I planned to spend Easter cleaning out my raspberry bed. But it was raining when I got up, and it continued to rain all morning. At noon I gave up and drove to the paper, to catch up on my work. Not that I had any work to catch up on. As empty as the newsroom was on holidays, it was a lot less empty than my bungalow.
There were just eight cars in the parking deck, including Aubrey’s Escort and Eric Chen’s little pickup truck. They were parked side by side in the Handicapped Only slots by the elevator. When I got to the morgue I tossed my raincoat on the counter and went to my desk for my tea mug. Everywhere in Hannawa families were setting down to baked beans, Jell-O salad, and spiral-cut ham. I’d be having a mug of Darjeeling tea and a package of stale oatmeal cookies from the vending machine. I cut through sports to the cafeteria. That damn sign was still taped to the back of Chip McCoy’s computer:
HER NAME IS DOLLY MADISON SPROWLS, BUT HER FRIENDS JUST CALL HER MADDY. TO THE OTHER 99.8% OF US SHE’S JUST PLAIN MAD
Those signs used to be stuck everywhere. Now there are just two, that one on Chip’s computer, and the one I framed and put on my kitchen wall at home.
I found Aubrey and Eric sitting together in the back. Aubrey was eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Eric was eating potato chips and sucking on a can of Mountain Dew. Good gravy, how odd finding those two together. I just stood there in the doorway with my empty mug.
Which made Aubrey laugh. “You caught us together in the cafeteria, not in bed,” she said. “You can come in.”
I looked at Eric. He was as stunned by what she said as I was. “Are there any cookies in the machine?” I asked.
Eric leaned back and checked. “Nada. But there’s some of those indigestible cheese cracker things.”
I bought the crackers, filled my mug with hot water, and started for the door.
Aubrey called out, “For christsakes, Maddy, sit down.”
I sat.
Eric didn’t say a thing-I’m sure his brain was full of dirty pictures of Aubrey and him in bed-but Aubrey launched into a nervous explanation of their togetherness. “Eric’s going to help me with the computer searches for other possible suspects. Just some quick checks for strange behavior, criminal or otherwise. I knew you wouldn’t have time.”
What she meant, of course, is that I wouldn’t have a clue on how to do it.
It was about then that Eric regained the use of his brain and remembered that he had to be in Youngstown for Easter dinner in a half hour, about eighty miles away. He got three cans of Mountain Dew from the vending machine-fuel for the road-and left. Aubrey took a cleansing breath and rolled her eyes. “What a boy that boy is.”
“You’re not going to your mother’s?” I asked.
“She’s having dinner at five and I’m going to point my car in that direction about three. But am I actually going to go to my mother’s? God only knows.”
While Aubrey cleaned up Eric’s mess, I gathered up her folders. Her SISSY folder was already an inch thick, and her T. BANDICOOT folder not much thinner. The folder marked HEAVEN BOUND CATH had two copies of the church directory rubber-banded together. “Two copies?” I asked. “Didn’t Guthrie give us just one?”
“I went back later for another one,” she said. “An older one. I got thinking about Tim Bandicoot breaking with Buddy Wing and realized that former church members were more likely to be suspects than present members. You know? Somebody mad enough at Buddy Wing to quit his church might also be mad enough to kill him.”
I handed her the folders. “Smart. How old is the other directory?”
Her faced scrunched with disappointment. “Just three years. But we might find somebody interesting. You don’t mind Eric doing this for me, do you? I should have asked.”
“What’s there to mind? Just be gentle with him.”
“Puh-leeze.”
I stayed at the paper until four, organizing my desk drawers, playing solitaire, calling my relatives in LaFargeville on the paper’s dime. Then I went home and opened a can of vegetable soup. I ate it right out of the saucepan, on the porch my Lawrence built on the back of the house the same summer he started screwing his secretary. It’s a wonderful porch, running the full length of the house, screened in to keep out the bugs, wide enough for my picnic table and a propane grill. The door opens right into my vegetable garden.
By eight I was in bed reading Jane Smiley’s new novel. Trying to read it, anyway. It was Easter Sunday and I was alone. I should have gone to church that morning. I should have stopped off at the drug store and bought myself a chocolate rabbit and some marshmallow peeps. I should have taken a week’s vacation and driven to LaFargeville to visit my brother and my niece. After Lawrence flew the coop I should have remarried somebody and had some children. I took the notebook and a pen from my nightstand and used Jane Smiley’s book as a desk. Lawrence was gone and Dale Marabout was gone and the only people I had to sponge the loneliness out of my life were Aubrey McGinty and Sissy James.
I started making my own notes on the Buddy Wing murder: Was Sissy James really innocent? Or had we just talked ourselves into believing she was? And what about all that evidence right there in Sissy’s garbage can? Yes, somebody who knew Sissy inside and out could have framed her. But Sissy was also troubled enough to frame herself, either intentionally or through her own stupidity.
I scribbled all sorts of crazy things in that notebook that night. I was lonely and frightened and just plain unsure.
Monday, April 24
“Well, did you make it home yesterday?” I asked Aubrey. I was so glad it was Monday and that horrible Easter weekend behind me.
She leaned across the counter and answered “Yeah,” as if she was angry with herself.
“Everybody has to go home once in awhile,” I said.
She asked, “And why is that?”
Friday, April 28
I hardly saw Aubrey that week. She was busy doing interviews for her series on the ghastly lives of the city’s street prostitutes. The idea for the series, of course, had grown out of her story on the body they found on Morrow Street. Aubrey wanted to explore the lives of these women while they were still alive. She had no trouble finding women still working the streets, and no trouble getting them to talk. What she wanted, and couldn’t find, was someone who’d escaped and built a new life for herself, on a better street.
Friday morning she asked if I wanted to go back to the Heaven Bound Cathedral with her, that evening, to see how easy it would be for a stranger to sneak in and kill someone.
I wasn’t crazy about the idea. But I went along.
The televised Friday night services continued after Buddy Wing’s murder without missing a week. For a while, in fact, more people attended, and more people watched, than had before Buddy gave his Bible that fateful kiss. In the story we ran on that ironic fact, Guthrie Gates said it was a tribute to just how much people loved their martyred pastor. If you ask me, it was the same morbid fascination that sends hundreds of thousands of teary-eyed tourists to Graceland year after year, even though they didn’t give a rip about Elvis when he was alive. Anyway, attendance and viewership dropped off after a couple of months.
We left the paper at six and drove in my Shadow to Aubrey’s apartment. It was my first visit and I was appalled. Her living room furniture consisted of an old kitchen chair with a ripped vinyl cushion, a big yellow ceramic lamp sitting on a folding TV table, and a pyramid of cardboard boxes.
Some of the boxes were marked SHIT FROM COLLEGE and some were marked SHIT FROM HOME. Coats and sweaters and newspapers and magazines and God only knows how many shoes were strewn everywhere. “How can someone own nothing and still live in a hovel?” I asked.
Aubrey was in her bedroom changing into a dress so she could fit in with the Christians. “I’m a young and
