The Skeleton Box

TWENTY-ONE

A blue Volvo station wagon was parked behind the Pilot when I pulled in. I didn’t recognize it. You didn’t see a lot of Volvos in Starvation Lake, or northern Michigan, for that matter. If you did, you’d be in Harbor Springs or Petoskey or Charlevoix.

A man was sitting at the desk mounded with old newspapers where the Pilot ’s photographer had sat before Media North decided we didn’t need a full-time shooter. He stood and offered his hand, and the first thing I noticed was that he was even shorter than me.

“Gus Carpenter?” he said. “Bennett Fuqua.”

I shook his hand, thinking, The Media North bean counter, Fuckwad. Instinctively, I glanced over at the police scanner perched on a shelf behind Whistler’s desk. Whistler had left the damn thing on again. I wondered if Fuqua had noticed.

“What brings you all the way over here?” I said. “Did the board authorize the mileage?”

He smiled uneasily. “Ah, ha, well, I was coming over anyway. United Way meeting in town, and I’m on the board. See, I specialize in nonprofits.”

At first I didn’t get that he meant the Pilot. “Funny,” I said. As nonchalantly as I could, I walked over and turned the scanner off.

“Don’t you need that?” Fuqua said.

“The cops’ll call if there’s anything important.”

Fuqua considered that, then said, “How is your mother?”

“She’s fine, thank you.”

“Philo tells me you were quite close to the woman who died. My condolences.”

“Thanks.” I threw my coat on a stack of press releases atop a rusted Royal typewriter I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away. “Excuse me a second.” I plugged my cell phone into an outlet next to my desk. On my blotter I set a bottle of A amp;W and a brown bag holding a turkey-and-cheddar I’d picked up at the Twin Lakes Party Store. I sat and dumped the sandwich out, wishing I’d asked for an extra dill pickle.

Fuqua sat back down. A puddle of snowmelt glistened around his rubber-toed boots. In his creased black corduroy slacks and white turtleneck sweater, he could have posed for an L.L. Bean catalog. “I’m actually hoping to come back for the big game,” he said.

“You’re a hockey fan?” I said.

“Newly so.” I was a little surprised at how young he seemed. I had pictured him as a bald man in his sixties with a bullfrog neck. But he couldn’t have been much older than me, if at all. “My daughter started playing, and I got hooked.”

“That’s how it is.”

“Growing up in Ohio, we didn’t have much hockey around. But what a fast game. Pretty expensive, too. Of course my daughter had to play the most expensive position.”

“She’s a goalie?”

“That’s right. I think I heard that you’re a goalie, too, right? Someone said you played on the last great team around here. That must have been something.”

I decided I wasn’t going to let this guy soften me up. I’d imagined that Fuckwad was the kind of penny-pinching eyeshade who would piss on his grandmother’s grave for a nickel, and I wasn’t going to change my view because he helped the United Way and liked hockey. “It was something, all right,” I said. “Mind if I eat?”

Fuqua knitted his fingers together in his corduroy lap. “You know how much we-actually, I-admire you and what you do.”

“That and ten bucks will get me a fresh package of legal pads.”

I took a big bite of my sandwich. Not bad. I wished Fuqua would wait outside until I finished. But he went on doing what he’d really come to do.

“As I think Philo told you, the Media North board of directors met yesterday. They deliberated for quite some time about the futures of a variety of our properties. They had to make some difficult decisions.”

I went on chewing, looked up at the wall clock. D’Alessio’s dog-and-pony show at Tatch’s camp was supposedly going to start in a little more than an hour. “Hold that thought,” I said.

“Gus, this is important.”

I ignored him, took another bite, dialed my desk phone.

“Yo, Enright’s,” Soupy said. I heard the Guess Who in the background.

I swung my chair away from Fuqua. “Hey,” I said.

“You got my truck?” Soupy said.

“Yeah. I’ll pick you up in twenty.”

“I’m working, man. Just leave it out front.”

“Take a lunch.”

“Trap, I’m up to my ass. Why?”

“It’s a surprise. Bring some Blue Ribbons.”

I didn’t want a beer but figured it would hook Soupy.

“Oh, OK,” he said. “I can’t go long, but a six-that shouldn’t take long, eh? But I’ll have to kick Angie out. She drained half a bottle of Crow when I left her here yesterday.”

“See you in a bit.”

I hung up and turned back to Fuqua. “Sorry.”

He was sitting straighter, his hands now flat on the chair arms. “The board had to make a particularly difficult decision regarding the Pine County Pilot. ”

OK, I thought. Whistler and I would have to wear gloves and hats in the office to stay warm. Copies would now be fifty cents a page, out of our pockets. At least that’s what I hoped. Nothing worse.

“Let’er rip,” I said.

Fuqua told me as if he was telling me I had some mayo on my cheek.

“The last issue of the Pilot will be published this Friday,” he said.

“Saturday.”

“No. We’re moving it up a day.”

“Now? With all the stuff going on around here?”

“There’s no good time to do this,” Fuqua said.

An image of Darlene kneeling over her dead mother flashed in my brain. “There are some better than others,” I said. “What about the hockey? What if the Rats win and go to the final? What if they win?”

When my Rats team had played in the state final against the Pipefitters in 1981, windows on every house and store and office in town were plastered with Rats team photos that had been printed across two full pages in the Pilot. I was front and center, sitting next to Tatch, our billowy leg pads touching. Even after we lost, people kept those pictures up for months until the tape dried out and peeled away. Then they folded them up and put them in the drawer where they’d saved front pages of the Tigers’ 1968 World Series win and the day Kennedy got shot.

“There was some discussion of publishing into next week,” Fuqua said. “Unfortunately, it’s a business thing. Our printing contract expired at the end of February. They gave us a grace period, which is up Friday. If we go beyond that, we have to renew for six months.”

“So the hell with Starvation, eh?”

Fuqua shifted in his chair. “After some discussion,” he said, “the board calculated that the River Rats were unlikely to beat the Pied Pipers anyway.”

“It’s the Pipefitters. And what the hell do you and the board know about hockey?”

Fuqua pursed his lips. I swiveled away, afraid I’d say something even worse, and punched a key on my computer. I had an e-mail from Joanie. I called it up: great seeing you. call me about whistler

— j

I turned back to Fuqua. “Tell me,” I said. “This difficult decision didn’t have anything to do with a certain consultant charge, did it? Please tell me four hundred and fifty piss-ass little dollars didn’t doom a paper that’s been here since they named the place Starvation.”

“Every factor was considered,” Fuqua said. “Although I will say one or two board members expressed some concern that the charge you mentioned looked like it might be checkbook journalism.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me.”

“I realize you’re upset,” he said. “Which is why I let the language go the first time. Now I’d appreciate a more professional demeanor.”

“My reporter used a consultant to help him get some information. It probably wasn’t penny smart, but he wasn’t whoring us out either. He even offered to pay himself.”

“It wouldn’t change our contractual situation.”

“I see,” I said. “Then I guess we’ll just do our best online. If the Rats win it all, people can still print out the page and put it up. As for the other stuff, I guess maybe you’re right.”

“No, Gus.”

“You just said-”

“No. No online. No anything. The Pilot is shutting down. It’s over. We’re closing the paper as of Friday.”

My stomach turned over. Icy needles of sweat pricked the back of my shoulders. “Hold on,” I said. “This can’t-Philo told me nobody wants to close the paper. He said the board was considering how to rationalize print and online.”

“That’s what the board did,” Fuqua said. He stood. “Philo said you yourself thought it would be a mistake to go online only. Something about antilock brakes.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It doesn’t matter. The money’s not there.”

I looked around the room and felt a sudden fondness for the clunky metal desks, the claptrap copier, the bubbling linoleum, the yellowing Pine County map peeling back from the wall, even the buzzing lamps. Fuck the board, I thought. Fuck every one of those fat-asses and the five thousand bucks they got for attending a two-hour meeting where they put a gun to the head of the only newspaper in Pine County. Fuck them and their fat-assed fucking wives and children. I hoped their fucking dogs died.

But I didn’t say it. Instead I sat there feeling a little like I’d felt all those years ago when I let in the goal that gave the Pipefitters the state championship. Now the Pilot would die on my watch as executive editor. I would be left to wonder again, as I had for years after that goal, whether I could have done something differently to make things right.

Fuqua explained that the board had deemed that the Pilot ’s closing would be announced in its final edition, and nothing would be said about it before. I nodded without agreeing. He said a human resources person would call to go over our “separation options.” By then I was too stunned to speak. I sat silent until Fuqua finished and asked me if I was all right. “I guess I’ll have to be,” I said, and he asked me if I would speak with Luke Whistler and I said I would. Then he told me he was sorry, he had to get to his United Way meeting, and I heard the back door close as he went out to his Volvo. I was facing my final deadline.

I dropped the rest of the sandwich in the trash. I threw my coat on and hurried out to Soupy’s truck and pulled it onto South Street and took two lefts to Main and pulled up in front of Enright’s, honking.

I forgot about calling Joanie.

“Jesus, Trap, it reeks in here,” Soupy said. “What the hell did we come here for?”

“Sentimental,” I said. “Want to get a last look before you sell it.”

I hadn’t been in Soupy’s mother’s house since an Easter dinner she had hosted when I was still living in Detroit. She made a leg of lamb with buttermilk mashed potatoes. That was the good part. The rest was Soupy’s dad getting plastered and lighting into Mrs. Campbell for spending too much on the dinner. His marina wasn’t doing well but, like his son, Angus Campbell was not a man inclined to find fault with himself. Soupy, his belly full of Blue Ribbons, had stepped in and soon the two of them were outside, threatening to kill each other while Mrs. Campbell and my mother yelled at them to grow up. Soupy threw one punch. Angus collapsed, unconscious, facedown in one of his own grimy boot prints in the snow. By the time we had carried him back inside, Mrs. Campbell and Mom had taken my mother’s car and gone. The first thing Angus Campbell said when he woke up was, “Goddamn broads.”

Now Soupy and I stood in the little dining room where we had sat down to that meal. The table had vanished beneath mounds of moldy magazines and decaying Pilots, kitchen appliances, a rusting empty birdcage, an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner in a duct-taped cardboard box. The floors were covered. There were boxes and brown-paper bags and milk crates and plastic bags, all filled to the top with lamps and books and vases and coffee mugs. There were rolls and rolls of wrapping paper, mud-caked flowerpots filled with spoons and forks, a soiled cat-litter box, at least a dozen half-eaten apples, shriveled and brown. I nudged a box with the toe of a boot and heard glass clink against glass.

“What a mess,” I said.

“Told you,” Soupy said. He plucked a can of beer off the six-pack he was carrying and handed it to me. “No wonder it hasn’t sold-yet.” I didn’t bother to suggest that Soupy clean the place up before showing it; the archdiocese probably wouldn’t care. I put the beer to my mouth and drew in the smell to mask the pervasive odor of cat litter mixed with sodden paper.

Soupy’s parents had separated in their final years. Mrs. Campbell stayed in the house in the woods, and Mr. Campbell usually slept on a cot at the marina when he wasn’t ushering a woman into a room at the Hill-Top Motel. One night, Angus had come to the house, lit, looking for a mounted set of deer antlers to settle a bar bet. Mrs. Campbell took the antlers and locked herself in a bathroom. The police had to be called. Mrs. Campbell had the locks changed. She accelerated her hoarding of things. Every single thing, apparently. The antlers were now propped atop a stained lampshade.

Scattered amid the junk heaped on the dining room table were piles of photographs, dozens of them in color and black and white, framed and not. I picked up one of Angus standing at the end of a dock dangling a stringer of bluegills. I tossed it aside. I grabbed a handful of Polaroids leaning against the birdcage and fanned through them: Soupy and me in our Rats uniforms; a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on my mother’s dining table; Soupy’s old basset hound, Stanley, draped uncomfortably in a Red Wings jersey.

I showed the picture of Stanley to Soupy.

“That was one crazy-ass dog,” Soupy said.

“Umbrellas, right?”

“Drove him mad. And motorcycles. He’d be quiet as a mouse, then he’d see somebody with an umbrella and go apeshit barking. Same with guys on motorcycles. Thank God he never saw a guy on a motorcycle with an umbrella.”

I picked up more photos. There was my mother and Mrs. Campbell beaming in bathing suits and Ray-Bans on my grandfather’s Chris-Craft. Mrs. Campbell cradling Soupy, a baby, in front of a Christmas tree. Another of Mrs. B and Mrs. Campbell curtsying together in bridesmaids’ dresses, possibly at Mom’s wedding. Seven little girls arm in arm wearing identical plaid jumpers over white blouses. It looked like the spelling-bee photo I had seen in the microfilm at the clerk’s office, but without Sister Cordelia or the young Judge Gallagher.

I set those down and picked up a stack held together by paper clips. They looked more recent than the others. There were no people in them, just trees full of leaves and the forest floor covered with pine needles and cones sloping down and away, the same scene taken from different angles, probably at dusk, judging by how the shadows fell along the ground. I looked at Soupy. “Has anyone actually come to look at the place?”

“Nope.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as a little unusual?”

“Not if they’re just going to rebuild anyway. They probably just want the land.”

“Are there mineral rights?”

“Yeah, but no minerals worth anything. Why do you give a shit?”

“What if I want to buy it?”

Soupy watched me over the top of his beer can as he took a long pull. He belched and said, “Right. Or maybe the kids who broke in want to buy it.”

“Somebody broke in here?”

“Didn’t you notice the door almost fell off when we came in? Fucking kids about tore it off the hinges.”

“When was this? Did you call the cops?”

“Couple of weeks ago. Came out here to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen and found the door all messed up and a bunch of boot prints.”

“What’d they take?”

“Look around, Trap. How the hell would I know?”

Soupy was a month older than me, but sometimes he felt like a little brother.

“You didn’t report it?”

“Report what? I didn’t want to be one of those Bingo Burglaries or whatever you call them. No need to have my name in the paper.”

I picked up the photo of the girls again. I counted seven. There had been five reported break-ins, six if you counted the one at Soupy’s parents’ place. Each had been at the grown-up home of one of the girls in the photo-except Phyllis nee Snyder Bontrager. While it was unlikely that a burglar would have seen this particular photo, he might have seen the one I’d seen, with Sister Cordelia, too, in a newspaper clipping.

I grabbed another stack of photos leaning against the birdcage. There were probably twenty-five in all. My mother was in every one. Some included Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. B, a few Audrey from the diner. I put the stack down and picked up a framed collage of three photos hinged together. The photos were of Mom; Mom with Mrs. Campbell; and Mom, Mrs. Campbell, and Mrs. B in Mom’s driveway, like the one I had seen at Mrs. B’s counter at the Pilot. I turned the frame sideways, turned it back the other way, turned it sideways again. The Three Stooges, I thought. And then I thought something else.

I took the triple-frame of photos in both hands and twisted one of the three pieces against its hinges. When the hinges bent but didn’t break, I braced the frame against the table’s edge and broke it off with a crack. My right hand slipped and caught a sharp corner and I saw a trickle of blood along a fingernail.

“Ouch,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Soupy said.

I put my finger in my mouth and sucked the blood away. I tossed the still connected frames on the table and held the one I’d broken off in front of Soupy’s face. It was a picture of our mothers standing in front of Audrey’s.

“It’s a map,” I said. “Your mom had a piece of it.”

“Have another beer, Trap. It’s a picture.”

“I’m not talking about this.”

I threw the photo aside and told Soupy about the lockbox, what was in it, the piece of paper I thought was a map, how it had gotten stolen, how it all had something to do with the murder of Sister Mary Cordelia.

“Fucking-ay,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Hell, no. But… that’s got to be it. Mom tore the thing into three and gave the other pieces to her best friends.”

“Which would be Mrs. B and my mom,” Soupy said.

“Right.”

“But for what? They rob a bank or something? You think that’s what born-agains are digging for down the hill?”

“Something like that,” I said. I rummaged through the junk on the table and found the photos of trees and leaves. I showed one to Soupy. “That look familiar?”

He squinted. “Looks like anything around here. Trees, dirt, pine needles.”

“Could be right outside, huh? Looking down the ridge to where Tatch’s people are?”

“Could be just about anywhere north of Grayling.”

I recalled how the wiggly lines in Mom’s drawing seemed to suggest a hill, the noted locations of trees. “Who took these pictures?”

“No idea, but, listen, that nun?”

“Yeah?”

Soupy walked slowly into the living room, his back to me. His empty can pinged on a heap of coat hangers. He yanked another beer off the ring, opened it, took a long pull.

“Ma got a call about some nun,” he said. “Sometime after Angus died.”

“Are you serious?”

He wrapped his arms around himself so that the beer can appeared beneath his left arm. “Man,” he said. “I really haven’t thought about Ma in a while.”

I wanted to say, What about the nun, but I just said, “Yeah?”

“She was the one, you know, who got up at like five in the morning to haul my ass to practice. Angus was usually sleeping it off, if he was even home. I’d give her all sorts of hell about getting out of bed, and sometimes she’d have to just throw me out on the floor.” He tried a chuckle, but it got stuck in his throat. “Then she’d have coffee made, and those cinnamon buns from the diner.”

“I remember.”

“She liked when your mom came along.”

Mrs. Campbell and my mother had taken turns driving the two of us to our early morning practices. Sometimes both went.

“When she got sick-” he said. He stopped, then started again. “When she got sick, she started thinking over things, stuff she’d forgotten about, stuff that’d been bugging her forever, stuff she’d never had time to screw around with. You know.”

“What about the nun?”

Soupy threw his head back and took another deep swallow. Then he said, “This woman called one night. I was over here helping Ma out with, I don’t know, I think I was putting the storm windows in for winter. Anyway, she was frying up some perch I’d caught that day and the phone rang. And I was messing with a window and she got on the phone and next thing I know I smell this burning. All that sweet perch going to waste. I rush in and the pan’s spitting grease and we’re about to have a damn fire, but Ma’s on the phone, talking real soft, like it’s some big secret, and I go over and say, ‘Ma, you’re going to burn the house down,’ and she takes me”-he grabbed himself by the collar of his shirt-“and shoves me away.”

“Doesn’t sound like Louise.”

“Nope.” He turned to face me. “Though she should have done it to Angus about a million times. Anyway, I go over and turn the stove off and dump the fish in the sink and go outside. But I slip down the wall out there”-he pointed outside-“and listen through the screen I haven’t replaced yet, to see what the hell’s got her so focused.”

“And it was the nun.”

“I think so. She kept saying something about a sister. But Ma didn’t have any sisters.”

“Did you hear the name ‘Cordelia’?”

“That’s the nun who got killed?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish-I honestly don’t remember. But I asked Ma after she’d calmed down. She said some woman was writing a history of St. Val’s, and she might actually pay for some information, and I thought, great, because the marina was sucking wind, and I think that was about the time we had to get one of the lifts fixed, cost a shitload.”

“You’re sure it was a woman?”

“Pretty sure. After thirty-eight years with Angus, Ma didn’t trust men much.”

“Did she ever help the woman? Or get paid?”

“I don’t think so. Then, it wasn’t long before she passed away.”

I sidled closer to Soupy, careful to avoid a cracked glass bowl filled with Mary Jane candy wrappers. “Why would you even remember this anyway?”

Soupy shook his head. “The smell, man. You ever smell perch burning? I still can’t eat them. Love to catch them. Can’t eat them.”

I sat back against the table. “And that would’ve been about the time our moms stopped talking to each other, wouldn’t it?”

“Goddamn broads, huh?” Soupy sat down on a pile of blankets on the sofa, the other beers dangling between his legs. “I can’t tell you, man, how sick she was about all of that. It killed her that your mom never came to see her in the hospital.”

“I’ll bet it killed my mom, too.”

“What was that all about anyway?”

By now it was clear to me that both Soupy’s mother and Mrs. B knew things that were important to my mother. It appeared that Mrs. Campbell had told or at least considered telling someone whatever it was she knew. Maybe what she knew about a map. Somebody had broken into this dump looking for something. I doubted it was kids.

“I don’t know, Soup,” I said. “I asked you once, you told me it was chick weirdness.”

“You don’t think it has something to do with this?”

“With what?”

“With what happened to Darlene’s mom.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

I drained my beer, tossed the can on the table. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Trap, I’ve got to get back.”

“Come on.” I reached with the hand with the bloody fingernail. “Don’t be hoarding those beers.”