The Skeleton Box

SEVEN

After Dingus cleared out, I headed down the river to Estelle Street, where I turned toward Main and the Pine County Courthouse.

My chat with the sheriff had reminded me to pick up some documents. The week before, I’d requested several years’ worth of tax reports on properties owned or formerly owned by Stewart and Bernice Edwards, Tatch’s parents, or owned by Roy Edwards, Tatch himself. He and his little camp of born-again Christians were fighting the county over an increase in taxes on the property where their trailers huddled on a wooded hill above the lake. They were arguing that they were a religious organization that shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all, and certainly not more than before. Now that Dingus seemed the least bit suspicious of Tatch-even if I didn’t think Tatch clever enough to break into a house without getting caught or mean enough to hurt a flea-I figured I ought to have those documents handy, just in case.

The redbrick courthouse stood over a square guarded by oaks and crosshatched with sidewalks blotched with dirty snow. I remembered the call I’d ignored and pulled out my phone to check messages. Luke Whistler had left one.

“Hey, boss,” he said. I heard the sound of a truck rumbling past him, wherever he was. “Popped a story online about what happened last night. Hope that’s OK, Mr. Sleep-All-Day. I’m headed out to the territories. Talk later.”

I pocketed the phone, thinking, how the hell could a fifty-six-year-old reporter be so chipper day after day? His beloved “territories” were anyplace outside the newsroom-the courthouse, the pizza joint, the cop shop, Audrey’s, the high school, Enright’s, wherever there might be someone willing to whisper in Whistler’s waiting ear.

Although the Pilot published on Tuesdays and Saturdays, our bosses at Media North let us post stories on the Internet each morning. Whistler loved having a place to counter Channel Eight’s ability to go with a story the minute they got it. So what if Channel Eight was also owned by Media North. I thought Whistler also liked having the freedom once in a while to post stories without showing them to me. “Always first,” he liked to say, “and frequently right.” I’d tell him I hoped he was joking, and he’d grin and assure me he was.

Vicky Clark wrapped both of her fleshy hands around mine and tugged me toward her across the glass-topped counter in the Pine County Clerk’s Office. My forearms tensed a little as my fingertips neared the cleavage jiggling in her low-cut sweater.

“Gus, I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Such a caring lady. I hope I can be so caring one day.”

I tried to slip my hands free but Vicky tightened her grip and pulled me closer, her perfume so sweet I thought my eyes might water.

“You’ll let me know about arrangements?”

“Sure.”

The deputy clerk had three fat youngsters and an on-and-off boyfriend named Sully who spent weekdays working road construction downstate and weekends fishing, drinking, and shooting pool with his old high school pals in Starvation. On balance, I figured Sully had a better life than Vicky, which was probably why she imagined it couldn’t hurt to try to draw me into hers, via her boobs. I couldn’t blame her for assuming that I, too, was stuck in Starvation forever, since I had already made my own downstate foray and it had ended badly.

I liked Vicky. We had a sort of understanding in our mutual stuckness. But I had no serious interest in her beyond friendly chitchat and extracting whatever I needed from her office. Especially if it meant I could avoid dealing with the clerk herself, a brittle stick of a woman who happened to be Vicky’s mother, Verna Clark.

Vicky gave me a smile, her tomato cheeks squeezing her eyes nearly shut. She loosed my hands. “One of these nights,” she said, “I have to have you over for dinner. In all modesty, my chicken and dumplings is to die for.”

“I love chicken and dumplings,” I said, while thinking, But not that much. “Hey-do you think I could get those documents I asked for last week?”

“Did you fill out a form and give it to me?”

“It was me,” Verna Clark said. The county clerk emerged from the rows of file cabinets behind her daughter, wearing the same drab gray woolen dress she seemed to wear every day. Here we go, I thought.

“Good morning, Mrs. Clark,” I said.

She peered up at the clock on the oak paneling over my head. “Nearly noon, Mr. Carpenter, and our lunch break. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”

It was vintage Verna. She couldn’t legally withhold the records, but she could make it difficult for you to actually put your eyes and hands on them. Complicating matters with formal paperwork gave both her and her daughter more things to do and the county commission reason to keep them on, when in fact one member of the Clark family could probably have handled the clerk’s office on her own, especially now that so little property was being bought and sold in Starvation anyway.

“I’m sorry, I can’t come back later,” I said. “I have to get back to my mom’s.”

“I’m very sorry to hear about the incident at your mother’s house,” Verna said. She stood pole straight at the counter, her reading glasses dangling from a frayed silver strand. “But we cannot allow the vagaries of daily life to disrupt our procedures.”

“Excuse me?”

Two lawyers stepped into the office and set briefcases on the floor.

“You’ll have to come back at one p.m.,” Verna Clark said.

“Why? I filled out the request forms a week ago. What’s the holdup?”

That was the wrong thing to say. Verna pursed her lips, then turned to Vicky. “You may take lunch now, but”-she looked at the clock again-“be sure to be back six minutes early.”

I glanced at the lawyers waiting by the double doors. They were smiling. I felt the seconds ticking off the clock.

“Bye, Gus,” Vicky said.

Verna waited for her to leave, then leveled her gaze on me. She’d been county clerk for as long as I could remember. She won re-election each time partly because she kept her office on budget, partly because her demeanor made her job seem so grim that nobody could work up the energy to mount a challenge. Verna herself seemed to operate on a limited budget of smiles and helpfulness that she rationed for county commissioners.

“For your information, Mr. Carpenter, there is no holdup,” she said. “You made a rather extensive request for records. We’ve processed them once and I need to check them over one last time to make sure that we’ve given you precisely what you asked for.”

“Forgive me, Mrs. Clerk, I mean Clark,” I said. “I’ll take whatever you have now.”

“As you know, the county is strict about closing times, given our current budget situation. I know you’re familiar with our budget, Mr. Carpenter, because you’ve written extensively about it, and opined extensively about it, too.”

The Pilot had published an editorial the previous November recommending that voters reject a tax increase that would have shored up the county budget. Someone at Media North headquarters in Traverse City had written the editorial, not me, but that distinction wouldn’t have mattered to Verna Clark.

“Yes ma’am. But if I could just-”

“The truth is, Mr. Carpenter, another individual was in to look at a number of the same records earlier today-after filing the proper request forms prior to you-and the files have yet to proceed through reprocessing.”

“I thought you said they were processed.”

“Yes, but not reprocessed.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought.

“Besides,” Verna continued, arching a thin eyebrow, “why is it necessary for the newspaper to monopolize the viewing of certain records?”

“Monopolize? What are you talking about?”

She took a set of keys from a pocket in her dress. “For someone who renders such harsh verdicts about our county’s operations, you appear to run a remarkably inefficient operation yourself. Perhaps you, too, should try being prudent.”

The word “prudent” had been in the headline of that damned editorial. “Are you telling me someone else from the Pilot was here?”

“This is apparently a very popular batch of records. I seem to recall someone from downstate requesting the very same papers not two years ago.”

“Really?”

“Really. We are now closed for the lunch hour, sir. You’ll need to leave.”

“Wait, Vern-Mrs. Clark. Are you saying my colleague was here? Luke Whistler?”

Her face betrayed the faintest hint of a smile. She was enjoying this. Verna Clark may have been a bitch, but she was a smart bitch.

“Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to discuss individual requests for records. But you seem like you’re at least intelligent enough to put two and two together.” She pointed a finger past me. “I’ll thank you for closing the door on your way out.”

I walked out thinking, Whistler wanted those records? For what?

“Poppy,” I said into my phone as I swung my pickup onto Main.

“Hey,” said Dick Popovich, head coach of the Hungry River Rats. I helped him with the goaltenders. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

“Yeah.”

“Phyllis was all class. Good to the town. Good to the hockey program.”

Mrs. B wasn’t a big hockey fan, but she had worked the ticket table in the rink lobby since I played for the Rats, and brought big boxes of her molasses cookies and chocolate-covered macaroons to the Rats’ annual preseason fund-raiser. Whenever people in Starvation Lake wanted to raise money, they went to Mrs. B for cookies. She never said no. A hundred people must have told her she should open her own cookie shop, to which she would always say, “I bake cookies. If I could bake money, I would bake money.”

“She was,” I said. “I wanted to let you know I might be late to the pregame skate. Got a few things to do.”

“Understood. Glad you called, though. We gotta have a talk with Tex.”

Matthew Dobrick, sixteen years old, was the River Rats’ big, fast, crafty left wing. His teammates had nicknamed him “Tex” for the garish green-and-gold Dallas Stars jacket he wore. He insisted he had won the jacket new in a raffle downstate. But the seams coming apart along the shoulders and the torn left pocket made me think it had been plucked from a bin at a consignment store.

Tex had never known his father. His mother, from what I had heard, had played the role of dutiful hockey mom, shuttling her son from practice to game to practice while carrying on an affair with a team dad who worked as a shoe salesman by day and dealt marijuana and cocaine on nights and weekends. When the police appeared at his apartment one evening with a search warrant, Tex’s mother was there and, maybe because she was using, took a swing at one of the cops. It was not the first time she’d run afoul of the law. Even after she had ratted out her boyfriend, the judge sentenced her to eighteen months at the prison in Decatur.

So Tex had come to Starvation Lake to live with his uncle Roy, known to us as Tatch, and just like that, for the first time in almost twenty years, the River Rats were contenders for the state championship. In his first and only season with the Rats, Tex had scored more goals than the rest of the team combined. Unfortunately, he had also tallied the most minutes in penalties, which was why Poppy and I needed to have a talk with him.

“Yeah, but let’s go easy,” I said. “The kid plays angry. It helps him.”

“It doesn’t help when he’s sitting in the penalty box. Mic-Mac knows his deal. They’ll be goading him. He’s got to keep his cool.”

Mic-Mac, a scrappy bunch of bumblebees from Detroit’s northwest side, was to be our opponent in the state quarterfinal that evening.

“I’m taking his skates out to him in a bit,” I said. “You want me to say something?”

“Going up to that religious camp?”

“Yeah, part of the drill. The kid plays superstitious, too.”

As I approached Mom’s little yellow house, I looked through the bare trees to the frozen white crescent of the lake curling north and then west. A crow settled in the branches of a beech, a black blot on the smoky quilt of sky.

You have a nice, simple life, I thought as I watched it.

I wanted to check on Mom before I took Tex his skates. Then I had to drop by the pregame skate, then get back to the Pilot and move a few stories for the next day’s paper. I wanted to get to puzzling out what or who nye-less was. Maybe just the gibberish of a woman who’d suffered a serious blow to the head. Or maybe not.

I pulled onto the shoulder just short of the driveway and the do-not-cross tape ringing the yard of grass and trees between Mom’s house and Mrs. B’s. As kids, Darlene and Soupy and I had called it the “big yard,” and we’d spent a lot of time there, building snow forts in winter, racing our bicycles between the trees in summer.

One late evening, I had tried to kiss Darlene as we balanced next to each other on our bikes watching the sun dip behind the bluffs across the lake. “Ewww!” she yelled, punching me in the chest before I could get my lips on hers. I toppled over into a pricker bush and scrambled out bleeding while Darlene pedaled away laughing.

Would she really leave Starvation Lake?

I shut off my truck and sat there a minute, thinking. The tape strung closer to the house was at the end with the dining room and bathroom and Mom’s bedroom. The cops must have figured the intruder had entered through the glass door into the dining room; otherwise, the kitchen would be taped off, too, wouldn’t it? Mom normally locked the door, but the lock had been sticking, so she might have left it undone. I had been promising to fix it but hadn’t gotten around to it.

I heard rapping at the passenger-side window and turned to look. Luke Whistler was standing there, notebook in hand. I rolled the window down.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Isn’t this where the story is?”

I rolled up the window and got out, walked around to Whistler. Under his down vest today he wore a black Detroit Police Athletic League sweatshirt striped with bleach stains.

“Did you talk to my mother?” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “This is as close as I got. Channel Eight came by, too. T.J. tried to sweet-talk her way in, but the cops wouldn’t budge.”

“T.J.? You know her?”

Whistler grinned. “A little.”

“What’s that mean, ‘a little’?”

“She likes white wine,” he said.

He was sleeping with Tawny Jane Reese? Every loser in Starvation Lake had jerked off at least once to Channel Eight’s slinky, fortyish reporter.

“No way,” I said.

“She has a police scanner on her nightstand. So do I.”

“When my mother’s house was-wait. I don’t want to hear this.”

I put my hands in my coat pockets and walked toward Mom’s, stopping where the driveway met the road. A sheriff’s cruiser and an unmarked police car sat there, flashers on. I saw Mom sitting at the dining room table in her fuzzy blue bathrobe.

“How’s she doing?” Whistler said.

“Who? Tawny Jane?”

“Come on, man.”

“You got anything more for tomorrow’s paper?”

“Matter of fact, might have a little scoop.” He pulled a watch out of his sweatshirt belly pocket. “See you back at the shop?”

“What’s the story?”

He grinned again. For someone like Whistler, getting a scoop was just as good as getting laid. I’d known a lot of guys like that in Detroit. A few women, too.

“Has to do with the sheriff.”

“If you’re getting it from D’Alessio, he better not hear you’re bopping Tawny Jane. He’s been trying to get up her skirt for years.”

“So I gather.”

“Let me handle Mom myself, OK?”

“Sure. Sorry.”

“That’s all right. Hey-hold on.” I moved closer to Whistler, looked over his shoulder to see whether any cops were around. “I got a little tip.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not much. Just a word. Apparently, Mrs. B-Phyllis-said something about it before she died.”

“Really? She saw the guy?”

“Maybe, maybe not. All we got is this, and I don’t know if it’s a name or what: nye-less.”

Whistler’s eyebrows crinkled. “Say again?”

I said it again.

“Huh,” he said. “Spelling?”

“No idea.”

“Weird. But I’m headed back. You want me to check into it? Not sure what to do exactly. Maybe run a few different spellings through a search engine or something.”

“Try it out. Maybe we get to it before the cops do.”

“Always first,” he said. “I’m on it.”

“Why was that man here?”

Mom sat across from me, a cup of tea at her elbow, speaking in her normal rapid-fire staccato, which meant she was probably thinking clearly, though that was prone to change in an unpredictable instant.

“Whistler?”

“Can’t you keep your own reporters away?”

“He won’t be back. I can’t help with the TV crews.”

“I thought they worked for your company, too.”

“They don’t work for me.”

The inside of the house was a snarl of yellow tape. The police had strung a narrow pathway from the kitchen to the dining room to Mom’s bedroom. Deputy Skip Catledge sat in the kitchen, waiting for something in the microwave. Outside the picture window facing the lake, a detective paced the deck while talking into a cell phone.

“My God,” Mom said. “Mavis Schmieder just called to extend her condolences. She said she was at the IGA this morning and Frank D’Alessio was standing out front, handing out copies of some story from the Internet.”

D’Alessio must have stopped there after Audrey’s Diner. He’d probably been handing out printouts of our story on the break-in, turning up the heat on Dingus.

“Good old Frankie,” I said.

The microwave dinged. I turned and saw Catledge remove a ham-and-cheese sandwich on an onion roll.

“Is that it, Skip?” Mom said to him. “He’s using Phyllis’s death to get elected?”

Catledge looked surprised that someone had bothered to ask him. “I don’t have the slightest idea what goes on in that man’s head, Mrs. Carpenter.”

“He hasn’t even announced he’s running yet,” I said. “Maybe it’ll backfire.”

Mom sipped her tea, set the cup down. “That man is familiar,” she said.

“D’Alessio?”

“No.” She nodded toward the window. “Your reporter.”

“He was here for dinner last week. He loved the meatballs, remember? I think he went home wearing one on his vest.”

“Yes, Gussy. And you might also recall that I asked him if he had family ties here.”

“He said he didn’t think so.”

“I heard him. But we had a Whistler family here a long time ago. I remember a woman at the church. She had a funny name.”

“Hmm,” I said. I took one of my mother’s hands in mine and smiled. “Do you think she could have been Whistler’s mother?”

Mom slipped her hand away from mine and sipped her tea. I wanted to ask her about nye-less, but Catledge was standing six feet away. Instead I said, “How are you feeling?”

Her eyes focused on the cup as it plinked in the saucer.

“Phyllis was my rock,” she said.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know.”

She picked up her empty cup and saucer and stood. “I would love to take a shower, but my bathroom is police territory,” she said, glaring at Catledge. “At least they let me use the toilet.” Skipper stayed focused on his sandwich. “So I’ll just freshen up in the kitchen sink, and then I’m going to Murray and Murray.” The funeral home. “I told Darlene I’d look into arrangements.”

I doubted she would be able to arrange anything until the coroner was done with Mrs. B, but it wasn’t worth saying. I was glad she’d be occupied. “Darlene will be checking in on you,” I said. “I’ll be back tonight after the game.”

“Nobody needs to be checking on me. I’ve already told the police I want them out of here by sundown.”

“I’ll sleep in my old room.”

“You will not. You will get out there and get to the bottom of this. How are you going to do that sitting here with an old woman?”

I looked at Catledge after Mom had gone into her bedroom. “How’s Darlene doing?” I said.

He thought about it for a moment, then said, “She’s tougher than I’d be. One hell of a police officer, if you ask me.”