The Skeleton Box

ELEVEN

The kicked-up wind churned whorls of snow along the walk from Main Street to the Pine County Courthouse. I’d parked at one of the meters the county had installed in the 1980s when the town was flourishing, with rich downstate people coming up to buy property and houses on the lake. Now the meters stood there like antiques. Some county worker went around each week and collected the quarters. One week in January, he gathered a total of seventy-five cents.

Vicky Clark had propped a back door open with a phone book. I’d persuaded her to meet me in the clerk’s office to see if she could help me. Then we would go to her place for that dinner she had offered. That’s what I’d told her.

I smelled her perfume from the dark hallway outside the office. I hesitated, thinking maybe I shouldn’t do this after all. We weren’t all that different, Vicky and me. I’d left town for good, or so I thought, and made mistakes and come groveling home. She’d been a pianist with a scholarship to a music academy when her triplets made their unexpected appearance. Now here we were, chasing what we wanted amid the long evening shadows in the clerk’s office.

Vicky jiggled into the corridor and winked at me. “Pine County Clerk’s Office,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Hi.”

“Aren’t you missing the big game?”

“Duty calls,” I said. She giggled.

Two microfilm machines squatted on the back wall of the office behind eight long rows of file cabinets. Vicky leaned over my shoulder as I sat winding a plastic handle that scrolled through the microfilm of old Pilots projected on a screen. I’d gotten used to her perfume, but I shivered when I felt her hair tickle the back of my neck.

“Can I ask why you’re so interested in all this ancient stuff?” she said.

“Just some background for some stories I’m working on.”

“Oh. It doesn’t have anything to do with Phyllis, does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is exciting,” she said. “You have an exciting job.”

“Trust me, Vick, that’s rarely the case.”

“My mother would absolutely kill us.”

“I’ll bet. What time do you need to get home to your kids?”

“Don’t worry about that, sweetie. My girlfriend picked them up. They’re having a pajama party tonight.” Vicky leaned over further until I turned to look at her. She must have put lipstick on while I was scrolling. A blob of it had coagulated between her front teeth. Sympathy mixed with nausea in the pit of my belly. “You know,” she said, “I heard you had a little pajama party yourself a long time ago. Right here.”

She grinned and nodded toward a door with a frosted-glass window on the back wall. It led to a corridor where there was a janitor’s closet. As a college student working one summer at the Pilot, I had hid in that closet so I could get my hands on some files a clerk named Verna had refused to let me see. The night turned eventful when a young part-time security guard caught me. That was Darlene.

“Ah,” I said. “I never kiss and tell.”

“Good,” she said, nudging me with a hip and almost knocking me off of my chair. “I don’t either.”

Focus, I told myself. I looked at my watch. I decided I wouldn’t take any notes, I would simply make copies of the stories and escape before I got into real trouble.

One by one, I found the stories listed on the index card I’d taken from the Pilot basement. I hit the button to copy each and waited while the machine hummed, the images disappearing and then reappearing on the screen. Vicky collected the black-on-gray pages churning out of the machine and handed them to me.

I flipped through the first few pages, finding the August 17, 1944, story, “Town Searches for Missing Nun.” It was bannered across the top of the front page, with the headline and a deck and a three-column photo of a priest addressing a throng of mostly men. He wore a black cassock and a black three-cornered hat. His long, pointed nose divided knife-sharp cheekbones on a narrow face. He stood outdoors atop a short flight of wooden stairs leading to a pair of tall doors. A crucifix hung over the apex of the clapboard arch above him. One of the priest’s arms was outstretched, his sleeve billowing below his elbow, and the other was hidden inside his cassock above his belt.

The caption identified the building as St. Valentine’s-the old church, I thought-and the priest as Father Nilus Moreau.

I didn’t have time, but I read the story anyway. Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero had come to Starvation Lake from the Detroit suburb of St. Clair Shores, just before FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps diverted the Hungry River to form Starvation Lake. She was nineteen years old and barely five feet tall. A photograph showed a pale smiling face and hopeful eyes floating inside the black-and-white frame of her habit. “Her rosary probably weighs more than her,” said another nun who was quoted. I wished I had spent a few more minutes in the Pilot basement looking for stories about the nun.

“Vicky,” I said, “could you do me a favor?”

In a few minutes, we were both scrolling away. Vicky leaned over and said, “Look, your mom.” She shoved a copy of a story from November 1941 in front of my face. “Sr. Cordelia Takes Spellers to Roscommon Bee,” the headline read. A photo showed a bunch of girls in plaid jumpers over white blouses standing with a nun and a boy who seemed a bit older than the girls, maybe because he looked so studious in his white shirt and tie and horn-rimmed glasses. Vicky folded the sheet so as to block out the caption.

“Let’s see if we can guess the other ladies in the picture,” she said.

I wanted to get done and out of there, but I said, without looking, “I bet one’s Louise Campbell. And Phyllis Bontrager-or Snyder, back then.”

“So sad,” Vicky said. “Who’s this one, with the pigtails?”

“I don’t know, who?”

“You know what? I think it’s Sally Pearson. She even has a flower in one of her pigtails-and now she’s a florist. How about that?”

“Pretty amazing,” I said, still not looking.

Vicky took the page away and sat back in her chair. I looked up and saw that her plump face had puckered into a pout. Christ, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You asked me to find these stories,” she said.

“Yes, I’m a jerk. Let’s see, who else is in there?”

Vicky unfolded the sheet and read the caption aloud. “‘Bee-Ing Good Spellers,’” she said. “‘Sister Mary Cordelia of St. Valentine’s Catholic School with her best spellers. From left, Phyllis Snyder, Beatrice Damico, Gardenia Lawton, Louise Ellison, Mary Kentwood, Martha Yeager, Sally Wentzel, and teacher’s helper Horace Gallagher.’”

“Judge Gallagher?” I said.

“Oh my God, Horace,” Vicky said, pointing to the boy who still wore horn-rimmed glasses as the county’s longtime circuit judge. “Can you believe he got to be a judge?”

“More amazing that he stayed a judge with all the goofy high jinks he pulls in court.”

“Ha. You got that right.”

“Martha Yeager is who now?” I said.

“Nussler. After losing that Brenner guy from Mesick.”

“He cheated on her with old Tillie Spaulding. And it’s Gardenia Mapes now, right?”

“Was. She died last year. Alzheimer’s.”

I remembered writing about her death. Someone in her family, knowing of my mother’s issues, had called to ask that I handle the obituary. With the family’s permission, I had spoken with Gardenia’s doctor, who also happened to be my mother’s doctor, who told me that Gardenia was further along than my mother in her disease, but that I could expect much of the same.

“That’s weird,” I said.

“What?” Vicky rolled her chair closer to mine. Her perfume washed over me again. I wasn’t getting used to it.

“My mom’s a terrible speller,” I said. “Whenever she writes me a note or a letter, there’s always at least one thing wrong.”

My favorite was Mom spelling drawers as “droors,” maybe because it rhymed with “doors.”

“I can’t spell for beans either,” Vicky said.

I picked up the story headlined “Hope Ebbing in Search for Nun.”

“Let’s see here,” I said.

On August 15, 1944, Sister Cordelia had disappeared. According to the Pilot, no one actually saw her leave. The last person to see her was a gardener named Joseph Wayland. Police said Wayland had told them he waved hello to Sister Cordelia as he was hoeing a tomato patch and she was passing on her way to the church sacristy. He offered her a tomato but she begged off, saying she was late to see Father Nilus. She never arrived at the sacristy and she was never seen, at least not in Starvation Lake, again.

Father Nilus organized a party of hundreds of men and women who came from Kalkaska, Kresnak Lake, Mancelona, Sandy Cove, and Grayling, and as far away as Frederic and East Jordan, to help search for the nun. She was known to take solitary walks along the lakeshore and into the swampland beyond the lake’s northwestern corner. There were worries that she had fallen into a bog and drowned, or she had surprised a coyote or a badger and been bitten and bled to death.

“We will not relent,” Nilus was quoted as saying. The story went on, “The priest has worked like a madman, sleeping and eating but a portion of the time. After saying his Masses Sunday, he tramped through the woods with the rest of the searchers.”

Boats were dispatched. More than one hundred men donned waders and formed a sweeping line that moved step by step through the swamp. They found nothing but the rotting carcass of a fawn that had been gnawed by a predator.

After six days of searching and no sign of the nun, Starvation Lake’s uglier side began to emerge. It was inevitable. The locals needed rumors to explain their failure to find Sister Cordelia: She had grown disillusioned with the church and stolen away in her guilt and grief. She had fallen in love with a wealthy summer visitor from Muskegon and left to marry him. The possibility that she had been murdered was generally dismissed. Murders didn’t happen in young, hopeful Starvation Lake, certainly not to a nun.

Her students, who called her “Nonny,” a nickname that was not explained, were devastated, according to the story. The story said she was known best for teaching reading and writing. There was mention of a Saturday morning class called Letters to the Lord that students actually attended, even in summer. Sister Cordelia rewarded pupils with perfect attendance at those sessions with rosaries engraved with their initials. Eleven-year-old Beatrice Damico was quoted as saying, “I miss Nonny. She was so nice.”

I sat back in my chair. “Man,” I said.

“Aw.” Vicky placed a hand on my shoulder. I felt the edges of the rings she wore digging into my skin. I twisted my body around so that her hand came away.

“Let’s keep going,” I said. I switched out the roll of microfilm. I looked at my watch. Where the hell was that call from Poppy?

“Now what?” Vicky said.

“They caught the guy who killed the nun.”

“Oooh. Who knew microfilm could be so much fun?”

I spun the handle. The pages blurred past. I stopped every few to see where I was: March, May, July. Now the year was 1950. I stopped on August 5. Two stories dominated the top of the front page. “Gardener Arrested in Disappearance of Nun,” ran across five of the eight columns. The other, which I had not seen in the Pilot catalog, ate up the other three columns: “Arrest Boosts Sheriff’s Bid for Re-Election.”

“Look at that,” I said.

“What?”

“History really does repeat itself.”

I spun the handle again. The next story would have to have everything the arrest story had and more. I stopped at August 7, 1950.

ACCUSED KILLER MURDERED IN PINE COUNTY JAIL

By Carl L. Wick

Pilot Staff

STARVATION LAKE — The man accused of the long-ago murder of a young nun was killed in an apparent fight at the county jail here.

Joseph E. Wayland, 51 years old, died of internal injuries allegedly inflicted by another inmate at the Pine County Jail. Pine County sheriff R. Lawrence Spardell said the two had a disagreement over a game of craps.

Wayland was stabbed in the throat with a crude weapon the other man had fashioned from a spoon smuggled out of the jail mess, Spardell said.

The sheriff declined to identify the other man, pending an arraignment scheduled for Wednesday before Pine County circuit judge Franklin Carey.

Wayland was arrested last week on charges of first-degree murder in the disappearance of Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero.

Sister Cordelia, as the Felician nun was known at St. Valentine’s Catholic Church here, was reported missing in August of 1944. She was 30 years old at the time. The nun’s body was never found despite a massive search.

Wayland worked as a gardener at St. Valentine’s at the time of the nun’s disappearance.

Charges were filed based largely on the testimony of an unnamed Catholic parish priest who said Wayland confessed to the crime during the sacrament of penance.

The unnamed priest told police that Wayland revealed in the church confessional that he had bludgeoned the nun to death with a shovel after she rejected his romantic advances, and disposed of her body in Torch Lake.

Fr. Nilus Moreau, pastor of St. Valentine’s, referred questions to the Archdiocese of Detroit. Fr. Timothy Reilly, a spokesman for the archdiocese, denied that a priest had violated the sanctity of the confessional, but said, “We pray for the Lord’s love and tender mercy for Sister Cordelia, the men in the jail, and their families.”

Pine County prosecutor Michael Carey said plans were being made to dredge Torch Lake, but he wasn’t optimistic about finding the nun’s body so long after her murder.

Of the jail killing, he said, “This unfortunate turn of events appears to close the case of Sister Cordelia’s demise, and I sincerely hope we won’t have to speak of it again.”

Wayland has previously been convicted twice of public intoxication and was acquitted in 1939 of a charge of aggravated assault after allegedly striking a man with a bar stool.

His wife of 28 years, Esmerelda, died in childbirth in 1930. He is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Susan Breck of Plymouth, Michigan, and a grandson.

“Whoa,” I said, forgetting Vicky.

“What?”

I was focused on the last sentence of the clip. Breck, I thought. Again I did some math in my head. The Breck at Tatch’s camp could have been Wayland’s grandson.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just… I can’t believe I never knew about this.”

“It probably wasn’t something people were proud of,” Vicky said. “Anyway, it happened a million years ago. Did you see those clothes in the pictures? Crazy.”

I reread the story, focused again on the last sentence, and tried to get into my reporter’s garb, distance myself, be objective. Could it be mere coincidence? Could this Susan Breck be unrelated to the Breck who had insinuated himself into Tatch’s camp and convinced its dwellers that they could dig their way to liberation? Was Breck somehow connected to Nilus and, therefore, to Mrs. B? What was he really digging for?

“Are you getting hungry?” Vicky said.

“Huh?”

My phone rang. Thank God, I thought.

“For chicken and dumplings?”

“Hang on.”

I may have grabbed the phone a little too eagerly. Vicky folded her arms in that pose women adopt when they have an inkling that they’re about to be handed bullshit.

“Yeah?” I said into the phone.

“We’re down one-zip after two,” came the voice. It was Poppy. He was yelling. I flattened the phone hard against my ear.

“Excuse me?” I said. “This is Gus Carpenter.”

I could hear the din of the crowd across the ice from Poppy, who was probably standing by our bench, scanning statistics. “I said we’re down by one,” Poppy said, louder. “Dougie had a rough start, and they’ve got Tex all bottled up. But we’re still in it.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“You what?” Poppy said. “Gus?”

I waited as if listening to someone filling me in about something. I knew I was being a shithead, but I felt I had no choice.

“You there?” Poppy said.

“I understand,” I said into the phone. “Of course.”

“Let me guess-this involves a woman,” Poppy said. He hung up. I stayed on, knitting my brows. Vicky moved closer.

“All right, understood,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I clicked the phone off.

“You have to go?” Vicky said. She looked skeptical.

“Something’s going on with Mom.”

“Is she all right?”

“Well… I’m not sure.”

“Who was that?”

“Somebody at the sheriff’s office.”

“Oh. Your ex, I suppose?”

I decided that by saying nothing I would let her think that.

“I can’t believe she could just throw away a good man like you.”

I stood. “Sorry, Vick. I’ll have to take a rain check.”

“How about tomorrow? Sully’s gone till Saturday.”

I busied myself with folding up the copies and finding pockets for them. I couldn’t look Vicky in the eye anymore. “We’ll see.”

“No. We won’t, will we?”

“Come on, Vicky. It’s my mom.”

“Oh, of course. Did you get what you wanted?”

“Yes. Thank you so much.”

“I’m so glad. What are you waiting for?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry all right. Just leave.”

I should have felt worse than I did, but I was too busy thinking. As I walked to my truck through fluttering snowflakes, it struck me that if Breck was connected to Nilus and to Mrs. B, he might also be linked, in some way I couldn’t fathom at the moment, to my mother.