The Skeleton Box (20 page)

“What’s going on?”

“Listen,” she said. Her eyes darted toward the oval windows on the upper half of the garage door. “Take this somewhere safe. Do not let anyone know you have it.”

I looked at the box. “Why can’t I—”

She pressed the blue key into my palm. “The police are coming. Listen now.”

“They’re coming here? No, why?”

“I lost my boot. They found my boot.”

“Who? What boot?”

“The police.”

She went to the garage door and got up on her toes to look out through the ovals. I saw blue light flicker across her forehead.

“Holy shit, Mom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I thought it was over,” she said, coming back to me. “It’s not over. That person came for me and got Phyllis instead.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Why would—”

She slapped a palm down hard on the lockbox. “If you want to know about Nilus and about Nonny, you have to take this and get out of here now. Go.”

“Are they going to arrest you? Who’s Nonny?”

“I’ll be fine. You must go, Gus. Go now.”

She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around my chest and hugged me as hard as she’d hugged me in years. When she pulled her face away, I saw dampness on her cheeks. “You have work to do,” she said.

I could have stood there and opened the door for the police, asked them what the hell was going on. I had no idea why they were descending but, as crazy as it seemed, the fact that they were there made me think my mother was not, at this particular moment, out of her mind. Her eyes were clear. She was speaking in her regular staccato. This wasn’t the mother who left the teakettle whistling for hours, who forgot the directions to the IGA, who drifted into unknowable recesses of her memory. This was the mother who had brought me up, who had proudly recited my grade-point and goals-against averages to anyone who asked, who had always remembered to put a roll of white hockey tape in the left pocket of my Rats jacket, a black roll in the right, because I was superstitious that way.

I started to go out the side door we’d entered but through the window saw the beams of headlights bouncing on the tree trunks as the police cruisers struggled up the two-track to the garage. I shut that door
and, with the lockbox cradled in my arm, pulled open the door to the short stairway up to Dad’s tree house.

I looked back at Mom, who was standing on her tiptoes again, her face aglow in the police lights. “God, Mother,” I said. I shut the door behind me and scrambled up the steps to another door that opened onto the outside landing. I twisted its knob and shoved but it did not budge against the snow piled against it on the other side. “Damn,” I said.

My heart was racing. Sweat trickling down from under my wool Red Wings cap stung my left eye. I blinked at the sweat and twisted the knob again and drove my left shoulder into the door, trying not to make too much noise. The door moved a little, maybe a quarter of an inch, so I shoved it again, then again, until finally it fetched up against something hard. Sometimes during a thaw, water would overflow from the eaves and form puddles that refroze into ridges of ice on the landing. The door was stuck on one now.

I looked back down the stairs. A thin line of white light shone across the bottom of the door. I listened. I heard the big steel garage door clanking its way up. “Christ,” I whispered. I had to squeeze through the six-inch gap I had opened.

The snow on the landing was at least a foot deep. I reached the box around the door and heard it land with a moist crunch. I did the same with my coat. Then I turned myself sideways and stuck my left leg and arm out between the door and the jamb. I grasped at the railing outside but it remained a few inches out of my reach.

I forced my torso into the crack. A splinter on the door’s edge stabbed into my back so I squeezed harder against the jamb. I heard voices in the garage. Dingus and Darlene. Holy God, I thought, how could Darlene arrest my mother?

I reached for the railing again and got it with my ring and middle fingers. I relaxed for a second, then held my breath, sucked in what gut I had, and pulled as hard as I could. As I sprang free onto the landing, my flannel shirt caught on the strike plate. The shirt ripped and I heard something bounce into the dark stairwell.

Outside now, I held my breath again, listening.

I shut the door, threw my coat on, picked up the box. Now what? Dad had refused to build an outer stairway. He had said he didn’t want neighbor kids or drunken teenagers or other strangers using his tree house when he wasn’t around. Really he didn’t want anyone using it, except him and the buddies he chose and, once in a while, me. I had to jump the eight or nine feet to the ground.

I slogged through the snow to the railing. The police lights now rippled color across the snow alongside the garage, but the landing remained in darkness. I took out the flashlight and, shielding it with one hand, snapped it on and aimed it at the ground, hoping to see a giant snowdrift I could jump into. There wasn’t one.

I turned the flashlight off and tossed the box down. As long as I roll, I thought, it can’t hurt much worse than a slap shot to the balls. I jumped. I landed next to the box, rolling, chunks of snow scratching into my neck and down my shirt. I grabbed the box and scuttled up the hill, trying to stay low, dodging trees, praying the cop lights wouldn’t find me.

I should have kept running when I crested the ridge. Instead I stopped and squatted with one arm around a birch and peered back down on Mom’s latest crime scene. Darlene and Dingus were standing with their arms folded in the shadows at the edge of one cruiser’s headlights and Skip Catledge was helping Mom into the back of another car, the lights churning all their faces blue and red. It didn’t appear that they had cuffed her, for which I was grateful. She stopped before ducking into the car and nodded at Catledge as if to say thank you. Skipper, polite as ever, nodded back.

The door slamming on Mom made me think of the Bonneville’s trunk lid. You had to bang it down hard. Mom wouldn’t have known that, because she didn’t drive the Bonnie. Dad had driven it, and I had, though not for a couple of years. At some point, she had gone to the garage and put the lockbox I now carried under my arm in the Bonnie’s trunk. Hidden it there, actually, where she thought nobody would find it.

But when? And why? And what did she mean, she had lost a boot? And “Nonny”? Where had I heard that before?

I followed a different path out of the woods than the one we had come up earlier, avoiding my pickup, which I figured the police would find and tow. Still in the trees, about fifty feet up from Horvath Road, I pulled out my cell phone and called Soupy.

W
hat the fuck, Trap?”

Soupy had pulled his pickup over to the roadside near the public access boat ramp on the southwestern end of the lake. I came out of the trees where I’d been waiting in a snowdrift up to my thighs.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking the snow off my legs. Soupy hadn’t been happy about my call for help, but I rarely asked anything more of him than a Blue Ribbon, so he came. I hoped he hadn’t said anything to his customers at Enright’s about why he was leaving.

“I had to stick Angie behind the bar,” he said, and I caught a whiff of mint laced with liquor. “By the time I get back, I could be wiped out. So where’s your truck? What do you got there, a box of cash or something? Treasure in the woods?”

The lockbox was a little too big to hide in my coat, so I had set it on my lap, as if I carried a box like that around with me all the time. “The truck got towed,” I said. “The box is Mom’s. I don’t know what’s in it.”

Soupy chuckled. “Old Mom Carpenter could probably could keep all her skeletons in a box that small, eh?”

We happened to be passing Mom’s house. I glanced across the road into the trees sheltering Dad’s garage. I didn’t see any cop lights. “Mom’s going to jail,” I said.

“Get out.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not going with her?”

“No. I assume they’d arrest me, too.”

“Holy fuck. First Tatch, now Mom C? Who’s next, Mother Teresa? What did they arrest her for? They don’t think—”

“No idea. They just took her in, up at Dad’s garage.”

“What was she doing up there? That where you got that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Soup,” I said, “you can’t go back to the bar and start running your mouth.”

“Trap, come on, I love your mother. She’s the last person I’d want to hurt.”

Soupy really did love my mother, really did care about what she thought about him, even if his actions suggested he never heard a word of what she said about his drinking and slut chasing. It reminded me of Mom telling me she was worried about Soupy selling his parents’ place. He had to be “careful,” she had said.

“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Is that the law firm you’re dealing with on your parents’ house?”

“Hold on,” Soupy said. “You’re hiding in the trees like a prison escapee and I’m the one getting questioned? What’s in the box?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, Soup?”

He slowed the truck where the shore road curved into Main at the western end of town. A streetlight illuminated a gnarl of scar on Soupy’s cheekbone where a puck had struck him when we were kids. I remembered the blood spurting between his fingers as he clutched at his cheek and how he made himself laugh while our old coach tried to butterfly the gash closed with hockey tape before he took Soupy to the clinic.

“Eagan whatever sounds right,” he said. “What do you care? Or that Whistler guy?”

“What about Whistler?”

“He’s been asking me about the house, too.”

Damn, he’s good, I thought.

“Who’s the law firm representing?” I said. “They’re sure as hell not buying it for themselves.”

“They didn’t tell old Soupy. Probably some rich guy who’s going to tear the place down and throw up a mansion. Who cares? I need the cash. You going to open that?”

Knowing nothing of the lockbox’s contents, I had no desire to open it in front of Soupy.

“I don’t have a key,” I lied.

“I got a crowbar in the flatbed.”

“Mom told me to take it and go. You have to give me your truck.”

Soupy jammed the accelerator down to blast through the yellow light at Estelle. “Give you my—oh, shit, a cop.”

The sheriff’s cruiser was parked on Main two blocks down. It waited across from my rental house, where, to my surprise, my truck sat in the side drive.

“Soup,” I said. “Turn. Now.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“I thought—”

“Now.”

Soupy swung his truck right onto Garfield, drove a block, and turned right again onto South, rolling toward the parking lot behind the
Pilot.
I didn’t see a sheriff’s cruiser there, but I couldn’t risk going to the newsroom either.

“Here?” Soupy said.

“Keep going.”

He continued past the
Pilot
and turned left on Elm, then went another block to Ambling and turned right toward the lake. Then he pulled over again and parked.

“Trap,” he said, “you look like you’re going to have a baby. The cops want that box, don’t they?”

I had to speak to him in a language he would understand. “Soup, you know how they say every hockey game has like three hundred mistakes?”

“Never heard that,” Soupy said.

“I read it in
Hockey News,
and I thought, I bet you two hundred of them happen when you’re tired. You know, the other team’s in your end, and you’re running around and you can’t get off the ice, and you’re sucking wind, that’s when you screw up, make a bad pass, take a bad penalty.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

I grabbed the door handle. “Are you going to help me?”

He turned sideways in his seat. “Just square with me. Is Mom C in real trouble?”

“She’s in jail,” I said. “But there’s something else. I mean, she has her memory issues, but she’s either gone crazier than a shithouse rat or there’s something else going on.”

Soupy pointed at the box. “And you think it might be in there?”

“Maybe.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. He sighed. Soupy didn’t sigh much. “What the hell. Take it.” He opened his door and stepped into the street. “You’re going to have to fill it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I always do: wing it. If I need a truck for something, I can borrow one from one of the five hundred people who owe me money.”

“Soup—”

“No, man, I mean it, just go.” He nodded in the direction of where the cop was parked. “The hell with those idiots. They arrest my buddy, my best buddy’s mom. Fuck them.”

I slid behind the steering wheel. Soupy extended his hand. I shook it.

“Take the back roads,” he said. “I don’t want to have to hock the thing back from the cops. Let me know what happens with Mom C.”

“Will do.”

He slammed the door shut. I gave him a salute. He grinned and gave me the finger.

I didn’t pick up my cell phone until Grayling.

Mom’s lockbox sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat. It wouldn’t fit beneath. It made me nervous sitting there, where a cop could see it if one pulled me over.

Half a mile before merging onto Interstate 75 south, I pulled into a gas station. I leaned into Soupy’s narrow rear seat and scooped up the garbage piled on the floor: crumpled Doritos and Burger King
bags, empty dip cans, plastic pop bottles streaked with spat dip, a pizza box holding two old slices of pizza and a torn-open condom package, emptied bottles of Beam and El Toro, wads of hockey tape from nights when Soupy was in such a hurry to get to Enright’s that he undressed in the truck.

I dumped it all on top of the lockbox. Then I got out and stood by the truck watching for cops while the gas tank gurgled full. Dingus couldn’t arrest me in Crawford County, but he’d had me followed in the past. Inside the station, I bought three bottles of Vernors, a big bag of chips, and some onion dip.

Back in the truck, I started to punch a
Detroit Times
number into my cell phone, then decided to check my messages first. There were two. Coach Poppy had left the first when Mom and I were about to descend the hill to Dad’s tree house.