C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

Freelancing always gives reporters the heebie-jeebies-even unemployed ones-so I wasn’t surprised that his first reaction was to shake his head like an oscillating fan. “No-no-no-no, Maddy,” he said. “There’ll be no have-keyboard-will-travel stuff for this boy.”

I patted his nervous hands. “I admire your standards. I really do. And I admire the courage it took to walk away from the paper. You’ve got moxie out the wazoo. But if you’re anything like other reporters I know, you’ve also got bills out the wazoo.”

Dale hemmed and hawed through several cups of coffee. But in the end he agreed to put on a suit and tie and meet with the corporate honchos dangling that big, fat freelance job. They offered and he accepted.

I was happy for Dale. And pretty damned pleased with myself. So when Aubrey started smirking at me that morning in the morgue, I guess I got a little crusty. Later in the day I made amends by sharing a pack of stale Fig Newtons from the vending machine with her. Thank God she had the good sense not to bring up Dale’s freelance job again.

Wednesday, May 24

During a little mid-week pillow talk Aubrey learned that Eric was having a birthday on Sunday. Instead of taking him to the Olive Garden and a movie, she got the bug to throw a surprise birthday dinner for him. She not only wanted to bake a cake, she also wanted to make him a lasagna. I was astonished. “This is suddenly very domestic of you,” I said. We were on our phones grinning at each other across the newsroom. “You must be either pregnant or in love.”

She cradled the receiver under her chin and playfully gave me the finger with both hands. “Those are two things I will never be. I just thought a nice dinner with the three of us would be fun.”

“The three of us?”

“You can’t possibly think I could tackle cake and a lasagna by myself.”

“And here I thought it was because we’d become something of a family.”

Again she gave me the fingers. This time I gave them back.

So the secret birthday dinner for Eric was set: I’d go to her apartment early Sunday afternoon and help her make the lasagna and the cake and then when Eric showed up that evening, expecting Dominos pizza and sex, he’d get crepe paper, balloons, and Dolly Madison Sprowls in a pointy paper party hat.

Thursday, May 25

All week Aubrey worked the phones. All week people hung up on her.

The one person who did talk to her-and talk and talk-was the eyebrow woman. Having spilled the beans about Sissy’s child in Mingo Junction, she now freely rummaged through her brain for anything Aubrey might find useful. “And of course you know about Family Night,” she said matter-of-factly during one of their conversations.

“Family Night?” Aubrey asked.

Five minutes later Aubrey was standing in front of my desk, telling me everything that the eyebrow woman had told her. “It appears we have a few loose ends to tie around the Reverend Bandicoot’s neck,” she said.

Friday, May 26

Aubrey drove. The insurance company had replaced the windows in her old Escort two days after they were smashed, but there were still tiny shards of glass everywhere in the car. So all the way to Hannawa Falls, I sat in the back fishing out the glass between the seats, and Eric sat in front fishing them off the dashboard. It became a game, like seeing how many out-of-state license plates you can spot.

Hannawa Falls is a tidy blue-collar suburb just east of the city. It’s where many of the area’s autoworkers settled in the Fifties and Sixties. The endless acres of Cape Cods and ranches had been paid for with years of sacrifice. The owners of those tiny palaces were not about to allow the teeniest bit of sloth, by themselves or their neighbors, to eat into their hard-won equity. Every lawn was mowed. Every shrub was trimmed. We wound our way through a series of concrete streets named after deciduous trees until we arrived on the cul-de-sac where Tim Bandicoot lived. We parked and waited.

At six-fifteen, the garage door went up and a dark green minivan backed out. Four heads were visible through the windows: Tim Bandicoot, his wife, Annie, and their two sons. Aubrey waited until they reached the end of the street and then followed. We wound back through the deciduous tree streets pretty much as we’d come in, until we reached East Tuckman, the wide, four-lane street that runs through the suburb like a barbecue spit. The Bandicoots turned left and drove to Eastfield Centre, the gargantuan shopping strip that has sucked most of the retail out of downtown Hannawa.

They pulled into Arby’s. We parked across the street at a Burger King. They went inside to eat. Aubrey sent Eric inside for carryout. It took the Bandicoots forty minutes to eat. Then they drove to the book store next to the mall. “How boring is this,” Aubrey moaned as we parked five rows behind them. “Friday night at Borders.”

I told her I thought a family outing to Borders was actually a pretty nifty thing.

“Putt-Putt golf for the mind,” she said.

“To each his own,” I said. Aubrey was already heading for the door and Eric and I were walking like quick little penguins to catch up.

We lingered by the magazine racks while the Bandicoots browsed the tables of just-published non-fiction. After a few minutes they split up. Annie headed for the children’s section with the boys. Tim wandered into the history section.

We followed Tim, hiding by the books on World War II while he worked his way down the long aisle of Civil War books. When he opened a large gray-covered volume on Robert E. Lee, Aubrey slid beside him and turned sideways, resting her elbow on the top of the shelving. “Civil War buff,” she said. “How ironic.” She was referring, of course, to his famous split with Buddy Wing over speaking in tongues.

Tim raised his head only slightly. His eyes drifted from Aubrey to Eric to me-by now we were awkwardly hovering behind her-then back to the book. “I thought you hung out in the dairy aisle,” he said. He, of course, was referring to our ambush of the eyebrow woman at Artie’s supermarket.

“Wherever I can learn something,” Aubrey said.

Tim closed the big book on Robert E. Lee and cradled it across his chest. Psychological armor, I suppose. “I knew Sissy had a daughter, if that’s what you want to know.”

Aubrey curled her index finger under her thumb and flicked the portrait of Lee on the cover. “Do you consider the great Robert E. a hero or a traitor?”

He put the book back on the shelf. He was struggling to remain calm. And failing. “You’re insinuating that I knew Sissy was in Mingo Junction the night Buddy was poisoned.”

“Did you know?”

“I knew she always went there for holidays. And I suppose she told me she was going there that weekend. But then Buddy was killed and three days later she confessed.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that she was confessing-just perhaps-to protect you?”

“Why would that occur to me?”

Aubrey tried again. “Did it occur to you that maybe somebody else was setting Sissy up?”

Tim started pawing the books nervously. I figured any second now he was going to pull out the biggest coffee table volume he could find and beat Aubrey over the head with it. “The police were crawling all over my house and my church, trying to prove that I did it,” he hissed. “Then they found all that stuff at Sissy’s place, and she confessed. What was I supposed to think?”

Aubrey began nodding, sarcastically. “So-just so I’m clear on this-never once did you say to yourself, ‘You know, maybe I should tell the police she just might have been in Mingo Junction that Friday night.’”