One
Sherry Pinkwhistle woke up to the deep silence of snowfall, cozily ensconced in the warmth of her bed and the knowledge that she had just solved another murder.
She'd woken up five minutes before her alarm-it was 6:55-and she wanted to stay in bed for a while longer than she usually would, just for the sake of luxuriating a little. A treat. A thank-you to herself for a job well done. It was no good, though: Lord Thomas Cromwell came into the room at exactly two minutes past seven and started shouting for his breakfast, and there was nothing for Sherry to do but get up, push her toes into her warm slippers, and start her day.
Sherry didn't like to think of herself as a dull person, but she did like to stick to her morning routine. Lord Thomas Cromwell had his breakfast-a half can of salmon-flavored wet food: he was on a strict vet-ordered diet (Sherry was as regimented about Lord Thomas Cromwell's health and fitness as she was lax about her own)-before she started the coffee. While the coffee was brewing, she went out to fetch the paper. Then she made her egg (soft-boiled) and her toast (with lots of butter) and poured herself a cup of coffee before sitting down at the kitchen table next to the window to have her breakfast.
While she ate, she read the paper and watched the snow fall onto the pine trees in the woods past the garden, with Lord Cromwell curled up comfortably in her lap and purring with all his fat, warm strength. It was an early April morning to meet expectations, with the boldest crocuses sitting up straight to spit in the eyes of the snowflakes. In just another few weeks she would be able to start working in her garden again. A few months after that there would be sunflowers, and the deep-green smell of tomato vines, and she'd sit at the kitchen table in the evenings working on new little houses for the fairy garden that she'd started building two summers ago. Maybe she'd add in some toadstools. When she was a little girl, she'd spent a lot of time hoping to spot a fairy in the inhospitable environment of her suburban backyard. After she'd grown up and gotten married, her husband had always rolled his eyes at her being whimsical. Now she was getting old, and she lived alone, and she could have all the toadstools that she liked.
Sometimes, when she was working on her fairy garden, she would think of her best friend. They had had their fairies-and-witches phase together and had tried to make potions out of dirt and berries they'd found in parks and carved magic wands out of twigs long after they both should have grown out of it. Neither of them had ever really grown out of it. Or maybe Caroline had, by now. Sherry hadn't spoken to her in years.
She tried not to think too much about Caroline.
She returned her attention to the Winesap Herald. The murder was on the front page, of course. prominent local realtor arrested for business partner's murder. There was no mention of Sherry's involvement. Sheriff Brown tolerated her helping out with his cases, but he wasn't interested in sharing credit for his arrests with the local librarian. That suited Sherry just fine. She didn't help him with his cases because she wanted fame and glory. She did it because she was good at it.
Sherry took her time with the rest of the paper, paying particular attention to whether or not the advertisement she'd taken out for the upcoming library bake sale had been printed correctly. It had been. She also took note of a cello recital that she'd like to see in Albany. Then, finally and reluctantly, she read the national news. She always read the national news so that she'd be a well-informed person, but she'd noticed more and more recently that she had trouble remembering any of it. The world's affairs seemed very far away, in Winesap.
Once she'd dispensed with the paper and cleaned up after her breakfast, Sherry got washed and dressed and battled fruitlessly with her crop of wild graying cowlicks for a minute or so. Sherry generally thought of authors as powerful and mysterious creatures, like Olympians, but if she ever met one in person, she would feel compelled to speak to her kindly but sternly on the topic of hair. There seemed to be a general agreement among authors that unruly hair was a sign of a free-spirited and artistic nature, as if zaniness was extruded through the follicles. I'm afraid, Sherry imagined saying to the author (who would have very tidy blonde hair in a chignon and be wearing a cream-colored silk blouse), that I'm not free-spirited and artistic at all. I'm very cautious and conventional. I clip coupons for laundry detergent out of the monthly mailer, have only ever slept with one man, and never learned how to appreciate poetry. My hair just comes out of my head like this.
It occurred to her, abruptly, that this was a distinctly zany thing to think about. Maybe the authors were onto something.
Sherry gave up on her hair and bundled herself in all her warm winter things. It was just about freezing outside, which wasn't particularly cold, as early April went. Sherry was a sturdy Upstate New Yorker now, firmly removed from her soft and vulnerable Floridian youth, and prided herself on her ability to be scornful about any temperature above zero degrees Fahrenheit. Besides, the sun was out. She passed a few evergreen bushes still clinging on to bright-red berries that stood out like exclamation points against the dark greens, whites, and grays of the landscape. They were the sorts of berries that she and Caroline would definitely have put into their potions when they were little girls. They had a wicked look to them, like something that would poison a princess in a fairy tale. Snow white, bloodred, Sherry thought, and the branches of the trees as black as ebony. She assumed they were, at least. She'd never known what ebony actually looked like.
A few brave jays and chickadees were shouting salutations or obscenities at each other as she walked across the road and down the long gravel driveway to Alice Murdoch's house. Like Sherry's own driveway, Alice's driveway was snow covered except for a narrow walking path that ran down the left side, and would remain so until she had a guest who needed a place to park. When they'd first met, they'd bonded over the fact that they were two of the only people in town who didn't own a car.
Sherry rang the bell, as usual, and as usual waited for a long time in the screened-in porch for Alice to emerge. The porch was even more cluttered than usual. There were more pairs of skis and snowshoes than Sherry remembered having seen on Friday morning, along with several paper shopping bags from the local grocery store, what looked like an egg incubator, and, inexplicably, a large plastic cat carrier. Alice didn't own a cat. Sherry considered what she might be doing with the carrier. In the sort of book that Sherry felt somewhat embarrassed to admit to reading, Alice would have trapped a boggart in it.
Eventually Alice appeared, her fine blonde hair so full of winter static that it floated in the air between her shoulders and her hat, which was bright blue with a pom-pom on top like something that had been made for a small child. She was already apologizing. "I'm sorry, I just turned on the TV and saw about the murder on the news. Was it you again, Sherry?"
Sherry responded modestly. "It wasn't me, really. I just noticed a thing or two that the detective hadn't quite gotten to yet, and pointed them out to him. He did all of the rest."
Alice nodded, not taken in for a second. Everyone in town knew that Sherry was good at murders. Sherry appreciated the recognition, if not the phrasing. "I knew it," Alice said. "I knew it had to be you. Oh, wait a second," she added, and retreated back into her house. She reappeared a moment later with a lumpy little something wrapped in foil that she thrust into Sherry's hands. "Banana bread," she said. "I couldn't sleep, so I got up early to bake it."
Alice wasn't usually the most domestic kind of girl. Generally, she reminded Sherry of a small, damp animal that someone had just found huddled under their front porch and brought inside, despite the animal clearly not understanding how it was supposed to be behaving inside a human home. There was something feral about her, not in the sense that she might lash out, but in the sense that you worried that if you made too much eye contact she might hide under the couch and refuse to come out again. If she was a character in a book, she would be the housemaid who became hysterical when the police spoke to her but calmed down in the soothing presence of Miss Marple. She was the sort of person who normally had the baking done for her by concerned motherly types, rather than doing the baking herself, and the fact that she'd made banana bread to share with Sherry felt somehow as momentous as when a stray cat consented to being petted.
"Thank you," Sherry said, touched. Then she tucked the banana bread into her big quilted bag-it was more than big enough to accommodate her lunch, two paperbacks, and a loaf of banana bread, and much more practical than the sort of little purse that she'd almost managed to convince herself that she'd enjoyed carrying when she was younger-and they started to walk down the hill together toward town.
Alice had moved into the ramshackle little house across the road from Sherry's cottage three years earlier, as an even younger, thinner, and more terrified-seeming girl with a few dollars in cash, a giant bruise on her left cheekbone, and a recently revoked driver's license. Sherry hadn't asked any questions. Instead, she'd spent a few weeks bringing Alice casseroles and the local paper folded to the want ads. Soon enough Alice had gotten her job at Alan's antiques store, and they'd been walking into town together almost every morning since. The antiques store opened at ten, but Alice liked to sit in the library in the cozy corner near the door to the locked room that they never used and read before work. Sherry suspected that she didn't particularly enjoy spending too much time at home alone.
They always had nice chats on their morning walks. This morning, they talked about Sherry's latest murder case. It had been a particularly tricky one: the perpetrator, Mr. Wenchel, who was the victim's partner in a real estate firm, had met his victim in an empty house by posing as a potential buyer under an assumed name, and had created an alibi by hiring a man to pretend to be him at the state real estate association's annual dinner. Sherry had only managed to figure out the ruse when she spoke to the other dinner attendees and learned that "Mr. Wenchel" had blundered an extremely basic point of real estate law while chatting with a colleague during the cocktail hour.
They arrived at the library at exactly fifteen minutes before nine, and Sherry unlocked the doors with the specific blend of anticipation and resignation that she always felt in the few quiet minutes before the library opened in the morning. Soon there would be patrons asking for her to find "that book by that lady who was on Oprah a few months ago, it had a blue cover, I think?" and old Mr. Agnes getting snippy with Connie the assistant director over an interloper in his favorite chair, and children smacking each other over the head with the Little Golden Books. Soon there would be a prolonged hunt for a collection of local maps from the late eighteenth century, and little girls all bright-eyed over their newfound power to use their very first library cards to check out the complete works of Louisa May Alcott, and long meetings about an upcoming series of evening performances by local folk musicians, and the particular pleasure that came of turning the circulation desk over to her staffer Beth in order to take a peaceful twenty minutes to drink hot plastic-scented tea from a thermos and eat an egg salad sandwich. Soon there would be all those things, but for now there was peace and quiet, and the smell of old paper and ink, and the hum and click as the fluorescent lights came on one after another and the library woke up for another deliciously monotonous Friday.
Alice retreated into her favorite nook by the nonfiction section to read-she was in the middle of a self-improvement phase at the moment, which made Sherry miss the endless Jodi Picoult of last winter-and Sherry finished making her rounds to turn on the lights and make sure that no one had left anything disgusting in the reading room. Then she went to the circulation desk just in time to answer the first phone call of the morning.
The day went on mostly as usual, with a bit of additional chaos introduced by a new library page who had mis-shelved all of last month's periodicals into the wrong parts of the back volume section. Then, finally, it was time for lunch and the relative peace of the sheltered area behind the circulation desk where Sherry was hidden from view by the corkboards where she posted announcements. She had just taken her first bite of egg salad sandwich when she heard someone calling her name. "Sherry! Sherry, are you back there?"
Copyright © 2024 by C. M. Waggoner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
