The Skeleton Box

THIRTY

The sky was flawless blue outside the barred window behind Luke Whistler’s head.

It was a morning in July. Whistler sat across from me with his manacled hands folded atop the metal table, his white hair trimmed to a crew cut, his pinkie naked of his ring. His black Toronado was parked outside in the impound lot of the Pine County Jail.

“Enjoying your stay, Luke?” I said.

He’d been refusing my requests to speak with him since his trial in May. On this morning, one hour before he was to appear in court for his sentencing, Darlene had rousted him from his jail cell and brought him to the interview room where I was waiting.

“Piss off, junior,” he said. “You’re a minor-leaguer and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

“And your journalism career has ended badly, as predicted,” I said. “What happened to your ring? The cops hock it?”

At trial it had come out that Bitsy Whistler, before departing Starvation Lake for the last time, had swiped a ciborium from the sacristy at St. Valentine’s. After she died, Whistler had it melted down and made into the ring.

“These cops are fuckups,” Whistler said. “You watch-I’m getting off on appeal. I didn’t kill anyone. Yeah, I panicked, but I didn’t hit anybody hard enough to kill them. She had a heart attack. I couldn’t help that.”

The jury had convicted Whistler of manslaughter. Dingus had wanted a charge of second-degree murder, but Eileen Martin didn’t think she could make it stick. Except for a fingerprint Whistler could have left the night he had dinner at Mom’s, there was no physical evidence that he’d actually been in the house. Whistler had learned well from the burglar he’d followed on that aborted Free Press story.

With a little help from me, Darlene dug up evidence suggesting Whistler had motive. There were canceled checks written to Whistler’s mother by Nilus until just before his death, and then by various people at Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne until Bitsy died.

“That’s not what the jury said, is it, Luke?” I said. “If it was a heart attack, why’d you go to such lengths to point the finger elsewhere-the message on the voice mail, making me think I was discovering stuff about Nilus when you knew about it all along? Huh? Why didn’t you just come clean?”

“I had a story to get.”

“That reminds me. I know how you knew about your mother killing the nun-”

“Nilus killed the nun.”

“Right. I know how you knew she was buried under the church, but how did you know about Nilus moving her?”

Whistler shrugged. “He made a few visits to see my mother downstate. You can read all about it in my book.”

The Detroit Times, under the byline of M. Joan McCarthy, had reported that at least two New York publishers had expressed interest in a Lucas B. Whistler memoir. It infuriated me, but what could I do? People wanted to read that sort of stuff, so other people published it. It wasn’t all that different from how I’d made my living.

Now, though, sitting within reach of the man who had killed a woman I loved who was the mother of another woman I loved, I recalled Poppy’s advice to Tex. With one hard, unexpected right, I could shatter Whistler’s nose, break his jaw, watch him suffer, if only until Darlene came in and dragged me away.

I stood and moved around the table to Whistler’s right. He looked up at me.

“A book’s a pretty good idea,” I said. “Maybe I’ll write one.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You too, Luke. I’ll miss you in court today, though. Going fishing.”

State troopers arrested Father Timothy Reilly one week after the arraignments of Breck and Whistler. The archdiocese and the state cops had arranged it so he’d be taken into custody in the middle of the night, when no reporters were around.

But Dingus got a heads-up. Catledge heard and called Darlene at home, where she was finishing up her suspension. She told me and I called Joanie McCarthy, who was waiting with a Times photographer when police brought Reilly out in cuffs.

Judge Gallagher bound Reilly over for trial on a charge of first-degree murder in the 1944 disappearance of Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero. The priest refused to speak to the police and stood mute in the courtroom, where his lawyers from Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne plied Gallagher’s deaf ears with pleas to leave an old man be. Dingus and Eileen Martin knew the charge was over the top, but they hoped to elicit evidence that Reilly had conspired in the past year to conceal what Nilus and Bitsy Whistler had done.

In the meantime, Reilly, out on bond, went into hiding while the Detroit newspapers wrote story after story about the archdiocese’s alleged cover-up of Nilus’s chronic womanizing, the death of the nun, the reburial of her bones. I was able to slip Joanie a few tips on where to find paternity suits. One day I got an e-mail from her that made me smile: “Our buddy Regis is no longer in the employ of Eagan MacDonald.” She said she owed me a Red Wings game, and I said that if I could bring Darlene along, that would be fine.

After his release, soon after Reilly’s arrest, Wayland Breck rented a cabin on Crooked Lake so he could keep tabs on the trials of the priest and Whistler and assist the prosecution where needed. But when Tatch and his fellow Christian campers heard Breck was still around, they organized daily pickets at his cabin. If the Pilot had still been publishing, it would have run a three-column photo of people parading past his house, holding signs that said BRECK GO HOME and LIARS BELONG DOWNSTATE. Breck left Starvation in early June.

The Michigan State Bar’s Judicial Ethics Committee came down hard on Judge Gallagher after learning of the shenanigans in his chambers. Rather than face censure, Gallagher retired. He posted his typewritten resignation letter on a bulletin board at Audrey’s Diner amid ads for propane and landscaping services. The letter thanked everyone in Starvation, “especially those who both violate and enforce the law, for making my life so interesting for more than forty years.” He said quitting wasn’t difficult because his cancer had spread and he was moving to Arizona where he would “bask in the warmth of the Lord while preparing for the one verdict that truly matters.”

The sun hovered just over the tree line at the lake’s far end. I was sitting in the oak swing on the bluff at Mom’s house. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Darlene said.

“Just looking at the lake. The sun’s still out and what is it? Nine o’clock?”

“About.”

“I love July.”

“So did your mother,” Darlene said. She had a towel knotted over her bikini bottom. She sat, her bare knee grazing my thigh. “How was fishing?”

“Not much biting, but fun to hang with Soup.”

“How is he?”

“You know. Polished off a six-pack by the time we got to the cove. Thinking of selling the bar. Or maybe not. He got a legit offer on his parents’ place. That should tide him over for, I don’t know, a month or two.”

“Poor Soupy.”

“And he got a dog.”

“No.”

“Yeah. My fault. I showed him a picture of old Stanley, he wanted another dog.”

“Is this one afraid of umbrellas, too?”

I laughed.

“So,” I said, “Whistler got the max?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Did you get to usher him out?”

“No. Watched from the cheap seats. I’m not quite back in Dingus’s good graces.”

“You’ll get there.”

She stretched her arms over her head and wagged her neck back and forth. “I was so sweaty from all the unpacking, I had to go for a dip.”

I had watched her from the swing. She swam freestyle straight out from the dock a hundred yards, then flipped on her back and paddled out to the middle of the lake, where all I could see was the wake of her kicking feet. I could have watched all night.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a photograph and a folded piece of paper.

“Good thing I didn’t toss that box,” I said.

“Which box?”

“The one from Mom sitting on my sofa for weeks. It had a bunch of crayon drawings I did as a kid and report cards and other junk. But this is actually interesting.”

I handed Darlene the Polaroid. She looked. I saw her eyes mist.

“Mom,” she said. “And look how cute you are.”

The photo was black and white. Mrs. B sat astride a hospital bed with an arm around me, her eyes wide and happy behind her big glasses. I was trying to smile but my throat probably hurt too much.

“Where is this?” Darlene said.

“A hospital downstate. I just got my tonsils out.”

“Why was my mother there? I don’t remember this.”

“Supposedly she was there because Mom couldn’t handle hospitals after Dad died. But this”-I brandished the folded paper-“suggests Mom was up to something else.”

It appeared to have been torn from the kind of notepad Mom kept by her kitchen phone. I gave it to Darlene. “Oh, gosh,” she said.

I’d found it stuck to the back of the Polaroid. Written on it in my mother’s handwriting was the address and phone number for Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne on Shelby Street in downtown Detroit.

“That’s when she saw Reilly,” Darlene said.

“Gotta be. He isn’t going to get off, is he?”

“He has some good lawyers.”

“Paid for by the collection basket,” I said. “At the very least, he’s dragging the archdiocese’s name through the mud.”

“Is that important to you?” Darlene said.

“I don’t mind it.”

She turned her body on the swing to face me. “I lost my mother, but I don’t intend to lose my faith. She was too strong for that.”

I wanted nothing but peace with Darlene. We were neighbors now, she in her mother’s house, me in Mom’s. We had agreed to live that close, maybe sell one of the houses later, move into the other together. For now, we were close enough that I could leave her bed in the middle of the night and walk home, and she could do the same.

I pulled an envelope out of my other pocket, feeling the raised letters within. “This finally came today,” I said. “You know, Verna Clark could take a lesson from the clerk in Sanilac County. Her name is Bonnie Or wall and she’s a peach.”

Darlene took it. The return address said Sandusky, Michigan. “You haven’t opened it?”

“I already know what’s in it,” I said.

To honor the River Rats’ best season in nineteen years, the town council won the state’s permission to post a commemorative sign at the Starvation Lake exit on I-75.

A sign-posting ceremony was held at noon on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Townspeople assembled in a cornfield along the highway. County commissioner Elvis Bontrager presented the sign to DOT workers who then anchored it on the shoulder near the beginning of the exit ramp. The sign, a rectangle of white lettering on a green background, announced the River Rats as the 2000 Michigan State Hockey Runners-Up.

The Rats had lost, 3–2, to the Austin Painters in the championship final. Dougie Baker played another acrobatic game, stopping forty-six shots. It wasn’t enough. The Painters jumped out to a 2–0 lead, then made it 3–1 in the middle of the third period. They got to celebrating a bit early and Danny FitzGerald scored to pull the Rats within a goal with under two minutes remaining. The hometown crowd went wild, banging on the glass, waving the big blue-and-gold Rats banners. Coach Poppy pulled Dougie for a sixth skater. Maybe if that extra guy had been Tex, the Rats would have pulled it out, but Tex was standing on crutches behind the bench. We didn’t manage another shot on goal.

But, unlike nineteen years before, when the town sank into an extended sulk following our state title loss to the Pipefitters, Starvation’s leaders realized that great teams don’t come along every year, and they decided to brag about the moment to everyone on Michigan’s main north-south freeway.

I was as happy as anyone about that.

Which may be why my mother decided, without letting me know, that she was going to attend the posting ceremony. She’d said nothing about it when we met for breakfast that morning at Audrey’s. She had tea and wheat toast. I had blueberry pancakes and ham. We didn’t talk about anything important, except my reminding her that we were supposed to meet with her lawyer that afternoon to discuss her testimony in the trial of Father Reilly.

“Yes, yes,” she said, annoyed. “Lawyers and more lawyers.”

“I’ll pick you up after the sign ceremony,” I said.

“Fine. My tea is too weak.”

I’ll never know what she was thinking. She took a wrong turn off of Route 816, a road she had traveled maybe ten thousand times, and wound up atop Dead Sledder Mile, driving away from I-75 instead of toward it.

Later, Darlene and I would try to explain to ourselves how Mom had gotten off track. We agreed that she was tired, having just taken over Mrs. B’s Meals on Wheels routes. But she’d also been withdrawn and quiet for weeks. Despite our efforts to get her out for euchre or a boat ride or anything, she’d sit for hours at the front window of her house, staring at the lake. We knew why. She was blaming herself for the death of one friend and the estrangement of the other. Trying to persuade her otherwise seemed only to sink her deeper into despair, as if the effort to soothe her proved that she was right, that she had failed two women she had loved, and who had loved her.

Dead Sledder’s coiling descent wasn’t as treacherous in the spring, but a morning shower had made the asphalt slippery. Mom probably felt the car slide left at the turn halfway down the hill and overcompensated to the right. She wound up in the ravine beyond the opposite road shoulder, her Buick crumpled against an oak. When I arrived at the scene, police officers were moving around in the twin halos of her headlamps glowing in the shadows of the trees. I smelled gasoline and oil. Darlene stopped me at the shoulder and told me I couldn’t go down. I tried to fight past her but finally fell to my knees, wailing, No, this can’t be happening.

A few days later, Dingus called me to his office. He sat behind his desk, I sat in my usual chair facing him. “You’re not a thin-skinned guy, so I’m just going to tell you how it is,” the sheriff said. “We hired two different mechanics to look your mom’s vehicle over from stem to stern. It could have used tires but otherwise was in fine condition.”

“She was going to testify,” I said. “You don’t think that they-somebody-could… I mean, she could have nailed Reilly to a cross.”

“Maybe,” Dingus said. “But these aren’t stupid people.”

“Have you ruled out suicide?”

“Well,” the sheriff said, “you never can rule it out, really, not when there’s one person dead and no witnesses. But I wouldn’t-”

“So, no, you haven’t ruled it out?”

“We cannot rule it out, Gus, no, but I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

Darlene had saved some of her mother’s ashes from her funeral. We scattered those along with some of Mom’s on the lake at sunset on June 20, the longest day of the year. We sprinkled the rest of Mom’s ashes on the graves of my father and Louise Campbell.

The rosary Sister Cordelia had given her hung from my truck’s rear-view mirror.

Now Darlene tore the envelope open. She took out the paper inside and unfolded it.

She looked at me. “When did you know?”

“I had an inkling when I first heard my mom traveled to a spelling bee. I just didn’t want to admit it. But I was damn near certain when Gallagher said what he said about the birthday cake, how Cordelia treated Mom special.”

Darlene handed me the birth certificate. It had been filed in Sanilac County on May 31, 1933. It was for Beatrice Clare. The space for her last name was left blank. Her mother was listed as Mary Gallesero. The father’s name had been typed over enough times that it was illegible.

“How does that make you feel, Gussy?” Darlene said.

“How do you think? It makes my skin crawl to think Nilus was, you know.”

“Your grandfather. And Whistler, too.”

“Yeah. My half uncle? Jesus. No wonder Mom-”

“Don’t. Your mother loved you more than anything in the world.”

I didn’t say it. Instead I looked across the lake. The sunlight was almost gone. I felt Darlene’s knuckles soft on my cheek.

“Your grandmother was beautiful and kind,” she said. “And Bea loved her. Just think: Grandma Nonny.”

An elderly couple passed in a canoe, their paddles dipping soundlessly into the silver water.

“I wonder if Mom knew,” I said.

“That Nonny was her mother?”

“Yeah.”

“At some point, she must have. It’s almost like she was keeping a secret from herself. Then when her memory problems started, it wasn’t as easy. She couldn’t remember what she wasn’t supposed to remember.”

“Something like that.” I leaned my elbows on my knees. “She was right, though.”

“About what?”

“She told me, ‘The truth will not set you free.’”

“Does that hurt you?”

“That the truth doesn’t set you free?”

“No. That your mother kept things from you.”

I smiled despite myself. “After all my years in the newspaper business, you’d think I’d have learned that the truth usually turns out to be bullshit.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” I leaned back on the swing. “Do you think you would have left, Darl?”

“Left where?”

“Here. If D’Alessio had lasted and it turned out he beat Dingus in the election.”

“I’m here now,” she said. “We’re here now. And I’m thinking, I don’t know, maybe I’ll even run for sheriff.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You should. Dingus has had his day.”

We sat there, still and content, feeling the night breeze, watching the tree line etched against the sky disappear in the blackness.

Darlene snuggled into me. “Can I tell you a secret?” she said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. Do you know when I first fell in love with you?”

I grinned. “The night I played that amazing game against Grand Rapids in the regional final?”

“No, idiot.”

“Sorry. When?”

“It was this one morning when we were kids. A school morning. I’d gotten up late and just got out of the shower. My hair was a mess, and I stood on my porch trying to fix it while the bus waited. You were standing out by the bus, and I kept waiting for you to yell at me, ‘Get going, Darlene,’ like you usually did. But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You remember?”

“I do.”

“Come on.”

“You were wearing that white parka with the fake fur on the hood. Fats and Blinky were barking their asses off.”

“That could have been any day.”

“But it wasn’t.” I set a hand on her thigh and squeezed. “So, you keep secrets too, huh?”

“I just told you, so it’s not a secret anymore.”

“Uh-huh. Apparently, I’m attracted to people like you.”

She pressed a toe to the ground and pushed so that the swing began to rock.

“Lucky me,” she said.