Chapter Twenty-Two

Twenty-two

Sherry had only made it about halfway down the block when Father Barry caught up with her. "Sherry!"

She stopped, letting herself look mildly irritated. She had a long list of things that she needed to get done . Troublesome loose ends that she needed to stitch back together. First up was Jason and his not particularly convincing alibi. She needed to find out if any of his neighbors had noticed him leaving when he was supposed to be cozily ensconced at home with his lovely wife and daughters. "Yes?"

"You're shutting me out of what you're doing because of Todd, aren't you?"

Her face went warm. "I don't know him," she said after a second. Arguing the point seemed like a waste of time.

"But you know me ," he said. Then he said, "Sherry, I love my brother. But I'm not going to tell him anything that you tell me in confidence. I'm a priest. I know how to keep my mouth shut."

For good or evil , Sherry thought. She was feeling uncharitable. She said aloud, "Why are you so interested in knowing what I'm doing, then? You weren't so excited to get involved in my demon problems a few days ago."

He sighed. "I don't want to get involved. But I can't just let an old—I can't just let a woman go talk to murderers by herself without telling anyone where she is. You could be lying dead somewhere and none of your friends would have any idea."

"You were going to say an old lady , weren't you?" Sherry asked, pleased to be able to score a point in the face of Father Barry's otherwise honestly fairly reasonable argument. He went slightly red again, which felt like enough of an admission of error that she could make a concession of her own. "I'm going to talk to Jason Martinez's neighbors first, to see if anyone can confirm or dispute his alibi. He says that he was home all night."

"Then let me go with you," Father Barry said. "He's one of my parishioners. If I ask about him, it will be less suspicious."

"It will be if you ask the questions that I want the answers to," Sherry said, though she had to admit to herself that it wasn't a completely terrible idea. She still wasn't sure that she wanted him tagging along. "If a priest showed up at my house and started asking questions about my neighbor's movements at night, I'd think that either he was a robber dressed up as a priest to case the joint, or that the priest was some kind of weird pervert."

"I would make it sound good," he said. "I'd say—that I was expecting to meet him that evening after dinner to counsel him about something, but I haven't seen him since, and I've been concerned about him. Then I could take it from there."

She considered that. "That sounds like a lot of lying, for a priest. We'll split the difference. I'll say that I'm involved in the investigation, and you wanted to come along as his spiritual adviser in case he's in crisis. Everyone knows I work with the police, and I'll have you for backup in case they don't want things to get back to the cops." That decided, she started marching toward the lake again, allowing Father Barry to trot along if he saw fit. She didn't want to wait any longer.

It was a pleasant walk down to the lake, at least, on the sort of glass-clear spring day when the air felt sharp enough to cut and the light glittered bright enough to dazzle on the water. The little houses that clustered around the lake looked shabbier than usual on this sort of day, with no leafy trees or flattering lighting to soften their flaws. They walked past one house with a collection of weather-faded plastic flowers and pinwheels sticking out of planters by the front door and a listing bathtub near the mailbox; one with peeling siding and a basketball hoop that had lost its basket; and a third that looked sleek and shiny and new, with a bright-red front door and neatly trimmed hedges. New money in town, maybe: young professionals who commuted into one of the nearby cities. In a few more years maybe all the plastic pinwheels would be gone forever.

It wasn't hard to find Jason's house: his rusty pickup was parked prominently out front, and she could see a pink plastic playhouse in the yard half-buried in the snow. Sherry nudged Father Barry to keep up and walked briskly as she passed the house, swinging her arms like a woman out for some afternoon exercise in the cold. Then she doubled back to knock on the neighbor's door.

No one was home. She tried a few more, until finally someone answered: a lady who might have been in her eighties bundled up in a big warm sweater with appliquéd flowers on the front. She gave Sherry the polite, fixed smile of someone who thinks that they're about to be asked to make a donation to something. "Can I help you?" Then she spotted Father Barry and beamed. "Oh! Good afternoon, Father! What a lovely surprise!"

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Sherman," Father Barry said. "It's so nice to see you. How's that ankle doing?"

Sherry tried not to look as impressed as she felt. He was still new in town and had probably about a hundred parishioners: most people wouldn't have been able to match one old lady's face to the right name and medical complaint this early in their tenure as parish priest. That is, if he had matched the right face to the correct failing joint, which it appeared he had: Mrs. Sherman was still smiling. "Oh, just about the same," she said. "Would you like to come in for a coffee?"

"I don't know if we have time today, Mrs. Sherman," Barry said. "We just wanted to stop by because I'm helping my friend Sherry look into something."

"Oh," Mrs. Sherman said, and directed a slightly suspicious glance toward Sherry. "You're the one who does the murders."

Sherry winced. "I investigate murders," she said. She didn't do them. She wasn't that sort of lady.

"We wanted to ask about one of your fellow parishioners," Barry said hurriedly. "Your neighbor, Jason Martinez. It seems like the police might be looking at him for Alan Thompson's murder, and I was hoping that one of his neighbors might be able to say whether or not they noticed him leaving home that night. I want to be able to tell the police that I don't think he possibly could have done it with a clear conscience." He was blushing slightly, but that somehow just made him look even more wholesome and sincere than he usually did. Sherry was impressed all over again. He hadn't even really technically lied .

Mrs. Sherman had the look of a woman who was fulsomely appreciating an extremely sincere, wholesome, and square-jawed young priest. "How nice of you, Father," she said. "I don't know if I can help, though. I don't think I know Mr. Martinez."

"He's one of your across-the-street neighbors," Sherry put in. "A few doors down. The family with the two little girls and the playhouse in the front yard."

"Oh, him!" Mrs. Sherman said. "I know him and his wife to wave to, but I don't really know them. He's in trouble? They seem like such a nice family."

"We hope that he isn't going to be in any trouble," Barry said soothingly.

"We were wondering if you might have noticed him coming and going from the house the Saturday night before last," Sherry said. "It would have probably been between nine and midnight."

Mrs. Sherman was already shaking her head. "I went to bed very early that night. I'd been woken up at four in the morning by the neighbor's dog barking, so I was completely dead to the world by nine. I'm sorry I can't be more helpful."

Father Barry looked somewhat crestfallen but quickly recovered himself. "Oh, no, don't apologize," he said. "I knew it was a long shot that anyone would have noticed anything. People don't just watch their neighbors all night long. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us!"

Mrs. Sherman indicated that it was nothing and that she'd be more than happy for Father Barry to drop by anytime. Sherry cleared her throat. "Just one more thing," she said, and immediately felt self-conscious. She should have come with a raincoat and a cigar. "The dog that woke you up. Does it do that often?"

" All the time ," Mrs. Sherman said. "It's awful. It's one of those little ones, the little things that look like rats. It goes absolutely berserk every time anyone walks past the house. It hates pedestrians. I think it thinks they're all mailmen. There's nothing it hates more than the mailman. Once after a big storm he came to deliver the mail on skis and the thing nearly launched itself straight through a window to get at him. If it wasn't such a tiny dog I'd be scared for the poor man. That dog is malevolent ."

"Like a miniature Cujo," Sherry said. "I hope you got a good night's sleep on Saturday, at least."

"I did. Like I said, I passed out at nine and slept through until morning, which is unusual for me. Usually I'm up and down all night. Things like wind and the birds wake me up."

Sherry said a few polite things about how difficult that must be and how she sometimes struggled to get enough sleep herself, then shamelessly promised Mrs. Sherman, without consulting Barry, that Father Barry would be coming by for coffee soon, which allowed them to leave Mrs. Sherman feeling happy about the whole strange conversation. As they walked away, Sherry could hear muffled, high-pitched yaps coming from inside the house next door.

"Well," Sherry said eventually, "at least we know that Jason didn't walk to kill Alan."

"How?" Father Barry asked. "Wait, don't tell me. Because of the dog? It would have barked if someone walked past the house, and that would have woken up Mrs. Sherman?"

"Right," Sherry said. "Because the dog hates pedestrians. I didn't think that Jason would have walked to Alan's, anyway, though. He has a limp. I don't see why a man who's unsteady on his feet would choose a night with heavy snow falling to walk almost a mile to confront someone who betrayed his trust decades earlier, kill him, and then make history's slowest getaway. It would have been a stupid thing to do, and it would have set off the horrible dog, so it probably didn't happen. If he did it, he would have driven there."

"So we don't know any more than we did before," Father Barry said.

"Sure we do," Sherry said. "We know that Jason definitely didn't leave his neighborhood on foot, which means that if he was involved, someone might have seen a red pickup near the murder scene. That's something."

Barry seemed unconvinced. They knocked on a few more doors, anyway. Only three more people answered: one young man who'd been at work at a bar in Saratoga at the time, a stay-at-home mother to a toddler who'd been asleep on the living room couch while her husband contentedly ignored the toddler dumping an entire bottle of chocolate syrup onto the living room floor, and a furtive-looking teen girl who'd been listening to music in her bedroom for most of the evening and hadn't seen or heard a thing until Barry mentioned that it was connected to a murder investigation, at which point she'd definitely heard someone screaming. By the time they decided to give up and head back to the village, Father Barry was looking a little downcast. "Cheer up, Father," Sherry said. She was feeling surprisingly high-spirited herself. Just being out and about and asking questions made her feel a little more in control. "It's never as easy as you hope it's going to be, but you always end up knowing more than when you started."

"Very philosophical of you," Father Barry said.

"I think so, too," Sherry said modestly. "I have a few more things that I need to look into this afternoon. Will you be tagging along this whole time?"

Father Barry frowned. "Will it involve more interrogating strangers?"

"No," Sherry said. "It will mostly involve the internet."

"The what?" Father Barry asked, and Sherry distracted him by darting toward Jason's pickup truck, which they were currently walking past. Something had just occurred to her. She was crouching down in the snow behind the truck when Father Barry caught up to her. " Sherry ," he hissed. "He's going to look out the window and see you!"

Sherry popped up again, beaming all over her face. She felt triumphant. "That's fine," she said. "If he comes charging out of the house to confront me, I'll just tell him—"

She stopped. Caught herself short. She'd agreed to Barry coming along with her on this particular fact-finding mission, but she wasn't sure how much information she should continue to share. She didn't think that he would intentionally disrupt her investigation, but there was still the problem of Todd to consider. Until she was sure of where she stood with the disreputable Todd, she would have to be careful about what she said to his twin brother.

"What?" Barry asked. "You'll tell him what?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "I mean—I might be wrong. I'll tell you later." Then she took off walking again. Father Barry only badgered her about it very briefly before he gave up. When they arrived back on Main Street, he hesitated. "Are you going to talk to more people?"

"No," she said. "I'm going to the library to do some more research." She was going to go rooting around on social media some more, but it didn't seem wise to bring that up when it seemed that Father Barry still couldn't remember what the internet was. She also planned on going straight from the library to Alan's house so that she could illegally break and enter it again, a plan that seemed somewhat more likely to get her in trouble than spending all afternoon in the library computer room. She thought that she could save Father Barry the worry of having to hear about that part.

"Oh," he said, his shoulders relaxing. "That should be safe, shouldn't it be? I need to work on my homily. I put it off until the weekend last week and was up most of Saturday night trying to finish it before mass. I think people might have been able to tell. It wasn't very good." He looked very anxious at the thought.

Sherry wasn't usually the sort of person who gave spontaneous hugs, but in that moment, she really did want to hug Father Barry. "I'm sure I'll be safe," she said. "Go work on your homily. I'll see you soon."

They went their separate ways. Sherry went straight to the library and walked past a few browsing patrons to enter the computer lab. As soon as she reached the door, they all snapped their faces away in unison, toward a book or a shelf or the floor, anywhere but the door that led to the computers. It was as if the director had shouted, " Action ," and they all had to look away from the camera. It made Sherry's skin itch.

Once she was safely established at a computer with the door closed firmly behind her, she was delighted to discover that Todd had accepted her fake account's friend request on Instagram. She scrolled through his posts. It took a while to get through them: he generally didn't stay inactive for longer than a few days. There was enough information available for Sherry to form what she thought might be a fairly accurate picture of Todd's life. A handsome, charming man with a large social circle but not many close friends. A string of what might be boyfriends or girlfriends, none of them lasting longer than a month or so. Lots of pictures from nightclubs, parks, nice restaurants, charming city streets, and the beautiful homes where he attended dinner parties. No pictures of his own home, which she suspected would be quite modest. No ostentatious displays of expensive purchases. No pictures that showed much of his body except when his being shirtless was appropriate for the occasion: here he was in a candid shot on the beach looking casually gorgeous while laughing with a friend. All very calculated and curated for effect: all very tasteful and pointedly not desperate. Nothing referencing his parents, though occasionally Barry would feature in childhood pictures of the two of them together with captions like, Heading upstate to see this guy or Best friends since before birth . It seemed that Barry's loyalty to his brother was genuinely mutual. There was even one picture of them as adults, with Barry in his priest's collar, with the caption Barry and his evil twin . The comments below were very heavy on the jokes about kneeling, confessing sins, et cetera. Poor Barry: he was like a vegan who was constantly being offered free filets.

She kept digging through the posts. Corey's apartment featured in one, as did the man himself in a group shot taken at some gallery opening from six months earlier. She clicked through to the profiles of the other people tagged in the picture. Nobody stuck out as particularly relevant, until she hit one well-dressed older gentleman with receding silver hair and an impressive set of white teeth. His profile contained a link to his website. MikeKaminskiAntiques.com.

Mike Kaminski, the antiques dealer who had seen Alan on his last day alive.