Chapter Eleven

Eleven

"A personal call?" Sherry repeated, and sat up a bit straighter. "Did he say who from?"

Alice grimaced slightly. "The cops kept asking that, too. But like, it really wasn't a big deal, I don't think. I mean, I barely even noticed it when it happened; it wasn't some big dramatic thing. He talked for maybe five minutes, and then he came back out of the office and talked to a customer about an old French lamp. He didn't act weird or upset or anything. Just normal ."

"And he didn't mention who he'd been talking to?"

"No, and she didn't say who she was when I picked up, either," Alice said.

Sherry blinked. "You were the one who picked up the phone?"

Alice did something that looked like an eye roll that hadn't quite made it out of its larval stage before she squashed it. "Yeah, that's how I knew that it was a personal call. She called the shop and asked for Alan, then said it was personal when I asked if I could help her instead. I told him that he had a call and he said he'd pick up in the office. That's it. Nothing else happened."

"I see," Sherry said. "Did you notice anything unusual about her voice?" As soon as she said it, she felt ridiculous. Like what ? A thick Russian accent?

Alice's expression suggested that she found the question just about as ridiculous as Sherry did. "Like what?"

Sherry was blushing. She improvised. "Like—did she sound worried? Annoyed? Did she sound young or old?"

"Oh," Alice said. "No. I mean, she didn't sound upset. She just sounded normal. Not like a kid. Maybe middle-aged? I dunno. She didn't have, like, that old-lady voice?"

Sherry decided against asking whether or not she had that old-lady voice. She didn't think she did. She wondered whether most women noticed when they started developing it, or if they sounded to themselves exactly like they always had. She decided to drop the subject of the phone call for now. She had an idea of who it might be, anyway. Call Susan. She cleared her throat. "What happened next?"

"Nothing," Alice said. "Alan sold that lamp. A few more customers came in."

"Anyone who stood out?"

"No. Mostly browsers. That's most people who come in, usually. One guy spent a lot of money, but we know him. He owns a shop in New York City and comes up every couple of months to look for stuff he can resell. I already told the cops about him."

"I'm sorry to make you repeat yourself," Sherry said, though she wasn't all that sorry. "Do you have his name? Phone number?"

"His name's Mike Kaminski," Alice said. "I don't have his number, but he always leaves his business cards in the shop. I could get you one if you want. I don't think he did anything, though. He's just a normal guy. Sometimes we get resellers who want to rip Alan off, but Mike isn't like that. The worst thing he's ever done is get kind of annoyed that Alan took one of the pictures in this set of framed prints he wanted to buy, but that was pretty normal. Rich people and collectors like to buy complete sets of things. He was nice to me about it, though."

"I'd like to get his number, anyway, if you don't mind," Sherry said, and took note of the man's name, with remind Alice need number . Alan's ex-wife, his only employee, a rival antiques dealer. So far her list of suspects wasn't particularly impressive. No one stood out as having a strong motive. Still, she had to follow up on every possible lead. "What happened after he left?"

"Nothing," Alice said. " Really nothing. We closed for an hour for lunch. I ate a sandwich in the back and Alan went out. To the diner, I think. Then it got slow, so Alan said I could go home early and he would close up on his own. So I went home and watched TV, and then you came and gave me that food, and a while after that my power went out. That's it." She swallowed audibly. "Sherry, my rent's due in a week."

Sherry made a note to ask at the diner whether or not anyone remembered if Alan had come in for lunch on that day, and, if he had, whether he'd eaten alone. Then she took a beat to consider what Alice had told her. She'd noticed that Alice hadn't mentioned that Alan had had to talk to her about her performance at work that day. Not that Sherry would have mentioned it, either: it didn't seem like the sort of thing that any normal person would bring up when their employer suddenly turned up dead, and from how Alan had phrased it, it might have been a minor enough conversation that it could have slipped Alice's mind after all the chaos.

"Did Alan owe you a paycheck?" she asked, switching over from investigating detective to helpful-friend mode. She'd always liked being the friend that people came to when they were in trouble. It had led to what might have been the biggest mistake of her life. She stomped down that thought. That was back then, and in an extremely unusual circumstance; this was now, and nothing but helping out a young lady in dire financial straits.

"Yeah," Alice said. "I mean—normally I get paid every other Monday, because he did the paperwork on Sunday afternoons. So that's two weeks of work."

Sherry grimaced in sympathy. "I'll see what I can do," she said. "You might want to speak to his lawyer." She wrote down the name and number for her. "There has to be some sort of procedure for when this sort of thing happens. And I can always lend you the money for your rent." She drank some more terrible coffee as a bid to avoid eye contact and immediately regretted it. Hazelnut.

"You don't have to do that, Sherry," Alice said. That meant that she definitely wanted Sherry to do it.

"It's fine," Sherry said firmly. "I have the money. How much are you short? I'll write a check."

Alice was blushing, a blotchy flush that stretched down her neck. Sherry immediately felt bad for her. It must be frustrating to have a body that included a built-in billboard for displaying your emotions.

"Five hundred?" Alice asked, in practically a whisper.

"That's fine," Sherry said, very briskly. She didn't want any pity to leak out into her voice. "I'll bring it by tomorrow. And I'll ask around town about a job for you." She braced herself, took a big swallow of the awful coffee, and set the mug down. "Thank you for the coffee."

Alice's eyes had gone shiny. "Thank you," she said. "You really don't need to."

"I'm going to, anyway," Sherry said, slightly too loudly. It probably wasn't the right thing to say. She hated this kind of conversation. She stood up in order to escape it more quickly. "I'll see you tomorrow," she added, and then picked up her bag and bolted toward the door. On the way down the driveway she noticed those bushes again, their red berries gleaming against the dark green. Somewhere in the back of her mind there was a very soft hum.

Sherry's little house felt even quieter than it usually did when she got home. She put the radio on immediately, then stood in the middle of her living room for a moment. Her heart was still beating fast. From the shock of that horrible photo in Alan's house, she thought, until it occurred to her that she'd been drinking coffee all morning and only eaten part of a chocolate doughnut. Now it was almost lunchtime, and she wasn't hungry, just nervous and miserable. "This is stupid," she said aloud, and marched herself to the kitchen, where she set out to assemble a tuna salad sandwich.

The sound of the can opener, as always, summoned Lord Thomas, who came trotting up on his cotton-ball feet and gave a decorous little "Prrrow?"

Sherry smiled at him instinctively, then remembered that he wasn't to be trusted and frowned. "Are you really my cat," she asked aloud, "or are you an evil spirit or the ghost of an extremely unpleasant historical figure? Because I'm only going to give you the can to lick if you're my cat."

" Mow! " said Lord Thomas, in a way that she interpreted to mean Stop being difficult and give me the tuna, woman! She eyed him for a moment. "The problem with you is that it's hard to tell if you're a rude person or an ordinary cat," she said. Then she gave up and gave him the empty tuna can. The two of them spent a pleasant minute or so together, her assembling her sandwich—the secret was dried dill and celery salt—and him licking out the can so vigorously that he bumped it with his little nose all the way to the other side of the room. Then he sat down to polish his whiskers while she sat down to enjoy her lunch. This peaceful interlude lasted until Lord Thomas hopped up onto the chair next to Sherry's and said, loudly, "And how are those investigations going, woman?"

" Ngah! " said Sherry, who had been lulled into a false sense of security by his extremely un-demonic tuna-can licking. She pressed a hand to her chest in a way that she was conscious of being a bit dramatic even as she was doing it. "You startled me!"

"I do apologize," Lord Thomas said, unconvincingly. "And what of the investigation?"

She glowered at him. "After I've finished my lunch," she told him, and made an extremely elaborate and protracted meal out of her final bites of whole wheat crust. After the last few crumbs were gone, she risked a glance at Lord Thomas. He was staring at her. She sighed. "I have a short list of suspects. None of them are all that impressive, but more interesting stuff usually comes up after I've been digging for a while. And now that I've given you that, you owe me some information, too, don't you? Isn't that how the deal is supposed to work?"

"Indeed," said the cat, and stretched one of his front legs forward and pointed his nose toward the ground as if he was maybe planning on grooming his belly. It took her a moment to realize that he was trying to bow. "I am at your service, Mistress Pinkwhistle."

Sherry found herself momentarily at a loss. "I don't know what to ask. How is this supposed to work, exactly?"

"How would you expect it to work," the cat asked her, "in a tale of this nature?"

"In a tale of this nature," Sherry repeated. "I don't know. Maybe for you to give me a magic sword or something."

"I am Lord Thomas Cromwell, not Lord Merlin," said the cat, a little more testily than Sherry thought was completely reasonable, considering that he'd asked . "This is my counsel: Attend to what particularly strikes you as you go about. Attend to the resonances of things. In the deepest human heart there is a memory of ancient enemies, and a knowledge of how to defeat them."

Sherry watched him expectantly, waiting for more. No more came. That was, apparently, it. "That's it? Just attend to the resonances of things ? I've been working hard on investigating, and all you have for me is resonances ?"

The cat drew himself up, which—even though he was a tubby fifteen pounds—wasn't nearly as impressive as Sherry suspected he wanted it to be. "I have advised you in matters ancient and sacred, woman! Take care not to dismiss me so easily."

"Oh, excuse me , Your Highness," Sherry said. "I just thought that maybe with all of your drama about making a deal, you might be a little better at holding up your end of it."

" My lord will do," said Lord Thomas. "Or sir . And there's no need for you to pretend that performing your investigations is such a great trial. Don't act as if you aren't enjoying yourself, woman. This is what you like to do, isn't it? Meddle in the doings of the dead?"

Something about the way he said it made Sherry regret having finished her whole sandwich. She pushed the empty plate away. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know exactly what I mean," he said. "She doesn't force you to take such an interest in her murders. Her powers are the stuff of unquenchable lusts and blinding rages, not the cold-blooded gathering of clues. She can influence the killer, not the detective. You must enjoy snooping around in the blood and guts, for her to have chosen you. You must feel as if you have a talent for it, and look forward to the opportunity to practice your art. Thinking about corpses gives you a little thrill, does it?" The cat's eyes, normally green, were glowing a dull red.

" No ," she said. "And that looks stupid."

"I beg your pardon?" Lord Thomas said, in a tone of genuine uncertainty that made Sherry feel as if she'd regained a bit more of an even footing with him.

"Your eyes," Sherry said with authority. "You might be able to get away with it if you were a black cat, but as it is, the red clashes with your fur. It just looks silly, on a marmalade cat."

"Oh," Lord Thomas said, and his eyes promptly started to glow green. "Is that better?"

"Yes, much better," Sherry said. "You look very nice. And stop accusing me of being a pervert. You know perfectly well that that's ridiculous."

"Indeed!" Lord Thomas said, triumphantly this time. "You do like it, though, don't you? You like feeling very clever and important, and saving the day when no one else can. What a hypocrite you are, Sherry Pinkwhistle!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Sherry said. She was reaching for her purse.

"Oh, yes, you do," the cat said. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, woman? All of that meddling in other people's secrets when you won't confront what you've done, when your secrets remain buried, when you arrrllghh !"

Sherry smiled at him smugly over the barrel of her plant spritzer. She'd gotten him right in the face with the holy water, and he'd leapt straight up into the air and landed on all four paws on the kitchen floor, all his orange fluff standing on end. "When I what , Lord Thomas?"

Lord Thomas hissed at her and ran off to hide under the living room sofa.

"That's what I thought!" Sherry called after him. Then she got up to wash the dishes.

She spent the rest of the day doing lots of things that were, essentially, wasting time, while still preserving a tiny scrap of pretense that she was working hard on the investigation. Mostly she just read some more from her stockpile of books on the occult. Some of them seemed like thinly veiled excuses for the authors to breathlessly report on the scandalous personal lives of nineteenth-century spiritualists. One of them, at least, Sherry thought might actually come in handy: it contained a lengthy section on the sorts of objects and symbols that various pagans and occultists found generally important and powerful while going about their…occulting. She was reading along contentedly enough when a passage suddenly struck her . In matters pertaining to death, there is no plant with stronger and older magic than the yew.

The matters Sherry had been dealing with recently certainly pertained to death. Yew. Maybe that could be helpful. More helpful, perhaps, if she knew what on earth a yew tree looked like, or how to find one. She didn't know very much about trees—she liked to garden, but she mostly stuck to things she could eat, and wildflowers. She made a mental note to look up yew in the encyclopedia the next time she was in the library.

She jolted awake the next morning before her alarm went off and spent a few moments frozen in place, terrified of something that hadn't happened yet. What would it be this time? More men screaming outside her door or shouting at her through her cat's mouth? Something horrible transforming her mother's face in the photo on her bedside table? Then she got ahold of herself, got out of bed, and answered the phone. The ringing had woken her up.

"Good morning, Sherry," said Father Barry. He sounded repulsively chipper. "I just ran into the coroner when I was out on my run. He'd like to meet you at the diner in an hour, if you have time."

Sherry blinked, then looked at the clock on her bedside table. "Father," she said after a moment. "It's five in the morning . You ran into the coroner at five in the morning ? It's still dark outside. Does he have an assistant at the morgue named Renfield?"

There was a brief pause. "I don't know if Matt has an assistant," he said finally. "I think that technically he's the assistant medical examiner, so you have to be sure not to tell anyone that he's talking to you about the case. He could get fired."

"Right," Sherry said. It was too early in the morning to explain her references to a disgustingly youthful and energetic priest. At least she could feel fairly confident that he wasn't possessed. There was no way on earth (or any unpleasant adjacent plane) that the demon wasn't familiar with the main characters in Dracula . "I'll be at the diner at six. Thank you, Father."

"You're welcome," Father Barry said. Then he added an extremely cheerful, "Have a nice day! God bless!" before he hung up.

Lord Thomas Cromwell had slipped into the room as she talked on the phone, and gave her an imperious meow. "Good morning to you, too," she said, and yawned. "Maybe I should take up running." Then she added, very hurriedly, "Just joking." The last thing she needed was her possessed cat trying to hold her to her flippant promises to start exercising.

She rushed through getting ready and writing a check for Alice, shoved the check through Alice's mail slot, and made it to the diner just after six. Then she took an awkward moment to scan the room for the medical examiner. Despite her having run into him in passing a few times before in the course of her sleuthing, she always imagined him as a man in a black tailcoat, which was definitely an image from Dickens and wrong both for the job and for the century. The disappointing reality was a tall, lanky, balding man who was usually wearing either a baggy sport coat or tight running gear that made him look even more Gumby-like than he otherwise would. He spotted her first and did one of those awkward half-stand-and-waves that people did when greeting an acquaintance who'd just walked into a restaurant.

She approached the booth, and he jolted back up into an uncomfortable booth-constrained crouch to shake her hand. "Good morning, Sherry," he said.

"Good morning," Sherry said, and slithered her way into the other side of the booth. "It's so nice of you to meet me." There were already two menus on the table. It seemed rude to launch directly into questions about the dead-people business. Besides, she wanted to order some coffee. She tried to catch the waitress's eye. "I was so impressed when Father Barry said that he bumped into you on a run this morning," she tried. "I could never be that disciplined! Don't you get cold, running so early in the winter?"

"No," he said. "I just layer. I leave for my run every morning at four, then come here at six. It's not hard if you go to bed early. The priest said that you wanted to talk about the Thompson case?"

Matt McGuire, it seemed, wanted nothing more than to talk about his dead-body business before Sherry had had the chance to put her coffee order in. The waitress, whom Sherry had never seen before—Sherry had never in her life gone to a diner before eight a.m.—saved her by coming over with the carafe of her own accord. "Coffee?" she asked. Then, after Sherry had answered in the affirmative, "Youknowwhatyouwant, hon?"

Sherry took half a second to panic over this unanticipated demand for her to make a decision. Then she said, "Baconeggencheese," with the confidence she'd developed from shouting her order at the surly owner of her local bodega during her brief sojourn in New York City. Then she tacked on a more polite, "Please."

"Be right up," the waitress said, and ambled off.

Sherry blinked at McGuire. "Did you want to—"

"She knows what I want," he said. "I always get the same order." Then he said, "Alan Thompson died of an epidural hemorrhage following blows to the frontal and parietal bones."

Sherry flinched. She couldn't help it. She prided herself on being unflappable, but she was unmistakably flapped. Alan. Poor Alan. She took a sip of coffee and tried to gather herself. Multiple blows didn't square with what she'd imagined when she looked at the scene. "The frontal and parietal bones?"

"The front and upper back of the head," McGuire said, and indicated with a finger where he meant on his own head.

She frowned. "So someone hit him from the back, then ran around and hit him in the front as well?"

"No," he said. "The pattern of injury was consistent with his having been struck on the back of the head with a blunt instrument, then hitting his head again on another object as he fell forward."

"A blunt instrument like a brass table lamp, and another object like a coffee table?"

"I wouldn't be comfortable making that determination," McGuire said. "But yes, possibly."

"Right," Sherry said. That squared perfectly: she just hadn't factored in that coffee table. The back of her mind whispered, Poor Alan. "Right," she said again. "Do you have a time of death?"

"I've put it at sometime between ten p.m. and midnight," he said.

"Ten thirty," Sherry said absently.

He frowned. "What?"

"He dropped me off at my house after ten," Sherry said. "I didn't check my watch when we arrived, but I remember noticing that it was almost ten before we left his house. Then he needed time to drive back home, greet a guest, and make two cups of tea before he was killed. It probably couldn't have been before ten thirty." An hour and a half was a nice, tight time frame for her to work with, much better than cases she'd dealt with where the victim was long since cold. Just a neat, tidy hour and a half or so to account for, and not whole days or weeks or longer in which people had a dispiriting tendency to not remember where they'd been or who they'd seen or what they'd had for dinner.

The new timeline also took care of one of Sherry's few suspects. Alice had been home when Sherry went across the road to give her the leftover Chinese food, and they'd chatted until about ten thirty. She'd still been home at just after midnight when she'd walked to Sherry's house to ask for help when her power had gone out. Alice didn't own a car, which meant that in order for her to have killed Alan within McGuire's estimated time of death, she would have had to walk all the way to Alan's house in a raging blizzard in the dark, knock on his door to be invited in for tea, kill him, walk back, and then go to Sherry's house to ask for help, all in under an hour and a half. The walk to Alan's house in good weather took forty-five minutes at least, and the walk back up the hill to Alice's took longer. In a blizzard, Sherry was fairly sure that making it to Alan's house, killing him, and then getting back up to Sherry's in time to ask for help with her electrical problems would be beyond the capacities of one skinny little retail assistant. Besides, Alice still didn't have a motive. Sherry was pleased with this realization for the moment it took her to register that she now didn't really have any suspects at all. A mysterious woman who might have been Alan's ex-wife. Some perfectly pleasant antiques dealer. Then it hit her, and she blanched. She didn't have any suspects. But to the police—to any uninterested observer—the most likely suspect was the last person who had seen him alive, and the only person who could testify that he'd still been alive for any time between ten and midnight.

It wasn't just because of the demons that Sherry would have to solve this one quickly.