Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I turned the truck off. It had to be too hectic at the jail to see Mom yet. I thought I’d make myself some supper, take a quick nap, then go down. After that, I’d get with Whistler and make a plan for publishing the last issue of the Pilot.

“Gus.”

The voice came from outside my window. Skip Catledge was playing a flashlight beam just below my face. I rolled the window down.

“Are you deaf?” he said. “Almost broke your window.”

“Thinking.”

“Follow me, please.”

“Follow you where?”

The lights on the cruiser parked behind me began to flicker on my rear window. “Just do it,” Catledge called out.

Silhouettes of reporters and cameramen and townspeople slid back and forth against the fluorescent glow of the glass-walled lobby of the Pine County Sheriff’s Department. “Mob scene,” I said to myself.

Catledge steered past the main entrance and headed toward the rear lot where the cops parked. As I followed, I saw Tawny Jane standing next to the Channel Eight van, smoothing her hair back in a side-view mirror.

Catledge stopped his cruiser and stepped out and opened the chain-link fence to the rear lot. After I pulled in, he got out again and closed the fence. We parked near the back door to the jail. I stepped out of my truck.

“Isn’t that fence automatic?” I said.

“Froze up,” Catledge said. “Dingus doesn’t have the budget to fix it.”

He ushered me through two buzzing doors. Everything was as brightly lit as a school cafeteria. I saw Dingus emerge from his office fingering a set of keys. “This way, son,” he said.

Catledge peeled off. The sheriff led me into the women’s wing of the jail, through a locked door, then through another, and finally into a dim gray corridor lined on both sides with cells. He stopped at the third one on the right. Through the bars I saw Mom, curled up beneath a wool blanket on a narrow bed, asleep. I felt the urge to reach in and stroke her shoulder, comfort her somehow. Dingus held a finger to his lips and shook his head. “Just wanted you to see,” he said.

He didn’t speak again until he’d closed his office door and indicated the angle-iron chair facing his desk. “Sit,” he said. The room smelled of mustard and salt. A hot dog for dinner, I thought. Probably cooked in the microwave in the shift room.

I sat. I’d been in the same chair many times while trying to wheedle information out of the sheriff, who usually leaned back and smiled through his handlebar mustache, his way of saying he wasn’t about to help me.

Dingus wasn’t smiling now. He sat and picked up his phone and hit a button and said into the handset, “Stand by,” then hung up the phone. He brushed some crumbs off the blotter, set his bowling-pin forearms down, and leaned toward me. Besides the phone and the blotter, the only things on his desk were a stapler, a set of black handcuffs, a file folder half an inch thick with papers, and a framed picture of his girlfriend, Barbara. He opened a drawer, took out a box of staples, closed the drawer, and set the box on the desk.

“Did you give my mother a sleeping pill?” I said.

He ignored that. “Where’ve you been?” he said. His Scandinavian singsong made it hard sometimes to tell whether he was just fooling around. Tonight, I was pretty sure he was not.

“You brought me here, Dingus.”

He plucked a row of fresh staples out of the box, then picked up the stapler and pulled the top half back to expose the carriage. “Figured you’d be out in the lobby with the other buzzards,” he said.

“Has my mother been charged?”

He slipped two sheets of paper out of the file folder, fitted them into the stapler, and punched it down with a fist. “Should she be?” he said.

“I can’t imagine with what.”

Dingus set the stapled sheets aside, took two more from the file folder, and slammed the stapler so hard that it flipped on its side. “How about obstruction of justice?”

“That would only apply if she actually knew anything.”

He righted the stapler. “What is it you hockey guys say? ‘You can’t hit what you can’t catch’?” He slammed the stapler again, this time without any paper in it. “Well, you can’t see what you can’t see, can you? Excuse me.” He picked up his phone and hit a button. “Now, please,” he said into the phone. Then he addressed me again. “Be warned, sir, although she’s your mother, you would be ill-advised to cover for her, legally speaking.”

“You think I’m covering for her?”

“Have you retained legal representation?”

“Why should I?”

“Your prerogative,” he said. “But let me tell you something: We do not believe that Bea slept as soundly Sunday night as she claims.”

“She said she woke up to go to the bathroom.”

“There’s more to it than that. Or maybe she’s told you.”

“Told me what?”

His office door opened. Darlene walked in. She had doffed her deputy’s hat and tied her hair back with a rubber band. She was carrying something behind her back that I couldn’t see from where I sat.

“Stay right there, Deputy,” Dingus said. Then, addressing me, “Can you think of a reason your mother would have left the house that night?”

My heart jumped into my throat. Because I could think of a reason.

“No,” I said.

“Do not lie to me, son. I can and will hold it against you.”

I wanted to ask Darlene what was going on. But of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t even look at her, which was why Dingus had brought her in, for maximum dramatic effect, to impress upon me the need to plumb Mom’s fickle mind for whatever secrets she was keeping. Or had forgotten.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” I said.

“But you will unless you want to join your mother in a cell. I can charge you with obstruction of justice, too.”

I grabbed my notebook and pen out of my back pocket. “That for the record?”

Dingus came out of his chair and leaned across his desk and pointed a finger so close to my face that I thought he might thrust it into my eye. “Do not trifle with me,” he said.

“Don’t trifle with me, Sheriff.”

He held his finger there a moment longer, then sat back down. “Bea Carpenter,” he said, “did not kill her best friend. And she might have slept through the assault on Phyllis Bontrager. But she woke up. And she got out of bed.”

“Which she has willingly admitted.”

“Here’s what she has not admitted: She left that house.” He turned to Darlene. “Put it here,” he said, indicating his desk.

From behind her back, Darlene produced a clear plastic bag. She slid one end open and removed a green boot with a black rubber toe and fake white fur lining the opening. I recognized it as one of the pair I’d bought Mom for Christmas. Then I remembered the old galoshes she’d worn when we’d gone up to Dad’s tree house.

“Tell me,” Dingus said. “Did you buy Bea a pair of boots recently?”

“For Christmas.”

“At Reid’s.”

“How’d you know?”

“Receipt. Credit card number.”

“So what?”

He looked at Darlene. She said, “We found it stuck in the snow on the path up to your Dad’s tree-garage. It was unlaced and pointing down the hill. The toe had gotten caught beneath a tree root under all that snow.”

I wanted to help Darlene, because I loved her mother and I loved her. But I wasn’t about to speak what I was now thinking: that Mom had left the house with the lockbox and gone up to Dad’s garage and hidden the box in the trunk of the Bonneville, then hurried back inside.

Nilus, Mrs. B had said. Like Soupy’s mom, she knew things that only they and my mother knew. I thought back to Sunday morning. Perhaps that’s what Mom and Mrs. B had been talking about when I’d come in with Saturday’s Pilot. Mom had asked why “they” hadn’t taken anything. I now concluded that she must have meant the Bingo Night Burglar.