Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Scattered amid the junk heaped on the dining room table were piles of photographs, dozens of them in color and black and white, framed and not. I picked up one of Angus standing at the end of a dock dangling a stringer of bluegills. I tossed it aside. I grabbed a handful of Polaroids leaning against the birdcage and fanned through them: Soupy and me in our Rats uniforms; a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on my mother’s dining table; Soupy’s old basset hound, Stanley, draped uncomfortably in a Red Wings jersey.

I showed the picture of Stanley to Soupy.

“That was one crazy-ass dog,” Soupy said.

“Umbrellas, right?”

“Drove him mad. And motorcycles. He’d be quiet as a mouse, then he’d see somebody with an umbrella and go apeshit barking. Same with guys on motorcycles. Thank God he never saw a guy on a motorcycle with an umbrella.”

I picked up more photos. There was my mother and Mrs. Campbell beaming in bathing suits and Ray-Bans on my grandfather’s Chris-Craft. Mrs. Campbell cradling Soupy, a baby, in front of a Christmas tree. Another of Mrs. B and Mrs. Campbell curtsying together in bridesmaids’ dresses, possibly at Mom’s wedding. Seven little girls arm in arm wearing identical plaid jumpers over white blouses. It looked like the spelling-bee photo I had seen in the microfilm at the clerk’s office, but without Sister Cordelia or the young Judge Gallagher.

I set those down and picked up a stack held together by paper clips. They looked more recent than the others. There were no people in them, just trees full of leaves and the forest floor covered with pine needles and cones sloping down and away, the same scene taken from different angles, probably at dusk, judging by how the shadows fell along the ground. I looked at Soupy. “Has anyone actually come to look at the place?”

“Nope.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as a little unusual?”

“Not if they’re just going to rebuild anyway. They probably just want the land.”

“Are there mineral rights?”

“Yeah, but no minerals worth anything. Why do you give a shit?”

“What if I want to buy it?”

Soupy watched me over the top of his beer can as he took a long pull. He belched and said, “Right. Or maybe the kids who broke in want to buy it.”

“Somebody broke in here?”

“Didn’t you notice the door almost fell off when we came in? Fucking kids about tore it off the hinges.”

“When was this? Did you call the cops?”

“Couple of weeks ago. Came out here to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen and found the door all messed up and a bunch of boot prints.”

“What’d they take?”

“Look around, Trap. How the hell would I know?”

Soupy was a month older than me, but sometimes he felt like a little brother.

“You didn’t report it?”

“Report what? I didn’t want to be one of those Bingo Burglaries or whatever you call them. No need to have my name in the paper.”

I picked up the photo of the girls again. I counted seven. There had been five reported break-ins, six if you counted the one at Soupy’s parents’ place. Each had been at the grown-up home of one of the girls in the photo-except Phyllis nee Snyder Bontrager. While it was unlikely that a burglar would have seen this particular photo, he might have seen the one I’d seen, with Sister Cordelia, too, in a newspaper clipping.

I grabbed another stack of photos leaning against the birdcage. There were probably twenty-five in all. My mother was in every one. Some included Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. B, a few Audrey from the diner. I put the stack down and picked up a framed collage of three photos hinged together. The photos were of Mom; Mom with Mrs. Campbell; and Mom, Mrs. Campbell, and Mrs. B in Mom’s driveway, like the one I had seen at Mrs. B’s counter at the Pilot. I turned the frame sideways, turned it back the other way, turned it sideways again. The Three Stooges, I thought. And then I thought something else.

I took the triple-frame of photos in both hands and twisted one of the three pieces against its hinges. When the hinges bent but didn’t break, I braced the frame against the table’s edge and broke it off with a crack. My right hand slipped and caught a sharp corner and I saw a trickle of blood along a fingernail.

“Ouch,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Soupy said.

I put my finger in my mouth and sucked the blood away. I tossed the still connected frames on the table and held the one I’d broken off in front of Soupy’s face. It was a picture of our mothers standing in front of Audrey’s.

“It’s a map,” I said. “Your mom had a piece of it.”

“Have another beer, Trap. It’s a picture.”

“I’m not talking about this.”

I threw the photo aside and told Soupy about the lockbox, what was in it, the piece of paper I thought was a map, how it had gotten stolen, how it all had something to do with the murder of Sister Mary Cordelia.

“Fucking-ay,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Hell, no. But… that’s got to be it. Mom tore the thing into three and gave the other pieces to her best friends.”

“Which would be Mrs. B and my mom,” Soupy said.

“Right.”

“But for what? They rob a bank or something? You think that’s what born-agains are digging for down the hill?”

“Something like that,” I said. I rummaged through the junk on the table and found the photos of trees and leaves. I showed one to Soupy. “That look familiar?”

He squinted. “Looks like anything around here. Trees, dirt, pine needles.”

“Could be right outside, huh? Looking down the ridge to where Tatch’s people are?”

“Could be just about anywhere north of Grayling.”

I recalled how the wiggly lines in Mom’s drawing seemed to suggest a hill, the noted locations of trees. “Who took these pictures?”

“No idea, but, listen, that nun?”

“Yeah?”

Soupy walked slowly into the living room, his back to me. His empty can pinged on a heap of coat hangers. He yanked another beer off the ring, opened it, took a long pull.

“Ma got a call about some nun,” he said. “Sometime after Angus died.”

“Are you serious?”

He wrapped his arms around himself so that the beer can appeared beneath his left arm. “Man,” he said. “I really haven’t thought about Ma in a while.”

I wanted to say, What about the nun, but I just said, “Yeah?”

“She was the one, you know, who got up at like five in the morning to haul my ass to practice. Angus was usually sleeping it off, if he was even home. I’d give her all sorts of hell about getting out of bed, and sometimes she’d have to just throw me out on the floor.” He tried a chuckle, but it got stuck in his throat. “Then she’d have coffee made, and those cinnamon buns from the diner.”

“I remember.”

“She liked when your mom came along.”

Mrs. Campbell and my mother had taken turns driving the two of us to our early morning practices. Sometimes both went.

“When she got sick-” he said. He stopped, then started again. “When she got sick, she started thinking over things, stuff she’d forgotten about, stuff that’d been bugging her forever, stuff she’d never had time to screw around with. You know.”

“What about the nun?”

Soupy threw his head back and took another deep swallow. Then he said, “This woman called one night. I was over here helping Ma out with, I don’t know, I think I was putting the storm windows in for winter. Anyway, she was frying up some perch I’d caught that day and the phone rang. And I was messing with a window and she got on the phone and next thing I know I smell this burning. All that sweet perch going to waste. I rush in and the pan’s spitting grease and we’re about to have a damn fire, but Ma’s on the phone, talking real soft, like it’s some big secret, and I go over and say, ‘Ma, you’re going to burn the house down,’ and she takes me”-he grabbed himself by the collar of his shirt-“and shoves me away.”