Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Doesn’t sound like Louise.”

“Nope.” He turned to face me. “Though she should have done it to Angus about a million times. Anyway, I go over and turn the stove off and dump the fish in the sink and go outside. But I slip down the wall out there”-he pointed outside-“and listen through the screen I haven’t replaced yet, to see what the hell’s got her so focused.”

“And it was the nun.”

“I think so. She kept saying something about a sister. But Ma didn’t have any sisters.”

“Did you hear the name ‘Cordelia’?”

“That’s the nun who got killed?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish-I honestly don’t remember. But I asked Ma after she’d calmed down. She said some woman was writing a history of St. Val’s, and she might actually pay for some information, and I thought, great, because the marina was sucking wind, and I think that was about the time we had to get one of the lifts fixed, cost a shitload.”

“You’re sure it was a woman?”

“Pretty sure. After thirty-eight years with Angus, Ma didn’t trust men much.”

“Did she ever help the woman? Or get paid?”

“I don’t think so. Then, it wasn’t long before she passed away.”

I sidled closer to Soupy, careful to avoid a cracked glass bowl filled with Mary Jane candy wrappers. “Why would you even remember this anyway?”

Soupy shook his head. “The smell, man. You ever smell perch burning? I still can’t eat them. Love to catch them. Can’t eat them.”

I sat back against the table. “And that would’ve been about the time our moms stopped talking to each other, wouldn’t it?”

“Goddamn broads, huh?” Soupy sat down on a pile of blankets on the sofa, the other beers dangling between his legs. “I can’t tell you, man, how sick she was about all of that. It killed her that your mom never came to see her in the hospital.”

“I’ll bet it killed my mom, too.”

“What was that all about anyway?”

By now it was clear to me that both Soupy’s mother and Mrs. B knew things that were important to my mother. It appeared that Mrs. Campbell had told or at least considered telling someone whatever it was she knew. Maybe what she knew about a map. Somebody had broken into this dump looking for something. I doubted it was kids.

“I don’t know, Soup,” I said. “I asked you once, you told me it was chick weirdness.”

“You don’t think it has something to do with this?”

“With what?”

“With what happened to Darlene’s mom.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

I drained my beer, tossed the can on the table. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Trap, I’ve got to get back.”

“Come on.” I reached with the hand with the bloody fingernail. “Don’t be hoarding those beers.”

We climbed the hill rising from the garage behind Soupy’s mother’s house. As a boy, Soupy had flooded a flat patch of ground behind the garage and used it to practice his stickhandling moves on moonlit nights. Sometimes his father would come out late, bottle in hand, and exhort his son to try this feint or that dangle, and Soupy would scoop up his pucks and say he was tired, he was going to bed.

Our boots crunched through the snow, Soupy bitching about the cold, nagging me about where we were going, me ignoring him, scanning the trees for a familiar pattern, something that resembled what I had seen in that peculiar set of photos on Mrs. Campbell’s table, of trees and forest floor in fading light. The light now, as afternoon began to yield to evening, was the color of old snow. Thirty yards ahead of us, a thin streak of yellow glowed along the top of the ridge. As we climbed, I started hearing something from the other side of the hill, the sound of voices calling out in unison, as yet unintelligible.

“Jesus freaks,” Soupy said.

“Hockey freaks,” I said.

We kept climbing. The voices grew louder. As we crested the ridge, I heard behind me the snap and gurgle of a beer being opened, and then, as Soupy came up next to me, “What the hell, man?”

We stood between oaks, facing the long slope down to Tatch’s camp. Lightbulbs in orange plastic cages dangled from nails driven into tree trunks. Extension cords snaked through the trees to the circle of trailers. Halfway down the hill, an idle backhoe crouched, its toothy scoop poised in midair like a dinosaur’s jaw hovering over its prey. The ground surrounding it for fifty yards in every direction was torn into winding gullies and potholes blotting the snowy surface. The wooden handles of shovels and pickaxes jutted from mounds of snow and dirt amid the black hollows.

“I knew they were digging here,” Soupy said, “but I didn’t know it was this serious. What are they looking for?”

“Not gold,” I said. “And not a septic field.”

The voices below were rising. I saw the townspeople walking up the two-track from the beach road, their flashlights bouncing like fireflies in the gathering dusk. They carried signs and a banner, a shambling bunch of twenty or thirty people in parkas and hats and mufflers obscuring their faces in wool. D’Alessio led them, wielding a bullhorn in one hand and a hockey stick in the other.

“Septic field?” Soupy said.

“It’s a dodge Breck’s been using to get Tatch’s born-again friends to chew up the ground looking for something else. Something he wants. Something your mother may have helped him with, intentionally or not.”

“I hope not.”

“Look.”

I pointed up into the trees where the handmade crosses hung.

“Oh, man,” Soupy said. “Creep me out.”

We trudged toward the camp, stepping between potholes and ditches and the crisscross shadows on the snow. The chant of the mob from town became clearer: “We want Tex. We want Tex. We want Tex…”

The clearing between the trailers was a slop of mud. Women stood at the doors of each of the trailers, shovels held across their bodies like rifles. I knew two of them-Jody Frost and Lisa Royall-and wasn’t surprised at all that they would go along with this drama, having seen them at play in their own personal theater on more than a few occasions at Enright’s.

“Are we the fucking Hardy Boys?” Soupy said. “Jody Frost with a shovel? I’d sooner take on a flatbed full of Dobermans. Don’t you think the Rats could get by without Tex? It’s not like the Pipefitters are going to be scared of him.”

“It’s not about Tex,” I whispered. “It’s about Darlene’s mom, and yours, and mine. And a bunch of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”

We stopped at the perimeter of the camp, peering into the clearing through an eight-foot gap between two trailers. I pulled Soupy behind one of the trailers so we could watch without being seen. At the center of the clearing stood Breck, hatless, blank-faced, his bare hands clasped behind his back.

The throng assembled on the far edge of the clearing. I saw the Fleder brothers, Floyd Kepsel, Shirley McBride, Clayton Perlmutter, others I’d seen around town but didn’t know that well, people who had nothing better to do than shake their fists at the world. Handmade signs bobbed over their heads: Free Tex. He’s a Boy, Not a Pawn. Where’s Your Christianity Anyways? Two high school girls held opposite ends of a bedsheet banner painted with Free Tex Go Rats. Frank D’Alessio, clad in an unzipped deputy’s parka, stepped out in front of them all.

Breck held up one hand. “Please stop there,” he said. “This is private property. Please respect our privacy.”

The crowd grumbled back, “Let the boy go.” I noticed an unruly head of white hair moving behind them. Luke Whistler ambled along in his down vest, holding aloft what looked like a cassette recorder. His eyes weren’t on the mob but on the hill behind me.