The Skeleton Box (33 page)

“Did you ever go back?”

“Never,” Mom said. “Five—I think it was five—years later, I married Rudy. We tried for a long time to have children. The doctor told me to stop. Then we had you, Gus.”

“We’re going up there now. Can you find it?”

Mom stared at her hands. “If I can find the birch trees.”

Tree branches scratched the sides of the car, dropping tufts of snow as we climbed the two-track. Mom was glued to her window, watching.

We stopped at the edge of the clearing where the four trailers were circled. A strand of yellow do-not-cross tape lay on the ground between two trees. The trailers melted into dark when Darlene flicked her headlamps off. We got out of the car. She turned on a flashlight and aimed it at the clearing.

Lisa Royall stood blinking in the light. She had something cradled beneath her coat.

“Lisa,” Darlene said. “Stay where you are.”

“Now what do you people want?” Lisa said. She took a step forward, shaded her eyes with a hand. “You want the children, too? Who is that anyway?”

“Sheriff’s Deputy Darlene Esper. Please remain still.”

“Hello, Lisa,” Mom said.

“Bea?”

“Yes, dear.”

Darlene started walking in Lisa’s direction. Mom and I followed. “You have nothing to worry about, Lisa,” Darlene said. “We’re just passing through.”

“You’re scaring the kids, you and everybody else tromping around up here. Why can’t you just let us be?”

“Everybody else?” I said. “Who else?”

“I don’t know. Somebody. A few hours ago.” She waved at the dug-up hill above the trailers. “Guess he thought I didn’t hear him. I yelled and he took off.”

Whistler, I thought.

“Go back to bed,” Darlene said.

“We’re not bad people,” Lisa said.

I looked at my mother. She was gazing up at the crosses in the trees. Darlene waved the flashlight beam at the nearest trailer.

“You better get that kid inside before he freezes to death.”

“She.”

“We’re going to be moving through now.”

Lisa watched from a trailer doorstep as we crossed the clearing to the ridge where the backhoe hunched amid the ruts and potholes. Mom stopped and surveyed the furrowed hill. She looked right, looked left.

“No,” she said. “I can’t—wait.” She held a hand out to Darlene. “The flashlight, please.”

Darlene gave it to her. Mom aimed the beam way up the hill and right, then swung it slowly to the left, beyond the area where Breck and Tatch and the campers had dug. She shifted the beam downward, then right again, then back, slower still, to the left, where she stopped. The beam had fallen on the crown of an old stump poking up through the snow. It was a good twenty feet from the nearest gully.

“There,” Mom said.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Follow me.”

“Be careful, Bea, honey.”

We skirted the holes as we climbed. Mom held the beam steady on
the stump. I tried to take her elbow but she shook me off. Five feet from the stump, Mom stopped and played the beam slowly back and forth again on the trees and the rising ground beyond. She stopped it on a pair of dying birches wrapped around each other.

“Like yesterday,” she said, to herself.

I thought I recognized the contours of the area from the piece of the map I had seen. Breck apparently hadn’t seen any of Mom’s map. He was guessing, based on the archdiocese’s interest in the land. More of the systematic digging eventually might have reached the spot where Mom now shone the flashlight. She shifted the beam down and moved it along the ground a few inches at a time until it stopped on a dark spot on the surface of the snow.

“No,” she said.

She rushed forward, the flashlight beam swinging wildly. “Mom,” I said. She was whispering, “No, no, no.” She dropped the flashlight and fell to her knees at the edge of the hole. Snow dusted the loose dirt at the bottom. The hole was fresh.

Mom reached down and dug her bare hands into the earth, tearing at it, throwing the cold dirt and snow up and out of the hole. Darlene and I got down on either side of her.

“No,” she said. “No, no.” She began to sob.

“Mom,” I said, putting my arm around her, feeling her shrug me off. “What is it?”

“She’s gone,” Mom said. “Somebody took her.” She stopped digging and covered her face with her hands, the sobs convulsing her body. “Nonny, Nonny, Nonny,” she cried. “Oh, Nonny, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry . . .”

H
ere, darling,” Millie Bontrager said when we dropped my mother at her house. She wrapped Mom in a blanket. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“I’ll come for you in the morning, Mom,” I said. “I love you.”

“Yes, Gussy,” she said. She looked sad. “I want to go to bed.”

Darlene left me at the back door of the
Pilot.

“I better go face the music at work,” she said.

“I have to find Whistler,” I said. I’d called him twice while we drove back to town. He didn’t answer. I didn’t leave messages.

Darlene reached across the front seat of her cruiser and squeezed my hand. “Call me if you find out anything.”

In the newsroom, I hoped to see Whistler at his computer, pinkie ring snicking the keys. But all I saw was his desk, cleared of everything but his computer, a stapler, the blotter, and an empty Peerless
Pilot
Personals coffee cup full of paper clips.

I flipped on the black-and-white TV resting atop a pile of old
Pilots
on our fired photographer’s old desk and tuned it to Channel Eight. The sports guy was yammering about the River Rats’ chances against the Pipefitters. “Without Tex Dobrick,” I heard him say, “this one seems piped for the’Fitters . . .”

Go to hell, I thought.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Whistler’s cell. It rang, and rang again. Then I heard another ring, clearer, from nearby. I went to my desk. Whistler’s phone was lit up on my chair seat. I ended the call. He had left his phone sitting on a white business envelope. Typed on
the front was simply GUS. I tore the envelope open. Something fell out onto the floor. Whistler’s Media North credit card. I tossed it on my desk. The envelope also held a single typewritten page, folded in three.

I slid it out and read it:

Gus,

We had a good run together. You are a fine journalist (even if you’re a
Times
guy—ha ha). I must regretfully resign from the
Pilot,
effective now. It’s not like you need me around for one more paper. Besides, it’s bad luck to hang around for the last issue of a newspaper. You know what they say about journalism careers ending badly. I had hoped we could get to the bottom of the Bingo Night Burglaries. Why bother now?

Will send forwarding info.

I’m sure the future holds good things for you.

Always First!

Luke

P.S. Sorry again about that monitor I killed! It deserved it!

“Bullshit,” I said. “Fucking bullshit.” I balled the letter up and threw it at the wall.

A feeling came over me, a feeling I knew well from playing goalie. You’re in the net and a guy is bearing down on you and you know you have the angle cut off but he’s a sniper who can detect the tiniest gap you’ve unwittingly left between your legs or under one of your arms, so you tighten up from head to toe and slide out another six inches to cut off even more of his angle.

Then his stick unwinds and follows through and you feel the puck hit you at almost the same instant that you realize you saw it, or at least a black blur that must have been it, and you know you have it but you’re not sure where, maybe your glove, maybe your gut, maybe your crotch, maybe beneath a leg pad, and you wrap yourself into a tuck while the shooter crashes in and your defensemen scramble around looking for the puck.

You’re terrified that it will flop out from wherever you’re holding it and lie there for the shooter or one of his teammates to slap into the net. You feel the fear in knowing that you have hold of something, but you don’t really know where it is, and you might lose it before you ever get control. And if you let that happen, then it will be your fault, and your fault alone. Because your job is to keep the puck out of your net. You and only you.

I had to do something.

I went to my desk, picked up my phone, looked at my blotter. Scratched across one corner of the February page was a 313 number. Joanie. I’d forgotten to call her back. She had said she would ask around about Whistler.

I dialed.

“Yeah,” she said.

Music blared in the background, and I thought I heard an announcer’s voice narrating a hockey game, heard the names Maltby and Draper.

She’s at the Anchor Bar, I thought. “It’s Gus.”

“What?” She was yelling. “I can’t hear you.”

“It’s Gus,” I shouted.

“Hang on.”

I heard a clamor of voices talking over Hendrix and clinking bottles. I pictured Joanie stepping outside onto the sidewalk on Fort Street, coatless and shivering.

“What’s up?” she said.

“I’m calling about Whistler.”

“Why didn’t you call before?”

“I was busy. What do you know?”

“Oh, jeez, this is weird.”

“What?”

“So, long story short: Whistler had turned into this classic investigative reporter, always working on some big secret project that’s going to win a Pulitzer and hardly ever getting anything in the paper. His career was in the crapper four or five years ago, the desk was trying to move
him to one of the suburban bureaus, but he told them to stuff it. Then, a couple of years ago, he almost got fired.”

“For what?”

“He was working on a story about a professional burglar.”

“No.”

“Yeah. A real pro. Rips off the rich folks in the Pointes and Oakland County. Apparently Whistler got a little deeper into this story than he should have. Followed the guy around, actually saw him pull some jobs.”

I did not want to believe this.

“Are you sure?” I said.

I thought of my mother’s house, and the sliding glass door I hadn’t fixed.

“I’m sure,” Joanie said.

Mom, I thought, had had Whistler and me to dinner one Sunday. She had complained about the door, how it wouldn’t lock right. He was sitting there, hearing it as he finished his cherry cobbler.

“No way,” I said.

I felt sick to my stomach.

“It’s what I was told, Gus.”

“By whom?”

“A couple of people, but mainly his ex.”

Whistler’s ex. The woman who always wanted to get to the crime scene before the cops. Creepy good, he’d said. I sat back on my desk, woozy.

“What’s her name? Barbara something?”

“Beverly. Beverly Taggart. Byline had a middle ‘C.’”

“Tags,” I said.

“Whatever. She wasn’t happy. Said Whistler owes her money.”

“Hang on a second.” Tawny Jane had popped up on the TV. She was standing in front of the sheriff’s department. She had a news bulletin. The police had released Tatch and the other born-agains. Breck remained in custody.

“Sorry,” I said. “How did Whistler not get fired?”

“How else? One of the top
Freep
guys is a drinking buddy. They just killed the B-and-E stories and told him he better come up with
something else good. So he holed himself up in some fourth-floor cranny for months, locked the door, shooed people away. The bosses started looking for excuses to can him. He finally got in trouble spending money on long-distance phone calls and outside experts and other stuff regular reporters can’t touch.”

I picked up the credit card I’d tossed on my desk. Whistler had used it to pay a consulting firm $450. But what was the firm’s name? I kicked myself for not asking Philo when he’d told me about it.

“Then,” Joanie said, “on Christmas Eve, he just e-mailed them, ‘I quit,’ and disappeared.”

“Christmas Eve?”

“Dramatic, huh? Why?”

“Because he started at the
Pilot
in November.”

“Are you sure?”

“Might even have been late October. He wrote the annual turkey story.”

“Oh. Well. Maybe my source got it wrong.”

I dropped the credit card and grabbed the Media North cell phone Whistler had left behind. He had insisted, as if he were doing me a favor, on using his own Detroit phone until the end of the year, when his service contract was up. But now I thought, no, Gus, you dipshit—that’s when the
Free Press
shut his
Free Press
phone off, when he tendered his resignation.

“No,” I said. “I am a fucking idiot.”

When Whistler joined the
Pilot,
he hadn’t yet quit the
Free Press.
His bosses there must have assumed he was doing his investigative reporter thing, digging a dry hole, looking for news outside the newsroom, whatever vapid saying he used. He wasn’t looking for a place to land in retirement. He didn’t give a shit about fishing. He was in Starvation Lake looking for the very same thing Breck was.

“Fire his butt,” Joanie said.

I almost laughed. “He fired himself,” I said. “He’s gone.”

“Good.”

“No, not good.” Tawny Jane was on the tube again, recapping the day’s Bingo Night Burglary news. The cops hadn’t let the Channel Eight
crew come up to Tatch’s camp, so they shot from up on the ridge. I watched the camera pan the hill, passing Soupy’s parents’ house.

I had an idea.

“Could you get me that woman’s number?”

“Who?”

“Beverly Taggart.”

“Hold on. I might have it in my purse.” She did. I wrote it on my blotter. “Is there anything—oh, wait, one last little thing. Not that it matters, but it’s funny.”

“What?”

“You know how Whistler’s legendary for smashing computers?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems it’s not an anger thing. The guy would get freaked out on deadline and have like a panic attack. He wasn’t mad. He just lost it under pressure.”

“Really?”

“Typical investigative reporter, huh? Can’t handle the real stuff.”

“I guess. Listen, I owe you.”

“That’s right,” Joanie said. “When are you going to come visit again? Maybe less business and more pleasure next time?”