C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

“Because she was in trouble and I knew she didn’t want that trouble spreading to Rosy. And I guess I figured if Sissy confessed to killing that preacher it was for a reason. I figured she must have been mixed up in it some way.”

None of us said anything for a long time. We just rubbed our eyes and watched Eric play with the cat. The warm May sun was sprinkling across the steps. “Just to get it all straight,” Aubrey finally whispered, “Sissy was here that Friday night?”

“She was.”

“And when the police came to see you, you told them she wasn’t?”

“That’s right.”

“They didn’t press you? The way we did?”

“They was here about five minutes.”

“We know they talked to your father. Do you know if they talked to anybody else? Other relatives? Your neighbors?”

“They just got in their car and drove off.”

“Fucking boneheads,” Aubrey hissed.

This time Jeanie laughed. The weight of the world was off her shoulders. At least some of it was.

We talked with Jeanie for another half hour or so. We told her what we knew of Sissy’s new life at Marysville. She told us about Sissy’s childhood in Mingo Junction. It was not a childhood anyone would want. Sissy was eleven when her mother died. Her mother was with her latest boyfriend, driving home fast and drunk from a bar in East Liverpool, on a black November night, when a bend in a road that had always been there sent them into the Ohio River. Sissy went to live with her aunt and uncle, Jeanie’s parents. It was not long before her uncle started cornering Sissy in dark corners of the house when no one else was around. It went on for years. “He used to bother me like that, too, until Sissy came to live with us,” Jeanie said. At fourteen Sissy started drinking. Got into drugs. Got into beds and back seats with any boy who wanted to. When she was seventeen she escaped to Hannawa, to its strip bars and its by-the-hour motels, finally finding her way to the Heaven Bound Cathedral. “I think having Rosy is what finally turned her around,” Jeanie said. “Even if she couldn’t raise her baby herself, she could behave better for her.”

“Being the girlfriend of a married preacher isn’t exactly behaving,” I pointed out.

“It was an improvement over what she was,” Jeanie said.

We headed for home, taking the same zig-zag route we came on. In the town of Wellsville, Eric made us stop at a convenience store for Mountain Dew and Doritos. I bought a little bag of cashews and Aubrey bought some M amp;Ms. The chewing got us talking.

“I can’t believe how easy that was,” Aubrey said, putting one little circle of candy in her mouth at a time.

“Buying snacks is not a difficult thing,” Eric answered. He was putting one handful of Doritos in his mouth at a time.

“I mean how easily Jeanie opened up to us,” Aubrey said, playfully throwing an M amp;M at him. “It makes you wonder who’d be in prison if the detectives who drove down here hadn’t been so eager to get back to Hannawa.”

Eric found the M amp;M in the folds of his shirt and ate it. “What blows me away,” he said, “is that Jeanie lied for Sissy in the first place. Usually relatives lie to keep somebody out of jail.”

“That is odd,” I agreed.

Aubrey threw another M amp;M at Eric. “What’s odd? She owed Sissy that lie.”

Eric retaliated for that second M amp;M by smashing a Dorito on Aubrey’s head. There is nothing worse in the world than young people in heat. “Owed her?” I asked.

Aubrey picked the orange bits from her hair. “You heard what she said-her father stopped molesting her when Sissy moved in. She didn’t suffer because Sissy did. How’d you like to carry guilt like that around?”

Eric wasn’t buying Aubrey’s analysis. “She’s already raising the kid for her. How much guilt could she have?”

Aubrey threw an entire handful of M amp;Ms at him. “Quit having opinions about things you don’t understand!”

Aubrey hadn’t just thrown those M amp;M’s. She’d thrown them hard. Her rebuke hadn’t been playful. It had been loud and angry. In the mirror I watched Eric slide back into the seat and stuff his cheeks with Doritos, already accustomed to her mood swings after only a few days of love. “If Jeanie lied to the police because she owed Sissy that lie,” I asked, “why did she tell us the truth?”

Aubrey pressed her face against the side window. She stared at the passing sky. “She owed her the truth, too.”

We drove along in silence, the playfulness wrenched right out of us from the sadness we found in Mingo Junction. “At least now we know Sissy didn’t kill Buddy Wing,” Aubrey said after several miles. “I can go to Tinker and start working on the story above ground.”

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Tinker already knows about your investigation.”

Aubrey wasn’t at all pleased to hear that. “Who told him? Marabout?”

I could feel my head shrinking down my sweater like a turtle. “I told him.”

She said, “Shit, Maddy!” But it sounded like “ Et tu Brute? ”

I confessed in full: “Yesterday I went to see Bob Averill about Dale’s quitting-”

“Averill knows too?”

“He knows, too. I was explaining why Dale went off his rocker.”

“That he’s jealous of me? Good God.”

“That is not why he quit.”

Aubrey was an inch from screaming. “That’s exactly why he quit.”

“No it’s not, Aubrey. He’s simply afraid you’re biting off more than you can chew.”

Aubrey put an M amp;M on her outstretched tongue and flicked it in like a lizard devouring a fly. “That sounds like jealousy to me.”

Eric laughed at her. “You are so full of yourself.”

“I am not full of myself.”

“Of course you’re full of yourself,” I said. “If you weren’t you couldn’t be doing what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with being-confident.”

Aubrey surrendered. “So if Dale wasn’t driven mad by my brilliant reporting, then what was it?”

I wasn’t about to share my mid-life crisis theory with her. No one her age could possible understand an excuse like that. So I put it in journalistic terms. “You work all those years as a reporter convinced that the editors on the copy desk are a bunch of drooling old doofuses. Then suddenly you’re on the desk. You’re the drooling old doofus. You panic. You embarrass yourself. Anyway, that’s sort of what I was telling Tinker and Bob when I let the cat out of the bag about the Buddy Wing thing.”

I thought I was getting through to her but I was wrong. “This is the most important story of my life,” she said. “I can’t afford this relentless busybody crap of yours.”

She glared at me and I glared back. The car drifted and I almost clipped a mailbox. “You should have told them yourself,” I said.

Aubrey swung her head around and waited for Eric to defend her. But Eric didn’t defend her. He offered her his last Dorito. “Okay,” she said, “maybe I should have said something. But I wanted to be sure about Sissy first. I didn’t want them to think I was some chicky-poo air-head off on some wild goose chase.”

“Believe me,” I said, “nobody thinks that.”

Monday, May 15

Aubrey was summoned to Bob Averill’s office as soon as she got to work Monday. She was up there for two hours. When she got off the elevator, she gave me a thumbs up. The paper was going to let her proceed with the story.

I wasn’t a bit surprised. Proving that Sissy James didn’t kill Buddy Wing would be a great story. It would be a nasty, tantalizing drama that would keep the city spellbound for months. Murder. Sex. Police ineptitude. Religious hypocrisy. It would be Hannawa’s O.J. story.