Another thing Aubrey didn’t know beforehand was that Sissy had a daughter. Maybe I’m letting my own heart get the best of me, but I think that revelation played heavily on Aubrey’s conscience. So, at the same time she was coldly looking for a second person to frame, she was frantically trying to free Sissy for all the right reasons.
I’d been back on the interstate a good fifteen minutes when flashing blue lights suddenly filled my rear-view mirror. It was daylight. I had hundreds of cars and trucks for company. But those lights sent a shiver from the back of my eye sockets to the tip of my tailbone. It’s something how fear stays with you, isn’t it? I’ve been away from LaFargeville for fifty years but every time I see a pasture of cows I feel the hoof of that old Guernsey breaking my toes again, the way it did that afternoon long ago when my father was teaching me to milk. And now those flashing lights were filling me with the same panic I felt that rainy night in July when Aubrey followed me home from Ike’s.
Of course I knew it wasn’t the Taurus Man following me that night. The Taurus Man was Dale Marabout. And I knew it wasn’t any of the other suspects Aubrey had concocted. But I did fear it might be Lionel Percy again. It had only been four nights since he’d scared the bejesus out of us on West Apple, and he did not seem like the kind of man who could be satisfied scaring someone just once. You don’t know how relieved I was to hear the pathetic beep of Aubrey’s little Escort.
Which is funny. During all those months I suspected Aubrey of killing Buddy Wing, I never once feared for my own life. Maybe I was just too full of my own cleverness. My own deceitfulness. Maybe I was so fond of the good Aubrey that I couldn’t believe the bad Aubrey would hurt me.
Which was ridiculous. Looking back now with a clear head, I doubt Aubrey would have hesitated two seconds if she’d discovered I was onto her. She’d already sacrificed two decent men and a lot of squirrels for her brilliant career, hadn’t she? Why wouldn’t she sacrifice a squirrelly old librarian?
Anyway, the terror sparked by those blinking blue lights quickly fizzled. I pulled over. A baby-faced State Highway Patrol officer walked up to my open window. “Your turn signal’s been blinking for many many miles, ma’am,” he said.
Dale Marabout’s secret investigation did not always go as smoothly as I’d hoped. My first scare, of course, came that Tuesday in late May when Aubrey started drilling me in the morgue about Dale’s new freelance job. When she’d surprised him at the library the night before-where he was busy researching the poisons she’d used to kill Buddy Wing, by the way-he’d told her he was working on a project for a local company. Aubrey assumed he’d “descended into the dark, slimy world of corporate PR,” as she put it. I let her go right on thinking that. The next scare came a week later in Meri when Eric Chen’s chivalry got the best of him. Luckily Eric was humiliated into silence. Then just two weeks after that, when police found Ronny Doddridge’s body, I was sure Aubrey had killed him. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when the coroner ruled it a suicide. That poor, big-eared lamb was dead but at least I wasn’t responsible for it.
My fears returned right after the Fourth of July when the windows on Tish Kiddle’s Lexus were smashed. No mystery who did the smashing. “What’s Aubrey going to do if Tish stays on the story?” I worried to Dale.
“There’s not a chance in hell Tish Kiddle will stay on the story,” he said. He was right. Forty-eight hours later Tish Kiddle was broadcasting from sunny Orlando.
TV 21’s report on Tim Bandicoot’s public confession about his affair with Sissy James did bring matters to a head, however. Tinker told Aubrey to start writing her series and Bob Averill put in a call to Detective Scotty Grant. Bob Averill made me go to police headquarters with him. “Sorry we didn’t tell you about this earlier,” Bob told Scotty Grant. “We weren’t sure of our facts yet and we didn’t want to get you folks involved in a crazy goose-chase.”
Grant was surprisingly grateful. “Nobody likes chasing gooses,” he said.
So it came down to that final Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. While Aubrey was imprisoned in the newsroom racing to meet her deadline, Dale Marabout was at home racing to meet his, turning a dozen reporter’s notebooks full of scribbled notes into a story.
By now Scotty Grant had advised Tim and Annie Bandicoot of the situation. They were prayerful and cooperative. Officers searched their property. Under the driver’s seat of Annie’s Saturn they found a Bible covered with hand-painted gold crosses. Under the passenger’s seat they found a curly auburn wig and pair of red-framed lollipop glasses big enough to disguise even the most familiar face. It still wasn’t enough to arrest Aubrey, however. Dale’s evidence was largely circumstantial and the items found in Annie’s car bore neither a suspicious fingerprint nor fiber.
Sunday, after I had lunch with Dale and Sharon at Speckley’s, I drove to Bob Averill’s pricey condominium in White Lake. Tinker and Scotty Grant were there. “Okay, Maddy,” Bob said, bringing a tray of snapping highballs from the kitchen, “tell us what you’ve got in mind.”
I told them about Aubrey’s surprise birthday dinner for Eric. “She wanted me to help her make a cake and a lasagna. Cakes are nothing. But a lasagna, that’s a pretty time-consuming dish, even when you’ve got all the ingredients handy. Lots of layers. Lots of steps. If you forget to put one of the ingredients on your shopping list-say the ricotta cheese-and somebody has to go back to the supermarket, well that just stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it?”
Bob sloshed his mouthful of highball, like it was mouthwash. “Just how does this lasagna of yours help arrest Aubrey, Maddy?”
I toasted the three impatient men and after a miniature sip, bedazzled them with my shrewdness: “Dale needed everything he could get on Aubrey’s past. I’d been to Aubrey’s apartment before, and seen her cardboard boxes marked SHIT FROM COLLEGE and SHIT FROM HOME. The evidence that might be in those boxes was simply gnawing a hole in me. So when Aubrey asked me over to help her make a lasagna, I was tickled pink. I gave her a list of ingredients to buy and intentionally left off the ricotta cheese. So right when I was up to my elbows in boiling noodles, she had to run out to the supermarket. I figured that would give me time to snoop. I found her college transcripts-which listed that odd elective course she took in criminal toxicology-and I found the textbook from that course, with a number of poisons marked with a yellow highlighter, including procaine and lily of the valley.”
Scotty Grant was as excited as a thirteen-year-old finding his father’s Playboys. “And that stuff is still in her apartment?”
I nodded proudly. “It is. And that’s my idea. Aubrey plans to frame Annie Bandicoot. But what if she suddenly discovers, at the very last minute, that Annie wasn’t really at home that Friday night? That she had a solid alibi?”
Tinker at least was keeping up. “She’d have to frame somebody else.”
“Absolutely. And she’d have to plant some convincing evidence. And what does she have that she could grab in a hurry?”
“I’m guessing it’s not a slice of your leftover lasagna?” Bob joked.
“Her toxicology textbook,” I said.
“It would have her fingerprints all over it,” Tinker said.
“Xeroxes wouldn’t,” Scotty Grant said.
I toasted him. Everybody dutifully sipped. I told them my idea and they went for it.
So, Monday afternoon, while Aubrey was working feverishly to complete her stories, I brought Aubrey the story from the morgue files that Eric had found-the one about Annie Bandicoot being in Kentucky over the Thanksgiving weekend with a gaggle of other preachers’ wives.