C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

The Krispy Kreme box was empty when we left Bandicoot’s storefront church. Aubrey’s car was still out front. “You know,” she said as we pulled away, “we never should’ve pigged out on those doughnuts.”

“Don’t I know it,” I said. “We’ll have to fast for a week.”

Aubrey U-turned through an abandoned Sinclair station. “Screw the calories. Think about who gave us those doughnuts. A man who, maybe, poisoned Buddy Wing twice. Maddy-we have got to be more careful.”

Even after all those Krispy Kremes Aubrey wanted to go to Speckley’s for lunch. The place is as busy Saturday mornings as it is weekdays, so we had to wait in line. Aubrey bought a Herald-Union from the box outside and read it standing up. I got a menu from the counter and looked for something light that might counteract any slow-acting poison. When we finally got a table-in the smoking section-I ritually ordered the meat loaf sandwich and au gratin potatoes as usual. Aubrey got a house salad and tomato soup.

I started our debriefing session: “Tim Bandicoot was nice enough, wasn’t he?”

“Too nice.”

“Think so? Other than the doughnuts I don’t think he spread it on too thick.”

My appraisal angered her. “These TV preachers manipulate people for a living. They get perfectly sane people to jump up and down and roll around on the floor and then hand over the grocery money. And when they get caught with some bimbo in a motel room? They simply trot out their God’s already forgiven me-won’t you? shtick and everything’s hunky-dory until the next time they get caught. Remember Jimmy Swaggert? ‘I have sinned! I have sinned!’ I think we just got Swaggert-ed, Maddy.”

I wasn’t so sure. Tim Bandicoot had seemed sincere to me. “He told us he didn’t want forgiveness,” I said.

“Shtick. He gave me his Bic for christsake. What was that all about?”

“You needed a pen?”

“That was my shtick. I’ve got a purse full of pens.”

The waitress brought our food. Aubrey used her little finger and thumb to fish out the curls of raw onion from her salad. She deposited them in the ash tray. “Did you hear what he said when I told him we’d been to visit Sissy at Marysville? ‘I heard.’ How did he hear? Who told him?”

“Sissy?”

“Of course, Sissy.”

“So they’re still communicating.”

Aubrey filled her mouth with Romaine lettuce. “So he’s still manipulating.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe Tim Bandicoot was the icky egomaniacal murderer I thought going in, before the Krispy Kremes, the chocolate-brown cow eyes and that big dose of contrition. “So where do we go from here?”

“Shopping.”

Sunday, April 23

I planned to spend Easter cleaning out my raspberry bed. But it was raining when I got up, and it continued to rain all morning. At noon I gave up and drove to the paper, to catch up on my work. Not that I had any work to catch up on. As empty as the newsroom was on holidays, it was a lot less empty than my bungalow.

There were just eight cars in the parking deck, including Aubrey’s Escort and Eric Chen’s little pickup truck. They were parked side by side in the Handicapped Only slots by the elevator. When I got to the morgue I tossed my raincoat on the counter and went to my desk for my tea mug. Everywhere in Hannawa families were setting down to baked beans, Jell-O salad, and spiral-cut ham. I’d be having a mug of Darjeeling tea and a package of stale oatmeal cookies from the vending machine. I cut through sports to the cafeteria. That damn sign was still taped to the back of Chip McCoy’s computer:

HER NAME IS DOLLY MADISON SPROWLS, BUT HER FRIENDS JUST CALL HER MADDY. TO THE OTHER 99.8% OF US SHE’S JUST PLAIN MAD

Those signs used to be stuck everywhere. Now there are just two, that one on Chip’s computer, and the one I framed and put on my kitchen wall at home.

I found Aubrey and Eric sitting together in the back. Aubrey was eating yogurt out of a plastic cup. Eric was eating potato chips and sucking on a can of Mountain Dew. Good gravy, how odd finding those two together. I just stood there in the doorway with my empty mug.

Which made Aubrey laugh. “You caught us together in the cafeteria, not in bed,” she said. “You can come in.”

I looked at Eric. He was as stunned by what she said as I was. “Are there any cookies in the machine?” I asked.

Eric leaned back and checked. “Nada. But there’s some of those indigestible cheese cracker things.”

I bought the crackers, filled my mug with hot water, and started for the door.

Aubrey called out, “For christsakes, Maddy, sit down.”

I sat.

Eric didn’t say a thing-I’m sure his brain was full of dirty pictures of Aubrey and him in bed-but Aubrey launched into a nervous explanation of their togetherness. “Eric’s going to help me with the computer searches for other possible suspects. Just some quick checks for strange behavior, criminal or otherwise. I knew you wouldn’t have time.”

What she meant, of course, is that I wouldn’t have a clue on how to do it.

It was about then that Eric regained the use of his brain and remembered that he had to be in Youngstown for Easter dinner in a half hour, about eighty miles away. He got three cans of Mountain Dew from the vending machine-fuel for the road-and left. Aubrey took a cleansing breath and rolled her eyes. “What a boy that boy is.”

“You’re not going to your mother’s?” I asked.

“She’s having dinner at five and I’m going to point my car in that direction about three. But am I actually going to go to my mother’s? God only knows.”

While Aubrey cleaned up Eric’s mess, I gathered up her folders. Her SISSY folder was already an inch thick, and her T. BANDICOOT folder not much thinner. The folder marked HEAVEN BOUND CATH had two copies of the church directory rubber-banded together. “Two copies?” I asked. “Didn’t Guthrie give us just one?”

“I went back later for another one,” she said. “An older one. I got thinking about Tim Bandicoot breaking with Buddy Wing and realized that former church members were more likely to be suspects than present members. You know? Somebody mad enough at Buddy Wing to quit his church might also be mad enough to kill him.”

I handed her the folders. “Smart. How old is the other directory?”

Her faced scrunched with disappointment. “Just three years. But we might find somebody interesting. You don’t mind Eric doing this for me, do you? I should have asked.”

“What’s there to mind? Just be gentle with him.”

“Puh-leeze.”

I stayed at the paper until four, organizing my desk drawers, playing solitaire, calling my relatives in LaFargeville on the paper’s dime. Then I went home and opened a can of vegetable soup. I ate it right out of the saucepan, on the porch my Lawrence built on the back of the house the same summer he started screwing his secretary. It’s a wonderful porch, running the full length of the house, screened in to keep out the bugs, wide enough for my picnic table and a propane grill. The door opens right into my vegetable garden.

By eight I was in bed reading Jane Smiley’s new novel. Trying to read it, anyway. It was Easter Sunday and I was alone. I should have gone to church that morning. I should have stopped off at the drug store and bought myself a chocolate rabbit and some marshmallow peeps. I should have taken a week’s vacation and driven to LaFargeville to visit my brother and my niece. After Lawrence flew the coop I should have remarried somebody and had some children. I took the notebook and a pen from my nightstand and used Jane Smiley’s book as a desk. Lawrence was gone and Dale Marabout was gone and the only people I had to sponge the loneliness out of my life were Aubrey McGinty and Sissy James.