Saturday, April 1
It was a toss-up whose car we’d take that morning. Neither my Dodge Shadow nor Aubrey’s Ford Escort was in any shape for a long drive. But if we were going to Marysville somebody had to drive. My car got the nod when we compared tire tread.
I picked her up at her apartment building, a crumbling old Art Deco palace at West Tuckman and Sterling. It had been a wonderful neighborhood once. I’ve seen the old pictures: muscular oaks lining brick streets, trolley cars, big old Tudors surrounded with wrought-iron fences. Now the oaks are gone, the bricks paved over with asphalt, the trolleys replaced by boxy buses, the wrought-iron by chain-link, and the wonderful old homes chopped up into efficiency apartments for poor souls who don’t have two nickels to rub together.
Aubrey was waiting outside for me, in the rain. She got in the car with soaked hair, a mug of black coffee, and cheeks as pink as bunny slippers.
“Good gravy,” I scolded, “you’ll catch pneumonia.”
“Pneumonia is caused by micro-organisms, not raindrops,” she said.
It was only six-thirty and I made an illegal U-turn to get back to the I-491 interchange. “I don’t think so, Aubrey.” I told her how President William Henry Harrison gave a four-hour inaugural speech in the rain, contracted pneumonia, and died four weeks later.
She was pressing the coffee mug against her forehead. “Don’t mother me, Maddy.”
I took I-491 to I-76 to I-71. We hit one pocket of rain after another. Aubrey was driving me nuts changing stations on the radio.
My lunch with Dale Marabout the previous week had poured more fuel on my already combustible curiosity and sent me looking for answers about what made Aubrey tick. Whenever I’d gotten a spare minute, I’d snooped through the files looking for anything to do with Rush City or a McGinty. And now I was chomping at the bit to ask her about something I’d found. However, what I’d found wasn’t good, and that kept me chomping instead of asking. It kept me disappointed in her, and disappointed in me, all the way to Marysville.
Marysville is a little city of eleven thousand or so in Union County, a half hour northwest of Columbus. Back in the Eighties the governor persuaded the Japanese carmaker Honda to build a big auto plant there, providing thousands of good jobs and ruining thousands of acres of good farmland. Until then the county’s biggest employer was the Marysville Reformatory for Women. It’s where they sent Sissy James after she confessed to poisoning Buddy Wing.
Saturday morning is not a good time to visit someone in prison. It’s when everyone wants to visit. So there were quite a number of cars lined up at the gate and the guards were taking their time checking people in.
Except for the chain-link fences and Slinky-like rings of razor wire, the prison looked like a small college. Some of the buildings were old and strangely quaint-the first were built in the early nineteen hundreds-while others were cold and modern. There were a few bunches of trees here and there, though the prison clearly could have budgeted a little more for landscaping. On the drive from Hannawa, Aubrey told me that Marysville housed eighteen hundred women, most for non-violent crimes like drugs or forgery or prostitution, most for getting mixed up with the wrong kind of man.
I was surprised that Sissy James had agreed to talk with Aubrey. I also was glad Aubrey invited me along. I’d sat in the morgue for forty years watching reporters rushing in and out, watching the stories they banged out turn into neat columns of print. Now I was getting a chance to see a reporter in action. I knew that Aubrey cared how this whole Sissy James thing panned out, but frankly I just liked the snooping and the lunches afterward.
The guards directed us to the maximum security building. It was big and new. Except for the bars in the windows it didn’t look much different from the middle school they built up the street from my bungalow a few years ago. Inside we were politely interrogated, checked for drugs and weapons, and led into a tiny windowless room. It was furnished with an uncomfortable-looking blue sofa, a single wood chair without armrests, and a small coffee table made of molded plastic. The walls were bare except for a closed-circuit TV camera and a framed photo of Republican Governor Dick Van Sickle.
Aubrey motioned for me to sit in the chair. She sat in the middle of the sofa, so Sissy would have to sit close to her no matter which end of the sofa she chose. We only had to wait a couple of minutes before Sissy was ushered in. Her baggy cotton slacks and blouse were the same gray as the floor tiles. The guard positioned herself in the doorway, arms folded across her mixing-bowl breasts.
Sissy was surprisingly friendly. She smiled and shook our hands and sat on Aubrey’s left side. She’d only been in Marysville for four months, but she looked thinner than she did on the interrogation and arraignment tapes. Aubrey took a notebook and pen from her purse, but she didn’t open the notebook or click the pen, her old off-the-record trick. “What job do they have you doing here, Sissy?” she asked.
“Flag shop.”
“Making flags you mean?”
“American flags. Ohio flags. I like it.”
“Keeps your mind off things?”
“It makes the day go by.”
“You’ve got a long row to hoe, don’t you? Life without parole.”
“Life goes by in a minute. Then you’ve got eternity with the Lord.”
“Confident you’re going to heaven then?”
Sissy’s smile turned hard and uneasy, like the seat of that damn wooden chair I was sitting on. “I’ve already been forgiven,” she said.
Aubrey put her notebook on the coffee table and twisted until her arms and chin were resting on the back of the sofa. She was close enough to stroke Sissy’s cheek if she wanted. “And what has God forgiven you for? Murdering Buddy Wing or covering up for somebody else?”
Sissy’s eyes floated up to the governor’s picture, her popularly elected lord here on earth. “I know there’s still lots of talk about me taking the blame for somebody else.”
Aubrey nodded. “For Tim Bandicoot, your lover.”
Sissy just stared at the governor. “Everybody knows me and Tim did wrong. That’s no secret. God’s forgiven me for that, too.”
“And apparently Tim’s wife has forgiven him,” Aubrey said. “I hear they’re a happy family again.”
Said Sissy, “As it should be.”
“You don’t think Tim was just using you for sex? The way other men had used you for sex?”
I watched Sissy’s eyes cloud over, her nostrils glow pink. “You just know everything, don’t you?”
Aubrey’s voice shriveled into a whisper. “I read the transcripts of your sentencing hearing. If it hadn’t been for all that stuff that happened to you when you were a kid, you might be on death row right now.”
I’d remembered Dale’s story on the sentencing: Sissy’s lawyer had talked for an hour about her illegitimate birth, her mother’s early death, the shoplifting, the running away, the drugs, the stripping in rathole bars, the escort service stuff, how she’d been rescued by the Rev. Buddy Wing, pressing his open hands against the inside of her television screen. Her lawyer was followed by a dozen members of the Heaven Bound Cathedral, forgiving her the way they knew Pastor Wing surely would have forgiven her, praying that Sissy be allowed to live and be a witness for God’s love inside the secure walls of the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
“What happened to me ain’t important,” Sissy told Aubrey. Her head was bent over her knees now, and her arms wrapped around her waist, as if she had a bad case of menstrual cramps. “All that matters is that Satan got the best of me and I killed Pastor Wing.”
If I’d been the one asking the questions, I would have been rocking Sissy in my arms. But Aubrey pulled back, making sure there wasn’t a whit of compassion in her voice. “I don’t think you killed Buddy Wing,” she said. “And I don’t think Tim Bandicoot killed him either, though I’m sure that’s what you think.”
Sissy almost screamed it: “I killed Pastor Wing. Why don’t anybody believe that?”
Aubrey put her notebook back in her purse. She hadn’t written a word. “Well, the police believe it. The judge believes it. So you’ve got them on your side. But me, I’m not on your side. I’m going back to Hannawa and I’m going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tim Bandicoot didn’t do it, even if he’s the world’s biggest asshole in every other way. And then I’ll come back and we’ll have another talk.”
Sissy James walked out of the room before another word could be said. Her arms were still wrapped around her waist. She was crying.
Aubrey and I drove into Marysville and had an early lunch in a restaurant that looked a lot like Speckley’s. The specialty of this place was fried bologna sandwiches. We were both intrigued. The bologna was a half-inch thick, smothered in cheddar cheese. The bun was soaked with grease. They were absolutely wonderful. After lunch we checked out the antique shops. I bought an old Lassie novel for Joyce, my niece back in LaFargeville. Like every collie owner I ever met, Joyce collects anything Lassie. Then we started for home.
In the hilly part of Richland County traffic stopped. Both lanes north, both lanes south, thousands of idling cars and trucks spewing blue exhaust. It was raining so hard you’d of thought we were in a car wash. We couldn’t see a thing. Aubrey punched the radio buttons for the right song to soothe her growing anxiety. Finally she squealed “Shit!” and jumped out of the car. She disappeared up the berm.
I was antsy, too. Not so much about the traffic jam-sooner or later we’d start moving again-but about the lie Aubrey told me that day we went to see Guthrie Gates at the cathedral. One of the first lessons new reporters at the Herald-Union learn is that you don’t bullshit Morgue Mama. Heap all the bullshit you want on your sources or on the editors. On Morgue Mama, not even a teaspoonful. But now there I was, being bullshitted by Aubrey McGinty and afraid to confront her about it. I was simply furious with myself.
Aubrey was gone for a half hour. She jumped into the car soaking wet. “Remember Maddy,” she said even before the door was closed, “pneumonia-virus.”
She took her cellphone from her purse and punched in a flurry of numbers with her little finger. Somebody picked up right away. “Metro,” she said. And so I learned about the accident up ahead at the same time the desk did. A skidding semi full of Florida grapefruit had been broadsided by another semi hauling steel I-beams. Bouncing, flying, rolling grapefruit had caused six separate accidents. Nobody was dead, but several had been seriously injured, among them 25th District congresswoman Betty Zuduski-Lowell. “Her nose is broken and she’s screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s a member of the U.S. Congress,” Aubrey told the desk. “There must be fifty or sixty people standing in the rain eating grapefruit-God, I wish I had a camera.”
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.