Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Whistler had known Breck, or had known about him, before I had. For some reason he’d kept that from me. I took out my cell phone to dial Whistler, then changed my mind.

I went back to my desk and slid the letter beneath some file folders in a drawer. I wanted to know more about Breck; more about his grandfather; more about Nilus and his women; more about who was behind Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne’s stealthy efforts to buy up the land above the northeastern corner of the lake; and if and how it was all connected. I thought I might make a quick run downstate. And I would not tell Whistler.

I made a mental note to call Millie Bontrager after dinner and ask if she could stay with Mom the next day. Then I sat down at my computer and called up the last e-mail from Joanie McCarthy. I hit Reply and typed:

Joanie,

Good to hear from you. Mom’s as OK as can be expected. Thanks for asking. I hear you’re kicking some butt down there. That’s great-but no surprise. Matter of fact, I might be able to use your help. Call me asap.

My pickup truck fishtailed on the slippery washboard of Trimble Trail, an ignored gravel road that meandered through the low hills south of the lake.

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.