The Skeleton Box (27 page)

“Told you,” Soupy said. He plucked a can of beer off the six-pack he was carrying and handed it to me. “No wonder it hasn’t sold—yet.” I didn’t bother to suggest that Soupy clean the place up before showing it; the archdiocese probably wouldn’t care. I put the beer to my mouth and drew in the smell to mask the pervasive odor of cat litter mixed with sodden paper.

Soupy’s parents had separated in their final years. Mrs. Campbell stayed in the house in the woods, and Mr. Campbell usually slept on a cot at the marina when he wasn’t ushering a woman into a room at the Hill-Top Motel. One night, Angus had come to the house, lit, looking for a mounted set of deer antlers to settle a bar bet. Mrs. Campbell took the antlers and locked herself in a bathroom. The police had to be called. Mrs. Campbell had the locks changed. She accelerated her hoarding of things. Every single thing, apparently. The antlers were now propped atop a stained lampshade.

Scattered amid the junk heaped on the dining room table were piles of photographs, dozens of them in color and black and white, framed and not. I picked up one of Angus standing at the end of a dock dangling a stringer of bluegills. I tossed it aside. I grabbed a handful of Polaroids leaning against the birdcage and fanned through them: Soupy and me in our Rats uniforms; a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on my
mother’s dining table; Soupy’s old basset hound, Stanley, draped uncomfortably in a Red Wings jersey.

I showed the picture of Stanley to Soupy.

“That was one crazy-ass dog,” Soupy said.

“Umbrellas, right?”

“Drove him mad. And motorcycles. He’d be quiet as a mouse, then he’d see somebody with an umbrella and go apeshit barking. Same with guys on motorcycles. Thank God he never saw a guy on a motorcycle with an umbrella.”

I picked up more photos. There was my mother and Mrs. Campbell beaming in bathing suits and Ray-Bans on my grandfather’s Chris-Craft. Mrs. Campbell cradling Soupy, a baby, in front of a Christmas tree. Another of Mrs. B and Mrs. Campbell curtsying together in bridesmaids’ dresses, possibly at Mom’s wedding. Seven little girls arm in arm wearing identical plaid jumpers over white blouses. It looked like the spelling-bee photo I had seen in the microfilm at the clerk’s office, but without Sister Cordelia or the young Judge Gallagher.

I set those down and picked up a stack held together by paper clips. They looked more recent than the others. There were no people in them, just trees full of leaves and the forest floor covered with pine needles and cones sloping down and away, the same scene taken from different angles, probably at dusk, judging by how the shadows fell along the ground. I looked at Soupy. “Has anyone actually come to look at the place?”

“Nope.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as a little unusual?”

“Not if they’re just going to rebuild anyway. They probably just want the land.”

“Are there mineral rights?”

“Yeah, but no minerals worth anything. Why do you give a shit?”

“What if I want to buy it?”

Soupy watched me over the top of his beer can as he took a long pull. He belched and said, “Right. Or maybe the kids who broke in want to buy it.”

“Somebody broke in here?”

“Didn’t you notice the door almost fell off when we came in? Fucking kids about tore it off the hinges.”

“When was this? Did you call the cops?”

“Couple of weeks ago. Came out here to make sure the pipes hadn’t frozen and found the door all messed up and a bunch of boot prints.”

“What’d they take?”

“Look around, Trap. How the hell would I know?”

Soupy was a month older than me, but sometimes he felt like a little brother.

“You didn’t report it?”

“Report what? I didn’t want to be one of those Bingo Burglaries or whatever you call them. No need to have my name in the paper.”

I picked up the photo of the girls again. I counted seven. There had been five reported break-ins, six if you counted the one at Soupy’s parents’ place. Each had been at the grown-up home of one of the girls in the photo—except Phyllis née Snyder Bontrager. While it was unlikely that a burglar would have seen this particular photo, he might have seen the one I’d seen, with Sister Cordelia, too, in a newspaper clipping.

I grabbed another stack of photos leaning against the birdcage. There were probably twenty-five in all. My mother was in every one. Some included Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. B, a few Audrey from the diner. I put the stack down and picked up a framed collage of three photos hinged together. The photos were of Mom; Mom with Mrs. Campbell; and Mom, Mrs. Campbell, and Mrs. B in Mom’s driveway, like the one I had seen at Mrs. B’s counter at the
Pilot.
I turned the frame sideways, turned it back the other way, turned it sideways again. The Three Stooges, I thought. And then I thought something else.

I took the triple-frame of photos in both hands and twisted one of the three pieces against its hinges. When the hinges bent but didn’t break, I braced the frame against the table’s edge and broke it off with a crack. My right hand slipped and caught a sharp corner and I saw a trickle of blood along a fingernail.

“Ouch,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Soupy said.

I put my finger in my mouth and sucked the blood away. I tossed the still connected frames on the table and held the one I’d broken off in front of Soupy’s face. It was a picture of our mothers standing in front of Audrey’s.

“It’s a map,” I said. “Your mom had a piece of it.”

“Have another beer, Trap. It’s a picture.”

“I’m not talking about this.”

I threw the photo aside and told Soupy about the lockbox, what was in it, the piece of paper I thought was a map, how it had gotten stolen, how it all had something to do with the murder of Sister Mary Cordelia.

“Fucking-ay,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Hell, no. But . . . that’s got to be it. Mom tore the thing into three and gave the other pieces to her best friends.”

“Which would be Mrs. B and my mom,” Soupy said.

“Right.”

“But for what? They rob a bank or something? You think that’s what born-agains are digging for down the hill?”

“Something like that,” I said. I rummaged through the junk on the table and found the photos of trees and leaves. I showed one to Soupy. “That look familiar?”

He squinted. “Looks like anything around here. Trees, dirt, pine needles.”

“Could be right outside, huh? Looking down the ridge to where Tatch’s people are?”

“Could be just about anywhere north of Grayling.”

I recalled how the wiggly lines in Mom’s drawing seemed to suggest a hill, the noted locations of trees. “Who took these pictures?”

“No idea, but, listen, that nun?”

“Yeah?”

Soupy walked slowly into the living room, his back to me. His empty can pinged on a heap of coat hangers. He yanked another beer off the ring, opened it, took a long pull.

“Ma got a call about some nun,” he said. “Sometime after Angus died.”

“Are you serious?”

He wrapped his arms around himself so that the beer can appeared beneath his left arm. “Man,” he said. “I really haven’t thought about Ma in a while.”

I wanted to say, What about the nun, but I just said, “Yeah?”

“She was the one, you know, who got up at like five in the morning to haul my ass to practice. Angus was usually sleeping it off, if he was even home. I’d give her all sorts of hell about getting out of bed, and sometimes she’d have to just throw me out on the floor.” He tried a chuckle, but it got stuck in his throat. “Then she’d have coffee made, and those cinnamon buns from the diner.”

“I remember.”

“She liked when your mom came along.”

Mrs. Campbell and my mother had taken turns driving the two of us to our early morning practices. Sometimes both went.

“When she got sick—” he said. He stopped, then started again. “When she got sick, she started thinking over things, stuff she’d forgotten about, stuff that’d been bugging her forever, stuff she’d never had time to screw around with. You know.”

“What about the nun?”

Soupy threw his head back and took another deep swallow. Then he said, “This woman called one night. I was over here helping Ma out with, I don’t know, I think I was putting the storm windows in for winter. Anyway, she was frying up some perch I’d caught that day and the phone rang. And I was messing with a window and she got on the phone and next thing I know I smell this burning. All that sweet perch going to waste. I rush in and the pan’s spitting grease and we’re about to have a damn fire, but Ma’s on the phone, talking real soft, like it’s some big secret, and I go over and say, ‘Ma, you’re going to burn the house down,’ and she takes me”—he grabbed himself by the collar of his shirt—“and shoves me away.”

“Doesn’t sound like Louise.”

“Nope.” He turned to face me. “Though she should have done it to Angus about a million times. Anyway, I go over and turn the stove
off and dump the fish in the sink and go outside. But I slip down the wall out there”—he pointed outside—“and listen through the screen I haven’t replaced yet, to see what the hell’s got her so focused.”

“And it was the nun.”

“I think so. She kept saying something about a sister. But Ma didn’t have any sisters.”

“Did you hear the name ‘Cordelia’?”

“That’s the nun who got killed?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish—I honestly don’t remember. But I asked Ma after she’d calmed down. She said some woman was writing a history of St. Val’s, and she might actually pay for some information, and I thought, great, because the marina was sucking wind, and I think that was about the time we had to get one of the lifts fixed, cost a shitload.”

“You’re sure it was a woman?”

“Pretty sure. After thirty-eight years with Angus, Ma didn’t trust men much.”

“Did she ever help the woman? Or get paid?”

“I don’t think so. Then, it wasn’t long before she passed away.”

I sidled closer to Soupy, careful to avoid a cracked glass bowl filled with Mary Jane candy wrappers. “Why would you even remember this anyway?”

Soupy shook his head. “The smell, man. You ever smell perch burning? I still can’t eat them. Love to catch them. Can’t eat them.”

I sat back against the table. “And that would’ve been about the time our moms stopped talking to each other, wouldn’t it?”

“Goddamn broads, huh?” Soupy sat down on a pile of blankets on the sofa, the other beers dangling between his legs. “I can’t tell you, man, how sick she was about all of that. It killed her that your mom never came to see her in the hospital.”

“I’ll bet it killed my mom, too.”

“What was that all about anyway?”

By now it was clear to me that both Soupy’s mother and Mrs. B knew things that were important to my mother. It appeared that Mrs.
Campbell had told or at least considered telling someone whatever it was she knew. Maybe what she knew about a map. Somebody had broken into this dump looking for something. I doubted it was kids.

“I don’t know, Soup,” I said. “I asked you once, you told me it was chick weirdness.”

“You don’t think it has something to do with this?”

“With what?”

“With what happened to Darlene’s mom.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

I drained my beer, tossed the can on the table. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Trap, I’ve got to get back.”

“Come on.” I reached with the hand with the bloody fingernail. “Don’t be hoarding those beers.”

W
e climbed the hill rising from the garage behind Soupy’s mother’s house. As a boy, Soupy had flooded a flat patch of ground behind the garage and used it to practice his stickhandling moves on moonlit nights. Sometimes his father would come out late, bottle in hand, and exhort his son to try this feint or that dangle, and Soupy would scoop up his pucks and say he was tired, he was going to bed.

Our boots crunched through the snow, Soupy bitching about the cold, nagging me about where we were going, me ignoring him, scanning the trees for a familiar pattern, something that resembled what I had seen in that peculiar set of photos on Mrs. Campbell’s table, of trees and forest floor in fading light. The light now, as afternoon began to yield to evening, was the color of old snow. Thirty yards ahead of us, a thin streak of yellow glowed along the top of the ridge. As we climbed, I started hearing something from the other side of the hill, the sound of voices calling out in unison, as yet unintelligible.

“Jesus freaks,” Soupy said.

“Hockey freaks,” I said.

We kept climbing. The voices grew louder. As we crested the ridge, I heard behind me the snap and gurgle of a beer being opened, and then, as Soupy came up next to me, “What the hell, man?”

We stood between oaks, facing the long slope down to Tatch’s camp. Lightbulbs in orange plastic cages dangled from nails driven into tree trunks. Extension cords snaked through the trees to the circle of trailers. Halfway down the hill, an idle backhoe crouched, its toothy scoop poised in midair like a dinosaur’s jaw hovering over its prey. The ground surrounding it for fifty yards in every direction was torn into winding gullies and potholes blotting the snowy surface. The wooden handles of shovels and pickaxes jutted from mounds of snow and dirt amid the black hollows.

“I knew they were digging here,” Soupy said, “but I didn’t know it was this serious. What are they looking for?”

“Not gold,” I said. “And not a septic field.”

The voices below were rising. I saw the townspeople walking up the two-track from the beach road, their flashlights bouncing like fireflies in the gathering dusk. They carried signs and a banner, a shambling bunch of twenty or thirty people in parkas and hats and mufflers obscuring their faces in wool. D’Alessio led them, wielding a bullhorn in one hand and a hockey stick in the other.

“Septic field?” Soupy said.

“It’s a dodge Breck’s been using to get Tatch’s born-again friends to chew up the ground looking for something else. Something he wants. Something your mother may have helped him with, intentionally or not.”

“I hope not.”

“Look.”