police don’t have. And I’m guessing Gates wouldn’t be too crazy about sharing with us. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”
We’d just walked through sports. I took a look over my shoulder. A half-dozen sets of male eyes quickly shifted from Aubrey’s jeans, some to the ceiling, some to computer screens, some to the floor, none to me. “It doesn’t matter?”
Aubrey was looking over her shoulder, too. Making sure she was being appreciated. “Even if Gates killed poor old Buddy for the tithes and offerings, he’d have to take it easy with the church elders for a while.”
This late in the day the cafeteria was empty. I headed for the hot water. Aubrey headed for the candy machine. “So where does this leave your investigation?” I asked.
“Nowhere and everywhere,” she answered. “Just like before.”
Chapter 6
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
We’d just walked through sports. I took a look over my shoulder. A half-dozen sets of male eyes quickly shifted from Aubrey’s jeans, some to the ceiling, some to computer screens, some to the floor, none to me. “It doesn’t matter?”
Aubrey was looking over her shoulder, too. Making sure she was being appreciated. “Even if Gates killed poor old Buddy for the tithes and offerings, he’d have to take it easy with the church elders for a while.”
This late in the day the cafeteria was empty. I headed for the hot water. Aubrey headed for the candy machine. “So where does this leave your investigation?” I asked.
“Nowhere and everywhere,” she answered. “Just like before.”
Chapter 6
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
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