The Skeleton Box Page 12

  “It’s late.”

  “I’m here because of Father Nilus Moreau,” I said. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Mom considered it. “He was at St. Val’s when I was a girl. I worked for him for a few years at the rectory. Why?”

  “He was your boss?”

  “I guess. Grandma Damico liked him, but she liked all the priests.”

  She meant her adoptive mother, my grandmother.

  “What’s Grandma D got to do with it?” I said.

  Mom shook her head. “She never liked Rudy, you know.” My father.

  “What? Why are you—”

  “She would never let us be alone in the house. It was fine for my brothers. They could have their girlfriends in at all hours when Mama and Papa weren’t there. But Rudy had to stay away.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You asked.”

  “No. I asked about Father Nilus.”

  “Grandma Damico liked him.”

  Grandpa Damico died of a heart attack before I was born. Grandma D lasted until I was almost seven. I remembered how she looked too fat for her tiny kitchen and how her apron smelled of garlic and how disappointed I was that she gave me socks and underwear for my sixth birthday and then again for Christmas a month later.

  “Why does that matter?” I said.

  “She got me the job with Nilus. She said she wanted me busy, but really she just wanted me away from all the boys. ‘Boys bad,’ she used to say. ‘Boys bad.’ She was right, of course, as her own sons proved.”

  “So you knew him pretty well?”

  “Who?”

  I told myself to be patient. It was late, Mom was tired, I was testing her.

  “Nilus,” I said.

  She placed her hands palms down on her knees and assessed them. “He was my friend, for a while,” she said.

  “You never mentioned him before.”

  “I suppose not. He went away when I was, oh, I don’t know, sixteen or seventeen? I wrote him a few letters, but he never wrote back. So I guess he wasn’t my mentor. Maybe I had the wrong address.”

  “Where were you writing?”

  “Why are you asking me these things?”

  I studied her face. She wasn’t going to say more until I answered.

  “During the break-in,” I said, “Mrs. B tried to call Darlene. Darlene didn’t answer so her mom left a message. She mentioned this Nilus. At least we think she did.”

  Mom looked away. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  She looked back at me. “Why would Phyllis say something like that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. Did she know this guy, too?”

  “Of course. We went to the same school. We went to Mass every day.”

  “Did something happen that would have—”

  “A lot happened,” Mom said. “But then it was over, and we went on with our lives.”

  “Are you talking about the nun? Sister Cordelia?”

  Now Mom studied my face.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “I read about her at the—in old newspaper clippings.”

  “It was quite a story.”

  “You knew her?”

  “We all knew her. She taught us.”

  “Reading and writing and spelling, right? Did you like her?”

  Mom nodded. “She was nice. She brought us cake on our birthdays.”

  “Did Grandma Damico like her?”

  “No. She thought Non—Sister Cordelia was too pretty to be a nun.”

  “She did look pretty in the picture I saw. She took you on a trip for a spelling bee.”

  “Really?” Mom thought about this. “I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that we lost.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about any of this?”

  Mom lowered her eyes, and the fine features of her face—the high cheekbones, the thin-lipped mouth—narrowed into a concerted frown, as if she was trying to remember something. She began to rock gently on the footstool. She raised her right hand in front of her face and looked at the backs of her fingers. She rotated her hand slowly one way, then the other. Then she turned it over and curled her fingers into her palm.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “My fingernails,” she said. “I have to wash my hands. Look at my nails. They’re filthy.”

  I leaned over and looked. Her fingers and her palm were clean. Her unpolished nails, too. “They look fine,” I said.

  “I need the hard brush. The bristles get under the nails.”

  I had learned not to argue about things she believed she saw or heard that no one else could see or hear. They would go away on their own. I wanted to put my arm around her, but that wouldn’t have done any good either. I waited. She stared at her fingers a little longer, then let her hand fall back into her lap. The rocking stopped.

  “I wish Phyllis were here,” she said.

  “So do I,” I said. “Can you tell me anything more about Nilus?”

  “Why are you so concerned with a priest who’s been dead for years?”

  “How did you know he was dead?”

  “I don’t know. He was old.”

  “I thought he never wrote you back.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Where was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’d you send your letters?”

  “Detroit.” A muscle in her jaw pulsed. “The archdiocese.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m tired.”

  “That’s not why you stopped going to church, is it?”

  “Because he didn’t write back to me? No.” She sighed. “No, he was a help after”—she paused—“after Sister Cordelia left. For a while.”

  She’d never told me exactly why she had walked away from the church. She and Mrs. B had their occasional debates, of course, and almost every time Mom would say of St. Val’s, “There’s nothing in there but a frustrated man and his expensive geegaws.” I never knew if she meant the pastor or God himself.

  “Nilus died in the U.P.,” I said. “In 1971.”

  “Hmm,” she said. She looked past me and I turned to see headlights moving past the house again. “When will the police stop?”

  “Why do you care so much?”

  “I want my life to go back to normal.”

  It would never be normal again without her best friend, but I didn’t need to say that. “You’d better get some sleep,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “How is Alden?”

  My mother was one of the only people in the world who called Soupy by his given name. “He’s fine. I mean, you know, he’s in bankruptcy and his life’s a total mess, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “I worry about him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I do. He’s selling his parents’ property, isn’t he?”

  “He has an offer. Why?”

  “He needs to be careful.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Mom stood, gathering her robe around her. “I’ll stay at your place tomorrow night, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course. Any particular reason?”

  “I’m tired of the police watching my every move.”

  “They’re not watching you, Mom. They’re watching over you.”

  “Millie’s coming to get me in the morning,” she said. “We’re going to have breakfast at Audrey’s, then go to the funeral home.”

  “I thought you were going there today.”

  “Where?”

  “The funeral home.”

  Mom thought about this for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t.”

  “How come?”

  She looked past me into the kitchen again, as if she hadn’t heard my question. “Tomorrow night,” she said, “I’ll need you to help me with something.”

  “All right.”

  “After it’s dark.” She leaned over an
d kissed me on the cheek. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  I scraped my plate and put it in the dishwasher, then dialed voice mail on my cell phone. Sure enough, there was Whistler’s voice, telling me at ten fifty-two that Tawny Jane Reese was about to clobber us with the Nilus scoop.

  “Damn,” I said, and shut the phone off.

  THIRTEEN

  My phone was ringing when I came through the back door to the Pilot newsroom. Only one person, my boss, called me on the line that was blinking. I grabbed it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” Philo Beech said.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  Millie Bontrager had picked Mom up just as I was dragging myself out of bed. I’d hugged them both and told Mom I’d call her in the afternoon. Now I had a few things to do at the Pilot before I went to the drain commission meeting where Breck was supposed to make an appearance. I had a few questions to ask him about a murdered murderer who might have been his maternal grandfather.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Philo said. “How’s your mother doing? It seems like every time I look at my computer, something else bad has happened over there.”

  “Mom’s OK.”

  Philo would have been standing at the fourth-floor window of his corner office in Traverse City, tall and gawky in a sleeveless argyle sweater, peering down on Front Street as he talked. Seven years my junior, he was enthralled with the idea that he was at corporate, with his own office and a shared secretary, after his promotion from the Pilot to Media North assistant vice president for news and innovation. As a reporter, he’d barely been able to cover a high school volleyball match. Now he was in charge of telling editors and reporters like me which stories to cover and how. It was actually the order of things at newspapers big and small. The guys who couldn’t skate or shoot or stickhandle often wound up running the hockey team.

  I needed a fresh notebook for the drain commission meeting. We’d run out of the latest ration corporate had shipped, but Whistler hoarded them, so I walked over to his desk. I didn’t see any unused notebooks. But there on his calendar blotter sat the fat gold pinkie ring he was constantly taking on and off. His Toronado was parked out back, so I figured he was in the john.

  “I hope they find whoever caused all this trouble,” Philo said. “And I hope everything works out for your mother, and for you.”

  I cradled the phone on my shoulder and picked up Whistler’s ring. Its heft surprised me. Either Whistler had a thick pinkie or the ring had a lot of real gold in it. I rotated it in front of my eyes. Up close, it was far from perfect, closer to oval than round, with hairline streaks of scarlet and silver flecking the gold. Carved on the inside were four letters in uppercase italic: EJPW.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Interesting story on Channel Eight last night, eh? The Catholic Church?”

  This was Philo’s way of asking me why the Pilot hadn’t had the story first.

  “Tawny Jane may be out on a limb on that,” I said. “But we’re on it.”

  Philo cleared his throat. It was time for the business part of the call. I heard the toilet flush in the john and set Whistler’s ring down on his blotter.

  “This probably isn’t the best time, but there is something I—we—need to discuss.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The Media North board of directors, as you know, meets this afternoon.”

  I didn’t know or care, but I said, “Yeah.” EJPW. Initials, I assumed. But for what? Whistler’s high school? An old girlfriend? An ex-wife? His ex, I recalled, was Barbara or Beverly something, so it wasn’t that ex.

  “One item on the agenda,” Philo continued, “is a discussion of how to rationalize our print and Internet platforms.”

  That got my attention. “Rationalize platforms? You mean shut the paper down?”

  “Calm down, Gus. You’re jumping to conclusions again.”

  “Our readers aren’t ready for point and click. They’re old, like three times your age. I know you find that hard to imagine, but technology’s not their thing. They still get freaked out by antilock brakes.”

  “Nobody wants to close the paper.”

  “It’s March, ads are in the shitter, so the bean counters get panicky, and the fastest way to fix things is to kill the dinosaur, whack the printing and delivery, all that bothersome expensive stuff, and just put the whole thing on the Internet. Then we’ll all get rich.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  Whistler came out of the john. “Morning,” he said.

  I nodded at him. He went to his desk, put his ring on, fished his car keys out of his vest. He waved and started to leave, but I held up a finger for him to wait. He shrugged and sat on his desk.

  “Damn right,” I told Philo. “Because Audrey’s Diner and Kepsel’s Ace Hardware and Sally’s Floral aren’t going to pay squat for Internet ads, are they?”

  Philo sighed.

  “So what’s the discussion about?”

  I heard a chair squeak—Philo sitting—and then clacking on a computer. I sat at my desk. Whistler had left a page torn from a notebook on my keyboard. A bunch of names and numbers were scratched across the page in black pen. I set it aside and flicked on my computer. At the top of my e-mail queue were two from a former Pilot reporter now working at my old paper in Detroit, the Times. The tapping on Philo’s end stopped.

  “Look,” he said. “We’re just trying to envision the best way to go forward. Ignoring the Web would be—”

  “We’re not ignoring the Web. For Christ’s sake, it’s what got you your promotion. We posted twice yesterday and we’ll be posting more today.”

  Whistler smiled and winked and gave me a thumbs-up. I gave it back.

  “Please listen,” Philo said. “There’ll be a broad discussion of where we go with our online platform, how gradually or not we migrate content—”

  “Can you speak in English?”

  “Can you shut up?” He waited. So did I. He continued. “The board is going to talk about what we’re doing and how, what we ought to do about costs, whether we should start charging for the paper on the Internet.”

  “Who the hell’s going to start paying for something they already get for free?”

  I toggled to e-mail and opened the first of the two topping the queue. It had come in the night before:

  hey, stranger. got two tix for wings this sun v avs. leave the rat(s) race behind and come down. Will buy you a beer. Or three. We’ll have fun.

  —j

  Philo ignored my rhetorical question. “Well, Gus, I have to tell you that part of what got this whole discussion going was our CFO noticed some rather large and, frankly, rather disturbing cost spikes at your operation.”

  Nothing good ever followed the word “frankly.”

  “Here?” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  I scoured my brain for what I’d recently put on my Media North credit card. All I could come up with was two beers and a basket of fried dill pickles at Enright’s for me and some real estate guy trying to unload the empty strip mall outside of town.

  “There was that monitor your reporter destroyed,” Philo said.

  “That was last year’s budget. Wait—I did buy a month’s worth of toilet paper the other day. But at least it was Costco.”

  “This is no joke. Your costs are out of control. Long-distance calls. Copying and printing. And a consultant? In Grosse Pointe, for Pete’s sake? Who authorized that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We have three credit-card charges totaling four hundred fifty dollars.”

  “For what?”

  “Hard to tell. All it said was ‘Information services.’ Some consulting firm.”

  I looked at Whistler. He, too, had a Media North credit card. It wasn’t supposed to be used for anything but gas on long-distance trips and the occasional coffee or lunch with a source. Certainly nothing over fifty
bucks.

  “That’s got to be a mistake,” I said, lowering my voice so Whistler wouldn’t hear. “Hell, Luke used his own cell phone until the end of the year when he could’ve been using ours. It’s not like he’s trying to screw us. Someone probably got our credit card mixed up with somebody else’s.”

  “Do you personally approve Pilot expense reports?” Philo said.

  “Of course.”

  That was technically true. My two employees—Whistler and, previously, Mrs. B—filed their infrequent reports online and zapped them to me. The supremely efficient paperless process required so many clicks and strokes to scrutinize each entry that I gave up and just approved the reports without looking. Which was even more efficient, as I saw it.

  Philo waited. He knew I was full of shit. He knew all I cared about was writing stories.

  “I’m worried about you,” he finally said.

  “Why?”

  “I know you’ve had a rough—a very rough—couple of days.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “I fibbed before,” he said. “There is very serious consideration being given to putting the Pilot on the Internet only.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit. They want to try it with one of our papers to see how it goes. Fuqua’s running the numbers now.”

  Fuqua was Media North’s CFO. Fuckward, I called him. He had been hired away from a chain of fudge shops. He had never worked at a newspaper. Based on the memos he e-mailed about how to be more “smart” and “productive” about covering news, I had come to doubt that he had even read a newspaper.

  “So the Pilot would be a pilot project, huh?”

  “I hope not,” Philo said. “I actually don’t think it makes business sense, at least not yet. But you’re not helping me with four hundred fifty dollar bills.”

  There was no use arguing.

  “Understood,” I told Philo. “I will check into it.”

  “I’m going to try to head this thing off for now,” he said. “But this train’s going to arrive sooner or later.”

  “What was that all about?” Whistler said after I’d hung up.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Listen, I hate to ask, but did you put a bunch of charges on your credit card for some consultant or something?”

  Whistler gave me a look. Great reporters never liked being questioned on such unimportant details as how much money they spent chasing stories. Nor did I. But things were different now. If the Pilot went online only, the bean counter Fuqua would shut the newsroom, sell the desks and chairs and copier, and make us work from home. Or, worse, Traverse City.