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
