Monday, July 3
Aubrey started calling Marysville at a quarter to eight Monday morning. She was hoping that some efficient soul in the warden’s office would pick up the phone before starting time. She did not want Tish Kiddle talking to Sissy before she did.
At three that afternoon she was still trying to get past the voice mail. At five she finally spoke to a real live person and made her request for a visitation.
TV 21 did a follow-up story on its six o’clock, news. Tish had nothing new, just old footage of Buddy Wing staggering backward into the fake palms. “What are the police saying?” anchorman Bill Callucci asked Tish as she stood in the empty parking lot at the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “Well Bill, in an exclusive interview with TV 21, Hannawa Police Chief Donald Polceznec told us exclusively that his department has no plans to reopen their investigation-at this time.”
“So they might reopen it in the future?” asked anchorwoman Jamie Stokes.
“That’s clearly a possibility,” Tish answered.
“And you’ll keep us posted?” Bill Callucci asked.
“Will do,” answered Tish.
Tish’s lazy reporting delighted Aubrey. Tinker, too.
Aubrey’s story for Tuesday reported that while police stated publicly they had no immediate plans for reopening the case, the Herald-Union had learned that Chief Polceznec had asked the department’s top homicide detective Scotty Grant to review Tim Bandicoot’s statements to see if a further investigation was warranted.
Tuesday, July 4
Having to wait out the holiday drove Aubrey crazy. But actually it was something of a blessing. It gave her a long, uninterrupted day to start writing her series. I spent the day at home, weeding and napping, and after the sun went down, listening to the dogs in the neighborhood bark every time some damn kid lit a cherry bomb.
Wednesday, July 5
After a long day of furious writing and frustrating phone calls, Aubrey finally heard from the prison. “Sorry,” the woman in the warden’s office said. “Sissy James does not wish to see you at this time.”
Aubrey went immediately to Tinker, who immediately took her upstairs to see Bob Averill. An enormous decision had to be made. Should the paper go ahead with a full-blown series as planned? Without Sissy’s admission that she didn’t kill Buddy Wing? Or would it be wise to scale things down? Run a story here and there? Over the months pile fact upon fact like a many layered Dobosh torte, until the police were forced to reopen the case?
During their meeting, Bob excused himself on the pretense of having to use the restroom and called me in the morgue. “This is very important, Maddy. When you went with Aubrey to Mingo Junction-you personally heard Sissy’s cousin say that she was there all weekend?”
“I was standing right next to Aubrey,” I said.
“You’re absolutely sure? We could look awfully foolish if our journalistic ducks-”
“They’re in a row, Bob.”
“So, you’re sure?”
“Good gravy, Bob.”
So the decision was made. We’d still go with the full-blown series, starting on the following Wednesday. That would give Aubrey one week. If she got through to Sissy James, good. If she couldn’t, then we’d go with what we had.
Thursday, July 6
I put in an extra hour at my desk doing nothing then drove home. I covered a frozen chicken patty with bottled spaghetti sauce and Parmesan cheese and baked it in the oven for fifteen minutes. I poured a warm can of Squirt over a tumbler of ice cubes. I had my dinner on the back porch, watching what I hoped were rain clouds rolling in from the west. My lawn and flower beds desperately needed a soaking.
I felt so alone sitting there. And angry at myself because I did.
I’d lived by myself since 1963, when Lawrence and I divorced. The first few years were terrible but I got so used to being alone that little by little I convinced myself I liked it that way. Now Aubrey McGinty had sucked me into her life. She’d filled my evenings and my weekends. She’d filled my head, and I suppose even my heart, with a sense of adventure, a feeling of family.
I took my tray into the kitchen and checked the cupboard to see how many tea bags I had left. I had enough for six months. I drove to Ike’s for more.
“Morgue Mama,” he sang out.
“One for here, Ike, and a couple boxes for the road.”
I was still there at nine when the rain hit. When Aubrey’s little white Escort pulled to the curb.
Aubrey bought a bottle of cranberry juice and a bag of barbecue potato chips. She joined me at my table by the window, pushing aside my boxes of tea bags. “Anything fit to print today?” I asked.
“That’s why I stopped when I saw your car. You’ll never guess whose windows were smashed out.”
“Oh my-not again.”
“Not mine-Tish Kiddle’s.” She dug a printout of her story from her purse. She kept up a running commentary while I read. “Can you believe she drives a Lexus? You see where she lives? Saffron Hills? Do you know how pricey those condos are? Good God, how much money does that fluff-cake make?”
Tish Kiddle’s paycheck did not interest me. Her smashed car windows did. “You think this means she’s onto something?”
Aubrey slid down in her chair and glumly folded her arms. “At the very least somebody’s afraid she is.” She flipped back her hair and stared me. “You think I’m pretty enough for TV news?”
I’d come to Ike’s to talk to Ike. To relax in his slow, easy voice. Now Aubrey was buzzing all over me, like a bee at a picnic. I was simply not in the mood for her ego, or her jealousy, or her youth. When Aubrey headed for the restroom, I headed for my car.
It was still raining-not as hard as before but enough to keep my windshield wipers clacking. The lights along the downtown’s empty streets were dim, mutated blurs. I turned onto West Tuckman. It wasn’t that late but the rain had chased everybody home to the suburbs.
Just west of the monstrous old YMCA building, a pair of headlights filled my rear-view mirror, bright, then dim, then bright again. I pushed on the gas pedal. I made sure my doors were locked. The headlights got closer. Flashed again. I sped up more.
I scolded myself for panicking. I lifted my chin and squinted at the mirror. To see what kind of car it was. To see what kind of danger I was in. But it was too dark, and it was raining too hard, and the headlights were too close and too bright.
I was driving through the 3rd District now, Lionel Percy’s domain. But if that was a police car following me, wouldn’t its blue roof lights be blasting? Wouldn’t its siren be squealing? I decided not necessarily. I reached Potter’s Hill, where the city’s old ceramic industry once flourished. Now it was a lifeless strip of used car lots and empty storefronts with tattered For Sale or Lease signs in the windows.
I ran the red light at Halprin Street. So did the car behind me.
You can imagine what was going on inside my head. Car windows being smashed. Men jumping out from bushes slapping and scratching. Lionel Percy popping up like a jack-in-the-box clown. Preachers tumbling backward into pots of fake palms. The street was slick with standing water. I drove faster anyway. In a few minutes I would be in Meri. There would be people there, brighter street lights and glowing neon.
I started chastising myself, in that special shrill whisper we save for our own ears: “It’s your own damn fault. You didn’t have to get involved with that crazy girl. You could have stayed right in your safe little Morgue Mama world making people miserable. But you had to tag along like the sidekick on some old Saturday morning western. And now here you are about to be beaten, killed or worse. You old fool. You’re as full of yourself as she is.”
I also started thinking about ways to defend myself-kicking, biting, screaming, calmly talking myself out of trouble, running like a rabbit-but I quickly realized that my age was my only defense. “Who would hurt a sixty-seven-year-old woman?” I whispered. “Then again, who would murder a seventy-five-year-old preacher?”
The traffic light at Teeple was yellow when I slipped under it. It was a dark neighborhood crowded with tall frame houses, drooping trees and uneven slate sidewalks. There were a few more cars on the street. Unfortunately not enough to stop the demon behind me from riding my bumper.
Two blocks from Meri the car behind me started beeping. It was a weak, oinking beep, no more threatening than the timer on my microwave. “Good gravy,” I growled. I pulled over and watched Aubrey trot toward me through the rain. I rolled down my window and claimed my two boxes of Darjeeling tea.
Friday, July 7
On Friday I went into work at seven. In case I was needed. In case something surprising happened I didn’t want to miss. Aubrey was already at her desk, a Walkman snapped over her ears filling her ears with God knows what kind of noise while she typed like a maniac.
Just after eleven, I heard her howl. She danced toward me like a flamenco dancer, chopping her feet and clicking her fingers. She leaned across my desk until our noses were almost touching. “Guess who just called me? Tim Bandicoot. Tomorrow morning he’s going to Marysville, and you and I are going along.”
Saturday, July 8
At two in the morning my phone rang. It was Aubrey and she was worried-about her own behavior.
“You’ve got to promise me I won’t screw this up,” she said.
I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, hoping what she’d just said would make more sense if I was sitting up. “You want me to promise that you won’t screw up?”
“You know I will, Maddy. All those hours in the car with that idiot. I’m bound to say something that sets him off.”
I knew what she was talking about now. In just a few hours we would be driving to Marysville with Tim Bandicoot, to get Sissy James to admit her innocence. I slid to the floor and shuffled toward the wicker chair by the window. Sometimes I curl up there when it’s too hot to sleep, but mostly I use it as a staging area for my laundry. That night it was piled with bathroom towels that still needed folding. I pushed them onto the floor and sat. “You’ll just have to concentrate,” I said. I could hear the soft clink of computer keys. “Are you still at work?”
She yawned. “Where else would I be?”
I was going to say something motherly about the need for a good night’s rest. But then I remembered the all-nighters Dale Marabout used to pull when he was a young police reporter. Sometimes the stories demand it. “There’s some gum in my desk if you need it,” I said.
“That’s what I’ll do tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll cram my mouth full of gum so I can’t talk. When Timmy boy says something tempting I’ll just, ‘Yom-yom-yom-yom-yom.’”
“Good plan,” I said. “Can I go back to bed now?”
There were a few seconds of very serious silence. “What do you make of all this?” she asked. “Tim Bandicoot inviting us along, I mean.”
“Maybe it’s Sissy’s idea.”
“Not in a trillion years. I don’t think it’s Tim’s idea either. He’s got to hate my guts.”
“His wife’s idea then?”
“Has to be.”
“For good or ill, you think?”
“I’d say for ill.”
“Really?”
“Annie Bandicoot’s motives might be pure as snow-loving supportive wife just trying to make nice-but I think we’re talking Bride of Machiavelli here.”
I’d tried to fight it but I was wide awake now. I got on my knees and started folding towels. “You think we’re walking into some kind of a trap? You thought that about the church thing on Sunday.”
“Maddy, you’re not following the bouncing ball. Not us walking into a trap. Annie Bandicoot trying to avoid one.”
“Get the gum, Aubrey. You’re getting punchy.”
“Think about it. Sweet little Annie gloms onto Tim Bandicoot when she’s still in Sunday school. He’s handsome and ambitious and heir to the throne. She marries him when she’s only nineteen. For a while the future looks peachy. But then Tim starts questioning Buddy’s ways-all that speaking in tongues business. Buddy starts having second thoughts. He brings in Guthrie Gates and starts grooming him as his heir. Then Buddy suddenly gives Tim the boot. Tim tries to build a new church. But after six years he’s still preaching to that scraggly rabble on Lutheran Hill. Worst of all, he’s schtoomping some loser bimbo. This isn’t Stand By Your Man. This is Save Your Man’s Sorry Ass. So Annie puts on a wig and some funny glasses or something and waltzes into the cathedral and poisons the man who did her man wrong. And she frames the bimbo. Maybe Tim’s new church will take off now. Maybe Tim will behave himself now.”
I was down to the wash cloths. “You’re saying he knows his wife killed Buddy?”
“Maybe he knows. Maybe he suspects. Maybe he’s too afraid to find out.”
“And then you come along and start digging into the murder?”
“That’s right-and then I come along. Tim handles it pretty well at first. He really doesn’t know anything for sure-so he doesn’t have to lie. But the nosy bitch reporter keeps prying. Proves Sissy couldn’t have done it. Things start to unravel. Tim and Guthrie try to bury the hatchet. They come to the paper hand in hand. They end up shoving each other like a couple of feuding five-year-olds. Annie has to take the bull by the horns now. She tells her man, ‘You’re ruining everything we’ve worked all these years for. Sunday morning you’re going to come clean and confess your sins to the world. And then you’re going to Marysville and rescue Sissy, and you’re taking the nosy bitch reporter with you.’”
I crawled back in bed. In the moonlight the stacks of towels on the floor looked like the skyline of a tiny city. “A good offense is a good defense,” I said.
“Bingo,” she said.
I arrived at the Herald-Union at eight. Aubrey met me downstairs in the lobby. She had a travel mug of coffee in one hand and a granola bar in the other. Her bag hung from her shoulder. She looked horrible. I imagine I did, too.
When Tim Bandicoot pulled up in his minivan, Aubrey made me sit up front. She got in the back and curled up against the door, sipping and chewing with her eyes closed. Her strategy, apparently, was to sleep all the way to Marysville. “She’s been writing all night,” I explained.
For the longest time Tim and I talked about safe, dumb things-the newest effort to revitalize the downtown, how far the suburbs were spreading into the countryside, whether the Cleveland Indians were going to catch the Chicago White Sox in the standings. Then just as we were getting on I-491, Aubrey came to and leaned between the banana-shaped front seats. “I thought maybe your wife would come along,” she said to Tim.
I saw his eyes peek over the bottom of the rear-view mirror. I expected him to make some benign excuse. But he didn’t. “You and my wife in the same car? There’s already been one murder.”
We took I-491 to I-76 to I-71. Fifteen minutes north of Columbus we exited onto U.S. 36 and sped west to Marysville. At the prison we were taken to the same room where we’d talked to Sissy before. We sat on the same blue sofa.
All morning I’d been dying to see the expressions on Sissy’s and Tim’s faces when they first saw each other, to get some visceral sense of how they really felt about each other. Would they have the same look or different looks?
When Sissy came in she was already crying, clutching a wad of tissue the size of a major league baseball. She smiled the second she saw Tim.
Tim didn’t smile. But he did start crying. He stood up and she wrapped her arms around his neck and they hugged and took turns refilling their depleted lungs. There was some kind of love going on there. What kind I didn’t know.
Sissy shook Aubrey’s hand and then mine. She settled into the hard wooden chair across from the sofa. There was some perfunctory chit-chat about the weather and the prison food and how things were going at the church-all fine-and then Tim got the ball rolling by offering a prayer. We all bowed our heads and closed our eyes. We all peeked.
“Sissy,” Tim said, “both Aubrey and Mrs. Sprowls know about our past relationship. So do a lot of other people.”
Sissy nodded and pressed the back of her hand against her lips, bracing for the sorrow to come.
“I have confessed it to the congregation,” he said, “and it has been reported in the media. Our relationship was wrong.”
Sissy closed her watery eyes and nodded.
“And I take full responsibility for all that has happened,” he said.
His confession and her nodding went on for several minutes. Aubrey took notes. I dabbed my eyes with the tip of my pinkie.
Finally Tim got to the reason for our visit. “Sissy, if you are being held wrongfully in this prison, I have to know-so I, and we, and everybody who cares about you, can help you.”
Well, his sentence structure was as awkward as a toad in a basket of apples, but it was a start.
“I killed him,” Sissy said.
She might as well have said, “I am a Greyhound bus.” That’s how believable it was.
“I do not need protecting,” Tim answered.
Aubrey closed her notebook and fed her ballpoint through the top spiral. She laid it next to her on the sofa cushion. She leaned forward. “I bet you were really confused when the police showed up at your house. It was only six o’clock. You were getting ready for work. Like everybody else in Hannawa, you knew Buddy Wing was dead. You’d read the newspaper stories and knew exactly how and when he died. While Detective Grant was questioning you in the kitchen, other cops were searching your property. You told the detective you didn’t know anything. Then they found all that stuff in your garbage. You knew instantly somebody wanted you to take the blame. But who? Tim Bandicoot? Your spiritual leader? Your lover? You knew Friday night was Family Night at the temple. You knew Tim always did something with his family. You knew that particular Friday night he was supposed to take his sons to the basketball game in Cleveland. But did he? Detective Grant started pressing you to confess.”
Sissy continued her Greyhound bus defense. “I was not covering up for Tim or anybody else-I don’t see why everybody has such a hard time understanding that.”
“Because,” said Aubrey, “you were still in Mingo Junction that Friday night. You were there the entire weekend. With your cousin Jeanie and her daughters-and your daughter Rosy.”
Sissy was stunned. A secret more important than her life had been told. Her eyes blamed Tim.
“We learned it on our own,” I heard myself say.
Sissy’s fingers dug into the varnish on the chair arms. She began to pant, as if giving birth to Rosy all over again. “It was not Tim’s baby.”
Aubrey left the sofa and kneeled in front of Sissy. “We are not interested in the father of your child, or who you thought you were covering up for. We just want to hear from you that you didn’t do it.”
The growl of an unexorcised demon escaped from Sissy’s quivering lips. “Just so you can get a good story.”
“Yes, so I can get a good story,” Aubrey admitted. “A story that will get you out of here. The real world’s a mean place, Sissy, as you discovered a long time ago. It’s mean with selfish people covering up their mistakes and saving their asses. Prosecutors don’t reopen cases without public pressure. Judges get re-elected by putting people in prison, by not letting them out. Everybody’s eyes are fixed on their own precious futures. Nobody looks back until they’re forced to look back. And that’s what we’re going to make them do now. We’re going to force them to look back. Force them to free you and find who really killed Buddy Wing.”
Sissy dried her eyes with her ball of tissue. She sat up straight and put her knees together and rested her folded hands on top of them. Aubrey stretched out her arm and motioned impatiently for her pen and notebook. I gave them to her.
“Tell the truth,” Tim said softly.
Said Sissy James: “I did not put poison on Pastor Wing’s Bible, or in his water pitcher. I was in Mingo Junction, Ohio, on that Friday night, visiting my cousin and my daughter.”
It was the confession Aubrey wanted. But Aubrey wanted more. “Did you confess thinking that Tim might have been the killer?”
Sissy checked Tim’s face for permission. “All I knew was that somebody wanted me to take responsibility for what happened.”
Aubrey still wanted more. “You’re saying you still don’t know who that somebody is?”
I popped up like a piece of burnt toast. “That’s not our job, Aubrey.”
Aubrey twisted toward me. The unexorcised demon was now residing in her.
“We’ve got all we need for now,” I said.
Aubrey smiled, grimly. She un-clicked her pen and flipped her notebook closed. She stood up. “Mrs. Sprowls is right. We have all we need for now.”
Tim Bandicoot stepped across the coffee table and pulled Sissy to her feet. He kissed her forehead. “I’ll get you a good lawyer. We will make this thing all right.”
Our meeting with Sissy James did not last much longer than that. Tim led us in prayer again and Sissy meekly begged Aubrey not to report that Rosy was her daughter. Aubrey promised that she would not report it, unless others reported it first. We drove back to Hannawa.
Was I surprised that Aubrey made that promise? No, I was not.
Aubrey and Sissy shared a common past, sexual abuse. They were two young women seeking safety and acceptance, and if possible, some kind of love. Of course Aubrey would make that promise.
That evening at Ike’s when we discussed it, Aubrey explained her promise differently: “Sissy having a daughter by some john is terrific stuff. But it’s worth sacrificing, for now. This little series isn’t going to be the end of it. There’ll be lots of follow-up stories. I’m going to need Sissy’s gratitude.”