Chapter Three

Three

For the rest of the afternoon, Sherry attempted to behave herself. This meant that she spent several hours helping patrons with their requests, and no time at all investigating homicides. She always felt a bit guilty for allowing the hardworking taxpayers of Winesap, New York, to subsidize her on-the-clock Sherlock Holmesing. She felt a bit less guilty when one of the pages came to her to inform her that someone had thrown up on the floor of the restroom. At that point she thought that she did more than enough work on behalf of the public, really, and the fact that she wasn't charging them extra for ridding their town of murderers along with helping them with their school assignment about the pyramids was very gracious of her.

Sherry had heard the phrase "The end of the day couldn't come soon enough." It didn't. By the end of the day, she didn't have nearly enough energy left in her to walk home. Fortunately, she didn't have to. It was Friday, and every Friday evening Sherry met her friend Janine at the Temperance Tea Shop on Main Street for their traditional Tea and Gossip. At the moment, Sherry was running late. She ought to just send Janine a quick—

The thought fled her head. She tried to grab hold of it, but it was gone, and a moment later she forgot that she'd had it at all.

The ever-prompt Janine was already seated at their usual table, presiding over two steaming pots of tea and a tiered tray full of tea sandwiches and cakes and scones with the associated accoutrements. Sherry felt herself relax. There was something so wonderfully comforting about a whole tiered tray full of miniature sandwiches and petit fours like little pink and brown birthday presents. It was food that defied anxiety. You were never presented with a tray full of tiny cakes in the face of catastrophe. An elaborate afternoon tea was the emotional antithesis to the canned soups of natural disasters or casseroles of recent bereavement.

Janine, for her part, looked as distant from the grim realities of a homicide investigation as the jam and clotted cream. She was wearing a pair of absolutely enormous red earrings and a very soft-looking cream-colored sweater that Sherry couldn't imagine wearing without immediately covering it in coffee or tomato sauce.

For a moment Sherry found herself wanting to laugh at Janine's outfit, like it was somehow comically out of style. In the next moment she was left feeling baffled by herself. Janine had always been much more stylish than Sherry, and Sherry really had no standing at all to find her clothing choices humorous. Sherry had no standing to critique Janine in general, when Janine was a complete paragon in most ways that mattered. She was the sort of person who demanded adverbs: she never walked when she could stride briskly, and Sherry had never known her to whisper when she could instead confidently declare. Though she was a very kind and generous person, Janine had the sort of naturally pinched and skeptical face that looked as if she would tolerate absolutely no homicidal nonsense. In truth, she had the face of the librarian who hushed boisterous children in old movies, while Sherry herself had the face of the nanny who would give the British children currant buns in one of those old books about boarding schools.

Sherry had barely taken her seat before Janine started to look even more pinched than usual. "Oh, no," Janine said. "Who's been murdered this time?"

Sherry felt a peculiar sinking sensation in her chest. "Oh, no," she said, echoing Janine. "It's terrible, isn't it?"

Their eyes met. There was something strange in Janine's expression. "It is," she said. "Sherry, there's something terrible—"

She stopped. Smiled. Her expression had turned as smooth as an eight ball. "Why don't you tell me about your latest case, Sherry?" she asked, and then poured Sherry a cup of tea and gestured invitingly at the food.

Sherry couldn't remember what they'd just been talking about. Never mind, then. She took a sandwich. "It was John," she said. "Charlotte's husband."

She explained everything that she'd learned, while Janine drank her tea and listened attentively. Janine worked as a counselor and always listened attentively. She was also an extremely practical person who read mostly New York Times –bestselling nonfiction and the occasional Jean M. Auel as a treat, making her an excellent sounding board for murder investigations who only very rarely went off on a flight of fancy about how some woman's husband probably had another woman trapped in a secret room in the basement or buried under the peonies in the backyard. She ate a scone with lots of jam and cream. Then she said, "Do you think that there's a possible financial motive?"

"I don't know," Sherry said. "It's possible. Even if he didn't have very much money, he was the sort of guy who liked to give everyone he met the impression that he did." She considered that while she ate a petit four. "Imagine killing someone for his money and then realizing that he didn't have any money for you to take."

"I can't imagine killing someone for his money to begin with," Janine said. "Or killing someone for any reason."

"Hm," Sherry said noncommittally. She could easily imagine killing someone for any reason. She contemplated murder all the time.

"There's always sex," said Janine.

"Hm?" said Sherry, who was selecting her next treat from the tray. She decided on a salmon sandwich. "What about sex?" Sherry wasn't a prude, exactly, but she always found the mention of sex somewhat jarring out of its proper context.

"As a motive," Janine said. "You said that there's been infidelity in the past. People can do strange things when they're jealous. Or in love."

"In love with John Jacobs?" Sherry asked, her eyebrows climbing upward. "Mad with jealousy over John Jacobs ?"

She could tell that Janine was trying not to smile. " Sherry ," she said, admonishingly. "I'm sure that…many women have been wildly in love with John Jacobs. And he's—he was —younger than us."

"I didn't say that he was old ," Sherry said, and started spreading clotted cream onto a scone. "A head of wilted iceberg lettuce isn't as old as us, either."

Now Janine really did laugh, and then looked guilty about it. " Sherry ," she said. "You're horrible ." Janine was one of the only people in the world who knew that Sherry was horrible. "The man was killed this morning and you're comparing him to wilted lettuce."

"I'm sorry," Sherry said. The words were a bit muffled. Her mouth was as full of scone as her heart was of repentance. She swallowed. "I didn't like John, but he didn't deserve to be murdered."

"John was a bit…difficult," Janine conceded. "He struck me as someone who needed a lot of external validation to feel secure."

Sherry drank some tea. "His mother didn't love him enough, and that's why he cheated on his wife?"

Janine didn't even bother responding to that. "I think that the destroyed paintings are very suggestive, don't you?"

Sherry nodded. "It was personal. Someone was angry with him."

"I thought that, too," Janine said. "But it could also be more specific. The anger could be partly directed at the paintings themselves. Maybe someone who resented John's work, or who had reason to want to destroy certain pieces. What if, say, the person responsible was jealous, and destroyed paintings of other women?"

"You mean Charlotte," Sherry said. "I really don't think that she would." She frowned then, thinking. "I think I need to figure out which paintings were taken or destroyed before I look into anything else. If they were nothing but bowls of fruit and sailboats, then at least I'll know that it was just wanton destruction and be able to start looking somewhere else for clues." Then, satisfied with her decision, she ate a chocolate petit four and asked Janine how the poetry class she'd been auditing was going.

The next day was Saturday, which felt like something of a blessing. Saturday was always a busy day at the library, and at the moment Sherry welcomed busyness. She'd found that after she'd first started on a new murder investigation, a day of hard work helped her to digest all the fresh details like a brisk walk after a heavy meal.

This particular Saturday was a rainy one, so the library was even busier than usual, crowded with damp, furious children and their beleaguered parents competing for space with students and retirees. Everything was louder than it should be, and damper than Sherry would like it to be, and the whole place smelled distressingly like wet dog despite the fact that dogs weren't allowed in the library. The sense of discontent was only deepened by one of the staff reporting to Sherry that someone had taken advantage of the cheap lock on the back door and broken into the library the night before. Nothing had been taken, and it wasn't even the first time that it had happened—the creaky, possibly haunted old library building was an enticing place for bored teenagers to explore with flashlights in the middle of the night—but it was the sort of thing that made Sherry uneasy. She didn't like it when crimes happened in her vicinity that she wasn't personally involved with solving, and the lack of evidence made the Mystery of the Broken Lock a case that was as uncrackable as it was boring.

It was a relief to come to the end of the day, kindly but sternly herd out the last straggling patron, and put the library to bed for the night. She was tired. As she, Connie the assistant director, and an eager teenage page finished tidying everything away, she cast a longing look at her favorite spot in the whole library, with the squashy red velvet armchair and old lamp with the stained-glass shade tucked into it. The corner was at the far end of the nonfiction section, near the door to the room that they never used, so that barely any traffic went past it. Sherry always thought that it would be the perfect place to disappear into a novel for a few hours. Not that Sherry ever had time to sit down and read a novel when she was at the library, but just looking at that chair and imagining herself in it made her feel a bit more rested.

Sherry bid a silent goodbye to the wonderful corner, finished locking up, and walked toward Main Street, her head down against the wind and sleet. It felt as if the elements had set themselves against Sherry personally, slapping at her face and trying to drag her umbrella from her hands. Then the onslaught abruptly eased. She looked up, startled, into the smiling face, enormous gray mustache, and even more enormous umbrella of Alan Thompson. "Need a lift?"

Alan, absurdly, was Sherry's…she wasn't sure, really. The word boyfriend was too ridiculous, and lover would be inaccurate. Gentleman friend , maybe. Alan didn't seem to mind that she was keeping things to the occasional brief kiss after many months of dating. He bought her dinner once a week, and they drank wine and talked about books together, and she never once had to pick up his socks. It was perfect. And here he was now, heroically saving her from the quarter-mile walk to Marino's in the sleet. That was the sort of man Alan was. You could tell from the mustache. It was, Sherry always thought, the kindest mustache she had ever seen.

"But we're so close," Sherry said, even as she followed him to his Volvo and waited for him to open the door for her before she clambered inside. It was toasty warm and perfectly cozy in the car, with the sleet tapping against the windshield and classical music playing on the radio. She felt as coddled and pampered as the people in movies looked when they wore thick white bathrobes in hotel rooms.

"Everywhere is far away when it's cold and raining," Alan said comfortably. "How was your day?"

Sherry told him all about it. He told her about his day right back. Alan was a retired lawyer who owned and managed the little antiques store on Main Street. Sherry found him wildly sophisticated, which she was aware only went to show how unsophisticated she was. She didn't mind. He was the first person she'd ever met who'd spent more than three days in Paris. He knew words to describe wine other than red or white , and he could talk about the sorts of very Important new books she never read, even though she knew that secretly he'd rather read a good Western. He was the sort of man who loved hot dogs and Louis L'Amour, but dutifully had his spinach salad and David Foster Wallace because the proper authorities had informed him that both were good for him. Altogether, Alan was the human equivalent of a subscription to the New Yorker . Her thinking that would mortify poor Alan, of course. He wasn't a snob; he was the sort of earnest, kindhearted, well-to-do liberal who seemed to truly feel terrible about all his money.

At dinner Sherry drank almost half a bottle of wine and smiled fondly at him as he earnestly attempted to solve her latest case. She'd told him all about it over the appetizers, and now he was working over the details in the same careful, lawyerly way that he'd lifted the flesh from the bones of the rainbow trout special he'd ordered for his entrée. "I know that you don't like the idea," he said finally, "but Occam's razor would certainly suggest that the wife did it."

She liked how he talked. He would have been one of the dweebs in high school, but he'd stayed in shape, kept most of his hair, and wore suit jackets with patches on the elbows, and had thereby managed at the age of sixty-five to achieve distinguished . The rules worked differently for women. A young girl had recently called Sherry adorable , and Sherry had decided to take it as a compliment. Maybe she was adorable. She'd recently seen a segment on the evening news about some panda bears at the Boston Zoo that had featured one of them rolling placidly down a gentle slope. It had been extremely adorable. There could be worse things in life than to resemble that panda bear. "I don't make up my mind about my cases ahead of time," she said loftily. "But you're right. I don't think Charlotte did it."

"But no one ever does, do they?" he asked. "No one ever thinks that their friend could have possibly done it. That's why we should look at the facts. Cui bono? In this case, it's almost certainly the spouse."

"If there's much to inherit," Sherry countered. "If it's nothing but debts, won't she be worse off with him gone?"

"Not if he was digging them deeper into a hole," Alan said. "When someone dies in debt, the debts are generally paid out of the deceased's estate. She'll take what remains and be able to start over wherever and however she wants. She's young enough that she'll be able to get away pretty cleanly."

"But why not just get a divorce , then?" Sherry asked. "That's the ridiculous part. This isn't 1865, and she isn't even religious. Yesterday she was telling me about all kinds of things she's done that her mother doesn't approve of, which rules out family pressure to stay married. If she didn't want to be married anymore, why not divorce him?"

Alan frowned. "I don't know," he said. "But I don't think many people commit murder after they've sat down and done a cost-benefit analysis. It might have been impulsive. In a moment of anger. Or she might have been drunk, even."

"I might believe that about a man," Sherry returned immediately. "Women don't usually drink too many beers and then beat their spouses to death for buying the wrong kind of cornflakes."

Alan blinked. "Men don't usually do that, either," he said mildly. "It's been years since the last time I drunkenly clobbered a lady to death over the cornflakes."

She obliged him with a snort, then moodily prodded at her remaining pile of pasta puttanesca. "If it wasn't Charlotte, then who are our suspects? Janine and I both think it must have been personal, but that doesn't narrow things down very much. He was the sort of man who probably made enemies easily. A former business partner, maybe?" She sighed.

Alan took a sip of his wine, considering. "When someone is murdered," he said, "I think that the police look at the spouse first. But then they start wondering about a lover. Could that be it? A scorned mistress or jealous husband might have motive to murder."

Sherry sat up straighter. "You're right," she said. "Charlotte did say that he'd cheated before." She took a sip of her own wine, feeling significantly cheered up by the prospect of a promising angle to pursue that wasn't Charlotte. "I should start looking into where he might have had the opportunity to meet young women." Then she smiled, her brain working faster. "Where he had the opportunity to paint young women."

Alan raised his eyebrows. "To paint them?"

She nodded and reached triumphantly for the dessert menu. "Those paintings that were destroyed," she said. "They weren't just slashed , like you might imagine. They were destroyed . Shredded so badly that you couldn't even tell what the subjects were." All the options looked delicious. "Would you like to split the tiramisu?"

"I'll have a bite," Alan said. "What about the paintings?"

"Oh, good," Sherry said, and gestured for the waiter to order her dessert.

"The paintings?" Alan prompted her once the waiter had left.

"The paintings?" Sherry repeated. "Oh, sorry. It's nothing too earth-shattering, really. Just me speculating. They could have all been nothing but ugly pictures of sailboats. I just wonder whether the killer might have been worried about leaving their own face at the scene of the crime."