Chapter Nine

Nine

The next morning, Sherry started her day by packing her biggest quilted purse with essential supplies. First, she put in a few ugly plastic rosaries she'd been given at first communions and baptisms and had never bothered clearing out of her junk drawer. Next, she added in some crystals. Finally, she went into the kitchen to fill a few small Ziploc bags with salt and empty out the spray bottle that she used to keep Lord Thomas off the counters. She showed the spray bottle to the cat, who was basking in a sunbeam on the kitchen floor. "I'm going to fill this with holy water," she told him. "So don't get any ideas. I'd like my cat to stay a cat. Any funny business and you're getting the spritz."

Lord Thomas rolled over onto his back to show her his soft white belly. She frowned. Either he really was just a cat again, in which case her little speech was embarrassing, or he wasn't a cat and was actively trying to embarrass her by making her feel as if she'd just been standing alone in her kitchen tough-talking a harmless little kitty like they were a couple of rival mafiosos. She felt her cheeks go warm. Then she shoved the salt and spray bottle into her bag and left.

From her house she went straight to church, where she filled up her spray bottle from the convenient metal container near the font, the purpose of which had always previously eluded her. It hadn't occurred to her to think that it might be there just in case someone had an urgent case of demon problems. Maybe they were required by the church in case of demonic mishaps in the same way that the government mandated sprinklers in restaurants in case of grease fires.

From the church she marched directly back to the sheriff's department, straight past the front desk and into the sheriff's office. Sheriff Brown, predictably, looked extremely irritated. "You can't just barge in here whenever you want, Sherry," he said. "What is it?"

"I'm very sorry," Sherry said, and spritzed him straight in the face with the holy water.

Sheriff Brown made a horrible roaring sound, like something between a T. rex and a garbage disposal. Sherry spritzed him again, more to try to get him to stop making that noise than for any other reason. This time the sound he made was a very ordinary human-sounding squawk. "What the f— hell , Sherry?" he said, with a look in his eye like a man who had sublimated his desire to say a curse word into a more respectable urge to slap a senior citizen. Sherry took a step back. "You can't just— Get out of my office, now !"

"Only if you take these," Sherry said, and shoved two crystals, some salt, and a plastic rosary into his hand. "And promise to keep them on you."

Sheriff Brown looked like a man who was prepared to argue. He opened his outraged mouth. Sherry cut him off before he could start. "Just take them, and I promise that I'll leave and stop bothering you."

The sheriff gave her a baleful look but didn't projectile vomit or try to break his own neck again. Instead, he took the fistful of items Sherry was offering and jammed them into his pocket. " Leave. "

"Keep them on you," she said. "Maybe you should put them in a lanyard or something. Like an amulet."

" Get out before I arrest you ," Sheriff Brown said, and Sherry got out. She couldn't even blame the demonic possession for getting kicked out of the sheriff's office this time: that had been the very ordinary voice of a more-than-ordinarily annoyed Sheriff Brown. She tried not to worry too much that she'd made a mistake by coming by. She didn't want the sheriff to be possessed, but she also didn't want to be on a very not-possessed sheriff's bad side.

The library was just a quick walk away. She went there, more so she could spend a few minutes breathing in the deeply ordinary and comforting smell of the place than for any other reason. Generally, Sherry spent a lot of time disabusing her bookish friends of the idea that being a librarian was the ideal career for a reader: it wasn't as if the county paid her to achieve her goal of finally getting through The Guermantes Way or chatting with her fellow bibliophiles about the latest Jonathan Franzen. Most of the time when she was at work, she was more concerned with keeping the patrons from flushing foreign objects down the fragile old toilet than she was with soaking in the lovely book-drenched atmosphere. Whenever she came to the library on a day off, she found herself startled by how legitimately pleasant a place it was to be.

She wandered through the shelves for a while, avoiding making eye contact with anyone who might want to speak with her, until her feet came to an abrupt stop. A moment later a book jumped off the shelf and landed on her left foot. She'd already been hissing and dramatically hopping up and down for a few seconds of silent agony before she registered which book had just attacked her.

It was a biography of Thomas Cromwell.

For a moment, Sherry considered leaving without the book, just as a way to assert her independence from her demonic overlord. Then she gave in and grabbed it off the ground. If she was going to, in a sense, live with the man, she might as well know a bit more about him than what she'd gleaned from A Man for All Seasons , which was exactly enough to make her think that Lord Thomas Cromwell would be a very funny name for a cat and not a drop more. At the very least she might glean something that she could use to insult him if he tried being rude to her again.

Once she was home, she added the biography to her fast-growing pile of demon-related literature, then went to the telephone to make some calls. First, she called up Janine and managed to make it just long enough for Janine to pick up the phone before she blurted out, "Do you remember calling me?"

"Sherry," Janine said after a moment. "You just called me . I picked up the phone. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Sherry said. "I mean the last time you called me. You shouted at me about how I need to investigate Alan's death."

There was a longer pause this time. Sherry braced herself for denial and an argument, just like how Sheriff Brown had argued with her. Instead, Janine said, "I've been worried about that for days. I remember calling you to find out how you were, and then everything went hazy. I was thinking about bringing it up at my next physical. I shouted at you?"

Sherry, unexpectedly, felt her eyes start to sting. Embarrassing. She blinked a few times. "You did," she said. It came out plaintive. "You didn't sound like yourself. And—" She hesitated, just for a second. Then the whole wild story came tumbling out: Janine's call, and Sheriff Brown standing outside her door the whole night long, and talking to Father Barry and having him witness the absolute madness of what happened at the sheriff's office, and then finally, terribly, humiliatingly, she had to say aloud, in English, to another human being, that her cat had been possessed by the spirit of an extremely rude and even more extremely dead figure from English history.

This time the silence stretched out for so long that Sherry had a miserable moment of wondering whether Janine might have hung up on her in disgust. Instead, Janine said, "Maybe we ought to talk in person."

"Yes," Sherry said immediately, and thought fast. "Eight tomorrow morning at the rectory at Sacred Heart?"

"At the rectory ?" Janine asked. "Why?"

"So that my cat can't spy on me," Sherry said. She felt a little giddy. "Just make sure that you come. I'll see you in the morning."

As soon as she hung up, she picked up the phone again, this time to call Charlotte. She told the whole story again. Charlotte didn't go silent at least. She gasped and groaned and said things like, " Seriously? Oh my God!" that suggested to Sherry that she was taking her story with gratifying seriousness. When people didn't take you seriously, they never demanded to know whether or not you were being serious: they just made subdued noises of agreement as often as possible until they spotted a window in the speeding train of your narrative, jumped out of it, and ran desperately toward the safety of a change of subject.

Then Sherry got to the part about Lord Thomas, and Charlotte started to laugh. "Oh my God, Sherry, you really got me, I thought you were serious! I was sitting here getting goose bumps remembering how you were talking about something wicked coming the other day, like, this is it! So how are you, really? I'm so sorry about your friend, by the way. I wanted to call you, but I didn't want to intrude."

"You could have called," Sherry said, oddly touched. "I always like talking to you. And I wasn't joking."

And there was the nervous silence. Sherry was the one to break it. "I'd like you to meet me at the rectory at Sacred Heart tomorrow morning."

Charlotte started giggling again. "At the Catholic church? So like—in case one of us gets possessed, the priest is nearby?"

"Sort of," Sherry said. "Father Barry's going to be there. Mostly I want to make sure that the cat can't listen in."

Charlotte giggled even harder at that. "Oh, great! I'm glad that's the reason. That's kind of fun." Then, abruptly: "Do you think the girl who killed John was possessed?"

Sherry swallowed. "I hadn't thought of that," she said honestly. "Maybe."

"Oh," Charlotte said. "Jesus. What does that mean, do you think? I mean—should she go to prison? Do you think she really wanted to do it? You can't plead not guilty by reason of the devil making you do it, can you?"

"I don't know," Sherry said. "I think that people try, but it doesn't usually work. Son of Sam didn't get away with it, at least." She swallowed again. "I think we should try to stop the—whatever it is from hurting any more people before we start worrying about the rest of it."

"Not like worrying about it would make a difference, anyway," Charlotte said. "What are we going to do, call up the governor and go, ‘Listen, you might want to sit down, this is going to blow your mind .' Wait a second, is that what you're calling about? You want me to help you fight demons ?"

"I'd like you to help me fight demons," Sherry said. She was blushing. "You don't have to, though, if you don't want to. I don't want to pressure you. But you're one of the smartest people I know around here, and you've been affected by all of this. I thought that you might want to be involved."

"Are you kidding?" Charlotte asked. "I've just been sitting around crying and eating Oreos for weeks now, and you're telling me that I have the option of going full Buffy instead? Even if you're crazy, at least I'll have to put a bra on to help you investigate whether or not your evil cat's trying to kill you."

"I don't think that Lord Thomas is trying to kill me, exactly," Sherry said, in the spirit of fair play. "Mostly he's just tried to boss me around and get me to open cans for him in exchange for telling me secrets, which isn't that different from how cats usually act. But I don't want him listening in on my conversations."

"Understood," Charlotte said. "Makes complete sense. Should I bring anything tomorrow to the demon-hunting society meeting? Do we need…garlic? Stakes? Ingredients for mimosas? Are we doing brunch, or just coffee?"

"The garlic and stakes probably wouldn't hurt," Sherry said. "I've been stocking up on crystals. Every little bit helps, when it comes to demons. And I'm going to bring some pastries." Then she said goodbye to Charlotte and hung up to call Father Barry, feeling markedly more cheerful than she had a few minutes earlier. There was something really bolstering about having Charlotte laugh at her and then promise to come help, anyway. It made her feel as if things couldn't be quite as bad as they felt.

Father Barry wasn't nearly as delighted with her call as Charlotte had been. Mostly he just sounded annoyed that she'd planned to use the rectory as the venue for the inaugural meeting of the demon-hunting society without consulting with him first. "I'm still moving in! There are still boxes everywhere in here, Sherry!"

"Boxes everywhere are better than demons everywhere, Father," Sherry said reasonably. "We won't mind. None of us are the world's best housekeepers, either. I'm going to bring pastries."

"I guess I could make some coffee," Father Barry said sullenly. "Don't expect anything special, though. I haven't even had time to unpack the espresso machine."

Sherry took a moment to marvel over that particular pronouncement before she said, "I don't think anyone will expect a cappuccino, Father. I'll see you in the morning." Then she hung up and returned to her growing pile of library books. She needed to learn everything about demons that she could, with the inaugural meeting of her local demon-hunting society in just a few hours.

···

Sherry arrived at the rectory the next morning a few minutes after eight. "I'm so sorry I'm late," she said, as Father Barry ushered her into a completely spotless living room with no evidence of so much as a packing peanut anywhere in sight. "There was a line at the bakery." She deposited her greasy bags of doughnuts and Danishes on Father Barry's gleaming coffee table and then blinked at Charlotte, who was seated on his couch dressed in knee-high boots and some sort of cargo vest, and drinking what looked suspiciously like a cappuccino. "Uh. Good morning."

"Good morning!" Charlotte said. "Do you want a coffee? I was just showing Barry how to do some latte art."

"She's so talented!" Janine said from her spot in a nearby armchair.

"I found the espresso machine," Father Barry added, and then trotted off. Sherry made strained small talk with Charlotte until he returned in triumph with a foamy little drink in a dainty little cup, and there was a bit of collective exclaiming over how well he'd made the foamy little tulip on top.

"Well," Sherry said, after the excitement had died down. "I'm glad to hear that you've all been enjoying yourselves." It came across, she was afraid, less than entirely sincerely. "Are we all ready to get started?"

"Oh, definitely," Charlotte said. "I'd like to call this meeting of the Village Library Demon-Hunting Society officially to order!"

Barry waved his hand a little. "Shouldn't it be the Rectory Demon-Hunting Society?"

"Definitely not," Charlotte said. "We're a nondenominational organization. And, anyway, our fearless leader's the librarian."

Everyone looked at Sherry.

"Er," Sherry said, suddenly self-conscious. "Right." She sat down on the couch next to Charlotte and went digging into the bag of doughnuts for a moment to buy time. She picked out a chocolate glazed. Then she said, "Well. I guess—the problem is that we have a demon in town. Or an…ancient spirit, I guess. My cat has been calling it just her . I think I've bought some time with her by promising to investigate Alan's death, but that's not really a long-term solution to a demon infestation. I thought that maybe if we all got together, we could come up with some ideas about how to stop her."

"Honestly," Janine said, "I'm only here because I'm worried about you, Sherry. I know that you're upset about Alan, of course you are, but you can't let yourself get sucked into some wild conspiracy theory." She looked at the other two for confirmation. "Right?"

There was a moment of silence. Janine frowned. "You two aren't in on this, too, are you?"

Father Barry cleared his throat. "I know that I might be, uh, expected to take a certain stance, professionally. But I was with Sherry when she went to see the sheriff the other day. I guess that there could be some other explanation for what happened, but I'm not sure what the explanation could be ." He looked unhappy. "I do trust that God won't give me anything that I can't handle, but I definitely wasn't hoping for demons. It just…looks like it might be demons."

"I believe her, too," Charlotte said abruptly. "I've been thinking about it since Sherry called yesterday. There's been weird stuff happening to me for a while now. Like right after John died. I found his body, and the cops came, and the next thing I knew I was at the library asking Sherry for help. I guess I just thought that I blacked out for a second from the shock. But—no offense, Sherry—why would I go to some lady I've only met a few times before I called my own mom to tell her what happened? It was like something was making sure I followed the script. And my lawyer friend I called hasn't been able to make it here this whole time. Every time she tries, something crazy happens to keep her away. Last night her car caught on fire. Like, it just blew up in the parking garage. It doesn't make any sense."

"That's not evidence of anything," Janine said. "This is all just a bunch of confirmation bias. I believe you that you can't remember much after you found John's body, Charlotte, but I think that your gut was probably right originally when you thought that it was just the shock. Our memories are incredibly fallible, especially when it comes to trauma. And your friend not showing up when you needed her is awful, but sometimes people are just flaky. I know someone whose fiancé left her at the altar in 1987, and as much as I'm sure she would have preferred thinking that the devil made him do it, I'm pretty sure that he was just a jerk."

"Wow, condescending !" Charlotte said.

"Janine," Father Barry said, "I don't mean to be rude, but you have three completely sane people all suddenly telling you that they think that we might be having"—he flushed—"demon problems. Couldn't you at least consider the idea that we could be right?"

" No ," Janine said. " Come on , Father. This is exactly how people join cults." Then she swallowed. "There has to be a logical explanation."

"So we'll figure it out ," Sherry said. "Let's say that this is some sort of—mass psychosis that's making people in Winesap kill each other and also making the three of us think that maybe it's because of some evil spirit. Do you know anyone who might be able to help figure that out? Call them up! If we can solve this mess with therapy and medication, then I'd rather have that than try to play Van Helsing. I can barely bend over far enough to weed my tomato beds. I'm not exactly prepared to fight the armies of darkness."

"I don't know if any therapists are qualified for this situation, Sherry," Janine started.

"Why not?" Charlotte chirped. "Because it's supernatural , maybe?"

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," Father Barry murmured.

"I'm Jewish," Janine told Father Barry, in the same tone of firm but polite warning that she usually used to tell waiters that she was a pescatarian. Then she sighed. "I have a colleague who wrote his dissertation on culture-bound syndromes."

"Great!" Sherry said, triumphant. "Give him a call. He can study us!"

"Not if the demon is keeping people out of Winesap," Charlotte said. "If it wants Sherry solving the murders, then it makes sense that it would keep my friend out, right? Like, if I was a demon trying to do my demon thing in a town, I would do it like in The Truman Show . Put a big bubble over the whole place. Otherwise you'd get people wandering in and going, like, wait a second, what's going on here? What's with all of these murders? Why hasn't anyone gotten the FBI up here? Shouldn't there be a Republican running for governor talking about how he's going to crack down on the upstate violent crime wave? It doesn't make any sense that we've got a murder rate like the apple farmers have been forming cartels to ship coke over the Canadian border and no one's noticed ."

"Hm," Sherry said, and then looked toward Father Barry. "Has the bishop gotten back to you?"

"Well," Father Barry said after a long moment. "No. But that might not be…a demon problem. Exactly." He cleared his throat. "Sometimes he ignores my calls."

" Barry ," Charlotte said. "Did you piss off the bishop ? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything!" said Father Barry. "I mean—I think I might have frustrated him a few times by mixing up my heresies. And I might have called him a little often when I first got here. But I needed advice! And there's also, uh." He cleared his throat again. "Todd."

Charlotte looked like a woman watching her new favorite reality show. "Ooh, Todd ?" she asked. "Who's Todd ?"

"My brother," said Father Barry, with a nearly imperceptible sigh. "I introduced him to the bishop's niece, and he brought her to Cancún. She apparently had a really good time."

Everyone in the room except for Charlotte winced. Charlotte looked delighted. "You have a brother who takes nice Catholic girls to Cancún? Older or younger?"

"Twenty minutes younger," Father Barry said. "And yes, before you ask, we're opposites but still close, just like the twins on TV. We talk on the phone almost every day. He's not a bad guy . He's, uh. Figuring things out."

"Oh my God," Charlotte said. " Identical? "

Father Barry looked pained. "Yes. Can we please stop talking about Todd?"

"We don't have to talk about Todd," Sherry said. "Listen, I have an idea. How about we all try to contact someone from outside of Winesap to ask for help? It would be killing two birds with one stone. If none of them get back to us or can make it here, then we can probably assume that Charlotte's right about this being like The Truman Show , and we'll know that we have to figure this out on our own. If they do get back to us, then we'll have some extra help, which will be even better."

Janine was frowning. "Won't the sheriff object to you bringing in a bunch of outsiders, Sherry?"

Sherry's cheeks warmed slightly. "We don't have to tell him," she said. "And he's kicked me off of the case. Or at least—he's gone back and forth between screaming at me to investigate and telling me to stay away from him, so I've decided to investigate independently for now." She lifted her chin a little. "If you don't feel comfortable with that, then you don't have to help."

"I don't feel comfortable with any of this," Janine said, and then sighed. "I'll call some colleagues."

"I've got a friend who's a witch," Charlotte said. "Just as a side hustle, I mean, not full-time in a cottage in the woods. She's a project manager for a management consulting firm. I could call her and see if she knows anything about evil spirits."

"She probably knows a lot of them in management consulting," Sherry said.

"I don't know how I feel about working with a witch ," Father Barry said. "I'm sure that your friend is, uh, a good witch, but it's all dabbling with the same bad stuff, isn't it?"

"Oh, come on, like the Catholic Church has this amazing record of not being evil," Charlotte said. "She's not going to open up a gate to hell or something. As far as I know, she mostly just burns herbs in people's apartments after they get dumped to get rid of the bad ex-boyfriend energy."

"She sounds like a lovely young lady," Sherry said firmly. "You should call her. It's all hands on deck in a crisis, Father. And I'll…keep investigating. That's what the…spirit thing wants me to do, and I don't want to push it too much. It got a bit…threatening the other night." She suppressed a shiver. For all that she'd been sassy at her cat—it was just a cat , for God's sake—she couldn't erase the memory of how she'd felt while she was hiding in her bathroom and listening to that monstrous voice howling just outside her door.

"Don't you have anyone to call, Sherry?" Janine asked.

"No," Sherry said, and then blinked. "Well—maybe. I'll think about it." She didn't know anyone with expertise in evil spirits, but the question had made her think of one person who owed her an extremely major favor. She didn't want to call her, though. Her stomach tightened up from guilt just thinking about it. She drank some more of her fancy coffee and took a big bite of her doughnut. Then Charlotte piped up again.

"I think that we should all be equipped with stuff to protect ourselves," she said, which launched the whole group into a fairly spirited discussion of rosaries, holy water, garlic, salt, rowan wands, et cetera, until even Janine was lobbying in favor of the usefulness of her collection of anti-evil-eye charms brought back from Grecian vacations. This devolved, over the next few minutes, into discussion of vacations in general. Father Barry, unsurprisingly, had spent a lot of time in Italy.

Sherry drank her coffee and ate her doughnut, letting the sound of the conversation wash over her. It was comforting, for a second, to be able to imagine that a group of competent adults had taken over and would solve everything for her. Then she finished her cappuccino, licked the last fleck of chocolate off her thumb, and stood up. "I should go," she said. "I have to keep investigating. Thank you all so much for meeting with me."

"Wait," Father Barry said. He fidgeted slightly in his chair. "I know the coroner. I could ask him to meet you. In case there's anything that you need to know about the body. About Alan's body, I mean."

Sherry flushed. Alan was dead, but it still felt indecent to talk about his body. "Thank you, Father," she said. Then she said her goodbyes and left. She needed to go to Alan's house.