Before the elevator door closed he shouted a single word at Aubrey, who had her knees on her desk and the Hannawa white pages in her lap: “ HAPPY?”
I hurried down the stairwell as fast as I could and intercepted Dale on the parking deck. He was crying like a baby. While we hugged I reached into his pants pocket for the handkerchief I knew he carried there. I dabbed his eyes and whispered “It’ll be okay” I don’t know how many times.
Dale was ripe for a mid-life crisis no matter what was going on at the paper. He was in his late forties and his kids were grown. Whatever secret dreams he carried inside him were simply dreams now, defeated by the limits of his talent and his metabolism. So in my mind Tinker’s transferring in from Baton Rouge, or Aubrey McGinty waltzing in from Rush City, had very little do with Dale’s anger. He was angry with himself.
“Wait an hour,” I told him, “then go back to your desk with a mug of coffee and a cookie and nobody will say a thing.”
He tried to unlock his car but I strategically squashed my backside against the door. “There’s no way in hell I’m going back in there,” he said.
“Yelling ‘I quit’ is not the same as writing ‘I quit.’ Until you give Tinker a written resignation, you haven’t officially resigned. You’ve just gone a little crazy. You’re allowed. All will be forgiven.”
“Move your ass,” he said.
I moved and he drove off. He didn’t show up for work the next day and Sylvia Berdache told me Tinker had an e-mail waiting for him when he got to work. It said: “In case you haven’t heard by now, I.
FUCKING. QUIT.”
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?”
