by C. R. Corwin
The need to explain tightened his face. “I couldn’t make it to the memorial service. And my mother’s not too mobile these days.”
“The obituary said she lives in Florida.”
“Captiva Island. She has MS.”
I bobbed my chin sympathetically. “I knew your uncle since college, but I don’t think I ever met any of his family.”
“There never was much,” he said. “And there’s only Mom and me now.”
I couldn’t exactly ask him if he was Gordon’s heir. But that’s exactly what I wanted to know. “So I guess all the legal stuff has fallen on your shoulders.”
He was surprisingly candid. “It’s all a little weird. I really never knew the man. Saw him a few of times when I was a kid, funerals and things, but that’s about it. Then I get a call that he’s dead and I’ve inherited everything.”
Boy, did I want to know what everything meant. “I guess you’ve got your hands full.”
He chuckled wearily. “What I’ve got is an old house full of junk.”
I found a way to ask him if he had a wife, or children.
“I guess that’s the other thing I inherited from him,” he said. He heard what he’d said and laughed. “I don’t mean his gay gene. I mean his loner gene.”
I assured him I knew what he meant. “So what exactly do you do in Harper’s Ferry?”
“At the moment I’m going broke teaching people how to kayak.”
“The funny little Eskimo boats?”
“Yup. The funny little Eskimo boats.”
I maneuvered the conversation back to Gordon’s estate. “I guess you’ll have to sell the house.”
“It’s a great little house,” he said. “I wished there was some way I could zap it down there—or zap the Potomac River up here.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll have trouble finding a buyer.”
He nodded with his eyebrows arched high and happy. Clearly he figured to make a pretty penny on Gordon’s house. “Getting rid of his stuff is the problem,” he said. “He’s got ten tons of rubble that could be worth a lot or nothing.”
“I wouldn’t give you a dime for this old couch,” I said. “But some of this other stuff looks like it might be worth something.”
“I’m not talking about his furniture. I’m talking about all that stuff from his archeological digs.”
I finagled a tour of the house. It was indeed filled with, well, junk: old bottles and cans and boxes, tools and toys, kitchen gadgets, kitschy wall plaques and dime store paintings. “I suppose you could hold a tag sale.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Mickey said. “But not up here.”
“You’re hauling all this stuff down to Harper’s Ferry?”
“Summer’s coming fast. I’ve got a barn full of kayaks to get ready. And Harper’s Ferry is pretty much the flea market capital of the world.”
“I think the Hannawa Chamber of Commerce would challenge you on that,” I said.
We squeezed into Gordon’s small downstairs office. There were bookshelves on all four walls. “Boy, I bet our old friend Effie would love these for her shop,” I said.
“She’s been bugging me since the funeral,” he said.
“Since the funeral? You were there?”
He shook his head, sourly. “She called me down in Harper’s Ferry. About six times. A very persistent woman.”
“Yes, she is—you’re going to sell them to her?”
“At some point maybe,” he said. “But I’m going to take them back to Harper’s Ferry with everything else. I need to evaluate what I’ve got. Think things through.”
“That’s wise,” I said.
Effie’s eagerness to buy Gordon’s books didn’t surprise me at all. Effie had known Gordon forever. She’d undoubtedly rummaged through his library a thousand times. And she was a businesswoman. Collections like that didn’t come on the market every day.
We snooped around the kitchen then headed down the basement steps. I spread my fingers across my face. “Oh, my!” The basement walls were lined with crudely constructed shelves, all stuffed with junkyard treasure.
“It’ll be a bitch hauling this stuff out of here,” he said. “But it’ll make my creditors happy. One or two of them anyway.”
I circled the basement like a visiting head of state reviewing the troops on the White House lawn. I stopped in front of the shelves next to the furnace. I studied the rows of cocoa cans. I struggled to remember my conversation with Andrew Holloway, and the catchy little question Gordon always asked his students at the dig: “Anything interesting today, boys and girls?” he’d ask. “Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy Dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?”
Without appearing too nosy, I scanned the other shelves in the basement for old bottles or dolls. There weren’t any. I motioned for Mickey to join me. “You wouldn’t want to sell me these old cocoa cans, would you?”
He did want to sell them to me. For five dollars a can. There were twenty-two of them.
So I wrote Mickey a check for $110.00 and felt like an absolute fool carrying them out to my car.
***
I drove away with more than a back seat full of cocoa cans. I also had a brain full of unanswered questions: Did Gordon save those cocoa cans for a reason? Did they have a story to tell?
Was Mickey really surprised to learn that he was Gordon’s heir? And just how far in debt was his kayak business in Harper’s Ferry? Why hadn’t he come to Gordon’s memorial service? Harper’s Ferry isn’t that far from Hannawa. And why did he sneak into town to bury him now? The minute the coroner released his body? Without a minister for a graveside prayer? Without inviting any of Gordon’s friends?
And what was that crack about his not inheriting Gordon’s gay gene?
***
I drove home for what I planned to be the most boring evening of my life. I was going to eat popcorn and suck on peppermint swirls, and watch six or seven hours of old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, until Gordon’s murder, and David Delarosa’s murder, were no more a bother to me than the dust bunnies under my bed.
But when I pulled into my driveway, Jocelyn and James were waiting on my porch. Jocelyn’s usual happy-as-an-apple face was puckered with anguish. I struggled toward her with my three shopping bags of old cocoa cans. The first words out of her mouth were not exactly promising: “Oh Maddy, I don’t know how to ask you this.”
I put down my cocoa cans and scratched James’ ping-pong paddle ears. He reciprocated by slobbering on my elbows with his big pink tongue. “How long?” I asked.
Jocelyn pulled in her neck, as if I was about to pound her with a sledgehammer. “Five months?”
The last time she asked me to watch James it was for three days. “Five months?”
She started to cry—the kind of crying that includes a lot of shoulder shaking and throaty moans that sound like mating whales. She told me her daughter Deena’s husband had been swept into the Pacific Ocean while collecting mussels for a paella, for their fifteenth wedding anniversary dinner, and now Deena was going to be a young working widow with three daughters at that awkward age. Jocelyn was going to spend the summer in Eureka, California, while the kids were out of school. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, Maddy,” she said, “but if you could take in James until the end of August—I’ll pay for all his food, of course.”
I loved James. But I didn’t want to love him that much. But heavens to Betsy, what could I do? “When do you have to leave?”
“The funeral’s on Wednesday,” she said. “I was hoping you could drive me to the airport tonight.”
And so instead of watching old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, I was starring in a brand-new sitcom of my own: James & Me. My only hope was that it would merely be a summer replacement and not picked up for the fall.
Chapter 12
Friday, April 6
I had a nice, peaceful lunch at Ike’s and then took my good old time walking back to the paper. It was only
fifty degrees outside but the sun was shining like it was the middle of July. I didn’t dare do it, of course, but I felt like whistling that peppy theme song from The Andy Griffith Show.
On my way through the newsroom I wiggled my fingers at Louise and Margaret and even Ed Boyer in sports. Two out of three wiggled back. Then the second I lowered my happy behind into my chair, Suzie appeared out of the ether. “Mr. Averill wants to see you,” she whispered. “Immediately.”
I let the elevator take me to the fifth floor. I squeaked along the old hardwood floor to the sterile gray office at the end of the hall. I hate to admit it, but I was trembling like a just-hatched peep.
Bob Averill has been editor-in-chief for fifteen years. The owners of The Herald-Union, the Knudsen-Hartpence chain, sent him here to boost the paper’s sagging circulation. They’ve pretty much given up on that impossible dream. Nobody reads newspapers anymore. So Bob’s top priority now, or so it seems, is to coax me into retirement. But as you know, Dolly Madison Sprowls has no plans to hippity-hop into that briar patch any time soon.
I took half a minute outside Mr. Averill’s office to get myself under control—and pick the dog hair off my sweater—then knocked on his door with as much vinegar as I could muster under the circumstances.
“No need to knock, Maddy!”
I was not only confronted by Bob Averill’s sour frown. But also the sour frown of Managing Editor Alec Tinker, and even worse, the sour frown of Detective Scotty Grant. They were slumped in the leather swivel chairs that surrounded the glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the office, a star chamber of medieval inquisitors with a pinch of Larry, Curly and Moe. “My three favorite men,” I said.
There were several empty chairs. Mr. Averill pointed to the one he wanted me to sit in.
I sat. I pressed my nervous knees together.
Tinker handed me a small folded newspaper. It was a copy of the Hemphill College student newspaper, The Harbinger. The story across the top was about a proposed tuition hike. The story across the bottom was about me.
It was not a hard news story, but one of those “notes” columns all newspapers run these days, where style and speculation take precedence over documented fact. The column was cleverly called “Campus Claptrap.” The headline asked this question:
Is Maddy Sprowls At It Again?
As bad as that headline was, it was the byline under it that made me wilt:
By Gabriella Nash
Harbinger Editor
“Heavens to Betsy,” I heard myself hiss, “that horrible girl with the green hair.” I started to read:
Just eight months ago, Hemphill College alumna Dolly Madison “Maddy” Sprowls led police to the real killer of television evangelist Buddy Wing. Now it appears she is trying to beat baffled detectives to the person who murdered archaeology professor Gordon Sweet.
After graduating from HC in 1957, Sprowls went to work for The Hannawa Herald-Union. But not as a reporter. As a librarian. That’s right, the diminutive, 68-year-old Sprowls is the desk-bound gnome who watches over the newspaper’s morgue, where the stories real reporters write are filed away for future reference.
And why is Sprowls so interested in Professor Sweet’s murder? It seems that she and Sweet were old college friends. In fact, both were members of a quixotic band of campus bohemians called The Meriwether Baked…
“Did you get to the sentence about you not being a reporter?” Tinker asked.
“I sure did,” I said. “It’s right above the one that calls me a gnome.”
Tinker was too agitated to let me read in peace. “We’d like to believe this claptrap is exactly that, Maddy.”
Detective Grant seconded the motion. “And so would we baffled detectives.”
I knew it would be hard to plead guilty and not guilty at the same time. But I knew I’d have to try. I finished reading, let out a long, Reaganesque “Welllll” and then launched into a breathless explanation that I hoped would save me from collecting my pension: “It’s true enough that I’ve been asking a few people a few questions, about Gordon’s murder, and other things that may or may not be related, or even important, but I sure as heck didn’t tell that girl at the college what I was up to.”
“Or us,” Tinker pointed out.
“Or us,” Scotty Grant added.
Now Mr. Averill took a turn at me. “So this Miss Nash didn’t give you a heads-up about her story? Didn’t give you a chance to respond?”
“I’m as surprised by this as you are, Bob.”
I watched Mr. Averill’s troubled eyes drift along his office walls. They were lined with a century’s worth of important front pages, in thick black frames, from the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to the most recent addition, the one revealing Buddy Wing’s real killer. “I suppose you’ve earned the right to explain yourself,” he said. “If you think that’s possible.”
So that was the start of my visit to the woodshed. It was the longest damn hour of my life. I apologized for my secretiveness. I apologized for my carelessness. I apologized for my impulsiveness and my loose-cannonness. I agonized out loud over my incurable curiosity, like some bad actor in a Shakespearean play. I also told them everything I knew about Gordon’s murder, who I suspected and why. By the time I finished, they were as exhausted as I was.
Mr. Averill made a motorboat sound with his lips. He drummed his fingers on the armrests. He stood up and buttoned his suit coat over his middle-aged belly. “I don’t think we need to take any disciplinary action here, do you Alec?”
Tinker gave him a terse, “No, sir.”
“How about you, Detective Grant? Mrs. Sprowls hasn’t broken any laws, has she?”
“Not yet,” Grant said.
Mr. Averill walked me to the door. “Now you keep yourself out of trouble, Maddy,” he said. “And if you can’t, I hope you’ll at least keep us in the loop. We do like to sell newspapers around here.”
“And we like to solve crimes,” Detective Grant said.
I squinted at them until their cat-like grins withered. “You bastards,” I said.
***
I got off the elevator and went straight for the ladies room. Not to pee. To seethe. That hadn’t been Shakespeare up there. That had been a goddamned puppet show. And I’d been the puppet. Detective Grant wanted Gordon’s murderer. Tinker and Mr. Averill wanted a good story. They knew I just might deliver both. I sized myself up in the mirror, my silly hair and my wrinkled face, my gravity-ravaged boobs and shoulders. I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could. “We’ll just see who’s gonna pull whose strings,” I said.
I went back to my desk. I got my tea mug and headed for the cafeteria. It was empty, except for one rumpled man slumped over a bottle of tomato juice. Detective Grant.
I filled my mug with hot water and dunked my teabag. I walked toward him, not like the frightened puppy I’d been upstairs. Like a full-grown Doberman pinscher. “If you’re staking out the cafeteria to see who’s been stealing the cheese and crackers from the vending machine, I confess. A totally justifiable act of mercy.”
He gave me a culpable smile. “Sorry about that little kabuki dance in Averill’s office.”
I sat across from him. “Did they call you or did you call them?”
He toasted my pugnacity. Took a painful sip of tomato juice. “If I hadn’t called them, I’m sure they would have called me.”
“I’m sure they would have, too.”
He turned sideways, propped his feet on the chair next to him. Started retying his shoes. “You promised me you weren’t going to get involved, you know.”
“I guess I just couldn’t stop myself.”
“And I guess I’m glad you couldn’t.”
“So we’re even-steven then?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Sprowls. We are not even-steven. I’m still the big bad police detective and you are still the private citizen who’s going to mind her p’s and q’s.”
“And it wil
l forever be thus?” I asked
“Sayeth the Lord,” he said.
Our verbal duel was put on hold for a few minutes, while Dusty Eiffel, The Herald-Union’s talented young political cartoonist, shaking a double handful of quarters like a rattlesnake’s tail, planted himself in front of the candy machine. He bought a bag of M&Ms, a Baby Ruth, a Butterfinger, and a package of Strawberry Twizzlers. He grinned at us. “Drawing funny pictures is hell,” he said.
After Dusty went off for his afternoon sugar buzz, Detective Grant got serious. “The fact is, Mrs. Sprowls, I’m running in place with this investigation. In a big pair of muddy clown shoes. As far as physical evidence is concerned, I’ve got zilch. No fingerprints, no footprints, no tire tracks, no nothing. As far as—”
I stopped him. “What about Andrew Holloway’s vomit?”
His Golden Arches eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I’ve got a whole bag of that. But no proof he didn’t throw up when he said he did.”
“So his alibi is pretty tight?”
“That’s my other problem,” he said. “Nobody’s alibi is tight. I’ve talked to everybody you have, and obviously a few more. None of them can prove where they were or weren’t that Thursday. Not Andrew Holloway, not Professor Glass, not Fredricka Fredmansky, not the Moffitt-Stumpfs, not the infamous nephew.”
Now I looked at him with surprise. “Infamous? What makes Gordon’s nephew infamous?”
“A nickel bag of drug convictions for one thing. Possession. Cultivating. Dealing. Selling pipes and bongs out of the trunk of his car. Thirty-seven months of accumulated prison time. The sheriff down there has good reason to believe he’s still active in that area, growing marijuana up in the mountains.”
I’d found Mickey Gitlin a little spooky, too. Still I felt he deserved the benefit of the doubt. “He wouldn’t exactly be the only person in West Virginia doing that, would he?”
