The Skeleton Box (12 page)

“OK, gentlemen,” Poppy said. He wore a Rats sweat suit. His head, a tousle of thinning gray, was bare. “What’s the most important thing?”

“The puck,” the Rats answered in unison.

“That’s right—the puck. Because the best defense . . .”

“Is to have the puck on your stick.”

“If we have the puck, we cannot lose, am I right?”

“Yes sir, Coach.”

“And we move the puck to the open man because . . .”

“The puck has no lungs.”

“That’s right, the puck never gets tired.” He grabbed his whistle, blew another short blast. “Tex, hang around,” he said. “Everybody else, be back here no later than six-fifteen.”

The Rats scattered. Tex slipped a glove off and held his right hand in front of his face, frowning.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

He showed me the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “Blister,” he said. “On my shooting hand.”

“From breaking your stick in half?”

“Freaking digging.”

“At the camp?”

“Yeah. Bunch of bullshit. That Breck dude is a dick.”

“Whoa there, partner,” Poppy said. “Tape it up and forget it. You’re going to have a big game tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“The Mic-Macs are going to be all over you, trying to get you to do something stupid.”

“I won’t.”

“Yeah, well, listen up.”

Poppy had told me about his plan earlier. It stemmed from his own youth skating for the old Detroit Junior Red Wings. Poppy had been a brawler then, assigned to beat up opposing players who hassled the Junior Wings’ stars, like Gordie Howe’s son Mark. Poppy had some wicked scars on his knuckles to prove it.

If you pushed him, Poppy would talk about those days, but it was clear that he had regrets, that he wished he hadn’t established himself as merely a fighter, a reputation that followed him into the low minor leagues but never propelled him even close to the NHL. Back then, their fighters came from every corner of Canada but never from the United States.

“I want you to keep your cool,” Poppy said. “When you get honked off at some guy for putting his stick up your butt, count to three, call him an asshole, walk away.”

“I can do that.”

“But just in case.” Poppy moved in close to Tex. “Just in case you feel like you can’t hold it in, here’s what I want you to do.”

Tex waited.

“Do not drop your gloves. Do you hear me? Under no circumstances will you drop your gloves. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Instead, if some guy gets you to the point that you’re just dying to blast him, I want you to do this. I want you to hit the guy once, as hard as you can.” Poppy threw a slow fake punch just short of Tex’s face. Tex did not flinch. “Just once. As hard as you can. Then head directly to the penalty box. Do not pass go.”

Tex smiled. “You sure about this, Coach?”

“It ain’t funny, son. I don’t want you to lose it at all out there. I don’t want you in the penalty box. But I’d rather you took a two-minute penalty than something that sits you down longer or gets you tossed.”

“Do you understand, Tex?” I said.

“Yeah. One punch, go to the box.”

“Especially with that Holcomb guy.”

“Pinky?” Tex said. “What a wuss. I’ll take him and—”

“No,” Poppy said. “The point is not to go head-hunting. The point is to stay calm, focus on the puck, but if you feel the dam bursting, you know what to do.”

“OK, Coach.”

“Control yourself. Be a man.”

For some reason I thought of my reporter’s propensity for smashing computers. Whistler, who was forty years older than Tex.

“I’ve got to fix this hand,” Tex said.

As he skated away, Poppy said, “You think he’ll get into it with Pinky?”

“Of course,” I said. “Just a question of how much.”

“God help us. I worry about him up there with all those crazy people. He’s a good kid. Not sure he’s cut out for that.”

“Me either. Listen, Pop, I might be a little late tonight. Got some stuff to take care of.”

He looked taken aback for a second, then said, “Got it. Hey—we’re going to have a moment of silence for Phyllis again, right after the anthem.”

“Great. Ring me between periods, will you?”

“Will do.”

“Don’t forget.”

My phone rang as I was pulling out of the rink parking lot.

“Whistler here,” the caller said. “Got lucky again.”

“With T.J.?”

“Good one. No. With this Nilus guy. My source at the archdiocese is
retired, but he remembered him from way back. Said to check a couple of counties for lawsuits. I left a note on your desk. Maybe you want to run them down. Or I can.”

“Lawsuits against Nilus?”

“Concerning Nilus, supposedly, though I doubt he’s the only defendant, because as a priest he wouldn’t have two nickels. The church or the diocese would be the deep pockets.”

“What did he supposedly do?”

“Not sure. The guy was a little squirrelly. Might be nothing—you know, a property dispute or something. Maybe somebody got pissed that he made him say too many Hail Marys.” Whistler laughed at his little joke and, as he laughed, I heard a snatch of music, the opening riff of a Procol Harum song. I imagined him standing outside Enright’s.

“I’ll check it out,” I said. “I found out some interesting stuff myself.”

“Cool. What do you got?”

A snowplow rumbled past, a pair of fluttering River Rats flags attached to the cab windows.

“Not much yet,” I said, “but the clips—well, the headlines—filed downstairs, you know, the morgue, said Nilus was around when some nun disappeared years ago. Then they got the guy who killed her and he got killed in jail.”

“Whoa. Awesome shit, man. You get it in tomorrow’s paper?”

“No.” I looked at my watch. “Two minutes to deadline, and I don’t really have it nailed.”

“Always first,” Whistler said.

“And frequently right.”

“Let’s hope Channel Eight doesn’t have it.”

“I’ve got to go. Thanks for the good work.”

“You got it,” he said. “Tough story, but a good story.”

“Yeah.”

“And, Gus, next time you go down to that basement, let someone know so we can send down a search team if you don’t come out.”

Besides two moldering tomatoes and half a head of slimy lettuce, all I could find in my fridge were two cans of Blue Ribbon, a month-old package of Swiss cheese, a jar of dill pickles, and some Miracle Whip. It would be enough. I was starving.

I had planned to shop for groceries that weekend but got busy. Before going to Mom’s Sunday morning, I’d had to dump a quart of 2 percent milk that had soured before I’d even opened it. My one loaf of bread was nearly stale, but I figured it would be fine toasted, at least until it started growing mold, so I’d stuck it in the freezer.

Now I took it out and put two hard, frosted slices in the toaster on the counter next to the fridge. The kitchen, with its drab green walls and fake petunias hanging in a plastic basket over the sink, wasn’t all that big, but bigger than the one I’d had when I’d last lived alone, in an apartment over the
Pilot,
before spending a year back at Mom’s.

I had moved out of Mom’s six months before and rented one of the old Victorians on Main a few blocks from the
Pilot.
The rent was cheap because the landlord lived downstate and he liked having someone there to make sure the pipes didn’t freeze and the roof was shoveled. I could walk to work, which helped clear my mind for rewriting press releases and arm wrestling with corporate and cops and town council members.

Some mornings I would be sitting in that kitchen eating a bowl of Cheerios, hearing the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, imagining it was growing louder by the tick, and I would feel oddly certain that somebody else should have been there, that I shouldn’t be sitting alone in a house that big, in a town that small, and I would get up and turn on a radio or, if it was warm enough outside, open a window so I could hear cars and trucks passing on Main.

Now, while the bread toasted, I spun the lid off the Miracle Whip and shoved my nose inside. It didn’t smell life threatening yet. I cut two dill pickles into thin slices and set them on a paper plate festooned with little Santa heads.

I gazed out the window over the sink. Across the way I could see the Andersons sitting down to dinner. Two towheaded boys and a teenage girl waited at the table while their mother set a casserole in the middle.
Beef stew? I wondered. Scalloped potatoes? Darlene made terrific scalloped potatoes with ham.

The boys and the girl were wearing matching River Rats sweatshirts. The father, Oke, came in talking into a cell phone. His wife gave him a look and he smiled and dropped the phone into a pocket and sat down. I’d gone to high school with the guy. He used to come to Rats games back then. He and his buddies would sit in the very top row at one end of the stands, avoiding teachers because they’d had a little pregame party in the woods near Jitters Creek.

Oke ladled the casserole onto the kids’ plates. I imagined him and his wife and the boys sitting in the bleachers across from the Rats bench while the girl—I thought her name was Jo, and like a lot of the girls she was sweet on Tex Dobrick—squeezed along the glass with all the other high school girls in the corner near the concession stand.

My toast popped up.

I laid the pieces of bread down side by side and used a spoon to slather Miracle Whip on both. I laid a slice of cheese on each piece, the pickles on one, and mashed the whole thing together.

Miracle Whip splatted out one end of the sandwich into my palm as I took the first bite standing at the sink. I finished it in six bites and leaned my head under the faucet for a long drink of water. Dinner was done.

My phone rang. After I’d spoken with Whistler, I had tried and failed to get both Mom and Darlene. I hoped this was one of them.

“What do you got for me?” Dingus said.

I wished I hadn’t answered. “Not much,” I said. “Tatch said he had family matters the other night.”

“What family matters?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You call yourself a reporter?”

“It’s Tatch, Dingus. You were right about his camp.”

I wondered if Darlene had told Dingus about Nilus by now, if they’d figured out he might be a priest who once lived in Starvation.

“How about Bea?” he said.

“She might have told me more if you didn’t have Catledge hovering.”

“It’s for her own safety.”

My phone beeped. Another call was coming in, but I couldn’t hang up on Dingus.

“I appreciate it,” I said. “Mom did say she heard Frankie was out campaigning.”

“Yeah, waving your stories around,” Dingus said. “Thanks for the help.”

“We have a story tomorrow saying he’s going to make it official.”

“Stop the presses. That guy’s been up my butt for months.”

“Solve the case. He’ll go away.”

“I do hope your mom talks, Gus. Because I’d hate to have to bring you in.”

“Bring me in for what?”

“For questioning.”

“You might want to reread the First Amendment, Dingus.”

“Uh-huh. The shield of shields. Who the heck’s going to wield that for you, son? Your lawyers? The last time you were in my office, you had to borrow a pen.”

Which was true.

He ended the call with a satisfied grunt.

I dialed voice mail. There was a message from Darlene.

“Gus,” she said. “I hope you’re making more progress than we are, and . . . I hope you’re doing OK and Mom C’s all right.” Seconds of silence followed. “I might try to stop by the rink, but . . . we’ll see. We’ve got extra patrols out in the neighborhoods, in case this guy tries another house while everyone’s at the game. Talk later.”

I hit Replay, listened again. It hurt to hear Darlene in pain, but hearing her voice also felt good. She hadn’t spoken to me that softly since she’d ended things the year before. I hoped it wasn’t only because of her mother.

I went upstairs to my bedroom, brushed my teeth, ran a hand through what remained of my hair. Mom always said I looked better with my hair short anyway. “My own little Paul Newman,” she would say.

I heard cars honking outside on Main Street.

I grabbed my River Rats jacket, a blue-and-gold satin number with “Coach Carpenter” stitched in cursive over the left breast. Beneath that, another line of script said, “State Runner-Up 1981.” Poppy had had it put on. I told him I wished it wasn’t there, and he told me, Grow up, Gus, that was the greatest Rats team ever.

I went downstairs and stood at the bay window watching the cars and pickups and SUVs inching down Main toward the rink, an actual traffic jam in Starvation Lake. Horns blared. Kids hung out of windows waving Rats pennants. People stood curbside, thigh deep in snowbanks, clapping their mittens together and chanting, “Gooooo River Rats! Beeeat Mic-Mac!”

A sheriff’s cruiser whooshed by the line in the left lane, lights flashing.

The people of Starvation Lake had set their new home alarm systems and fastened the new padlocks on their doors and set out for a night of forgetting. Of forgetting about the vacant storefronts down the street, the For Sale signs on the lake, the high school having too little money to continue shop classes, the plastics plant closing and taking its fifty-eight jobs to Alabama. Maybe they couldn’t forget the break-in that had left one of their own dead, but they could channel their fear and confusion into cheering for the long-haired, pimply-faced boys taking their first step toward the town’s first state title.

I really wanted to join them, but I had something else to do.

T
he kicked-up wind churned whorls of snow along the walk from Main Street to the Pine County Courthouse. I’d parked at one of the meters the county had installed in the 1980s when the town was flourishing, with rich downstate people coming up to buy property and houses on the lake. Now the meters stood there like antiques. Some county worker went around each week and collected the quarters. One week in January, he gathered a total of seventy-five cents.

Vicky Clark had propped a back door open with a phone book. I’d persuaded her to meet me in the clerk’s office to see if she could help me. Then we would go to her place for that dinner she had offered. That’s what I’d told her.