So Dale’s resignation was official and I felt just awful about it. I stewed about it all week and on Friday afternoon sneaked upstairs to see Bob Averill. He smiled and shook my hand with both his hands. “Maddy, why is it we don’t get a chance to talk anymore?” I’m sure he figured his horrible week was going to end on a high note, the long-prayed-for retirement of Dolly Madison Sprowls. Instead I dumped Dale Marabout’s resignation in his lap.
His smile sagged. “I heard about that.”
“Not my version, you haven’t,” I said.
He listened to what I had to say. Then he called Tinker upstairs and had me repeat the whole thing to him.
Saturday, May 13
Saturday morning, Aubrey, Eric and I were supposed to drive down to Mingo Junction to check out Sissy’s mystery baby. But at eight Aubrey called me. She was absolutely furious. “They smashed out my windows. Went right around my car with a goddamn sledgehammer or something. Right in the goddamn garage.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Take your pick. Those Nazis cops in the 3rd District who don’t want me writing about their asshole commander. Those crazy Christians who don’t want me to free Sissy. Those pimps who don’t want me talking to their meal tickets. That wacko pal of yours.”
“I think we can rule out Dale Marabout,” I said.
“Do you? I think we can put him at the top of the list.”
“Stop talking crazy.”
“He blames me for his lousy life, Maddy.”
Now I was the furious one. Dale did not have a lousy life. He had a good life. I came very close to telling her that she was the one with the lousy life. I twisted my bangs until I was under control. “I gather this means we’re not going to Mingo Junction today.”
“It means that Eric’s driving. Unless you want to drive.”
I did not want to drive. I did not even want to go.
But I did go.
And I did drive, Aubrey next to me with her knees propped on the dash, Eric sprawled in the back seat with a big bottle of Mountain Dew.
One reason Eric Chen was coming along on this week’s snoopfest was that he and Aubrey had copulated into a couple. They were still in the inseparable stage. The more utilitarian reason was that he was from Youngstown, which is just north of Mingo Junction, in that impoverished southeastern slab of Ohio where nobody in their right mind ever visits.
I would have taken the Ohio Turnpike all the way to Youngstown and then followed State Route 11 down the Ohio River. Eric made me zig-zag along a series of narrow county roads. We went through one worthless town after another. We had lunch at a Dairy Queen in East Liverpool and then picked up Route 7 for our final descent into trepidation.
Mingo Junction is a suburb of Steubenville, if that tells you anything. It’s a very long town, stretched out in the floody flats along the banks of the Ohio River. Small mountains hold the town in like the walls of a prison. The steel mills where people used to work have rusted away. The chemical plants that sour the air haven’t. It’s a poor and depressing place. You understand immediately why people like Sissy James move north to Hannawa.
Aubrey had done her homework. She had a street map of the town and the addresses of the James families living there. Her plan was to go from house to house and simply ask if Sissy was there and then interpret the terror she found in her relatives’ eyes.
The first house we went to was painted the most awful blue. The window casings were painted pink. The lawn hadn’t been mowed in weeks. Aubrey made Eric wait in the car. The narrow porch was lined with plastic Adirondack chairs. A man about my age came to the door. He was wearing a yellowed T-shirt. He had a floppy slice of Swiss cheese in one hand and the piece to a jigsaw puzzle in the other. He glowered at us impatiently.
Aubrey smiled at him like a Girl Scout selling cookies. “Hi-you Sissy’s father?”
“Uncle.”
“I’m sorry-we were looking for her parents.”
“All she ever had was a mama and her mama’s dead.”
“Her mother was your sister then?”
His impatience was replaced by anger. “Go see Jeanie if you got questions. She’s the one Sissy’s thick with.”
“Jeanie?”
He pointed with his Swiss cheese hand. “My daughter Jeanie. Lives two miles down Georges Run Road there. Brown house with a swing set in front.”
“Did you see Sissy at Thanksgiving?” Aubrey asked, as if it were a friendly afterthought.
“Like I told the police when they came-I ain’t seen her in ten years.” He shut the door in our face.
We found Jeanie’s house. It was a skinny two-story, covered with raggedy asphalt shingles and surrounded with overgrown shrubs. There were actually two swing sets in the front yard, an old rusty one and a brand new one with a spiral slide. The porch was covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting. Eric stayed in the car without being told.
A frazzled woman in her thirties opened the screen door. Aubrey asked her if she were Jeanie.
The woman was suspicious immediately. “I am.”
“Has Sissy been here since last Thanksgiving?”
Jeanie’s eyes worked back and forth like a Kit Kat clock as she tried to figure out the answer. Inside the house a television was on and children were screaming at each other. Finally she said, “Who says she was here even then?”
“She always visits at Thanksgiving, doesn’t she?”
Three girls suddenly appeared around Jeanie’s legs. One was maybe seven. The other two in the three or four range. All had red circles around their mouths and big plastic glasses of Kool-aid in their hands. Jeanie slid onto the porch and closed the door behind her. “Who are you two?”
Aubrey introduced us. She told her we were from the newspaper in Hannawa. She also introduced Eric, who had escaped from the car and was now sitting on the lawn with a malnourished cat in his lap.
“We just met your father,” I said.
Jeanie looked at me with empty eyes. “Did you?”
Aubrey got back to business. “I guess you know Sissy is in prison for murder?”
“I do.”
“Had to be a shock, huh? Your cousin arrested for murder?”
“It was.”
“And how did you first hear about it? Read about it? See it on TV?”
The children were banging on the door, wanting out. Jeanie ignored them. “I saw it on TV. I don’t get the paper.”
From the wry curl on Aubrey’s lips I gathered she was not surprised that Jeanie did not subscribe to a newspaper. “But you must have known about it before you saw it on television,” Aubrey said. “News like that would spread through a family pretty fast.”
Jeanie’s face wrinkled with bewilderment, or guilt, or fear, or some other agonizing emotion. Apparently she did not want to tell the truth any more than she wanted to lie. “Sissy told me herself.”
Aubrey was delighted to hear that. “Before her arrest or after?”
“I think before.”
That delighted Aubrey even more. “And she said what?”
“That she’d just killed a man. That it was likely she’d have to spend the rest of her life in prison, if not be put to death. I didn’t know it was that famous preacher until I saw the TV.”
“And she told you to watch after her child?” Aubrey asked.
Jeanie’s once-empty eyes were now cloudy with tears. I gave her the pack of Kleenex from my purse.
“That’s right,” Aubrey continued, “we know about the daughter.”
“Ain’t nobody supposed to know.”
Aubrey pointed with her chin at the children playing inside. “Which one is hers?”
“The oldest girl. Rosy.”
“She doesn’t know Sissy is her mother, does she?”
Jeanie shook her head.
“And when Sissy called you that day-she told you not to say anything about Rosy to the police, right?”
“Ain’t nobody supposed to know,” Jeanie said again.
“So Rosy thinks you’re her mother. And thinks Sissy is Aunt Sissy.”
Jeanie nodded as if she had a hundred girls to raise.
“It’s really wonderful of you,” I said.
She seemed to appreciate that. “What’s one more?” When she tried to give the Kleenex back I told her to keep it.
Aubrey kept pressing. “So, did Sissy visit all Thanksgiving weekend?”
“Just Thanksgiving Day.”
“Is that what you told the police when they talked to you?”
“It is.”
“But that’s not true, is it?”
“Just Thanksgiving Day.”
Aubrey pulled out her notebook and slipped it under her arm. A threat to start recording Jeanie’s untruths for all the world to read. “Let me get a clear picture of this,” she said. “Sissy has a daughter one hundred and fifty miles away. A daughter she aches to see, even if it’s just as Aunt Sissy. And when the four-day Thanksgiving weekend comes, she drives down for one lousy afternoon? Eats some turkey and says bye-bye? Goes home and kills a man?” She pulled out her pen and tapped it on her nose. “She stayed the whole weekend, didn’t she?”
Jeanie watched the pen bounce. “I told the police it was just the one day.”
Aubrey pulled the cap off the pen with her teeth. She held it there like a tiny cigar. “And the police accepted your lie because they didn’t have any reason not to. Because they didn’t know about Rosy. Because they wanted to corroborate Sissy’s confession as fast as they could. Because they’re boneheads.”
Jeanie was crying into her hands now. “Why can’t you believe me?”
Aubrey slipped her pen back into the cap. “Because we’re not boneheads, Jeanie. Because we know Sissy had an alibi for that Friday night. Just like you know it. Because we fucking care.”
Aubrey’s crudeness made Jeanie cry all the more. Because she was not a crude woman. Because she was a good woman caught between the truth she wanted to tell and the lie she had promised to tell. “I care, too.”
Aubrey handed me her notebook and took Jeanie in her arms. She guided her down to the first step and sat next to her. “Who was at your house for Thanksgiving dinner then? Sissy? Your parents? Your kids and your husband?”
“Just me and Sissy and the girls. I don’t have a husband no more and I don’t see my parents any more than I have to.”
“And now you don’t have Sissy anymore,” Aubrey said.
My but Aubrey was good. I was beginning to feel my own eyes water up. I kneeled in front of Jeanie and patted her hands. “Why did you lie for her, dear?”
“Because she was in trouble and I knew she didn’t want that trouble spreading to Rosy. And I guess I figured if Sissy confessed to killing that preacher it was for a reason. I figured she must have been mixed up in it some way.”
None of us said anything for a long time. We just rubbed our eyes and watched Eric play with the cat. The warm May sun was sprinkling across the steps. “Just to get it all straight,” Aubrey finally whispered, “Sissy was here that Friday night?”
“She was.”
“And when the police came to see you, you told them she wasn’t?”
“That’s right.”
“They didn’t press you? The way we did?”
“They was here about five minutes.”
“We know they talked to your father. Do you know if they talked to anybody else? Other relatives? Your neighbors?”
“They just got in their car and drove off.”
“Fucking boneheads,” Aubrey hissed.
This time Jeanie laughed. The weight of the world was off her shoulders. At least some of it was.
We talked with Jeanie for another half hour or so. We told her what we knew of Sissy’s new life at Marysville. She told us about Sissy’s childhood in Mingo Junction. It was not a childhood anyone would want. Sissy was eleven when her mother died. Her mother was with her latest boyfriend, driving home fast and drunk from a bar in East Liverpool, on a black November night, when a bend in a road that had always been there sent them into the Ohio River. Sissy went to live with her aunt and uncle, Jeanie’s parents. It was not long before her uncle started cornering Sissy in dark corners of the house when no one else was around. It went on for years. “He used to bother me like that, too, until Sissy came to live with us,” Jeanie said. At fourteen Sissy started drinking. Got into drugs. Got into beds and back seats with any boy who wanted to. When she was seventeen she escaped to Hannawa, to its strip bars and its by-the-hour motels, finally finding her way to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “I think having Rosy is what finally turned her around,” Jeanie said. “Even if she couldn’t raise her baby herself, she could behave better for her.”
“Being the girlfriend of a married preacher isn’t exactly behaving,” I pointed out.
“It was an improvement over what she was,” Jeanie said.
We headed for home, taking the same zig-zag route we came on. In the town of Wellsville, Eric made us stop at a convenience store for Mountain Dew and Doritos. I bought a little bag of cashews and Aubrey bought some M amp;Ms. The chewing got us talking.
“I can’t believe how easy that was,” Aubrey said, putting one little circle of candy in her mouth at a time.
“Buying snacks is not a difficult thing,” Eric answered. He was putting one handful of Doritos in his mouth at a time.
“I mean how easily Jeanie opened up to us,” Aubrey said, playfully throwing an M amp;M at him. “It makes you wonder who’d be in prison if the detectives who drove down here hadn’t been so eager to get back to Hannawa.”
Eric found the M amp;M in the folds of his shirt and ate it. “What blows me away,” he said, “is that Jeanie lied for Sissy in the first place. Usually relatives lie to keep somebody out of jail.”
“That is odd,” I agreed.
Aubrey threw another M amp;M at Eric. “What’s odd? She owed Sissy that lie.”
Eric retaliated for that second M amp;M by smashing a Dorito on Aubrey’s head. There is nothing worse in the world than young people in heat. “Owed her?” I asked.
Aubrey picked the orange bits from her hair. “You heard what she said-her father stopped molesting her when Sissy moved in. She didn’t suffer because Sissy did. How’d you like to carry guilt like that around?”
Eric wasn’t buying Aubrey’s analysis. “She’s already raising the kid for her. How much guilt could she have?”
Aubrey threw an entire handful of M amp;Ms at him. “Quit having opinions about things you don’t understand!”
Aubrey hadn’t just thrown those M amp;M’s. She’d thrown them hard. Her rebuke hadn’t been playful. It had been loud and angry. In the mirror I watched Eric slide back into the seat and stuff his cheeks with Doritos, already accustomed to her mood swings after only a few days of love. “If Jeanie lied to the police because she owed Sissy that lie,” I asked, “why did she tell us the truth?”
Aubrey pressed her face against the side window. She stared at the passing sky. “She owed her the truth, too.”
We drove along in silence, the playfulness wrenched right out of us from the sadness we found in Mingo Junction. “At least now we know Sissy didn’t kill Buddy Wing,” Aubrey said after several miles. “I can go to Tinker and start working on the story above ground.”
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Tinker already knows about your investigation.”
Aubrey wasn’t at all pleased to hear that. “Who told him? Marabout?”
I could feel my head shrinking down my sweater like a turtle. “I told him.”
She said, “Shit, Maddy!” But it sounded like “ Et tu Brute? ”
I confessed in full: “Yesterday I went to see Bob Averill about Dale’s quitting-”
“Averill knows too?”
“He knows, too. I was explaining why Dale went off his rocker.”
“That he’s jealous of me? Good God.”
“That is not why he quit.”
Aubrey was an inch from screaming. “That’s exactly why he quit.”
“No it’s not, Aubrey. He’s simply afraid you’re biting off more than you can chew.”
Aubrey put an M amp;M on her outstretched tongue and flicked it in like a lizard devouring a fly. “That sounds like jealousy to me.”
Eric laughed at her. “You are so full of yourself.”
“I am not full of myself.”
“Of course you’re full of yourself,” I said. “If you weren’t you couldn’t be doing what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with being-confident.”
Aubrey surrendered. “So if Dale wasn’t driven mad by my brilliant reporting, then what was it?”
I wasn’t about to share my mid-life crisis theory with her. No one her age could possible understand an excuse like that. So I put it in journalistic terms. “You work all those years as a reporter convinced that the editors on the copy desk are a bunch of drooling old doofuses. Then suddenly you’re on the desk. You’re the drooling old doofus. You panic. You embarrass yourself. Anyway, that’s sort of what I was telling Tinker and Bob when I let the cat out of the bag about the Buddy Wing thing.”
I thought I was getting through to her but I was wrong. “This is the most important story of my life,” she said. “I can’t afford this relentless busybody crap of yours.”
She glared at me and I glared back. The car drifted and I almost clipped a mailbox. “You should have told them yourself,” I said.
Aubrey swung her head around and waited for Eric to defend her. But Eric didn’t defend her. He offered her his last Dorito. “Okay,” she said, “maybe I should have said something. But I wanted to be sure about Sissy first. I didn’t want them to think I was some chicky-poo air-head off on some wild goose chase.”
“Believe me,” I said, “nobody thinks that.”