Barbara reached the door at the end of the hall. It was locked. She froze. We formed a half circle around her. Grant was panting like James after his walks. “Bag on the floor,” he ordered. “Then you.”
Barbara got the instructions wrong. She swung the bag and hit Grant in the head. She tried to plow through us. Gabriella grabbed her around the waist and twisted her to the floor. The two uniformed officers quickly holstered their guns. One pinned Barbara’s arms. The other pinned her legs.
Dale Marabout started screaming at Gabriella. “That was not your job! Jesus-I can’t believe it! That was not your job!”
Gabriella was rubbing blood off her forehead. She’d landed hard. “Marabout,” she said. “Shut the fuck up.”
Dale wasn’t about to. “You watch. You write. You don’t tackle.”
Weedy clicked away.
The officers rolled Barbara over. Grant handcuffed her. They stood her up.
Barbara had apparently considered the possibility that she’d be caught. She had a story ready. “My mother killed her,” she said. “I knew she put the gun in there. I was just protecting her. Obstructing justice.”
Good gravy, she’d even considered what they should charge her with. I knew better, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “Oh, come on! Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy a gun owner? That seems a little far-fetched!”
“She’s not the Miss Nicey Nice everyone thinks,” Barbara snarled back. “She’s a witch.”
Grant wasn’t happy. He recited the Miranda Warning to both of us.
We both ignored him.
“You were having an affair with Phil McPhee,” I said. “And so was Violeta Bell. You found out and killed her.”
“I’m a tenured professor!”
“The fur balls prove it,” I said.
Barbara recalculated. “Phil McPhee killed her. When she found out about me-that Phil and I were in love-she went nuts and threatened to tell his wife.”
“And so he had no choice but to kill her?”
“I didn’t know until after the fact.”
Barbara Wilburger was some piece of work, wasn’t she? First she was protecting the mother she hated. Now she was ratting out the man she loved.
The two officers led Barbara out. Grant put his arm around me. Whispered in my ear. “Now, what’s all this about fur balls?”
24
Tuesday, September 19
It was only a straw sticking out of a little plastic cup, but from my point-of-view, flat on my back in a hospital bed, still woozy from the anesthetic, it looked like some huge and horrible tool of torture. And Ike, with his big Republican smile, looked for all the world like a sadistic medieval inquisitor. “Have some apple juice,” he said.
I’d just had my tonsils out. I didn’t want any apple juice or ice cream or vanilla pudding or anything else. I just wanted to go home and hide until the shame wore off.
He aimed the straw at my frown. “Be a good girl.”
I shook my head no. A little too hard. My throat started throbbing like I’d just swallowed a cactus.
He wiggled the straw between my lips. I surrendered and took a sip. It did feel good. “See there,” he said. “Dr. Ike is going to take good care of you.”
“I wish you were a doctor,” I squeaked, enduring the pain in order to get my sarcastic remark off. “Then I could fire you and get a new one.”
He stuck the straw back in my mouth. “There’s no getting a new Ike Breeze.”
I changed the subject before things got too gooey. “Paper?”
I hadn’t had time to read the paper that morning-I had to be at the hospital at six-so before being carted off to the tonsil-yanking room, I’d asked Ike to make sure I had a paper to read the second I woke up. He held up the front page so I could read it. The headline across the top made my throat feel so much better:
Gun Dealer Identifies Professor
“Glasses, please.”
Ike took them out of his shirt pocket and put them on my face with the skill of a blind optometrist. I read Dale Marabout’s story:
HANNAWA-A Chippewa Lake man has identified Professor Barbara Wilburger as the woman who bought a. 22 pistol from him during a gun show at the Wayne County Fairgrounds, police said.
Wilburger, 55, who teaches business ethics at Hemphill College, was arrested August 30 at a Bloomfield Township cemetery after she removed a. 22 pistol from the burial urn of slain antique dealer Violeta Bell.
“I saw that picture of her being led off in handcuffs and thought, ‘Hey, I know that lady,’” said retired county sanitation worker and firearms collector Bruce Bilbowski, in a telephone interview yesterday with The Herald-Union.
There were some things in Dale’s story that I already knew, of course. That Barbara Wilburger already had been charged with first degree murder. That her request for bail had been denied. That she was rusting away in county jail awaiting the hearing to set her trial date.
Other things I did not know. Things that made her conviction all the more likely.
I did not know, for example, that gun collectors like Mr. Bilbowski do not have to have a license to sell their personally owned firearms at gun shows. And because they are not licensed dealers, they do not have to do a background check. However, they are required to ask their customers for a photo ID. The law-abiding Mr. Bilbowski did just that. Moreover, the serial number on the gun he sold Barbara Wilburger matched the serial number on the gun she fished out of Violeta’s ashes.
“I checked the obits for you,” Ike joked, forcing me to take another sip of apple juice. “No Dolly Madison Sprowls. So don’t let all that good news you’re reading make you think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
I rolled up the paper and swatted him.
Ike got that look in his eye. “I know this was a hard thing for you to do, Maddy. Both James and I appreciate it.”
I swatted him again. Getting my tonsils out was a hard thing for me to do. Not only because I was a 69-year-old woman having a child’s operation. Not because everyone at the paper was going to tease me. And not because of that propaganda about sleep apnea leading to more serious problems. No, it was a hard thing for me to do because it forced me to admit that I needed both James and Ike in my life. I swatted him a third time for good measure.
Ike leaned back in his chair and let me read. Unfortunately his good behavior only lasted a few minutes. Out of the corner of my eye I caught him pulling the paper top off my little plastic cup of pudding. “That better be for you,” I squeaked.
“As a matter of fact it is,” he said. He spooned a big lump of it into his mouth. I got his attention. Motioned that I wanted some, too. He guided a spoonful into my mouth.
The pudding was soothing. Seeing Eric Chen standing side-by-side with Gabriella Nash in the doorway was not. I made a painful, pudding-clogged sound that sounded a little like, “No visitors!”
They came in anyway. Eric did not have a Mountain Dew in his hand. But he did have FedEx box. “Package from Canada,” he said.
“No doubt a diamond-encrusted tiara from the prince,” Gabriella added.
Eric liked that. “Princess Maddy of Tonsilvania.”
Ike did not like that. He took the package from Eric hands. “You want me to toss these two troublemakers out?”
I shook my head no. Motioned for Ike to open the package.
Ike sat up straight and slid his legs together. Rested the package across his knees. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a penknife.
Yes, Ike is one of those men who always carries a penknife.
He opened the knife and felt the blade with his thumb. Then he slowly cut the clear tape across the top of the package.
If only my surgeon had been that careful.
He rolled the tape into a ball. He looked around for a wastebasket. Eric and Gabriella joined the hunt. They couldn’t find one. Ike finally put the ball on my tray. He closed his penknife and put it in his pocket.