Chapter Twelve

Twelve

Their food came then, and Sherry and McGuire ate their breakfasts in a silence that was less companiable than it was forged out of a mutual understanding that neither of them was remotely interested in chitchat. Then she went straight to the library and to her favorite enormous old encyclopedia, which she kept partially just as a decoration—it was one of those nice leatherbound sets—and pulled out the volume for Y . She looked up yew and read the description. Evergreens with fleshy red fruits.

Bright red, standing out against the snow.

Sherry stared at the black-and-white illustration. The shape of the berry was right, too. This was exactly the plant that had been tugging at her attention lately on her walks.

The back of her neck went spiky. The cat had gone on about resonances . Well, maybe. Maybe there was something to it, though she didn't know exactly what. She put the encyclopedia away, still feeling vaguely uneasy. It was an hour before the library would usually open, and she was technically on leave. She started vacuuming. Some strange, wild corner of her brain felt convinced that, if she was a good and responsible librarian who kept the place clean and organized, the police wouldn't suspect her of murder. She hung around for the rest of the day, even, ignoring the baffled looks and timid questions of the staff members who'd clearly been told not to expect her. Everything went smoothly and utterly comfortingly until a little boy came up to the desk with several books of Greek mythology to check out.

"Oh, these look interesting," she said encouragingly. She always felt a sort of kinship with small children who checked out big dry books on the sorts of topics that peculiar, uncoordinated children tended to be interested in, like wild horses and dinosaurs and ancient Rome.

The little boy looked up at her. "Sherry," he said, in Alan Thompson's voice. "Please, God, help me ."

Sherry gave a muffled, strangled scream and stumbled backward, then frantically grabbed for her purse to try to fumble for the spray bottle full of holy water. It was too late, though: by the time she'd found it and looked up again, the boy was gone. He'd left his books behind. Sherry placed her hand on the pile as if she was swearing on a Bible, right over Athena's breastplate on the cover. The books were real. It was all real.

"I'm not crazy," she said aloud, to the immediate and obvious alarm of a passing page.

She hung around until the library closed, then went back to the diner. She told herself that she had business there: she'd forgotten to ask about whether anyone had noticed Alan eating there on the day he'd died. Really, she'd do almost anything to avoid having to go home and be alone with Lord Thomas Cromwell. She used to love petting her cat when she was unhappy and in need of comfort, but it wasn't very pleasant anymore to think that he might sit in her lap and purr.

She'd checked out a Georgette Heyer before she left the library. She tucked herself into a corner booth with the lords and ladies, then ordered a cup of decaf to drink while she read. When the coffee arrived, it came with a very nice-looking slice of cherry pie. "From Jason," the waitress said. "We all heard about your friend Alan. We're really sorry."

Sherry looked up. Jason, the cook, gave her a small smile and a wave from behind the counter. "Thank you," Sherry called out, touched. He did a different wave, the "it was nothing" kind. Sherry waved back. Then she looked up at the waitress. Jessica, Sherry thought was her name. "Speaking of Alan," she said. "Do you know if he ate lunch here at the diner this past Saturday?"

Jessica frowned as if she was giving that some thought. "I think so," she said. "Yeah, I think maybe he did. Holly had the table—she's new—but I think I remember seeing him, unless I'm getting the day wrong. I'd have to ask Jason which day we had the chicken Florentine."

"That would be lovely of you, if you could," Sherry said. "Do you remember if anyone was with him?"

Jessica looked uncomfortable. "Yeah," she said. "That's why I noticed him. He was with a woman who wasn't you, and she didn't look like she was from around here, so she really stood out."

" Oh ," Sherry said, and felt her stomach sink in a way that really wasn't reasonable at all. She'd been insistent about Alan never having been her boyfriend. "Right. Can you describe her?"

"Older," Jessica said. "I mean, uh. Not old . About Alan's age." About Sherry's age, she meant. "She had this kind of ashy bob, that kind of transitional color for when you're trying to grow the gray in gracefully? I used to do hair, so I always notice if someone has a really good or bad dye job."

"And was this one good or bad?" Sherry asked. She hoped that it was bad.

"Definitely good," Jessica said immediately. "She probably spent a ton on it. She definitely didn't get it done around here. I was trying to guess in my head what she was doing up here. I thought maybe some fancy interior design lady who was meeting Alan to buy special antiques from him or something. That's what she looked like. She was wearing this long camel-colored coat. No one from around here dresses like that. I remember feeling bad that it was touching the floor and probably getting mud on it from people's snow boots."

"That does sound memorable," Sherry said. It was the most neutral thing she could think of to say. "Could you ask Jason about the chicken Florentine? I'm sorry to be a bother."

"It's no problem; it's dead in here, anyway," Jessica said. Then she lowered her voice slightly. "Are you investigating ?"

Sherry nodded. " Yes ," she said, lowering her own voice even though there was no one around to possibly overhear. People loved to feel as if they were helping with a murder investigation, and the more dramatic you managed to make it seem, the more they loved it. If there were a seedy dive bar in Winesap, Sherry would arrange to meet all her witnesses there just to take advantage of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, all there was that came close to fitting the bill was a bar and grill next to the gas station that served soggy hot wings and played a constant rotation of Tom Petty's greatest hits, which wasn't exactly an environment where you'd expect to see Philip Marlowe meeting with a beautiful young widow. "It really would be a huge help if you could confirm that he had lunch with an unidentified person on the day he was killed." She managed not to flinch at the phrase the day he was killed . It was the sort of phrase that she needed to use to get the information that she wanted: people seemed to find it impressive, along with our main suspect , and the estimated time of death , and motive and opportunity .

Jessica was already nodding. "I'll ask," she said, and trotted off. A moment later it was Jason, not Jessica, who came walking over to Sherry's table. It took him a while: Jason had a fairly pronounced limp. When people asked him about it, he came up with a different ridiculous story every time: Sherry's favorite version was that he'd been trampled by a bull in Pamplona. She'd heard that the actual explanation was that he'd fallen off a ladder while working as a roofer in his twenties, but that wasn't nearly as much fun.

"Thank you for the pie," Sherry said again.

Jason shrugged this off. "You're having a bad week," he said. Jason was a stocky man with warm brown eyes and an easy smile. He'd once told Sherry that he'd moved to New York from Los Angeles as a teenager, and he still wasn't accustomed to the winters. Now he was in his early forties or so, a relative newcomer to Winesap and the diner, and the proud father of two very polite and princessy little girls who sometimes did their homework sitting on stools at the counter. His much younger and very sweet wife was a Winesap local who worked at the hospital in Schenectady, where they'd met, as a nurse's aide.

Sherry had gotten to know Jason because, as one of the few regulars who often hung around the diner after the dinner rush on weekday evenings, she'd had the chance to chat with him when he'd occasionally emerge from the kitchen. He liked Ray Bradbury and Tolkien and was currently working his way through Dune . He drove a rusty red pickup, and she'd deduced from things he'd mentioned to her about his home that he and his family lived in one of the modest little former summer homes around the lake. The lake houses had been built back in the 1920s, when little towns in the nearby countryside were still attractive summer home destinations to the people of Schenectady and Albany. The tourist industry had died for decades and was now being reconstructed by the determined populace, but the lake houses were far too small now to meet the needs of the wealthy vacationers who had once owned them. They were perfect, though, for the ordinary working-class people of Winesap. You could have your own dock with a boat there, as long as you didn't mind living shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors.

Sherry smiled at him. He was such a nice young man. "I don't suppose you remember which day this past week you had the chicken Florentine?"

"Saturday," he said immediately. "I remember because we ran out before noon, but Holly forgot to wipe it off the specials board, so she kept giving me tickets with the Florentine on them until I went out there and erased it myself."

"Thank you, that's very helpful," Sherry said. "Did you happen to notice whether or not Alan Thompson was here? If you'd recognize him, I mean."

He shook his head. "I know what he looks like, but I only came out of the kitchen long enough to fix the board. We were slammed my whole shift Saturday."

"I see," she said. "Thank you, anyway. That was very helpful of you."

"No problem," he said, then hesitated before he said, "I was sorry to hear about Alan. I never spoke to him, but he must have been a pretty smart guy, to be a lawyer. I hope you catch who did it."

"Thank you," Sherry said, and then Jason went back to the kitchen. It took her until she was halfway through her pie for it to occur to her how odd it was that he'd mentioned Alan being a lawyer, when he'd said that he'd never talked to him, and Alan had retired from the law a few years before Jason came to Winesap. She looked up to see if he was still behind the counter, so that she could maybe ask him, but he'd vanished back into the kitchen again.

Once her pie was finished, there was nothing for her to do but head home. She did so grudgingly, trudging her way up the hill in the cold, the road illuminated only by very rare streetlights and the lights of houses flashing briefly through the bare trees. She jolted at a sudden blast of noise: it sounded like a motorcycle driving through the village. Strange, at this time of year. A few steps later she caught a flash of red in the corner of her eye. Blood , she thought, and turned to look. The red of the yew berries shone dully in the light spilling from the window of a nearby house. She remembered the description from the encyclopedia. It had called the berries fleshy . They looked fleshy now, like freshly cut beef. She shivered. Then she took a few quick steps toward the bush, reached out to grab hold of a branch, and tugged and twisted until it came off in her hand. Then she hurried off, shoving the branch into her coat pocket the best she could. She'd sweated a little, and now she shivered. It was awfully cold.

She thought longingly of Alan then, of the way that he always seemed to know when she was feeling particularly tired and beaten down and would pull up in his car to whisk her off to something pleasant. Not today. Not ever again, and wasn't she selfish for thinking about herself when a good, kind man had been killed? She'd be suspicious of herself if she was someone else. The odd old woman who lived on the outskirts of town and was the last person to have seen the victim. The old woman whose evil cat knew she had something to feel guilty about.

She'd avoided thinking about it for years. She'd left Florida to try to escape from it. Here she was, though, with some— person claiming to be the devil trying to use what she'd done as leverage.

She was still a few minutes away from home when she decided that she needed to talk to Caroline.

As soon as she arrived, she started stalling, of course. She made herself a cup of tea. She turned the radio on, then turned it off again. She used the bathroom and took a long, hot shower, and bundled herself up in her cozy bathrobe. She poured herself a glass of brandy. Then, with no more delaying tactics available to her, she got out her old address book and found the number she wanted. Even as she dialed, she found herself hoping that it would be a wrong number. They might have moved away. She remembered being in the car with Caroline six years ago, how she'd told her over and over that everything would be all right. She was very good at comforting other people, at tricking them into thinking that she was the wise, protective older sister or mother or grandmother they'd never had, when really she was just as baffled as anyone. She didn't seem capable of applying the same skill to her own racing heart.

A woman answered. There was the sound of a TV blaring in the background. "Hello?"

Sherry swallowed. "Linda? This is Sherry."

Part of Sherry expected her to say, Wrong number . She hoped for it. Instead, she said, " Sherry? God, it's been years. How are you? Where are you? I heard that you moved to New York City."

It was like getting into a time machine. Linda's voice had barely changed, the same warm smoker's rasp. "I did, for a while," Sherry said. "Then I left." The city had been awful. She'd never been the sort of woman who stood out, but the city had made her more invisible than she'd ever been. Men kept walking straight into her on the street. She'd wanted to live somewhere where she wouldn't be looked through with the same blank-faced not-quite hostility that she'd seen directed at a gentleman ostentatiously playing the panpipes on the subway platform. "It wasn't for me," she said. "I'm upstate now. Up in the Adirondacks."

" Upstate ," Linda said, in the same way she might have said Tokyo . Linda, as far as Sherry knew, had never been farther north than Tallahassee. "Is it freezing?"

An unpleasant part of Sherry was tempted to say something like, No, it's sweltering. I'm wearing shorts on the piazza right now. "It was just about freezing today," she said instead. "It's warming up. Last month it got down to twenty below."

"What does that feel like?" Linda asked, and Sherry found herself unable to resist trying to describe it: how she had to wear tights underneath her pants to keep her thighs from going numb, and the essential nature of thick socks, and how on really cold mornings she had to cover her face so that the snot wouldn't freeze inside her nose. She'd never had the chance to explain her new world to someone from back home before. She'd made too clean a break. It felt better than she'd imagined it would.

Eventually, though, Sherry had to bring things around to her reason for having called. "I was hoping to get back in touch with Caroline," she said. "Do you have any contact information for her?"

Linda didn't say anything for a while. There was just the sound of the television in the background. A sitcom laugh track. "Maybe she doesn't want you to talk to her," she said finally. "If she didn't give you her number herself."

"She couldn't have," Sherry said patiently. "I moved just after she…left. Remember? I don't know where she is, but she doesn't know where I am, either." She frowned into the phone. An issue had just occurred to her. "Do you know where she is?"

"I'm her sister , Sherry," Linda said, as if she was offended. Then she abruptly changed her tone. "Aw, Christ, you know Caroline . She won't tell me. I think it might be Costa Rica, though. Her plane was headed for Mexico, but I don't think she'd stay there with the authorities knowing she'd been there. She used to talk about wanting to go to Costa Rica."

It was jarring hearing Linda so casually mention the authorities in regard to Caroline. Their two brothers and most of Linda's boyfriends over the years had all had their run-ins with the law, but Caroline had always been the good daughter, the one who'd done everything right, up until the day she'd done absolutely everything wrong. "Costa Rica," Sherry repeated. "I remember that, too." It had been one of the things that had made her and Caroline friends: their fondness for shared daydreams about travel. When they were still in high school, they'd made dream collages from pictures they'd cut out of magazines, mostly pictures of gorgeous models posing in front of famous monuments or on romantic cobblestoned European streets. Costa Rica had come later, from TV nature documentaries. Caroline had wanted to see a howler monkey. Even after everything, part of Sherry was glad to think that Caroline had really, finally gotten away to somewhere better. Maybe she was drinking a cocktail on a beach somewhere right now, with howler monkeys crying out from the jungle just behind her. She cleared her throat. "You're in contact with her, though?"

There was a sudden crackling sound from Linda sighing into the receiver. "I have a number for her," she said. "It changes pretty often. I have to wait for her to call me first. Then when she calls, she always lets it ring three times and then hangs up, so I know it's not a telemarketer and pick up the next time."

"Wow," Sherry said, impressed despite herself. "Like James Bond."

"I know," Linda said, sounding as if she was possibly a little more impressed than she'd admit, too. "It's just like Caroline, isn't it? She was always something else."

Sherry made an agreeable noise. Caroline was certainly something . "Could you tell me the number? It sounds like with all of the spycraft I won't be able to learn much about where she lives from it, anyway. And she could always choose to ignore the message, if she doesn't want to speak to me. I promise not to harass her. I just want to talk to her about something, that's all."

Linda hesitated for a second. "Do you have a pen?"

Sherry did. Linda rattled off a number. Sherry wrote it down, then had her repeat it, just in case. She had the feeling that if she called back and asked for it again, she might get a different answer. Linda had always been prone to sudden shifts in mood. It had made her exciting to be around when they were teenagers, especially with the air of glamor and sophistication that had come from her having been learning to be a hairdresser while Sherry and Caroline were still in high school. "You should come up for a visit sometime," she said spontaneously. "Escape the heat this summer. Or sometime around the holidays. You could see the snow. I have plenty of space here."

The pause before Linda responded told Sherry the answer in advance. "That's nice of you, Sherry," she said. "Maybe I will." She wouldn't, of course. "It was good to hear from you." She would probably never call Sherry back.

"It was good to hear from you, too," Sherry said. Then she wished Linda good night and hung up.