Bryan Gruley: The Skeleton Box

I stood and moved around the table to Whistler’s right. He looked up at me.

“A book’s a pretty good idea,” I said. “Maybe I’ll write one.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You too, Luke. I’ll miss you in court today, though. Going fishing.”

State troopers arrested Father Timothy Reilly one week after the arraignments of Breck and Whistler. The archdiocese and the state cops had arranged it so he’d be taken into custody in the middle of the night, when no reporters were around.

But Dingus got a heads-up. Catledge heard and called Darlene at home, where she was finishing up her suspension. She told me and I called Joanie McCarthy, who was waiting with a Times photographer when police brought Reilly out in cuffs.

Judge Gallagher bound Reilly over for trial on a charge of first-degree murder in the 1944 disappearance of Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero. The priest refused to speak to the police and stood mute in the courtroom, where his lawyers from Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne plied Gallagher’s deaf ears with pleas to leave an old man be. Dingus and Eileen Martin knew the charge was over the top, but they hoped to elicit evidence that Reilly had conspired in the past year to conceal what Nilus and Bitsy Whistler had done.

In the meantime, Reilly, out on bond, went into hiding while the Detroit newspapers wrote story after story about the archdiocese’s alleged cover-up of Nilus’s chronic womanizing, the death of the nun, the reburial of her bones. I was able to slip Joanie a few tips on where to find paternity suits. One day I got an e-mail from her that made me smile: “Our buddy Regis is no longer in the employ of Eagan MacDonald.” She said she owed me a Red Wings game, and I said that if I could bring Darlene along, that would be fine.

After his release, soon after Reilly’s arrest, Wayland Breck rented a cabin on Crooked Lake so he could keep tabs on the trials of the priest and Whistler and assist the prosecution where needed. But when Tatch and his fellow Christian campers heard Breck was still around, they organized daily pickets at his cabin. If the Pilot had still been publishing, it would have run a three-column photo of people parading past his house, holding signs that said BRECK GO HOME and LIARS BELONG DOWNSTATE. Breck left Starvation in early June.

The Michigan State Bar’s Judicial Ethics Committee came down hard on Judge Gallagher after learning of the shenanigans in his chambers. Rather than face censure, Gallagher retired. He posted his typewritten resignation letter on a bulletin board at Audrey’s Diner amid ads for propane and landscaping services. The letter thanked everyone in Starvation, “especially those who both violate and enforce the law, for making my life so interesting for more than forty years.” He said quitting wasn’t difficult because his cancer had spread and he was moving to Arizona where he would “bask in the warmth of the Lord while preparing for the one verdict that truly matters.”

The sun hovered just over the tree line at the lake’s far end. I was sitting in the oak swing on the bluff at Mom’s house. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Darlene said.

“Just looking at the lake. The sun’s still out and what is it? Nine o’clock?”

“About.”

“I love July.”

“So did your mother,” Darlene said. She had a towel knotted over her bikini bottom. She sat, her bare knee grazing my thigh. “How was fishing?”

“Not much biting, but fun to hang with Soup.”

“How is he?”

“You know. Polished off a six-pack by the time we got to the cove. Thinking of selling the bar. Or maybe not. He got a legit offer on his parents’ place. That should tide him over for, I don’t know, a month or two.”

“Poor Soupy.”

“And he got a dog.”

“No.”

“Yeah. My fault. I showed him a picture of old Stanley, he wanted another dog.”

“Is this one afraid of umbrellas, too?”

I laughed.

“So,” I said, “Whistler got the max?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Did you get to usher him out?”

“No. Watched from the cheap seats. I’m not quite back in Dingus’s good graces.”

“You’ll get there.”

She stretched her arms over her head and wagged her neck back and forth. “I was so sweaty from all the unpacking, I had to go for a dip.”

I had watched her from the swing. She swam freestyle straight out from the dock a hundred yards, then flipped on her back and paddled out to the middle of the lake, where all I could see was the wake of her kicking feet. I could have watched all night.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a photograph and a folded piece of paper.

“Good thing I didn’t toss that box,” I said.

“Which box?”

“The one from Mom sitting on my sofa for weeks. It had a bunch of crayon drawings I did as a kid and report cards and other junk. But this is actually interesting.”

I handed Darlene the Polaroid. She looked. I saw her eyes mist.

“Mom,” she said. “And look how cute you are.”

The photo was black and white. Mrs. B sat astride a hospital bed with an arm around me, her eyes wide and happy behind her big glasses. I was trying to smile but my throat probably hurt too much.

“Where is this?” Darlene said.

“A hospital downstate. I just got my tonsils out.”

“Why was my mother there? I don’t remember this.”

“Supposedly she was there because Mom couldn’t handle hospitals after Dad died. But this”-I brandished the folded paper-“suggests Mom was up to something else.”

It appeared to have been torn from the kind of notepad Mom kept by her kitchen phone. I gave it to Darlene. “Oh, gosh,” she said.

I’d found it stuck to the back of the Polaroid. Written on it in my mother’s handwriting was the address and phone number for Eagan, MacDonald amp; Browne on Shelby Street in downtown Detroit.

“That’s when she saw Reilly,” Darlene said.

“Gotta be. He isn’t going to get off, is he?”

“He has some good lawyers.”

“Paid for by the collection basket,” I said. “At the very least, he’s dragging the archdiocese’s name through the mud.”

“Is that important to you?” Darlene said.

“I don’t mind it.”

She turned her body on the swing to face me. “I lost my mother, but I don’t intend to lose my faith. She was too strong for that.”

I wanted nothing but peace with Darlene. We were neighbors now, she in her mother’s house, me in Mom’s. We had agreed to live that close, maybe sell one of the houses later, move into the other together. For now, we were close enough that I could leave her bed in the middle of the night and walk home, and she could do the same.

I pulled an envelope out of my other pocket, feeling the raised letters within. “This finally came today,” I said. “You know, Verna Clark could take a lesson from the clerk in Sanilac County. Her name is Bonnie Or wall and she’s a peach.”

Darlene took it. The return address said Sandusky, Michigan. “You haven’t opened it?”

“I already know what’s in it,” I said.

To honor the River Rats’ best season in nineteen years, the town council won the state’s permission to post a commemorative sign at the Starvation Lake exit on I-75.

A sign-posting ceremony was held at noon on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Townspeople assembled in a cornfield along the highway. County commissioner Elvis Bontrager presented the sign to DOT workers who then anchored it on the shoulder near the beginning of the exit ramp. The sign, a rectangle of white lettering on a green background, announced the River Rats as the 2000 Michigan State Hockey Runners-Up.

The Rats had lost, 3–2, to the Austin Painters in the championship final. Dougie Baker played another acrobatic game, stopping forty-six shots. It wasn’t enough. The Painters jumped out to a 2–0 lead, then made it 3–1 in the middle of the third period. They got to celebrating a bit early and Danny FitzGerald scored to pull the Rats within a goal with under two minutes remaining. The hometown crowd went wild, banging on the glass, waving the big blue-and-gold Rats banners. Coach Poppy pulled Dougie for a sixth skater. Maybe if that extra guy had been Tex, the Rats would have pulled it out, but Tex was standing on crutches behind the bench. We didn’t manage another shot on goal.