Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Luke,” I yelled. “Help!”

Either he didn’t hear or he didn’t think he should intervene, because he kept looking around where he was standing and writing in his notebook, as a reporter probably should have. “Whistler!” I screamed again, and now he shuffled out from the trees, sliding sideways in his sneakers as he stuffed his notebook in his vest. His gaze was fixed on Breck.

“The boy,” I yelled.

“Stop that prick,” Soupy said.

“Grab him,” Perlmutter called out.

“The boy.”

Breck was almost in reach when Tex veered right to skirt a ditch and lost his footing. He slid legs first into the trench, grabbing in vain at the snow rimming the edge. There was a hard whump and then the cry of a boy in sudden, anguished pain. I saw his hair tossing back and forth above the lip of the ditch and then I came up to the edge of the hole alongside Breck and Soupy and saw Tex bellowing and holding his left leg with both hands, writhing in the blackened snow. The Fleders came up next and then Perlmutter, who took one look at Tex and lost his lunch. I noticed cop lights flashing on the tree trunks around us.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Whistler said.

An ambulance took Tex away.

Sheriff Dingus Aho cuffed Breck and read him his rights.

“Am I being charged?” Breck said.

“We’ll get to that in due course,” Dingus said.

Darlene stood to the side, staring at Breck. As Skip Catledge opened a cruiser back door, Breck screwed his head around to look back up the hill. Dingus clapped a hand on the back of his neck.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Breck said.

“Shut the hell up,” Dingus said, shoving Breck into the car.

I looked where Breck had looked and saw Whistler still poking around on the hill.

“I’m out of here,” Soupy said. He went skittering along the edge of the clearing, around the back of the trailers, sidestepping the ditches as he climbed. He stopped briefly to pick up the last beer he’d dropped when he hip-checked Breck.

Two paddy wagons rolled up. Catledge and Darlene went to each of the trailers. The doors creaked open, the residents straggled out. There were about twenty in all, men and women, a few children. I’d seen them at the IGA, counting out pennies for their purchases; standing in line at the once-a-week food pantry maintained by the senior center; at Enright’s, begging Soupy to extend them a little more credit for half a shell of beer to wash down the twenty-five-cent pickled egg they’d fished out of the jar on the bar. I had seen their faces but I hadn’t seen them, knew their names but didn’t know them. Soupy liked to say they were people with no lives. But here, I thought, on a lonely hill above the lake, they have a life, or at least they believe they do.

The police put the children in a trailer with Lisa Royall and told her to keep them inside while the other adults from the camp were taken for questioning. Catledge herded Jody Frost and the others into the paddy wagons while Jody tried to twist free, yelling, “Why aren’t you arresting D’Alessio and those other assholes?” Lisa watched from her trailer door, trying not to cry, and I saw children’s faces peeking through tattered drapes on a window next to her. “None of this would have happened,” Lisa shouted, “if you all would just leave us alone.”

D’Alessio, who’d been resuscitated by a paramedic, watched the arrests, then started down the hill on his own. Dingus ordered Darlene to bring him back and put him in a cruiser. “Are you sure, Sheriff?” she said. “Don’t we have enough-”

“That’s an order, Deputy,” he said.

Darlene chased him down. As she cuffed him, he shouted at Dingus, “What the hell in the world can you charge me with, Sheriff?” Dingus glanced over his shoulder, said, “Trespassing,” and then turned to me. “Get your boy,” he said, pointing at Whistler, “and get out of here, before I arrest you, too.”

Whistler drove us to town. The car reeked of garlic, its backseat piled with old Roselli’s Pizza boxes. In a Toronado, that’s a lot of boxes.

“You find anything on that hill?” I said.

“A lot of dirt under the snow,” he said.

“You think this is it?” I said. “Is Breck the Bingo Night guy?”

“He’s got motive, right? Avenge his grandfather?”

“Seems like,” I said. “But you think he’d actually kill someone?”

“Maybe it was an accident.”

“It’s a dead body either way, remember?”

“Do the cops have any hard evidence? Anything that could really put anyone away?”

I recalled what Shipman had said about Tatch and Mom possibly saying something about Breck. “Tatch may have given him up,” I said.

“You know what sucks?” Whistler said. “We don’t have a paper until Saturday.”

“It’s worse than that,” I said.

I told him about the Pilot ’s fate. It wasn’t clear what would happen to the two of us, I said, but I assumed we would either be laid off or farmed out to some other Media North property, maybe even Channel Eight.

“So it’s Friday and that’s it?” Whistler said.

“Look at the bright side,” I said. “More time with Tawny Jane.”

Whistler scowled. “I should have stayed at the damn Free Press. ”

We remained silent as he turned onto Main. He pulled to the curb in front of the Pilot, cutting across the angled parking spaces as if he didn’t plan to stay. “You mind filing something about that circus to the Web? I’ll drop by the cop shop.”

“OK,” I said. “You want to hear about my trip downstate? Pretty interesting stuff.”

“Later, for sure,” he said. He looked at his watch.

“Maybe meet for a beer.” I pushed my door open. Snow had begun to fall. “Let’s go out with a bang, eh?”

“Yep.” He didn’t sound like his heart was in it, though. Luke Whistler’s survival, I thought, depended on having a newspaper to write for. “So they cleared that whole hill?”

“There’s just the Royall woman and some kids left.”

“OK. Call you later.”

I wrote my story, locked up, and walked to my house through sheets of snow. A plow trundled past me on Main, blade clanking, yellow lights blinking in the whiteness. A bit late, I thought, but that’s how it went in a county short of cash.

My pickup truck was covered in white. I opened the driver’s door and stepped back so the snow on the roof didn’t cascade onto my head. I reached in and started the engine to defrost the windshield and grabbed a long-handled brush and used it to scrape the outside of the truck clean. The snow brushed across my bare knuckles but I didn’t feel it much because I’d been back in Starvation Lake long enough that I was accustomed to the cold.

My phone rang. I climbed inside the truck and turned up the fan and felt the heat blow around me. Coach Poppy was calling. He was at the hospital in Traverse.

“Tex has a high-ankle sprain,” he said. “He’s lucky he didn’t break something.”

“That’s terrible.”

“What the hell’s the matter with this place?”

“I’m actually trying to find out.”

“I know it’s hardly the priority right now, and I hate to say it, but we don’t stand a chance against the’Fitters without Tex.”

“Unless Dougie plays out of his mind.”

“We’ll show up,” Poppy said. “The town needs something.”

“Be thankful the Rats got this far. At least nobody’s going to be blaming somebody for the rest of their lives. Tell Tex to hang in there.”

I looked at empty Main Street, recalling the cars and trucks parading to the rink for the Mic-Mac game two nights before. Blaring horns and jam-packed bleachers would make no difference against the Pipefitters. Not without our star winger.