Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I leaned over and looked. Her fingers and her palm were clean. Her unpolished nails, too. “They look fine,” I said.

“I need the hard brush. The bristles get under the nails.”

I had learned not to argue about things she believed she saw or heard that no one else could see or hear. They would go away on their own. I wanted to put my arm around her, but that wouldn’t have done any good either. I waited. She stared at her fingers a little longer, then let her hand fall back into her lap. The rocking stopped.

“I wish Phyllis were here,” she said.

“So do I,” I said. “Can you tell me anything more about Nilus?”

“Why are you so concerned with a priest who’s been dead for years?”

“How did you know he was dead?”

“I don’t know. He was old.”

“I thought he never wrote you back.”

“He didn’t.”

“Where was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d you send your letters?”

“Detroit.” A muscle in her jaw pulsed. “The archdiocese.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m tired.”

“That’s not why you stopped going to church, is it?”

“Because he didn’t write back to me? No.” She sighed. “No, he was a help after”-she paused-“after Sister Cordelia left. For a while.”

She’d never told me exactly why she had walked away from the church. She and Mrs. B had their occasional debates, of course, and almost every time Mom would say of St. Val’s, “There’s nothing in there but a frustrated man and his expensive geegaws.” I never knew if she meant the pastor or God himself.

“Nilus died in the U.P.,” I said. “In 1971.”

“Hmm,” she said. She looked past me and I turned to see headlights moving past the house again. “When will the police stop?”

“Why do you care so much?”

“I want my life to go back to normal.”

It would never be normal again without her best friend, but I didn’t need to say that. “You’d better get some sleep,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “How is Alden?”

My mother was one of the only people in the world who called Soupy by his given name. “He’s fine. I mean, you know, he’s in bankruptcy and his life’s a total mess, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“I worry about him.”

“Why?”

“Because I do. He’s selling his parents’ property, isn’t he?”

“He has an offer. Why?”

“He needs to be careful.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

Mom stood, gathering her robe around her. “I’ll stay at your place tomorrow night, if that’s all right.”

“Of course. Any particular reason?”

“I’m tired of the police watching my every move.”

“They’re not watching you, Mom. They’re watching over you.”

“Millie’s coming to get me in the morning,” she said. “We’re going to have breakfast at Audrey’s, then go to the funeral home.”

“I thought you were going there today.”

“Where?”

“The funeral home.”

Mom thought about this for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t.”

“How come?”

She looked past me into the kitchen again, as if she hadn’t heard my question. “Tomorrow night,” she said, “I’ll need you to help me with something.”

“All right.”

“After it’s dark.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

I scraped my plate and put it in the dishwasher, then dialed voice mail on my cell phone. Sure enough, there was Whistler’s voice, telling me at ten fifty-two that Tawny Jane Reese was about to clobber us with the Nilus scoop.

“Damn,” I said, and shut the phone off.

My phone was ringing when I came through the back door to the Pilot newsroom. Only one person, my boss, called me on the line that was blinking. I grabbed it.

“Hey,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Philo Beech said.

“I’ve been busy.”

Millie Bontrager had picked Mom up just as I was dragging myself out of bed. I’d hugged them both and told Mom I’d call her in the afternoon. Now I had a few things to do at the Pilot before I went to the drain commission meeting where Breck was supposed to make an appearance. I had a few questions to ask him about a murdered murderer who might have been his maternal grandfather.

“No, I’m sorry,” Philo said. “How’s your mother doing? It seems like every time I look at my computer, something else bad has happened over there.”

“Mom’s OK.”

Philo would have been standing at the fourth-floor window of his corner office in Traverse City, tall and gawky in a sleeveless argyle sweater, peering down on Front Street as he talked. Seven years my junior, he was enthralled with the idea that he was at corporate, with his own office and a shared secretary, after his promotion from the Pilot to Media North assistant vice president for news and innovation. As a reporter, he’d barely been able to cover a high school volleyball match. Now he was in charge of telling editors and reporters like me which stories to cover and how. It was actually the order of things at newspapers big and small. The guys who couldn’t skate or shoot or stickhandle often wound up running the hockey team.

I needed a fresh notebook for the drain commission meeting. We’d run out of the latest ration corporate had shipped, but Whistler hoarded them, so I walked over to his desk. I didn’t see any unused notebooks. But there on his calendar blotter sat the fat gold pinkie ring he was constantly taking on and off. His Toronado was parked out back, so I figured he was in the john.

“I hope they find whoever caused all this trouble,” Philo said. “And I hope everything works out for your mother, and for you.”

I cradled the phone on my shoulder and picked up Whistler’s ring. Its heft surprised me. Either Whistler had a thick pinkie or the ring had a lot of real gold in it. I rotated it in front of my eyes. Up close, it was far from perfect, closer to oval than round, with hairline streaks of scarlet and silver flecking the gold. Carved on the inside were four letters in uppercase italic: EJPW.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Interesting story on Channel Eight last night, eh? The Catholic Church?”

This was Philo’s way of asking me why the Pilot hadn’t had the story first.

“Tawny Jane may be out on a limb on that,” I said. “But we’re on it.”

Philo cleared his throat. It was time for the business part of the call. I heard the toilet flush in the john and set Whistler’s ring down on his blotter.

“This probably isn’t the best time, but there is something I-we-need to discuss.”

“Shoot.”

“The Media North board of directors, as you know, meets this afternoon.”

I didn’t know or care, but I said, “Yeah.” EJPW. Initials, I assumed. But for what? Whistler’s high school? An old girlfriend? An ex-wife? His ex, I recalled, was Barbara or Beverly something, so it wasn’t that ex.

“One item on the agenda,” Philo continued, “is a discussion of how to rationalize our print and Internet platforms.”

That got my attention. “Rationalize platforms? You mean shut the paper down?”

“Calm down, Gus. You’re jumping to conclusions again.”

“Our readers aren’t ready for point and click. They’re old, like three times your age. I know you find that hard to imagine, but technology’s not their thing. They still get freaked out by antilock brakes.”

“Nobody wants to close the paper.”

“It’s March, ads are in the shitter, so the bean counters get panicky, and the fastest way to fix things is to kill the dinosaur, whack the printing and delivery, all that bothersome expensive stuff, and just put the whole thing on the Internet. Then we’ll all get rich.”