C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

Wednesday, June 28

As soon as I got to my desk Aubrey motioned for me to come to hers. I hurried across the newsroom, tea bag still soaking in my mug. “Can’t you wait until a woman’s awake?” I complained.

She wanted me to hear the message on her phone. She handed me the receiver and punched the replay button. The voice was precise and sweet in the phoniest way:

Aubrey…this is Annie Bandicoot. Something really important is going to happen Sunday at Tim’s church. And I thought you might want to be there. Services start at ten…bye-bye.

Aubrey put her hands behind her head and swiveled back and forth in her chair. With her elbows sticking out like that she looked like an angel ornament swinging from a Christmas tree. Her smile was absolutely Satanic. “What do you make of that?” she asked me.

“Assuming it was really Annie Bandicoot?”

“Yeah. Assuming that.”

“Then I’d say something important is going to happen. Something they want reported.”

“They? Or just Annie? Remember what she said: ‘I thought you might want to be there.’ I thought, not we thought.”

Dangling tea bag or no, I took a sip from my mug. “It’s probably innocent enough. But it does make you wonder why Annie made the call and not Tim, doesn’t it?”

“So many possibilities, Maddy: Tim is so distraught after his little shoving match with Guthrie Gates that wifey-poo has to do his dirty work. Or wifey-poo, tired of seeing her man muck things up, takes matters in her own hands. Or maybe the Bandicoots are in cahoots, going on the offensive together to cover their guilt.”

“Bandicoots in cahoots,” I said. “I like that.”

She ignored me. “Maybe that wasn’t Annie Bandicoot on the phone at all. Maybe that was someone from Guthrie’s church, wanting me to show up at Tim’s church, so Tim would see me and go off on me and look like a complete jerk, which I would dutifully include in my series.”

I had a possibility of my own: “Maybe somebody’s going to spike Tim’s water pitcher.”

Aubrey turned her wings back into arms and silently applauded my deductive powers. “Whatever’s going to happen, you and I, Dolly Madison Sprowls, are going to church Sunday.”

Friday, June 30

Eric finally came out of his funk and completed the computer search on Edward Tolchak, the neighbor who kept shooting out the Heaven Bound Cathedral’s parking lot lights. Unfortunately, as Aubrey already had surmised, the search came up with nothing useful. After getting out of jail for the third time, Tolchak had filed a civil suit against the Heaven Bound Cathedral. The cathedral settled out of court, removing two of the light poles, installing Venetian blinds on Tolchak’s windows, planting a row of blue spruce along his property line and paying him $25,000 for the mental anguish he’d suffered. I gave the findings to Aubrey.

Sunday, July 2

Sunday morning Aubrey and I drove to Lutheran Hill. So did the man in the red Taurus station wagon. We spotted him behind us shortly after Aubrey picked me up. “Do you think Annie Bandicoot left a message on his phone, too?” Aubrey asked. She was neither angry nor afraid. Not even anxious. She was enjoying all this.

When we reached the New Epiphany Temple and pulled into the gravel parking lot, the man in the station wagon made a quick turn onto a side street and parked. He was protecting his license plate number like it was the secret formula for Coca-Cola.

The old Woolworth’s store was filled to the gills. We found a pair of empty chairs near the back. Aubrey nudged me and pointed at the huge cross behind the pulpit. It was twinkling.

A quintet of musicians took their positions in the corner and started playing-two guitars, trumpet, drums and an electric piano. People started clapping in time. Many were rocking their shoulders and bobbing their heads. I noticed I was tapping my toes. Then Aubrey took a camera out of her purse and put it in her lap. “Good gravy,” I whispered, “you’re not going to take pictures, are you?”

“I was asked to come and cover an important event. Of course I’m going to take pictures.”

“You start snapping that thing during the service and they’ll descend on us like a plague of locusts.”

No sooner said, the back door swung wide and a muscle-bound man with a backwards baseball cap and a television camera on his shoulder slid inside. Behind him was Tish Kiddle. Aubrey hissed “television whore” loud enough for half the congregation to hear.

The thrones on the stage suddenly filled up with elders. A couple dozen people from the congregation filtered to the stage and sang this absolutely wild hymn that sounded an awful lot like the Isley’s Brothers’ Do You Love Me?

Then Tim and Annie Bandicoot appeared at the pulpit together. The congregation seemed to shrivel. Clearly this is not what usually happened at the temple’s Sunday morning service. Annie lovingly rubbed her husband’s shoulder and then stepped to the microphone. She said this: “Tim is going to talk to you, and I want you to know that what he is going to say, he has already said to me, and to our children. I want you to know that we love him and trust him and believe in him. And we believe in you.”

Then she said this: “Jesus said to the Pharisees, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’ So should you decide to cast stones at my husband when this is finished, I will be standing at his side.”

Aubrey looked at me and mouthed that line from the Tammy Wynette song, Stand By Your Man.

It was clear where this whole thing was going. Jesus had said that cast-the-first-stone stuff to the Pharisees after they brought a woman to him charged with adultery, and reminded him that the punishment under the old laws of Moses was death by stoning.

Tim Bandicoot hugged his wife and stepped to the microphone. “I am guilty of the sin of adultery. And it was with a woman you all know. A woman who today sits in prison, for the murder of our beloved Buddy Wing.”

Aubrey finished scribbling the quote and then snapped a series of photographs.

Tim’s confession was filled with tears and whimpering and loud prayers peppered with scripture. There was plenty of crying in the audience, too. Every now and then someone would pop from their folding chair and implore him to “Go and sin no more”-the same thing Jesus said to the woman after he’d saved her from the Pharisees’ stones.

I must say that Tim Bandicoot’s agony looked genuine to me. And I have some experience with the agony of unfaithful men: Dale Marabout’s, when I found him on the floor with the kindergarten teacher; my husband Lawrence’s, when I found him in the garage with the secretary from the labor union. I could tell from Aubrey’s frozen smirk that she did not believe Tim Bandicoot’s contrition was for real.

But then he said this: “There are those who believe Sissy did not kill Pastor Wing. There are those who believe Sissy confessed to that terrible sin to protect me. Though I surely broke Buddy’s heart, I did not stop it from beating. I did not kill Buddy Wing.”

He started to cry again, and shake. Annie took him in her arms and they swayed like wind chimes. To get a better angle, Aubrey slid into the aisle and sank to her knees, clicking off more shots.

Tim gently pushed his wife away and, with arms stiffly anchored on his pulpit, directly addressed the long-legged reporter kneeling in the aisle. “I do not know if Sissy is innocent or guilty, Miss McGinty. But I will go to her prison cell, and I will beg that if she has not spoken the truth, she speaks it now.”

Tim and Annie left the stage. Aubrey tried to follow them into the hallway behind the stage, but a large black man in a brown suit stopped her. The musicians started playing and the choir started singing. The congregation clapped and danced and the tears poured.