Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I woke up on my back, the living room carpet scratchy on my shoulder blades. Darlene was awake, looking at me from where her head lay on my chest.

“Gus,” she said. “What do you believe?”

“I don’t like the guy, but I don’t think Breck-”

“Not that. I mean believe. Like faith. My mother, she believed in God, the church.”

“Did you know your mom had a rosary at the office? Kind of like the one in my mom’s lockbox. She’d set it next to her sometimes when she was writing obits.”

Darlene closed her eyes. “What about you?”

“I don’t have a rosary,” I said.

“Please don’t.”

I looked around the room. My gaze fell again on the aerial shot of the lake.

“I don’t know.” I said. “I guess I believe in doing my best, trying to be a good guy, be nice to my mom, take care of the people I love. Is that good enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope it is. It has to be.”

“Why? Why does it have to be?”

I knew the answer. I’d known it for a while, but I hadn’t had the guts to say it.

“Because I’m here, Darlene,” I said. “I’m here because you’re here. You’re why I came back after screwing up in Detroit. OK? Is that good enough?”

She picked her head up from my chest. I looked at her.

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She leaned up and kissed my neck, then let her head fall back on my breast. My eyes drifted back to the picture of the lake. I thought of how we used to lie on our backs on the raft in summer, our eyes closed, our fingertips touching. I thought of Mrs. B, fingering her rosary beads, silently praying, then setting the rosary down and typing. I thought of my mother’s rosary, hidden away in a metal box.

I nudged Darlene.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Why didn’t that body wash up on Torch Lake?”

She slid a hand down my belly and let it rest on the inside of one leg. “God, I’m tired. What are you talking about?”

“Sister Cordelia. You know. The sheriff who got re-elected way back when? Who solved the nun’s murder? Breck’s grandpa supposedly dumped her in Torch Lake. But the body never washed up.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes boats go down and don’t wash up. The tunnels.”

“Nobody’s ever found one of those tunnels,” I said. “It’s like Bigfoot.”

“You never really believe anything, do you.”

“I guess not.”

“Why does it matter whether the body washed up?” Darlene said.

I thought of my mother, lying in her cell, her hands crossed on her breast. I remembered her at my house, scrutinizing her fingers and nails, insisting they were filthy when they were not.

“Gus?”

“Mom knows,” I said.

“Mom knows what?”

“Mom knows where that nun is.” I sat up, dislodging Darlene. “We have to get her.”

“She’s in jail.”

“No. We have to get her and get going. Now.” Mom’s words came back to me. “Before someone else gets there first.”

Darlene opened the back door of her sheriff’s cruiser and helped Mom slide in next to me. She looked tiny in her gray parka.

“Gussy?” she said. “What is going on?”

“You’ll see.”

“I want to go home.” She put a hand on the back of the seat, leaned forward, and addressed herself to Darlene. “Take me home, honey.”

Darlene pulled the car onto Route 816 and punched the accelerator. She replied without turning around. “I’m sorry, Mom C. You’re actually still in custody.”

“I hope you don’t get in any trouble,” I told Darlene.

“Christenson was the duty guy,” she said. “All those people from Tatch’s camp were keeping him pretty busy.”

“Where are you taking me?” Mom said.

Snow fluttered in the headlight funnels piercing the dark ahead of Darlene’s cruiser. The rear of the car shimmied as she eased into a descending hairpin. Mom grabbed at the seat, squinted out the window.

“Why are we going here? I hate this road.”

We were winding to the bottom of Dead Sledder Mile.

“Almost there, Bea,” Darlene said.

“Oh, God, not this road. Especially in the dark.”

Dead Sledder flattened. Darlene drove another mile, slowed, and came nearly to a stop. Mom was sitting up, watching. Darlene turned the cruiser onto a two-track, the tires groaning in the snow. The two-track wound upward through the dark trees.

“No,” Mom said. “Please, I don’t want to go.”

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

“Stop,” she told Darlene.

Darlene braked beneath a canopy of snow-laden evergreens.

“What’s the matter, Bea?”

“I know why you’re taking me here,” Mom said.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Mom reached across the seat and grabbed my arm. “No.”

“Why, Mom? What’s up there?”

“Everybody has a past,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Gus,” Darlene said.

“The future is all that matters,” Mom said.

“Sorry, this is gibberish. Darlene, go.”

Mom moved as if to slap my face, but I caught her by the wrist.

“Darlene,” I said.

“Let go of me,” Mom said.

“Calm down.”

“I will.”

I let go. “You left the house the other night,” I said. “You snuck out to Dad’s tree house.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t play the memory game.” I pointed through the windshield at the two-track. “You know what’s up there. Mrs. B knew what’s up there. Soupy’s mom knew.”

She looked out her window. “Louise loved money more than me,” she said. “Someone asked her. She told them. She wanted me to forgive her.”

“She told them what?”

Mom’s face fell into her hands. Her shoulders began to heave. I couldn’t afford to care. Not then.

“Mother,” I said, “I know you weren’t playing cribbage yesterday.”

“Go easy on her,” Darlene said.

“Why were you taking money out of the bank? Why were you going over your will? What are you afraid of? You hid the lockbox, then you made sure I had it. Was that a slip? Or did you really want me to know?”

“Please,” Mom said. She looked up, looked around, looked out her window again. “The sun. The sun was going down. I saw it on the leaves.”

“Gus,” Darlene said. “Leave her.”

“She’s playing us,” I said. “There is no sun. There are no leaves. Enough of the secrets.”

“You were not there,” Mom said.

The car lurched into reverse. “She’s had enough,” Darlene said.

“All right. Stop. Now.” It was Mom. “I’m not a ‘her.’ I’m not a ‘she.’ Don’t talk about me as if I wasn’t even here. I’m still here.”

“I’m sorry, Bea,” Darlene said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“No,” Mom said. “No.” She turned and looked into my eyes. “The truth will not set you free, son. The truth is a burden.”

She told us.

Bea Damico had loved Rudy Carpenter since she was in the sixth grade. They had gone steady since the eighth. Watching sunsets from the beach at the public access, lake water lapping across their feet, young Bea and Rudy had talked of the day when they would marry and buy a house on the lake. It wouldn’t have to be a big house, just one big enough for the two of them and maybe two children, a boy and a girl, and maybe a dog. The first time Rudy told Bea he loved her, she made him promise that they would paint the house yellow, her favorite color.

And then, one June, the summer before her last in high school, came Eddie McBride, Rudy’s cousin from Ann Arbor. Like the other downstate boys who appeared at their family cottages in summer, Eddie had about him a confidence-Mama Damico called it swagger, as if the word was an obscenity-that made a girl think, for just a minute, maybe longer, that there might be something beyond Starvation Lake, beyond the Frostee Freeze and sock hops, beyond plunking for bluegill and water-skiing barefoot and making out on the dive raft at Walleye Lake.