Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“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.”

The rusted metal step creaked as I lifted my boot onto it. I stopped and looked around, hoping I’d chosen the right trailer. Four were arranged in a ragged circle in the clearing that was home to Tatch’s camp.

The trailers sat amid oaks and beeches and birches on a flat interruption of an incline that rose from the lake’s northeastern shore. Soupy’s parents’ house, vacant since their deaths, sat just beyond the crest of the ridge, a few hundred yards up.

I heard something from the other side of the trailer where I was standing. There was a chugging sound, like machinery, and the clank and scrape of metal. Someone was clapping and shouting something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Hey, Gus,” Tatch called out. “Over here.”

I spun around to see Tatch waving from the trailer at my back. Through the stripped trees behind him I could see all the way down to the white lake.

“Hey, Tatch,” I said.

Like some born-agains, Tatch had become one after hitting bottom-specifically, the bottom of Dead Sledder Mile. Dead Sledder was a two-lane corkscrew of asphalt that spiraled between narrow gravel shoulders dropping off forty and fifty feet into thickets of merciless pines. The road got its nickname after a toboggan full of downstate tourists rode it into the grille of an oncoming semitrailer after a long night at Enright’s in the 1970s.

Tatch himself awoke one morning in August of 1999 lying between two roadside crosses garlanded in flowers, having been flung from his pickup as it careened off Dead Sledder’s last vicious curve. His truck was a steel pancake; Tatch was unhurt except for the hangover throbbing in his head. He swore as he lay there, regarding the markers of two less fortunate souls, that he would never take another drink and that he would seek the Lord as his savior. He would keep one promise more faithfully than the other.

None of it really surprised people in town. Tatch came from a family of devout Christians who read the Bible aloud before and after every meal and led the choir at the Church of the Messiah in Mio. His mother would bellow scripture at Tatch as he played goalie for the River Rats when we were kids, even when he was sitting on the bench and I was in the net. The team favorite was “Save with thy right hand, and hear me.” It was only natural, then, that adolescent Tatch would rebel in every way, seeking salvation in Southern Comfort, Stroh’s, red bud, and speeders. And it seemed just as natural, at least to the people of Starvation Lake, that Tatch years later would fall back on the only thing he’d ever thought he understood except partying and hockey.