by Bryan Gruley
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.”
“What’s going on?”
“Listen,” she said. Her eyes darted toward the oval windows on the upper half of the garage door. “Take this somewhere safe. Do not let anyone know you have it.”
I looked at the box. “Why can’t I-”
She pressed the blue key into my palm. “The police are coming. Listen now.”
“They’re coming here? No, why?”
“I lost my boot. They found my boot.”
“Who? What boot?”
“The police.”
She went to the garage door and got up on her toes to look out through the ovals. I saw blue light flicker across her forehead.
“Holy shit, Mom,” I said. “What’s going
on?”
“I thought it was over,” she said, coming back to me. “It’s not over. That person came for me and got Phyllis instead.”
“Who’s ‘they’? Why would-”
She slapped a palm down hard on the lockbox. “If you want to know about Nilus and about Nonny, you have to take this and get out of here now. Go.”
“Are they going to arrest you? Who’s Nonny?”
“I’ll be fine. You must go, Gus. Go now.”
She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around my chest and hugged me as hard as she’d hugged me in years. When she pulled her face away, I saw dampness on her cheeks. “You have work to do,” she said.
I could have stood there and opened the door for the police, asked them what the hell was going on. I had no idea why they were descending but, as crazy as it seemed, the fact that they were there made me think my mother was not, at this particular moment, out of her mind. Her eyes were clear. She was speaking in her regular staccato. This wasn’t the mother who left the teakettle whistling for hours, who forgot the directions to the IGA, who drifted into unknowable recesses of her memory. This was the mother who had brought me up, who had proudly recited my grade-point and goals-against averages to anyone who asked, who had always remembered to put a roll of white hockey tape in the left pocket of my Rats jacket, a black roll in the right, because I was superstitious that way.
I started to go out the side door we’d entered but through the window saw the beams of headlights bouncing on the tree trunks as the police cruisers struggled up the two-track to the garage. I shut that door and, with the lockbox cradled in my arm, pulled open the door to the short stairway up to Dad’s tree house.
I looked back at Mom, who was standing on her tiptoes again, her face aglow in the police lights. “God, Mother,” I said. I shut the door behind me and scrambled up the steps to another door that opened onto the outside landing. I twisted its knob and shoved but it did not budge against the snow piled against it on the other side. “Damn,” I said.
My heart was racing. Sweat trickling down from under my wool Red Wings cap stung my left eye. I blinked at the sweat and twisted the knob again and drove my left shoulder into the door, trying not to make too much noise. The door moved a little, maybe a quarter of an inch, so I shoved it again, then again, until finally it fetched up against something hard. Sometimes during a thaw, water would overflow from the eaves and form puddles that refroze into ridges of ice on the landing. The door was stuck on one now.
I looked back down the stairs. A thin line of white light shone across the bottom of the door. I listened. I heard the big steel garage door clanking its way up. “Christ,” I whispered. I had to squeeze through the six-inch gap I had opened.
The snow on the landing was at least a foot deep. I reached the box around the door and heard it land with a moist crunch. I did the same with my coat. Then I turned myself sideways and stuck my left leg and arm out between the door and the jamb. I grasped at the railing outside but it remained a few inches out of my reach.
I forced my torso into the crack. A splinter on the door’s edge stabbed into my back so I squeezed harder against the jamb. I heard voices in the garage. Dingus and Darlene. Holy God, I thought, how could Darlene arrest my mother?
I reached for the railing again and got it with my ring and middle fingers. I relaxed for a second, then held my breath, sucked in what gut I had, and pulled as hard as I could. As I sprang free onto the landing, my flannel shirt caught on the strike plate. The shirt ripped and I heard something bounce into the dark stairwell.
Outside now, I held my breath again, listening.
I shut the door, threw my coat on, picked up the box. Now what? Dad had refused to build an outer stairway. He had said he didn’t want neighbor kids or drunken teenagers or other strangers using his tree house when he wasn’t around. Really he didn’t want anyone using it, except him and the buddies he chose and, once in a while, me. I had to jump the eight or nine feet to the ground.
I slogged through the snow to the railing. The police lights now rippled color across the snow alongside the garage, but the landing remained in darkness. I took out the flashlight and, shielding it with one hand, snapped it on and aimed it at the ground, hoping to see a giant snowdrift I could jump into. There wasn’t one.
I turned the flashlight off and tossed the box down. As long as I roll, I thought, it can’t hurt much worse than a slap shot to the balls. I jumped. I landed next to the box, rolling, chunks of snow scratching into my neck and down my shirt. I grabbed the box and scuttled up the hill, trying to stay low, dodging trees, praying the cop lights wouldn’t find me.
I should have kept running when I crested the ridge. Instead I stopped and squatted with one arm around a birch and peered back down on Mom’s latest crime scene. Darlene and Dingus were standing with their arms folded in the shadows at the edge of one cruiser’s headlights and Skip Catledge was helping Mom into the back of another car, the lights churning all their faces blue and red. It didn’t appear that they had cuffed her, for which I was grateful. She stopped before ducking into the car and nodded at Catledge as if to say thank you. Skipper, polite as ever, nodded back.
The door slamming on Mom made me think of the Bonneville’s trunk lid. You had to bang it down hard. Mom wouldn’t have known that, because she didn’t drive the Bonnie. Dad had driven it, and I had, though not for a couple of years. At some point, she had gone to the garage and put the lockbox I now carried under my arm in the Bonnie’s trunk. Hidden it there, actually, where she thought nobody would find it.
But when? And why? And what did she mean, she had lost a boot? And “Nonny”? Where had I heard that before?
I followed a different path out of the woods than the one we had come up earlier, avoiding my pickup, which I figured the police would find and tow. Still in the trees, about fifty feet up from Horvath Road, I pulled out my cell phone and called Soupy.
SIXTEEN
What the fuck, Trap?”
Soupy had pulled his pickup over to the roadside near the public access boat ramp on the southwestern end of the lake. I came out of the trees where I’d been waiting in a snowdrift up to my thighs.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking the snow off my legs. Soupy hadn’t been happy about my call for help, but I rarely asked anything more of him than a Blue Ribbon, so he came. I hoped he hadn’t said anything to his customers at Enright’s about why he was leaving.
“I had to stick Angie behind the bar,” he said, and I caught a whiff of mint laced with liquor. “By the time I get back, I could be wiped out. So where’s your truck? What do you got there, a box of cash or something? Treasure in the woods?”
The lockbox was a little too big to hide in my coat, so I had set it on my lap, as if I carried a box like that around with me all the time. “The truck got towed,” I said. “The box is Mom’s. I don’t know what’s in it.”
Soupy chuckled. “Old Mom Carpenter could probably could keep all her skeletons in a box that small, eh?”
We happened to be passing Mom’s house. I glanced across the road into the trees sheltering Dad’s garage. I didn’t see any cop lights. “Mom’s going to jail,” I said.
“Get out.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going with her?”
“No. I assume they’d arrest me, too.”
“Holy fuck. First Tatch, now Mom C? Who’s next, Mother Teresa? What did they arrest her for? They don’t think-”
“No idea. They just took her in, up at Dad’s garage.”
“What was she doing up there? That where you got that?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Soup,” I said, “you can’t go back to the bar and start running your mouth.”
“Trap, come on, I love your mother. She’s the last person I’d want to hurt.”
Soupy really did love my mother, really did care about what she thought about him, even if his actions suggested he
never heard a word of what she said about his drinking and slut chasing. It reminded me of Mom telling me she was worried about Soupy selling his parents’ place. He had to be “careful,” she had said.
“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Is that the law firm you’re dealing with on your parents’ house?”
“Hold on,” Soupy said. “You’re hiding in the trees like a prison escapee and I’m the one getting questioned? What’s in the box?”
“It’s them, isn’t it, Soup?”
He slowed the truck where the shore road curved into Main at the western end of town. A streetlight illuminated a gnarl of scar on Soupy’s cheekbone where a puck had struck him when we were kids. I remembered the blood spurting between his fingers as he clutched at his cheek and how he made himself laugh while our old coach tried to butterfly the gash closed with hockey tape before he took Soupy to the clinic.
“Eagan whatever sounds right,” he said. “What do you care? Or that Whistler guy?”
“What about Whistler?”
“He’s been asking me about the house, too.”
Damn, he’s good, I thought.
“Who’s the law firm representing?” I said. “They’re sure as hell not buying it for themselves.”
“They didn’t tell old Soupy. Probably some rich guy who’s going to tear the place down and throw up a mansion. Who cares? I need the cash. You going to open that?”
Knowing nothing of the lockbox’s contents, I had no desire to open it in front of Soupy.
“I don’t have a key,” I lied.
“I got a crowbar in the flatbed.”
“Mom told me to take it and go. You have to give me your truck.”
Soupy jammed the accelerator down to blast through the yellow light at Estelle. “Give you my-oh, shit, a cop.”
The sheriff’s cruiser was parked on Main two blocks down. It waited across from my rental house, where, to my surprise, my truck sat in the side drive.
“Soup,” I said. “Turn. Now.”
“Where?”
