I was down to the wash cloths. “You’re saying he knows his wife killed Buddy?”
“Maybe he knows. Maybe he suspects. Maybe he’s too afraid to find out.”
“And then you come along and start digging into the murder?”
“That’s right-and then I come along. Tim handles it pretty well at first. He really doesn’t know anything for sure-so he doesn’t have to lie. But the nosy bitch reporter keeps prying. Proves Sissy couldn’t have done it. Things start to unravel. Tim and Guthrie try to bury the hatchet. They come to the paper hand in hand. They end up shoving each other like a couple of feuding five-year-olds. Annie has to take the bull by the horns now. She tells her man, ‘You’re ruining everything we’ve worked all these years for. Sunday morning you’re going to come clean and confess your sins to the world. And then you’re going to Marysville and rescue Sissy, and you’re taking the nosy bitch reporter with you.’”
I crawled back in bed. In the moonlight the stacks of towels on the floor looked like the skyline of a tiny city. “A good offense is a good defense,” I said.
“Bingo,” she said.
I arrived at the Herald-Union at eight. Aubrey met me downstairs in the lobby. She had a travel mug of coffee in one hand and a granola bar in the other. Her bag hung from her shoulder. She looked horrible. I imagine I did, too.
When Tim Bandicoot pulled up in his minivan, Aubrey made me sit up front. She got in the back and curled up against the door, sipping and chewing with her eyes closed. Her strategy, apparently, was to sleep all the way to Marysville. “She’s been writing all night,” I explained.
For the longest time Tim and I talked about safe, dumb things-the newest effort to revitalize the downtown, how far the suburbs were spreading into the countryside, whether the Cleveland Indians were going to catch the Chicago White Sox in the standings. Then just as we were getting on I-491, Aubrey came to and leaned between the banana-shaped front seats. “I thought maybe your wife would come along,” she said to Tim.
I saw his eyes peek over the bottom of the rear-view mirror. I expected him to make some benign excuse. But he didn’t. “You and my wife in the same car? There’s already been one murder.”
We took I-491 to I-76 to I-71. Fifteen minutes north of Columbus we exited onto U.S. 36 and sped west to Marysville. At the prison we were taken to the same room where we’d talked to Sissy before. We sat on the same blue sofa.
All morning I’d been dying to see the expressions on Sissy’s and Tim’s faces when they first saw each other, to get some visceral sense of how they really felt about each other. Would they have the same look or different looks?
When Sissy came in she was already crying, clutching a wad of tissue the size of a major league baseball. She smiled the second she saw Tim.
Tim didn’t smile. But he did start crying. He stood up and she wrapped her arms around his neck and they hugged and took turns refilling their depleted lungs. There was some kind of love going on there. What kind I didn’t know.
Sissy shook Aubrey’s hand and then mine. She settled into the hard wooden chair across from the sofa. There was some perfunctory chit-chat about the weather and the prison food and how things were going at the church-all fine-and then Tim got the ball rolling by offering a prayer. We all bowed our heads and closed our eyes. We all peeked.
“Sissy,” Tim said, “both Aubrey and Mrs. Sprowls know about our past relationship. So do a lot of other people.”
Sissy nodded and pressed the back of her hand against her lips, bracing for the sorrow to come.
“I have confessed it to the congregation,” he said, “and it has been reported in the media. Our relationship was wrong.”
Sissy closed her watery eyes and nodded.
“And I take full responsibility for all that has happened,” he said.
His confession and her nodding went on for several minutes. Aubrey took notes. I dabbed my eyes with the tip of my pinkie.
Finally Tim got to the reason for our visit. “Sissy, if you are being held wrongfully in this prison, I have to know-so I, and we, and everybody who cares about you, can help you.”
Well, his sentence structure was as awkward as a toad in a basket of apples, but it was a start.
“I killed him,” Sissy said.
She might as well have said, “I am a Greyhound bus.” That’s how believable it was.
“I do not need protecting,” Tim answered.
Aubrey closed her notebook and fed her ballpoint through the top spiral. She laid it next to her on the sofa cushion. She leaned forward. “I bet you were really confused when the police showed up at your house. It was only six o’clock. You were getting ready for work. Like everybody else in Hannawa, you knew Buddy Wing was dead. You’d read the newspaper stories and knew exactly how and when he died. While Detective Grant was questioning you in the kitchen, other cops were searching your property. You told the detective you didn’t know anything. Then they found all that stuff in your garbage. You knew instantly somebody wanted you to take the blame. But who? Tim Bandicoot? Your spiritual leader? Your lover? You knew Friday night was Family Night at the temple. You knew Tim always did something with his family. You knew that particular Friday night he was supposed to take his sons to the basketball game in Cleveland. But did he? Detective Grant started pressing you to confess.”
Sissy continued her Greyhound bus defense. “I was not covering up for Tim or anybody else-I don’t see why everybody has such a hard time understanding that.”
“Because,” said Aubrey, “you were still in Mingo Junction that Friday night. You were there the entire weekend. With your cousin Jeanie and her daughters-and your daughter Rosy.”
Sissy was stunned. A secret more important than her life had been told. Her eyes blamed Tim.
“We learned it on our own,” I heard myself say.
Sissy’s fingers dug into the varnish on the chair arms. She began to pant, as if giving birth to Rosy all over again. “It was not Tim’s baby.”
Aubrey left the sofa and kneeled in front of Sissy. “We are not interested in the father of your child, or who you thought you were covering up for. We just want to hear from you that you didn’t do it.”
The growl of an unexorcised demon escaped from Sissy’s quivering lips. “Just so you can get a good story.”
“Yes, so I can get a good story,” Aubrey admitted. “A story that will get you out of here. The real world’s a mean place, Sissy, as you discovered a long time ago. It’s mean with selfish people covering up their mistakes and saving their asses. Prosecutors don’t reopen cases without public pressure. Judges get re-elected by putting people in prison, by not letting them out. Everybody’s eyes are fixed on their own precious futures. Nobody looks back until they’re forced to look back. And that’s what we’re going to make them do now. We’re going to force them to look back. Force them to free you and find who really killed Buddy Wing.”
Sissy dried her eyes with her ball of tissue. She sat up straight and put her knees together and rested her folded hands on top of them. Aubrey stretched out her arm and motioned impatiently for her pen and notebook. I gave them to her.
“Tell the truth,” Tim said softly.
Said Sissy James: “I did not put poison on Pastor Wing’s Bible, or in his water pitcher. I was in Mingo Junction, Ohio, on that Friday night, visiting my cousin and my daughter.”
It was the confession Aubrey wanted. But Aubrey wanted more. “Did you confess thinking that Tim might have been the killer?”
Sissy checked Tim’s face for permission. “All I knew was that somebody wanted me to take responsibility for what happened.”
Aubrey still wanted more. “You’re saying you still don’t know who that somebody is?”
I popped up like a piece of burnt toast. “That’s not our job, Aubrey.”
Aubrey twisted toward me. The unexorcised demon was now residing in her.