Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Get me down, please.”

I helped her out. She reached up and brought the trunk lid down. It bounced lightly on the latch and stayed open half an inch, as it must have been when Mom first tried to unlock it.

“Hold on,” I said, moving between Mom and the trunk.

“Hurry, son.”

I lifted the lid a foot, flattened my hands on it, and slammed it down. “You’ve got to really hammer it. Thing never worked right.”

Mom handed me the lockbox. “Take this and go,” she said.

It didn’t feel as if it had much in it. “What is this?”

Mom reached into the neck of her coat, down into her sweater, and came out with another key. This one, blue, looked newly copied.

“And this,” she said. “Now you have to-Wait.”

“What’s going on?”

“Listen,” she said. Her eyes darted toward the oval windows on the upper half of the garage door. “Take this somewhere safe. Do not let anyone know you have it.”

I looked at the box. “Why can’t I-”

She pressed the blue key into my palm. “The police are coming. Listen now.”

“They’re coming here? No, why?”

“I lost my boot. They found my boot.”

“Who? What boot?”

“The police.”

She went to the garage door and got up on her toes to look out through the ovals. I saw blue light flicker across her forehead.

“Holy shit, Mom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I thought it was over,” she said, coming back to me. “It’s not over. That person came for me and got Phyllis instead.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Why would-”

She slapped a palm down hard on the lockbox. “If you want to know about Nilus and about Nonny, you have to take this and get out of here now. Go.”

“Are they going to arrest you? Who’s Nonny?”

“I’ll be fine. You must go, Gus. Go now.”

She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around my chest and hugged me as hard as she’d hugged me in years. When she pulled her face away, I saw dampness on her cheeks. “You have work to do,” she said.

I could have stood there and opened the door for the police, asked them what the hell was going on. I had no idea why they were descending but, as crazy as it seemed, the fact that they were there made me think my mother was not, at this particular moment, out of her mind. Her eyes were clear. She was speaking in her regular staccato. This wasn’t the mother who left the teakettle whistling for hours, who forgot the directions to the IGA, who drifted into unknowable recesses of her memory. This was the mother who had brought me up, who had proudly recited my grade-point and goals-against averages to anyone who asked, who had always remembered to put a roll of white hockey tape in the left pocket of my Rats jacket, a black roll in the right, because I was superstitious that way.

I started to go out the side door we’d entered but through the window saw the beams of headlights bouncing on the tree trunks as the police cruisers struggled up the two-track to the garage. I shut that door and, with the lockbox cradled in my arm, pulled open the door to the short stairway up to Dad’s tree house.

I looked back at Mom, who was standing on her tiptoes again, her face aglow in the police lights. “God, Mother,” I said. I shut the door behind me and scrambled up the steps to another door that opened onto the outside landing. I twisted its knob and shoved but it did not budge against the snow piled against it on the other side. “Damn,” I said.

My heart was racing. Sweat trickling down from under my wool Red Wings cap stung my left eye. I blinked at the sweat and twisted the knob again and drove my left shoulder into the door, trying not to make too much noise. The door moved a little, maybe a quarter of an inch, so I shoved it again, then again, until finally it fetched up against something hard. Sometimes during a thaw, water would overflow from the eaves and form puddles that refroze into ridges of ice on the landing. The door was stuck on one now.

I looked back down the stairs. A thin line of white light shone across the bottom of the door. I listened. I heard the big steel garage door clanking its way up. “Christ,” I whispered. I had to squeeze through the six-inch gap I had opened.

The snow on the landing was at least a foot deep. I reached the box around the door and heard it land with a moist crunch. I did the same with my coat. Then I turned myself sideways and stuck my left leg and arm out between the door and the jamb. I grasped at the railing outside but it remained a few inches out of my reach.

I forced my torso into the crack. A splinter on the door’s edge stabbed into my back so I squeezed harder against the jamb. I heard voices in the garage. Dingus and Darlene. Holy God, I thought, how could Darlene arrest my mother?

I reached for the railing again and got it with my ring and middle fingers. I relaxed for a second, then held my breath, sucked in what gut I had, and pulled as hard as I could. As I sprang free onto the landing, my flannel shirt caught on the strike plate. The shirt ripped and I heard something bounce into the dark stairwell.

Outside now, I held my breath again, listening.

I shut the door, threw my coat on, picked up the box. Now what? Dad had refused to build an outer stairway. He had said he didn’t want neighbor kids or drunken teenagers or other strangers using his tree house when he wasn’t around. Really he didn’t want anyone using it, except him and the buddies he chose and, once in a while, me. I had to jump the eight or nine feet to the ground.

I slogged through the snow to the railing. The police lights now rippled color across the snow alongside the garage, but the landing remained in darkness. I took out the flashlight and, shielding it with one hand, snapped it on and aimed it at the ground, hoping to see a giant snowdrift I could jump into. There wasn’t one.

I turned the flashlight off and tossed the box down. As long as I roll, I thought, it can’t hurt much worse than a slap shot to the balls. I jumped. I landed next to the box, rolling, chunks of snow scratching into my neck and down my shirt. I grabbed the box and scuttled up the hill, trying to stay low, dodging trees, praying the cop lights wouldn’t find me.

I should have kept running when I crested the ridge. Instead I stopped and squatted with one arm around a birch and peered back down on Mom’s latest crime scene. Darlene and Dingus were standing with their arms folded in the shadows at the edge of one cruiser’s headlights and Skip Catledge was helping Mom into the back of another car, the lights churning all their faces blue and red. It didn’t appear that they had cuffed her, for which I was grateful. She stopped before ducking into the car and nodded at Catledge as if to say thank you. Skipper, polite as ever, nodded back.

The door slamming on Mom made me think of the Bonneville’s trunk lid. You had to bang it down hard. Mom wouldn’t have known that, because she didn’t drive the Bonnie. Dad had driven it, and I had, though not for a couple of years. At some point, she had gone to the garage and put the lockbox I now carried under my arm in the Bonnie’s trunk. Hidden it there, actually, where she thought nobody would find it.

But when? And why? And what did she mean, she had lost a boot? And “Nonny”? Where had I heard that before?

I followed a different path out of the woods than the one we had come up earlier, avoiding my pickup, which I figured the police would find and tow. Still in the trees, about fifty feet up from Horvath Road, I pulled out my cell phone and called Soupy.

What the fuck, Trap?”

Soupy had pulled his pickup over to the roadside near the public access boat ramp on the southwestern end of the lake. I came out of the trees where I’d been waiting in a snowdrift up to my thighs.