Dig by C.R. Corwin Page A

was pretty clear on that,” he said. “He died from the fall. It fractured the back of his skull and ripped his brain loose. His head quickly filled with blood and some of it trickled out.”
    “So the blood upstairs was from the frying pan—or whatever—and the blood downstairs was from the fall?”
    “The coroner’s opinion—”
    “His opinion?”
    Dale chuckled at my skepticism. “A coroner’s opinion is not exactly the same as you having an opinion, Maddy.”
    I didn’t care for the chuckling and I sure didn’t care for his lack of faith in my deductive powers. “You think I’m going off half-baked here, don’t you?” I hissed.
    He had the good sense to retreat: “You’re the most fully baked woman I know. What I meant is that the coroner’s opinion comes at the end of a very thorough autopsy report. And the coroner’s opinion was that the initial blow upstairs knocked him over the railing and while he was lying flat on his back, dying from a massive cranial hemorrhage, the killer smashed away at his face.”
    I thought my own brain was going to rip loose. It was filled with a swirl of grisly images: David sprawled helplessly on the cold floor while some fuzzy, faceless beast swung that big imaginary frying pan; Sweet Gordon climbing that grassy hill while an equally fuzzy beast raised a pistol and took careful aim.
    Wouldn’t you just know it, Kurt Depew chose that moment to poke the barrel of his rifle out his bathroom window and fire.
    Everyone in Hannawa Falls ducked but me.
    I heard Dale screech, “Will you get the fuck down?”
    ***
     
    Well, I did get down. But it was a waste of time. There was only the one shot and it landed a million miles from us. By the time I pulled myself up Dale was already heading toward the police line. He was bent low like Alan Alda in the opening shots of a
M*A*S*H
episode, running toward that helicopter full of wounded soldiers.
    I was only the paper’s librarian. But when a big story like that breaks, you have to put everything else aside—your job description, your well-deserved reputation as an uncooperative old crone—and do what you can to help get that story covered. So I bent low and headed back to Starbucks for more tea and coffee. I’m sure I looked a lot more like Groucho Marx than Alan Alda.
    ***
     
    “What about suspects?” I asked Dale. “There had to be someone other than Sidney Spikes.”
    It had been more than an hour since that shot sent everybody into a tizzy. Dale had gathered what little information there was and called it in. Apparently Kurt Depew had just wanted the police to know he was still alive and kicking. He’d taken aim at a black SWAT team helmet sitting on the hood of a patrol car. Sent it bouncing like a beach ball. “They interviewed lots of people,” Dale said, “but from the looks of their notes, Spikes was the only one they had much interest in.”
    “Any record of the police talking to a student named Howard Shay?” I wondered.
    Dale checked his memory. “Yeah, that was one of the names I saw.” His thoughtful frown twisted into a wicked grin. “Another name I saw was that of a young librarian—one Dolly Madison Sprowls.”
    My brain immediately went back to that day after Easter in 1957 when those two detectives appeared at my apartment door. They were both chubby, both painfully squeezed into threadbare blue suits. I remember thinking they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee in
Alice in Wonderland
. Anyway, they’d come at the worst possible time. I was trying to make the first poppyseed kuchen of my young marriage, using the indecipherable recipe my Auntie Edna had sent me from LaFargeville. They crowded around me in my tiny kitchen and peppered me with questions until I was ready to fly.
    “One Dolly Madison Sprowls who didn’t know diddly,” I told Dale.
    He laughed. “No, you didn’t. And neither did anyone else.”
    “Including Sidney Spikes?”
    Dale had long ago finished his coffee and was