The Skeleton Box

TWO

We ignored the first knock. The punk who drove the Zamboni had been barging in and yelling at us about leaving empties in the dressing room. So we started locking the door.

“Soupy?” I said. “Cold one?”

I reached into a plastic bucket filled with ice and fished out a Blue Ribbon. My squad, the Chowder Heads of the Midnight Hour Men’s League, had just beaten the Ice Picks of Repicky Realty, 7–0.

“Pope shit in the woods?” Soupy said. I tossed him the beer. He slumped on a bench between Wilf and Zilchy, his hair a sweaty blond tangle, his hockey socks bunched around his ankles. The room smelled of mildew and tobacco dip. I grabbed myself a beer, the ice stinging my knuckles, and dropped my goalie mask into my hockey bag.

Soupy hoisted his can toward me. “You stoned them tonight, Gus. When’s the last time you had a shutout?”

I shrugged. “I think I was still living downstate.”

I had left our little northern Michigan town, Starvation Lake, in the 1980s and worked at a big Detroit newspaper. I came home after getting in some trouble on the job. I could have gone a lot of places-Battle Creek, Toledo, Daytona Beach. But I returned to Starvation.

I’d been back only two and a half years, and at times it felt as if I’d never left. Which was frightening, if I let myself think about it. At other times I felt as if I’d wanted to come back all along, as if I had some unfinished business, some question I had to answer about myself. Meantime, I played goaltender at night and spent my days as executive editor of the Pine County Pilot, circulation 3,876 and falling.

“Speaking of goalies, where was Tatch?” Wilf said.

Tatch was the Ice Picks goalie. He’d been a no-show that night.

“Goalies,” Soupy said. He took a pull on his beer, the liquid clicking inside the can, then thrust it up over his head. “The hell with them. How about them Rats?”

Most of us had played for the River Rats, the local youth team, as teenagers. We’d lost the 1981 state final on a goal I should have stopped.

“State finals, baby,” Wilf said, “right here in beautiful Starvation Lake.”

There was another, harder knock at the door. Then a voice.

“Police. Open up.”

“Hell, it’s just Skipper,” Soupy said. “Game tomorrow’s at seven. Pregame at my bar. The Enright’s Pub shuttle will leave for the rink at six-thirty sharp. Adult beverages will be provided.” He looked at me. “You coming?”

“Yeah, right.” As a Rats assistant coach, I didn’t drink much before games.

“Pussy.”

The door swung open and Pine County sheriff’s deputy Skip Catledge stepped into the room. I saw the Zamboni punk slink away with a ring of keys. The deputy pointed at me. “Get dressed.”

“He wasn’t drinking, Skip, honest.”

“Shut up, Soup. Let’s go, Gus. We have a situation.”

I thought of my mother. She was watching TV in her pajamas when I left for the game. Our next-door neighbor, Phyllis Bontrager, had come to sit with her.

“A situation where?”

“I’ll be outside,” the deputy said. “In two minutes, I’ll come in and haul your butt out.”

Cop flashers blinked in the distance as Catledge steered his sheriff’s cruiser off Main Street and onto the beach road along the lake’s southern shore. The lake itself was invisible in the blackness beyond the naked trees. Twin bands of packed snow ran down the asphalt lanes between the steep banks on both shoulders.

The deputy, his hat perched on the dashboard, had spoken barely a word since we’d left the rink. He had had me sit in the front next to him. Not a good sign.

“Are those flashers where I think they are?” I said.

“We’ll be there in a minute.”

Half a mile ahead, the flashing lights obscured my mother’s little yellow house. I imagined what might have happened. A greasy pan Mom had left burning on the stove. A fireplace flue she had neglected to open. A door she had forgotten to lock. Dammit, Mother, I thought, then immediately felt bad about it. We’d never had to lock our doors in Starvation Lake. Then the break-ins had begun.

“Why no siren?” I said.

“No need to wake up the whole town.”

“Skip, if it’s-”

“Gus, I don’t know, OK? Sheriff told me not to call him and he hasn’t called me. He’s probably keeping it quiet so every old lady with a scanner doesn’t show up to watch.”

“Watch what?”

He stepped harder on the gas. The trees and houses flew past, cozy log cabins and plank board cottages built in the 1940s and 1950s, and makeover mansions of red brick and cut rock and cantilevered decks built in the 1990s. We were heading to Mom’s house, all right. There were no flames that I could see. I told myself Mom was all right.

Catledge grabbed his hat and set it on his head. We slowed. A hundred yards ahead, another deputy emerged from the shadows along the road shoulder, a flashlight beam bouncing in front of him. Catledge blinked his headlights. The beam waved us through.

Some of Mom’s neighbors stood along the road, pajamas and bathrobes sticking out from under winter coats. As we passed, one spied me and shook her head and brought her hands up into a clasp at her face.

“Christ,” I said. “What the hell’s going on?”

Static crackled on Catledge’s shoulder mike. I heard the Finnish lilt of the sheriff’s voice. “Deputy,” it said. “Did you collect Mr. Carpenter?”

Mom’s house sat on a snow-covered bluff overlooking the lake. Now it was surrounded by five police cars, two ambulances, and a fire truck. The swirling blue and red lights striped the aluminum siding and roof shingles. Why two ambulances? I thought.

We stopped at the end of Mom’s driveway. One ambulance was parked there. The other waited in the snow in Mom’s front yard, one of its twin rear doors swung open. I saw sheriff’s deputies moving around in the light blazing inside the house.

As I climbed out of the cruiser, I heard a woman’s sob, sharp and halting, as if she were trying not to cry. I knew that sound. I looked in the direction of the ambulance in Mom’s yard.

“Darlene,” I said, then louder. “Darlene.”

A door slammed. The ambulance eased out of the yard onto the road. I turned to Catledge. “Where’s Darlene?”

Darlene Esper was another Pine County sheriff’s deputy. She was also my ex-girlfriend and the daughter of Phyllis Bontrager-Mrs. B to me-the next-door neighbor who had been with my mother that night.

“I don’t know,” Catledge said. He took my elbow and nudged me toward the house. “The sheriff’s waiting.”

“I heard her in that ambulance,” I said. “They must have-shit. Is Mrs. B in that ambulance?”

Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho stepped into the muddy snow outside the sliding glass doors to Mom’s dining room, a walkie-talkie squeezed in one pork-chop hand. He was a big man who looked bigger silhouetted against the backlit wall.

“I can’t go in?” I said.

Dingus shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a crime scene.”

“It’s my family.”

“I’m sorry.”

I had glanced into the kitchen as I passed, noticed a glass casserole soaking on the counter next to the sink. Yellow police tape was strung everywhere. The dining room, except for a cop flashlight resting on the table, looked to be in order. Beyond there, officers wearing latex gloves shuffled in and out of the bathroom next to Mom’s bedroom.

“Where’s my mother? Is she in one of those amb-”

“No. She’s fine. Phyllis Bontrager is on her way to Munson.”

Munson was the medical center in Traverse City, forty miles west. You didn’t go there for cuts and bruises.

“What happened?”

“There was a break-in.”

“I want to see my mom.”

He hooked his walkie-talkie on his belt. “Calm down.”

“What’s the big fucking secret, Dingus? It’s another Bingo Night Burglary, isn’t it?”

Dingus stepped toward me. The sweet aroma of Tiparillo floated off of his handlebar mustache. “Watch your language,” he said.

“You mean ‘bingo night’?”

My newspaper had made the connection between the break-ins and bingo night. That had not pleased the sheriff, who was up for re-election and didn’t appreciate headlines reminding voters that he had no clues, no suspects, no idea why someone was breaking into homes, rifling through personal papers, and then leaving empty-handed. “Bingo Night Burglaries” was catchy and I’d heard people saying it at the rink and Audrey’s Diner and Fortune Drug and imagined that it might help circulation.

“We’re not sure what happened here,” the sheriff said. “As I’ve said, bingo night is a coincidence. There’s bingo every night somewhere around here.”

Mother had been waiting when Darlene, the sheriff’s deputy, had arrived, heeding Mom’s 911 call, he told me. Darlene found her mother lying unconscious on the bathroom floor. Questioning my mother so far had proved fruitless.

“She’s a little confused,” Dingus said.

“You know Mom’s got memory issues.”

She was going on sixty-seven. Her memory had always been selective, but now she wasn’t always certain what she should be selecting. Sometimes she was all there, sometimes hardly at all. The illness played tricks on her, and Mom tried to play tricks back, often in vain.

“I understand.”

“Is Mrs. B going to be all right?”

The sheriff looked away, into the house. “Doc Joe’s on his way to Munson.”

Doc Joe Schriver was the county coroner.

Mrs. B had been stopping by at night to make sure Mom had turned off the stove, doused the fire, and done whatever else she needed to do before bed. Sometimes Mrs. B stayed for a while and sat in the rocking recliner to read while the fire died. I pictured her sitting there in her favorite winter sweater, the red one knitted with the shapes of reindeer heads.

I felt a pinprick of sleet on my cheek. “The guy attacked her?”

“We don’t know it’s a guy. We don’t-”

“Gus!”

The voice came from the road. Dingus and I both turned to see Luke Whistler, the Pilot reporter I’d hired four months before. He was standing with the bathrobes outside the police tape. Whistler had written most of the Bingo Night stories. The cops weren’t fans. I waved and called out, “Go to Munson.”

Whistler pointed his notebook at the deputies keeping him and the crowd back. “They won’t let me in,” he said.

“Just go,” I said.

I looked down the road and was relieved not to see the Channel Eight TV van. I turned back to Dingus. “Murder?” I said.

He couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “Maybe we can get you in to see your mom for a minute.”

In the other break-ins, the intruder or intruders had come when no one was home. Maybe they’d come tonight thinking Mom would be at bingo. She went most Sundays but hadn’t tonight. The only light likely to have been burning was the one on the end table by the chair where Mrs. B did her reading. I imagined Mom dozing in bed, maybe watching something on the tiny black-and-white tube that sat atop her dresser, Mrs. B in the living room, absorbed in Maeve Binchy.

“That would be good,” I said.

“Just do me a favor. Try not to jump to any conclusions.”