C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

It was exciting to see Aubrey in action like that. She was thorough, detached. For some reason it gave me the courage to confront her about the lie. As soon as she was off the phone I dove in. “Forgive me,” I said, “but I have to ask you about that fleece jacket you bought at Old Navy.”

She reached for the radio knob, unconcerned and probably not listening to what I was saying. I softly pushed her fingers away. “You told me the gift certificate was from your sister. Your sister is dead.”

Her eyes froze on me. “You been snooping, Maddy?”

“I don’t snoop,” I said. “I get intrigued.”

She slid down and rested the back of her head on the seat. “It’s all there, isn’t it. In print forever and ever. Everybody’s dark secrets. I’m sorry I lied to you.”

“It’s not that you lied to me,” I said. “I’m concerned why you lied to yourself like that.”

She started to cry, the way Sissy James had cried when Aubrey pressed her. “I just miss her, Maddy.”

We didn’t discuss it any further. There was no need to. I knew all that I needed to know from the stories in the files. She knew all she needed to know from having lived it. The poor lamb. It was a horrible thing:

Aubrey’s older sister had committed suicide fifteen years before, when she was thirteen and Aubrey just nine. She’d sprinkled an entire bottle of her mother’s antidepressants inside a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She made that sandwich three months after their stepfather was tried and acquitted for repeatedly having sex with her. Was Aubrey abused like that, too? Probably. I did find her mother’s divorce listed in the courthouse news, eight months after the suicide. If Aubrey was molested, it ended when she was ten.

So, of course Aubrey gave herself a Christmas gift from her sister every year. She missed her sister. She needed to keep her alive any way she could. And of course she lied to me, if you really want to consider it a lie. Why would you explain something like that to a stranger? I was angry at myself for bringing it up. Angry for snooping. Yet it seemed to explain why she wanted to help Sissy James. Why she went looking for the truth back in Rush City when the football coach was murdered. Cops screw up. Courts send innocent people to jail. Courts set guilty people free. Somebody has to care.

Sunday, April 2

The next day I worked on my tomato and pepper plants. It’s an annual ritual that always leaves me hating myself. The process actually starts in September when I take four or five of my best-looking green peppers and a couple of my fatter tomatoes and rip them open for the seeds. I spread the seeds out on pieces of newspaper and let them dry. Then I roll the papers up and put a rubber bands around them and write TOMATOES on one and PEPPERS on the other.

Then the first week of April I plant the seeds in a tray and put them on a card table by the window in my bedroom that faces south, so they get a full day of sun. I keep the trays watered and watch the tiny sprouts pop through the potting soil. They come in thick as grass. When they get so big, I pluck out the scrawny ones, so the healthier ones have plenty of elbow room. I water them and talk to them and when they’re three or four inches high they shrivel up and die. Then Memorial Day weekend, I drive to Biliczky’s Garden Center and buy a half-flat of tomato plants and a half-flat of pepper plants, and plant the damn things in my garden. The rabbits whittle the leaves off three-quarters of them, but the rest survive. I get enough peppers to cut into my summer salads and enough tomatoes to get my fill of BLTs. Right after Labor Day I pick a few of each and rip them open for the seeds. Spread them out on newspaper to dry.

Monday, April 3

Monday morning I got on the elevator with Nanette Beane, the religion editor. She was cradling another cactus for her desk. She already had a dozen of them, some of them two feet tall. The newsroom joke is that they thrive on Nanette’s dry prose. Instead of making my usual beeline to the morgue, I meandered through metro to Aubrey’s desk.

Aubrey was busy putting a human face on the half-naked female corpse found over the weekend in the parking lot of an abandoned factory on Morrow Street. Morrow runs parallel with the interstate, in the southern end of the 3rd District. There are lots of abandoned factory buildings there. They find lots of bodies there.

“Prostitute?” I asked. The female bodies were almost always prostitutes, the male bodies almost always drug dealers.

She gave me an of-course-she-was shrug while looking for her coffee mug among the clutter. “Mother with three little kids, too. She had their pictures in her purse. Among the needles and condoms, and the wad of lottery tickets.”

“You want me to pull any files for you?” I asked.

“Eric’s already on it,” she said. She took a gulp from her mug-I could tell from her expression that the coffee was cold. “Just stay on him, Maddy. He’s got the attention span of a snowflake in Honolulu.”

I squinted toward the morgue. Eric was at his computer, eyes six inches from the screen, arched hands attacking his keyboard like tap-dancing tarantulas. “He looks sufficiently motivated,” I said.

She knew what I meant. “Don’t even go there-he’s the world’s biggest geek.”

“A geek in heat,” I said.

She dismissed me with a long “Puh-leeze” and another gulp of cold coffee.

I circled through the morgue to hang up my coat and get my mug, and then went to the cafeteria to fix my first dose of Darjeeling tea. When I returned Doreen Poole was waiting for me at my desk. “I need some stuff on the mayors’ wives,” she said.

“The mayor has more than one wife? Now that’s a story.”

Doreen started nibbling at her lower lip. I love to piss her off. And it’s not just because she’s the one who started the Morgue Mama thing. It’s the way she floats through her day like a soggy cloud, oblivious to all the parades she’s raining on. “The wives of past mayors,” she said. “I’m thinking of doing a story about how their role has changed over the years.”

“Thinking of doing a story?” I asked. This is the part of my job I’ve always hated. Reporters are always thinking of doing a story on something. What it means is that they don’t have anything important to write about at the moment, so they try to pull some flimsy feature story out of thin air. They’ll have Eric or me work for hours finding stuff about the story they’re thinking of writing. Then something important does happen on their beat and they’re off on that and all our work was for nothing. “Let me guess, Doreen,” I said. “You saw that documentary on A amp;E last night about the presidents’ wives and you thought it might be interesting to localize it.”

“I think it would be interesting.”

I fished the tea bag out of my mug. At home I always add a couple squirts of skimmed milk and honey to my Darjeeling tea. At work I drink it straight. Darjeeling is one of the famous black teas from northern India, grown in the shadows of Mt. Everest, which has always been my favorite mountain. When reporters come to the morgue begging for my files on this or that, I want them to go away feeling they’ve just climbed Everest. “My guess is that the lives of mayors’ wives haven’t changed much over the years,” I said. “They slowly turn into alcoholics waiting for their husbands to come home at night.”

I told Doreen to make me a list of some specific mayors’ wives and I’d see what I could find. After she threw back her head and stormed off, I threw my teabag in the trash and went to work finding everything we had on Tim Bandicoot, his wife Annie, and his rival, Guthrie Gates.