SEVEN Janice Anderson wasn’t on Purdy’s list of contacts, but she’d provided key information when Virgil broke the school board case. He didn’t know if she’d have any relevant information on the Hemming murder, the old lady nonetheless keeping her ear to the ground, so instead of going straight to Hemming’s house, he stopped at Anderson’s.
Virgil parked down the street from her house, walked the last two hundred yards—no point in advertising the fact that he was talking to Anderson—pushed through her front gate, and knocked on her bluebird orange door. He heard her moving inside, and a moment later an elderly woman with short, curly white hair and rimless glasses pulled open the inner door, pushed open the storm door, and said, “Virgil Flowers. I knew you’d come snooping around.”
“You gonna leave me standing out here freezing my tits off?” Virgil asked.
“Not at all. Say, did you ever play football?”
“Yeah, in high school, out in Marshall. I was a wide receiver.”
“That explains a lot,” she said. “C’mon in anyway. I wouldn’t want to have any frozen tits on my conscience.”
—
Anderson had spent nearly forty-three years in Trippton as a high school teacher, and since few outsiders moved into Trippton, virtually everybody in town, forty-eight and younger, had been in one of her classes. Since she’d grown up in Trippton, she also knew almost everybody between forty-eight and seventy as friends from her youth.
She led the way into the kitchen and asked, “Coffee or hot cocoa?”
“Cocoa,” Virgil said, as he took a chair at the kitchen table.
“That’s right,” she said. “You get your caffeine from Diet Coke.” She got a can of Hershey’s cocoa out of the cupboard, and as she was putting it together with milk and sugar on the stove she said, “You’re here about Gina Hemming.”
“Yup. What do you know?”
“A few things—which you didn’t hear from me,” she said.
“Of course not,” Virgil said. “By the way, I’ve got a list for you to look at.”
He put the yellow legal pad page out on the kitchen table, and when she’d finished mixing the cocoa and milk with a metal wisk, she picked it up and read down the list.
“If any of these people killed her, it was an accident,” she said. “Though, I guess the cover-up wouldn’t have been an accident, would it? Taking her out and throwing her in the river.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Killing her wasn’t an accident, either, unless you’d consider whacking somebody on the head with a heavy object to be an accident.”
She frowned at that and said, “I hadn’t heard exactly how she was killed. So she was beaten to death?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. ‘Beaten to death’ usually means a person was hit a whole bunch of times. Hemming was hit once, with something round and heavy, like a full bottle of wine.”
“Didn’t fall and hit her head?”
“She could have, I guess, and then, not thinking clearly, crawled through the streets of Trippton, down to the Mississippi, where she cut a hole in the ice and threw herself in.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. I’m an old woman,” Anderson said.
“An old woman who’s trying to close down Trippton football. It’s like telling the Catholic Church to cut out Holy Communion.”
“Barbaric sport. Nasty. Nasty. A hundred years from now, nobody will believe that we allowed it to go on. It’s gladiatorial games, but with children,” Anderson said. “Anyway, none of the names on this list exactly jump out at me. I had all of them . . . Wait a minute. Were all these people in the same class?”
“Yes. Class of ’92,” Virgil said. “The last people to see her alive, according to Jeff Purdy, were the members of a committee putting together the Twenty-fifth Reunion for next summer.”
“Hmph. There is a lot of potential violence in class reunions. Old wounds never healed, and maybe even exacerbated, over the years, especially when they’re all in the same pressure cooker, like Trippton,” she said. “You look at most reunions, there’s usually at least one fistfight among the men, one hair-pulling spat among the women, and more. There’ve been whole brawls . . .”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Remember, these people, at their twenty-fifth, are all well into their lives and careers, and they’re all the same age, in the same pond,” Anderson said. “They’ve married each other, they’ve had affairs with each other, they’ve had business clashes and disappointments, the loving couple in senior high wound up marrying other people—and somebody got dumped. Brutal stuff, when you think about it.”
“You’re making this sound harder than I want it to be,” Virgil said.
She looked him over for a few seconds, then said, “You know, you originally struck me as the lazy sort who wouldn’t go out of his way to work too hard. I now know that’s purely dissembling on your part. A mask. The last time you were here, you arrested the entire school board and the newspaper editor for murder, cleaned the meth heads out of Orly’s Creek, broke up a dognapping ring, and even got Johnson Johnson to stop drinking, which was probably the biggest miracle of all.”
“He stopped himself,” Virgil said.
“That’s not what Johnson told me,” Anderson said. She poured a large cup and a small cup of cocoa at the kitchen sink, reached into another cupboard, took out a bottle of Grand Marnier, added a jolt to each of the cups of cocoa, shook in a bit of nutmeg and cayenne pepper, and gave him the big one. “Anyway, I now see you as a person with a very deceptive personality. I believe that to be calculated, although I suppose it’s possible that it’s slightly schizophrenic. Of course, that’s neither here nor there . . . Let’s talk about Gina.”
—
Let’s,” Virgil said, in relief. The cocoa smelled wonderful, but was hot enough to set fire to his face, so he put it down to let it cool for a while.
“How much do you know about her?” Anderson asked.
“What Jeff Purdy told me—and I’ve seen her body, so that I know that she was pretty.”
“Jeff Purdy—there’s an Olympic-level brownnoser for you. I gave him a D in sophomore English. Not going to set any land speed records for honesty, either, in my opinion.”
“Gina Hemming,” Virgil said, pushing her back on point. He took a sip of the cocoa: still too hot.
Gina Hemming, Anderson said, had been one of the brightest students in her class, one of two National Merit Scholars, and was also pretty, popular, and stuck-up. “She stayed that way, right until she was killed. Lucy Cheever, who is on your list, was the most popular girl in the class . . . She was Homecoming Queen. Also smart.”
Anderson filled in a quick history for the dead woman, including her fraught marriage to Justin Rhodes.
“Justin was a year older than Gina, and he’s had a question of sexuality hanging over his head since high school. I once walked in on him necking with a trombone player named Ralph Filson back in the boys’ dressing room when the place was supposed to be empty. Ralph was definitely gay, everybody had known that since he was in third grade, but I hadn’t known it about Justin . . . if he is, in fact, gay. I think there’s some possibility that he’s only gay in reaction to his father, who is an enormous, brass-plated asshole and homophobe. In other words, a feature, not a bug.
“On the surface, though, the marriage looked pretty good,” Anderson continued. “They obviously liked talking to each other, you’d see them out on the town, and they both liked to dance. Justin’s family is the biggest local Realtor . . . So they seemed to be cruising along. Then, through hard work, nepotism, and the timely demise of her father—he choked to death down at the steak house—Gina took over the bank and became important on her own.”
Rhodes was currently experimenting with the name Justine. He and Hemming had separated a year earlier but hadn’t yet divorced.
“I knew most of that from Johnson,” Virgil complained. “I came to you for the good stuff.” The cocoa was now perfect. He added, “This is the best cocoa I’ve ever had in my life.”
She nodded and took them back to the topic of Gina Hemming. “Here’s some of the good stuff: before she and Justin separated, Gina had an on-and-off affair with a brute named Corbel Cain.”
Virgil nodded. “Really. C-o-r-b-e-l C-a-i-n?” He wrote it down.
“That’s correct. Corbel is a tough guy. Though not dim. He’s smart enough. I believe I gave him a B-plus in English. He’s a heavy-equipment operator, not somebody that you’d think would be in Gina’s wheelhouse. Corbel and his wife are one of those high school couples that didn’t break up. He married his sweetheart right after graduation, and they’re still married, though he’s beaten her up a few times—enough that his wife’s father once put a shotgun to Corbel’s ear and said if he did it again, he’d blow his head off.”
“You think he would?”
“Yes. Janey Cain is the apple of her father’s eye. Her father is a farmer down south of town, and a man who means what he says,” Anderson said.
Virgil picked up a vibration in her voice, looked at her for several seconds, not responding, sipping on his cocoa. She suddenly blushed and said, “Goddamn you, Flowers.”
“You got this information from your farmer friend, right? Might have had a couple of interesting reunions yourself?”
“Shut up. Anyway, I happen to know that Corbel and Gina had an off-and-on affair for years. I know Corbel drinks and I know that he has a violent streak,” Anderson said. “If you asked me if I thought he did it . . . I would have said yes, before you told me a few minutes ago how she died. To tell you the truth, I can’t see him hitting her with a heavy object. He’d use his fists. He’s been in enough fights over the years that he knows how to channel his anger.”
“When was the last time you think they were . . . seeing each other?”
“It’s probably been a couple of years now. They started and stopped a few times, I believe. They could have started again. Corbel is quite a . . . vigorous type, somewhat attractive in a rough way, and he’s not a braggart. He wouldn’t have talked about their relationship. I suspect that when Gina needed a sexual outlet, she turned to Corbel.”
“If he didn’t talk, and she didn’t talk, how do you know about it?”
“Because us old people talk to each other even if nobody else pays attention to us. People think when you pass sixty-five, you suddenly turn stupid. Anyway, we see things, and we used to see Corbel sneaking into Gina’s house. And people have seen them sneaking into the Days Inn over in La Crosse. This was two or three years ago, though. Maybe even longer.”
“Got it,” Virgil said. “Where can I find Corbel?”
“He’s got an equipment yard down on the river, on the south end of the marina. You know where the marina is?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t hear it from me,” she said.
“Of course not.”
“And you don’t know I might have had a farmer friend,” she said.
“I’ve already forgotten about it,” Virgil said. He drank the last of the hot cocoa. “Though, to tell you the truth, Janice, when you’ve had a serious relationship with a person, and at your age . . . why not put everything else aside and go for it?”
“His wife is still alive,” Anderson said.
“A lot of people . . .”
“His wife is my sister,” she said.
“Ah,” Virgil said. “The twists in the social fabric of Trippton never fail to astonish me.”
“Let it go.”
—
One other thing,” Virgil said. “Do you know where I could find Jesse McGovern?”
A wrinkle appeared in her forehead. “I don’t . . . I don’t believe I know that name.”
“Liar.”
“You’re right, I am.” She rapped the table with her knuckles. “Stay away from her, Virgil. I know about this private detective who’s wandering around town. If you found Jesse, anything that happened would lead to a tragedy.”
Virgil felt a little sneaky about it, about the misdirection, but he did it anyway and asked, “Say . . . Jesse McGovern’s not in this same class, the Class of ’92, is she? She wouldn’t be connected somehow?”
“No, no, she’s several years younger. She’s your age,” Anderson said. She told Virgil how to get to Gina Hemming’s house, which was only a few blocks away, a little higher on the hill.