Chapter 19
1
Chrissy has almost given up on Deacon Andy when her burner finally comes to life. She’s sitting at one of the picnic tables near the Dingley Park food wagons, with her suitcase safely placed between her feet (which are clad in sensible but stylish Vionic flats). The lights have just gone on around the playing field, where the men from the Police and Fire Departments are still practicing. Chrissy would like to be on the well-lighted bleachers over there—here on the park’s darker side she’s already been hit on twice—but doesn’t dare. The chances of being recognized are too great. Here on the edge of the trees is safer, and the two guys who approached her were pretty hesitant. She even toted her suitcase to Taco Joe’s food wagon and got a burrito. She knew it was a risk, but her stomach had gone beyond growling and was actually roaring.
She answers the phone on the first ring.
“You really need to come home,” Andy Fallowes says. He sounds put out and scared. “I got a call from a city detective as well as that bodyguard person. This is serious , Christopher.”
“I’m Chrissy.”
Andy pauses, then gives a longsuffering sigh. “Chrissy, then.”
“Not coming home. Finishing what I started. If I can do that, I’ll keep you out of it. If you don’t help me, I won’t.”
“Pastor Jim says—”
“I don’t care what that old man says. Do you have a list of some places where I can disappear until tomorrow, or don’t you?”
Another sigh. “There are two empty warehouses on Bincey Lane. That’s near the lake. There’s an empty Sam’s Club out by the airport—”
“Too far,” Chrissy says. “I don’t dare go back to my car.”
“There’s also an abandoned hockey rink in a place called Dingley Park. It’s awaiting demolition—”
“What?”
“I said…”
But Chrissy barely hears the rest of it. She’s looking at the conical, paint-peeling roof poking over the tops of the surrounding fir trees. She thought it was some kind of storage shed.
She thinks, Who says God doesn’t help those in need?
2
Chrissy makes a slow, ambling circle of the condemned building, pink suitcase in hand, keeping an eye out for anyone drifting around on this side of the park, probably those looking for drugs or blowjobs. She sees no one, but catches a strange and unpleasant aroma, which she thinks is probably improperly stowed garbage from behind one of the food trucks, most likely the one selling fish.
When she comes back to the double doors, she sets her suitcase down and examines the keypad. Before Chris’s father became rich as an inventor of inverters, voltage regulators, and smart circuits, Harold Stewart was a humble electrician, one who knew many tricks of the trade… some of which Donald “Trig” Gibson would have remembered from his own father’s sermons in this very building.
Put things on the floor. They can’t fall any further.
Never go back to your van empty-handed.
Use a potato peeler to strip wires.
If you can’t get into a building with a keypad, try the Plumber’s Code.
Chrissy looks around, just as Trig did before her. She pulls off the keypad’s cover, just as Trig did before her. She reads the Plumber’s Code on the inside of the cover—9721—just as Trig did before her. She pushes the numbers. The light on the keypad turns green, and she hears a clunk as the locking bar releases. She snaps the cover back onto the keypad and goes inside, ready to run if she hears the meep-meep-meep of a burglar alarm. There’s nothing. She closes the door.
Safe! Good God almighty, she’s safe.
She’s glad she didn’t toss the burner down a sewer grate. It’s a flashlight-equipped Nokia Flip. She takes it from the jacket pocket of the pants suit, turns on the light, and shines it around. She’s in a lobby. There are a couple of dust-covered ticket windows on the right and on the left there’s a snackbar denuded of snacks. The smell in here is stronger, and she no longer thinks it’s trash from the fish wagon. That’s a decomposing animal.
Chrissy goes into the rink, phone in one hand, suitcase in the other, shoes gritting on the dusty concrete. The floor, once a-shimmer with ice, is now just cracked concrete crisscrossed with beams that look like railroad ties. For all she knows, that’s what they are. From high above, where the last daylight is still leaking through cracks in the roof, she can hear the soft coo and flutter of pigeons.
There’s something draped across the beams at the center of the rink. She believes it’s the source of that smell, and too big to be a dog. She thinks it could be a person, and as she walks toward it, stepping from one beam to the next, she sees that it is.
Chrissy examines the decaying body and murmurs, “Oh, you poor thing. I’m so sorry.”
She kneels down, although this close, the stench of decay is almost unbearable. It’s a girl. Chrissy can only be sure of that because of the scraggly hair and the nubs of breasts. The fiends and fuckers have mostly been kept out, but there’s no way to keep the rats and insects at bay, and they have picked away at the dead girl’s face until there is little face left; the eyes are empty sockets that stare sightlessly up at the roof with an expression of outraged shock.
There is something in the girl’s right hand. Chrissy spreads the fingers and brings the phone down close. Two words: CORINNA ASHFORD. Probably her name.
“Until tomorrow night, it’s just you and me, Corinna,” Chrissy says. “I hope you don’t mind the company.”
Chrissy stands up and beam-walks back to the snackbar. She feels terribly sorry for the dead girl, no doubt killed and left here by some sex maniac. But Chrissy isn’t sorry enough to sit with her.
Corinna is just too smelly.
3
Back in her connecting room, while Holly is trying to decide if seven-thirty is too early to get into her pj’s, her phone rings. It’s Barbara. She sounds out of breath and happy. Her phone call telling Holly she’d won tickets to the Sista Bessie show seems like years ago instead of weeks. Since then she’s become an honorary Dixie Crystal and has established a firm friendship with the woman she now calls Betty.
Holly listens to what Barbara is proposing and says she will if she can; she has to check with the woman she’s protecting. She doesn’t want to call Kate her boss, probably because that is exactly what Kate is.
Kate is sitting on the sofa in her suite, watching a panel of politicians or politician wannabes (Holly isn’t sure there’s a difference) discuss the latest cultural hot-button issue.
“Holly, you should sit down and listen to this shit. You won’t believe it.”
“I’m sure it’s interesting,” Holly says, “but if you’re set for the night, I’m going out for an hour or two.”
Kate turns from the TV and gives her a wide smile. “Hot date?”
“No, just going to see my friend Barbara. She’s going to be singing at the shows here in town with Sista Bessie. Including one song, which was originally a poem, that she wrote herself.”
“No shit!” Kate jumps up. “How totally cool! She won that poetry prize, didn’t you say?”
“Yes, the Penley.” Holly knows (courtesy of Charlotte Gibney, from whom all wisdom of the bummer type flowed) that pride goeth before a fall, but she feels pride, anyway. Is almost bursting with it. “Her book has been published and is selling pretty well.” This is a white lie, but Holly feels that wishful thinking makes it hardly a lie at all.
“Then get with her, for God’s sake!” Kate goes to Holly, puts her hands on her shoulders, and gives her a friendly shake. “Take some video, if she sings and if they’ll allow it. I’ll send Corrie out to get her book tomorrow. I want to read it.”
“If I can get over to my apartment, I’ll give you a copy,” Holly says. “I’ve got an extra.” Actually she has ten, purchased from Appletree Books in Cleveland.
“Fantastic.” Kate grabs the remote and zaps off the TV. “When I was a kid, I idolized Avril Lavigne and Rihanna. I used to fantasize about being onstage in a glittery low-cut gown, singing something bouncy and fast, like that song ‘We Got the Beat.’ Do you remember that one?”
“Yes.”
“Instead, I wound up doing… this.” She looks around at her new suitcases and stacks of her latest book, waiting to be signed. “It’s good, I wouldn’t change it, but dreams… sometimes dreams, they…”
She shakes her head, as if to clear it.
“Go on. Visit your young friend. Tell her we’ll be in the audience Saturday night, clapping and cheering her on. Also tell her Katie McKay envies the hell out of her chance to sing with Sista Bessie.”
There’s a knock on the door. Holly checks the peephole, then lets Corrie in with an armload of Woman Power tee-shirts for Kate to sign. Kate groans, but good-naturedly.
“I’m going out for awhile,” Holly tells them. “Keep the door locked, okay?”
“I doubt very much if this guy Stewart could get upstairs,” Kate says. “His picture is everywhere .”
“Just the same. And remember he might look like a she.”
Kate puts one stocking-clad foot behind her and does a deep curtsey that would look perfectly acceptable in the Court of St. James’s. “Yes, boss.”
No , Holly thinks. That’s you .
4
Barbara said to use the service entrance, which Holly knows from the old days, when Bill Hodges was still alive. This is how they came in on the night when Brady Hartsfield tried to blow the fracking place sky-high.
Holly parks in the small employees’ lot beside a white Transit van with MINGO AUDITORIUM on the side. Beneath it is a motto: JUST THE GOOD STUFF! ? The service door to the little kitchen is open. Two men are standing beside it, a bald guy in jeans and a Sista Bessie tee, the other in a sportcoat and tie. From inside comes the booming, echoing sound of a rock-and-soul band in full flight.
The man in jeans comes to her, hand held out. “I’m Tones Kelly, Sista’s tour manager. And you must be Barbara’s friend Holly.”
“I am,” Holly says. “Very nice to meet you.”
“We love Barbara,” Tones says. “Sista especially. She read Barbara’s book of poems, and they just clicked.”
“And now she’s in the band!” Holly says. Marvels, actually.
Tones laughs. “She sings, she dances, she plays the tambo on the beat, she writes poems… what can’t she do? A star is born!”
The other man comes forward. “Hello, Ms. Gibney. I’m Donald Gibson, the Mingo’s Program Director.”
“You’re going to be a busy bee this weekend,” Holly says, shaking his hand. Two years ago she would have offered her elbow to both men, but times have changed enough for her to resume the old practice. She still keeps a bottle of hand sanitizer in her purse, though. Some would call her a hypochondriac, but so far she’s avoided even a mild case of Covid, and she wants to keep it that way.
Donald Gibson leads the way down a short corridor. As they go, Holly recognizes the song the band is playing as an old Al Green tune, “Let’s Stay Together.” Sista Bessie (Holly can’t think of her as plain old Betty, at least not yet) is singing in a low, sweet voice that channels Mavis Staples so clearly that Holly gets a run of gooseflesh on the back of her neck. The music stops in mid-verse, and as they step into the elevator, the band starts up some other song, one Holly doesn’t recognize.
“They are doing a bump rehearsal, because your Ms. McKay has the hall tomorrow night,” Tones says. “Betty thought Ms. McKay might want it tomorrow day to do a sound check.”
“That will ease her assistant’s mind,” Holly says. “What’s a bump rehearsal?”
“They do a little bit of every song on Sista’s set list,” Tones says. “To make sure the band and Ross—he’s our sound guy—are on the same wavelength. The settings change between rave-ups and ballads. So do the lights and the cyc, but I let Kitty Sandoval worry about that. I just need to make sure the sound is right.”
“You also have to make sure the band stays in the same key from song to song, right?” Gibson asks. He pushes his glasses up on his nose.
“Right,” Kelly says.
There’s something familiar about Gibson, but before Holly can begin to think of what it might be or where she might have seen him before, the elevator doors open backstage and the band wallops them: the intro to “Land of 1000 Dances.”
Gibson takes Holly’s hand—she doesn’t like it, but allows it because it’s dark back here—and leads her to stage left, the exact post she expects to be occupying tomorrow night when Kate speaks. She’s hardly aware of Gibson letting go and stepping back, because she’s totally absorbed by what’s going on at center stage. Entranced, really.
Barbara is wearing black pants and a shimmery white shirt. She’s banging a tambourine with the heel of her hand, swinging her hips, stepping in time with the other three Dixie Crystals, and looking young—so young and sexy and beautiful. It’s a dance-craze song from yesteryear, and she segues from the Pony, to the Frug, to the Watusi, to the Mashed Potato. Even the Twist. And she shines .
The band cuts out. Barbara sees Holly and runs across the stage, leaping over the power cords. She hurls herself into Holly’s arms, almost knocking her over. Her cheeks are high with color; tiny drops of sweat nestle in the hollows of her temples.
“You came! I’m so glad!”
Sista Bessie joins them. “You are Barbara’s friend, Holly.”
“I am. And I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I’m a big fan of your songs. I remember your gospel days.”
“Long ago,” Betty says, and laughs. “Long time gone. Barbara is some kind of special, as I’m sure you know.”
“I do,” Holly says.
“We are just finishing up. We have three more bumps, then the show closer, which you may recognize. It’s called ‘Lowtown Jazz.’?”
“I know it very well, Sista Bessie.”
“Call me Betty. The Sista is strictly show-and-blow. Come on, Barb, let’s get this done so we can all go home and I can rest my weary dogs.” To the band she hollers, “ No work tomorrow, guys and dolls! ” They cheer that.
Holly watches, mesmerized, Tones Kelly and Donald Gibson forgotten, as the band launches into “Dear Mister,” one of Sista Bessie’s early hits, then “Sit Down, Servant,” and then a verse of her biggest hit, “Let’s Stay Together.”
A roadie flips Betty a towel. She mops her broad, makeup-free (tonight, at least) face with it, then addresses the band again. “In honor of our special guest, Barbara’s friend Miss Holly, we are going to do ‘Lowtown Jazz’ reet and complete. I want you to make that mutha strut !” She turns to Barbara. “Get out front, girl, and count us off!”
This time the chills go all the way up Holly’s body, from her heels to the nape of her neck as Barbara—who she can still remember as a gawky teenager just out of braces—faces the empty seats. She raises her fisted hands and pops up a finger from each. “One… two… you know what to do!”
The drums start, a tom-tom beat low and steady. The bass kicks in, then the brass. Barbara does a Michael Jackson slide back to Sista Bessie as the Crystals, now a trio again, start singing, “ Jazz, jazz, bring that shazz, do it, do it, show me how you move it, get on down and groove it, do that Lowtown jazz. ” Sista Bessie and Barbara sing the verses together, dancing in perfect step, trading the mic, singing words that Holly knows not just from Barbara’s published book but from a coffee-stained legal pad where the first draft was jotted.
The song goes on for almost five minutes, a show closer for sure, and Holly is mesmerized, especially by the end, where everyone in the band falls out except for the driving drums.
“ Let me hear you, Buckeye City! ” Sista Bessie exhorts the empty seats. On Saturday night, Holly knows, five thousand people will be on their feet, singing, Jazz, jazz, bring that shazz, do that Lowtown jazz. Singing her friend Barbara’s words. Holly feels like she’s dreaming awake, the sweetest dream ever, and when the drums stop, she doesn’t want to wake up.
Onstage, Betty and Barbara embrace.
“She really loves that girl,” Tones says.
“She certainly does,” Donald Gibson says, almost dreamily. “My, my, my. She certainly does.”
5
Chrissy totes her suitcase behind the snackbar and sits on it, because she doesn’t want to get the seat of her Kamala suit dirty. She has four bars on her Nokia burner. Most of the local news outlets are paywalled, but one indie site, operated by someone calling himself Buckeye Brandon, is free. There’s a transcript for each of his podcasts. Chrissy selects the one for “The Surrogate Juror Murders: What We Know So Far,” and reads it with great interest.
It confirms what she was already quite sure of, based on news reports she’s listened to while traveling from Davenport to Buckeye City: she has, by either fate or pure accident, stumbled upon one of the Surrogate Murderer’s victims. Buckeye Brandon’s recap includes the names of the judge, the defense attorney, the prosecutor, and all the jurors—the twelve who actually decided Alan Duffrey’s fate, plus two alternates. One of the primaries was Corinna Ashford, which is the name Chrissy found in the poor dead girl’s hand. Buckeye Brandon doesn’t seem to know that someone has been murdered in Ashford’s name, probably because the police don’t know or because they’re holding it back.
Chrissy thinks the Surrogate Juror Murderer may be tempted to use the rink again. Possibly to gloat over his kill, possibly as a place to dump another body. Because , Chrissy thinks, the trees around this place would be the perfect hunting ground for someone like this monster. Lots of homeless people dumpster-diving behind the food wagons, probably addicted to drugs and always looking for more. For all I know, cruising for drugs is how the dead girl in the old rink ran into her killer. What better place to put another kill than a condemned building? Did he send the police a picture of Corinna Ashford’s name in that poor girl’s hand?
“I bet he did,” Chrissy murmurs.
She can’t be sure the Surrogate Murderer will be back, but he might be. All Chrissy knows is that she herself intends to stay here until Kate McKay’s lecture tomorrow night. If the man who killed that girl should return to the scene of the crime before then…
She unzips her purse. Inside are cosmetics, lotion, a mirror, a wallet with pictures of her mother inside (but no credit cards; Christine Stewart has none), safety pins, bobby pins, a little writing pad, a snack-sized bag of Doritos, and a .32 ACP. It’s fully loaded, and that should be enough to take down Kate McKay. Plus the assistant and the bodyguard if necessary… but only if necessary. The last shot she’s been saving for herself.
Now the gun has another purpose. It may be possible for her to serve the Lord not only by killing the female monster who advocates the murder of helpless babies; she may also be able to kill the crazy person who is murdering innocent strangers. She thinks that crazy person will come. Must come.
She thinks God put her here for more than one purpose.
6
The band has left, the star and the backup singers have left, the roadies and the techies are gone, the stage is dark. Only Trig remains, and he means to go back to his trailer-park home soon. In all probability for my last night , he thinks. There’s some sadness in the thought, but no real regret. More and more he believes that he was lying to himself all along. It was never about creating guilt in those that caused Alan Duffrey’s death; that was just an excuse. It was killing for the sake of killing, and since there is no Murderers Anonymous, there’s only one way he can stop. And he will, after finishing the job… or at least as much of it as he can manage.
But the world must know.
He sits at his desk, bouncing the ceramic horse—Trigger—up and down, thinking about how to proceed. Then he puts it back in its place and opens an app on his desktop. It’s titled MINGO SIGNBOARDS and controls the digital readout over the lobby doors and the huge signboard out front on Main Street, where passersby can read the current schedule. Right now those signs read FRIDAY MAY 30 7 PM KATE McKAY and SATURDAY-SUNDAY MAY 31 AND JUNE 1 SISTA BESSIE SOLD OUT .
The computer is asking him NEW SIGNBOARD? Y N.
Trig clicks on Y. A new field appears.
He types: AMY GOTTSCHALK JUROR 4 (KATE McKAY) BELINDA JONES JUROR 10 (SISTA BESSIE) DOUGLAS ALLEN PROSECUTOR (CORRIE ANDERSON) IRVING WITTERSON JUDGE (BARBARA ROBINSON) ALL GUILTY. He pauses, then adds: DONALD “TRIG” GIBSON JUROR 9 GUILTIEST OF ALL.
DONE? Y N.
He clicks on Y.
POST NOW N OR HOLD H?
He clicks H.
When the next field appears, the one for the time the signboards will change, he thinks carefully. The National Anthem at the charity game is key. If Sista Bessie sings it, all may go as planned.
He has no real belief that everything will work as he would like it to work—too many moving parts, too much unpredictability—but murder has made him a fatalist. He must move ahead and take what he gets.
He googles How long on the average is the National Anthem at baseball games? The answer is one minute and thirty seconds. He can’t ask google if the softball game will start on time, but unless it gets going very late, it shouldn’t matter. For all he knows ( too many moving parts, too much unpredictability ), Sista Bessie will slip in the shower, get a migraine, come down with Covid, get bopped on the head by an enthusiastic fan, anything , and be unable to sing at all.
With a sense of crossing his own bloody Rubicon, he types MAY 30 7:17 PM for the time his final signboard will replace the current one. The computer asks him to confirm, which he does.
If all goes as he hopes, tomorrow evening at 7:17 there will be a crowd milling in and around the Mingo, wondering where their idol is. Then someone will see the electronic signs change, and they will understand.
7
It isn’t too hard for John Ackerly to locate “the woo-woo meeting where they turn off the lights and spark up candles.” It’s called the Twilight Hour, and convenes in the basement of a church in Upsala. He takes a drive out there, expecting nothing but hoping for any scrap of info he can pass along to Holly. If nothing else, he can get a shot of sobriety—“claim his chair,” as they say in the various recovery programs.
It’s a good meeting. John listens, but mostly he looks around, picking out half a dozen oldtimers. He speaks to several after the meeting, asking if they remember someone who identified as Trig. Two of them do, both vaguely; one of the old chestnuts passed around at meetings is that alkies and drug fiends have “a built-in forgetter,” and it’s true.
“Sure, I remember him,” says Robbie M. “Bearded fella, but then I think he shaved. Mighta moved away.” Robbie is on a pair of canes. He makes his way—slowly, painfully—into the church kitchen, where he pours himself a final paper cup of coffee. John shudders to think how strong the stuff must be at the bottom of the four-gallon urn.
“Anything about him stand out?”
“Nope. White, middle-aged—more or less—your size. Why you interested?”
“Just trying to track him down for a friend.”
“Well, I can’t help you. Big Book Mike might be able to, but he’s dead.”
I know , John doesn’t say. I found him .
John is sure Holly would have more questions to ask, but he can’t think of a single one. He thanks Robbie and heads for the door.
“Usually called himself Trig, but sometimes Trigger. Like the horse.”
John turns back. “What horse?”
“Roy Rogers’s horse. You wouldn’t remember, too young. Couple of times, this was years ago, he ID’d himself by his real name.”
“What real name?”
“Told you, it was years ago. Does it even matter?”
“It might. It might matter a lot.”
“Could have been John. Like you.” Robbie sips from his paper cup, frowning. “Although it might have been Ron.” He scratches his wattled neck. Then, as a question: “Could have been Vaughn?”
John takes a napkin from beside the coffee urn and writes his number on it. “If you think of anything else about the guy, give me a call. Would you do that?”
Robbie drops him a wink. “He owe your friend money? Is that it?”
“Something like that. You take care, Robbie.” He watches the old guy tuck the napkin into the back pocket of his timeworn Dickies workpants, where it will undoubtedly be forgotten.
8
Jerome is watching a late basketball game on TV when he gets a text from his sister.
Barbara: Can you get Betty at the Mingo tomorrow? She wants to check show clothes/costumes with her dresser.
Jerome: Sure, already on the schedule.
Barbara: Pick her up there at 5:30 she said and bring her to the Garden City Plaza. She’s got a special ride to Dingley Park in some fancy convertible. I think with the mayor. She says you should come with!
Jerome: OK. BTW you look great in those tight pants.
Barbara: Shut up.
Jerome texts John Ackerly, asking if he’s still up.
John: Sure. Went to a meeting. Now watching the Cavs.
Jerome: Me too. Game sucks.
John: Totally.
Jerome: Can I pick you up at 5 PM tomorrow? Then U drive my car to the field?
John: OK, I’m there. Pick me up at Happy.
The Cavs are getting their shit handed to them on the West Coast. Jerome turns off the TV and goes to bed.