The Skeleton Box (21 page)

“Hey, Gus, got a weird call,” Poppy said. “Some woman left a message, said Tex is done playing hockey. Putting away foolish things, she said. Didn’t leave a name, but I gather she’s from Tatch’s camp. I’d heard some talk about this but was hoping it was bull. Without Tex, I’m not liking our chances against the Pipefitters. Give me a shout.”

I knew I had more important things to worry about, but the old River Rat in me couldn’t help thinking: Damn, the Rats are so close, if they just had Tex, they could actually bring a state title, a little glory, a bit of relief to Starvation.

The second message was from Darlene. My heart skipped a beat when I heard her voice say, “Gussy.” She hadn’t called me that in a long time.

“I waited outside your house for an hour,” she said. Oh, shit, I thought; that was her in the cop car across the street, not someone who’d come to arrest me. She must have made sure my truck made it home, too. “Bea is safe . . . I hope you’re safe . . . Be careful, OK?”

It felt good to hear that. I saved the message and turned the phone off, wishing I had the charger, which was plugged into a wall socket at the
Pilot
.

Traffic was light, the weather clear. I stayed in the right lane and
kept my speed around seventy-four, a bit over the limit but not so fast as to rouse a state trooper. I almost pulled into the rest stop at Nine Mile Hill, but a state trooper darted into the exit lane ahead of me and I stayed on I-75. Twenty-five miles later, I veered into the rest area at West Branch. Two sedans and a minivan were parked near the restrooms. A pudgy man in a Catholic Central High School fleece was dragging a little girl toward the restrooms. She was throwing a flop-around tantrum and the man was barking something at her that, thankfully, I could not hear. I rolled past them and pulled into a spot about five places down from their minivan.

I left the dome light off. I took a quick look around, checked all the mirrors. The man and the squalling girl disappeared into the glowing restroom hut. The lot sat still and quiet beneath the high street lamps. No cops. Nobody behind me.

I bent to the passenger seat floor, pushed the trash aside, and picked up the lockbox. I set it on my lap and pulled the blue key out of my pocket. I glanced around again before sliding the key into the lock. At first it jammed when I tried to turn it. I jiggled it gently, not wanting to break it off. Who knew when my mother had last opened the thing?

Finally it gave. The lid opened soundlessly. Taped to the bottom of the box was a manila envelope. Scratched on the front in black ballpoint pen, in my mother’s cursive hand, was one word: “Nilus.”

I felt goose bumps break out along my forearms.

I peeled away the tape securing the envelope inside the box and lifted the envelope out. I ran a palm across the top surface. It was smooth and flat except for a cluster of bumps beneath the paper in one corner. I shook it. The bumps seemed to rattle. I turned the envelope up and the bumps slid down to the other end.

Fresh tape sealed one end of the envelope, as if Mom had recently opened and then resealed it. As I stripped away the new stuff, I saw the speckled gray outlines of past sealings, felt the cracked, yellowed remnants of tape that looked to be years old. I peeked into the open end. It was too dark to see inside. I dipped a hand in. My fingertips brushed over the rough edge of a piece of paper, then across a thinner, softer
paper, like old newsprint. I reached into the corner where the bumps had slid. I cupped them in my palm—a necklace?—and pulled my hand out.

Curled in my palm was a rosary.

I took it in two fingers and let it unwind before my face. A crucifix of bronze or something cheaper dangled at the end of a thin metal chain strung with smooth brown wooden beads. As the rosary twirled in the shadows of Soupy’s truck, I noticed a gold tag attached to the chain at the end opposite the crucifix. I pinched the tag and brought it close to my face. Something was engraved on it that I couldn’t make out in the dark. I reached overhead and switched on the dome light.

I squinted to read the engraving on the face of the little tag, bracing myself for the possibility that it might read “Nilus.” It did not. The engraving bore only three letters:
BCD.
For Beatrice Clare Damico, I assumed. My mother’s maiden name.

“Man,” I said to myself. I turned off the dome light.

I tried to recall Mom saying the rosary. I could imagine a woman kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Mother at St. Valentine’s, her head bowed and her eyes shut, her lips forming shapes of the words in the Hail Mary, a rosary laced in her fingers. But I couldn’t tell if it was actually Mom before she walked away from the church, or an image I had conjured from a book or a movie or my own scant memories of services. I held my hand up, let the rosary slide down between my fingers, closed my hand into a gentle fist. Why had my mother saved it? Why had she felt the need to lock it away?

I dropped the rosary back into the envelope. I reached in and pulled out one of the pieces of paper. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the glass door on the restroom building flash in the light. The father and his daughter were coming out. He was carrying her now, and she was eating a candy bar. The door of the minivan opened and a woman stepped into the light, smiling. The father set the girl down and she ran to her mother, who gathered the child into her arms.

The piece of paper was a rectangle. One of the two long edges looked as if it had been folded and then carefully torn along the fold. I decided
I was holding one third of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch page. I turned it sideways so a short edge was on top. At the top of the rectangle were a faded stylized capital “S” and part of a small “a” along the torn edge. Below those were color pictures, cut in half by the ripped edge, of what looked like ice-cream confections, maybe a sundae and a soda.

Sanders, I thought. The classic Detroit ice-cream and candy palace. I had tried to take Mom there on one of her rare visits when I worked at the
Times.
But she had demurred, calling the place a tourist trap. It was funny to hear that from someone who lived in a town desperate to be a tourist trap. We got ice-cream cones at a Baskin-Robbins instead.

But now in my hands was what looked like a placemat from a Sanders restaurant, maybe the very one I had tried to take Mom to. The mat had to be old, maybe as old as me, because I could see parts of the prices of the items, and each carried a cents rather than a dollar sign.

I flipped the paper over.

On the back was some sort of drawing—or, again, part of a drawing, because I had in my hands only about a third of a page. I switched the dome light back on and leaned into it. As I looked more closely, the drawing appeared to be a map of some sort, drawn in ballpoint ink. It looked as though someone might have carefully traced over the lines and letters on the drawing, perhaps because the earlier version was fading.

In the upper left corner of the page was an arrow pointing up and marked alongside with a capital “N.” For north, I assumed. A smaller arrow beneath it pointed down and off the left side of the page, and beneath the arrow was the word “LAKE,” written in my mother’s hand.

A car pulled in two spaces to my right. I lowered the paper to my lap and waited while a stooped old man emerged from the Chrysler and made his way slowly toward the restrooms. He wore an orange hunting cap with a picture of a deer over the bill. He peered at me as he passed. For a second I thought he might stop, and I started to slip the paper back into the envelope, but he just smiled and nodded, and I gave him a polite smile and pointed at the restrooms as if I were waiting for my wife. He kept walking.

I looked back at the map. Beneath the arrows, a curving line traced
the upper portion of an irregular oval from the bottom left of the page up and around to the bottom right. Within the oval my mother had scratched three X’s and some squiggly vertical lines. Perhaps, I thought, the squiggles signified a hill or a rise. The X’s were clustered around those lines, each marked with the name of a tree: “BIG OAK STUMP,” “BURNED OAK,” and “TWO-TRUNK BIRCH.”

The burned oak stood at the apex of a triangle with the other oak and the birch marking the ends of its legs. A scalene triangle, I thought, remembering my mother saying it to me over my ninth-grade geometry textbook at the dining room table. She was better at math than she was at spelling. The scalene was outlined by dotted lines. A fourth dotted line bisected it from the burned oak down and off the page’s ragged bottom edge. To where, or to what, I had no idea.

A treasure map? I thought. It made me recall what I had said to Tatch when I’d visited his camp and seen all the people toiling on the hill:
Digging for gold?
Now I asked myself: Could this crude map my mother had drawn years or even decades ago show Breck and his blindly faithful diggers how to find whatever it was they were tearing up the earth for? If so, it would have to have something to do with Nilus, wouldn’t it, or why else would Mom have put it in an envelope labeled as it was?

I slipped the page back into the envelope and pulled out the other paper. It was, as I’d thought, newsprint, a yellowed, one-column clip that had been scissored out of a newspaper, then folded over once. I’d seen it on the microfilm machine at the clerk’s office: “Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail.” I quickly reread it, noting again the connection between the accused, Joseph Wayland, and his grandson, Breck.

I felt someone looking at me and lifted my eyes to see the orange hunting cap floating in the dark before my truck. The old man grinned and looked back at the restrooms with a shrug, as if to say, “What do women do in there anyway?” I smiled again, nervously I thought, and kept a sidelong gaze on him until his Chrysler pulled away.

Mom obviously didn’t want the police to know about what I held in my hands, or else she wouldn’t have rushed me out the back of Dad’s
garage. I imagined her now, sitting in a jail cell, reading a book or a magazine. I pictured Darlene stopping by to see her. I felt relieved. I wondered if the police would release Mom before I returned to Starvation, and hoped they would not.

I put everything back in the envelope, dropped it into the lockbox, locked it, and stuffed it under the rubbish on the floor. The fluorescent glow of the restroom lobby grew dim in my rearview mirrors as I pulled back onto I-75.

I
turned my cell phone on after crossing the bridge at Zilwaukee, a bit more than a hundred miles north of Detroit. There were two new messages.

Attorney Peter Shipman said he’d been retained by my mother. Darlene, he said, had called him, God bless her. “Bea’s fine,” he said. “The cops aren’t saying much, and I told her to stay mum for now. No charges yet, but they’re holding her for questioning. Between us, I think they think it’s for her own safety. She has her own cell and they’re treating her with kid gloves. She sends her love.”

The young woman on the other message said simply, “Call me when you hit twenty-three.”

I dialed Joanie McCarthy when I exited onto U.S. 23 south toward Detroit.

“Thirsty?” she answered.

“Where are you?”

“The newsroom. The desk called me in to chase some stupid
Freep
story we wrote a week ago. Then they decided there was no space for it.”

My old newsroom: the wooden desks like steamer trunks, the wires snaking up the ancient pillars, the rattle of keyboards ringing off the tile floors, the smells of bad coffee and old leather and newsprint.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just pop it on the Internet.”

“Might as well put it in a bottle and throw it off the banks of the Detroit River. You still shoot pool?”

“Not for a while, but it’s kind of late, isn’t it?”

“Not upstairs at Aggie’s. You know it?”

I looked at my watch. After midnight. I had thought I would get a motel and meet Joanie in the morning. But she had stayed up, so I guess I had to stay up.

“Greektown, right? Monroe?”

“Off Beaubien. An hour?”

“Sure. You got some stuff on Breck?”

I heard what I thought was her taking her feet off of a desk, plopping them on the floor. “Altar boy,” she said.

“How so?”

“See you at Aggie’s. Bring your A game.”

I had to hop between three puddles of vomit glistening in the streetlights on the sidewalk outside Aggeliki’s Greek.

A man wearing a grease-spattered apron and folded white paper hat came out of Aggie’s with a bucket and mop, shaking his head. He looked at me and I said, “Not me, man.” He said something in Greek that I didn’t understand. His look said fuck off.

I opened the glass door to the vestibule at Aggie’s. The restaurant lay beyond another glass door to my right, aglow in white fluorescence, clattering with plates and forks and the babble of the boozed and drowsy. The aroma of garlic filled my nose, and my belly told me pastitsio, please, and dolmades, with a cup of creamy lemon soup. But I turned to my left and pushed through a wooden door that hid a gloomy stairway reeking of cigarettes. At the top of the stairs, I heard the faint din of the Clash on a speaker that must have had a torn woofer, then the dull crack of a rack of pool balls being broken, then the voice of a man saying, “Get in there, sweetness.”

I squinted through the haze, thicker even than at Enright’s. Behind the balls rolling to a stop on the table, Joanie McCarthy leaned against a paneled wall, a pool stick propped in one hand. Her face was obscured in the smoky radiance of the two bare lightbulbs hanging over the table, but I could tell it was her by the way her wide hips swung to one side over her crossed legs.

I caught her eye. She smiled. I was transported back to the
Pilot
newsroom, two years before, when she had sat where Whistler now sat, daring me to run the stories she wrote that she knew would upset the old fogies who would rather sit around Audrey’s bitching about how the politicians were pissing away their tax dollars than have to stomach
reading about it in the
Pilot.
On the rare occasion back then when Joanie smiled without sarcasm, I don’t know exactly why, but I would feel better about myself, and about her.