C Corwin - Dig

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. There was still a piece of yellow crime scene tape tied to the trunk of a tree. Andrew jumped out and unlocked the gate. We drove in. The road hadn’t changed much in fifty years. It was still a narrow, gravel-covered lane cutting straight across a flat expanse of weeds and briars. For several hundred yards the ground sank ever lower. Then after a small brook it began to rise. The road wound through a series of knobby hills, finally ending in a small, gravel-covered parking lot.

We got out of the car. There wasn’t a house in sight. “You can see why the killer wasn’t afraid to shoot a gun out here, can’t you?” I said. “It would just be a faint pop in the distance, if anybody heard it at all.”

I didn’t mean for it to be a rhetorical question, but Andrew treated it like one. He put his hands in his coat pockets and started walking toward the path that led up the side of a grassy hill. I trotted like a penguin to catch up. I tried again. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else being around, would you?”

He didn’t answer that one either. He put his head down and started up the hill. I followed. It was a dirt path but the ground was still hard from the winter. In a week or two, once the temperature climbed a bit and the spring rains started in earnest, it would be a soupy mess. “Exactly where did you find him?”

Andrew stopped and pointed into the brown, foot-tall grass, just a few feet to his right. “Right there.”

“There?” I was expecting to find crime tape and footprints and ground stained purple with Gordon’s blood. But it was just grass, tall, dry and brown, nodding ever so slightly in the late winter wind. “So that Saturday you found him-did you see his body from the parking lot?”