“I didn’t mean worthless, Maddy. That garbology project was important to him. And important academically. But he was a wee bit obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“It sounds selfish. But we used to travel together. Every July. Wonderful road trips all over the country. Wherever there were old ruins for him to crawl around on, and bookstores where I could buy the horrible, self- published novels of frustrated local writers. But the last few years, since he got permission to dig out there, he just couldn’t pull himself away.”
For twenty minutes Chick bored my pants off with their summer road trips. Halfway through an especially mind-numbing account of their drive across western Kansas, I changed the subject and asked him about the Kerouac Thing just three days before Gordon’s body was found. “Just who was there, anyway?” I asked.
“The usual suspects,” he said. “Me and Gordon, Effie and the Moffitt-Stumpfs. Other professors. Grad students.”
“Shaka Bop?”
Chick used Shaka’s real name, the name we all knew him by in the fifties, before his Black Panther days. “Sidney? No, Sidney wasn’t there. He usually is though.”
“And Gordon was okay that night?”
“Oh yeah. Of course he and I got into it about the cheeseburger. But we always did that.” Chick finished his second goblet of wine and poured a third. He spoke derisively of himself in the third person: “What would a Kerouac Thing be without that crazy asshole Chidsey Glass having a nervous breakdown over some lousy four-inch square of American cheese?”
Chapter 5
Tuesday, March 20
That morning I did something I hadn’t done in thirty years. I called in sick. I didn’t pretend to have a sore throat or the flu. I just called the newsroom secretary and said, “Morning Suzie, this is Maddy Sprowls. I’m taking a sick day.” Suzie said “Okey-dokey” and that was that.
Then after a nice long breakfast while I watched Regis and Kelly, I drove to Hemphill College for my appointment with Andrew J. Holloway III, Gordon’s graduate assistant, the young man who’d not only found Gordon’s body at the landfill, but also his car, fifteen miles away.
To tell you the truth, I was more than a little surprised when Andrew agreed to take me to the landfill. He didn’t know me from Adam. And to some degree or the other he was a suspect in Gordon’s murder. I’m sure if I’d been up front about my motives, he would have treated me like one of those annoying telemarketers that call at suppertime-he would have slammed down the phone like he was dispatching a cockroach. Instead I’d gone on and on about how close Gordon and I had been in college-which was true enough-and how it would do an old lady good if I could see for myself the place that not only meant so much to his life, but also unfortunately meant something to his death. I think I even may have used that icky word closure, if you can imagine that.
So, Andrew agreed to show me the landfill and I felt just awful about my-what’s that word Big Daddy used for it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? -my mendacity!
I pulled up in front of Menominee Hall, as we’d arranged the night before on the phone. I watched a skinny kid in a baggy unbuttoned pea coat trot down the granite steps toward my Dodge Shadow. His hands were planted in his pockets. His collar was pulled up around his ears. I lowered the window. He bent low so I could see his face. “Mrs. Sprowls?” he asked.
“Andrew J. Holloway III?” I asked back.
He got in and slammed the door so hard I thought my eardrums were going to burst. “Andrew is plenty,” he said sheepishly. He had a narrow face and a huge, V-shaped smile that featured overlapping front teeth. He also had a thick streak of blue in his hair. I’m sure it was a fashion statement but it looked more like somebody had accidentally dropped a paint brush on his head.
I pulled away from the steps and looped back onto West Tuckman. “I don’t remember seeing you at the memorial service, Andrew.”
“I guess I’m not very good at those kind of things,” he said.
“They can be awkward,” I agreed.
I drove past the Puritan Square Shopping Centre, where I can’t afford to shop, and then turned left onto Wooster Pike. We headed south through the low, rolling hills. When I first came to Hannawa, Ohio, in the early fifties, those hills were covered with cow pastures. Now they were covered with houses. “Gordon was a pretty good teacher, was he?” I asked.
“Yeah-Professor Sweet really had it going on.”
Andrew had called me Mrs. Sprowls and now he had called Gordon Professor Sweet. He was an awkward, insecure, well-mannered kid. I just knew I was going to get oodles of good information out of him. “Was this your first year as Gordon’s assistant?”
“Second.”
“You’re close to getting your master’s degree then.”
“Just finish this semester and hand in my thesis.”
“Then what?”
“Start on my Ph. D.”
“Here at Hemphill?”
“Hemphill’s too small to have a doctoral program. I’ll have to go back to Ohio State.”
“Back to Ohio State? You didn’t do your undergraduate work here?”
“Wish I had.”
We took the old iron bridge over Killbuck Creek. Gradually the housing developments gave way to open fields and thick stands of sugar maples. We were in Durkee Township now. “Quite a comedown coming to Hemphill, I guess.”
Andrew finally showed some spunk. “Oh, no-Professor Sweet had built Hemphill’s archaeology department into one of the strongest undergraduate programs in the Midwest. I couldn’t believe he chose me.”
“You must be a brainiac.”
“When you’re born with a Roman numeral at the end of your name, you have lots of time to study.”
We both giggled. I liked this goofy kid. “Then you were here for his dig at the landfill last summer?”
“The summer before that, too.”
“You and Gordon must have been pretty close.”
He didn’t answer. But I could tell from the absent way he was staring out the window that he’d felt very close to Gordon indeed. I thought about my Aunt Ruby, and how much I’d idolized her, and how when she died, during my senior year in high school, I couldn’t bring myself to attend her funeral. I changed the subject before we both started crying. “I haven’t been to the Wooster Pike dump in years and years,” I said. “I’m dying to see it again.”
Andrew knew the landfill’s history better than I did: “For decades it was tiny township dump, going back to the 1920s. The city of Hannawa bought it from the township at the end of World War II, when the city’s population was exploding. It was one of several dumps the city used back then. It served the Meriwether Square area, the college, some of the neighborhoods on the city’s far west end. It wasn’t expanded into a full-blown modern landfill until 1974, when the Environmental Protection Agency got on the city’s back. It was Hannawa’s primary landfill until 1996, when the Richland Hills facility was finally opened.”
“Well, it was sure popular with students in the fifties,” I said. “We’d come out from the college to see what kind of interesting junk we could find. Half of the dorm rooms were decorated with junk from that old dump. Half of the rooms smelled like the dump, too, as I recall.”
Andrew flashed his overlapping teeth at me. “Professor Sweet used to tell us it was also where students came to drink and have sex.”
“Well-in those days what passed for sex,” I said.
We reached the road to the landfill. I pulled in and we bounced through the muddy puddles at the entrance.
