Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I really wanted to join them, but I had something else to do.

The kicked-up wind churned whorls of snow along the walk from Main Street to the Pine County Courthouse. I’d parked at one of the meters the county had installed in the 1980s when the town was flourishing, with rich downstate people coming up to buy property and houses on the lake. Now the meters stood there like antiques. Some county worker went around each week and collected the quarters. One week in January, he gathered a total of seventy-five cents.

Vicky Clark had propped a back door open with a phone book. I’d persuaded her to meet me in the clerk’s office to see if she could help me. Then we would go to her place for that dinner she had offered. That’s what I’d told her.

I smelled her perfume from the dark hallway outside the office. I hesitated, thinking maybe I shouldn’t do this after all. We weren’t all that different, Vicky and me. I’d left town for good, or so I thought, and made mistakes and come groveling home. She’d been a pianist with a scholarship to a music academy when her triplets made their unexpected appearance. Now here we were, chasing what we wanted amid the long evening shadows in the clerk’s office.

Vicky jiggled into the corridor and winked at me. “Pine County Clerk’s Office,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Hi.”

“Aren’t you missing the big game?”

“Duty calls,” I said. She giggled.

Two microfilm machines squatted on the back wall of the office behind eight long rows of file cabinets. Vicky leaned over my shoulder as I sat winding a plastic handle that scrolled through the microfilm of old Pilots projected on a screen. I’d gotten used to her perfume, but I shivered when I felt her hair tickle the back of my neck.

“Can I ask why you’re so interested in all this ancient stuff?” she said.

“Just some background for some stories I’m working on.”

“Oh. It doesn’t have anything to do with Phyllis, does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is exciting,” she said. “You have an exciting job.”

“Trust me, Vick, that’s rarely the case.”

“My mother would absolutely kill us.”

“I’ll bet. What time do you need to get home to your kids?”

“Don’t worry about that, sweetie. My girlfriend picked them up. They’re having a pajama party tonight.” Vicky leaned over further until I turned to look at her. She must have put lipstick on while I was scrolling. A blob of it had coagulated between her front teeth. Sympathy mixed with nausea in the pit of my belly. “You know,” she said, “I heard you had a little pajama party yourself a long time ago. Right here.”

She grinned and nodded toward a door with a frosted-glass window on the back wall. It led to a corridor where there was a janitor’s closet. As a college student working one summer at the Pilot, I had hid in that closet so I could get my hands on some files a clerk named Verna had refused to let me see. The night turned eventful when a young part-time security guard caught me. That was Darlene.

“Ah,” I said. “I never kiss and tell.”

“Good,” she said, nudging me with a hip and almost knocking me off of my chair. “I don’t either.”

Focus, I told myself. I looked at my watch. I decided I wouldn’t take any notes, I would simply make copies of the stories and escape before I got into real trouble.

One by one, I found the stories listed on the index card I’d taken from the Pilot basement. I hit the button to copy each and waited while the machine hummed, the images disappearing and then reappearing on the screen. Vicky collected the black-on-gray pages churning out of the machine and handed them to me.

I flipped through the first few pages, finding the August 17, 1944, story, “Town Searches for Missing Nun.” It was bannered across the top of the front page, with the headline and a deck and a three-column photo of a priest addressing a throng of mostly men. He wore a black cassock and a black three-cornered hat. His long, pointed nose divided knife-sharp cheekbones on a narrow face. He stood outdoors atop a short flight of wooden stairs leading to a pair of tall doors. A crucifix hung over the apex of the clapboard arch above him. One of the priest’s arms was outstretched, his sleeve billowing below his elbow, and the other was hidden inside his cassock above his belt.

The caption identified the building as St. Valentine’s-the old church, I thought-and the priest as Father Nilus Moreau.

I didn’t have time, but I read the story anyway. Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero had come to Starvation Lake from the Detroit suburb of St. Clair Shores, just before FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps diverted the Hungry River to form Starvation Lake. She was nineteen years old and barely five feet tall. A photograph showed a pale smiling face and hopeful eyes floating inside the black-and-white frame of her habit. “Her rosary probably weighs more than her,” said another nun who was quoted. I wished I had spent a few more minutes in the Pilot basement looking for stories about the nun.

“Vicky,” I said, “could you do me a favor?”

In a few minutes, we were both scrolling away. Vicky leaned over and said, “Look, your mom.” She shoved a copy of a story from November 1941 in front of my face. “Sr. Cordelia Takes Spellers to Roscommon Bee,” the headline read. A photo showed a bunch of girls in plaid jumpers over white blouses standing with a nun and a boy who seemed a bit older than the girls, maybe because he looked so studious in his white shirt and tie and horn-rimmed glasses. Vicky folded the sheet so as to block out the caption.

“Let’s see if we can guess the other ladies in the picture,” she said.

I wanted to get done and out of there, but I said, without looking, “I bet one’s Louise Campbell. And Phyllis Bontrager-or Snyder, back then.”

“So sad,” Vicky said. “Who’s this one, with the pigtails?”

“I don’t know, who?”

“You know what? I think it’s Sally Pearson. She even has a flower in one of her pigtails-and now she’s a florist. How about that?”

“Pretty amazing,” I said, still not looking.

Vicky took the page away and sat back in her chair. I looked up and saw that her plump face had puckered into a pout. Christ, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You asked me to find these stories,” she said.

“Yes, I’m a jerk. Let’s see, who else is in there?”

Vicky unfolded the sheet and read the caption aloud. “‘Bee-Ing Good Spellers,’” she said. “‘Sister Mary Cordelia of St. Valentine’s Catholic School with her best spellers. From left, Phyllis Snyder, Beatrice Damico, Gardenia Lawton, Louise Ellison, Mary Kentwood, Martha Yeager, Sally Wentzel, and teacher’s helper Horace Gallagher.’”

“Judge Gallagher?” I said.

“Oh my God, Horace,” Vicky said, pointing to the boy who still wore horn-rimmed glasses as the county’s longtime circuit judge. “Can you believe he got to be a judge?”

“More amazing that he stayed a judge with all the goofy high jinks he pulls in court.”

“Ha. You got that right.”

“Martha Yeager is who now?” I said.

“Nussler. After losing that Brenner guy from Mesick.”

“He cheated on her with old Tillie Spaulding. And it’s Gardenia Mapes now, right?”

“Was. She died last year. Alzheimer’s.”

I remembered writing about her death. Someone in her family, knowing of my mother’s issues, had called to ask that I handle the obituary. With the family’s permission, I had spoken with Gardenia’s doctor, who also happened to be my mother’s doctor, who told me that Gardenia was further along than my mother in her disease, but that I could expect much of the same.