The Skeleton Box Read online

  I felt a pinprick of sleet on my cheek. “The guy attacked her?”

  “We don’t know it’s a guy. We don’t—”

  “Gus!”

  The voice came from the road. Dingus and I both turned to see Luke Whistler, the Pilot reporter I’d hired four months before. He was standing with the bathrobes outside the police tape. Whistler had written most of the Bingo Night stories. The cops weren’t fans. I waved and called out, “Go to Munson.”

  Whistler pointed his notebook at the deputies keeping him and the crowd back. “They won’t let me in,” he said.

  “Just go,” I said.

  I looked down the road and was relieved not to see the Channel Eight TV van. I turned back to Dingus. “Murder?” I said.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “Maybe we can get you in to see your mom for a minute.”

  In the other break-ins, the intruder or intruders had come when no one was home. Maybe they’d come tonight thinking Mom would be at bingo. She went most Sundays but hadn’t tonight. The only light likely to have been burning was the one on the end table by the chair where Mrs. B did her reading. I imagined Mom dozing in bed, maybe watching something on the tiny black-and-white tube that sat atop her dresser, Mrs. B in the living room, absorbed in Maeve Binchy.

  “That would be good,” I said.

  “Just do me a favor. Try not to jump to any conclusions.”

  THREE

  Can you leave us alone for a few minutes, please?”

  The paramedic, a woman I did not know, glanced at the doorway to Mom’s bedroom, where Skip Catledge stood guard.

  “If you’re done,” the deputy said.

  “Surely.”

  She gave me a sympathetic nod on her way out.

  Catledge stepped out and slid the bedroom door closed. Mom sat up against the headboard, her eyes closed. “Gussy,” she whispered.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, took one of her hands in mine. “Mom, are you all right?”

  She wore the button-down pajamas she wore every night from October through April, off-white flannels printed with floral designs so faded that you couldn’t tell the shapes were flowers anymore. I had bought the pajamas for her sixtieth birthday.

  Mom shook her head. Her eyes were puffy and red. Wads of used tissue cluttered the nightstand. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing.

  “She was my best friend,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Is she going to be all right? She wasn’t . . . she wasn’t moving when they took her.”

  “It’s not looking good, Mom.”

  “What am I going to do?” I had no answer but to squeeze her hand. “From the day your father died, Phyllis has been my rock.”

  A single tear dripped off her face onto her arm. I snatched a tissue from the box. Mom balled it up in her right hand and held it in her lap.

  I thought of the two of them, Phyllis and Bea, sitting next to each other at the end of our dock, the sun golden on their backs, their hair tied back in twin ponytails, their feet dangling in the water. They wore one-piece bathing suits and drank lemonade from tall pink plastic cups.

  They’d sit for hours, talking about what was in the paper that day, who gossiped what about whom at euchre night, how Mr. B had to go to the doctor about the lumbar pain that turned out to be cancer, which salads and Jell-O molds they would make for the town’s annual Labor Day picnic. About Darlene and me, and when we would both finally decide that we were made for each other and do something about it. When the late August sky blew chilly on their shoulders, they wrapped themselves together in a towel and kept talking.

  Mom looked up. “Darlene,” she said. “Where is she?”

  “On her way to the hospital with Mrs. B.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You know Darlene. She’ll just funnel it all into finding out what happened.”

  “That poor girl. She’ll be all alone.”

  Mom dabbed at her eyes. I was all she had left now. The Damico family who had adopted her sixty-four years before were all dead but for a stepbrother in Oregon she hadn’t seen in years. She had plenty of friends, but none so close as Mrs. B.

  “So what happened, Mom?”

  She glanced at the bedroom door, leaned in close to me. “I don’t think Sheriff Aho is very happy with me. He kept asking questions: ‘Who was it? Did you see a face? Did you hear a voice? Was it someone you knew?’”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “Yes. Then I woke up, because I had to pee. I’d had an extra cup of tea.”

  “And you found her.”

  She swallowed a sob, her eyes welling again. “There was—there was so much blood.”

  “Mom.”

  “I was useless. Useless to my best friend.”

  “Mom, it’s not your fault.”

  She picked up her hands then and held them in front of her face. She stared at the palms, then turned her hands over and stared again.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  She let her hands fall. “If only she hadn’t been here.”

  “Why didn’t you go to bingo?”

  “She shouldn’t have been here. I am not her responsibility.”

  No, I thought, Mom was my responsibility. That’s what I heard her saying, whether she meant it or not.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want me to move back in? Maybe just till summer breaks?”

  “I’ll be fine, son. They won’t come back.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I heard the door slide open behind me.

  “Gus,” Catledge said.

  I gave Mom’s hand another squeeze. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll find out what happened.”

  “You always do.”

  Catledge took me through the dining room and outside.

  I had sat at Mom’s dining room table that Sunday morning, with Mom and Mrs. B.

  I’d come with a copy of Saturday’s Pilot. A few days before, a snowplow had flattened the blue plastic Pilot tube in front of Mom’s house, then dragged it halfway around the lake. Saturday’s delivery guy was probably too hungover to bother to stop his station wagon and carry Mom’s paper to her door. The Pilot came only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Mom hated to miss one.

  When I walked in, Mom was talking in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  “Shush,” Mrs. B said. “You’re imagining things, Beatrice.”

  “Why aren’t they taking things?” Mom said. “Can you—” She cut herself off when she noticed me coming in.

  “Maybe they are,” Mrs. B said, “and the police are just keeping it quiet.”

  I set the fresh Pilot on the table where they sat on either side of a corner behind cups of tea.

  “Good morning, Gussy,” Mom said. “Do you want some tea?”

  “No thanks. Keeping what quiet?”

  “You,” Mrs. B said, “until I get my hug.”

  I smiled and went over and hugged her from above, smelling her hair spray mixed with perfume. She looked dressy in a silver necklace bedecked with peridots over a lavender turtleneck. She had been to nine o’clock Mass.

  Mom had not. My mother had stopped going to church when I was a boy. She never said why and I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t like going anyway. I figured her adoptive family had worn the Catholic out of her, with years of grade school, weekday Masses, then years working at the church rectory. She didn’t talk much about any of it. Every few years, Mrs. B would drag her to Mass, and Mom would swear off it again.

  Still, she liked the Epistles and Gospels and Psalms. Mrs. B stopped by every Sunday to fill Mom in on the readings over tea and coffee cake. “I’m happy to hear what God has to say,” I’d heard Mom declare a hundred times. “But I can do without the priests grubbing for money. I give them plenty at bingo anyway.”

  On that Sunday morning, I helped myself to a slice of poppy-seed Danish and gazed out at the evergreens along Mom’s bluff. They threw blue-hued shadows on the untrampled backyard sn
ow. I imagined how different they would look in summer, how they’d dapple the grass shimmering green in the sun. Mom and Mrs. B chattered away about a recipe for vegetable lasagna, which sounded terrible to me.

  Mom had read somewhere, probably something ping-ponging around the Internet, that vegetables were good for people with memory issues. She’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, so I’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, because I made sure to visit Mom for dinner at least twice a week, less for the cooking, which wasn’t as good as it once was, than to check in.

  “Are you making it tonight?” I said. “Maybe I’ll bring some Italian sausage to go with it.”

  “Tonight is bingo at St. Val’s,” Mrs. B said, pushing her goggle-sized glasses up on her nose. “There’s a potluck before.”

  Mom was frowning. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

  “I have a nice pot of goulash already made, dear.”

  “I’m not sure I’m feeling up to it.”

  “Oh, boo, Beatrice. You have to get those old bones up from that chair and out of this stuffy house.” As Mom of late had found less energy for going out, Phyllis had happily become her scold, because she thought Mom needed to get out, needed to see people, needed to keep her mind working. She reached over and patted my mother’s hand. “I’ll pick you up at six sharp.”

  Mom stared at the hand Mrs. B had placed on hers. I heard snowmobiles whining their way past the house on the lake below.

  “I don’t like church,” Mom said.

  “We’re not going to church. We’re going to bingo.”

  “We shouldn’t leave the house on bingo night.”

  “How else are we going to go to bingo?” Mrs. B said. “Maybe Gus will babysit.”

  “What about my house?” I said, grinning.

  “Right,” Mom said. “That’s what the burglar must be looking for—smelly old hockey equipment.”

  “I’ll have my lovely daughter swing by,” Mrs. B said. “I think she’s on duty tonight.”

  “I have a game,” I said. Mom was staring at Mrs. B’s hand now. “Mom?”

  “I don’t like the mothballs,” she said.

  Mrs. B gave me a reassuring glance, then addressed Mom. “There are no mothballs, Bea. That was a long time ago.”

  “We kept the robes in mothballs.”

  She was talking about the job she’d had at the church rectory, many years before I was born. She did this from time to time, slipped back into the long ago like falling backward off of our dive raft into the lake. On recent Sunday mornings, I had noticed, she was more likely to go back a long way. Then she’d suddenly arrive back in the moment, as if she’d emerged from a time machine, as alert as if she had never left.

  “Yes, I know,” Mrs. B said. “The mothballs are gone now.”

  Mom pursed her lips, thinking. I hesitated as I might with someone having a nightmare. I had heard you weren’t supposed to wake them up. I didn’t know what to do. The doctors weren’t sure, either.

  “Mom?” I finally said. “Are you all right?”

  “Bingo?” she said. “Phyllis?”

  “That’s right, tonight,” Mrs. B said. “I’ll be here at six.”

  Mom folded her arms. “Call me at five. We’ll see.”

  I recalled that morning and how sweet Mrs. B had smelled, as I steered my pickup truck west on M-72 through sleet as thick as oatmeal.

  I had hesitated to go, but Dingus, who probably didn’t want reporters around anyway, had assured me a nurse and a deputy would stay with Mom through the night.

  I pushed my truck as fast as I safely could on the slippery road to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. I had tried to call Darlene on the way but she didn’t answer.

  My cell phone burbled as I swung south onto U.S. 31.

  “Darlene?”

  “Dude.” It was Soupy. In the background I heard laughter and music and clinking glass. He was at Enright’s, the bar he owned on Main Street. “Man, I’ve been trying to call.”

  “Had my cell off.”

  “One of your mom’s neighbors just came in.” He stopped, sounding choked up, but mostly drunk. “I’m so fucking sorry. Mrs. B was the best.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who the hell would want to do that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “As you might expect.”

  “Mrs. B was her best pal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re—Hold on.” Soupy muffled his phone but I heard him anyway, taking an order for a round of shots. He came back on. “Sorry, man. I mean, what was I saying?”

  “Nothing. I’ve got to go.”

  “Jesus, Trap, let’s get”—he was choking up again, one of his late-night jags coming on—“let’s get together tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  I tossed the phone on the passenger seat. Two hours from closing time and Soupy was shitfaced in his own bar.

  I steered along the shore of the east bay, trying to focus on the driving, trying to think of anything but how it could have been Mom instead of Mrs. B on the coroner’s table.

  I imagined Mrs. B cutting through Mom’s yard in the dark that evening with her casserole in one hand, her other arm outstretched for balance as she minced through the snow in her brown galoshes with the undone buckles clacking. She would have let herself in and slipped off her galoshes before sliding the casserole into the oven. Hello, honey, she would have said. Always honey or dear or sweetheart or sweetie-pie.

  Sweetie-pie.

  They were the first words I had heard when I awoke in a hospital bed after getting my tonsils out. I was seven years old, somewhere in Detroit, a faraway city with big buildings and the Red Wings and doctors who promised my throat would stop hurting.

  Do you want ice cream? Chocolate or vanilla or strawberry? Mrs. B asked as she held both my hands in one of hers, smiling down at me. Your mother will meet us downstairs soon. Chocolate? Would you like chocolate, honey?

  My father had died barely a year before in that hospital, and Mom could not bear to go inside, so Mrs. B would go with me, and Mom would be waiting when I came out.

  Can I have two? I asked. May I? May I have two? Of course, sweetiepie. Mrs. B fed me vanilla and strawberry in slow, alternating spoonfuls, telling me to let it melt in my mouth before I swallowed so it wouldn’t hurt as much. I watched her face as she fed me. I swirled the ice cream around on my tongue. I forgot about my throat.

  Who could have killed that kind, precious woman?

  I pounded the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. My throat constricted. A sob forced its way up. Then came another, and another, and finally I couldn’t stop them.

  I pulled my truck onto the shoulder along the bay. But I veered a little too quickly, forgetting the sleet, and my rear end fishtailed left and right and then left again and I felt the truck slipping and grinding toward the blackness of the water. “Goddammit!” I shouted, stomping the brakes and wrenching the steering wheel to get one of my tires back onto the asphalt.

  The truck crunched to a halt just short of the knife-edged rocks along the water, my headlight beams disappearing in the gloom beyond. “Fuck me,” I said, and dropped my head to the steering wheel, crying to the plinking of my hazard lights.

  FOUR

  Sorry. Hospital’s closed. Nobody’s going in.”

  Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood with his arms crossed in front of the double glass doors at Munson’s emergency entrance.

  “Hospitals don’t close, Frankie,” I said.

  “They do today. Especially to vultures.”

  As he swayed to and fro on his heels, his forehead moved in and out of the light thrown by an overhead lamp.

  I held up my empty hands. “No pen, no notebook. I just want to see Darlene.”

  She was standing with her back to me down the corridor behind D’Alessio, talking to a nurse. Doctors and cops milled in the hall beyond h
er.

  “Your mom doing OK?” D’Alessio asked.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Good. Go home and take care of her.”

  “I need to see Darlene.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s with her mother. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  “Have they pronounced her dead?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “A little ticked you’re not working the scene, Frankie?”

  “What scene? A bunch of people stumbling over each other. I’m fine right here.”

  What an asshole, I thought. But that was Frankie. I’d played hockey against him for years, and he was no different on the ice. My pals in the Midnight Hour Men’s League referred to him as a short little prick with a short little prick.

  “So when are you going to announce?” I said. “Noon tomorrow would be perfect, don’t you think? By then, every voter in the county will have heard what happened tonight.”

  D’Alessio was the subject—and probably the source—of rumors about a possible election challenge to Dingus. The two had never gotten along. For many years, running against Dingus, who stayed on budget and made sure locals didn’t get too many speeding tickets, would have been futile. The burglaries had changed that. Murder would change it more.

  “No comment,” D’Alessio said.

  “Right. So I won’t quote you in the Pilot on your fellow deputies stumbling around and you let me duck in and see Darlene. OK?”

  “How about, Sorry about what happened but go home.”

  “Whoa,” came a voice behind me.

  “Mr. Whistler,” D’Alessio said.

  “Deputy,” Luke Whistler said.

  Of course they knew each other. Whistler had gotten a few scoops on the Bingo Night stories and I figured his source was D’Alessio, who was leaking stuff to make Dingus look bad. Whistler hadn’t had anything juicy for a while, so I assumed Dingus was now keeping D’Alessio in the dark.