Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Darlene,” I said, then louder. “Darlene.”

A door slammed. The ambulance eased out of the yard onto the road. I turned to Catledge. “Where’s Darlene?”

Darlene Esper was another Pine County sheriff’s deputy. She was also my ex-girlfriend and the daughter of Phyllis Bontrager-Mrs. B to me-the next-door neighbor who had been with my mother that night.

“I don’t know,” Catledge said. He took my elbow and nudged me toward the house. “The sheriff’s waiting.”

“I heard her in that ambulance,” I said. “They must have-shit. Is Mrs. B in that ambulance?”

Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho stepped into the muddy snow outside the sliding glass doors to Mom’s dining room, a walkie-talkie squeezed in one pork-chop hand. He was a big man who looked bigger silhouetted against the backlit wall.

“I can’t go in?” I said.

Dingus shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a crime scene.”

“It’s my family.”

“I’m sorry.”

I had glanced into the kitchen as I passed, noticed a glass casserole soaking on the counter next to the sink. Yellow police tape was strung everywhere. The dining room, except for a cop flashlight resting on the table, looked to be in order. Beyond there, officers wearing latex gloves shuffled in and out of the bathroom next to Mom’s bedroom.

“Where’s my mother? Is she in one of those amb-”

“No. She’s fine. Phyllis Bontrager is on her way to Munson.”

Munson was the medical center in Traverse City, forty miles west. You didn’t go there for cuts and bruises.

“What happened?”

“There was a break-in.”

“I want to see my mom.”

He hooked his walkie-talkie on his belt. “Calm down.”

“What’s the big fucking secret, Dingus? It’s another Bingo Night Burglary, isn’t it?”

Dingus stepped toward me. The sweet aroma of Tiparillo floated off of his handlebar mustache. “Watch your language,” he said.

“You mean ‘bingo night’?”

My newspaper had made the connection between the break-ins and bingo night. That had not pleased the sheriff, who was up for re-election and didn’t appreciate headlines reminding voters that he had no clues, no suspects, no idea why someone was breaking into homes, rifling through personal papers, and then leaving empty-handed. “Bingo Night Burglaries” was catchy and I’d heard people saying it at the rink and Audrey’s Diner and Fortune Drug and imagined that it might help circulation.

“We’re not sure what happened here,” the sheriff said. “As I’ve said, bingo night is a coincidence. There’s bingo every night somewhere around here.”

Mother had been waiting when Darlene, the sheriff’s deputy, had arrived, heeding Mom’s 911 call, he told me. Darlene found her mother lying unconscious on the bathroom floor. Questioning my mother so far had proved fruitless.

“She’s a little confused,” Dingus said.

“You know Mom’s got memory issues.”

She was going on sixty-seven. Her memory had always been selective, but now she wasn’t always certain what she should be selecting. Sometimes she was all there, sometimes hardly at all. The illness played tricks on her, and Mom tried to play tricks back, often in vain.

“I understand.”

“Is Mrs. B going to be all right?”

The sheriff looked away, into the house. “Doc Joe’s on his way to Munson.”

Doc Joe Schriver was the county coroner.

Mrs. B had been stopping by at night to make sure Mom had turned off the stove, doused the fire, and done whatever else she needed to do before bed. Sometimes Mrs. B stayed for a while and sat in the rocking recliner to read while the fire died. I pictured her sitting there in her favorite winter sweater, the red one knitted with the shapes of reindeer heads.

I felt a pinprick of sleet on my cheek. “The guy attacked her?”

“We don’t know it’s a guy. We don’t-”

“Gus!”

The voice came from the road. Dingus and I both turned to see Luke Whistler, the Pilot reporter I’d hired four months before. He was standing with the bathrobes outside the police tape. Whistler had written most of the Bingo Night stories. The cops weren’t fans. I waved and called out, “Go to Munson.”

Whistler pointed his notebook at the deputies keeping him and the crowd back. “They won’t let me in,” he said.

“Just go,” I said.

I looked down the road and was relieved not to see the Channel Eight TV van. I turned back to Dingus. “Murder?” I said.

He couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “Maybe we can get you in to see your mom for a minute.”

In the other break-ins, the intruder or intruders had come when no one was home. Maybe they’d come tonight thinking Mom would be at bingo. She went most Sundays but hadn’t tonight. The only light likely to have been burning was the one on the end table by the chair where Mrs. B did her reading. I imagined Mom dozing in bed, maybe watching something on the tiny black-and-white tube that sat atop her dresser, Mrs. B in the living room, absorbed in Maeve Binchy.

“That would be good,” I said.

“Just do me a favor. Try not to jump to any conclusions.”

C an you leave us alone for a few minutes, please?”

The paramedic, a woman I did not know, glanced at the doorway to Mom’s bedroom, where Skip Catledge stood guard.

“If you’re done,” the deputy said.

“Surely.”

She gave me a sympathetic nod on her way out.

Catledge stepped out and slid the bedroom door closed. Mom sat up against the headboard, her eyes closed. “Gussy,” she whispered.

I sat on the edge of the bed, took one of her hands in mine. “Mom, are you all right?”

She wore the button-down pajamas she wore every night from October through April, off-white flannels printed with floral designs so faded that you couldn’t tell the shapes were flowers anymore. I had bought the pajamas for her sixtieth birthday.

Mom shook her head. Her eyes were puffy and red. Wads of used tissue cluttered the nightstand. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing.

“She was my best friend,” she said.

“I know.”

“Is she going to be all right? She wasn’t… she wasn’t moving when they took her.”

“It’s not looking good, Mom.”

“What am I going to do?” I had no answer but to squeeze her hand. “From the day your father died, Phyllis has been my rock.”

A single tear dripped off her face onto her arm. I snatched a tissue from the box. Mom balled it up in her right hand and held it in her lap.

I thought of the two of them, Phyllis and Bea, sitting next to each other at the end of our dock, the sun golden on their backs, their hair tied back in twin ponytails, their feet dangling in the water. They wore one-piece bathing suits and drank lemonade from tall pink plastic cups.

They’d sit for hours, talking about what was in the paper that day, who gossiped what about whom at euchre night, how Mr. B had to go to the doctor about the lumbar pain that turned out to be cancer, which salads and Jell-O molds they would make for the town’s annual Labor Day picnic. About Darlene and me, and when we would both finally decide that we were made for each other and do something about it. When the late August sky blew chilly on their shoulders, they wrapped themselves together in a towel and kept talking.

Mom looked up. “Darlene,” she said. “Where is she?”

“On her way to the hospital with Mrs. B.”

“Oh, God.”

“You know Darlene. She’ll just funnel it all into finding out what happened.”

“That poor girl. She’ll be all alone.”

Mom dabbed at her eyes. I was all she had left now. The Damico family who had adopted her sixty-four years before were all dead but for a stepbrother in Oregon she hadn’t seen in years. She had plenty of friends, but none so close as Mrs. B.