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Bryan Gruley: The Skeleton Box

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Bryan Gruley The Skeleton Box

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“Yes, I know,” Mrs. B said. “The mothballs are gone now.”

Mom pursed her lips, thinking. I hesitated as I might with someone having a nightmare. I had heard you weren’t supposed to wake them up. I didn’t know what to do. The doctors weren’t sure, either.

“Mom?” I finally said. “Are you all right?”

“Bingo?” she said. “Phyllis?”

“That’s right, tonight,” Mrs. B said. “I’ll be here at six.”

Mom folded her arms. “Call me at five. We’ll see.”

I recalled that morning and how sweet Mrs. B had smelled, as I steered my pickup truck west on M-72 through sleet as thick as oatmeal.

I had hesitated to go, but Dingus, who probably didn’t want reporters around anyway, had assured me a nurse and a deputy would stay with Mom through the night.

I pushed my truck as fast as I safely could on the slippery road to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. I had tried to call Darlene on the way but she didn’t answer.

My cell phone burbled as I swung south onto U.S. 31.

“Darlene?”

“Dude.” It was Soupy. In the background I heard laughter and music and clinking glass. He was at Enright’s, the bar he owned on Main Street. “Man, I’ve been trying to call.”

“Had my cell off.”

“One of your mom’s neighbors just came in.” He stopped, sounding choked up, but mostly drunk. “I’m so fucking sorry. Mrs. B was the best.”

“Yeah.”

“Who the hell would want to do that?”

“Nobody.”

“How’s your mom?”

“As you might expect.”

“Mrs. B was her best pal.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re-Hold on.” Soupy muffled his phone but I heard him anyway, taking an order for a round of shots. He came back on. “Sorry, man. I mean, what was I saying?”

“Nothing. I’ve got to go.”

“Jesus, Trap, let’s get”-he was choking up again, one of his late-night jags coming on-“let’s get together tomorrow.”

“Right.”

I tossed the phone on the passenger seat. Two hours from closing time and Soupy was shitfaced in his own bar.

I steered along the shore of the east bay, trying to focus on the driving, trying to think of anything but how it could have been Mom instead of Mrs. B on the coroner’s table.

I imagined Mrs. B cutting through Mom’s yard in the dark that evening with her casserole in one hand, her other arm outstretched for balance as she minced through the snow in her brown galoshes with the undone buckles clacking. She would have let herself in and slipped off her galoshes before sliding the casserole into the oven. Hello, honey, she would have said. Always honey or dear or sweetheart or sweetie-pie.

Sweetie-pie.

They were the first words I had heard when I awoke in a hospital bed after getting my tonsils out. I was seven years old, somewhere in Detroit, a faraway city with big buildings and the Red Wings and doctors who promised my throat would stop hurting.

Do you want ice cream? Chocolate or vanilla or strawberry? Mrs. B asked as she held both my hands in one of hers, smiling down at me. Your mother will meet us downstairs soon. Chocolate? Would you like chocolate, honey?

My father had died barely a year before in that hospital, and Mom could not bear to go inside, so Mrs. B would go with me, and Mom would be waiting when I came out.

Can I have two? I asked. May I? May I have two? Of course, sweetiepie. Mrs. B fed me vanilla and strawberry in slow, alternating spoonfuls, telling me to let it melt in my mouth before I swallowed so it wouldn’t hurt as much. I watched her face as she fed me. I swirled the ice cream around on my tongue. I forgot about my throat.

Who could have killed that kind, precious woman?

I pounded the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. My throat constricted. A sob forced its way up. Then came another, and another, and finally I couldn’t stop them.

I pulled my truck onto the shoulder along the bay. But I veered a little too quickly, forgetting the sleet, and my rear end fishtailed left and right and then left again and I felt the truck slipping and grinding toward the blackness of the water. “Goddammit!” I shouted, stomping the brakes and wrenching the steering wheel to get one of my tires back onto the asphalt.

The truck crunched to a halt just short of the knife-edged rocks along the water, my headlight beams disappearing in the gloom beyond. “Fuck me,” I said, and dropped my head to the steering wheel, crying to the plinking of my hazard lights.

FOUR

Sorry. Hospital’s closed. Nobody’s going in.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood with his arms crossed in front of the double glass doors at Munson’s emergency entrance.

“Hospitals don’t close, Frankie,” I said.

“They do today. Especially to vultures.”

As he swayed to and fro on his heels, his forehead moved in and out of the light thrown by an overhead lamp.

I held up my empty hands. “No pen, no notebook. I just want to see Darlene.”

She was standing with her back to me down the corridor behind D’Alessio, talking to a nurse. Doctors and cops milled in the hall beyond her.

“Your mom doing OK?” D’Alessio asked.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Good. Go home and take care of her.”

“I need to see Darlene.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s with her mother. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

“Have they pronounced her dead?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“A little ticked you’re not working the scene, Frankie?”

“What scene? A bunch of people stumbling over each other. I’m fine right here.”

What an asshole, I thought. But that was Frankie. I’d played hockey against him for years, and he was no different on the ice. My pals in the Midnight Hour Men’s League referred to him as a short little prick with a short little prick.

“So when are you going to announce?” I said. “Noon tomorrow would be perfect, don’t you think? By then, every voter in the county will have heard what happened tonight.”

D’Alessio was the subject-and probably the source-of rumors about a possible election challenge to Dingus. The two had never gotten along. For many years, running against Dingus, who stayed on budget and made sure locals didn’t get too many speeding tickets, would have been futile. The burglaries had changed that. Murder would change it more.

“No comment,” D’Alessio said.

“Right. So I won’t quote you in the Pilot on your fellow deputies stumbling around and you let me duck in and see Darlene. OK?”

“How about, Sorry about what happened but go home.”

“Whoa,” came a voice behind me.

“Mr. Whistler,” D’Alessio said.

“Deputy,” Luke Whistler said.

Of course they knew each other. Whistler had gotten a few scoops on the Bingo Night stories and I figured his source was D’Alessio, who was leaking stuff to make Dingus look bad. Whistler hadn’t had anything juicy for a while, so I assumed Dingus was now keeping D’Alessio in the dark.

“What’s going on here?” Whistler said.

He wore a drab down vest patched in four or five places over a faded navy-and-orange sweatshirt announcing the Detroit Tigers as American League Champions, 1984. Sleet had mussed his white hair and streaked it dark along the sides of his boxy head. His retiree’s gut pushed the sweatshirt’s belly pocket out so that I could see the outline of a tape recorder inside.

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