The Skeleton Box Page 8

  I grimaced through another tepid sip.

  “Saw your truck outside,” Whistler said. “Got a little info on that thing you asked about.”

  Nye-less? I thought. “That was fast.”

  “I wish I could take credit. This Google thing is pretty nifty.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Soupy said.

  “Nothing,” I said, standing up and feeling justified in keeping something from Soupy. “Can I have a Coke to go? And a bag of Better Mades?”

  “Out of Coke,” he said. He snatched the potato chips off a rack on the back bar and threw the bag at me. I caught it in my left hand. “Nice save,” he said.

  “You going over to the shop?” Whistler said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll meet you there in five.”

  Soupy grabbed my bottle, downed the dregs, and flipped it at the trash barrel. It bounced off the pizza box and shattered on the floor.

  “Fuck it,” I heard him say as I went out the door.

  The Pilot front counter was buried. There were newspapers—the Free Press, the Times, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, shoppers from Kalkaska and Bellaire—the weekend mail, and our weekly bundle of memos from corporate headquarters in Traverse City.

  Plus the remembrances for Mrs. B: Bouquets of flowers. Baskets of dried cherries and fudge. A frozen casserole that must have come from some well-meaning lady who didn’t understand that Mrs. B was Darlene’s mom, not mine, or who just didn’t know what else to do when someone died but bake something stuffed with cheese and potatoes and offer it to the bereaved.

  I needed to hire a replacement but didn’t want to think about it yet.

  Whistler was hunched over his keyboard, batting away with his two forefingers. The plastic clacks of the keystrokes were punctuated by the metallic clicking of a fat gold pinkie ring slapping the shift key. A foam cup of coffee steamed next to him; he wouldn’t touch it until the steam was gone and the coffee was about the temperature of that beer I’d choked down at Enright’s. He said he’d gotten used to lukewarm coffee on winter stakeouts in Detroit.

  I went to my desk and dumped the mail across my blotter. There were three March of Dimes solicitations; the spring sports schedule from Pine County High School; and press releases from an advertising agency in Traverse, the Meijer supercenter in Charlevoix, the winter park in Petoskey. At the bottom of the pile lay a manila envelope tied with string. It contained the ad layouts for the next day’s paper. I already knew what it would tell me: We had barely any ads, which meant fewer pages and less space for stories.

  “Hey,” Whistler said. “Just sent you a story.”

  The shrinking news hole hadn’t been a problem until Whistler showed up and started writing more stories than we had space for. It forced me to trim his stories, or hold them for the next paper, or just keep them out altogether, hoping someone would find them on our website. Whistler had complained only once so far, when I held a story he’d written about a road commissioner’s secret financial interest in an asphalt company in favor of an advance story on the River Rats’ chances in a Christmas tournament.

  “Public service ought to trump kids’ play,” he’d said.

  Hockey, I had replied, is more than kids’ play in Starvation Lake.

  Now I hit a key and Whistler’s story appeared on my computer screen.

  Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank T. D’Alessio will challenge the incumbent sheriff—his boss—in November’s election, according to papers expected to be filed with the county clerk and disclosed exclusively to the Pine County Pilot.

  Whistler was big on self-promotion, constantly mentioning the Pilot in his stories, what the Pilot knew “exclusively,” what it had reported before. I figured he did it because he had come from Detroit, where chest-thumping was part of the newspaper game. I usually sliced it out. Besides the AP guy in Grand Rapids, who seemed to come north only after the temperature hit eighty, we had no real competition except for Channel Eight. Readers and advertisers weren’t going away because we weren’t getting stories first. They were just going away.

  I spun in my swivel chair to face Whistler. “Nice,” I said. “But do we have to do the commercial so high in the story?”

  He propped a sneaker on the edge of his desk. “Why not tell the readers we’re kicking ass on their behalf?”

  “I think they can see the paper they’re holding in their hands is the Pilot. Besides, doesn’t everyone know Frankie’s going to run?”

  Whistler smiled the smile of a reporter who knew his boss was clueless. “According to the clips I read, everyone knew he was going to run last election, too. And he didn’t run.”

  “He backed out because he knew he didn’t have a chance.”

  “Correct. But everything’s different now, isn’t it?”

  He had me there. The second and third paragraphs of his story were all about the break-ins, the murder, and Sheriff Dingus Aho’s inability so far to figure out what was going on. D’Alessio will love that, I thought.

  “The story doesn’t quote D’Alessio and the department spokesman declined to comment,” I said. “So I’m guessing your main source is Frankie.”

  Whistler shrugged. He took the pinkie ring off, rubbed the finger, put the ring back on. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources. But you should know that our friend from Channel Eight is snooping around, too.”

  “Your friend,” I said. I tore open the bag of chips and popped a handful into my mouth. “You better hope D’Alessio doesn’t find out about you and your close relationship with her police scanner.”

  “Ha,” Whistler said. “We better get that thing online, eh?”

  “You think D’Alessio would do any better than Dingus?”

  “I have no idea. Just a good story.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall over the copier. Eight minutes after three. “Tawny Jane doesn’t have a program till five, but she could do a bulletin. Let me give this a quick read.”

  I read the story through, fixed a few typos, and hit Send. A goateed twenty-two-year-old at the main printing plant would have it on the Media North website in minutes.

  “Done,” I said. “Another Whistler scoop.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, “but really, BFD, you know, all we did was beat another reporter.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  “Well, yeah. ‘Always first.’ But it’s one thing to beat a competitor. They’re just journalists, after all. It’s another thing to beat the cops.”

  “Right. Like your ex-wife.”

  “Tags.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which brings me to this,” Whistler said. He kicked away from his desk, rolled over to me, and leaned forward in his chair. He had a printout folded in one hand. “Did a little Internet search.”

  “You are cutting-edge for an old man.”

  “Funny. Write this down.”

  I picked up a pen.

  “N-I-L-U-S,” he spelled.

  I looked at it written on my blotter.

  “Nilus,” I said. “As in nye-less?”

  “Nilus Moreau,” Whistler said. “Father Nilus Moreau.”

  “A priest?”

  “He was the pastor of St. Valentine’s.”

  “Here? In Starvation Lake?”

  “A long time ago. I only did a quick search. Been spending most of my time calling around to cop shops that might be hearing echoes from Dingus and his guys.” He handed me the printout. “Found an obit in the Marquette Mining Journal, 1971.”

  I scanned it quickly, three short paragraphs on an inside page of the Mining Journal from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Father Nilus Moreau had come to Starvation Lake in the early 1930s before it was even called Starvation Lake. He led the effort to build a new church at St. Valentine’s in 1951. He died in a nursing home in Calumet at the age of sixty-nine.

  “So what?” I said.

  “Where did you get this Nilus tip?” Whistler said.

  I tho
ught of Darlene. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources either. But it wasn’t D’Alessio.”

  “OK. But you ought to run it down from here, don’t you think?”

  “Fair enough.”

  A priest? I thought, and an image of the crosses in the trees at Tatch’s camp popped into my head.

  “Speaking of churches,” I said, “I was out at that born-again camp today.”

  Whistler’s white eyebrows went up. “Whatever for?”

  “One of the kids on our hockey team lives there. Took him his skates.”

  “I’ll bet that was interesting.”

  “A little weird, actually. Reminds me: Were you trying to get the records on that land?”

  I could tell Whistler hadn’t expected that question. “I might have seen them if the wench clerk had let me.”

  “You didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Sorry, boss. I always go looking for the documents. The docs can’t kiss your ass and buy you lunch and make you write like a wimp, like those auto reporters back in—” He caught himself, perhaps remembering I had once covered that industry. “Oh, sorry.”

  “I wish writing like a wimp had been my problem.”

  “Anyway, I got nowhere with Verna the Vault. But it’s a story, right? The born-agains want to get out of paying taxes, or at least pay less. Kind of a sore subject in this economy.”

  “Yep. They apparently have a lawyer now, an out-of-towner named Breck.”

  Whistler sat back in his chair. “Breck?”

  “Like the shampoo. Didn’t get the first name. Know him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Seems like he’s running things out there. They’ve got a backhoe tearing up that hill.”

  “Really? Building themselves a church?”

  “Nah. Something about a septic field leaking into their land. They’re going to try to use it to squeeze the county for some cash.”

  “You can’t get blood from a stone.”

  “Right.” I ate another chip. “But they might be making some hay about it at the drain commission tomorrow. You want to go? This Breck guy’s supposed to be there.”

  “The drain commission? Hmm.” Whistler pedaled his chair back to his desk. “I’m going to be a good guy and let you do it, how’s that?”

  “Thanks a million.”

  “But tell you what. I’ve got a source in the archdiocese from covering the pope’s visit to Detroit way back when. If he’s not dead, I’ll call him, see what I can find out about this Nilus character.”

  “Did you check the old papers downstairs?”

  “In the morgue?”

  “Nobody calls it a morgue anymore.”

  “What you got downstairs ought to be one, as cold and damp as it is. I got allergies. The last time I went down there, I sneezed for a week.”

  “I’ll look. There’s probably something.”

  Whistler stood up. “I’ve got to see a man about a horse,” he said. “But one thing. If you’re poking around back in whenever Nilus was here, you might stumble over my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yeah. She lived nearby for a little while in the forties. Matter of fact, I lived here, but we moved away when I was a little shaver.”

  So Mom’s recollection of a Whistler in Starvation Lake was not mistaken. I said, “But didn’t you tell my mother—”

  “I know, I fibbed to your mom. I’m sorry. See, unlike your mom, mine was nothing to be proud of. Spent most of her life in a bottle. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t know how well your mom knew her, and I didn’t want to get into it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “How is your mom anyway?”

  “Getting through it. I’ve got to check on her.”

  Whistler yanked keys from his vest pocket. “Will let you know what I find out. Let’s get there before the cops, eh, boss?”

  I finished up the next day’s paper. Wrote a few headlines, some photo captions, a brief on the high school girls’ basketball team going to Big Rapids for a game. Then I went to the back of the newsroom and descended a set of creaky stairs to the basement.

  At the bottom I reached up and pulled on a string that lit a single overhead bulb. The air tasted of chalk. Black binders filled with old newspapers lay in racks along two walls. The binders went back only about forty years, so I doubted they’d help me much. In the darkest corner of the room stood a pair of wooden file cabinets, painted green. Index cards taped on the drawers were marked with letters in alphabetical order. I pulled open the drawer marked Na–No and flipped through the file folders inside.

  I found the file I wanted about two-thirds deep in the drawer: “Moreau, Rev. Nilus.” I pulled it out and opened it, praying it would hold a yellowed, cut-out clip or two. The file was empty except for an index card. I pulled the card out and walked across the floor to read beneath the lightbulb. The typewriting on the card said:

  St. Valentine’s Welcomes New Pastor, November 2, 1933.

  Nilus Expands Orphanage with Children from Midland, January 20, 1934.

  Town Searches for Missing Nun; “No Stone Unturned,” Priest Vows, p. A–1, August 17, 1944.

  Hope Ebbing in Search for Nun, p. A–1, August 28, 1944.

  “Holy shit,” I said. I flipped the card over. The list continued on the back:

  Gardener Arrested in Disappearance of Nun, p. A–1, August 5, 1950.

  cf. Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail, p. A–3, August 7, 1950.

  This had to be the nun Dingus had told me about, and the guy who’d gotten his throat cut in the jail. I did the math in my head. Mrs. B and Mom were the same age, sixty-six. They had known each other since they went to the school at St. Val’s together. The school had closed sometime in the 1970s. Mom and Mrs. B would’ve been eleven years old when the nun vanished. I wondered if the nun had taught at St. Val’s, if Nilus had. Did he know Mrs. B as a little girl?

  I flipped the index card back to the front. A faded blue stamp in the upper right hand corner said MICROFILM.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I slipped the card into my shirt pocket. I ran up the stairs and sat down at my desk and picked up my phone. I felt a little burst of that energy I’d felt at the Detroit Times whenever I thought I was on to a good story. I wanted to tell someone. For a second, I thought about calling Whistler and telling him too bad about your allergies.

  Instead, I dialed the clerk’s office.

  “Pine County Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

  I hung up and looked at the clock. Three forty-five. The pregame skate had already begun. I had to get going. I dialed again.

  “Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

  I couldn’t afford to wait again. “Vicky, please.”

  “Vicky?” her mother said. “Is this a personal call?”

  I screwed up by hesitating. “No. Not really.”

  “Not really? Well then, perhaps I can help you if whatever you need is doable within the next hour and fourteen minutes. After that, I’m afraid you’ll have to call tomorrow.”

  “It’s Gus Carpenter, Verna.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “Can I speak to the deputy clerk?”

  “May I?”

  “May I speak to the deputy clerk?”

  “She’s busy at the moment. How can I help you?”

  If I told Verna Clark what I really wanted, which was to look at the microfilm of those newspaper clips in the county archive, she would have informed me that I would need to come to the office the next morning and fill out a request form and then wait a week or ten days or whatever she decided would be long enough to frustrate the hell out of me. Silently I cursed the Media North bean counter who had decided the Pilot’s oldest stories could be most efficiently stored where Verna could lord it over them. The Pilot actually paid the county for this privilege.

  I had to throw her off somehow. So I said, “I need to ask Vicky about a recipe.”

  “A recipe? This is not Audrey’s Diner.”
r />   “Yes, but—”

  “I’m sorry. Is there any official county business I could help you with, sir?”

  “Could you tell your daughter I called?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Verna Clark hated to be reminded that her deputy also happened to be her daughter. Her opponent in her last election had run an attack campaign based largely on nepotism, and Verna had been forced to nearly drain her election fund defending herself. She even had to stoop to buying ads in the Pilot, which must have infuriated her.

  “Could you please—”

  “I heard you the first time, Mr. Carpenter. The Pine County Clerk’s Office will welcome your request in person. We close in one hour and thirteen minutes and reopen tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

  She hung up. But I had gotten her to speak my name aloud. My phone rang again a few minutes later. Vicky Clark whispered it: “Are you ready for chicken and dumplings?”

  TEN

  Pucks boomed off of the rink boards as I pushed through the double-door entrance to the Starvation Lake Arena. It felt reassuring. There would be no talk of burglaries or murder there.

  Through the lobby windows I saw Tex on the ice, bearing down on the goalie, Dougie Baker. Tex faked to his right, then dragged the puck the other way with the toe of his stick. Dougie slid with him. The puck hit a rut in the ice and rolled up on an edge. Tex tried to snap it between Dougie’s legs but got only half of the tumbling puck. It flip-flopped up and Dougie snatched it with his catching glove.

  “Fucking bullshit,” Tex yelled. He turned hard, spun behind the net, wound up with his stick, and, as he came around the other side of the net, swung the shaft across the goalpost with an echoing crack. The broken-off blade went flying. Tex skated to the bench.

  We really did have to talk with him.

  Refrigerant stung my nostrils as I hustled across the black rubber-mat floors past the benches beneath the big gold-and-blue Home and Visitors signs. I had relished that whiff of chill since I was a boy and the town rink, about the same age as me, hadn’t yet been closed in on the ends.