The Skeleton Box

FIFTEEN

My mother picked up as I was parking on Main in front of the Pilot.

“Is that you, Gussy?” she said.

“Are you at my place?” I said.

“I am. Why are all these boxes here? There’s nowhere to sit.”

On the floor and the sofa in my living room were four or five boxes I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there in a little while.”

“You’re not going to throw away your old report cards, are you?”

The old hockey tape box on the sofa was filled with junk from my boyhood that Mom had salvaged. “I’ll look through it soon,” I said. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

Mom told me about her day as I went inside. She and Millie had had a nice late breakfast in an empty Audrey’s Diner and done some shopping and then gone back to Millie’s and played cribbage and talked.

“When’s the funeral?” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“You said you were going to Murray and Murray to see about arrangements.”

“Oh, yes. Millie called over there. They said Darlene was handling it.”

I couldn’t imagine how. “I thought you were helping.”

“Dingus arrested the Edwards boy?” She was changing the subject. “Whatever for?”

“I’m looking into it,” I said.

Neat stacks of mail crowded the Pilot ’s L-shaped front counter. The baskets and bouquets were standing on the floor in the corner. Whistler must have tidied up.

“Can you imagine what Bernice would think?”

If she were around, Tatch’s mom would have been at the press conference shouting biblical quotes. “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” I said.

“Good,” Mom said. “Tonight we have to go somewhere.”

The door swung open and the postman dropped a bundle of mail bound with rubber bands at my feet. “Do you need something at the store?” I said.

“No. As soon as it’s dark, we have to go. Before someone else gets there.”

“Someone else gets where?” I said, but Mom had hung up. “Everything’s a mystery,” I said to myself, shaking my head. I turned off my phone and picked up the bundle of mail. “Luke?” I called out. There was no answer.

A turquoise sweater, fuzzy with lint, one button missing, was draped over the back of the stool facing Mrs. B’s computer. I set the bundle on the chair and idly punched the space bar on her keyboard. The screen stayed black.

Mrs. B had stood there greeting customers, trading gossip, taking classifieds, paying the weekly bills until Media North automated the ads and bills and Philo asked me if the Pilot really needed Mrs. B anymore, if we shouldn’t just stand a placard on the counter with a list of phone numbers that visitors could call for their needs. “And who exactly will explain to Mrs. Evangelista why we moved the crossword from A2 to A8 and have her go back out the door smiling?” I had said.

Philo never brought it up again.

Next to Mrs. B’s computer stood three photographs in fake wooden frames she probably had bought off the dollar shelf at the drugstore. One was of Darlene, looking solemn on the day of her graduation from police academy, her hair in a bun, her deputy’s hat cradled in the crook of an elbow. Another showed her as a girl crouched inside an inner tube on a boat dock and throwing her pigtailed head back to laugh as her father tickled her from behind.

The last photo was of Mrs. B with my mother and Soupy’s mom. The frame was etched all around with the words “friends” and “forever.” The women were standing with their arms around one another, my mother at the center, in front of a minivan. I tilted the picture to see their faces better in the shadows. They were all smiling.

I had taken that picture.

It was a Friday in July and I had taken a long weekend off from the Times to come north and see Mom and relax by the lake. I was sitting down the bluff on her dock with the Pilot and a cup of coffee when I heard a woman’s shriek and then another. I dropped the paper and ran up to see Mrs. Campbell, all two-hundred-some pounds of her, lying on her back next to a minivan in Mom’s driveway. She was laughing. Mom and Mrs. B were doubled over laughing. “Curly, Curly, Curly,” Mrs. B kept saying between gasps of laughter, using Mrs. Campbell’s nickname.

“What’s going on?” I said, and all of them laughed even harder. Mrs. Campbell got to one knee. She had a wicker purse the size of an Easter basket looped around one arm. Tears glistened on her plump cheeks. Mom and Mrs. B helped her to her feet. They’d been trying, without success, to lift her into the minivan. “Dear lord, Louise,” Mom said. “If we don’t get you in that van, you’re never going to win that million dollars you promised Angus.” That brought more peals of laughter. I shook my head and was starting back down to the lake when they asked me to snap a photo.

They had been friends for as long as I could remember. Mrs. Campbell would refer to them as the Three Musketeers and Mom would say, on cue, “Oh no, dear, we are definitely the Three Stooges.” Mrs. Campbell was Curly, Mrs. B was Larry, and my mother, of course, was Moe.

Sometime after Soupy’s dad died, July 4, 1997, something happened between them that Mom chose not to speak of, at least not with me. Suddenly they no longer were an inseparable trio. Mom still did things with Mrs. B, and Mrs. B with Mrs. Campbell, but Moe and Curly no longer spoke. Thanksgiving at our house that year was quiet, with too much room around the table in Mom’s dining room. I missed Mrs. Campbell’s creamed onions and cinnamon chocolate cake.

When I asked Mom why Soupy and his mother hadn’t come, she told me she’d simply decided to have a smaller dinner and, as was her practiced habit, avoided further discussion. Darlene and I weren’t really talking at the time, so I didn’t bother asking her, but I did query Soupy, who shrugged and said, “Hell, I don’t know. Chick weirdness. Even when they get old, that shit never stops. They’ll get over it.”

They never did, as far as I could tell. When Mrs. Campbell died the next year, Mom made a brief appearance at the wake but didn’t attend the funeral Mass. “You know I don’t go to church,” she told me.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “What about Soupy?”

“It’s none of Alden’s business,” she said.

“What is none of his business?”

“It’s none of yours either. I saw Alden at the funeral home. He doesn’t expect to see me at church, but that shouldn’t stop you.”

Now I picked up the photograph from Mrs. B’s counter. I looked at the smiles the women wore, lacking any trace of vanity or goofy self-consciousness, unlike the smiles men plastered on for photographs. How sad, I thought, that only my mother now remained, that she might never smile so purely again.

I put the photograph back.

I picked up the mail bundle and the rubber band snapped in my hand, the mail spilling across the floor. “Shit,” I said, bending to pick it up.

There were two manila envelopes from adult education at Kepshire Community College; a narrow cardboard box, probably containing a pen in the shape of a baseball bat, from the Detroit Tigers Fan Club of Antrim County; and fifteen or sixteen white envelopes of varying sizes. I riffled through those. One said “Attorney Discipline Board, State of Michigan.” Was some local lawyer in trouble? I slipped it out of the stack.

It was addressed to Lucas B. Whistler.

If I had thought about it for more than five seconds, I probably would have set it on the counter or on Whistler’s desk. I told myself it was also addressed to the Pine County Pilot, of which I was an official representative. Nowhere was it marked “Personal and Confidential.” I remembered the conversation I’d had with Philo about expenses.

I tore the envelope open. I flicked on a desk lamp next to Mrs. B’s computer and scanned the page in my hand. It was dated the prior Friday.

Beneath Whistler’s address it said: “RE: Case No. B-MI-8675309-01. Wayland E. Breck.”

I looked over my shoulder through the newsroom door at Whistler’s desk. At Enright’s, I’d asked Whistler if he knew Breck. Nope, he had said.

The letter didn’t say much: “This is to acknowledge receipt of your February 23, 2000, request for additional information regarding Case No. B-MI-8675309-01. We will evaluate your request and reply as promptly as required by law. Please be advised that, due to staffing shortages necessitated by budget reductions, our backlogs are currently running longer than usual.”

That was all.

I put the letter back in the torn envelope and stood there thinking. Twilight was falling on Main Street. The dim glow from Enright’s glimmered on the Pilot ’s front window.

Whistler had known Breck, or had known about him, before I had. For some reason he’d kept that from me. I took out my cell phone to dial Whistler, then changed my mind.

I went back to my desk and slid the letter beneath some file folders in a drawer. I wanted to know more about Breck; more about his grandfather; more about Nilus and his women; more about who was behind Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne’s stealthy efforts to buy up the land above the northeastern corner of the lake; and if and how it was all connected. I thought I might make a quick run downstate. And I would not tell Whistler.

I made a mental note to call Millie Bontrager after dinner and ask if she could stay with Mom the next day. Then I sat down at my computer and called up the last e-mail from Joanie McCarthy. I hit Reply and typed:

Joanie,

Good to hear from you. Mom’s as OK as can be expected. Thanks for asking. I hear you’re kicking some butt down there. That’s great-but no surprise. Matter of fact, I might be able to use your help. Call me asap.

My pickup truck fishtailed on the slippery washboard of Trimble Trail, an ignored gravel road that meandered through the low hills south of the lake.

Mom sat next to me, watching the trees pass.

We had had a quiet dinner of cheese-and-mushroom pizza I had picked up at Roselli’s. Mom had barely eaten. She had seemed preoccupied. Why do you keep looking out the windows? I had asked, and she had told me to finish my pizza. How was your day? I had said, and she said her day would not be over until she ran the errand she wanted me to run with her. I had asked her where we were going and why and she had said, with great and specific determination, Just do what I say for once, please.

So I did. If Mom was imagining something, it wouldn’t hurt to indulge her. If she was not, then I wanted to know what it was. Maybe it would shed some light on the priest and the dead nun and whoever had killed her and what, if anything, it all had to do with the death of Mrs. B. Or, more likely, it would tell me nothing.

I pulled the truck over just after Trimble veered north in the direction of the lake and just before it began to run parallel to South Beach opposite a thick pine stand. I parked far enough away from the snowdrifts on Mom’s side of the car so that she had plenty of room to get out. It didn’t matter that the car sat near the middle of the road. Snowplows were the only vehicles that plied Trimble and, if Pine County’s finance manager had his way, they wouldn’t be seen on that road again either.

Mom stood at the edge of the road shoulder, peering into the woods. I closed her door, which she didn’t seem to notice was open. I glanced up the slope creeping from her feet to a ridge in the gloom. I knew there was a footpath that wound up through the trees, but it was barely visible in the snow.

“Why didn’t we just take Horvath?” I said.

“For the same reason I wanted to stay at your place,” Mom said. “The nosy police.” She squinted in the direction of the snow-covered path. “Did you bring the flashlight?”

“Yes.” I flicked it on, pointed it into the forest. Snow glistened on the trees.

“Your father used to come up this way when he got off work early and didn’t want me to know. As if I couldn’t smell the beer and cigars on him when he came in.”

“Boys will be boys.”

“For ever and ever.” She took the flashlight. “Let’s go.”

I tried to take her by one arm but she shook me off. I actually wasn’t worried about her being able to make the climb. Her body, although frailer than a year before, was still in decent shape for a woman going on sixty-seven. It was her mind that worried me, whether it worried her or not.

We trudged our way up in snow to our knees. Mom’s left foot kept slipping on the incline, and I noticed she had tucked her corduroys into black rubber galoshes that I had worn as a boy. For Christmas I’d bought her a pair of insulated, waterproof boots for something like ninety bucks at a mall in Traverse City. Why hadn’t she worn those? She kept turning the flashlight on and off. She’d stop and turn it on, then turn it back off and we’d stumble ahead for five or six steps, then she’d turn it on again.

“Mother,” I said, “just keep it on.”

“Someone will see,” she hissed.

“Who? The police?”

“They’re watching.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Mom?”

“Quiet.”

We reached the top of the ridge. Beyond the treetops I could see the lake’s frozen expanse, as blank as fresh newsprint. An image flashed in my mind of Soupy and me squatting there on a summer night, drinking the Goebels or Black Labels we’d stolen out of some left-open garage, and plotting the rest of the evening without a thought to the rest of our lives. Mom pointed the flashlight down the slope. The beam fell on the trapezoidal white shroud of Dad’s extra garage, his beloved tree house. Only a flagpole jutting up from the outer deck had gone untouched by snow.

My cell phone blurted from my jacket pocket.

“Gus,” Mom said. “What are you thinking?”

“Sorry.” I pulled the phone out. She grabbed at it. I yanked it away.

“Off now,” she said, handing me the flashlight. “You go first on the downhill.”

She grabbed a fistful of the back of my jacket and followed me down to Dad’s garage. In the faraway distance I heard the sound of a police siren. Probably chasing a drunken driver, I thought. Whistler would probably hear about it on the scanner.

Mom gave me a sudden shove from behind. “Get going,” she said.

Inside the garage I flipped the switch to turn on the overhead light, but Mom reached around me-“No”-and snapped it off. She felt her way to the Bonneville’s trunk. She dug in her coat pocket and produced a set of three keys attached to a fob holding a photograph of our long-dead dogs, Blinky and Fats. The chain, which also held a key for the basement door and one for the boathouse, usually hung on a key-shaped wooden rack next to the back door at Mom’s house. She held the keys in front of her face and selected a red one and inserted it into the lock on the Bonnie’s trunk lid.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “It’s already unlocked.”

I stepped around to where she was standing. The trunk lid came open with a rusty groan. The smells of oil and hockey mildew wafted out. Normally a tiny light on the underside of the lid would have blinked on. But it remained dark.

“Ah,” I said. “That’s why the battery was dead. I didn’t close the lid tight.”

“Flashlight,” Mom said.

I pulled it out and pointed the beam into the trunk, as big as a bathtub. I pictured it stuffed with five hockey bags and half a dozen sticks and, hidden beneath the hockey gear, three or four stay-cold packs of Stroh’s for trips downstate in our last season with the Rats. On a wool blanket rolled up in the back of the trunk lay one of Soupy’s old hockey sticks, a Montreal Surprise.

Mom pulled the stick away, undid the blanket, tossed it aside. “Help me here,” she said, propping a knee on the Bonnie’s bumper so she could reach farther into the trunk.

“I can do it,” I said.

“Just help me get up here.”

I grasped Mom beneath her left arm and hoisted her onto the bumper. She ducked her head and leaned in. I heard the siren again, actually two sirens, closer than before. Stupid souse must be shitfaced enough to think he can get away, I thought.

Mom scraped something across the floor of the trunk. She rose up, careful to keep her head from banging the underside of the trunk lid. “There,” she said. In her right hand she held a gray metal lockbox with a slot for a key and a handle folded flat on the top. She turned her head toward the garage door, hearing the sirens.

“Get me down, please.”

I helped her out. She reached up and brought the trunk lid down. It bounced lightly on the latch and stayed open half an inch, as it must have been when Mom first tried to unlock it.

“Hold on,” I said, moving between Mom and the trunk.

“Hurry, son.”

I lifted the lid a foot, flattened my hands on it, and slammed it down. “You’ve got to really hammer it. Thing never worked right.”

Mom handed me the lockbox. “Take this and go,” she said.

It didn’t feel as if it had much in it. “What is this?”

Mom reached into the neck of her coat, down into her sweater, and came out with another key. This one, blue, looked newly copied.

“And this,” she said. “Now you have to-Wait.”

“What’s going on?”

“Listen,” she said. Her eyes darted toward the oval windows on the upper half of the garage door. “Take this somewhere safe. Do not let anyone know you have it.”

I looked at the box. “Why can’t I-”

She pressed the blue key into my palm. “The police are coming. Listen now.”

“They’re coming here? No, why?”

“I lost my boot. They found my boot.”

“Who? What boot?”

“The police.”

She went to the garage door and got up on her toes to look out through the ovals. I saw blue light flicker across her forehead.

“Holy shit, Mom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I thought it was over,” she said, coming back to me. “It’s not over. That person came for me and got Phyllis instead.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Why would-”

She slapped a palm down hard on the lockbox. “If you want to know about Nilus and about Nonny, you have to take this and get out of here now. Go.”

“Are they going to arrest you? Who’s Nonny?”

“I’ll be fine. You must go, Gus. Go now.”

She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around my chest and hugged me as hard as she’d hugged me in years. When she pulled her face away, I saw dampness on her cheeks. “You have work to do,” she said.

I could have stood there and opened the door for the police, asked them what the hell was going on. I had no idea why they were descending but, as crazy as it seemed, the fact that they were there made me think my mother was not, at this particular moment, out of her mind. Her eyes were clear. She was speaking in her regular staccato. This wasn’t the mother who left the teakettle whistling for hours, who forgot the directions to the IGA, who drifted into unknowable recesses of her memory. This was the mother who had brought me up, who had proudly recited my grade-point and goals-against averages to anyone who asked, who had always remembered to put a roll of white hockey tape in the left pocket of my Rats jacket, a black roll in the right, because I was superstitious that way.

I started to go out the side door we’d entered but through the window saw the beams of headlights bouncing on the tree trunks as the police cruisers struggled up the two-track to the garage. I shut that door and, with the lockbox cradled in my arm, pulled open the door to the short stairway up to Dad’s tree house.

I looked back at Mom, who was standing on her tiptoes again, her face aglow in the police lights. “God, Mother,” I said. I shut the door behind me and scrambled up the steps to another door that opened onto the outside landing. I twisted its knob and shoved but it did not budge against the snow piled against it on the other side. “Damn,” I said.

My heart was racing. Sweat trickling down from under my wool Red Wings cap stung my left eye. I blinked at the sweat and twisted the knob again and drove my left shoulder into the door, trying not to make too much noise. The door moved a little, maybe a quarter of an inch, so I shoved it again, then again, until finally it fetched up against something hard. Sometimes during a thaw, water would overflow from the eaves and form puddles that refroze into ridges of ice on the landing. The door was stuck on one now.

I looked back down the stairs. A thin line of white light shone across the bottom of the door. I listened. I heard the big steel garage door clanking its way up. “Christ,” I whispered. I had to squeeze through the six-inch gap I had opened.

The snow on the landing was at least a foot deep. I reached the box around the door and heard it land with a moist crunch. I did the same with my coat. Then I turned myself sideways and stuck my left leg and arm out between the door and the jamb. I grasped at the railing outside but it remained a few inches out of my reach.

I forced my torso into the crack. A splinter on the door’s edge stabbed into my back so I squeezed harder against the jamb. I heard voices in the garage. Dingus and Darlene. Holy God, I thought, how could Darlene arrest my mother?

I reached for the railing again and got it with my ring and middle fingers. I relaxed for a second, then held my breath, sucked in what gut I had, and pulled as hard as I could. As I sprang free onto the landing, my flannel shirt caught on the strike plate. The shirt ripped and I heard something bounce into the dark stairwell.

Outside now, I held my breath again, listening.

I shut the door, threw my coat on, picked up the box. Now what? Dad had refused to build an outer stairway. He had said he didn’t want neighbor kids or drunken teenagers or other strangers using his tree house when he wasn’t around. Really he didn’t want anyone using it, except him and the buddies he chose and, once in a while, me. I had to jump the eight or nine feet to the ground.

I slogged through the snow to the railing. The police lights now rippled color across the snow alongside the garage, but the landing remained in darkness. I took out the flashlight and, shielding it with one hand, snapped it on and aimed it at the ground, hoping to see a giant snowdrift I could jump into. There wasn’t one.

I turned the flashlight off and tossed the box down. As long as I roll, I thought, it can’t hurt much worse than a slap shot to the balls. I jumped. I landed next to the box, rolling, chunks of snow scratching into my neck and down my shirt. I grabbed the box and scuttled up the hill, trying to stay low, dodging trees, praying the cop lights wouldn’t find me.

I should have kept running when I crested the ridge. Instead I stopped and squatted with one arm around a birch and peered back down on Mom’s latest crime scene. Darlene and Dingus were standing with their arms folded in the shadows at the edge of one cruiser’s headlights and Skip Catledge was helping Mom into the back of another car, the lights churning all their faces blue and red. It didn’t appear that they had cuffed her, for which I was grateful. She stopped before ducking into the car and nodded at Catledge as if to say thank you. Skipper, polite as ever, nodded back.

The door slamming on Mom made me think of the Bonneville’s trunk lid. You had to bang it down hard. Mom wouldn’t have known that, because she didn’t drive the Bonnie. Dad had driven it, and I had, though not for a couple of years. At some point, she had gone to the garage and put the lockbox I now carried under my arm in the Bonnie’s trunk. Hidden it there, actually, where she thought nobody would find it.

But when? And why? And what did she mean, she had lost a boot? And “Nonny”? Where had I heard that before?

I followed a different path out of the woods than the one we had come up earlier, avoiding my pickup, which I figured the police would find and tow. Still in the trees, about fifty feet up from Horvath Road, I pulled out my cell phone and called Soupy.