The Skeleton Box (30 page)

“What the hell was that all about?”

I whispered it to Darlene as soon as Dingus’s door closed behind us. Darlene squeezed my arm hard, looked behind her, and yanked me down the hall, around a corner, and into a closet. She shut the closet door, plunging us into darkness. I backed up against a set of metal shelves, smelling soap and cardboard and then Darlene, as she stepped close to me.

She took one of my hands in both of hers and pressed something small into the palm.

“What’s this?” I said.

“The button you left on the stairs at the tree house the other night.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laid a hand on my chest. “When we came for Bea and you ran out the back.”

“Dingus is off his rocker,” I said.

“Shut up.”

She grabbed my coat collar and pulled me into her and kissed me, her badge pressing into my ribs. The kiss was not long but it was wet and warm and I felt a shiver ripple across my belly like the one I had felt when she had kissed me in the dark courthouse closet almost twenty years before. She pulled away and pushed me back against the shelves.

“What was that?” I said.

“Breck insists on talking to you.”

“What?”

“He has no lawyer and says he needs to speak with you. Dingus OK’d it.”

“Dingus really is crazy.”

She opened the door a crack, peeked out, closed it again, turned back to me. “Meet me later. My apartment.”

My gut fluttered again. “Are you sure?”

“You’re going to tell me all about the tree house and Bea.” She opened the door. “Out.”

Wayland Breck waited in orange coveralls at a long white Formica-topped table in the shift room. I was surprised to see a cigarette smoldering in a foil ashtray. He tapped a can of Vernors on the tabletop. Darlene sat me down across from him. His hands were unfettered, but I noticed shackles on his ankles.

“You have fifteen minutes,” Darlene said. I assumed she had brought us to the shift room because the rest of Breck’s group was being fingerprinted and mug-shotted and Dingus didn’t want them to see us talking. She closed the shift room door behind her. I saw the back of her head through the crosshatched observation window in the door.

“She’s important to you, isn’t she?” Breck said.

“Good evening, Breck. You wanted to talk to me?”

“Is she as important as your mother?” He smiled and took a drag on his cigarette before crushing it out. “You know, Mr. Carpenter, we are not so different. My mother kept secrets from me, too.” He let that hang there. I chose not to respond. “For years,” he continued, “I believed what my mother told me about my grandfather, that he died of emphysema in a hospital when I was a small boy. Only in her will did she leave a note telling me that was a lie.”

“Why would she wait? Weren’t you a grown man by then?”

“Yes. But as you, of all people, can appreciate, I can’t be sure why
she held back. Maybe she was embarrassed. In retrospect, I believe my grandfather’s death tortured her for most of her life. She was”—he stopped and looked at the table—“an increasingly sad woman.”

“But she kept the truth—or her version of it—from you.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want it to torture me.”

“But now it does.”

He chose not to reply.

“She didn’t commit suicide, did she?” I said.

“Melanoma.”

“And what is the truth?”

Breck looked at the shift room door. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

“On the record?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

I took out my pen and notebook and opened the notebook and wrote BRECK, JAIL, WED at the top of the first blank page. I looked up at him. Only then did I notice.

“Did the cops confiscate your glasses?” I said.

“I don’t wear glasses,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“My grandfather,” he said, “did not kill Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero.” He clasped his hands together on the table and leaned over them. “He may or may not have had romantic feelings for her. But he did not kill her. The truth is, he knew something about what happened to the nun, and so Father Nilus Moreau made sure he was eliminated. My grandfather wasn’t even arraigned. He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed in this very building in a matter of two days on a weekend.”

“That’s all public record.”

Breck continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “He tried to call the only person in the world he trusted—his daughter, my mother—but she was away at a wedding, and there was no voice mail or mobile phones to track her down. She heard about his death a good twenty-four hours after it happened.”

“He got in a fight with the wrong guy.”

Again he ignored me. “As a fellow investigator, Mr. Carpenter, you’ll
be interested to know that I found the priest who supposedly heard my grandfather’s confession.”

“Impressive.”

“Emile Waterstradt. Saint Robert Bellarmine. Otsego Lake. Glenfiddich.”

“Glenfiddich?”

“Scotch. A bottle a day. Waterstradt finally left the priesthood in his shame. I found him living in an apartment above a bar in Hillman.”

“How do you spell Waterstradt?” I said.

“He’s dead. But if he were still alive, perhaps he would tell you, as he told me, that my grandfather didn’t kill the nun, but that he did see what he believed to be the remains of the unfortunate nun.”

“Where?”

“In a crawl space beneath the old church. They were about to start building the lovely new church, and Grandpa was cleaning things up. He found her remains beneath a pile of dismantled pews. At first he thought it was an animal. But there were shreds of cloth.”

“Her habit.”

“Correct.”

“And he told the priest.”

“The charming Father Nilus, yes. As for the ‘wrong guy,’ after Rupert Calloway was released on the pretense that he had acted in self-defense, he subsequently moved north and enjoyed splendid employment at a home for retired priests on Lake Superior. He mowed the lawn and plowed the walks and in return received room and board and the convenience of a whorehouse in Ishpeming.”

“Rupert Calloway is—”

“The man who cut my grandfather’s throat. He died in ninety-seven. Unfortunately I didn’t find him in time to ask him a question or two.”

“You’re saying someone arranged for this Calloway guy to kill your grandfather?”

“I’m not saying it. Father Waterstradt said it, while crying like a child into his coffee cup of single malt. He and Nilus were close.”

“Entertaining story. But you didn’t go to the authorities.”

“What did the authorities say happened to the nun, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Your grandfather dumped her in Torch Lake.”

“But her body never washed up.”

“Sometimes bodies don’t wash up in that lake,” I said. “Sometimes boats don’t.”

Breck smiled. “I’ve heard all about the underground tunnels that suck things out to Lake Michigan.”

“Why should I believe a man who helped the church defend pedophiles?”

“Do not judge lest you be judged.”

“Enough with the biblical claptrap.”

“Believe what you like,” he said. “I saved most of those men from much harsher treatment at the hands of my clients.”

“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne, representing the archdiocese.”

“Indeed. To say they were ruthless would be an understatement of the first rank. My research, which the lawyers put on the record quite selectively, didn’t always help the archdiocese’s case. So they were forced to settle on less-than-palatable terms, at least financially. The men were compensated handsomely, and they went on with their lives.”

“You’re a hero. Congratulations.”

The door opened. Skip Catledge ducked in. “Five minutes,” he said.

The door closed. Breck said, “You’ve no doubt noticed that my name didn’t show up on any of these sex abuse cases until the early nineties, after my mother died.”

“So that’s why you got close to the church, to find out what happened to your grandfather.”

“The law firm would be careful, of course, with an outside contractor like me. But I made a few friends, learned a few things.”

“Like, they’re buying up land on the lake.”

“So you have done some homework. After I learned about the first purchases, last summer, I focused my research. And when I heard what they were offering for the Edwards parcels”—Tatch’s property—“I decided it was time to act.”

If only Tatch had taken the money and sold his land, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Mrs. B would be at Mom’s house now, drinking rosé over a game of Yahtzee.

“Have you enjoyed your little messianic charade?” I said.

“It is nothing compared to your colleague’s.”

“My collegue?”

“I’m sure Whistler hasn’t mentioned that he came to me a few years ago to ask about my grandfather. He said he was researching a story.”

“Bullshit.”

“He came with a woman. It was a hot summer day and I had a window open. I could hear them out in the parking lot, bickering. Then I heard tires screeching and he came in alone.”

A woman? “How did he find you?” I said.

“My mother’s name was in the papers when my grandfather died.”

Of course. That’s how I had made the connection. I felt a little sick. When Breck had told me outside the drain commission meeting that I was being “led astray,” I hadn’t thought he was referring to Whistler.

“But how would Whistler have known there was a story?” I said.

“He’s fifty-six. Born in June 1943. And yet his father, supposedly one Edgar Whistler, was killed in April 1942 at Bataan. Which doesn’t add up. But if little Lucas was born in one town—let’s say Clare, an hour away, but another world back then—and his mother moved him back to Starvation as a baby, people there wouldn’t doubt he was the son of the fallen soldier.”

“But”—I hesitated, uncertain of the answer—“then he moved away?”

“To Allen Park. His mother was a night janitor at Superior Motors. But Whistler had to help support her. By the way, this is all publicly available information. I’m surprised you don’t know it. Are you surprised you don’t know it, Mr. Carpenter?”

Surprised wasn’t the word. “I don’t need to know the entire history of my colleagues.”

“I see,” Breck said. “It’s funny. My contacts at the law firm called him Luke Chiseler. He knows more about any of this than anybody—or almost anybody. And he put a price on it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Mr. Whistler called it a book deal.”

“And?”

The shift room door opened again. Catledge stepped in.

“And . . . if you want to hear more, you should be at my arraignment tomorrow. It should be interesting. I dearly hope the entire town shows up.”

“Why Tex? What’s he have to do with this?”

“What better way to punish this town?” Breck said, then briefly lowered his eyes. “I am sorry about his injury. That was not intended.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I said.

“In case I don’t get a fair trial.”

“Why? You think you’re going to follow in your grandfather’s footsteps?”

“Time’s up,” Catledge said.

Breck rose. “Ask Father Reilly.”

I
didn’t want to believe Breck.

Whistler didn’t answer when I called him from my truck. I left a message, trying to sound nonchalant, hoping he was with Tawny Jane.

He was not.

Tawny Jane was finishing a stand-up in front of the sheriff’s department when I rolled up. Other reporters milled around in the shadows outside the vestibule, deciding where to go for beers after calling in their stories. Dingus was gone. D’Alessio, who apparently had been released, stood off to one side, waiting for someone to interview him.

I didn’t see Whistler or his Toronado. He had said he would be going to the cop shop, and I couldn’t imagine he’d miss a briefing on this story. But maybe he’d thought I would babysit that. Maybe he was already at the
Pilot,
posting something online.

The wind kept blowing Tawny Jane’s hair across her face, and she kept pulling it away with the hand that wasn’t holding the microphone. I eased my window down to hear.

“. . . will be arraigned tomorrow morning, a major turn of events in the spicy drama here in Starvation Lake, a quaint little town, which has seen its share of drama in the past. Channel Eight will be broadcasting live tomorrow from the Pine County Courthouse as Wylie Ezra Breck is arraigned before Judge Horace Gallagher . . .”

Not Wylie, I thought. And quaint? Not for a long time.

I threw my truck into park and got out and walked over to Tawny Jane. She gave me a look that said she wasn’t interested and turned to her cameraman, Butch. “Good enough?” she said. “We can smooth it out back at the station.”

“Yup,” Butch said. “Couple of shots, your hair makes you look like Cousin Itt.”

“Big news, eh, T.J.?” I said.

She tossed her hair back and pulled on a white wool hat. “A little late, aren’t you?”

“Whistler was here, wasn’t he?”

She pulled on mittens that matched her hat. “You’ll have to watch me at eleven.”

“Whistler was not here?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know why he didn’t show?”

“I don’t know a thing about that man.”

She climbed into the van and it spun away in a whirl of snow.

The streetlights on Main glimmered through the frosted kitchen window in Darlene’s second-floor apartment. We sat at her table with cups of tea. She had undone the top two buttons on her brown-and-mustard deputy’s shirt and shaken the hatband imprint out of her hair.

I didn’t wait for her to ask; she deserved to know. I told her everything Breck had told me, told her about the lockbox, my trip to Detroit, my meeting with Father Reilly, about Nilus’s womanizing and my theory about the map and Mom’s two best friends. Darlene listened without interrupting. If anything surprised her, I couldn’t tell. Maybe she was so weary of the drama swirling around her mother’s death that she could not register surprise anymore.

I reached across the table to take her hand. She let me.

“We haven’t even made funeral arrangements yet,” she said.