The Skeleton Box Read online

  We stood between oaks, facing the long slope down to Tatch’s camp. Lightbulbs in orange plastic cages dangled from nails driven into tree trunks. Extension cords snaked through the trees to the circle of trailers. Halfway down the hill, an idle backhoe crouched, its toothy scoop poised in midair like a dinosaur’s jaw hovering over its prey. The ground surrounding it for fifty yards in every direction was torn into winding gullies and potholes blotting the snowy surface. The wooden handles of shovels and pickaxes jutted from mounds of snow and dirt amid the black hollows.

  “I knew they were digging here,” Soupy said, “but I didn’t know it was this serious. What are they looking for?”

  “Not gold,” I said. “And not a septic field.”

  The voices below were rising. I saw the townspeople walking up the two-track from the beach road, their flashlights bouncing like fireflies in the gathering dusk. They carried signs and a banner, a shambling bunch of twenty or thirty people in parkas and hats and mufflers obscuring their faces in wool. D’Alessio led them, wielding a bullhorn in one hand and a hockey stick in the other.

  “Septic field?” Soupy said.

  “It’s a dodge Breck’s been using to get Tatch’s born-again friends to chew up the ground looking for something else. Something he wants. Something your mother may have helped him with, intentionally or not.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Look.”

  I pointed up into the trees where the handmade crosses hung.

  “Oh, man,” Soupy said. “Creep me out.”

  We trudged toward the camp, stepping between potholes and ditches and the crisscross shadows on the snow. The chant of the mob from town became clearer: “We want Tex. We want Tex. We want Tex . . .”

  The clearing between the trailers was a slop of mud. Women stood at the doors of each of the trailers, shovels held across their bodies like rifles. I knew two of them—Jody Frost and Lisa Royall—and wasn’t surprised at all that they would go along with this drama, having seen them at play in their own personal theater on more than a few occasions at Enright’s.

  “Are we the fucking Hardy Boys?” Soupy said. “Jody Frost with a shovel? I’d sooner take on a flatbed full of Dobermans. Don’t you think the Rats could get by without Tex? It’s not like the Pipefitters are going to be scared of him.”

  “It’s not about Tex,” I whispered. “It’s about Darlene’s mom, and yours, and mine. And a bunch of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”

  We stopped at the perimeter of the camp, peering into the clearing through an eight-foot gap between two trailers. I pulled Soupy behind one of the trailers so we could watch without being seen. At the center of the clearing stood Breck, hatless, blank-faced, his bare hands clasped behind his back.

  The throng assembled on the far edge of the clearing. I saw the Fleder brothers, Floyd Kepsel, Shirley McBride, Clayton Perlmutter, others I’d seen around town but didn’t know that well, people who had nothing better to do than shake their fists at the world. Handmade signs bobbed over their heads: Free Tex. He’s a Boy, Not a Pawn. Where’s Your Christianity Anyways? Two high school girls held opposite ends of a bedsheet banner painted with Free Tex Go Rats. Frank D’Alessio, clad in an unzipped deputy’s parka, stepped out in front of them all.

  Breck held up one hand. “Please stop there,” he said. “This is private property. Please respect our privacy.”

  The crowd grumbled back, “Let the boy go.” I noticed an unruly head of white hair moving behind them. Luke Whistler ambled along in his down vest, holding aloft what looked like a cassette recorder. His eyes weren’t on the mob but on the hill behind me.

  “We’re calling your bluff, Breck,” D’Alessio said. “Just let Tex go. We’ll leave you alone. We might even put in a good word for you on your property taxes. We all know somebody on the appeals board.”

  “You can forbear, Mr. Candidate,” Breck said. “Matthew is not here.”

  “Where’s Dingus?” Soupy whispered.

  “Good question,” I said. “Maybe he’s afraid to follow D’Alessio’s lead.”

  D’Alessio stepped toward Breck. “If you’ve taken Tex somewhere against his will—”

  “It’s you who are trying to take from us against our will,” Breck said. “We have sought recourse and been denied our rights to due process.”

  “What about due process for Phyllis Bontrager, sir?” someone yelled, then somebody else, “You ought to be the one in jail, Breck. Where were you Sunday night?”

  Breck was unmoved “We are law-abiding citizens,” he said. “We ask to be left alone. You violate our land in your vanity. You seek to empty our pockets in your greed. You imprison one of us in your vengefulness. You are sinners. Your fathers were sinners, and their fathers before them.” I thought of his grandfather, the sharpened spoon tearing into his neck, the blood washing into the water swirling pink in the shower drain.

  D’Alessio took another step forward and pointed up the hill. “Looks like you’re the ones violating the land,” he said. “Still looking for that septic field?”

  I saw Whistler sliding away from the crowd and ducking behind one of the trailers at the opposite end of the clearing.

  “That’s far enough, Frank.”

  Jody Frost stepped away from her trailer and raised her shovel like an ax. She and Frankie had had a tumultuous dalliance some years back, with rumors of sex in his sheriff’s cruiser involving, of course, his handcuffs and baton. After Jody broke up with him, he kept pulling her over for minor traffic infractions and telling her she’d better take him back or she might wind up in jail. The last time he stopped her, she grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into the car and kissed him, thrusting her tongue hard into his mouth while rolling the window up on his neck, trapping him, and locking the door. Then she turned the radio up full blast, climbed out the passenger side, and walked home while D’Alessio screamed over the music. Nearly two hours passed before a state trooper happened upon poor Frankie, still screaming, his face smeared with lipstick. The trooper laughed so hard that it took him a few minutes to free Frankie, who never bothered Jody Frost again.

  Now D’Alessio gave her an uneasy grin. “Hello there, darling,” he said.

  “Jody,” Breck said. “This man is no threat to anyone but himself.”

  “Really?” D’Alessio said. “Who the hell are you anyway?”

  Breck addressed the townspeople. “This is what matters to you?” I leaned into the gap between the trailers, looking for Whistler; I’d lost him. “A hockey game? You’ve lost one of your own, another two are in jail, and this is what matters? Perhaps even God cannot help you.”

  The crowd started yelling again and moving toward Breck. “Get back, goddammit,” Jody yelled, stepping toward them, the blade of the shovel next to her head. “You’re scaring our kids.”

  Breck turned to her. “Stay where you are, please, Ms. Frost.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Breck,” D’Alessio said. “She’s a spunky one.”

  Jody glared first at D’Alessio, then at Breck, threw her shovel to the ground, and stomped back inside her trailer, slamming the door.

  “Look,” D’Alessio said. “We’re trying to meet you halfway here.” The mob hear-heared. “Let Tex go and we’ll put some pressure on Dingus to let Tatch go. Hell, nobody thinks he did anything anyway.”

  Breck took his wire-rims off, wiped them on his sweater, put them back on. “You are a fool, Mr. Candidate,” he said. “Surrounded by fools. Matthew and the rest of us want nothing to do with you or your pathetic schemes.”

  Soupy poked me in the shoulder. “Trap.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Look, idiot.”

  I turned and saw Whistler scrabbling up the hill behind us. He fell to one hand, then an elbow as his sneakers slipped in the snow and mud. He stopped at the backhoe and wrote something in his notebook. Then he disappeared behind it. I turned back to Breck.

  “You are on private property,” Breck told the th
rong. “I am asking you to remove yourselves now.”

  “Or you’re gonna do what, mister?” someone shouted.

  “How about we remove you, huh?” someone else cried.

  The door on Jody’s trailer swung open and she came bounding out, wearing a camouflage jacket, hair pulled away from her face in a rubber-band ponytail. Instead of a shovel, she was holding a double-barreled shotgun. She stopped halfway across the clearing and raised it to her shoulder, aimed in the direction of the throng. They gasped as one. “Call the police,” someone shouted, and I saw cell phones come out, people punching keys.

  “No,” Breck said, turning to Jody. “We are not them, Jody. Please. Put the gun away.”

  “We’ve been pushed around enough,” she said.

  “Listen to him, Jody,” D’Alessio said. “You’re just going to get yourself in trouble.”

  She leveled the barrel at D’Alessio. “Back off, fuckface.”

  D’Alessio looked at Breck. “‘Fuckface,’ eh? That some new born-again—”

  The boom of the shotgun cut him off and sent the crowd shrieking and diving into the snow, jumping behind trailers, racing down the two-track and off into the woods. D’Alessio keeled over backward into the mud. I clutched at the trailer next to me for balance and stepped into the clearing. Jody had lifted the barrel so that her shot flew into the sky. But D’Alessio remained on his back, apparently unconscious, perhaps fainted. I froze, watching to see if Jody, smirking at the fallen D’Alessio, would shoot again.

  Only Breck saw Tex.

  The boy burst from the trailer door behind another woman, almost knocking her down. “Dammit!” she screamed, while Breck swiveled and crouched for a tackle. Tex was barefoot in long johns and a T-shirt. “Tex,” I yelled as Soupy pushed out from behind me and moved into the clearing.

  Tex started first toward the scattering townspeople, but Breck scrambled over to cut him off, so Tex swerved and almost slipped down but held his feet and sprinted at Soupy and me, his eyes not seeing us, his feet churning snow, Breck gaining on him. I heard women and men bellowing from the other side of the clearing, some of the voices coming closer, Tex yelling as he ran, “Get away from me!”

  Breck was close enough to try a flying tackle when Soupy jumped in front of him and threw a hip check that would have made a Red Wing proud. Breck flopped sideways with a grunt. He was back on his feet in an instant and, before Soupy could get his hands up, smacked Soupy hard in the shoulder with the heel of a hand. Soupy toppled over and I stepped up and took a run at Breck, but he jumped aside and I spilled face-first into the snow. Breck started up the hill as I got to my feet. “Don’t do it, Matthew,” he called out. “You are not their servant.”

  Jody Frost was shouting, “I’ll shoot, dammit, I’ll shoot again,” as the Fleders and Clayton Perlmutter ran past her in pursuit of Breck. “Get that man,” Perlmutter wheezed, a few steps behind the Fleders as they gained on Breck. The shotgun went off again. There was more screaming. Everyone but Tex and Breck flung themselves facedown in the snow. “Goddammit, Jody,” Bart Fleder yelled. “You got some balls.”

  We all jumped up and started scrambling again up the slippery ridge, but Breck had nearly caught the barefoot, half-naked boy who wanted to play a game of hockey. Tex weaved left and then right and then left again, dodging the ditches, slipping Breck’s grasp. “Stop now, Matthew,” Breck kept calling, but Tex kept plowing up the hill through the twilight. About twenty yards beyond him I spied Luke Whistler, peering out from between a pair of birches on one side of the gullies, scribbling in his notebook.

  “Luke,” I yelled. “Help!”

  Either he didn’t hear or he didn’t think he should intervene, because he kept looking around where he was standing and writing in his notebook, as a reporter probably should have. “Whistler!” I screamed again, and now he shuffled out from the trees, sliding sideways in his sneakers as he stuffed his notebook in his vest. His gaze was fixed on Breck.

  “The boy,” I yelled.

  “Stop that prick,” Soupy said.

  “Grab him,” Perlmutter called out.

  “The boy.”

  Breck was almost in reach when Tex veered right to skirt a ditch and lost his footing. He slid legs first into the trench, grabbing in vain at the snow rimming the edge. There was a hard whump and then the cry of a boy in sudden, anguished pain. I saw his hair tossing back and forth above the lip of the ditch and then I came up to the edge of the hole alongside Breck and Soupy and saw Tex bellowing and holding his left leg with both hands, writhing in the blackened snow. The Fleders came up next and then Perlmutter, who took one look at Tex and lost his lunch. I noticed cop lights flashing on the tree trunks around us.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Whistler said.

  An ambulance took Tex away.

  Sheriff Dingus Aho cuffed Breck and read him his rights.

  “Am I being charged?” Breck said.

  “We’ll get to that in due course,” Dingus said.

  Darlene stood to the side, staring at Breck. As Skip Catledge opened a cruiser back door, Breck screwed his head around to look back up the hill. Dingus clapped a hand on the back of his neck.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Breck said.

  “Shut the hell up,” Dingus said, shoving Breck into the car.

  I looked where Breck had looked and saw Whistler still poking around on the hill.

  “I’m out of here,” Soupy said. He went skittering along the edge of the clearing, around the back of the trailers, sidestepping the ditches as he climbed. He stopped briefly to pick up the last beer he’d dropped when he hip-checked Breck.

  Two paddy wagons rolled up. Catledge and Darlene went to each of the trailers. The doors creaked open, the residents straggled out. There were about twenty in all, men and women, a few children. I’d seen them at the IGA, counting out pennies for their purchases; standing in line at the once-a-week food pantry maintained by the senior center; at Enright’s, begging Soupy to extend them a little more credit for half a shell of beer to wash down the twenty-five-cent pickled egg they’d fished out of the jar on the bar. I had seen their faces but I hadn’t seen them, knew their names but didn’t know them. Soupy liked to say they were people with no lives. But here, I thought, on a lonely hill above the lake, they have a life, or at least they believe they do.

  The police put the children in a trailer with Lisa Royall and told her to keep them inside while the other adults from the camp were taken for questioning. Catledge herded Jody Frost and the others into the paddy wagons while Jody tried to twist free, yelling, “Why aren’t you arresting D’Alessio and those other assholes?” Lisa watched from her trailer door, trying not to cry, and I saw children’s faces peeking through tattered drapes on a window next to her. “None of this would have happened,” Lisa shouted, “if you all would just leave us alone.”

  D’Alessio, who’d been resuscitated by a paramedic, watched the arrests, then started down the hill on his own. Dingus ordered Darlene to bring him back and put him in a cruiser. “Are you sure, Sheriff?” she said. “Don’t we have enough—”

  “That’s an order, Deputy,” he said.

  Darlene chased him down. As she cuffed him, he shouted at Dingus, “What the hell in the world can you charge me with, Sheriff?” Dingus glanced over his shoulder, said, “Trespassing,” and then turned to me. “Get your boy,” he said, pointing at Whistler, “and get out of here, before I arrest you, too.”

  Whistler drove us to town. The car reeked of garlic, its backseat piled with old Roselli’s Pizza boxes. In a Toronado, that’s a lot of boxes.

  “You find anything on that hill?” I said.

  “A lot of dirt under the snow,” he said.

  “You think this is it?” I said. “Is Breck the Bingo Night guy?”

  “He’s got motive, right? Avenge his grandfather?”

  “Seems like,” I said. “But you think he’d actually kill someone?”

  “Maybe it was an accide
nt.”

  “It’s a dead body either way, remember?”

  “Do the cops have any hard evidence? Anything that could really put anyone away?”

  I recalled what Shipman had said about Tatch and Mom possibly saying something about Breck. “Tatch may have given him up,” I said.

  “You know what sucks?” Whistler said. “We don’t have a paper until Saturday.”

  “It’s worse than that,” I said.

  I told him about the Pilot’s fate. It wasn’t clear what would happen to the two of us, I said, but I assumed we would either be laid off or farmed out to some other Media North property, maybe even Channel Eight.

  “So it’s Friday and that’s it?” Whistler said.

  “Look at the bright side,” I said. “More time with Tawny Jane.”

  Whistler scowled. “I should have stayed at the damn Free Press.”

  We remained silent as he turned onto Main. He pulled to the curb in front of the Pilot, cutting across the angled parking spaces as if he didn’t plan to stay. “You mind filing something about that circus to the Web? I’ll drop by the cop shop.”

  “OK,” I said. “You want to hear about my trip downstate? Pretty interesting stuff.”

  “Later, for sure,” he said. He looked at his watch.

  “Maybe meet for a beer.” I pushed my door open. Snow had begun to fall. “Let’s go out with a bang, eh?”

  “Yep.” He didn’t sound like his heart was in it, though. Luke Whistler’s survival, I thought, depended on having a newspaper to write for. “So they cleared that whole hill?”

  “There’s just the Royall woman and some kids left.”

  “OK. Call you later.”

  I wrote my story, locked up, and walked to my house through sheets of snow. A plow trundled past me on Main, blade clanking, yellow lights blinking in the whiteness. A bit late, I thought, but that’s how it went in a county short of cash.

  My pickup truck was covered in white. I opened the driver’s door and stepped back so the snow on the roof didn’t cascade onto my head. I reached in and started the engine to defrost the windshield and grabbed a long-handled brush and used it to scrape the outside of the truck clean. The snow brushed across my bare knuckles but I didn’t feel it much because I’d been back in Starvation Lake long enough that I was accustomed to the cold.