Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen

As soon as she'd hung up the phone, Sherry sat down again to update her suspect chart. She added one new row, but two new suspects, bringing the total up to seven.

SUSPECT

SUSPICION LEVEL

METHOD OF INVESTIGATION

Alan's sons, Eli and Corey Thompson

High. A huge inheritance is always a strong motive.

They both live far away. Might be in town for funeral? Find out if they have alibis for time of death.

She stared at her chart for a while, trying to extract some sort of sense from it. The results weren't very encouraging. A growing list of suspects, but nothing concrete: just vague motives and half-formed suspicions and shadowy figures who might not even be real. What she needed, what she really needed, was something more solid than a call with a nonagenarian and a few hopeful spritzes of holy water.

She sighed and rubbed at her eyes, then made two more calls. The first was to the public library in Schenectady, where she introduced herself as the librarian up in Winesap and asked, very humbly and apologetically, whether they had anyone there who'd be willing to dig through their local newspaper archives for her. She then spent five minutes on hold before she was transferred over to a very enthusiastic-sounding young intern, from whom Sherry just as humbly and apologetically requested that she fax over—she stumbled slightly over the word fax , for some reason—any news articles they might have available from about thirty years earlier referring to a public defender named Alan Thompson. The energetic young intern had apparently never wanted to do anything more in her life than she wanted to hunt down some antique trial reporting, especially since it was for a fellow librarian . Sherry refrained from asking whether the intern had, as yet, earned this level of collegial familiarity, and instead thanked her as if the intern was giving Sherry one of her kidneys. Then, confident that the kid was buttered up thickly enough to reduce any friction she'd encounter while trudging through the Gazette archives, she hung up.

She looked up at the wall clock. Five thirty. Perfect. Then she checked her address book and called Greg Walbrook.

The phone rang and rang, then went to voicemail. She tried again. This time Greg picked up, sounding just as baffled by the universe as usual. She'd only ever called him twice before, in the course of arranging Alan's birthday parties, and he always managed to answer the telephone as if he'd never used such a device before and was surprised to discover that he owned one. There was a faint, distant, "I—yeah, hold on a second." A brief moment of scuffling sounds, as if he was wrestling the phone away from someone and then dropping it repeatedly onto the ground. Then a much louder and clearer: "Greg Walbrook."

"I know, Greg," Sherry said. "That's why I called you. This is Sherry. Pinkwhistle," she added, just in case he thought he might be speaking to a Sherry he'd known in second grade.

"Sherry," he said, with evident surprise. Then, in a tone that felt as if it matched Sherry's own grief in its sheer, miserable bewilderment: "Alan's dead."

Sherry's throat tightened up. "I know," she said. "That's why I wanted to call you. Do you think we could meet up for dinner and talk?"

"For dinner? Oh—sure. Where? Uh. The diner okay?"

"That would be fine," Sherry said. As far as she knew, Greg never ate out anywhere other than the diner and the dive bar near the gas station. "Can I meet you at six thirty?"

Greg agreed, and Sherry got off the phone with him and hurried to get bundled up and head down the hill. It was a bit warmer out than it had been the previous evening, which was a relief. Getting in and out of town had been so much easier when Alan was driving her back home every so often. It was so much easier to be stubbornly independent when it was nice outside. It was so much easier to desperately miss someone when you lived alone.

Greg was already at the diner when she arrived, which wasn't surprising: he lived just two doors down. When she walked in, he peeked at her as if he thought it was rude to look at her too directly, then ducked his head and handed her a menu, only saying hello a beat later. It was a little strange, but so was Greg, and he and Alan had had a strange friendship. Greg was about as far from a retired attorney as he could get: he'd spent twenty years in the army and did odd jobs to make ends meet. He and Alan had met because Alan had needed someone to rewire and repair the old lamps and record players and things at the shop, and Greg had a special talent when it came to small appliances. He had a special talent when it came to a lot of things. He was also a handyman and a house painter and had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything World War II. He was notorious for asking local landowners if he could set up a deer blind on their properties and then not bothering to bring a gun along with him when he visited; he just liked to sit up there and take pictures of the deer. He was also, according to Alan, an excellent fly fisherman, and the two of them seemed to have formed a friendship on the basis of standing side by side in streams together in nearly unbroken silence.

From what Alan had told her, it wasn't the sort of friendship that involved the two of them pouring their hearts out to each other. Probably not the most promising ground for mining Alan's darkest secrets. Still, they did go out and have a beer together from time to time, and Greg was probably Alan's closest friend who lived here in Winesap. It would be investigative malpractice for Sherry to not at least talk to him.

She couldn't push it, though. Greg was skittish, like the delicate creatures of the wilderness he liked to spy on from his deer blind. Instead, she perused her menu with elaborate care while Greg did the same. When the waitress arrived, Sherry ordered the chicken Parmesan, and Greg ordered a meatball sandwich and a glass of milk. For some reason the order made Sherry's throat clench up for the second time that evening. Maybe she was just getting old.

Sherry gently nudged Greg into talking to her about fishing until their food arrived, then let the man finish the first half of his meatball sandwich before she said, very quietly, "I miss Alan."

He ducked his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Yeah," he said. "Me, too."

"Did he say anything to you?" she asked. "Before he died? Not right before, I mean—did he mention anything that was bothering him?"

He shook his head. "No," he said. "Not really."

"Not really? So—a little?"

He shrugged. "Everyone worries about something sometimes."

"I guess so," Sherry said. "I worry about my cat getting a urinary tract infection. I used to worry about politics. I was wondering if maybe Alan was worried about something more serious than that."

"He woulda told you if he was, wouldn't he?" Greg asked. "You were his girlfriend. We were just fishing buddies, mostly."

Something about the way he said that didn't settle well atop the chicken Parmesan. Sherry decided to chase after what her gut suggested. "But there are some things that a guy will tell his fishing buddy that he might not tell his girlfriend. Right?"

Greg shifted in his seat, looking deeply uncomfortable. "I know he's dead," he said. "But I still don't like talking about his business."

"He's dead because someone killed him," Sherry said. "If they killed him, they had a motive. I'm trying to figure out who might have wanted Alan dead."

He was shaking his head. "I don't think it was that serious," he said. "Just his wife. Wives're like that," he added, with all the authority of a lifelong bachelor. "She wouldn't leave him alone. It bugged him, that's all."

"His ex, you mean? Susan?"

He frowned. "He had an ex, too? Susan was his wife, wasn't she?"

Part of Sherry already knew where this conversation was headed. One piece after another falling out of the mosaic, the whole image of the man she'd known crumbling to pieces. Another part of her was still busy trying to parse out the individual words Greg was saying. "He only ever had one wife, Susan. They got divorced right before he moved to Winesap."

"They weren't divorced, that was the whole problem," Greg said, and then his face went red again. "Aw, shit, I'm sorry, Sherry—"

"It's all right," Sherry said quickly. "It's all right. I didn't know. I'm glad that I know now." She took a deep breath, then let it out. It was a relief, in a way. Rage was a big enough emotion that it managed to almost blot out the sadness. "So Alan was still married. Separated, though, obviously. Unless—he didn't Mr. Rochester her, did he?"

Greg looked baffled. "What?"

"Sorry, sorry," Sherry said. "I'm being ridiculous. Do you know why they weren't divorced? What was the holdup?"

"First it was that she didn't want to get the divorce," Greg said. "So he just took off, anyway, without bothering to deal with the paperwork. Then she agreed to the divorce, but I guess she wasn't happy about what he wanted to do with the money. She wanted to split things down the middle, but he wanted to keep the money he'd gotten from his granddad. The store was more a hobby than a moneymaker, and he was using his inheritance to keep it running in his granddad's memory, kind of, but she wanted to take half of what he had left. From what Alan said, it was getting pretty nasty."

Sherry's first thought was, poor Alan . Then she caught herself. Was it poor Alan, really? Maybe Susan had been awful for years, made his life a misery, refused to let him go, and then tried to take away his retirement nest egg once he finally escaped. Or maybe she was a loving wife and mother who treated Alan like gold for two decades, raised both of his strapping sons to adulthood, and had the rug pulled out from under her when he suddenly decided to run away from his family and leave her with nothing. Sherry didn't know. She'd never been a part of her boyfriend's marriage. Assuming that he'd been the wronged party in his dispute with his wife would only mar her judgment when it came to considering her suspects. "Divorces can be so awful," she said. It was a bland enough thing to say. "Do you know if he saw her often?"

Greg shook his head. "I don't think so. I'm pretty sure she was supposed to come up here and see him, though. He was hoping that she was ready to, you know, agree on how the money would get split up."

"And do you know if they ever actually met?"

He shook his head again. "No. He never said."

"Okay," Sherry said. They had, of course: Susan had been seen in the diner. The question was whether or not she'd gone home after that meeting to sleep peacefully in her own bed. "Thank you, Greg. You've been really helpful." She paused. "You were a really great friend to him, you know. He talked about you all the time."

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then, finally, he said, "He talked about you, too."

He was a nice man, she thought, even if he was a little odd. Maybe nicer than Alan had been. She'd always thought before that Alan was being very kind to spend so much time with him. Now she thought that maybe the charity had been extended in the other direction.

They finished eating. Sherry insisted on paying over Greg's protestations, then dawdled over coffee and a slice of pie after he left. She was dreading the idea of going home. The walk back up the hill, the quiet in her house, the fear of the voices that might come out of the dark. All of it. She still intended to go home, though, once the staff in the diner started pointedly putting the chairs up onto the tables and mopping the floors. The plan was to go home. Instead, she found herself walking toward the church, trying the door—it was unlocked—and slipping into one of the back pews. There was someone praying near the altar, but she left after twenty minutes or so, leaving Sherry alone.

The quality of the silence felt different here than it did at home. The church seemed to wear the quiet more comfortably than Sherry's little cottage did, like an old married couple who no longer felt the need to fill in the gaps in the conversation. The smell of old wood and incense was comforting, and the air had a cave-like coolness to it that felt the same now in April as it usually did in August. She'd just planned on sitting there, for a moment, until she worked up the energy and courage to walk back home. Then she realized how tired she was and thought that maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she lay down in the pew for a while to rest. She could remember thinking about how badly she'd wanted to do that sometimes as a bored child on Sunday mornings, still groggy after having been dragged out of bed bright and early for mass. She lay down and remembered more of those childhood Sunday mornings: the atonal drone of the parishioners trudging their way through a hymn, the low buzz of their parish priest giving his homily, the slow churn of the ceiling fans stirring through the thick air of the room, her mother grabbing at her knee to make her stop wriggling. She was thinking about all that when she fell asleep.

"Obviously you're always welcome here," Father Barry was saying. "But a pew can't be a comfortable place to sleep."

For one strange, unsettling moment, Sherry thought that she had somehow fallen asleep in the middle of confession. Then she remembered that she hadn't been to confession in several decades, and a moment later the rest of the strange previous evening dropped into her head in a solid clump. She jolted upright, groaning as her body registered displeasure at having spent the night—and it had been the whole night; there was light streaming in through the stained-glass windows—on a hard wooden pew and then noticed that Father Barry was holding two coffee cups. She took the one he held out to her, blushing hot. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I just wanted to lie down for a minute before I walked back home."

"You don't have to apologize," Father Barry said. He looked odd. It took her a few seconds too long to realize that it was because he was wearing blue jeans and a Notre Dame sweatshirt, no clerical collar to be found. It felt a little like seeing him in the nude. "There's a cot in the vestry, though. You could sleep on that next time." He paused. "Is it because of your haunted cat?"

"No," she said, then winced. "Partly. I don't know. I think I'm just…tired."

"That would make sense," he said, and looked at her for a moment in an annoyingly thoughtful, priestly sort of way. "Janine told me that she offered you her friend's vacation home, and you turned her down."

Sherry blushed again. "You've been discussing me?"

"Janine's worried about you," he said. He took a sip of his own coffee. "I think I would have said no, too. But it's my job to look out for my—flock." He said the word flock as if he felt slightly self-conscious about it, the way that some newly married men hesitated over the phrase my wife . "But you didn't make any vows when you became a librarian. If things get too bad, I don't think anyone would judge you for making a break for it."

"Wouldn't they?" she asked. "It sounds like something the villain of a novel would do. Run away like a coward as soon as things get scary."

"Sure," he said after a second. "People talk like they'd be prepared to die for the cause when most of them won't even take half a Saturday to volunteer for it. They're just doing…backseat heroism. Maybe they would judge you, but that doesn't mean that if we start getting demons pouring through the windows that you shouldn't get in the car and get out of Winesap. You never signed up for this. It's not your job to sacrifice yourself for everyone else just because the devil thinks you should. Or whatever that thing is that's been bothering you. You don't have to believe in the devil to believe that maybe whatever it is might not have your best interests at heart. I think you should reserve the right to walk away from this and enjoy a nice peaceful retirement somewhere."

She blinked at him for a second, taken aback. Then she swallowed. "Thanks, Father," she said. "That's really"—her voice cracked—"nice of you."

He smiled at that, as if he was pleased to have had his success at his pastoral duties recognized, then visibly caught himself and made his expression go graver. "I'm still always here if you need to talk."

Part of her wanted to laugh at him. He seemed particularly young when he said things like that. Instead she just thanked him again for the kind words and the coffee and finally set off on the long walk back home.