ushered in. Her baggy cotton slacks and blouse were the same gray as the floor tiles. The guard positioned herself in the doorway, arms folded across her mixing-bowl breasts.
Sissy was surprisingly friendly. She smiled and shook our hands and sat on Aubrey’s left side. She’d only been in Marysville for four months, but she looked thinner than she did on the interrogation and arraignment tapes. Aubrey took a notebook and pen from her purse, but she didn’t open the notebook or click the pen, her old off-the- record trick. “What job do they have you doing here, Sissy?” she asked.
“Flag shop.”
“Making flags you mean?”
“American flags. Ohio flags. I like it.”
“Keeps your mind off things?”
“It makes the day go by.”
“You’ve got a long row to hoe, don’t you? Life without parole.”
“Life goes by in a minute. Then you’ve got eternity with the Lord.”
“Confident you’re going to heaven then?”
Sissy’s smile turned hard and uneasy, like the seat of that damn wooden chair I was sitting on. “I’ve already been forgiven,” she said.
Aubrey put her notebook on the coffee table and twisted until her arms and chin were resting on the back of the sofa. She was close enough to stroke Sissy’s cheek if she wanted. “And what has God forgiven you for? Murdering Buddy Wing or covering up for somebody else?”
Sissy’s eyes floated up to the governor’s picture, her popularly elected lord here on earth. “I know there’s still lots of talk about me taking the blame for somebody else.”
Aubrey nodded. “For Tim Bandicoot, your lover.”
Sissy just stared at the governor. “Everybody knows me and Tim did wrong. That’s no secret. God’s forgiven me for that, too.”
“And apparently Tim’s wife has forgiven him,” Aubrey said. “I hear they’re a happy family again.”
Said Sissy, “As it should be.”
“You don’t think Tim was just using you for sex? The way other men had used you for sex?”
I watched Sissy’s eyes cloud over, her nostrils glow pink. “You just know everything, don’t you?”
Aubrey’s voice shriveled into a whisper. “I read the transcripts of your sentencing hearing. If it hadn’t been for all that stuff that happened to you when you were a kid, you might be on death row right now.”
I’d remembered Dale’s story on the sentencing: Sissy’s lawyer had talked for an hour about her illegitimate birth, her mother’s early death, the shoplifting, the running away, the drugs, the stripping in rathole bars, the escort service stuff, how she’d been rescued by the Rev. Buddy Wing, pressing his open hands against the inside of her television screen. Her lawyer was followed by a dozen members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral, forgiving her the way they knew Pastor Wing surely would have forgiven her, praying that Sissy be allowed to live and be a witness for God’s love inside the secure walls of the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
“What happened to me ain’t important,” Sissy told Aubrey. Her head was bent over her knees now, and her arms wrapped around her waist, as if she had a bad case of menstrual cramps. “All that matters is that Satan got the best of me and I killed Pastor Wing.”
If I’d been the one asking the questions, I would have been rocking Sissy in my arms. But Aubrey pulled back, making sure there wasn’t a whit of compassion in her voice. “I don’t think you killed Buddy Wing,” she said. “And I don’t think Tim Bandicoot killed him either, though I’m sure that’s what you think.”
Sissy almost screamed it: “I killed Pastor Wing. Why don’t anybody believe that?”
Aubrey put her notebook back in her purse. She hadn’t written a word. “Well, the police believe it. The judge believes it. So you’ve got them on your side. But me, I’m not on your side. I’m going back to Hannawa and I’m going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tim Bandicoot didn’t do it, even if he’s the world’s biggest asshole in every other way. And then I’ll come back and we’ll have another talk.”
Sissy James walked out of the room before another word could be said. Her arms were still wrapped around her waist. She was crying.
Aubrey and I drove into Marysville and had an early lunch in a restaurant that looked a lot like Speckley’s. The specialty of this place was fried bologna sandwiches. We were both intrigued. The bologna was a half-inch thick, smothered in cheddar cheese. The bun was soaked with grease. They were absolutely wonderful. After lunch we checked out the antique shops. I bought an old Lassie novel for Joyce, my niece back in LaFargeville. Like every collie owner I ever met, Joyce collects anything Lassie. Then we started for home.
In the hilly part of Richland County traffic stopped. Both lanes north, both lanes south, thousands of idling cars and trucks spewing blue exhaust. It was raining so hard you’d of thought we were in a car wash. We couldn’t see a thing. Aubrey punched the radio buttons for the right song to soothe her growing anxiety. Finally she squealed “Shit!” and jumped out of the car. She disappeared up the berm.
I was antsy, too. Not so much about the traffic jam-sooner or later we’d start moving again-but about the lie Aubrey told me that day we went to see Guthrie Gates at the cathedral. One of the first lessons new reporters at the Herald-Union learn is that you don’t bullshit Morgue Mama. Heap all the bullshit you want on your sources or on the editors. On Morgue Mama, not even a teaspoonful. But now there I was, being bullshitted by Aubrey McGinty and afraid to confront her about it. I was simply furious with myself.
Aubrey was gone for a half hour. She jumped into the car soaking wet. “Remember Maddy,” she said even before the door was closed, “pneumonia-virus.”
She took her cellphone from her purse and punched in a flurry of numbers with her little finger. Somebody picked up right away. “Metro,” she said. And so I learned about the accident up ahead at the same time the desk did. A skidding semi full of Florida grapefruit had been broadsided by another semi hauling steel I-beams. Bouncing, flying, rolling grapefruit had caused six separate accidents. Nobody was dead, but several had been seriously injured, among them 25th District congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. “Her nose is broken and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s a member of the U.S. Congress,” Aubrey told the desk. “There must be fifty or sixty people standing in the rain eating grapefruit-God, I wish I had a camera.”
It was exciting to see Aubrey in action like that. She was thorough, detached. For some reason it gave me the courage to confront her about the lie. As soon as she was off the phone I dove in. “Forgive me,” I said, “but I have to ask you about that fleece jacket you bought at Old Navy.”
She reached for the radio knob, unconcerned and probably not listening to what I was saying. I softly pushed her fingers away. “You told me the gift certificate was from your sister. Your sister is dead.”
Her eyes froze on me. “You been snooping, Maddy?”
“I don’t snoop,” I said. “I get intrigued.”
She slid down and rested the back of her head on the seat. “It’s all there, isn’t it. In print forever and ever. Everybody’s dark secrets. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“It’s not that you lied to me,” I said. “I’m concerned why you lied to yourself like that.”
She started to cry, the way Sissy James had cried when Aubrey pressed her. “I just miss her, Maddy.”
We didn’t discuss it any further. There was no need to. I knew all that I needed to know from the stories in the files. She knew all she needed to know from having lived it. The poor lamb. It was a horrible thing:
Aubrey’s older sister had committed suicide fifteen years before, when she was thirteen and Aubrey just nine. She’d sprinkled an entire bottle of her mother’s antidepressants inside a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She made that sandwich three months after their stepfather was tried and acquitted for repeatedly having sex with her. Was Aubrey abused like that, too? Probably. I did find her mother’s divorce listed in the courthouse news, eight months after the suicide. If Aubrey was molested, it ended when she was ten.
So, of course Aubrey gave herself a Christmas gift from her sister every year. She missed her sister. She needed to keep her alive any way she could. And of course she lied to me, if you really want to consider it a lie. Why would you explain something like that to a stranger? I was angry at myself for bringing it up. Angry for snooping. Yet it seemed to explain why she wanted to help Sissy James. Why she went looking for the truth back in Rush City when the football coach was murdered. Cops screw up. Courts send innocent people to jail. Courts set guilty people free. Somebody has to care.
