Bryan Gruley: The Skeleton Box

Gallagher was last to leave. “Take care of your mother,” he said. “And Bea, you take care of your son.”

When’s the last time you were here?” I said.

Mom and I had left the courthouse and, at my insistence, walked down Main to Estelle, then turned north and gone six blocks. We stood now behind the empty rows of varnished wooden pews in St. Valentine’s Roman Catholic Church. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go there. Maybe to jog Mom’s memory, maybe to make her feel things she preferred not to feel. Maybe for me. It felt like the only way.

“Funerals and weddings,” Mom said. “But Sunday Mass, not lately.”

“It seems like a nice church.”

“It’s a building. They knocked the other down and they can knock this one down, too.”

Stone columns embellished with gold-leaf carvings rose four stories to a vaulted ceiling painted sky blue with stars of gold. An enormous crucifix, Christ’s head lolling to his right, hovered over the marble altar. A statue of St. Joseph was missing three fingers. The patterned rugs running the length of the church were worn to a pinkish gray.

“There was quite a row over the stained-glass windows way back when,” Mom said. “The archdiocese said they were too expensive. Nilus ordered them anyway. There were special collections every Sunday for years to pay for them.”

“So the parish paid for Nilus’s guilt.”

She walked to one of the windows, unlocked a transom, and pushed it open. Cold air blew into the church.

“Look,” Mom said.

I walked over and leaned my head down so I could see out the transom. All I saw was a stand of snow-covered scrub pines at the bottom of a slope. “What about it?”

“That’s where the old church was. See the foundation?”

In the middle of the trees, two jagged outcroppings of concrete jutted up from the snow.

“Right.”

“That’s where Nonny was. For six years, until…”

Her voice trailed off.

“So what else is there, Mom?”

“This is not about me, Gus. It’s about Phyllis.”

“No. You know it’s about you. You’ve always known it.”

“I wish I wasn’t afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of being somebody else.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Some days I can’t remember what I did ten minutes ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone out to get the mail only to realize I’d already gotten it earlier. But I can remember everything from ages ago as if it was yesterday.”

“Why don’t you just tell me then? What else?”

“Son. I was seventeen years old and an accessory to murder.”

“No. You didn’t know you were burying a nun.”

“Not then. But later.”

“What do you mean?”

“That priest. That despicable man.”

She met him in a conference room at a law firm on Shelby Street in downtown Detroit. It was the summer of 1971.

Father Timothy Reilly sat at one end of a long table. Beatrice sat to his left. The room was warm and smelled of cigar smoke. The priest wore a dark jacket and shirt with a Roman collar. He thanked her for coming. He told her that Father Nilus Moreau had recently died in a hospital on the Keweenau Peninsula.

“He was a friend when you were a girl?” the priest said.

“Yes,” Bea said. “We lost touch.”

“I see. He remembered you, even at the very end.”

“That’s nice. Is that why you asked to see me?”

She’d heard from a lawyer named Eagan that a priest who’d once met her when she was a child wanted to see her the next time she was in Detroit. She wondered why, but she wasn’t eager to make the trip merely to satisfy her curiosity. When the lawyer called again to say the matter was “of a pressing nature” and mentioned Father Nilus Moreau, she decided she’d better get in the car.

Reilly didn’t answer her question. Instead he said, “Your own husband died recently?”

“Last year.”

The priest made a sign of the cross. “May his soul rest in peace.”

“Thank you.”

“Beatrice,” Reilly said, “I need to take you into my confidence. What I’m about to say is of a rather delicate nature.”

“A pressing matter.”

“Indeed. I believe you also knew Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero, did you not?”

The question startled her. She sat back in her chair. “Yes, Father. Why?”

Reilly folded his hands on the table and leaned over them toward Bea. “Forgive me for being direct,” he said. Then he told her that, based on a confession Father Nilus had given as part of his last rites, she apparently had been party to the death of Sister Cordelia.

“No. That’s ridiculous,” Bea said. “Nonny-Sister Cordelia disappeared when I was a girl. I missed her terribly.”

“Nonny. Yes, of course. I don’t mean, child, to imply that you participated in the actual murder of Sister Cordelia.”

“Murder?”

“We now believe she was murdered.”

Bea felt nauseated. “By who?”

“It’s not clear, unfortunately. What is clear, at least as Father Nilus confessed it to his God, is that you were involved in the disposal of the good nun’s remains.”

It all came rushing back: the humid evening forest, the smell of the earthworms, Nilus’s shiny black shoes at the rim of the hole.

“No,” was all she could think to say.

This was a crime, the priest explained, almost certainly a felony, and if she were to be convicted, she could land in prison. That would be especially tragic now that her husband had died, he said, because there would be no family left to care for her young son.

Bea felt the queasiness well in her stomach. “Father, what are you saying? I didn’t know what Father Nilus was burying there. I didn’t know what-”

“So you were there?”

She felt faint. She told herself to catch her breath. “Where?” she said.

“You don’t know where? Beatrice, God is listening.”

“Father, no, this… this can’t be-he said they were vestments and other old things. It was just a penance for me to dig a hole, to remind me I came from dirt.”

“Father Nilus took you into his confidence.”

“He did not.”

“Are you certain?”

She heard impatience in Reilly’s voice.

“I am certain. I did not know that”-now her voice caught-“that Nonny was… was there.”

“I see. His recollection differed.”

“Then he lied.”

Reilly offered his handkerchief. She waved it away.

“Beatrice, think. Why would a priest lie on his deathbed, standing at the gates of Heaven?”

Reilly rose and walked to a credenza that held a tray with glasses and a pitcher of water. He poured Bea a glass, set it down in front of her, and sat down again.

“Please, Beatrice, don’t worry,” he said. “You were only a child.”

“I was.”

“And you had sinned.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were doing penance because you had confessed to a sin. A mortal sin.”

Bea swallowed hard.

“But look,” Reilly said, “the fact is, the church has no desire to unearth this regretful episode. There is nothing to be gained. You are a good, practicing Catholic who I assume has earned God’s forgiveness. Let me ask you this: Could you by chance recollect where Father Nilus buried the poor Sister’s remains?”

She thought about this, decided she could answer yes.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Well, we’ve thought that, perhaps if we could discreetly locate them, we could give Sister Cordelia the proper religious burial she deserves.”

“But you don’t plan to tell the police?”

“So many years on, Beatrice.” He shook his head. “This is no longer a matter for men, but for God.”