C Corwin - Dig

I told one of my patented half-truths. “I was only wondering if she was engaged then or not, Effie. I’m no more interested in her sex life than I am in mine.”

We didn’t get back to Hannawa until late in the day. We unloaded Gordon’s books then headed through the rush-hour traffic toward my bungalow. It was six o’clock by the time I got home. I immediately went to the basement and checked my files. The information I needed wasn’t there. I called Eric at the morgue. “Stay put until I get there,” I said.

He whined like a third grader. “But it’s Friday.”

“It also might be Christmas,” I said. “Stay put!”

I filled James’ food bowl and headed for the garage. I was downtown in twenty minutes, storming through the newsroom like a category five hurricane. I was so anxious to get to work that I didn’t even take time to make a mug of tea. Which worried Eric to no end. “I will be able to get out of here sometime tonight, won’t I?”

“If the microfilm gods are with us,” I said.

Today we save stories on CDs. But a lot of the older stuff in the morgue is still on microfilm. I told him to pull out all of the film for 1956 and 1957. I sat him in front of the machine and pulled a chair alongside. “We’re going to start with 1956,” I said, “and check backward from the end of December.”

Eric wisely asked the pertinent question. “Check for what?”

I pretended he was the ignorant one and not me. “The society pages. For the engagement announcements. For the engagement of Gwendolyn Moffitt and one Rollie Stumpf.”

Newspapers don’t have society pages any more. The sexual revolution saw to that. The Herald-Union now has a section called Hannawa Life. Despite its gender-neutral title, it’s clearly geared at women. In addition to the stories on lowering your cholesterol, finding the right pre-school, and exercises you can do while pushing a supermarket cart, you’ll find the same old stuff we ran before Bella Abzug started waving her big floppy hat at us in the sixties: weddings, anniversaries and engagements, lots and lots of engagements.

We went through the December papers. The November papers and half the October papers. Then there it was, Saturday, October 13, 1956:

Mrs. and Mrs. Calvin W. Moffitt of Hannawa announce the engagement of their daughter, Gwendolyn Leigh, to Mr. Rolland H. Stumpf, son of Martin and Gladys Stumpf, of Pittsburgh, Penn.

Both Miss Moffitt and Mr. Stumpf are seniors at Hemphill College. They plan a June…

I leaned back and rubbed the long hours of travel out of my neck. “You can go home now,” I said to Eric.

He was uncharacteristically concerned. “You sure?”

I swept him away with my fingers. I watched him hurry to the elevator, swigging his Mountain Dew as he maneuvered through the mostly empty desks in the newsroom.

I thought about walking down to Ike’s. But I went home to James instead. And that Rubbermaid tub of Lawrence’s clippings Dory gave me.

Monday, June 11

Eric usually gets to the morgue a good half-hour before I do-or so he tells me. This morning I was the early bird. I handed him the clipping.

He glanced at the four men in the photo above the story before letting it flutter to his messy desk. In one well-practiced motion he clicked on his computer and cracked the plastic cap on his breakfast Mountain Dew. “Who are those goofy looking dudes?”

I’d looked at the photo so many times over the weekend that I’d memorized where each was standing. “Left to right they’re Herbert Giffels, Rollie Stumpf, Don Rodino and Elgin ‘Bud’ Wetzel. They’re the 1957 state collegiate debate champions.”

“I figured they weren’t football players,” he said.

“You have a keen eye, Mr. Chen.” I leaned over his desk and handed him the clipping a second time.

From the look on his face you’d swear it was five in the afternoon and not nine in the morning. “I suppose you want me to find them for you.”

“You only have to find three of them,” I said. “We already know where Rollie Stumpf is.”

The significance of the photo finally dawned on him. “Ah-the woebegone spouse of Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf.”

“That’s right. The other three could be anywhere.”

I got to work marking up the Sunday edition while Eric worked his on-line magic. It took him only fifteen minutes to determine that Don Rodino was dead. “Nothing fishy though,” he said. “Vietnam 1965. Navy pilot shot down over Hanoi.”

Just before noon he found Herbert Giffels. In a cemetery in Zanesville. “Must have been a car accident or something,” Eric said. “Wife died the same day. September 20, 1983.”

The search for Elgin “Bud” Wetzel took all afternoon. “Here he is,” Eric yawned at a quarter to five. “Beaufort, South Carolina.”

“Still alive?”

“Looks like it. Apparently he’s something of an expert on eighteenth century candle snuffers. He’s got a website-www. wickmeister. com.”

“How about a phone number? He got one of those antique things?” I asked.

And so I called Rollie’s last surviving debate partner. The voice of the man who answered was deep and clear, with only a hint that he might be on the south side of middle age: “Wickmeister!”

“This wouldn’t be Bud, would it?” I asked.

“It’s been a long time since anybody called me that,” he said.

I introduced myself. Told him I’d graduated from Hemphill a year before he did. That my late husband Lawrence had covered the state debate tournament for The Harbinger. “As I recall, he drove down to Columbus on the bus with you.”

“I do remember somebody pestering us with stupid questions while we were trying to prepare,” he said, adding a faint “heh-heh-heh” on the end to let me know he was joking.

It wasn’t all that funny, but I mustered up the best laugh I could. Then I got down to business, bending the truth every whichaway as I went along. “The reason I called is that I’m writing a memoir of sorts. And 1957 was such a big year for Lawrence and me. Him writing for the college newspaper. Both of us graduating. Getting married. And that horrible murder. It was the same day as the debate tournament as I recall.”

He corrected me. “The day after.”

I corrected him. “Actually, the police said he was killed in the middle of night. So I guess we’re both right.”

The champion debater in him wouldn’t let it go. “If it was after midnight, then it was the next day.”

I capitulated. “You’re right, of course. Anyway, I’ve been trying to piece everything together chronologically. When exactly Lawrence was in Columbus and when he was back here. And going through his old clippings I found the story he wrote on the debate tournament. And the photo that ran with it. The four of you with your big trophies. I figured somebody smart enough to win a state debate tournament would have a good memory.”

That really puffed him up: “‘Resolved…That the United States should discontinue direct economic aid to foreign countries.’ Don and Herbie handled first and second affirmatives. Rollie and I handled the rebuttal. We made those Wooster College boys sound like a pack of retarded chimpanzees, I’ll tell you.”

A number of snappy retorts came to mind. I wisely kept them to myself. “Lawrence and I knew the boy who was killed a little-David Delarosa was his name-and we were both shaken up. As you can imagine. I’ve been tying to remember exactly when the bus got back to Hannawa. I know I picked Lawrence up but I can’t remember if it was morning or afternoon or just when.”

Bud made my ear buzz with a long, thoughtful moan. “Boy, you’re making me go back a long time.”

“Unfortunately it has been a long time,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. The reason I was asking him about the bus schedule, of course, was to humor my silly suspicions about Gwen: That just maybe she was the Miss Forty Below in David’s letter to Gordon. That maybe David had succeeded in seducing her that Wednesday night at Jericho’s. That maybe with Rollie down in Columbus she simply couldn’t resist David’s ample animal charm. That maybe she was the girl for whom David flipped the seven on his door into an L. “That L means later,” David told Howard Shay, “It means I’m getting laid.” So maybe Gwen was the one who knocked David over the balcony, and filled with fear and shame continued to batter his pretty face on the hard floor, long after he was dead.