The Skeleton Box

SIXTEEN

What the fuck, Trap?”

Soupy had pulled his pickup over to the roadside near the public access boat ramp on the southwestern end of the lake. I came out of the trees where I’d been waiting in a snowdrift up to my thighs.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking the snow off my legs. Soupy hadn’t been happy about my call for help, but I rarely asked anything more of him than a Blue Ribbon, so he came. I hoped he hadn’t said anything to his customers at Enright’s about why he was leaving.

“I had to stick Angie behind the bar,” he said, and I caught a whiff of mint laced with liquor. “By the time I get back, I could be wiped out. So where’s your truck? What do you got there, a box of cash or something? Treasure in the woods?”

The lockbox was a little too big to hide in my coat, so I had set it on my lap, as if I carried a box like that around with me all the time. “The truck got towed,” I said. “The box is Mom’s. I don’t know what’s in it.”

Soupy chuckled. “Old Mom Carpenter could probably could keep all her skeletons in a box that small, eh?”

We happened to be passing Mom’s house. I glanced across the road into the trees sheltering Dad’s garage. I didn’t see any cop lights. “Mom’s going to jail,” I said.

“Get out.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not going with her?”

“No. I assume they’d arrest me, too.”

“Holy fuck. First Tatch, now Mom C? Who’s next, Mother Teresa? What did they arrest her for? They don’t think-”

“No idea. They just took her in, up at Dad’s garage.”

“What was she doing up there? That where you got that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Soup,” I said, “you can’t go back to the bar and start running your mouth.”

“Trap, come on, I love your mother. She’s the last person I’d want to hurt.”

Soupy really did love my mother, really did care about what she thought about him, even if his actions suggested he never heard a word of what she said about his drinking and slut chasing. It reminded me of Mom telling me she was worried about Soupy selling his parents’ place. He had to be “careful,” she had said.

“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Is that the law firm you’re dealing with on your parents’ house?”

“Hold on,” Soupy said. “You’re hiding in the trees like a prison escapee and I’m the one getting questioned? What’s in the box?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, Soup?”

He slowed the truck where the shore road curved into Main at the western end of town. A streetlight illuminated a gnarl of scar on Soupy’s cheekbone where a puck had struck him when we were kids. I remembered the blood spurting between his fingers as he clutched at his cheek and how he made himself laugh while our old coach tried to butterfly the gash closed with hockey tape before he took Soupy to the clinic.

“Eagan whatever sounds right,” he said. “What do you care? Or that Whistler guy?”

“What about Whistler?”

“He’s been asking me about the house, too.”

Damn, he’s good, I thought.

“Who’s the law firm representing?” I said. “They’re sure as hell not buying it for themselves.”

“They didn’t tell old Soupy. Probably some rich guy who’s going to tear the place down and throw up a mansion. Who cares? I need the cash. You going to open that?”

Knowing nothing of the lockbox’s contents, I had no desire to open it in front of Soupy.

“I don’t have a key,” I lied.

“I got a crowbar in the flatbed.”

“Mom told me to take it and go. You have to give me your truck.”

Soupy jammed the accelerator down to blast through the yellow light at Estelle. “Give you my-oh, shit, a cop.”

The sheriff’s cruiser was parked on Main two blocks down. It waited across from my rental house, where, to my surprise, my truck sat in the side drive.

“Soup,” I said. “Turn. Now.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“I thought-”

“Now.”

Soupy swung his truck right onto Garfield, drove a block, and turned right again onto South, rolling toward the parking lot behind the Pilot. I didn’t see a sheriff’s cruiser there, but I couldn’t risk going to the newsroom either.

“Here?” Soupy said.

“Keep going.”

He continued past the Pilot and turned left on Elm, then went another block to Ambling and turned right toward the lake. Then he pulled over again and parked.

“Trap,” he said, “you look like you’re going to have a baby. The cops want that box, don’t they?”

I had to speak to him in a language he would understand. “Soup, you know how they say every hockey game has like three hundred mistakes?”

“Never heard that,” Soupy said.

“I read it in Hockey News, and I thought, I bet you two hundred of them happen when you’re tired. You know, the other team’s in your end, and you’re running around and you can’t get off the ice, and you’re sucking wind, that’s when you screw up, make a bad pass, take a bad penalty.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

I grabbed the door handle. “Are you going to help me?”

He turned sideways in his seat. “Just square with me. Is Mom C in real trouble?”

“She’s in jail,” I said. “But there’s something else. I mean, she has her memory issues, but she’s either gone crazier than a shithouse rat or there’s something else going on.”

Soupy pointed at the box. “And you think it might be in there?”

“Maybe.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. He sighed. Soupy didn’t sigh much. “What the hell. Take it.” He opened his door and stepped into the street. “You’re going to have to fill it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I always do: wing it. If I need a truck for something, I can borrow one from one of the five hundred people who owe me money.”

“Soup-”

“No, man, I mean it, just go.” He nodded in the direction of where the cop was parked. “The hell with those idiots. They arrest my buddy, my best buddy’s mom. Fuck them.”

I slid behind the steering wheel. Soupy extended his hand. I shook it.

“Take the back roads,” he said. “I don’t want to have to hock the thing back from the cops. Let me know what happens with Mom C.”

“Will do.”

He slammed the door shut. I gave him a salute. He grinned and gave me the finger.

I didn’t pick up my cell phone until Grayling.

Mom’s lockbox sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat. It wouldn’t fit beneath. It made me nervous sitting there, where a cop could see it if one pulled me over.

Half a mile before merging onto Interstate 75 south, I pulled into a gas station. I leaned into Soupy’s narrow rear seat and scooped up the garbage piled on the floor: crumpled Doritos and Burger King bags, empty dip cans, plastic pop bottles streaked with spat dip, a pizza box holding two old slices of pizza and a torn-open condom package, emptied bottles of Beam and El Toro, wads of hockey tape from nights when Soupy was in such a hurry to get to Enright’s that he undressed in the truck.

I dumped it all on top of the lockbox. Then I got out and stood by the truck watching for cops while the gas tank gurgled full. Dingus couldn’t arrest me in Crawford County, but he’d had me followed in the past. Inside the station, I bought three bottles of Vernors, a big bag of chips, and some onion dip.

Back in the truck, I started to punch a Detroit Times number into my cell phone, then decided to check my messages first. There were two. Coach Poppy had left the first when Mom and I were about to descend the hill to Dad’s tree house.

“Hey, Gus, got a weird call,” Poppy said. “Some woman left a message, said Tex is done playing hockey. Putting away foolish things, she said. Didn’t leave a name, but I gather she’s from Tatch’s camp. I’d heard some talk about this but was hoping it was bull. Without Tex, I’m not liking our chances against the Pipefitters. Give me a shout.”

I knew I had more important things to worry about, but the old River Rat in me couldn’t help thinking: Damn, the Rats are so close, if they just had Tex, they could actually bring a state title, a little glory, a bit of relief to Starvation.

The second message was from Darlene. My heart skipped a beat when I heard her voice say, “Gussy.” She hadn’t called me that in a long time.

“I waited outside your house for an hour,” she said. Oh, shit, I thought; that was her in the cop car across the street, not someone who’d come to arrest me. She must have made sure my truck

made it home, too. “Bea is safe… I hope you’re safe… Be careful, OK?”

It felt good to hear that. I saved the message and turned the phone off, wishing I had the charger, which was plugged into a wall socket at the Pilot.

Traffic was light, the weather clear. I stayed in the right lane and kept my speed around seventy-four, a bit over the limit but not so fast as to rouse a state trooper. I almost pulled into the rest stop at Nine Mile Hill, but a state trooper darted into the exit lane ahead of me and I stayed on I-75. Twenty-five miles later, I veered into the rest area at West Branch. Two sedans and a minivan were parked near the restrooms. A pudgy man in a Catholic Central High School fleece was dragging a little girl toward the restrooms. She was throwing a flop-around tantrum and the man was barking something at her that, thankfully, I could not hear. I rolled past them and pulled into a spot about five places down from their minivan.

I left the dome light off. I took a quick look around, checked all the mirrors. The man and the squalling girl disappeared into the glowing restroom hut. The lot sat still and quiet beneath the high street lamps. No cops. Nobody behind me.

I bent to the passenger seat floor, pushed the trash aside, and picked up the lockbox. I set it on my lap and pulled the blue key out of my pocket. I glanced around again before sliding the key into the lock. At first it jammed when I tried to turn it. I jiggled it gently, not wanting to break it off. Who knew when my mother had last opened the thing?

Finally it gave. The lid opened soundlessly. Taped to the bottom of the box was a manila envelope. Scratched on the front in black ballpoint pen, in my mother’s cursive hand, was one word: “Nilus.”

I felt goose bumps break out along my forearms.

I peeled away the tape securing the envelope inside the box and lifted the envelope out. I ran a palm across the top surface. It was smooth and flat except for a cluster of bumps beneath the paper in one corner. I shook it. The bumps seemed to rattle. I turned the envelope up and the bumps slid down to the other end.

Fresh tape sealed one end of the envelope, as if Mom had recently opened and then resealed it. As I stripped away the new stuff, I saw the speckled gray outlines of past sealings, felt the cracked, yellowed remnants of tape that looked to be years old. I peeked into the open end. It was too dark to see inside. I dipped a hand in. My fingertips brushed over the rough edge of a piece of paper, then across a thinner, softer paper, like old newsprint. I reached into the corner where the bumps had slid. I cupped them in my palm-a necklace? — and pulled my hand out.

Curled in my palm was a rosary.

I took it in two fingers and let it unwind before my face. A crucifix of bronze or something cheaper dangled at the end of a thin metal chain strung with smooth brown wooden beads. As the rosary twirled in the shadows of Soupy’s truck, I noticed a gold tag attached to the chain at the end opposite the crucifix. I pinched the tag and brought it close to my face. Something was engraved on it that I couldn’t make out in the dark. I reached overhead and switched on the dome light.

I squinted to read the engraving on the face of the little tag, bracing myself for the possibility that it might read “Nilus.” It did not. The engraving bore only three letters: BCD. For Beatrice Clare Damico, I assumed. My mother’s maiden name.

“Man,” I said to myself. I turned off the dome light.

I tried to recall Mom saying the rosary. I could imagine a woman kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Mother at St. Valentine’s, her head bowed and her eyes shut, her lips forming shapes of the words in the Hail Mary, a rosary laced in her fingers. But I couldn’t tell if it was actually Mom before she walked away from the church, or an image I had conjured from a book or a movie or my own scant memories of services. I held my hand up, let the rosary slide down between my fingers, closed my hand into a gentle fist. Why had my mother saved it? Why had she felt the need to lock it away?

I dropped the rosary back into the envelope. I reached in and pulled out one of the pieces of paper. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the glass door on the restroom building flash in the light. The father and his daughter were coming out. He was carrying her now, and she was eating a candy bar. The door of the minivan opened and a woman stepped into the light, smiling. The father set the girl down and she ran to her mother, who gathered the child into her arms.

The piece of paper was a rectangle. One of the two long edges looked as if it had been folded and then carefully torn along the fold. I decided I was holding one third of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch page. I turned it sideways so a short edge was on top. At the top of the rectangle were a faded stylized capital “S” and part of a small “a” along the torn edge. Below those were color pictures, cut in half by the ripped edge, of what looked like ice-cream confections, maybe a sundae and a soda.

Sanders, I thought. The classic Detroit ice-cream and candy palace. I had tried to take Mom there on one of her rare visits when I worked at the Times. But she had demurred, calling the place a tourist trap. It was funny to hear that from someone who lived in a town desperate to be a tourist trap. We got ice-cream cones at a Baskin-Robbins instead.

But now in my hands was what looked like a placemat from a Sanders restaurant, maybe the very one I had tried to take Mom to. The mat had to be old, maybe as old as me, because I could see parts of the prices of the items, and each carried a cents rather than a dollar sign.

I flipped the paper over.

On the back was some sort of drawing-or, again, part of a drawing, because I had in my hands only about a third of a page. I switched the dome light back on and leaned into it. As I looked more closely, the drawing appeared to be a map of some sort, drawn in ballpoint ink. It looked as though someone might have carefully traced over the lines and letters on the drawing, perhaps because the earlier version was fading.

In the upper left corner of the page was an arrow pointing up and marked alongside with a capital “N.” For north, I assumed. A smaller arrow beneath it pointed down and off the left side of the page, and beneath the arrow was the word “LAKE,” written in my mother’s hand.

A car pulled in two spaces to my right. I lowered the paper to my lap and waited while a stooped old man emerged from the Chrysler and made his way slowly toward the restrooms. He wore an orange hunting cap with a picture of a deer over the bill. He peered at me as he passed. For a second I thought he might stop, and I started to slip the paper back into the envelope, but he just smiled and nodded, and I gave him a polite smile and pointed at the restrooms as if I were waiting for my wife. He kept walking.

I looked back at the map. Beneath the arrows, a curving line traced the upper portion of an irregular oval from the bottom left of the page up and around to the bottom right. Within the oval my mother had scratched three X’s and some squiggly vertical lines. Perhaps, I thought, the squiggles signified a hill or a rise. The X’s were clustered around those lines, each marked with the name of a tree: “BIG OAK STUMP,” “BURNED OAK,” and “TWO-TRUNK BIRCH.”

The burned oak stood at the apex of a triangle with the other oak and the birch marking the ends of its legs. A scalene triangle, I thought, remembering my mother saying it to me over my ninth-grade geometry textbook at the dining room table. She was better at math than she was at spelling. The scalene was outlined by dotted lines. A fourth dotted line bisected it from the burned oak down and off the page’s ragged bottom edge. To where, or to what, I had no idea.

A treasure map? I thought. It made me recall what I had said to Tatch when I’d visited his camp and seen all the people toiling on the hill: Digging for gold? Now I asked myself: Could this crude map my mother had drawn years or even decades ago show Breck and his blindly faithful diggers how to find whatever it was they were tearing up the earth for? If so, it would have to have something to do with Nilus, wouldn’t it, or why else would Mom have put it in an envelope labeled as it was?

I slipped the page back into the envelope and pulled out the other paper. It was, as I’d thought, newsprint, a yellowed, one-column clip that had been scissored out of a newspaper, then folded over once. I’d seen it on the microfilm machine at the clerk’s office: “Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail.” I quickly reread it, noting again the connection between the accused, Joseph Wayland, and his grandson, Breck.

I felt someone looking at me and lifted my eyes to see the orange hunting cap floating in the dark before my truck. The old man grinned and looked back at the restrooms with a shrug, as if to say, “What do women do in there anyway?” I smiled again, nervously I thought, and kept a sidelong gaze on him until his Chrysler pulled away.

Mom obviously didn’t want the police to know about what I held in my hands, or else she wouldn’t have rushed me out the back of Dad’s garage. I imagined her now, sitting in a jail cell, reading a book or a magazine. I pictured Darlene stopping by to see her. I felt relieved. I wondered if the police would release Mom before I returned to Starvation, and hoped they would not.

I put everything back in the envelope, dropped it into the lockbox, locked it, and stuffed it under the rubbish on the floor. The fluorescent glow of the restroom lobby grew dim in my rearview mirrors as I pulled back onto I-75.