Chapter Twenty-Seven

Twenty-seven

The next few weeks were very, very strange, despite being the most ordinary weeks that anyone in Winesap had lived through in years.

She woke up in the hospital, feeling groggy, nauseous, and as if more time had passed than she would have preferred. It was very dark outside, and Father Barry was asleep in a chair in the corner. She tried to clear her throat, which turned into a cough, which made her head pound. Father Barry woke with a small start, looked toward her, and sighed. "You're awake!"

"So are you," she said. "How long was I out?"

"Just a few hours," he said. "Asleep, not unconscious. You were awake when I brought you here. They think you have a concussion, so that's probably why you don't remember."

She'd expected, You lost a lot of blood . She'd remembered the blazing heat and the stickiness of the blood on her shirt. She pressed a hand to her chest where she remembered having stabbed herself with the yew wand. It was a little tender, maybe, like there might be a bruise there. She blinked at him. "What happened, exactly?"

He hesitated. "I told the hospital that I was waiting for you to get your things together in the next room, then heard a crash, and went in to find you on the floor. They said that you probably fainted from low blood sugar and banged your head. You were…acting confused, so they decided to keep you overnight for observation."

"Acting confused," she repeated. "Do you mean—"

"Talking about how you'd stabbed yourself to get rid of the demon," he said.

"Oh," she said. Her face was warm. "You just said—what you told the hospital. Was that the same as what actually happened?"

He gave his head a quick, hard shake. "There were voices," he said quietly. "Not just you. There was someone else." He paused. " Something else. I couldn't open the door, even though you hadn't locked it. Then we heard this—horrible howling sound, so I kicked the door in."

"Wow," she said, smiling despite its making her head hurt more. "Charlotte must have liked that."

Father Barry turned pink. "She probably would have liked it better from my brother," he said, and cleared his throat. "They were here earlier, by the way. Charlotte and Janine. Then they left to go get your cat and some of your things from your house. Janine said she had a key. You're not supposed to exert yourself too much after a concussion, so we don't want you walking up and down that hill for a while. Janine said that you can stay in her spare room for as long as you need, and Charlotte has volunteered to take the cat if he's too much for you."

"He's no trouble," Sherry said. "As long as he doesn't talk." Then she went abruptly teary. "You're all being so nice."

"We're your friends," he said, and then smiled slightly. "And this sort of thing is technically part of the job description."

"That's true," she said. She felt as if she was slurring again. Her eyelids were drooping. "Ministering to the possessed. And the dispossessed. After you've exorcised them."

"Is that what dispossessed means?" Father Barry asked. He stood up. "Get some sleep, Sherry. Janine will come get you in the morning, and I'll stop by to check on you."

"In the morning," Sherry mumbled, and fell asleep.

When she woke up again it was the morning, and a nurse desperately wanted to check her blood pressure. She permitted the woman to do so. Then Sheriff Brown walked in, holding his hat in his hand. He looked…different, somehow. Sherry wasn't sure if she could put her finger on how, exactly. Relaxed , maybe. Or maybe at ease . Like a seasoned performer who had finally reached the end of a long run of a particularly grueling show. "Sherry," he said. "I just wanted to let you know that we've cleared up the source of the poisoning."

"The what?" Sherry asked, baffled.

"You know," Sheriff Brown said, in the tone of voice of a man who really, truly needed Sherry to know. "The poisoning. The"—he paused for a fraction of a second—"ergot poisoning."

"The ergot poisoning," she repeated. "You mean—"

"Yes. The bakery got a delivery of tainted flour. And you know how popular those doughnuts are. The whole village lost its mind. We all thought—"

"That all of those people had been killed?" Sherry asked, her heart giving a leap up toward her chin.

"Oh, no," Sheriff Brown said hurriedly. "No, they're, ah, they're definitely dead. They died in the bus crash. Remember? That terrible bus crash?" Something in his expression caught and held her. Please , it seemed to say. Please, say that you remember the bus crash.

"Of course," Sherry said, after she took the moment she needed to bite down on her cheek to keep herself from crying. "The—bus crash. With all of those people from Winesap on it. They were going…"

"Down to the city. To see a Broadway show."

"Right," Sherry said. "Of course. Alan did love going to see shows. How silly of me to have forgotten. It must have been the bump on the head. And then we all thought that there had been a string of murders? Because of the…ergot poisoning."

"Exactly," Sheriff Brown said. "It was all just a series of tragic accidents. It'll take a while to get it all sorted out. All of those people who I—who were arrested."

"Of course," she said. "But it will all get sorted out?"

He gave a firm nod. It seemed to her that he was blinking less than he normally would. "Yes, definitely. Since it was all down to the bus crash. Followed by the mass hallucination caused by ergot poisoning. The prosecutor's office is already working on it. They'll all be exonerated. There will probably be some sort of payout from the state, even."

"Good, good," Sherry said, and then looked him in the eye. "Isn't it nice. That there was such a tidy explanation for all of this, after all."

He looked straight back at her. "Yes, Sherry. It's very nice. I'm very glad that we won't need to look into any of those deaths any further. It's all over now. We can leave it alone."

"Right," she said. "I understand. Thank you for coming to see me and letting me know. About the source of the poisoning, I mean."

"You're welcome," he said, and put his hat back on. "And, Sherry—thanks. To you, too."

A bit of an impish impulse seized her for a moment. "What for?"

He gave her a long look. "For your donation to the police athletic league fundraiser. That was a really generous check. It will make a real difference to the kids."

She smiled despite herself. "Oh," she said. "You're welcome."

"Goodbye, Sherry."

"Goodbye, Peter," she said. She supposed she would have to write that check once she went home.

···

Her friends kept all their promises. Janine came to pick her up as soon as she was given the green light to leave, and Charlotte came by with Sir Thomas in his cat carrier a few hours later. The doctor at the hospital who discharged her had told her that she needed full rest for the next few days, body and brain both, so that was exactly what she did. It was wonderful that doing exactly what she felt at a bone-deep level she needed to do was now medically necessary.

On the first full evening of her doctor-ordered convalescence, she was enjoying a post-dinner doze—she had eaten wonton soup while sitting up in bed, which had felt like a level of decadence worthy of an unusually louche Roman emperor—when she was jolted awake by a familiar voice very close by her ear. "Are you awake, Mistress Pinkwhistle?"

Sherry said something that, if it could be spelled, would probably be spelled something like " Unggblaughah?! " and sat up again. Lord Thomas was sitting at the foot of her bed. He was wearing a green ribbon tied in a bow around his neck. She stared at him for a moment, goggle-eyed. "I am now," she said finally. "How did you get that ribbon on your neck?" She hadn't put it on him.

"I wear this ribbon in celebration of your great triumph against the Ancient One!" the cat said in a voice so plummy you could use it to glaze a duck.

"Oh," Sherry said. "That's nice. But how did you get it on ?" For some reason this was, at the moment, striking her as the really pressing point.

"By various methods," the cat said airily. "And now, thanks to our mutual efforts, I am free of her influence!"

"Oh," she said again. "That is nice. I'm happy for you." She meant it. The possibly evil spirit of possibly actual Lord Thomas Cromwell had, despite her best efforts, grown on her a little, in the same way that a shockingly pink mold had grown over a casserole that she'd put off clearing out of her fridge over the past few frantic weeks of demon hunting. All sorts of strange things could change in your life while you were fighting evil spirits. "What will you do next?"

"I will slip this mortal form and disport myself among the fairy folk, for a time," Lord Thomas said.

"… Oh ," Sherry said cautiously. "Like…a vacation?"

" Yes! " Lord Thomas said, and started kneading his little paws on her duvet. "How prettily you put it, Mistress Pinkwhistle! I shall go on vacation ."

"That's great," Sherry said sincerely. "I hope you get a nice tan. So you won't be in my cat anymore?"

"I will vacate your cat entirely, so that you may stroke him at your pleasure," Lord Thomas said. "Although," he added, "if you have need of me, you need merely call my name with true intent, and I shall fly to your side. I now owe you a modest debt, Mistress Pinkwhistle."

"Should I call Lord Thomas Cromwell ?" Sherry asked, feeling very clever, "or your true name?"

The cat's voice changed then. The silly TV-movie-Tudor voice disappeared. Its voice now was a hiss and a meow, a mouse's dying squeak and the rustle of tall grasses. "You may not have my true name, mistress," it said. "But call me with intent, and I will come. Farewell to you, Mistress Pinkwhistle, giver of tuna cans, scratcher of ears, opener of the kitchen door to release me from my bondage."

"Goodbye," Sherry said. Her cat gave a slow blink. Then he rolled himself up into a ball and went to sleep. She watched him for a while. Then she went to sleep, too.

The next few days passed in the same way. She lay in bed, and listened to quiet music, and petted Lord Thomas's soft, warm sides until he stretched and purred. He didn't have a single rude thing to say. Why would he? Cats couldn't talk, after all. No one was murdered. An utterly horrified Janine demanded to know who'd been letting her leave her house in shoulder pads and bright-blue eye shadow. Sherry stopped ever seeing Charlotte without a cell phone either in her hand or very close to it. It came to Sherry's attention that, in the usual course of things, running the library involved a shocking number of extremely boring budget talks and board meetings that the demon had apparently dispensed with as not essential for plot purposes. Winesap went about its business like a nice, sleepy little rural town should.

Eventually, Sherry was well enough to move back into her house and get back to ordinary things again. She worked a few shifts at the library (poor Connie was still tasked with all of the meetings, for now), beat back the new spring weeds that were starting to sprout in the garden, and made a few cautious ventures into Alan's house to attempt to start organizing his things. She reached out to Eli to find out if he or his children wanted anything from the house. He didn't reply, so she did her best to start sorting out the things that might have sentimental value and organize them tidily away into the basement. She'd told herself that she didn't want Alan's house, that she'd never move in, but that was a lie. It was a beautiful house, it was much closer to the library, and it had been left to her by someone she'd loved. She could admit that now. She'd loved Alan, in her own way, and he seemed to have loved her back. It was too late to have realized it. It was something, at least.

One morning, as she sat in her living room dawdling over a cup of tea and a novel, her old landline started to ring.

That was strange. Ever since the demon left, everyone had gone back to using their cell phones as if they'd never stopped, even though she'd had to exchange numbers with her newer friends. Father Barry sometimes texted her memes, which she always found funny even when she didn't get the joke, because a priest sending memes reminded her of the time she'd seen a small dog in Manhattan wearing four tiny red leather shoes. Probably because of its lack of capacity to send memes as well as call people, her landline had been quiet for days. But now it was ringing. It was a number she recognized. Once she'd left the fog that the demon had created, she'd been able to search the internet to try to find where the number she'd used to call Caroline was from, and had learned that the number was from Eastern Europe: further research suggested that she might be using an internet service for calling and changing the country code to mask her location. It was a comfort, in a way, to think that whatever Sherry's best friend's flaws had been, the woman had never been stupid.

She answered it. On the other end of the line, Caroline said, "Sherry? Is that you?"

Sherry was lucky that her landline's cord was long enough for her to sit down hard in her armchair without pulling it out of the wall. She did so. "Caroline?"

Caroline gave that familiar laugh of hers. Her laugh that said they were both in on the joke. Then she said, "Wow, Sherry, I've missed you."

"I've missed you, too," Sherry said. "That's why I called. I've been thinking about you all the time. I know you probably don't want to tell me too much, but—how are you?"

That was all it took. It wasn't surprising, really. Caroline had always loved to talk about herself, and she'd always taken it for granted that Sherry would listen in wide-eyed fascination to every word that she said. And she wasn't wrong about that, was the embarrassing thing. Sherry always had orbited Caroline like a wayward bit of space station. Not now, though. Not exactly. She was listening as attentively as ever, but she wasn't letting herself get caught up in the narrative as Caroline spoke, as much as she would have enjoyed letting herself sit back and be swept away with the dark river, and the thick rubbery leaves of the trees, and the sudden shock of a macaw against the sky. Caroline talked about music, and rice and beans with a view of the beach, and meeting hippies and travelers and American retirees who'd settled in the same place that she'd chosen.

Caroline was very careful not to name a single person or place, but Sherry had expected that. Sherry listened. Sherry asked questions. Do you ever sit on the beach to watch the sunset? I hate how dark it is here all winter. Is it any brighter there? Does it rain much? Have you had any trouble communicating with the locals? She also took very, very careful notes. The way that Caroline described the monkeys. How long it took her to walk to the beach, and how long into town. The types of bars and restaurants she mentioned. The distance she had to travel to get to a store that sold the kinds of foods she missed from home. Sherry wrote it all down, as quickly and precisely as she could, until eventually Caroline stopped mid-sentence and said, "Oh, God, I'm going to be late! I'll call you back soon, Sher. Love you!"

"I love you, too," Sherry said to the dead air on the other end of the line. Caroline had hung up on her. Then she packed up her notebook and headed down to the library.

The computer room was open again, and constantly bustling now, full of people industriously scanning family photos or printing out boarding passes in preparation for their long-anticipated first trips to Italy or Cancún. It felt nice, somehow, to be able to walk past that now always-open door and go straight to the books. Travel guides, encyclopedias, atlases, and books on the tropical rain forests. It didn't take long to start narrowing things down. Everything had already pointed to Costa Rica, and everything that Caroline had said only confirmed that assumption. She could watch a sunset from the beach, so the west coast, and the proximity to the beach and presence of certain types of monkeys eliminated any highland areas. The amount of rainfall eliminated one popular expat destination, and the relative sleepiness that Caroline described knocked out another.

From there, she moved to the internet, where she refined her search further. This was where things got grueling. She'd had to pay very close attention to the things that Caroline had said that were likely to be core facts and not lies. How long she rode her scooter to get to the shops. The general size of the neighborhood she went to when she wanted to chat with other Americans. The types of food served at her favorite restaurant, and the drinks at her favorite bar. Eventually she managed to narrow the possibilities down to a few likely options. Then, before she logged out of her computer to give a library patron a chance to use it, she looked up a phone number.

Detective Daniel Ortiz sounded tired when he answered the phone. Sherry resisted the urge to be too apologetic for disturbing him. "Detective Ortiz? This is Sherry Pinkwhistle. You probably don't remember me, but you interviewed me six years ago about the Howard Hastings murder case. I was friends with his wife, Caroline."

Detective Ortiz sounded instantly more alert. "I remember you, ma'am. How can I help you?"

"I just wanted to tell you," she said, "that I've managed to speak to Caroline on the phone. I think she's living in Costa Rica, probably somewhere along the Whale Coast. There's one town in particular I think is the most likely option, but there are also a few other possibilities if she wasn't being completely accurate about the place."

"Wait, hold on a second," Detective Ortiz said, and there was a brief pause. Sherry imagined him searching a cluttered desk for a pen. "Okay. Where?"

Sherry listed off the names, which she'd neatly written down in her notebook. Detective Ortiz thanked her. "If she calls again, let me know right away."

"I will," Sherry said, and said her goodbyes and hung up before sitting back in her chair. She wasn't sure exactly how she felt. A little guilty, maybe. A little guilty, and vastly, enormously relieved. She hadn't truly realized how heavy it all had been until it was gone, and now, suddenly, she was free. She'd gone back to that first murder case. She'd done her best to really, truly help solve it. Now it was someone else's problem to deal with. Maybe she was a bad friend. Maybe Caroline had never deserved such a good one.

She left the library and started heading home. The little rented house was still home, for now, but the walk was pleasant. Somehow, without her noticing, spring had truly arrived. There were tulips in people's front yards. The sight of them made her think of something.

She called Janine first. "Would you like to go down to Albany with me?" she asked.

"Why?" Janine asked.

"I want to get takeout from a restaurant someone told me about and have a picnic in the park and look at the tulips before the crowds get there in a few weeks and the petals all fall off," Sherry said. "Will you come?"

Janine agreed. So did Charlotte, who agreed to go before having even been told what the plan was, and so did Barry, who extracted a promise to also go to the food co-op so he could buy some very expensive-sounding ingredients for a very complicated-sounding recipe he'd been wanting to make.

The picnic all organized, Sherry retrieved the wad of cash that she'd gotten from Caroline and kept hidden away for all these years. She put it into an envelope, which she addressed to Alice's mother, with a brief, anonymous note saying that the money was to be spent on Alice's little girl's education. Next, she went to the bank and withdrew the exact same amount from her own account, money that she'd saved up over the past few years of quietly working in Winesap and punishing herself for what she'd done wrong. It was hers, earned fairly: she had nothing left to feel guilty about. Or maybe she did. All those people who'd spent months in jail because of her investigations, all the people she could have saved by taking their deaths as seriously as she should have instead of as if it was all an elaborate game. It was strange, though: she couldn't work herself up to the shame that used to come so easily to her. Maybe Sheriff Brown was right. Maybe it really was all over. Or maybe Barry was rubbing off on her, and she was just ready to forgive herself a little. She tucked the money into her purse. Then she called a cab.

A few hours later, she was driving off the lot of the local used car dealership in an ancient sea-green Cadillac. It was the sort of car that her ex-husband would have thought was an embarrassing thing for an old lady to drive around in. It was the sort of car that Sherry would have been embarrassed to buy. Not anymore. She was done with that now. She needed a car, and she liked this one, so now this one was hers.

Her friends' reactions told her that she'd made the right decision. When she beeped the horn outside Charlotte's apartment and Charlotte saw the car, she gave a gratifying little scream of delight, like a character in a movie. Barry patted the hood and beamed at it like it was a friendly dog. Even Janine, when she saw it, gave a big, startled smile and said, "How fun!" before she climbed into the passenger's seat. Then they set off all together, the windows rolled down to let in the breeze and very modern pop music that Sherry was pleased to not recognize playing on the radio. She'd had more than enough of staying in Winesap and listening to only the timeless, inoffensive music that that demon had allowed to be played. She wanted to be lost, and baffled, and fully aware of being completely out of touch and behind the times. "Is this what the kids are listening to now?" she asked aloud more than once when something particularly terrible started to play. She loved every second of it.

When she finally found a parking spot near the restaurant, Janine gave her a skeptical look. " Here? " It was, admittedly, not the most glamorous-looking stretch of street.

"Here," Sherry said firmly, and got out, with Barry jumping out to tag along and help her gather up all the bags of containers from the friendly young man behind the counter. The restaurant was fairly spartan inside, with white walls and round tables topped with lazy Susans, but the smells wafting out of the bags made Sherry's mouth start to water. She'd ordered what had felt like half the menu, or at least everything that she thought that they realistically might be able to eat on a blanket in the park: dumplings in chili oil, dandan noodles, cucumber with garlic sauce, spicy beef tongue and tripe salad: as many of the things that she could think of that Alan had told her about while thinking that she'd never tried anything like it before. He'd wanted her to experience something new and good. This could be that, in a way. She'd eaten Sichuan food before, but not from this restaurant, with these three friends, while looking at tulips in the park on a nice late April afternoon.

She drove them to the park, and they walked to a spot by a bank of frilly pink and orange tulips with a good view of the fountain behind them, with its imposing Moses striking water from the rock. They scooped food onto paper plates, and Sherry poured prosecco into enamel mugs she'd found in Alan's camping supplies as everyone started to eat. There were exclamations over the food: there wasn't anything like it closer to Winesap. Janine, who hated having to look for parking and rarely ventured into any of the local cities, asked, "How did you even find that place?"

"Alan told me about it," Sherry said. "He'd been wanting to bring me there for a while, but he never had the chance."

Everyone went quiet for a moment. Sherry passed around the camping mugs. "To Alan," she said, holding up her mug of prosecco.

"To Alan," her friends said back. They all clinked mugs. Janine was the first to speak up. "I know that I didn't know him as well as you did, Sherry, but I remember back when Alan first moved to Winesap—"

They just talked about him for a while, then. About Alan, but also about Winesap, and all the strange, horrible, unreal things that had happened that they hadn't been able to think about too deeply. Sherry laughed a lot, then got a little teary. She ate too many noodles and drank exactly the right amount of prosecco. Eventually, the conversation shifted to other things: the vacation to southern France Janine was planning, and the dinner party Father Barry had invited them all to. (There would, he promised Charlotte, be eligible bachelors present, though his brother wouldn't be among them. The police hadn't been able to directly tie Todd to the cocaine ring, but he'd been lying low at a friend's goat farm in Vermont, anyway.) Charlotte waxed enthusiastic for a while about her plan for a new exhibit in the gallery featuring work made by inmates at the women's prison not far from Winesap. Then, abruptly, she said, "Hey, Sherry? Remember my witch friend I told you about? The one who got in the car accident and helped me bless your necklace?"

"Of course," Sherry said. "Poor thing, how is she?"

"She's fine," Charlotte said, taking a sip of her drink. "Insurance ended up paying for most of it. I had a really weird conversation with her the other day, though."

"Weird how?" Sherry asked, immediately interested. Charlotte lived in Winesap. At this point, they all had a high threshold for weird.

"This is going to sound crazy," Charlotte said.

"Not to us," Barry said, just as Sherry said, "Really?" and Janine gave a skeptical "Hm!"

They all laughed. Charlotte laughed, too. "Yeah, okay. So, she knows about the Winesap stuff, right? Like, I've been keeping her up to date, so she knows about everything that happened, and about you, Sherry, and how you kind of fixed everything. And the thing is, she's friends with a, uh, coven of witches in New Orleans, and they've all been sending her messages saying that they think there's…" She winced slightly, and said, almost apologetically, "A vampire? Attacking people around town? And she was wondering if maybe you'd be able to…consult with her a little? About what you do when you have…"

"Demon problems?" Father Barry asked.

"Right," Charlotte said. "Some serious -sounding demon problems."

Familiar -sounding demon problems, Sherry thought. Not in the vampire aspect, but in how thematic it was. Cozy murder mysteries in a quaint little town in rural upstate New York. Vampires in Louisiana. Until next time , the demon had said.

She shouldn't get involved. She didn't need to get involved.

"I don't know anything about vampires," she said slowly. "But…"

Charlotte leaned forward slightly. The water trickled in the fountain. A squirrel chirped in a tree above them. A big brown pit bull made an enthusiastic lunge for their picnic before abruptly being hauled back by his extremely apologetic owner. There were so many beautiful things in the world to enjoy that had absolutely nothing to do with murder, mystery, or disturbing occult plots.

And yet.

"But," Sherry said again. Her heart was beating a little faster. She had expected more time to pass before the demon creature showed up again, but here it was. It hadn't come to her this time. It had chosen somewhere far away for its new playground, and it hadn't invited Sherry. She wasn't the sort of sexy leather-clad figure that would fit into the southern gothic vampire romance or urban fantasy genres that she suspected her demonic friend was riffing off this time. Too bad. The demon had wanted a sweet old lady to star in its cozy mysteries. It had ended up with something else. "Things always slow down a little at the library, at this time of year," she said, and pressed her hand lightly to her chest, where she'd been ready and willing to stab herself in the heart the last time she'd kicked this obnoxious demon's ass right back to where it had come from. "And I'm sure we have some good books about vampire myths and New Orleans history. I might have a little time to do some extra reading."