her anything.
I felt so sorry for Eric. He had tried to defend the woman he loved-at least loved to sleep with-only to make a fool of himself. I knew what that kind of embarrassment was like. I once went to Dale Marabout’s apartment with a chocolate cake, to rekindle our faltering affair. Instead of knocking, I used the key he’d given me. I found him naked on his living room floor with that kindergarten teacher.
A few days after that incident in Meri, Aubrey confided in me that Eric had stopped sleeping with her. “I guess flying over the hood of that Yugo he came to the conclusion I’m not worth dying for,” she said. She said it as if she didn’t care. But I could see she did care. For years, Dale Marabout and I assured each other we were just in it for the sex. We laughed and copulated like a couple of those chimpanzees in equatorial Africa, bonobos I think they’re called, who just mindlessly screw and screw and screw. After I found Dale on the floor with the kindergarten teacher, I pretended not to care. I went to their wedding and, of all things, gave them a set of fitted flannel sheets. But I cared. And Aubrey cared. She’d been using Eric, no doubt about that, but it was for more than sex.
Chapter 14
Thursday, June 8
Thursday morning I went with Aubrey to Kent State University to see Dr. Howard Cooksey, a professor of television and radio news in the communications department. It would be a forty-minute drive across some of the most forgettable landscape in the state of Ohio.
“Were you still there when the black squirrels were poisoned?” I asked as Aubrey’s Ford Escort struggled up the long grade that divides the tiny towns of Richfield and Peninsula.
Her eyes widened. “How do you know about the squirrels?”
“Morgue Mama does not know all or see all,” I joked, “but Morgue Mama does remember all.” The fact was that after the eyebrow woman told us about students from the university working at the cathedral, I searched through the morgue’s Kent State files.
“That happened my senior year,” Aubrey said. “I covered it for the college paper.”
“So that was just three years ago.”
She played with the calendar in her mind. “Yeah.”
Kent is famous for its black squirrels and the poisonings shook the town and the campus to its roots, not as badly as the May 4, 1970 shootings, of course not, but it was amazing how worked up people became over the deaths of thirty-seven squirrels.
The black squirrel story actually began decades earlier, in the early Sixties, when the university’s grounds supervisor, a guy named Larry Woodell, went to Canada and brought back sixteen black squirrels. In Ohio you only see gray squirrels and red squirrels, so black squirrels popping across the lawns were quite a novelty, and the herd, whatever you call a group of squirrels, multiplied faster than rabbits. In 1982, the university held its first Black Squirrel Festival, complete with rock bands and a barbecue. The annual May 4 memorial commemoration and the Black Squirrel Festival in September are the yin and yang of campus life at Kent State, the sad and the silly if you will.
So, anyway, it caused quite a stir when people started finding the carcasses of black squirrels all over the place. The campus police called in the Kent city police, and the Kent city police called in the State Highway Patrol. “They never caught who did it?” I asked Aubrey.
“Nope. After thirty-seven squirrels it stopped. By Christmas break it was all over. But it was a cool story for awhile-you know what I mean by cool-it was actually pretty sickening.”
I did know what she meant by cool. Covering those squirrel poisonings when she was a senior journalism student at Kent was cool the same way covering the murder of that football coach was cool when she was a new reporter at The Gazette in Rush City, the same way that digging into the Buddy Wing murder now was cool. Big stories, no matter how tragic, are cool to cover. I’m sure that Aubrey’s stories on the squirrel poisonings for the college newspaper helped her get her first job in Rush City, and I know her football coach stories got her into the Herald-Union. Soldiers advance through the ranks by going to war. Reporters advance by covering cool stories. “How exactly were the squirrels poisoned?” I asked. “It wasn’t walnuts shot full of procaine, was it?”
She winced at my joke. “Ears of corn sprinkled with insecticide-as you well know.”
“Well, it’s still possible that’s it’s the same person, isn’t it? Psychopathic killers aren’t under any obligation to use the same poisons all the time, are they?”
Aubrey agreed that it was possible with an exaggerated, Oliver Hardy nod. “But think about the odds. In order for one of the television students to have poisoned both Buddy Wing and the squirrels, that student would’ve been at Kent three years ago, making him, at best, a sophomore when the squirrels were killed. I’ll admit that theoretically there might be a few sophomores capable of sprinkling poison on an ear of corn without poisoning themselves, but that still means there’s a three year-gap between crimes. Wouldn’t a wacko like that have moved up to a human victim right away?”
“Maybe there was someone in between,” I said.
“You’re the one with the steel trap mind, Maddy. Was anyone within a hundred miles of Kent State mysteriously poisoned in the last three years?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“And what college student carrying a full load, and working part-time, and getting loaded, and trying to get laid, would have the time to frame Sissy James? Find out she was a former member of the Heaven Bound Cathedral who’s having an affair with Buddy Wing’s old protege? Who has a secret child in Mingo Junction? Who she visits every Thanksgiving? This is Kent State we’re talking about, not Yale.”
“If it’s that far-fetched why are we even wasting our time going to Kent?”
“You got me.”
We were going to Kent State, of course, because the regular presence of strangers backstage at the cathedral would be an important part of Aubrey’s stories on the murder. She’d explore the two possibilities: one, that the real killer was someone everybody knew; two, that the real killer was someone nobody knew. She’d play it straight, not trying to identify possible suspects, not even hinting at possible suspects. But everyone reading her series would know who all the possible suspects were. And everyone would come to the same conclusion: The Hannawa police were too hasty in accepting Sissy James’s confession.
We drove through downtown Kent to the campus. Except for a few black squirrels and a few summer students, the campus was empty. We parked in a visitor’s lot and walked past the slope where on that horrible spring day in 1970 the Ohio National Guard had turned and fired. We followed a sidewalk trimmed with beds of red geraniums to Taylor Hall.
Inside we waited for twelve minutes for Dr. Cooksey to come out of his office. He was a tall, overweight man of fifty. He was wearing faded tan Dockers and a white polo shirt. He was not happy to see us.
The walls of his office were covered with glossy publicity photos of network news reporters and anchors. All were upside-down. Perhaps to show his students what a daring iconoclast he was. Perhaps so they wouldn’t feel in awe of the on-air stars they’d encounter once they graduated and went to work at some dippy little station like the one in Hannawa.
Anyway, Dr. Cooksey was not happy to see us and told us so: “I shouldn’t even talk to you. It can’t possibly do my students a lick of good.”
I quickly turned to Aubrey, to see how she was reacting. Her eyebrows were raised. She was tapping her chin with her pen. Behind her on the wall was a grinning upside-down Dan Rather. “A story goes where a story goes,” she said.
Dr. Cooksey leaned back in his chair and neatly inserted his fingers under his armpits. “But do you have a story, Miss McGinty?”
She ignored his question and asked the first of hers. “How many years have you been sending students to the Heaven Bound Cathedral?”
“I told you on the phone, seven or eight.”
“I was hoping you’d looked it up.”
