The Skeleton Box

NINE

Soup? You back there?”

I called down the whiskey-colored bar that ran the length of the tunnel of week-old smoke that was Enright’s Pub. A crash came from the office and storeroom behind the bar, like a stack of boxes had toppled.

“Son of a bitch,” I heard Soupy say. “Fucking closet.”

Foghat was grinding out of the jukebox. An old woman sitting at the other end of the bar nodded at me. Stalks of white hair stuck out from beneath her orange LaCoste Builders cap.

“Angie,” I said.

She knew my name but probably didn’t want to take the trouble to recall it. Instead she lifted her tulip glass of beer in a halfhearted toast, took a sip, and set it back down next to her cigarettes and Bic lighter. She returned to staring at the soap opera flickering soundlessly on the television over the bar. Beneath the TV hung a sign that said “If you’re drinking to forget, please pay in advance.”

I didn’t have to worry about a lunch rush at Enright’s. There hadn’t been one since the griddle stopped working in December. I’d been there that evening, awaiting a patty melt. Soupy was standing in front of the griddle, spatula in hand, watching a burger fry when the sizzling ebbed and then stopped altogether. He stared at the half-cooked meat for a minute, then tossed the spatula aside with a clatter and started fiddling with the griddle controls. “What the fuck?” he said. He stood there another minute staring at the grill, then picked up the spatula and scooped the meat into a garbage can. “Fuck it,” he said. “Go to McDonald’s.” He went back to his office and came out with a piece of cardboard he had torn from a gin box. “Grill Not Working-SORRY” was scratched across it in felt-tip pen. He stuck it to the wall over the back bar with a piece of white hockey tape.

The sorry sign was hanging there still when I walked in that afternoon looking for a Coke and a bag of Better Mades to take to the Pilot. Soupy hadn’t yet fixed the griddle, saying he didn’t have the money. That was undoubtedly true, but even if he did have the money, I doubted he would’ve squandered it on necessary repairs when he could be investing it in booze and the Bay City stripper who came up every other Monday to screw him, ignorant of the fact that Mr. Big Shot Resort-Town Tavern Owner was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and might never emerge. “I know what happens in Chapter Eleven,” Soupy liked to say. “Who knows about Chapter Twelve?”

Today he came out of his office sucking on a finger. He wore an apron stained with ketchup, or maybe blood, over an old Hershey Bears T-shirt. The Bears were the last minor league team Soupy had skated with before he walked away from his once promising hockey career for the more reliable pursuit of hungover weekday mornings.

“You hurt yourself?” I said.

“Shit, Trap.” He flicked on the cold water in the bar sink and let it run over his finger. “Need a damn chain saw to cut into those booze boxes. If they used the same glue on the space shuttle, we’d never had a problem.”

He turned the water off and reached into a fridge beneath the back bar. “Soup,” I said. “Just a Coke. I’m working.”

Soupy popped the caps off of two Blue Ribbons on an opener bolted to the sink. He slammed mine down so that foam slopped over the lip.

“Don’t be a pussy, Trap,” he said. He held his bottle out to me. “To Mrs. B.”

“Not fair.”

“She was a sweetheart.”

I clinked my bottle into his and took a swallow. I usually loved that first burning cold gulp of a beer, but this one was as lukewarm as a Detroit Lions fan.

“Did you pay the electric bill?” I said.

“Are you my mother?” Soupy said. “The lights are still on, aren’t they? Why don’t you go back to the fish-wrapper and fix this fucked-up town? Jesus, can’t the cops get anything right? People think they have to stay in their goddamn houses every night instead of going out for a drink with their friends. It’s tearing up the social fabric. Now Mrs. B is dead? It’s killing me.”

I had heard Soupy’s rant before. He must have heard “social fabric” on some talk show on the bar tube. While it was true that some people were staying closer to home, I doubted the old folks whose houses had been broken into had set foot in Enright’s since Reagan was president. But Soupy needed someone to blame besides himself.

“Who the hell would want to kill Mrs. B anyway?” he said.

“Nobody.”

“How’s Darlene doing? She talking to you now?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured she’d be back.”

“She’s not back the way you mean, but at least we’re talking.” I wanted to change the subject. “How about you? Get your mom’s house sold yet?”

Soupy’s mother had been dead for nearly two years, his father almost three, and Soupy was finally selling the house they had lived in for more than forty years. It sat on a few acres on the back side of the ridge above Tatch’s camp. Soupy hadn’t lived there in a long time and said he didn’t want to live anywhere his old man had lived. And he needed the money.

“Working on it,” he said. “Was over there yesterday, digging through Mom’s shit. What a pack rat. Stacks of magazines from the sixties, Liz goddamn Taylor on the cover, and she’s not as big as a house. And, oh, hey-I found the old Bobby Hull.”

“The table hockey game?”

“Yeah, man, with the little metal players. I thought it was long gone, but there it was, all covered with dust under the basement stairs. Way to go, Ma.”

As kids we’d played hundreds of games on that table. Soupy had nicknamed his goalie “Tommy Trapezoid.” When I started to play goalie myself, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, and soon shortened it to Trap, which he called me still.

“We’ll resume the series,” I said. “I’m up like two twenty to two hundred five.”

“Bullshit, man, I was way ahead. You couldn’t handle my right-wing-to-center move.”

“Whatever. When’s the garage sale?”

He’d been talking about having a garage sale for months. I couldn’t imagine Soupy actually going to the trouble of making price tags and haggling with old ladies over an ancient ottoman or toaster oven. More likely, he would load everything into his pickup and take it to the county landfill. Even more likely, load everything up and tote it around for a few months.

“Rethinking that,” he said.

“How come?”

“Not sure.”

He turned to the back bar and started rearranging schnapps bottles.

“Not sure about what?” I said.

He turned back around, glanced down the bar at Angie, lowered his voice.

“Really don’t want all these local assholes talking about my business,” Soupy said.

“You got a buyer?”

“Kind of out of nowhere. Yeah. Five above asking.”

That was a good price in Starvation, where houses for sale sat for months, even years, without an offer. The Campbells’ place, a two-bedroom with water-stained clapboard walls and a roof enveloped in vines, wasn’t even on the lake.

“They must love that knotty pine paneling, eh?” I said. “And the cigarette smell. Who’s the buyer? Do I know them?”

“I’m dealing with some law firm downstate.”

“You get me the name, I might be able to check it out for you.”

Soupy studied the rim of his bottle.

“Thanks. Don’t want to jinx it just yet,” he said.

You don’t know a guy for thirty years and not know when he’s bullshitting you. Especially Soupy, who, except when he had a hockey stick in his hands, wasn’t nearly as clever as he imagined. I let it go for the moment.

“Rats going to do it tonight?” he said.

“I think so.”

“Best thing that could happen around here, Rats win the state title. Good for the soul, good for the economy. Mrs. B would’ve wanted it that way.”

Mrs. B wouldn’t have given a rip, I thought. “I was just out giving Tex his skates,” I said.

Soupy flipped his empty at the overflowing barrel of garbage next to his office door. The bottle clanged off of another and nestled against a pizza box.

“Out where?” he said.

“Tatch’s.”

“Camp J.C.?”

“Yeah. A little spooky. Have you seen it?”

“Nope.” He reached into the fridge for another Blue Ribbon. “But I was out at Mom’s the other day and heard them making all sorts of noise.”

“They’re turning the hill into an ant farm. Got a backhoe going.”

“Bunch of crazy Jesus freaks, don’t want to pay their fair share.” It was Angie, shouting from her bar stool.

“Need a refill, Ange?” Soupy said.

She looked at her glass as if she hadn’t noticed it before. “Might as well.”

Soupy poured another tulip glass from the Busch Light tap and took it down the bar. When he came back, he said, “Where the hell was Tatch last night anyway?”

“He said family stuff.”

“Since when did Tatch give a shit about-” Soupy stopped and turned toward the front door as chilly air washed into the bar. Luke Whistler stepped in and closed the door.

“Gus,” he said. “Mr. Campbell.”

Soupy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and slapped a shot glass down on the bar. “Chief,” he said, filling the glass and nudging it in Whistler’s direction.

Whistler looked at it for a second, smiling uncomfortably, then picked it up and drank it back in one smooth swallow. As he set the glass back down, Soupy held the bottle up for a refill. Whistler pulled the glass away. “No thanks.”

“I guess you guys know each other,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be much of a reporter if I didn’t know the town barkeep,” Whistler said. Then he said to Soupy, “You’re going to get me in trouble with the boss.”

“Who, him?” Soupy said. “He’s a goalie. He doesn’t worry about anybody but himself and his little net. Ain’t that right, Trap?” He grabbed the beer I had pushed away and shoved it in front of me. “Drink up. People are dying of thirst in Cambodia.”

I grimaced through another tepid sip.

“Saw your truck outside,” Whistler said. “Got a little info on that thing you asked about.”

Nye-less? I thought. “That was fast.”

“I wish I could take credit. This Google thing is pretty nifty.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Soupy said.

“Nothing,” I said, standing up and feeling justified in keeping something from Soupy. “Can I have a Coke to go? And a bag of Better Mades?”

“Out of Coke,” he said. He snatched the potato chips off a rack on the back bar and threw the bag at me. I caught it in my left hand. “Nice save,” he said.

“You going over to the shop?” Whistler said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll meet you there in five.”

Soupy grabbed my bottle, downed the dregs, and flipped it at the trash barrel. It bounced off the pizza box and shattered on the floor.

“Fuck it,” I heard him say as I went out the door.

The Pilot front counter was buried. There were newspapers-the Free Press, the Times, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, shoppers from Kalkaska and Bellaire-the weekend mail, and our weekly bundle of memos from corporate headquarters in Traverse City.

Plus the remembrances for Mrs. B: Bouquets of flowers. Baskets of dried cherries and fudge. A frozen casserole that must have come from some well-meaning lady who didn’t understand that Mrs. B was Darlene’s mom, not mine, or who just didn’t know what else to do when someone died but bake something stuffed with cheese and potatoes and offer it to the bereaved.

I needed to hire a replacement but didn’t want to think about it yet.

Whistler was hunched over his keyboard, batting away with his two forefingers. The plastic clacks of the keystrokes were punctuated by the metallic clicking of a fat gold pinkie ring slapping the shift key. A foam cup of coffee steamed next to him; he wouldn’t touch it until the steam was gone and the coffee was about the temperature of that beer I’d choked down at Enright’s. He said he’d gotten used to lukewarm coffee on winter stakeouts in Detroit.

I went to my desk and dumped the mail across my blotter. There were three March of Dimes solicitations; the spring sports schedule from Pine County High School; and press releases from an advertising agency in Traverse, the Meijer supercenter in Charlevoix, the winter park in Petoskey. At the bottom of the pile lay a manila envelope tied with string. It contained the ad layouts for the next day’s paper. I already knew what it would tell me: We had barely any ads, which meant fewer pages and less space for stories.

“Hey,” Whistler said. “Just sent you a story.”

The shrinking news hole hadn’t been a problem until Whistler showed up and started writing more stories than we had space for. It forced me to trim his stories, or hold them for the next paper, or just keep them out altogether, hoping someone would find them on our website. Whistler had complained only once so far, when I held a story he’d written about a road commissioner’s secret financial interest in an asphalt company in favor of an advance story on the River Rats’ chances in a Christmas tournament.

“Public service ought to trump kids’ play,” he’d said.

Hockey, I had replied, is more than kids’ play in Starvation Lake.

Now I hit a key and Whistler’s story appeared on my computer screen.

Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank T. D’Alessio will challenge the incumbent sheriff-his boss-in November’s election, according to papers expected to be filed with the county clerk and disclosed exclusively to the Pine County Pilot.

Whistler was big on self-promotion, constantly mentioning the Pilot in his stories, what the Pilot knew “exclusively,” what it had reported before. I figured he did it because he had come from Detroit, where chest-thumping was part of the newspaper game. I usually sliced it out. Besides the AP guy in Grand Rapids, who seemed to come north only after the temperature hit eighty, we had no real competition except for Channel Eight. Readers and advertisers weren’t going away because we weren’t getting stories first. They were just going away.

I spun in my swivel chair to face Whistler. “Nice,” I said. “But do we have to do the commercial so high in the story?”

He propped a sneaker on the edge of his desk. “Why not tell the readers we’re kicking ass on their behalf?”

“I think they can see the paper they’re holding in their hands is the Pilot. Besides, doesn’t everyone know Frankie’s going to run?”

Whistler smiled the smile of a reporter who knew his boss was clueless. “According to the clips I read, everyone knew he was going to run last election, too. And he didn’t run.”

“He backed out because he knew he didn’t have a chance.”

“Correct. But everything’s different now, isn’t it?”

He had me there. The second and third paragraphs of his story were all about the break-ins, the murder, and Sheriff Dingus Aho’s inability so far to figure out what was going on. D’Alessio will love that, I thought.

“The story doesn’t quote D’Alessio and the department spokesman declined to comment,” I said. “So I’m guessing your main source is Frankie.”

Whistler shrugged. He took the pinkie ring off, rubbed the finger, put the ring back on. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources. But you should know that our friend from Channel Eight is snooping around, too.”

“Your friend,” I said. I tore open the bag of chips and popped a handful into my mouth. “You better hope D’Alessio doesn’t find out about you and your close relationship with her police scanner.”

“Ha,” Whistler said. “We better get that thing online, eh?”

“You think D’Alessio would do any better than Dingus?”

“I have no idea. Just a good story.”

I looked at the clock on the wall over the copier. Eight minutes after three. “Tawny Jane doesn’t have a program till five, but she could do a bulletin. Let me give this a quick read.”

I read the story through, fixed a few typos, and hit Send. A goateed twenty-two-year-old at the main printing plant would have it on the Media North website in minutes.

“Done,” I said. “Another Whistler scoop.”

“That’s nice,” he said, “but really, BFD, you know, all we did was beat another reporter.”

“Isn’t that the idea?”

“Well, yeah. ‘Always first.’ But it’s one thing to beat a competitor. They’re just journalists, after all. It’s another thing to beat the cops.”

“Right. Like your ex-wife.”

“Tags.”

“Yeah.”

“Which brings me to this,” Whistler said. He kicked away from his desk, rolled over to me, and leaned forward in his chair. He had a printout folded in one hand. “Did a little Internet search.”

“You are cutting-edge for an old man.”

“Funny. Write this down.”

I picked up a pen.

“N-I–L-U-S,” he spelled.

I looked at it written on my blotter.

“Nilus,” I said. “As in nye-less?”

“Nilus Moreau,” Whistler said. “Father Nilus Moreau.”

“A priest?”

“He was the pastor of St. Valentine’s.”

“Here? In Starvation Lake?”

“A long time ago. I only did a quick search. Been spending most of my time calling around to cop shops that might be hearing echoes from Dingus and his guys.” He handed me the printout. “Found an obit in the Marquette Mining Journal, 1971.”

I scanned it quickly, three short paragraphs on an inside page of the Mining Journal from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Father Nilus Moreau had come to Starvation Lake in the early 1930s before it was even called Starvation Lake. He led the effort to build a new church at St. Valentine’s in 1951. He died in a nursing home in Calumet at the age of sixty-nine.

“So what?” I said.

“Where did you get this Nilus tip?” Whistler said.

I thought of Darlene. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources either. But it wasn’t D’Alessio.”

“OK. But you ought to run it down from here, don’t you think?”

“Fair enough.”

A priest? I thought, and an image of the crosses in the trees at Tatch’s camp popped into my head.

“Speaking of churches,” I said, “I was out at that born-again camp today.”

Whistler’s white eyebrows went up. “Whatever for?”

“One of the kids on our hockey team lives there. Took him his skates.”

“I’ll bet that was interesting.”

“A little weird, actually. Reminds me: Were you trying to get the records on that land?”

I could tell Whistler hadn’t expected that question. “I might have seen them if the wench clerk had let me.”

“You didn’t say anything to me.”

“Sorry, boss. I always go looking for the documents. The docs can’t kiss your ass and buy you lunch and make you write like a wimp, like those auto reporters back in-” He caught himself, perhaps remembering I had once covered that industry. “Oh, sorry.”

“I wish writing like a wimp had been my problem.”

“Anyway, I got nowhere with Verna the Vault. But it’s a story, right? The born-agains want to get out of paying taxes, or at least pay less. Kind of a sore subject in this economy.”

“Yep. They apparently have a lawyer now, an out-of-towner named Breck.”

Whistler sat back in his chair. “Breck?”

“Like the shampoo. Didn’t get the first name. Know him?”

“Nope.”

“Seems like he’s running things out there. They’ve got a backhoe tearing up that hill.”

“Really? Building themselves a church?”

“Nah. Something about a septic field leaking into their land. They’re going to try to use it to squeeze the county for some cash.”

“You can’t get blood from a stone.”

“Right.” I ate another chip. “But they might be making some hay about it at the drain commission tomorrow. You want to go? This Breck guy’s supposed to be there.”

“The drain commission? Hmm.” Whistler pedaled his chair back to his desk. “I’m going to be a good guy and let you do it, how’s that?”

“Thanks a million.”

“But tell you what. I’ve got a source in the archdiocese from covering the pope’s visit to Detroit way back when. If he’s not dead, I’ll call him, see what I can find out about this Nilus character.”

“Did you check the old papers downstairs?”

“In the morgue?”

“Nobody calls it a morgue anymore.”

“What you got downstairs ought to be one, as cold and damp as it is. I got allergies. The last time I went down there, I sneezed for a week.”

“I’ll look. There’s probably something.”

Whistler stood up. “I’ve got to see a man about a horse,” he said. “But one thing. If you’re poking around back in whenever Nilus was here, you might stumble over my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. She lived nearby for a little while in the forties. Matter of fact, I lived here, but we moved away when I was a little shaver.”

So Mom’s recollection of a Whistler in Starvation Lake was not mistaken. I said, “But didn’t you tell my mother-”

“I know, I fibbed to your mom. I’m sorry. See, unlike your mom, mine was nothing to be proud of. Spent most of her life in a bottle. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t know how well your mom knew her, and I didn’t want to get into it.”

“Gotcha.”

“How is your mom anyway?”

“Getting through it. I’ve got to check on her.”

Whistler yanked keys from his vest pocket. “Will let you know what I find out. Let’s get there before the cops, eh, boss?”

I finished up the next day’s paper. Wrote a few headlines, some photo captions, a brief on the high school girls’ basketball team going to Big Rapids for a game. Then I went to the back of the newsroom and descended a set of creaky stairs to the basement.

At the bottom I reached up and pulled on a string that lit a single overhead bulb. The air tasted of chalk. Black binders filled with old newspapers lay in racks along two walls. The binders went back only about forty years, so I doubted they’d help me much. In the darkest corner of the room stood a pair of wooden file cabinets, painted green. Index cards taped on the drawers were marked with letters in alphabetical order. I pulled open the drawer marked Na-No and flipped through the file folders inside.

I found the file I wanted about two-thirds deep in the drawer: “Moreau, Rev. Nilus.” I pulled it out and opened it, praying it would hold a yellowed, cut-out clip or two. The file was empty except for an index card. I pulled the card out and walked across the floor to read beneath the lightbulb. The typewriting on the card said:

St. Valentine’s Welcomes New Pastor, November 2, 1933.

Nilus Expands Orphanage with Children from Midland, January 20, 1934.

Town Searches for Missing Nun; “No Stone Unturned,” Priest Vows, p. A-1, August 17, 1944.

Hope Ebbing in Search for Nun, p. A-1, August 28, 1944.

“Holy shit,” I said. I flipped the card over. The list continued on the back:

Gardener Arrested in Disappearance of Nun, p. A-1, August 5, 1950. cf. Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail, p. A-3, August 7, 1950.

Gardener Arrested in Disappearance of Nun, p. A-1, August 5, 1950. cf. Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail, p. A-3, August 7, 1950.

This had to be the nun Dingus had told me about, and the guy who’d gotten his throat cut in the jail. I did the math in my head. Mrs. B and Mom were the same age, sixty-six. They had known each other since they went to the school at St. Val’s together. The school had closed sometime in the 1970s. Mom and Mrs. B would’ve been eleven years old when the nun vanished. I wondered if the nun had taught at St. Val’s, if Nilus had. Did he know Mrs. B as a little girl?

I flipped the index card back to the front. A faded blue stamp in the upper right hand corner said MICROFILM.

“Shit,” I said.

I slipped the card into my shirt pocket. I ran up the stairs and sat down at my desk and picked up my phone. I felt a little burst of that energy I’d felt at the Detroit Times whenever I thought I was on to a good story. I wanted to tell someone. For a second, I thought about calling Whistler and telling him too bad about your allergies.

Instead, I dialed the clerk’s office.

“Pine County Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I hung up and looked at the clock. Three forty-five. The pregame skate had already begun. I had to get going. I dialed again.

“Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I couldn’t afford to wait again. “Vicky, please.”

“Vicky?” her mother said. “Is this a personal call?”

I screwed up by hesitating. “No. Not really.”

“Not really? Well then, perhaps I can help you if whatever you need is doable within the next hour and fourteen minutes. After that, I’m afraid you’ll have to call tomorrow.”

“It’s Gus Carpenter, Verna.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Can I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“May I?”

“May I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“She’s busy at the moment. How can I help you?”

If I told Verna Clark what I really wanted, which was to look at the microfilm of those newspaper clips in the county archive, she would have informed me that I would need to come to the office the next morning and fill out a request form and then wait a week or ten days or whatever she decided would be long enough to frustrate the hell out of me. Silently I cursed the Media North bean counter who had decided the Pilot ’s oldest stories could be most efficiently stored where Verna could lord it over them. The Pilot actually paid the county for this privilege.

I had to throw her off somehow. So I said, “I need to ask Vicky about a recipe.”

“A recipe? This is not Audrey’s Diner.”

“Yes, but-”

“I’m sorry. Is there any official county business I could help you with, sir?”

“Could you tell your daughter I called?”

“Excuse me?”

Verna Clark hated to be reminded that her deputy also happened to be her daughter. Her opponent in her last election had run an attack campaign based largely on nepotism, and Verna had been forced to nearly drain her election fund defending herself. She even had to stoop to buying ads in the Pilot, which must have infuriated her.

“Could you please-”

“I heard you the first time, Mr. Carpenter. The Pine County Clerk’s Office will welcome your request in person. We close in one hour and thirteen minutes and reopen tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

She hung up. But I had gotten her to speak my name aloud. My phone rang again a few minutes later. Vicky Clark whispered it: “Are you ready for chicken and dumplings?”