The Skeleton Box sl-3

by Bryan Gruley

  When I walked in, Mom was talking in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  “Shush,” Mrs. B said. “You’re imagining things, Beatrice.”

  “Why aren’t they taking things?” Mom said. “Can you-” She cut herself off when she noticed me coming in.

  “Maybe they are,” Mrs. B said, “and the police are just keeping it quiet.”

  I set the fresh Pilot on the table where they sat on either side of a corner behind cups of tea.

  “Good morning, Gussy,” Mom said. “Do you want some tea?”

  “No thanks. Keeping what quiet?”

  “You,” Mrs. B said, “until I get my hug.”

  I smiled and went over and hugged her from above, smelling her hair spray mixed with perfume. She looked dressy in a silver necklace bedecked with peridots over a lavender turtleneck. She had been to nine o’clock Mass.

  Mom had not. My mother had stopped going to church when I was a boy. She never said why and I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t like going anyway. I figured her adoptive family had worn the Catholic out of her, with years of grade school, weekday Masses, then years working at the church rectory. She didn’t talk much about any of it. Every few years, Mrs. B would drag her to Mass, and Mom would swear off it again.

  Still, she liked the Epistles and Gospels and Psalms. Mrs. B stopped by every Sunday to fill Mom in on the readings over tea and coffee cake. “I’m happy to hear what God has to say,” I’d heard Mom declare a hundred times. “But I can do without the priests grubbing for money. I give them plenty at bingo anyway.”

  On that Sunday morning, I helped myself to a slice of poppy-seed Danish and gazed out at the evergreens along Mom’s bluff. They threw blue-hued shadows on the untrampled backyard snow. I imagined how different they would look in summer, how they’d dapple the grass shimmering green in the sun. Mom and Mrs. B chattered away about a recipe for vegetable lasagna, which sounded terrible to me.

  Mom had read somewhere, probably something ping-ponging around the Internet, that vegetables were good for people with memory issues. She’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, so I’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, because I made sure to visit Mom for dinner at least twice a week, less for the cooking, which wasn’t as good as it once was, than to check in.

  “Are you making it tonight?” I said. “Maybe I’ll bring some Italian sausage to go with it.”

  “Tonight is bingo at St. Val’s,” Mrs. B said, pushing her goggle-sized glasses up on her nose. “There’s a potluck before.”

  Mom was frowning. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

  “I have a nice pot of goulash already made, dear.”

  “I’m not sure I’m feeling up to it.”

  “Oh, boo, Beatrice. You have to get those old bones up from that chair and out of this stuffy house.” As Mom of late had found less energy for going out, Phyllis had happily become her scold, because she thought Mom needed to get out, needed to see people, needed to keep her mind working. She reached over and patted my mother’s hand. “I’ll pick you up at six sharp.”

  Mom stared at the hand Mrs. B had placed on hers. I heard snowmobiles whining their way past the house on the lake below.

  “I don’t like church,” Mom said.

  “We’re not going to church. We’re going to bingo.”

  “We shouldn’t leave the house on bingo night.”

  “How else are we going to go to bingo?” Mrs. B said. “Maybe Gus will babysit.”

  “What about my house?” I said, grinning.

  “Right,” Mom said. “That’s what the burglar must be looking for-smelly old hockey equipment.”

  “I’ll have my lovely daughter swing by,” Mrs. B said. “I think she’s on duty tonight.”

  “I have a game,” I said. Mom was staring at Mrs. B’s hand now. “Mom?”

  “I don’t like the mothballs,” she said.

  Mrs. B gave me a reassuring glance, then addressed Mom. “There are no mothballs, Bea. That was a long time ago.”

  “We kept the robes in mothballs.”

  She was talking about the job she’d had at the church rectory, many years before I was born. She did this from time to time, slipped back into the long ago like falling backward off of our dive raft into the lake. On recent Sunday mornings, I had noticed, she was more likely to go back a long way. Then she’d suddenly arrive back in the moment, as if she’d emerged from a time machine, as alert as if she had never left.

  “Yes, I know,” Mrs. B said. “The mothballs are gone now.”

  Mom pursed her lips, thinking. I hesitated as I might with someone having a nightmare. I had heard you weren’t supposed to wake them up. I didn’t know what to do. The doctors weren’t sure, either.

  “Mom?” I finally said. “Are you all right?”

  “Bingo?” she said. “Phyllis?”

  “That’s right, tonight,” Mrs. B said. “I’ll be here at six.”

  Mom folded her arms. “Call me at five. We’ll see.”

  I recalled that morning and how sweet Mrs. B had smelled, as I steered my pickup truck west on M-72 through sleet as thick as oatmeal.

  I had hesitated to go, but Dingus, who probably didn’t want reporters around anyway, had assured me a nurse and a deputy would stay with Mom through the night.

  I pushed my truck as fast as I safely could on the slippery road to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. I had tried to call Darlene on the way but she didn’t answer.

  My cell phone burbled as I swung south onto U.S. 31.

  “Darlene?”

  “Dude.” It was Soupy. In the background I heard laughter and music and clinking glass. He was at Enright’s, the bar he owned on Main Street. “Man, I’ve been trying to call.”

  “Had my cell off.”

  “One of your mom’s neighbors just came in.” He stopped, sounding choked up, but mostly drunk. “I’m so fucking sorry. Mrs. B was the best.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who the hell would want to do that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “As you might expect.”

  “Mrs. B was her best pal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re-Hold on.” Soupy muffled his phone but I heard him anyway, taking an order for a round of shots. He came back on. “Sorry, man. I mean, what was I saying?”

  “Nothing. I’ve got to go.”

  “Jesus, Trap, let’s get”-he was choking up again, one of his late-night jags coming on-“let’s get together tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  I tossed the phone on the passenger seat. Two hours from closing time and Soupy was shitfaced in his own bar.

  I steered along the shore of the east bay, trying to focus on the driving, trying to think of anything but how it could have been Mom instead of Mrs. B on the coroner’s table.

  I imagined Mrs. B cutting through Mom’s yard in the dark that evening with her casserole in one hand, her other arm outstretched for balance as she minced through the snow in her brown galoshes with the undone buckles clacking. She would have let herself in and slipped off her galoshes before sliding the casserole into the oven. Hello, honey, she would have said. Always honey or dear or sweetheart or sweetie-pie.

  Sweetie-pie.

  They were the first words I had heard when I awoke in a hospital bed after getting my tonsils out. I was seven years old, somewhere in Detroit, a faraway city with big buildings and the Red Wings and doctors who promised my throat would stop hurting.

  Do you want ice cream? Chocolate or vanilla or strawberry? Mrs. B asked as she held both my hands in one of hers, smiling down at me. Your mother will meet us downstairs soon. Chocolate? Would you like chocolate, honey?

  My father had died barely a year before in that hospital, and Mom could not bear to go inside, so Mrs. B would go with me, and Mom would be waiting when I came out.

  Can I have two? I asked. May I? May I have two? Of course, swee
tiepie. Mrs. B fed me vanilla and strawberry in slow, alternating spoonfuls, telling me to let it melt in my mouth before I swallowed so it wouldn’t hurt as much. I watched her face as she fed me. I swirled the ice cream around on my tongue. I forgot about my throat.

  Who could have killed that kind, precious woman?

  I pounded the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. My throat constricted. A sob forced its way up. Then came another, and another, and finally I couldn’t stop them.

  I pulled my truck onto the shoulder along the bay. But I veered a little too quickly, forgetting the sleet, and my rear end fishtailed left and right and then left again and I felt the truck slipping and grinding toward the blackness of the water. “Goddammit!” I shouted, stomping the brakes and wrenching the steering wheel to get one of my tires back onto the asphalt.

  The truck crunched to a halt just short of the knife-edged rocks along the water, my headlight beams disappearing in the gloom beyond. “Fuck me,” I said, and dropped my head to the steering wheel, crying to the plinking of my hazard lights.

  FOUR

  Sorry. Hospital’s closed. Nobody’s going in.”

  Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood with his arms crossed in front of the double glass doors at Munson’s emergency entrance.

  “Hospitals don’t close, Frankie,” I said.

  “They do today. Especially to vultures.”

  As he swayed to and fro on his heels, his forehead moved in and out of the light thrown by an overhead lamp.

  I held up my empty hands. “No pen, no notebook. I just want to see Darlene.”

  She was standing with her back to me down the corridor behind D’Alessio, talking to a nurse. Doctors and cops milled in the hall beyond her.

  “Your mom doing OK?” D’Alessio asked.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Good. Go home and take care of her.”

  “I need to see Darlene.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s with her mother. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  “Have they pronounced her dead?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “A little ticked you’re not working the scene, Frankie?”

  “What scene? A bunch of people stumbling over each other. I’m fine right here.”

  What an asshole, I thought. But that was Frankie. I’d played hockey against him for years, and he was no different on the ice. My pals in the Midnight Hour Men’s League referred to him as a short little prick with a short little prick.

  “So when are you going to announce?” I said. “Noon tomorrow would be perfect, don’t you think? By then, every voter in the county will have heard what happened tonight.”

  D’Alessio was the subject-and probably the source-of rumors about a possible election challenge to Dingus. The two had never gotten along. For many years, running against Dingus, who stayed on budget and made sure locals didn’t get too many speeding tickets, would have been futile. The burglaries had changed that. Murder would change it more.

  “No comment,” D’Alessio said.

  “Right. So I won’t quote you in the Pilot on your fellow deputies stumbling around and you let me duck in and see Darlene. OK?”

  “How about, Sorry about what happened but go home.”

  “Whoa,” came a voice behind me.

  “Mr. Whistler,” D’Alessio said.

  “Deputy,” Luke Whistler said.

  Of course they knew each other. Whistler had gotten a few scoops on the Bingo Night stories and I figured his source was D’Alessio, who was leaking stuff to make Dingus look bad. Whistler hadn’t had anything juicy for a while, so I assumed Dingus was now keeping D’Alessio in the dark.

  “What’s going on here?” Whistler said.

  He wore a drab down vest patched in four or five places over a faded navy-and-orange sweatshirt announcing the Detroit Tigers as American League Champions, 1984. Sleet had mussed his white hair and streaked it dark along the sides of his boxy head. His retiree’s gut pushed the sweatshirt’s belly pocket out so that I could see the outline of a tape recorder inside.

  “Sorry, no reporters allowed,” D’Alessio said.

  “Of course not,” Whistler said. “Big story. No reporters. Who needs reporters?” He waggled a ballpoint pen in one hand and clutched a notebook in the other. He looked at me. “Sorry, boss. This can’t be easy for you.”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Your mom’s all right?”

  “Yeah. Where were you?”

  “Stopped at the cop shop.” He held up his notebook, open to a blank page. “Here’s what I got-squat. Nobody talking. How about you, Deputy?”

  “Talk to the sheriff,” D’Alessio said. “Anyway, your boss isn’t here for the big story. He came to see his ex-girlfriend.”

  Darlene Esper, nee Bontrager, had been my first love. We’d broken up the first time, years before, when I’d left Starvation to be a big-shot reporter in Detroit. After I’d come home, chastened, I found Darlene in an unhappy marriage, and we found our way back to each other. But by the time her divorce was final, we were apart again. I’d come to the hospital more out of a sense of duty to her mother than to her. At least that’s what I told myself.

  “Sure he did,” Whistler said. “Her mother’s dead. I’d just like to talk to the next of kin, whoever it is. That’s what reporters do.”

  “Parasites.”

  “Been called worse by my exes, believe me. But you’ll be the first to pick up the paper and look for your name, won’t you, Deputy?” Whistler turned to me. “Shall we go?”

  I took a last look into the hospital. There was Darlene, halfway down the corridor, facing my way. She raised a hand in a halfhearted wave, bit her lip. Then a doctor approached her and she disappeared around a corner.

  “How’d the game go tonight?” D’Alessio said. “I was working.”

  D’Alessio skated for the Ice Picks.

  “You had no goalie, so we won easy,” I said.

  “Where was Tatch?”

  “Hell if I know. Probably with his fellow born-agains.”

  “Frigging goalies.”

  As I pulled out of the lot behind Whistler’s gigantic sedan-an Olds Toronado, black with red pinstripes, 1970 or 1971-the Channel Eight TV van was trying to pull in.

  Tawny Jane Reese was hanging out of the front passenger window, yelling and gesturing angrily at two Traverse City cops waving the van away from the lot. She stopped for a few seconds to give Whistler a look as he slid past. It usually felt good to see my competitors hitting a stone wall. Tonight, nothing felt good.

  I parked on Main in front of the Pilot. The sleet had stopped. A snowplow’s brake lights made red needle points in the dark two blocks down. I stood on the sidewalk watching the plow veer along the lakeshore, toward Mom’s house.

  The street lamps had gone black at ten p.m., one of the austerity measures adopted by the town council. The late night darkness lured high school kids out for impromptu beer bashes on the beach, which required police visits, which probably cost more than the council had saved on shutting the lamps off. It made for decent copy in the Pilot.

  I let my eyes adjust to the darkness until I could make out the snow-mottled beach, the frozen gray scar of the lake’s edge beyond. The two-lane street stretched back from the beach, flanked on both sides by two-story clapboard-and-brick buildings. The marina, a bait shop, Repicky Realty, a vacated lawyer’s office. An abandoned movie theater, Fortune Drug, Kepsel’s Hardware, a vacated dentist office, Sally’s Dry Cleaning and Floral, and Kate’s Cakes, closed for the winter. Between them all, empty storefronts like missing teeth in a hockey player’s mouth. Behind the shops on my right, the Hungry River flowed unseen beneath a crust of ice.

  I smelled dampness in the air.

  Fuzzy amber light glowed in the front window of Enright’s Pub. I wondered if Soupy had forgotten to turn it off or had just passed out in his office. Two doors down, Audrey’s Diner was dark, but in an
hour or two, the lights would flick on and the proprietor would bustle about preparing for the breakfast rush of old men and their old wives.

  On this particular morning at Audrey’s, there would be less of the usual jabber about the River Rats’ chances in the state playoffs, or how the weather was helping or hurting the tourist business of snowmobilers up from downstate. The men and women would lean on the counter together and listen as the little radio Audrey kept over the griddle told them that one of their own, a woman who had sat with them eating French toast with powdered sugar, never syrup, had been found dead in the home of Bea Carpenter.

  It was my job to tell them what had happened and why. Whether they wanted to hear it or not. Whether I wanted to or not. Through the Pilot window I saw light bleeding from the newsroom into the reception area. My watch said 2:27 a.m.

  “Shit,” I said, and fitted my key into the door.

  Luke Whistler kept tapping on his keyboard as I threw my jacket over my chair and sat. I looked at my blank computer screen, considered having to write the obituary of Phyllis Marie Snyder Bontrager. Behind me, the tapping stopped. I heard the deadening hum of the fluorescent lamps overhead.

  “Hey, guy,” Whistler said.

  I heard him from behind the notes and files and newspapers and fast-food wrappers heaped on his gray metal desk. All I could see of him over the pile was the sheet-white top of his head.

  “Yeah?”

  He leaned back so that I could see his face. “Really sorry for what happened,” he said. “I couldn’t really say much back there with the copper.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You want to figure this out, boss?” He pushed his swivel chair out from behind his desk, the metal chair wheels crinkling the sugar packets scattered on the tile floor. “Huh? Me and you?”

  I let out a breath. I didn’t want to break down in front of Whistler.

  “Yeah. Hell yeah.”