Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-three
Sherry frowned at the screen. It wasn’t such a massive coincidence, really. Todd knew Corey. Corey was Alan’s son and did some work purchasing art for his antiques store. Mike Kaminski was a regular customer at said store, and both of them were involved in the wider world of art and antiques in New York. It was reasonable to think that they could have met at some point, running in such similar circles. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of normal social behavior that Corey could have brought Todd to a party where Mike Kaminski also happened to be in attendance.
It wasn’t a massive coincidence, but it was still a striking coincidence.
She clicked through Mr. Kaminski’s website for a while, not really sure what she expected to find. A section of the shop for murder weapons, maybe. Something that would clarify things a little. Instead, all she found was a niggling sense of unease that she was forgetting something. It bothered her. She frowned her way through a few more sections of the website. She was scrolling crankily past first a selection of rewired midcentury table lamps, followed by some admittedly nice-looking area rugs, when it hit her.
The website didn’t feature a single figurative drawing.
It was, yet again, far from damning. There were a fairly limited number of items on the website, clearly far from Mr. Kaminski’s entire inventory, and the fine art selection was particularly slim. Still, on reflection, it was strange. Mr. Kaminski had a very clear personal sense of taste that came through in what he was offering for sale: lots of bold geometric shapes and saturated colors, and everything on a scale that would fit into only the largest of Hudson Valley summer homes. Here was an enormous Bakelite and chrome ceiling lamp, and there was an abstract impressionist canvas selling for almost five thousand dollars that would take up the better part of Sherry’s living room wall. Nowhere was there anything like the modest little charcoal drawing that Alan had liked enough to bring home from the shop and hang on his own living room wall. Which was strange, because Alice had specifically mentioned Mr. Kaminski being annoyed that the set of drawings was missing one picture.
Sherry pulled out a notebook from her bag, returned to Instagram, opened up the profiles for each of the three men, and carefully noted down their movements on the days directly surrounding Alan’s murder. Then she carefully checked for any other social media accounts and did the same, before scrolling further through the accounts to confirm that certain details lined up correctly. She followed links from profile to profile, googled names, and looked up records. An hour passed, then two. She was beginning to feel as if she had an idea of how it all fit together.
Next, she looked up the telephone numbers for several restaurants and bars in New York City, introduced herself as working with the Winesap Sheriff’s Office, and asked if they could confirm that certain groups and individuals had been in their restaurants at the times in question. Finally, she called Mike Kaminski himself. He remembered her and was as helpful as ever, readily providing her with the names and numbers of some of the friends he’d been with on Saturday night and emailing her a picture of his receipt. That seemed to settle his location on the night in question but did nothing at all to clear him of involvement in whatever else the three of them might have been up to. She had a suspicion that there was a very neat explanation to many of the odd coincidences she’d been running into, but there was only one way for her to know for certain.
She really hoped she wasn’t going to get arrested for breaking into what was technically now her own house.
Sherry had successfully left the computer room without accidentally causing a break in the fabric of reality—the library patrons all looked away again when she exited, as if she’d left the bathroom not only with her fly down but also with snakes for hair—and headed to the circulation desk. There was one last thing that she wanted to check before she headed to Alan’s house, and it was in the file of cards for books that were currently checked out. She went immediately to the 700s, the arts-related section, and hit what she was looking for almost immediately: Alan had checked out multiple books on fine arts and art appraisal before he died, including one hefty encyclopedia of American artists of the twentieth century.
She wrote down the names of the books in her notebook, then headed for the exit. She’d almost made it out when she was waylaid by Mary, her elderly volunteer and favorite gossip provider. “ Sherry ,” she said. “I’m so sorry about Alan. He was such a wonderful man.” Mary and Alan had both been involved with the local historical society, and Mary had known Alan for longer than Sherry had.
“Thank you,” Sherry said. “He really was.” She was a little surprised that she still believed that. He’d been terrible at his job as a defense attorney and had fled his hometown in shame when he’d been found out, had lied to her about his wife, had spoiled his youngest son past the point of no return, and might have mismanaged his business so badly that he hadn’t been able to figure out an extremely serious problem with its operations until it was too late. He’d been kind, though. A weak man, maybe, and an incompetent man, almost certainly. Still, he’d been kind. It was more than you could say for lots of people.
“I’m sorry to bring up gossip at a time like this,” Mary was saying now—though she didn’t look very sorry—“but you’d asked me to tell you if I heard anything else about the priest and Mrs. Walker.”
Sherry, who’d been glancing toward the door, perked up immediately. “He’s been back? Did Karen say something to you?”
She nodded. “She said it was the strangest thing. For years now Mrs. Walker has only ever asked people over in the afternoon to sit by her bed and have tea. But two weeks ago she apparently was up and about trying on some of her nice old dresses, and then she told Karen that she was having a guest over for dinner on Saturday night and she wanted a full dinner like she used to have for guests with courses and wine. It was the priest. He came over at seven, and Karen said that he stayed for hours. She went to bed at almost eleven and he was still there. Mrs. Walker practically banished her from the room after she was done serving, but Karen could hear her just laughing away until late. She was talking about what a wonderful time she had with him for days afterward. Isn’t that strange? A priest coming to visit an old lady is one thing, but laughing and drinking wine with her until midnight?”
“Very strange,” Sherry agreed. Another piece of the puzzle nestled right into its proper spot. “Thank you very much for telling me. That was very helpful.” Then she left, hurrying on to her next destination.
The key to Alan’s house was, remarkably, still under the gnome.
It really did seem as if some responsible person should have removed it by now. There it still was, though, glinting gold in the late afternoon sun. She let herself in, then started to search. She was much more systematic about it this time, now that she knew what she was looking for. First, she went to his expansive bookshelves and hunted through them for a while—Alan was very tidy, but he had absolutely no organizational system in place for his books—until she found the art books he’d checked out from the library. She pulled them out to look through them. No notes detailing his worries, alas, but lots of scraps of paper stuck between various pages to mark his place. This artist or that one. There was no clear pattern that Sherry could see. That didn’t make it any less suggestive, in Sherry’s mind. He hadn’t just been trying to inform himself about art appraisal in general. It seemed to her that he had very specific things that he was trying to look up.
Next, his living room wall. The cowboy drawing. She took it down from its hook and looked at it more closely. Nothing immediately struck her, until the name in the cramped signature in the lower right corner caught her eye. The same as one of the names Alan had bookmarked. He’d been wondering about the provenance of his beloved new piece of art, just before he died. She checked the book again: the artist himself had died decades earlier.
She gave the drawing a gentle shake. Nothing. She turned it over to examine the frame. It was clearly very new, with fresh paper covering the back. No sticker from the shop that had done the framing work. Corey’s work, most likely. She was picking delicately at the paper with a fingernail to see if it would come off when a shadow went past the window.
Sherry, absurdly, hit the floor. A moment later someone knocked on the door and called out, “Is someone in there? I’m calling the police!”
Sherry cursed quietly to herself and waited for the neighbor—she was fairly certain that this must be the same neighbor who had recorded her crimes on his security camera—to leave. Once he’d walked off, she shoved the library books and the drawing into her enormous bag and headed for the back porch. She’d be able to escape more discreetly that way. She was passing through the porch when something caught her eye, and she paused. Alan kept some of his outdoor things back here. A couple of cheap plastic sleds that his grandchildren played with when they came to visit. His snowshoes, two pairs: one old-fashioned wood-and-leather pair that he’d told her that he mostly kept for sentimental reasons—they were heavy and bulky to use—and the modern aluminum-and-plastic set that she knew he used regularly for his long winter tromps through the woods. Next to the snowshoes were two pairs of skis and one pair of ski boots.
Odd.
She leaned down and, as quickly as she could, tried to fit one of the boots into the bindings for each pair of skis. One clicked into place almost immediately. The other wouldn’t, no matter how much she wiggled it.
She straightened and looked around. There were no other ski boots on the porch. There was no more time to hunt for the missing pair, though: she had to go. She hurried back toward the library. It was after five now, so it would be closed, and if Sheriff Brown was looking for her, he’d look for her at home first. That gave her a little extra time. She felt as if finally she was in her element again, as if her brain was working right, as if she was, once more, the kind of amateur detective that she liked to read about in books.
She got to the library, let herself in, and went straight back into the computer room. She made a few last checks and took notes of what she found. She needed to be sure that she wasn’t missing anything or mixing anything up. She took apart the picture frame, just to confirm exactly what she’d already been convinced was true, and put it back together again. She was about to try to pull off something ridiculous, something outrageous, something that she’d never done before. Something that she was very sure would catch her demon friend’s attention.
She went to the front desk and started making phone calls.
It took her a while. She didn’t have the numbers for everyone she wanted. Alice, first, that was easy. Charlotte and Janine. Father Barry, who had Todd with him. She asked Todd to please contact the Thompsons. She called the diner and asked for Jason, shamelessly pretending that she was more formally associated with the police than she was to make sure that his boss would let him come in. Then she called the actual police.
“Sherry,” Sheriff Brown said. “I was just at your house.”
“I know,” Sherry said. “I thought you might have been. I’m at the library. Could you please come here? In about”—she checked her watch—“thirty minutes?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Why?”
“To make an arrest,” Sherry said.
Another pause. “Of who? You?”
“No,” Sherry said. “Well, maybe, if you want to. For trespassing. But I want you to arrest Alan’s murderer.”
He sighed. It crackled through the receiver. “You’ve found him?”
“I really hope that I have,” Sherry said. “If I haven’t, you’re going to be the least of my problems. Are you going to come?”
“Do I have a choice?” Sheriff Brown asked, and then hung up before she could come up with anything snappy to say in response.
Sherry sat in the comfortable chair near the computer room and tried not to fidget too much. She always got horribly nervous right before she pointed her finger at someone and said, “ You .” There was always the same sickening lurch in her gut right as she named her suspect aloud for the first time, like the moments just before the roller coaster went over the first drop, when she inevitably, desperately thought, I wonder if they’ll stop the ride if I scream .
They wouldn’t stop the ride, of course. There were things that you just had to see through once you started them. This thing she was doing tonight was one of them. She’d started it off, and now she had to ride it all the way to the end.
There was a knock on the closed library door. Sherry answered it. It was Janine. God bless Janine. Sherry had been icing her out of the investigation a bit—she was just so skeptical —but of course she was the first to arrive when Sherry needed her. Now, having had the realization that the demon had trapped them all in a strange time warp, Sherry could suddenly recognize why she’d sometimes had the confusing urge to laugh when she saw Janine: while everyone else’s outfits seemed to tend toward the blandly timeless, Janine was purely, delightfully late eighties: today she was wearing enormous white earrings and a turquoise turtleneck under her long white coat. Sherry gave her a big hug. “I think I’ve done something pretty stupid, Janine,” she said into Janine’s shoulder. She smelled like fancy old-fashioned perfume.
Janine hugged her gently back. “What did you do?”
“Called all of my suspects and asked them to come here,” Sherry said. A small, hysterical little laugh escaped her chest. “Not you , you’re moral support. Most of the rest of them are suspects. I’m pulling a Poirot.”
“A what?” Janine asked, and pulled back to look at her. A moment later her heavily shadowed eyes went wide. “Oh, no. You mean the part at the end? When he calls everyone together and explains who did it?”
Sherry nodded. Janine sighed. “I really hope you know what you’re doing, Sherry. Did you ask the sheriff to be here, at least?”
“I don’t,” Sherry said. “And I did.”
Janine gave Sherry a look that told her exactly what she thought of Sherry trying to be clever. “So he’s coming? That’s something. We don’t want to end up with bodies in the library.”
“That was a Poirot, I think,” Sherry said, with another helpless giggle. “Or a Miss Marple? I don’t remember. But I’ll try to make it the opposite. No bodies in the library this evening.” No bodies in Winesap, either, she hoped, if she managed to accomplish what she wanted to tonight. “Tea?”
She made two big pots of tea in teapots that were still rattling around the office from last year’s garden party, spurred on by a bizarre compulsion to be a good hostess despite what she was planning. She set the tea things up in the meeting room. The rest of her guests and suspects started trickling in. Father Barry arrived, and Alice. The Thompsons showed up in one cautious bunch, with Todd there to lead them. Charlotte arrived and planted herself close to Sherry’s side. Jason came in, looking baffled and anxious, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Then, finally, the sheriff arrived, slipping quietly into the room as if he was hoping not to be noticed.
For a moment after he’d arrived, Sherry just stood there like an uncomfortable plus-one at a wedding. Then she pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “If you could all head into the meeting room in the back, please? Thank you.”
They all shuffled in a murmuring mass into the back and took their seats; all except Jason, who leaned against the wall close to the door like he wanted to be prepared to make a fast escape. Janine sprang into action to help Sherry pass the teapots around. Some people refused it with looks of dramatic disbelief that anyone could drink tea under these circumstances, but others filled their cups. There was a muted clinking of spoons. Corey was the first to crack and speak. “What exactly are we doing here, Miss Pinkwhistle?”
Sherry gave a smile that she hoped looked calm and confident rather than like the bared teeth of a submissive chimpanzee. “I know that it’s a little strange,” she said, “but I’ve asked you all to come here today because one of you killed Alan Thompson.”