meeting her. The young man had an incredible ability to see people who absolutely needed to be spoken to at the other end of the vestibule the instant that Sherry got within cassock-grasping range. Eventually enough parishioners had finished their doughnuts and left that Sherry was beginning to feel self-conscious about the length of time she’d spent lingering near the coffee urn. She was pondering whether it might be better to come back to chase the priest some more next Sunday, when there was a polite little “Ahem!” from just behind her.
She turned. Father Barry was standing next to a picked-over plate of Danishes and looking bashful. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you Mrs. Pinkwhistle?”
“Miss,” she said automatically. She always felt the need to disabuse people of the notion that there might be a Mr. Pinkwhistle hanging around as early as possible, to avoid awkward questions later on. Somehow her being a divorcée always took people off guard: she apparently didn’t look the part. It occurred to her somewhat belatedly that young Father Barry was probably more interested in confirming her identity and not her marital status. “Oh, yes. Sherry Pinkwhistle.”
He leaned in slightly. “The one who investigates the murders?”
“Yes,” Sherry said, and tried not to beam too obviously in expectant anticipation of his questions. Her love of answering questions about her investigations was one of her greatest weaknesses.
Father Barry didn’t ask her any questions, though. Instead, he folded her right hand in both of his and looked her straight in the eye. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “It’s wonderful that you’ve been able to help solve the crimes, but I can’t imagine howdifficult it’s been for you to have to be witness to so much terrible violence.” His provokingly unlined young forehead was creased with concern. “Especially in such a small town. I’m amazed by how well everyone seems to be holding up in spite of everything. My door is always open, though, if you ever need a sympathetic ear.”
“I’m lapsed,” Sherry said automatically. She felt strange. Uncomfortable.So much terrible violence. Such a small town.Itwas, wasn’t it? It was strange. It washorrible. So many deaths. How many murders had they had this year already? Five? More? She couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t she—
The thought was gone. She’d been thinking something important, but now it was gone. That had been happening more often lately. She needed to hold on to that thought. There was something important that she needed to hold in her head. She needed to—
Father Barry was staring at her. He looked worried, but his expression was gentle. “I’ll listen to anyone,” he said. “There’s no quiz on the date of your last confession ahead of time. And the coffee is free.”
“That’s how they get you,” she said. “With the free coffee.”
“Not how we keep them, though,” he said. “The coffee isterrible.” Then he gave her a smile that showed off a set of very winsome dimples and gave her hand one last squeeze before he released her. “I’m very glad that you decided to come to mass today, Sherry.”
Sherry mumbled something indistinct in response to that. She didn’t want to make any promises. Part of her wanted to run. “I’m always easy to find at the library,” she said, for lack of anything better to say, her eyes firmly averted from thesuspiciouslywinsome dimples. Then she made some noises tothe effect of,Goodbye, Father Barry, please don’t feel the need to show me out, I know where the door is, and made her escape.
She’d planned on going right home after mass. Now she didn’t feel ready for it. There was a strange hum in her body, a steady thrum of energy. Something peculiar in the back of her head. She had forgotten something. What had she forgotten? There was something that she needed to remember.
Instead of heading back up the hill toward home, she walked farther down Main Street and turned left toward the library. There was a cleaner who came twice a week to mop the floors and keep the dust at bay, but there was always more organizing and polishing to be done, and having work to do relaxed her. She’d never been very good at theornamentalaspects of womanhood, but she excelled at the bits where you were supposed to remember to dust the baseboards and wipe down the inside of the microwave with a wet sponge. She was the only one at the library who remembered to clean the cobwebs around the door to the room they never used. It sometimes seemed as if the staff and volunteers avoided that part of the library completely.
She started out at her desk and carefully sorted through all the old mail and other things that she’d very sternly told herself she would deal with after lunch before shoving them into a drawer and leaving them there for two months. By the time she’d finished with her sorting she felt significantly calmer and had a thick stack of documents to bring to the paper shredder. It felt like a bit of an affront to her new sense of equanimity when the shredder jammed and she had to shut the whole thing off and open it up to see what the problem was.
She’d expected just a clump of paper that had gotten twisted around in the machine somehow. Instead, what shefound was what looked like part of the binding of a book. She had a momentary, hot flare of fury at the thought that one of the newer volunteers had, for some reason, pushed one of the library books into the shredder. Then she looked closer and realized that it was something much more interesting. It was the binding of asketchbook, and Sherry was very confident that none of the library staff who spent time near her desk had any interest in drawing. She remembered then that the library had been broken into at just around the time John had been killed.
There was, obviously, nothing left to do at this point but to dig through the shreds and see what she would find.
It was difficult for Sherry not to feel very authentically detective-y as she set to her task. She imagined that she ought to be drinking an enormous amount of black coffee, possibly while speaking Swedish. This sense of well-being was somewhat deflated by the realization that, unlike the protagonist of a gritty Scandinavian crime novel, she didn’t have any ambitious—butveryattractive—rookie female officers she could force to help her dig through garbage for several hours, and she also couldn’t carry the evidence home with her to sort through as she drank whiskey in a melancholic fashion and thought about the estranged daughter she didn’t have. She would have to look through everything as quickly and tidily as possible, so she wouldn’t end up spending her entire evening on the library floor.
The tidying in Sweden, she thought resentfully, was probablyalsothe responsibility of the devastatingly attractive rookie female officers.
The task was more than a little frustrating. As it turned out, if you attempted to reassemble a sketchbook full of pencildrawings that had just been run through a paper shredder, you very quickly ran up against the limits of your own artistic sensibilities. Sherry couldn’t tell her asses from her elbows. What she was sure of, however, was that there were asses and elbows among the shreds, once she eliminated a few sailboats and city streets. Vaguely human forms were beginning to take shape. She assembled and reassembled. She accidentally gave a young lady the prow of a stout sailing vessel. In the end, though, she had two drawings that looked close to being fully assembled. They were both of the same person, she thought. A young woman, fully nude, sitting on an uncomfortable-looking wooden stool.
They looked to Sherry as if they’d been done in a life drawing session.
Sherry peered more closely at the pieced-together drawings, trying to get a sense of what sort of woman was depicted in them. Young, certainly. Caucasian, and probably very fair; possibly redheaded. On her cheeks were drawn what might have been pimples but what Sherry suspected were supposed to be freckles. Her equally befreckled shoulders were narrow and sloping, and her downturned eyes suggested that she was either lost in thought or avoiding the artist’s gaze. The latter, Sherry thought. The girl—more a girl than a woman, certainly—didn’t look remotely as if she was experiencing being nude in front of an audience as an empowering expression of her blossoming young sexuality. She mostly looked embarrassed, and possibly cold. Beautiful, but young enough and unsure enough of herself to enjoy hearing about how gorgeous and fascinating and unlike other women she was from a sophisticated older man, and naïve enough to believe that he meant what he said.
She looked, in other words, absolutely nothing like Charlotte, and in Sherry’s experience there was nothing that a certain particularly nasty type of man liked to do more than to sleep with women who were both much younger than and completely unlike their wives.
