The Skeleton Box Read online

  “What’s to stop this guy—”

  “Enough, Elvis.” Audrey barked it from behind the counter.

  Elvis turned in his seat. “Now, come on, Aud—”

  “I said, enough. Phyllis was my friend, too. Dingus is doing his best. If that isn’t good enough, you’ll have a chance to let him know at the polls. But now let’s let the poor man do his job. If you still insist on second-guessing him, that’s up to you, but you’ll do it somewhere else from now on. And Sheriff?” She turned to Dingus. “I’ll thank you to refrain from calling meetings in my establishment. The same goes for Frank D’Alessio.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Dingus said, giving a little bow. “With that, I’ll take my leave.” He picked up his hat and jacket off a chair and had opened the jangling door halfway when he looked at me. “You,” he said. “Out here.”

  I followed the sheriff down Main. He veered into the narrow alley between Repicky Realty and a defunct antique shop, waving me along.

  “Where are you taking me?” I said, but Dingus ignored me until he turned onto the walkway along the Hungry River and stopped. He peered over the railing at the river gurgling to the lake. He shook his head and leaned his elbows on the railing. Green paint was peeling off in spots because the town had only enough money to repaint once every two years.

  “My loyal deputy was in there earlier,” he said, “stirring up the rabble.”

  “D’Alessio?”

  “The one and only.”

  “The guy’s dumber than a sack of hockey pucks.”

  “Which never hurt a politician before, so far as I can tell. I wasn’t going to do any dog-and-pony shows, but Skip was in there getting a coffee and saw D’Alessio and gave me a jingle and said, ‘Boss, you better get down here before they hang you in effigy.’”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes. Frank’s treating all these crazy ideas—Phyllis got shot with a hunting bow, she got sliced up with a cheese grater—like they’re all real possibilities. He doesn’t know a thing.”

  “What did—”

  “The guy may have slammed her head into the bathroom door, and then, we think, into the floor. He may not have meant to kill her, but he did.”

  We stood watching the water for a moment. I’d never seen Dingus so worked up. “When was the last murder in Starvation?” I said.

  “In 1973,” he said. “A couple of brothers arguing over natural gas rights. Drinking, of course. One grabs a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and shoots the other across the kitchen table. I think he’s out of prison by now.”

  “That the only one?”

  “Before that, we had a man accused of murdering a nun at St. Val’s back in the forties or fifties. He got into it with somebody at the jail and got his throat cut. It was kind of a big deal at the time, though more because of the nun than the guy who killed her.”

  “And now you have this.”

  “Yes.” He came up from the railing. “And you are going to help me.”

  Dingus and I had a special relationship. Sometimes he helped me, mostly he didn’t. But when he did, he expected something in return, usually more than what he gave up. It never would have worked for a marriage, but as cop-reporter romances go, it was about as good as it gets.

  “Am I working for you or something?” I said.

  He stepped in closer. “Can it. You want to solve this as much as I do, whether it’s in your paper or not.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your mother. She knows things. I know she knows them. She knows she knows them.”

  “Not always. She—”

  “Pipe down. I know about memory problems. My mama had them, too, may she rest in peace. But Bea, forgive me for saying, she knows more than she’s letting on.”

  “Sometimes she can’t dredge it up.”

  “Yeah, well.” He leaned his face in close. I smelled the Tiparillos again. “Maybe you can help her.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you pass it along to your friendly neighborhood sheriff.”

  “So, Dingus, do you have any clues at all? Do you know why they’re not taking anything?”

  A frown bunched his mustache at his lips. He wasn’t going to respond. I considered asking about nye-less but didn’t want to expose Darlene. And I didn’t want to give away the only lead I had. “So, can I take off?” I said.

  “How about your friend Tatch?”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I let it go.

  “What about him?”

  “We got a tip he didn’t show up at the rink last night. That so?”

  A tip? Shit, I thought, that had to be D’Alessio, who’d heard from me that Tatch was a no-show. Then I recalled the message left at the Pilot the night before: Anyone checking on those whackaroonies at the Christian camp? Meaning Tatch. His camp.

  “Tatch wasn’t at the game,” I said. “But he’s not the most reliable guy on the planet.”

  “Uh-huh. He’s a goalie, isn’t he? Like you? I’m no hockey expert, but it’s pretty unusual for the guy who guards the net to miss a game, isn’t it? Kind of puts his team at a disadvantage?”

  “Kind of. What do you want from me?”

  “Just ask him a question or two.”

  “Why don’t you ask him a question or two?”

  “He’s your buddy. Couple of goalies, you think alike, right? If ‘think’ is the right word for goalies.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Just do it, huh?”

  A breeze off the river washed cold along the back of my neck. “I’m going out to his camp later anyway. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Good,” Dingus said. “You been out there before? I have nothing against born-again Christians, but I’ll tell you, that place is just a tad creepy.”

  SEVEN

  After Dingus cleared out, I headed down the river to Estelle Street, where I turned toward Main and the Pine County Courthouse.

  My chat with the sheriff had reminded me to pick up some documents. The week before, I’d requested several years’ worth of tax reports on properties owned or formerly owned by Stewart and Bernice Edwards, Tatch’s parents, or owned by Roy Edwards, Tatch himself. He and his little camp of born-again Christians were fighting the county over an increase in taxes on the property where their trailers huddled on a wooded hill above the lake. They were arguing that they were a religious organization that shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all, and certainly not more than before. Now that Dingus seemed the least bit suspicious of Tatch—even if I didn’t think Tatch clever enough to break into a house without getting caught or mean enough to hurt a flea—I figured I ought to have those documents handy, just in case.

  The redbrick courthouse stood over a square guarded by oaks and crosshatched with sidewalks blotched with dirty snow. I remembered the call I’d ignored and pulled out my phone to check messages. Luke Whistler had left one.

  “Hey, boss,” he said. I heard the sound of a truck rumbling past him, wherever he was. “Popped a story online about what happened last night. Hope that’s OK, Mr. Sleep-All-Day. I’m headed out to the territories. Talk later.”

  I pocketed the phone, thinking, how the hell could a fifty-six-year-old reporter be so chipper day after day? His beloved “territories” were anyplace outside the newsroom—the courthouse, the pizza joint, the cop shop, Audrey’s, the high school, Enright’s, wherever there might be someone willing to whisper in Whistler’s waiting ear.

  Although the Pilot published on Tuesdays and Saturdays, our bosses at Media North let us post stories on the Internet each morning. Whistler loved having a place to counter Channel Eight’s ability to go with a story the minute they got it. So what if Channel Eight was also owned by Media North. I thought Whistler also liked having the freedom once in a while to post stories without showing them to me. “Always first,” he liked to say, “and frequently right.” I’d tell him I hoped he was joking, and he’d grin and assure me he was.

  Vicky Clark wrapped both of her fl
eshy hands around mine and tugged me toward her across the glass-topped counter in the Pine County Clerk’s Office. My forearms tensed a little as my fingertips neared the cleavage jiggling in her low-cut sweater.

  “Gus, I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Such a caring lady. I hope I can be so caring one day.”

  I tried to slip my hands free but Vicky tightened her grip and pulled me closer, her perfume so sweet I thought my eyes might water.

  “You’ll let me know about arrangements?”

  “Sure.”

  The deputy clerk had three fat youngsters and an on-and-off boyfriend named Sully who spent weekdays working road construction downstate and weekends fishing, drinking, and shooting pool with his old high school pals in Starvation. On balance, I figured Sully had a better life than Vicky, which was probably why she imagined it couldn’t hurt to try to draw me into hers, via her boobs. I couldn’t blame her for assuming that I, too, was stuck in Starvation forever, since I had already made my own downstate foray and it had ended badly.

  I liked Vicky. We had a sort of understanding in our mutual stuckness. But I had no serious interest in her beyond friendly chitchat and extracting whatever I needed from her office. Especially if it meant I could avoid dealing with the clerk herself, a brittle stick of a woman who happened to be Vicky’s mother, Verna Clark.

  Vicky gave me a smile, her tomato cheeks squeezing her eyes nearly shut. She loosed my hands. “One of these nights,” she said, “I have to have you over for dinner. In all modesty, my chicken and dumplings is to die for.”

  “I love chicken and dumplings,” I said, while thinking, But not that much. “Hey—do you think I could get those documents I asked for last week?”

  “Did you fill out a form and give it to me?”

  “It was me,” Verna Clark said. The county clerk emerged from the rows of file cabinets behind her daughter, wearing the same drab gray woolen dress she seemed to wear every day. Here we go, I thought.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Clark,” I said.

  She peered up at the clock on the oak paneling over my head. “Nearly noon, Mr. Carpenter, and our lunch break. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”

  It was vintage Verna. She couldn’t legally withhold the records, but she could make it difficult for you to actually put your eyes and hands on them. Complicating matters with formal paperwork gave both her and her daughter more things to do and the county commission reason to keep them on, when in fact one member of the Clark family could probably have handled the clerk’s office on her own, especially now that so little property was being bought and sold in Starvation anyway.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t come back later,” I said. “I have to get back to my mom’s.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear about the incident at your mother’s house,” Verna said. She stood pole straight at the counter, her reading glasses dangling from a frayed silver strand. “But we cannot allow the vagaries of daily life to disrupt our procedures.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Two lawyers stepped into the office and set briefcases on the floor.

  “You’ll have to come back at one p.m.,” Verna Clark said.

  “Why? I filled out the request forms a week ago. What’s the holdup?”

  That was the wrong thing to say. Verna pursed her lips, then turned to Vicky. “You may take lunch now, but”—she looked at the clock again—“be sure to be back six minutes early.”

  I glanced at the lawyers waiting by the double doors. They were smiling. I felt the seconds ticking off the clock.

  “Bye, Gus,” Vicky said.

  Verna waited for her to leave, then leveled her gaze on me. She’d been county clerk for as long as I could remember. She won re-election each time partly because she kept her office on budget, partly because her demeanor made her job seem so grim that nobody could work up the energy to mount a challenge. Verna herself seemed to operate on a limited budget of smiles and helpfulness that she rationed for county commissioners.

  “For your information, Mr. Carpenter, there is no holdup,” she said. “You made a rather extensive request for records. We’ve processed them once and I need to check them over one last time to make sure that we’ve given you precisely what you asked for.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Clerk, I mean Clark,” I said. “I’ll take whatever you have now.”

  “As you know, the county is strict about closing times, given our current budget situation. I know you’re familiar with our budget, Mr. Carpenter, because you’ve written extensively about it, and opined extensively about it, too.”

  The Pilot had published an editorial the previous November recommending that voters reject a tax increase that would have shored up the county budget. Someone at Media North headquarters in Traverse City had written the editorial, not me, but that distinction wouldn’t have mattered to Verna Clark.

  “Yes ma’am. But if I could just—”

  “The truth is, Mr. Carpenter, another individual was in to look at a number of the same records earlier today—after filing the proper request forms prior to you—and the files have yet to proceed through reprocessing.”

  “I thought you said they were processed.”

  “Yes, but not reprocessed.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought.

  “Besides,” Verna continued, arching a thin eyebrow, “why is it necessary for the newspaper to monopolize the viewing of certain records?”

  “Monopolize? What are you talking about?”

  She took a set of keys from a pocket in her dress. “For someone who renders such harsh verdicts about our county’s operations, you appear to run a remarkably inefficient operation yourself. Perhaps you, too, should try being prudent.”

  The word “prudent” had been in the headline of that damned editorial. “Are you telling me someone else from the Pilot was here?”

  “This is apparently a very popular batch of records. I seem to recall someone from downstate requesting the very same papers not two years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. We are now closed for the lunch hour, sir. You’ll need to leave.”

  “Wait, Vern—Mrs. Clark. Are you saying my colleague was here? Luke Whistler?”

  Her face betrayed the faintest hint of a smile. She was enjoying this. Verna Clark may have been a bitch, but she was a smart bitch.

  “Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to discuss individual requests for records. But you seem like you’re at least intelligent enough to put two and two together.” She pointed a finger past me. “I’ll thank you for closing the door on your way out.”

  I walked out thinking, Whistler wanted those records? For what?

  “Poppy,” I said into my phone as I swung my pickup onto Main.

  “Hey,” said Dick Popovich, head coach of the Hungry River Rats. I helped him with the goaltenders. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Phyllis was all class. Good to the town. Good to the hockey program.”

  Mrs. B wasn’t a big hockey fan, but she had worked the ticket table in the rink lobby since I played for the Rats, and brought big boxes of her molasses cookies and chocolate-covered macaroons to the Rats’ annual preseason fund-raiser. Whenever people in Starvation Lake wanted to raise money, they went to Mrs. B for cookies. She never said no. A hundred people must have told her she should open her own cookie shop, to which she would always say, “I bake cookies. If I could bake money, I would bake money.”

  “She was,” I said. “I wanted to let you know I might be late to the pregame skate. Got a few things to do.”

  “Understood. Glad you called, though. We gotta have a talk with Tex.”

  Matthew Dobrick, sixteen years old, was the River Rats’ big, fast, crafty left wing. His teammates had nicknamed him “Tex” for the garish green-and-gold Dallas Stars jacket he wore. He insisted he had won the jacket new in a raffle downstate. But the seams coming
apart along the shoulders and the torn left pocket made me think it had been plucked from a bin at a consignment store.

  Tex had never known his father. His mother, from what I had heard, had played the role of dutiful hockey mom, shuttling her son from practice to game to practice while carrying on an affair with a team dad who worked as a shoe salesman by day and dealt marijuana and cocaine on nights and weekends. When the police appeared at his apartment one evening with a search warrant, Tex’s mother was there and, maybe because she was using, took a swing at one of the cops. It was not the first time she’d run afoul of the law. Even after she had ratted out her boyfriend, the judge sentenced her to eighteen months at the prison in Decatur.

  So Tex had come to Starvation Lake to live with his uncle Roy, known to us as Tatch, and just like that, for the first time in almost twenty years, the River Rats were contenders for the state championship. In his first and only season with the Rats, Tex had scored more goals than the rest of the team combined. Unfortunately, he had also tallied the most minutes in penalties, which was why Poppy and I needed to have a talk with him.

  “Yeah, but let’s go easy,” I said. “The kid plays angry. It helps him.”

  “It doesn’t help when he’s sitting in the penalty box. Mic-Mac knows his deal. They’ll be goading him. He’s got to keep his cool.”

  Mic-Mac, a scrappy bunch of bumblebees from Detroit’s northwest side, was to be our opponent in the state quarterfinal that evening.

  “I’m taking his skates out to him in a bit,” I said. “You want me to say something?”

  “Going up to that religious camp?”

  “Yeah, part of the drill. The kid plays superstitious, too.”

  As I approached Mom’s little yellow house, I looked through the bare trees to the frozen white crescent of the lake curling north and then west. A crow settled in the branches of a beech, a black blot on the smoky quilt of sky.

  You have a nice, simple life, I thought as I watched it.

  I wanted to check on Mom before I took Tex his skates. Then I had to drop by the pregame skate, then get back to the Pilot and move a few stories for the next day’s paper. I wanted to get to puzzling out what or who nye-less was. Maybe just the gibberish of a woman who’d suffered a serious blow to the head. Or maybe not.