Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

Sherry squinted blearily at Sheriff Brown, clutching at the front of her bathrobe to try to keep him from getting an eyeful of the stained, worn-out old pajamas she'd gone to bed in. It had given her a quick jolt of unease when she'd seen him on her front step, but he'd greeted her just like he usually would have, without any strange demands or horrible demon voices. He just looked very, very serious, which immediately kicked off a different kind of dread. "Peter? What are you doing here? What happened?" The thought hit her stomach like a gulp of ice water. "Has someone else been killed?"

He gave his head a hard, firm shake. "No. No, nothing like that. Don't worry. Everything's been quiet. Not even any kids breaking into garages." He paused. "I need you to come into the station with me, Sherry."

Her head gave an involuntary shake of its own. "What? Why?" Then, very stupidly: "But I'm still in my pajamas."

He gave a sympathetic wince. "I just need to talk to you about a few things relating to Alan's death. There's some stuff that we need to sort out."

She recoiled slightly. "Am I being arrested?"

He shook his head again. "No, no, of course not. We just need you to come in to answer a few questions."

"So you're bringing me in for questioning," she said. "Because I'm a suspect. Well, I knew that, I guess. I had myself on my own suspect list for being the last person to have seen him alive, just in case a demon possessed me and I did it without realizing it or something. Only I couldn't figure out how I possibly could have gotten down the hill and back up again and back into bed in time, especially once you factored in the time to change in and out of my pajamas—" She stopped. She was babbling. Sheriff Brown was frowning.

"Have you been drinking, Sherry?"

She flushed hot. "I had a few drinks with Charlotte last night. Can I—make some coffee, at least? And get changed?" And make sure that she had all her holy water and crystals and things hidden around her person before she went anywhere with him.

"Sure," the sheriff said. "I'll just wait in your living room, if you don't mind."

Sherry wanted to ask him what he'd do if she said that she did, in fact, mind. Crab-walk backward up her stairs while screaming in Aramaic, maybe. Just in case he might, she said, "I'll make coffee," and showed him inside. She went through the basics of her usual morning routine robotically, hyperconscious of the sheriff's presence in her private space. Even feeding her cat felt like too intimate a task to perform in front of him. She was grateful when the coffee was ready and she could politely pour him a cup, then escape upstairs for a few minutes of privacy to drink it while she pulled some clean clothes on and ran a comb through her hair, then shoved some anti-demon supplies into her pockets. She checked herself in the mirror. She looked tired and worried. Tired and worried and old and haggard. For the first time in what was probably months, she found herself digging through the drawer where she kept her makeup. She put on lipstick, then immediately wiped it off. She looked stupid with it on, like a child playing dress-up in her mother's high heels. At least her own frustration and embarrassment with herself had brought a little brightness to her eyes and color to her cheeks: she looked marginally less dead and resurrected.

Eventually she couldn't come up with any more excuses to delay the inevitable, so she dragged herself downstairs and meekly went with Sheriff Brown to ride to the station. He let her sit up front, at least, which was nice of him. At the station, he put her into a room she hadn't been in before. Once she'd accompanied the frantic daughter of a victim into a different room in the station, because the girl hadn't wanted to talk without her there. That room had been fairly pleasant and comfortable, like the waiting room in a doctor's office. This one was gray and spartan, just three chairs and a table that was bolted to the floor. A real interrogation room for a real suspect.

"Sherry," Sheriff Brown said, "I'd like you to go over everything that you did last Saturday evening after you got off work."

Sherry did, with as much detail as she could muster. Alan picking her up, deciding against their previous plans, going to pick up Chinese food, his house for dinner and a movie, the drive home and bringing Alice her leftovers. Then going to bed, and being woken up by Alice, and the whole saga of having to go to her house to help her with the fuse box. The wave of relief that passed over her as she talked through that last part took her off guard. "That's my alibi," she said aloud. "I'd realized that it was Alice's alibi, but I didn't think about myself. She can confirm that she saw me twice, once at about ten thirty and then again at midnight. I couldn't have walked down to Alan's house, killed him, and then gotten back up to bed in my house in time."

Sheriff Brown's face was expressionless. "You were the last to see him alive. You could have killed him, left his house, walked up, then gone to bed."

"But that would mean that he was killed at nine," Sherry said, before immediately realizing her mistake.

Sheriff Brown's eyes narrowed. "What makes you think that he wasn't?"

"Nothing," Sherry said quickly. She didn't want to get the medical examiner in trouble after he'd been willing to speak with her. "I just heard a rumor. That he was killed closer to midnight."

He didn't respond to that. Instead, he said, "When did you find out that Mr. Thompson was leaving you his house?"

Sherry's whole brain stuttered. "What?"

"He left you his house in his will," Sheriff Brown said. "Including everything inside it, plus two hundred thousand dollars to cover taxes and maintenance. Almost a million dollars' worth of cash and property in total. He owned a lot of valuable antiques."

" What? " Sherry said again. She couldn't process it. Alan's house . He had a beautiful house. He also had two beautiful sons, and beautiful grandchildren. "But—why not his sons?"

"A million in cash each," Sheriff Brown said. "Your boyfriend was a very rich guy. Plenty of reasons for someone to want him dead."

"I didn't know," Sherry said. She could feel her heart in her chest. "I had no idea. We never talked about money. We talked about books we'd been reading."

"You're not doing well financially, are you?" the sheriff asked. "They don't pay you much at the library. Your rent on that little house is pretty high. Doesn't seem like you have much put away for retirement."

"So you think I gambled on my boyfriend having left me something in his will and killed him?" Sherry said. Her voice sounded too high-pitched. "If I'd wanted to live in his house, why wouldn't I have just tried to marry him?" Her voice broke at the end of the sentence, and, to her horror, she started to cry.

Sheriff Brown leaned across the table just enough to hand her a tissue that he'd pulled out of his pocket. She took it, then just held it in her hand, nervously rolling one corner between two fingertips. He still looked calm. Not like a cartoon mouse at all right now. It seemed strange that she'd ever thought there was anything funny or cartoonish about him. "You wanted to marry him?"

She shrugged and swiped at her eyes. "I didn't think that I did. I don't know."

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to get married," the sheriff said. "Nothing strange about being angry when you find out that the guy you want to marry already has a wife."

It gave her a jolt. She snapped her head up to look at him. She'd never felt slow around Sheriff Brown before. Now she felt as if she'd wandered right into a trap. "I didn't know that he was married until after he died," she said. "You can ask anyone. I didn't know. I only found out when I talked to his friend Greg the other day and he accidentally told me. Alan always told me that he was divorced, and I believed him. Why on earth would I ever think he was still married? It wasn't a situation where we met at hotels. He told me where he kept his spare key so I could go into his house and water his plants while he was away. Where would he have kept a wife? It never occurred to me for a second, before Greg told me." Was she saying too much? Overexplaining? There was a camera in the room, she assumed. She had to force herself to keep her head still and not let her eyes dart around to look for it. Would this be the part of the video where the prosecutor paused the tape and asked the jury whether they believed her?

Sheriff Brown's expression remained impassive. "You're a smart lady," he said. "I honestly just find it hard to believe that you can solve murders left and right but couldn't figure out that this guy wasn't being honest with you." He paused. "Why'd you break into his house after he died, Sherry?"

Another jolt. "How did you know?"

"One of the neighbors was pretty spooked by Mr. Thompson's murder. He went out and bought three security cameras the next day and had them up and running by that evening. He saw you going in and out when he was reviewing the tapes and gave us a call. Why'd you do it, Sherry? What were you looking for?"

" Evidence , obviously," Sherry snapped. "I was investigating . Like I always do."

"You don't always break into victims' houses, though," Sheriff Brown said.

"You keep saying breaking in like I smashed in the window with a brick," she said. "I had access to the house whenever I wanted it. I just went and got the key." She paused then, and blinked. "And—if he left me the house, how could I break into my own property?"

She immediately knew that it was the wrong thing to say when his eyebrows lifted. "I wouldn't get too ahead of myself, if I were you," he said. "His estate's going to be in probate for a while longer, since there was a lot of it."

"I'm not getting ahead of myself," she said. "I have my own house to live in, I'm not desperate to have to take over a whole new one. I'm just—I know what you're getting at."

"I'm not getting at anything," he said blandly. She abruptly felt very aware of how horribly irritating all the suspects she'd spoken to over the years must have found her. "Walk me through what you did once you were inside of the house."

She told him, though a bit tersely. There wasn't too much to tell: she looked around, she got an idea of the scene of the crime, checked the rest of the house, then left. She didn't mention how the photo had screamed. It didn't seem like a useful thing to mention. "I didn't disturb anything or take anything out of the house," she said. "And it isn't as if my DNA and fingerprints wouldn't have been all over the place either way. You asked me to investigate." Then she remembered that there was something she needed to ask him. "Speaking of things being taken from the house. Were the account books from Alan's shop taken as evidence?"

He was, at this point, starting to look slightly irritated. There was something almost comforting about that. There was something frightening about a man who stayed perpetually and perfectly calm. "I'm just asking questions so we can try to figure out what happened to Mr. Thompson. You know how this works, Sherry. I'm not the enemy here." He paused. "And no. We didn't find anything like account books at the scene."

"Yes, I do know how this works," she said, and found herself standing before she could think better of it. She felt reenergized by the knowledge that she'd been right to think that those missing documents might be significant. If the police hadn't moved them, then the only other people who might have done it were Alan himself, just before he died, or the murderer. "So I know that I'm free to go unless I'm under arrest. Am I under arrest, Sheriff?"

"No," he said, after a moment. "Though you could be, for the breaking and entering."

"Is that a threat?" she asked. "Never mind. I'll be going, then. Let me know if you change your mind and decide that you want my help with investigating again." Then she added, with a flourish, "You might want to look into Jason Martinez at the diner."

"Because Mr. Thompson botched his defense?" Sheriff Brown asked. Sherry had to give him credit for how successfully he managed to seem only slightly smug. "We're very aware of his connection to Mr. Thompson. I've spoken to him and his wife already."

Sherry felt her whole face go hot. He sounded like a big-city police officer in a television press conference. When had Sheriff Brown learned how to talk like that? "Oh," she said. "Well—that's good. His alibi's weak."

"Thank you for letting me know," the sheriff said. It sounded sincere, if you didn't pay any attention to what seemed like the suggestion of a smirk lurking around the corner of his mouth. Then he said, "Just one more thing."

Like Columbo, she thought wildly. Somehow whoever was running the TV detective series she was trapped in had rewritten the character of Sheriff Brown. Before, he'd been the blundering local police sergeant who couldn't keep up with Poirot's deductions, and now he was Columbo. He had his suspect, and now he was circling around her, cornering her, fixing it so that she couldn't wriggle out of the trap. She sat, just the way that Columbo's suspects always stayed to answer more questions no matter how much they complained about him. Was she being compelled to do it? She couldn't tell. Maybe she just wanted to find out how the episode would end. "What is it?"

"I wanted to ask you about Howard Hastings," he said. "You were questioned in relation to his disappearance six years ago. What can you tell me about that?"

For a moment Sherry's mind felt utterly blank. Howard. Caroline's husband. She'd left Florida and come all the way to little Winesap to get away from the memory of him and Caroline. They'd followed her here, anyway. She licked her lips. "If you've been talking to—" Her voice came out in a dry rasp. She stopped. Cleared her throat. "If you've been talking to the Tampa police, you already know everything. I told them everything that I knew."

"I'm sure that you did," he said. Implacably. He felt implacable, like there was no way for her to escape from this conversation, even though the unlocked door was just a few steps away. "But they talked to you years ago, and the detective I spoke to wasn't the lead on the case. I'd like to hear it from you now."

She swallowed. "Caroline had been telling me for months that her husband was abusive," she said. "At first it was just him wanting to tell her when she could see her friends and family, but then it got worse. He changed the PIN for her bank card so she had to ask him for money. He would turn off the water in the house just so he could control when she took a shower. It was horrible. She cried like a little girl when she first started telling me about it."

"And you believed her?"

"Of course I did," Sherry snapped. "Do you know how many women I've known over the years whose husbands have treated them like dirt? My own mother—" She stopped. Her own sad childhood wasn't any of his damn business. "And he was an awful guy. Really nasty and pompous, the kind of guy who'd be really rude to a waitress and then leave a nickel as a tip. Always talking down to her in front of other people. And cheap , too. She got married to him too young, and he was fifteen years older, so he managed to impress her with roses and teddy bears before she was old enough to know better, then never bought her another present. I still don't think that she was lying about everything ."

"Cheap enough to have saved up a million in cash by the time he vanished," Sheriff Brown said, in an irritatingly knowing sort of way. "So, you believed that she was being abused. What did you do then?"

"Like I told the detectives in Tampa," Sherry said, "I really didn't do much. I was a listening ear. I told her that I thought she should leave him. Then, when she showed up at my house with her bags one night, I drove her to the airport. That's all. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than helping a friend." When she said it aloud, it all really did sound very ordinary and reasonable. Like what any good friend would do. The problem was that it was hard to maintain a secure sense of one's own innocence while being interviewed by the police, for the second time, about a possible homicide.

"So when you drove her to the airport, you weren't aware that her husband was missing?"

"No. Why would I be? He wasn't reported missing until days later, and she told me that she'd snuck out of the house while he was out at a bar."

"Right," the sheriff said. "So you drove her to the airport, and then a few days later you heard that he was missing. Did you call the police right away?"

"No," Sherry admitted. "I tried to contact Caroline first. I waited until I knew for sure that she wasn't going to get back to me before I called the police and let them know what I knew. They were already planning on talking to me by then. They knew that Caroline and I were best friends."

He leaned forward slightly. "Why wait and try to contact her first?"

"I don't know," she said. "I'd never had anything like it happen to me before. I felt like maybe I was being dramatic. Or maybe he'd gone after her and hurt her. I didn't know what to think. I was worried about her. And I thought that the police wouldn't care about what I had to say, anyway. I didn't know anything. I just drove the car."

"And then a few weeks after the police spoke to you, you filed for divorce and left the state. Why?"

Her cheeks warmed again. "I wasn't trying to—" she started, and then stopped. "I'd been thinking about a divorce for years. With my best friend gone in awful circumstances, there wasn't much else keeping me there."

He nodded slowly. "It's a strange coincidence, though, isn't it?"

"What is?"

"Your best friend's millionaire husband vanishes, and a day after he's last seen, she clears out all of their joint bank accounts and flees to Mexico with your help. A few years later, your millionaire boyfriend turns up dead, and you end up inheriting a million dollars in assets. You have to admit that it's a weird kind of thing to be involved in twice ."

"So you think I'm some kind of black widow?" she asked, her temper flaring. "And an incompetent one, apparently. If I'd planned on helping my friend bump off her millionaire husband, you'd think I would have gotten something out of it so I could retire to Acapulco instead of working full-time at the Winesap Library." She stood up. "I really am done with this now. I assume that you'll let me know if you decide that you're going to actually arrest me, instead of just waste my time asking a bunch of leading questions about something that a friend of mine did a decade ago."

He nodded, completely unruffled. Then he said, in a voice that wasn't his, in a voice that was older and colder and darker than the water at the very bottom of a deep lake, "You've been dawdling with this investigation, Miss Pinkwhistle. I don't think that you're free to go after all."