The Skeleton Box

FIVE

The tree house,” she had said on my cell phone. “Ten minutes.”

Beneath four months of snow, the one-car garage seemed barely more than a bump on a hill. If you didn’t know it was there, with a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville parked inside, you probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything more than a gigantic snowdrift.

I felt a tinge of regret seeing the shrouds of snow drooping from the eaves. My dad would have wanted me to climb on top of the garage and push the snow off so the weight didn’t cave the roof in. He had built the garage when I was two or three years old. On the back he had attached a platform of planks ringed by a wooden railing. He called it his “tree house.”

From up there you could peer across the tops of shoreline trees and see the southwestern corner of the lake, watch the falling sun play its last orange and purple sheen across the water’s mirror before going away. Dad spent many a summer evening up there, smoking cigars, drinking Stroh’s, listening to Ernie Harwell narrate the Tigers. Mom almost never went up, which I think was how Dad wanted it, though I never heard him say so. “Girls don’t really get it,” he would tell me with a wink on the nights he let me come up. He’d pop me an Orange Crush and we’d clink bottles in the dusk.

I had brought a shovel from my pickup. I used it to dig my way through knee-deep drifts to reach the side door. The door was unlocked. I shoved it open. The smell of gasoline washed over me. I stepped inside.

“Hey, old girl,” I said.

The Bonneville was gold with a cream vinyl roof. I pulled the driver’s door open and sat down. The keys were in the ignition. I had been starting the Bonnie every few months since moving back to Starvation. I had taken it out only once, two years before, for a long drive that almost killed her. After that, I let a mechanic have at her, and she’d come back almost as good as new. But now I hadn’t been out to the tree house in so long that I worried her battery had succumbed to the winter damp.

I turned the key. There were a few clicks. Then nothing.

“Shit,” I said. “My fault. Sorry.”

“What are you sorry for now?”

Darlene was silhouetted in the gray light framed by the side doorway, in uniform, a badge glinting on the furry front of her earflap cap. Her face was obscured in the shadow, but I could feel her gaze, pensive and wary and sad.

I got out of the Bonnie, pushed the door closed behind me.

“Hey, Darl,” I said. “I’m-”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

Darlene took off her cap and her dark hair fell around her shoulders. Her hands trembled as she held the cap, every muscle in her face straining to keep it from cracking. She started toward me and, as she did, she dropped the cap, as if it was too heavy to hold. I bent to pick it up but she fell to one knee and snatched it up in both hands, lifting it to her face, where she buried her eyes in its fur, her shoulders heaving.

“Darlene,” I said. I started to lay a hand on her left shoulder but hesitated, unsure whether I should.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can’t what?”

She stood. She wrapped her arms around me, pressed her face into my chest.

I remembered the night after her father’s funeral. We were in my dad’s garage. It was two or three in the morning. Darlene hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left the community hall where my mother and Soupy’s mom had stayed close to Mrs. B while the other ladies clucked around Darlene, telling her what a wonderful man her father had been. We left our clothes down in the garage and climbed the short stairway to Dad’s tree house. We fell asleep in the humid dark, waking just before dawn. Then she curled her body into me, shivering against the dew.

Now she lifted her head and stepped back, fitted her cap back on. “I don’t know,” she said.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a hankie or something,” I said.

She wiped a coat sleeve across her face. “I don’t want it to freeze there,” she said.

“Why did you want to come here?”

“I didn’t want them to see me.”

“Who? See you what?”

“The first thing Dingus did, after telling me he was so sorry about Mom, was tell me to stay away from you.”

Because Dingus didn’t like the Pilot reporting things until he was ready to have them reported. Especially now.

“That’s Dingus,” I said. “Look, Darl, I really am-I don’t know how to say it. About your mom. You know I loved her.”

Darlene turned away, fighting more tears, and took off her cap again, set it on the roof of the Bonneville. She laid her hands on the roof and stood there staring into the car through the driver’s window.

I looked in, too. The eight-track tape player was still bolted to the underside of the dashboard. During our college summers, before I left Starvation to work at the Detroit Times, Darlene had liked me to blast Elton John doing “Bennie and the Jets.” I hated the song, and she knew it, and when the tape got tangled up so badly that it wouldn’t play anymore, she accused me of messing it up on purpose. I told her I hadn’t but wished I had. The fight ended in Dad’s tree house sometime after midnight.

“Why didn’t they go to bingo, Gus?” Darlene said.

“I don’t know. Mom was in one of her crabby moods.”

“Don’t you usually go over for supper?”

“Usually. But I had a game.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s done. You weren’t there.”

“Wait. Weren’t you the one always telling me I had to cut the apron strings? Telling me, Come on, you want to live with your mommy all your life? You can’t pin this on me.”

“No.” She looked around the garage, finally let her eyes settle on mine. “I miss you.”

“You miss me. You’ve been missing me? Or you miss me now?”

“There aren’t many people left in the world who know me. Who really know me.”

I was not about to go into how she had ignored my calls for weeks, how she had stolen out the back of Enright’s the one Saturday night I had spied her there, how I had finally accepted that we were to be nothing more than failed lovers who through the happenstance of necessity would inhabit the same crowded space while barely acknowledging each other.

Now here she was, seemingly opening the door again.

“How did you hear?”

She looked at the floor. “I found her.”

“You mean you were there first?”

“Yes.”

“My God, Darl.”

“I was out on patrol when the call went out from dispatch. Your Mother had called nine-one-one. When I got there, there was just the one light on in the living room.”

“Where was my mother?”

“In the bathroom. With my mother.” Darlene’s lips were trembling now. “There was a lot of blood.” She put a forefinger to her left eyebrow. “She had a gash here.” She drew the finger away, held it half an inch from her thumb. “About like this. Like she was hit with something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

She covered her face with her hands. I moved closer, wanting to embrace her, unsure whether I should. Darlene shook her head, dropped her hands. “I tried to show her a hundred times what to do if she was ever… ever in trouble.”

“How to defend herself.”

“She told me, ‘I know where a man’s privates are.’”

“So she-”

“He must have hit her in the head. Or he hit her and she fell and hit her head. Or both. Detectives are working on it.”

“No knives or guns?”

“Not that we can tell. We took… we took the rug.”

“The rug?”

“It was soaked.”

“Ah. Me Sweet Ho,” I said, and Darlene smiled wanly, beautiful even then.

My mother knitted the rug many years before. A little yellow house sat on a pond ringed by pines over the legend “Home Sweet Home.” Over years of wear, the house blurred into the pond and trees, and some of the letters in the words faded into the fabric. When we were a lot younger, Darlene had liked to needle me about it.

She reached into a back pocket and produced a cell phone. She punched a few buttons and held it up in front of me.

“Listen.”

I moved closer and bowed my head to the phone. There was a beep. A few seconds of silence gave way to a woman’s voice.

“Darlene,” it whispered.

“Jesus,” I said. The voice belonged to Mrs. B.

“Listen,” Darlene said.

“There’s someone here,” Mrs. B whispered. She had to have been hiding. But why hadn’t she called 911? Maybe because her daughter was, after all, a cop.

The call went silent but for the sound of Mrs. B’s breathing. Hearing those shallow breaths must have been torture for Darlene, for they told her that her mother was frightened in the final moments of her life. I heard the creaking hinge of a door. I knew that sound. One of the two doors to Mom’s bathroom. There was a footstep. I pictured Mrs. B ducking her head out, stepping into the hallway, peeking around the corner into the living room.

If she saw someone, she didn’t say.

The door creaked shut.

There was silence again, then the sound of the other door opening. Mrs. B started to cry out but something muffled her voice. There was a brief scuffling, then a thud, then silence.

“My God,” I said.

“Wait.”

A few seconds passed. Then came a single word, in a barely audible whisper, a word I had never heard before. It sounded like “nye-less.” Like the name Silas, but with an “n.” Then, sounding barely able to speak, Mrs. B uttered it again: “Nye-less.”

Darlene ended the call.

I wanted to reach out and hug her, for what had happened to her mother, and for what she must have felt for not having picked up her mother’s call. Would she have made it to the house in time? Would she have been able to get an ambulance there faster?

“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” I said.

“I heard it ring, figured it was Mom, but… I was chasing a raccoon out of Mrs. Morcone’s house. She left the door open again. I thought I’d call Mom when I was done.”

“What was it she said? Nye-less? What is that?”

“I have no idea. I’ve listened to it a thousand times.”

“Can your tech guys make it clearer?”

“They can barely do a reboot.”

“Maybe it’s a name.”

“I thought of that.”

“What about the state cops? They have a lab.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Darlene,” I said. “You haven’t told anyone yet, have you.”

She had come close to losing her job the year before for failing to pursue a lead in the case of a close friend’s apparent suicide. She had let it become personal. Dingus gave her a break, knowing himself how hard it was for a cop to keep the proper distance in a place that could feel as crowded as New York City, minus the convenience of anonymity.

The case had also been the proximate cause of our second breakup, because my own investigation had exposed Darlene’s apparently willful negligence. So we’d gone our separate ways, or at least she had gone hers.

“No, I haven’t,” she said.

“It’s evidence. They’re going to run a check on the phone. They’ll see she called you.”

She yanked her cap back on her head. “I’ll tell them. It’s just-it was my mother.”

“So you’re on the case?”

“Damn right I am.”

“How’s Dingus? I’m thinking he’s afraid of losing, eh?”

“Heck, I’m afraid he’ll lose. I couldn’t work for that jerk D’Alessio. I wouldn’t.”

“So…”

“I’d need a job somewhere. With Mom gone…”

I felt a little shiver of panic. “There’s plenty of time for all that,” I said.

“We have to solve this, Gus.”

“Why don’t you let the police-”

“Dammit,” she said, “I am a police officer. I’m not about to go home and fucking cry into my pillow. My mother didn’t bring me up like that.”

No, she didn’t, I thought. “Do you think it’s the same guy who did the other houses?”

“That assumes just one person did all the other houses.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Whoever it was, in all these break-ins, has been very careful. No prints, no nothing, nothing stolen.”

“DNA?”

“Working on it.”

“Did the neighbors see anything?”

“The Grays are in Florida, the Cerrutis were in Detroit at a hockey tournament.”

“You’ve taped off the yard.”

“Routine. But it’ll discourage somebody if they decide to come back.”

“They’re not coming back.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can I put any of this in the paper?”

“I told you we were off the record.”

Actually she hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to push it. I was glad she’d come to me. “OK.”

“Please be careful what you report. This is my mother.”

“I know. I will.”

“Come here.”

She put a hand on my chest, feeling for my heart. It was pounding.

“You matter to me,” she said.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” I said.

“I’m going back to work. Nobody wants you there, believe me.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“No.”

I leaned out the doorway and watched her hike down the path to her car, thinking about her mother and about my mom and about that word: nye-less.