The Skeleton Box (19 page)

Philo never brought it up again.

Next to Mrs. B’s computer stood three photographs in fake wooden frames she probably had bought off the dollar shelf at the drugstore. One was of Darlene, looking solemn on the day of her graduation from police academy, her hair in a bun, her deputy’s hat cradled in the crook of an elbow. Another showed her as a girl crouched inside an inner tube on a boat dock and throwing her pigtailed head back to laugh as her father tickled her from behind.

The last photo was of Mrs. B with my mother and Soupy’s mom. The frame was etched all around with the words “friends” and “forever.” The women were standing with their arms around one another, my mother at the center, in front of a minivan. I tilted the picture to see their faces better in the shadows. They were all smiling.

I had taken that picture.

It was a Friday in July and I had taken a long weekend off from the
Times
to come north and see Mom and relax by the lake. I was sitting down the bluff on her dock with the
Pilot
and a cup of coffee when I heard a woman’s shriek and then another. I dropped the paper and ran up to see Mrs. Campbell, all two-hundred-some pounds of her, lying on her back next to a minivan in Mom’s driveway. She was laughing. Mom and Mrs. B were doubled over laughing. “Curly, Curly, Curly,” Mrs. B kept saying between gasps of laughter, using Mrs. Campbell’s nickname.

“What’s going on?” I said, and all of them laughed even harder. Mrs. Campbell got to one knee. She had a wicker purse the size of an Easter basket looped around one arm. Tears glistened on her plump cheeks. Mom and Mrs. B helped her to her feet. They’d been trying, without success, to lift her into the minivan. “Dear lord, Louise,” Mom said. “If we don’t get you in that van, you’re never going to win that million dollars you promised Angus.” That brought more peals of laughter. I shook my head and was starting back down to the lake when they asked me to snap a photo.

They had been friends for as long as I could remember. Mrs. Campbell would refer to them as the Three Musketeers and Mom would say, on cue, “Oh no, dear, we are definitely the Three Stooges.” Mrs. Campbell was Curly, Mrs. B was Larry, and my mother, of course, was Moe.

Sometime after Soupy’s dad died, July 4, 1997, something happened between them that Mom chose not to speak of, at least not with me. Suddenly they no longer were an inseparable trio. Mom still did things with Mrs. B, and Mrs. B with Mrs. Campbell, but Moe and Curly no longer spoke. Thanksgiving at our house that year was quiet, with too much room around the table in Mom’s dining room. I missed Mrs. Campbell’s creamed onions and cinnamon chocolate cake.

When I asked Mom why Soupy and his mother hadn’t come, she told me she’d simply decided to have a smaller dinner and, as was her practiced habit, avoided further discussion. Darlene and I weren’t really talking at the time, so I didn’t bother asking her, but I did query Soupy,
who shrugged and said, “Hell, I don’t know. Chick weirdness. Even when they get old, that shit never stops. They’ll get over it.”

They never did, as far as I could tell. When Mrs. Campbell died the next year, Mom made a brief appearance at the wake but didn’t attend the funeral Mass. “You know I don’t go to church,” she told me.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “What about Soupy?”

“It’s none of Alden’s business,” she said.

“What is none of his business?”

“It’s none of yours either. I saw Alden at the funeral home. He doesn’t expect to see me at church, but that shouldn’t stop you.”

Now I picked up the photograph from Mrs. B’s counter. I looked at the smiles the women wore, lacking any trace of vanity or goofy self-consciousness, unlike the smiles men plastered on for photographs. How sad, I thought, that only my mother now remained, that she might never smile so purely again.

I put the photograph back.

I picked up the mail bundle and the rubber band snapped in my hand, the mail spilling across the floor. “Shit,” I said, bending to pick it up.

There were two manila envelopes from adult education at Kepshire Community College; a narrow cardboard box, probably containing a pen in the shape of a baseball bat, from the Detroit Tigers Fan Club of Antrim County; and fifteen or sixteen white envelopes of varying sizes. I riffled through those. One said “Attorney Discipline Board, State of Michigan.” Was some local lawyer in trouble? I slipped it out of the stack.

It was addressed to Lucas B. Whistler.

If I had thought about it for more than five seconds, I probably would have set it on the counter or on Whistler’s desk. I told myself it was also addressed to the
Pine County Pilot,
of which I was an official representative. Nowhere was it marked “Personal and Confidential.” I remembered the conversation I’d had with Philo about expenses.

I tore the envelope open. I flicked on a desk lamp next to Mrs. B’s computer and scanned the page in my hand. It was dated the prior Friday.

Beneath Whistler’s address it said: “RE: Case No. B-MI-8675309-01. Wayland E. Breck.”

I looked over my shoulder through the newsroom door at Whistler’s desk. At Enright’s, I’d asked Whistler if he knew Breck.
Nope,
he had said.

The letter didn’t say much: “This is to acknowledge receipt of your February 23, 2000, request for additional information regarding Case No. B-MI-8675309-01. We will evaluate your request and reply as promptly as required by law. Please be advised that, due to staffing shortages necessitated by budget reductions, our backlogs are currently running longer than usual.”

That was all.

I put the letter back in the torn envelope and stood there thinking. Twilight was falling on Main Street. The dim glow from Enright’s glimmered on the
Pilot
’s front window.

Whistler had known Breck, or had known about him, before I had. For some reason he’d kept that from me. I took out my cell phone to dial Whistler, then changed my mind.

I went back to my desk and slid the letter beneath some file folders in a drawer. I wanted to know more about Breck; more about his grandfather; more about Nilus and his women; more about who was behind Eagan, MacDonald & Browne’s stealthy efforts to buy up the land above the northeastern corner of the lake; and if and how it was all connected. I thought I might make a quick run downstate. And I would not tell Whistler.

I made a mental note to call Millie Bontrager after dinner and ask if she could stay with Mom the next day. Then I sat down at my computer and called up the last e-mail from Joanie McCarthy. I hit Reply and typed:

Joanie,

Good to hear from you. Mom’s as OK as can be expected. Thanks for asking. I hear you’re kicking some butt down there. That’s great—but no surprise. Matter of fact, I might be able to use your help. Call me asap.

My pickup truck fishtailed on the slippery washboard of Trimble Trail, an ignored gravel road that meandered through the low hills south of the lake.

Mom sat next to me, watching the trees pass.

We had had a quiet dinner of cheese-and-mushroom pizza I had picked up at Roselli’s. Mom had barely eaten. She had seemed preoccupied. Why do you keep looking out the windows? I had asked, and she had told me to finish my pizza. How was your day? I had said, and she said her day would not be over until she ran the errand she wanted me to run with her. I had asked her where we were going and why and she had said, with great and specific determination,
Just do what I say for once, please.

So I did. If Mom was imagining something, it wouldn’t hurt to indulge her. If she was not, then I wanted to know what it was. Maybe it would shed some light on the priest and the dead nun and whoever had killed her and what, if anything, it all had to do with the death of Mrs. B. Or, more likely, it would tell me nothing.

I pulled the truck over just after Trimble veered north in the direction of the lake and just before it began to run parallel to South Beach opposite a thick pine stand. I parked far enough away from the snowdrifts on Mom’s side of the car so that she had plenty of room to get out. It didn’t matter that the car sat near the middle of the road. Snowplows were the only vehicles that plied Trimble and, if Pine County’s finance manager had his way, they wouldn’t be seen on that road again either.

Mom stood at the edge of the road shoulder, peering into the woods. I closed her door, which she didn’t seem to notice was open. I glanced up the slope creeping from her feet to a ridge in the gloom. I knew there was a footpath that wound up through the trees, but it was barely visible in the snow.

“Why didn’t we just take Horvath?” I said.

“For the same reason I wanted to stay at your place,” Mom said. “The nosy police.” She squinted in the direction of the snow-covered path. “Did you bring the flashlight?”

“Yes.” I flicked it on, pointed it into the forest. Snow glistened on the trees.

“Your father used to come up this way when he got off work early and didn’t want me to know. As if I couldn’t smell the beer and cigars on him when he came in.”

“Boys will be boys.”

“For ever and ever.” She took the flashlight. “Let’s go.”

I tried to take her by one arm but she shook me off. I actually wasn’t worried about her being able to make the climb. Her body, although frailer than a year before, was still in decent shape for a woman going on sixty-seven. It was her mind that worried me, whether it worried her or not.

We trudged our way up in snow to our knees. Mom’s left foot kept slipping on the incline, and I noticed she had tucked her corduroys into black rubber galoshes that I had worn as a boy. For Christmas I’d bought her a pair of insulated, waterproof boots for something like ninety bucks at a mall in Traverse City. Why hadn’t she worn those? She kept turning the flashlight on and off. She’d stop and turn it on, then turn it back off and we’d stumble ahead for five or six steps, then she’d turn it on again.

“Mother,” I said, “just keep it on.”

“Someone will see,” she hissed.

“Who? The police?”

“They’re watching.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Mom?”

“Quiet.”

We reached the top of the ridge. Beyond the treetops I could see the lake’s frozen expanse, as blank as fresh newsprint. An image flashed in my mind of Soupy and me squatting there on a summer night, drinking the Goebels or Black Labels we’d stolen out of some left-open garage, and plotting the rest of the evening without a thought to the rest of our lives. Mom pointed the flashlight down the slope. The beam fell on the trapezoidal white shroud of Dad’s extra garage, his beloved tree house. Only a flagpole jutting up from the outer deck had gone untouched by snow.

My cell phone blurted from my jacket pocket.

“Gus,” Mom said. “What are you thinking?”

“Sorry.” I pulled the phone out. She grabbed at it. I yanked it away.

“Off now,” she said, handing me the flashlight. “You go first on the downhill.”

She grabbed a fistful of the back of my jacket and followed me down to Dad’s garage. In the faraway distance I heard the sound of a police siren. Probably chasing a drunken driver, I thought. Whistler would probably hear about it on the scanner.

Mom gave me a sudden shove from behind. “Get going,” she said.

Inside the garage I flipped the switch to turn on the overhead light, but Mom reached around me—“No”—and snapped it off. She felt her way to the Bonneville’s trunk. She dug in her coat pocket and produced a set of three keys attached to a fob holding a photograph of our long-dead dogs, Blinky and Fats. The chain, which also held a key for the basement door and one for the boathouse, usually hung on a key-shaped wooden rack next to the back door at Mom’s house. She held the keys in front of her face and selected a red one and inserted it into the lock on the Bonnie’s trunk lid.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “It’s already unlocked.”

I stepped around to where she was standing. The trunk lid came open with a rusty groan. The smells of oil and hockey mildew wafted out. Normally a tiny light on the underside of the lid would have blinked on. But it remained dark.

“Ah,” I said. “That’s why the battery was dead. I didn’t close the lid tight.”

“Flashlight,” Mom said.

I pulled it out and pointed the beam into the trunk, as big as a bathtub. I pictured it stuffed with five hockey bags and half a dozen sticks and, hidden beneath the hockey gear, three or four stay-cold packs of Stroh’s for trips downstate in our last season with the Rats. On a wool blanket rolled up in the back of the trunk lay one of Soupy’s old hockey sticks, a Montreal Surprise.

Mom pulled the stick away, undid the blanket, tossed it aside. “Help me here,” she said, propping a knee on the Bonnie’s bumper so she could reach farther into the trunk.

“I can do it,” I said.

“Just help me get up here.”

I grasped Mom beneath her left arm and hoisted her onto the bumper. She ducked her head and leaned in. I heard the siren again, actually two sirens, closer than before. Stupid souse must be shitfaced enough to think he can get away, I thought.

Mom scraped something across the floor of the trunk. She rose up, careful to keep her head from banging the underside of the trunk lid. “There,” she said. In her right hand she held a gray metal lockbox with a slot for a key and a handle folded flat on the top. She turned her head toward the garage door, hearing the sirens.

“Get me down, please.”

I helped her out. She reached up and brought the trunk lid down. It bounced lightly on the latch and stayed open half an inch, as it must have been when Mom first tried to unlock it.

“Hold on,” I said, moving between Mom and the trunk.

“Hurry, son.”

I lifted the lid a foot, flattened my hands on it, and slammed it down. “You’ve got to really hammer it. Thing never worked right.”

Mom handed me the lockbox. “Take this and go,” she said.

It didn’t feel as if it had much in it. “What is this?”

Mom reached into the neck of her coat, down into her sweater, and came out with another key. This one, blue, looked newly copied.

“And this,” she said. “Now you have to—Wait.”