O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,105
when the burglaries in the colony had occurred. Then she looked at the deposit dates. They hadn’t seemed to follow any particular pattern, one in late July, two in August, another two in September, three in October, four in November. But now that she’d compared them with the dates of the burglaries, she could see that they started very soon after the first one and increased in frequency as time went on.
If it had been physically possible, Sweeney would have kicked herself. Why hadn’t she gone to ask Charley about the book when she had given it to her? She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of leaving it for Sweeney if she didn’t know or at least suspect why it was important. Sweeney was starting to have an idea of what it might be that Charley could have told her.
Sherry answered the door in her bathrobe. She looked as though she’d just gotten up and her face clouded when she saw who it was.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Sherry, is Charley here? It’s really important that I talk to her.”
“If you talk to her, are you going to tell the police and get her arrested?” Sherry turned around and went into the house, leaving the door open. Sweeney followed her inside. She had been cleaning. The hallway smelled of lemons; wood surfaces gleamed from a recent dusting.
“I know it must have looked bad, but all I can tell you is that I had no idea that Carl was going to get arrested. In fact, I don’t think Carl had anything to do with your mother’s death and I think Charley might be able to help me prove it.”
Sherry looked up at that. “She went for a walk. I got her a puppy, a couple of days ago. Carl had promised her one for Christmas. She took him out for a walk, to get him used to his leash.”
Sweeney had to resist screaming at her, “Why did you let her go alone?” Instead she said, “I’m going to go out and look for her, okay?”
Sherry nodded. “She just went for a walk,” she said, as though trying to convince herself.
She started across the back field, calling out Charley’s name. It was almost noon, and the sun was high above her, offering a little welcome warmth as she ran. She made a wide circle and came out by the cemetery, yelling for Charley all the while. But no one answered back.
Sweeney was about to turn around when she saw the entrance to the path through the woods. It was steep as you went down to the river. Suppose Charley had been walking and slipped. She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck and started into the woods.
When she reached the point where the path veered off toward the river in one direction and Birch Lane in the other, she started calling out Charley’s name again. Her voice echoed across the river and back again. “Lee-Lee-Lee-Lee,” it mocked her. A chickadee scolded her from a low-hanging pine tree and she watched it flit across the path, land and scold her again.
The path was slippery beneath the new layer of snow and she had to go carefully so she didn’t fall. She was almost to the studio when she saw the puppy. It lay on its side about thirty feet below her on the riverbank, its body half-buried in the snow, its head twisted back grotesquely, and she knew it was dead without going down to see.
It was five or ten minutes before she found the small form, curled into a fetal position beneath a spruce tree, the Christmasy, wonderful smell filling the air. Sweeney saw the red of her coat before she saw that it was Charley and she stopped, afraid to discover what had been done to her. She remembered the way Sabina’s eyes had stared up at her, the unnatural way her body had fallen.
But when Sweeney leaned over her and touched the bloody gash on her forehead, Charley’s body jerked a little and her eyes opened once, fixed on Sweeney and shut again. She had wrapped Charley in her own jacket and picked her up before she remembered about spinal cord injuries and not moving people who had fallen. Charley’s body was limp, but when Sweeney touched her skin, it was warm and she breathed as though she were sleeping, rhythmically and steadily. Sweeney felt the warm moistness of it against her neck.