Caroline was very careful not to name a single person or place, but Sherry had expected that. Sherry listened. Sherry asked questions.Do you ever sit on the beach to watch the sunset? I hate how dark it is here all winter. Is it any brighter there? Does it rain much? Have you had any trouble communicating with the locals?She also took very, very careful notes. The way that Caroline described the monkeys. How long it tookher to walk to the beach, and how long into town. The types of bars and restaurants she mentioned. The distance she had to travel to get to a store that sold the kinds of foods she missed from home. Sherry wrote it all down, as quickly and precisely as she could, until eventually Caroline stopped mid-sentence and said, “Oh, God, I’m going to be late! I’ll call you back soon, Sher. Love you!”
“I love you, too,” Sherry said to the dead air on the other end of the line. Caroline had hung up on her. Then she packed up her notebook and headed down to the library.
The computer room was open again, and constantly bustling now, full of people industriously scanning family photos or printing out boarding passes in preparation for their long-anticipated first trips to Italy or Cancún. It felt nice, somehow, to be able to walk past that now always-open door and go straight to the books. Travel guides, encyclopedias, atlases, and books on the tropical rain forests. It didn’t take long to start narrowing things down. Everything had already pointed to Costa Rica, and everything that Caroline had said only confirmed that assumption. She could watch a sunset from the beach, so the west coast, and the proximity to the beach and presence of certain types of monkeys eliminated any highland areas. The amount of rainfall eliminated one popular expat destination, and the relative sleepiness that Caroline described knocked out another.
From there, she moved to the internet, where she refined her search further. This was where things got grueling. She’d had to pay very close attention to the things that Caroline had said that were likely to be core facts and not lies. How long she rode her scooter to get to the shops. The general size of the neighborhood she went to when she wanted to chat with otherAmericans. The types of food served at her favorite restaurant, and the drinks at her favorite bar. Eventually she managed to narrow the possibilities down to a few likely options. Then, before she logged out of her computer to give a library patron a chance to use it, she looked up a phone number.
Detective Daniel Ortiz sounded tired when he answered the phone. Sherry resisted the urge to be too apologetic for disturbing him. “Detective Ortiz? This is Sherry Pinkwhistle. You probably don’t remember me, but you interviewed me six years ago about the Howard Hastings murder case. I was friends with his wife, Caroline.”
Detective Ortiz sounded instantly more alert. “I remember you, ma’am. How can I help you?”
“I just wanted to tell you,” she said, “that I’ve managed to speak to Caroline on the phone. I think she’s living in Costa Rica, probably somewhere along the Whale Coast. There’s one town in particular I think is the most likely option, but there are also a few other possibilities if she wasn’t being completely accurate about the place.”
“Wait, hold on a second,” Detective Ortiz said, and there was a brief pause. Sherry imagined him searching a cluttered desk for a pen. “Okay. Where?”
Sherry listed off the names, which she’d neatly written down in her notebook. Detective Ortiz thanked her. “If she calls again, let me know right away.”
“I will,” Sherry said, and said her goodbyes and hung up before sitting back in her chair. She wasn’t sure exactly how she felt. A little guilty, maybe. A little guilty, and vastly, enormously relieved. She hadn’t truly realized how heavy it all had been until it was gone, and now, suddenly, she was free. She’d gone back to that first murder case. She’d done her best toreally, truly help solve it. Now it was someone else’s problem to deal with. Maybe she was a bad friend. Maybe Caroline had never deserved such a good one.
She left the library and started heading home. The little rented house was still home, for now, but the walk was pleasant. Somehow, without her noticing, spring had truly arrived. There were tulips in people’s front yards. The sight of them made her think of something.
She called Janine first. “Would you like to go down to Albany with me?” she asked.
“Why?” Janine asked.
“I want to get takeout from a restaurant someone told me about and have a picnic in the park and look at the tulips before the crowds get there in a few weeks and the petals all fall off,” Sherry said. “Will you come?”
Janine agreed. So did Charlotte, who agreed to go before having even been told what the plan was, and so did Barry, who extracted a promise to also go to the food co-op so he could buy some very expensive-sounding ingredients for a very complicated-sounding recipe he’d been wanting to make.
The picnic all organized, Sherry retrieved the wad of cash that she’d gotten from Caroline and kept hidden away for all these years. She put it into an envelope, which she addressed to Alice’s mother, with a brief, anonymous note saying that the money was to be spent on Alice’s little girl’s education. Next, she went to the bank and withdrew the exact same amount from her own account, money that she’d saved up over the past few years of quietly working in Winesap and punishing herself for what she’d done wrong. It was hers, earned fairly: she had nothing left to feel guilty about. Or maybe she did. Allthose people who’d spent months in jail because of her investigations, all the people she could have saved by taking their deaths as seriously as sheshouldhave instead of as if it was all an elaborate game. It was strange, though: she couldn’t work herself up to the shame that used to come so easily to her. Maybe Sheriff Brown was right. Maybe it really was all over. Or maybe Barry was rubbing off on her, and she was just ready to forgive herself a little. She tucked the money into her purse. Then she called a cab.
A few hours later, she was driving off the lot of the local used car dealership in an ancient sea-green Cadillac. It was the sort of car that her ex-husband would have thought was an embarrassing thing for an old lady to drive around in. It was the sort of car that Sherry would have been embarrassed to buy. Not anymore. She was done with that now. She needed a car, and she liked this one, so now this one was hers.
Her friends’ reactions told her that she’d made the right decision. When she beeped the horn outside Charlotte’s apartment and Charlotte saw the car, she gave a gratifying little scream of delight, like a character in a movie. Barry patted the hood and beamed at it like it was a friendly dog. Even Janine, when she saw it, gave a big, startled smile and said, “How fun!” before she climbed into the passenger’s seat. Then they set off all together, the windows rolled down to let in the breeze and very modern pop music that Sherry was pleased to not recognize playing on the radio. She’d had more than enough of staying in Winesap and listening to only the timeless, inoffensive music that that demon had allowed to be played. She wanted to be lost, and baffled, and fully aware of being completely out of touch and behind the times. “Isthiswhat the kids are listening to now?” she asked aloud more than once when something particularly terrible started to play. She loved every second of it.
When she finally found a parking spot near the restaurant, Janine gave her a skeptical look. “Here?” It was, admittedly, not the most glamorous-looking stretch of street.
“Here,” Sherry said firmly, and got out, with Barry jumping out to tag along and help her gather up all the bags of containers from the friendly young man behind the counter. The restaurant was fairly spartan inside, with white walls and round tables topped with lazy Susans, but the smells wafting out of the bags made Sherry’s mouth start to water. She’d ordered what had felt like half the menu, or at least everything that she thought that they realistically might be able to eat on a blanket in the park: dumplings in chili oil, dandan noodles, cucumber with garlic sauce, spicy beef tongue and tripe salad: as many of the things that she could think of that Alan had told her about while thinking that she’d never tried anything like it before. He’d wanted her to experience something new and good. This could be that, in a way. She’d eaten Sichuan food before, but not from this restaurant, with these three friends, while looking at tulips in the park on a nice late April afternoon.
She drove them to the park, and they walked to a spot by a bank of frilly pink and orange tulips with a good view of the fountain behind them, with its imposing Moses striking water from the rock. They scooped food onto paper plates, and Sherry poured prosecco into enamel mugs she’d found in Alan’s camping supplies as everyone started to eat. There were exclamations over the food: there wasn’t anything like it closer to Winesap. Janine, who hated having to look for parking andrarely ventured into any of the local cities, asked, “How did you even find that place?”
“Alan told me about it,” Sherry said. “He’d been wanting to bring me there for a while, but he never had the chance.”
Everyone went quiet for a moment. Sherry passed around the camping mugs. “To Alan,” she said, holding up her mug of prosecco.
“To Alan,” her friends said back. They all clinked mugs. Janine was the first to speak up. “I know that I didn’t know him as well as you did, Sherry, but I remember back when Alan first moved to Winesap—”
They just talked about him for a while, then. About Alan, but also about Winesap, and all the strange, horrible, unreal things that had happened that they hadn’t been able to think about too deeply. Sherry laughed a lot, then got a little teary. She ate too many noodles and drank exactly the right amount of prosecco. Eventually, the conversation shifted to other things: the vacation to southern France Janine was planning, and the dinner party Father Barry had invited them all to. (There would, he promised Charlotte, be eligible bachelors present, though his brother wouldn’t be among them. The police hadn’t been able to directly tie Todd to the cocaine ring, but he’d been lying low at a friend’s goat farm in Vermont, anyway.) Charlotte waxed enthusiastic for a while about her plan for a new exhibit in the gallery featuring work made by inmates at the women’s prison not far from Winesap. Then, abruptly, she said, “Hey, Sherry? Remember my witch friend I told you about? The one who got in the car accident and helped me bless your necklace?”
“Of course,” Sherry said. “Poor thing, how is she?”
“She’s fine,” Charlotte said, taking a sip of her drink.“Insurance ended up paying for most of it. I had a really weird conversation with her the other day, though.”
“Weird how?” Sherry asked, immediately interested. Charlotte lived in Winesap. At this point, they all had a high threshold for weird.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Charlotte said.
“Not to us,” Barry said, just as Sherry said, “Really?” and Janine gave a skeptical “Hm!”
