“You could try the arts center?” the harried woman suggested. “The one in Troy? I’m sorry, I have no idea what her number is. You could always just show up here on Wednesday night and see if you can catch her.”
“Thank you,” Sherry said, and hung up, at which point she was forced to actually deal with the needs of the reading public. It really was annoying, she thought, when the job for which she’d been formally trained and which she was paid to perform by the local government got in the way of her unpaid amateur homicide detection. It was incredible that Jessica Fletcher ever managed to find the discipline to write novels when there was so much fascinating investigation to be done instead. Particularly in Cabot Cove, where people seemed to be murdered on a horrifically regular basis. Much like Winesap, really. It was strange. Hadn’t someone said something like that recently? It was both horrible and bizarre that people in Winesap were—
A patron was trying to get her attention: he was looking for a book that they didn’t have in Winesap. No problem: it should be available in Albany. Sherry made a call. Once she was done with that, she took a quick break to make coffee and chat with Mary, her volunteer for the afternoon. Mary was an energetic octogenarian, a former English teacher and general book enthusiast with an encyclopedic knowledge of popular gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They chatted a bit about what they’d been up to lately. When Sherry mentioned that she’d met the new young priest, Mary’s pale blue eyes narrowed slightly. “Oh,” she said.
“You don’t approve?” Sherry asked, prepared to be scandalized. Mary always knew everything about everyone in town: she was one of those elderly ladies who’d formed a network with her peers via various book clubs and churches and volunteer organizations that put her exactly one or two degrees of separation from everyone in Winesap.
“I don’t know,” Mary said slowly. “I just heard a funny story about him the other day. Do you know Pearl Walker?”
“I knowofher,” Sherry said. Mrs. Walker was an extremely rich widow who lived in a big old house on the outskirts of the village in a lavish, vaguely gothic fashion that she thought probably suited Mary’s sensibilities. Sherry had been told that Mrs. Walker had once been known for her extravagant parties, but in the past few years she’d mostly taken to her bed and granted only occasional audiences to her most esteemed friends and acquaintances. Her needs were met mainly via the efforts of an assistant named Karen, an inexhaustibly hardworking and cheerful type who wore slip-resistant clogs with flowers printed all over them and talked about her wealthy charge with an air of affectionate exasperation. “I’ve chatted with Karen. What about her?”
“Just something that Karen said the other day,” Mary said. “The priest has been coming by to visit Mrs. Walker sometimes, since she doesn’t like to go to church. Karen said that the first few times he showed up she thought he seemed very sweet and considerate, but on this most recent visit she overheard him asking Mrs. Walker strange questions about her finances, and the second Karen walked into the room he immediately changed the subject.”
“That does sound suspicious,” Sherry said, struck again by her little flight of fancy about the priest bilking little old ladiesout of their life savings before he murdered them. “Keep me updated if you hear anything else about it? It’s like something out of a domestic thriller.”
“Iknow,” Mary said appreciatively, just as a large group of mothers with small children walked into the library and began to demand all their attention.
The next few hours were nothing but work, until finally Sherry had more time to make phone calls. She looked up the number for the arts center in Troy, called them, and lied. She was the librarian in Winesap (true), she was hoping to bring more arts programming to the library (somewhat true), and she’d been considering organizing some life drawing sessions (a vile and wicked falsehood) and heard good things about the model used at the café sessions from a young lady who had attended one of them (another sinful lie).
The woman at the arts center was happy to help. Yes, they held occasional life drawing sessions and were familiar with the sessions held at the café, though they hadn’t actually been organized by the arts center. Yes, she did have the contact information for a model who she knew had worked at several of the café sessions, and she would be happy to share it: Ruth had mentioned to her that she was hoping to find more jobs to do. She was a sweet girl, very prompt and reliable, and the students found her interesting to draw—when they worked in pastels they had to struggle to get the shade of her beautiful red hair just right. It was so nice that Sherry was trying to organize life drawing up in Winesap. Sherry guiltily acknowledged the praise—she consoled herself with the thought that shemightreally organize some drawing classes at the library, one day—and then hung up.
Next she called the number that the arts center woman hadgiven her. No one picked up, but the answering-machine message belonged to an authoritative-sounding woman. “You’ve reached the Cohen residence. Please leave a message for David, Rachel, or Ruth after the tone.”
It was strange, Sherry thought. Not that this young woman apparently still lived with her parents. Something else. Something about the phone number, and the answering machine. There was no time to think about it any longer. There was the beep. Sherry put on her sweetest, fluffiest, most pocket-full-of-caramels-and-meeting-my-bingo-friends-at-the-diner-at-five-for-supper voice to leave a message. “Hello, Ruth. This is Sherry Pinkwhistle, the librarian up in Winesap. I’ve been trying to organize some life drawing classes for beginners here at the library, and I was wondering if you might be interested in modeling for us. They havewonderfulthings to say about you in the arts center in Troy. Call me back whenever you have the chance!” Then she left both her work and home numbers, followed by an extended, rambling dither about when she was at work and when she could be found at home, andoh, so sorry, there was an event at the library on Wednesday, so shewouldbe here a bit later that night, until the machine cut her off with a curt beep and she hung up. Perfect. No one would ever suspect a nice old lady who left such amusingly flustered grandmotherly messages of being a homicide detective, amateur or otherwise.
Ruth didn’t call back immediately. She didn’t call back at all, for the whole rest of that afternoon and until the next evening. Sherry was already in her bathrobe drinking a cup of chamomile tea with Lord Thomas Cromwell in her lap when her phone rang. She got up to answer it, to Lord Thomas’s enormous indignation. The voice on the other end of the linewas very high, almost childlike. “Hello? Is this Mrs. Pinkwhistle?”
“Miss,” Sherry said. “Yes, this is Sherry Pinkwhistle. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said. “This is Ruth Cohen. The model? You left a message?”
“I did!” Sherry said. “It’s so lovely to hear from you. I know it’s very old-fashioned of me, but would you like to come up to the library for an interview? I always like to meet people in person before we decide whether or not we’d like to work together.”
Ruth agreed to this, after a momentary hesitation, and they arranged a time: Ruth would come up that Friday at six, after the library was usually closed for the evening. Then they said their goodbyes and hung up. Sherry smiled and leaned down to pet Lord Thomas, who was standing on her slippers. She was pleased with herself. Winesap was a tiny place, and not a place that most people ever bothered to visit. Ruth hadn’t mentioned being familiar with it. It wouldn’t be an answer, exactly, but Sherry thought that it would be a fairly significant clue if Ruth arrived on Friday having never bothered to ask Sherry for directions to the library.
•••
Ruth never did call back for those directions. Sherry didn’t make any calls, either. There had been times in the past when she’d called Sheriff Brown in advance of meeting a suspect, just in case she was worried that things might get dangerous. She wasn’t worried about that this time. The skinny little freckled girl in those drawings didn’t look like she would pose much of a physical threat to anyone, even a slightly pudgysenior citizen who got most of her exercise from reading while walking. She also, if she was honest with herself, wasn’t completely sure that Ruth was her suspect. Charlotte was really the more obvious and rational choice. All Sherry had to say otherwise was her gut, and Sherry’s gut was as convinced that Charlotte hadn’t killed her husband as it was, sadly, opposed to dairy products. She fidgeted her way through the day, jerking her head up every time someone came through the door as if she expected Ruth to somehow arrive five hours early. Then, finally, it was time for the library to close, and Ruth walked through the door exactly on time.
Ruth, at first glance, looked very much like she had in John’s pictures. She was young—maybe about twenty—and thin and redheaded, though the effect was more attractive in person than it had been in the rather unflattering drawings. She was very tall, like a fashion model, with a long swan neck emerging from the collar of her coat, and came scurrying into the room as if she felt self-conscious about being noticed. The sort of beautiful but naïve young girl that a man like John would enjoy having hanging off his every word. A fawn, a sylph, a long-legged forest nymph of a girl. All in all, an unlikely murderer. Sherry’s mind was already skipping ahead to alternative suspects—Ruth’s jealous boyfriend, perhaps, or an overprotective parent? That authoritative-sounding mother Sherry had heard over the phone?—when Ruth finally looked up and met Sherry’s eyes. She held Sherry’s gaze for a long, cool, appraising moment. Then she looked away, then back, and gave a meek little smile, clasping her hands in front of her like a child abut to recite a poem at a school assembly. “Miss Pinkwhistle?”
Sherry thought that she might have underestimated young Miss Cohen. Perhaps John had, too.
“It’s so lovely to see you, Ruth!” Sherry said. She’d worn a big fluffy pink sweater today, and an equally fluffy white shawl. She thought that she looked like an extremely nonthreatening strawberry cupcake. “I have tea and cookies for us in the event room. Usually I don’t allow any food or drinks in the library, but I decided to make an exception.” This earned a polite laugh from Ruth, who seemed perfectly at her ease. Good.
The event room was one of Sherry’s favorite parts of the library. The library had, at one point, been a family home, and the meeting room had been first a summer kitchen and then a sunroom before the library had gotten hold of it. The many windows and poor insulation made it less than ideal for storing books, but perfectly serviceable for holding local candidate meet-and-greets and chamber music evenings and Sunday afternoon knitting circles, or whatever else it might be rented out for. Sherry loved all the light in it, and the view of the little community garden out back and the bird feeders that one of her elderly volunteers had set up a few years ago and still dutifully kept filled. The only real drawback was that insulation problem, which made it uncomfortably hot on summer days and frigid on winter evenings. Sherry was wearing several other layers under her pink sweater. Keeping the ambient temperature too low for the comfort of the unprepared was a useful trick both for ensuring that groups of chatty knitters didn’t stay at the library for longer than the time that they’d bookedandfor softening up the suspect you were grilling in your freezing-cold interrogation room. Sherry had learned that from a true-crime television show.
Sherry made chitchat with Ruth while she brewed the tea. She asked her about the drive, which she was delighted to learn had beenfine. Then she asked whether or not Ruth had ever visited Winesap before, in response to which she received a firmno. Satisfied, Sherry got down to business.
“Ruth,” she said, after they were settled in with their tea and cookies and it would be more difficult for Ruth to easily extricate herself from the situation. “I’m afraid that I have some difficult news. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, and I think they’ve been keeping it out of the papers for now.” Odd, now that Sherry thought of it. Odd that there had been journalists swarming the scenes at past murders in Winesap, but not at this one, despite the fact that John was a fairly prominent local citizen. Convenient, though, for Sherry’s purposes, when media attention to the crime might have made Ruth warier of a stranger calling her up and asking her to come to Winesap. It was strange, how often convenient coincidences so often seemed to help Sherry—
“What is it?” Ruth asked.
“I’m sorry,” Sherry said. “Have you heard about John?”
Ruth’s smile froze on her face. “What about him?”
Sherry bit back a triumphant,Ha!“John Jacobs, I mean,” she said. “The man who ran your life drawing sessions in Albany.”
