The Skeleton Box (37 page)

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I know,” Whistler said.

Gallagher resumed reading.

Bitsy went to a closet and removed a black cassock. She folded it upon itself several times and, kneeling in the spreading puddle of Cordelia’s blood, placed it tight over the nun’s face.

“I told her no, Lord, but I was too weak, too selfish, too fearful for my own welfare, to stop her,” Nilus wrote. “I thank you, dear Lord, that Cordelia did not appear to suffer.”

“Liar,” Whistler said.

Mom was doubled over now, quietly sobbing.

Nilus and Bitsy buried Cordelia in a crawl space beneath St. Valentine’s. Two years later, in 1946, Bisty and her young son moved downstate.

“With temptation removed, I redoubled my efforts to dedicate myself to you, Lord, by raising the necessary means to build a church that would give you greater glory.” Nilus wrote. “Circumstances arose, however, in which the Archdiocese of Detroit felt obliged to direct my actions. And so it is at the urging of Father Timothy Reilly that—”

“Your Honor,” Repelmaus said, “I demand that this, this, this proceeding, whatever it is, be adjourned now, before more rank speculation and unconfirmed evidence is allowed to slander the good name of my client.”

Gallagher looked at him. “You have a client named Father Timothy?”

“Actually, Your Honor—”

“Let me guess: attorney-client privilege?” Gallagher said.

“Father Timothy Reilly,” I said, “was the spokesman for the archdiocese quoted in the stories about Wayland’s murder in 1950.”

“You may leave now, Regis,” the judge said.

“Your Honor, you can’t be—”

“Bailiff?”

When the door had closed, Gallagher read the rest of the letter.

Nilus told Father Timothy about the nun buried beneath the church. Father Timothy, Nilus wrote, came to see him one night that August of 1950. He told Nilus that someone tearing down the old church might find the remains. He suggested that Nilus disinter Sister Cordelia and rebury her somewhere she would never be found.

And so, on August 21, 1950, he had.

His letter didn’t say that my mother had helped.

“Some confession,” I said. “He blames everybody and everything but himself for the murder of a nun and the subsequent cover-up.” I looked at Breck. “I’m sure you noticed there’s no mention of your grandfather.”

“I am not surprised,” Breck said.

“Mr. Whistler,” Gallagher said, “are you the son of Father Nilus Moreau?”

Whistler had turned pale. “Technically.”

“Horace,” Mom said. “I’ve had enough.”

“I can imagine,” he said. “Mr. Whistler, it would be prudent for you now to keep in mind that anything you say can and will be used against you.” He turned to Eileen Martin. “Ms. Prosecutor, do you plan to file charges against this man?”

“I need to confer with the sheriff,” she said.

“Then do so expeditiously. And what of Mr. Breck?”

“You have his plea, Your Honor.”

“And a paucity of evidence. However, I suspect Mr. Breck may have information that could be useful to your investigation. Did you hear that, Sheriff Aho?”

Dingus was whispering with Doc Joe. “Sorry?” he said.

“Sheriff, you ought to listen up,” Gallagher said. “You haven’t exactly covered yourself in glory these past few weeks.”

Dingus’s mustache twitched. “Yes, Your Honor. May I interrupt?”

“Interrupt.”

“That ring,” he said. “I’ll need it.”

Whistler grabbed his pinkie ring with the other hand. “First I want a lawyer.”

“They’ll confiscate it at the jail,” Gallagher said.

“Doc Joe, you’ve got the gloves on,” Dingus said.

The coroner held a gloved hand out. Whistler slipped the ring off and handed it over.

“So,” the judge said, “when we return to the courtroom, I will bind Mr. Breck over for trial in the hope that he might find ways to be helpful.”

“Noted, Your Honor,” Eileen said.

Gallagher placed the pouch back in the box and closed the lid.

“These items are now sealed until the court rules otherwise,” he said. “Deputy Catledge, please cuff the prisoners. Sheriff, I turn Deputy Esper back over to you for whatever you must do. But now let’s get back in court—everyone but you two.”

He meant Mom and me.

“Why?” I said.

“You can leave through my clerk’s office.”

“What are we supposed to do, Horace?” Mom said.

“As your son said, solve the case.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I trust you’ll figure it out.”

Everyone stood. Mom and I watched the others file back to the courtroom.

“Wait,” I said. “Darlene.”

I started toward her. She turned around and came to me. Dingus didn’t try to stop her. We embraced, Darlene burying her face in my chest.

“I had to go myself,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s almost over.”

We held each other for a long minute. Dingus finally took Darlene by an elbow.

“Careful, Dingus,” I said. “You don’t want to lose your best deputy.”

Gallagher was last to leave. “Take care of your mother,” he said. “And Bea, you take care of your son.”

W
hen’s the last time you were here?” I said.

Mom and I had left the courthouse and, at my insistence, walked down Main to Estelle, then turned north and gone six blocks. We stood now behind the empty rows of varnished wooden pews in St. Valentine’s Roman Catholic Church. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to go there. Maybe to jog Mom’s memory, maybe to make her feel things she preferred not to feel. Maybe for me. It felt like the only way.

“Funerals and weddings,” Mom said. “But Sunday Mass, not lately.”

“It seems like a nice church.”

“It’s a building. They knocked the other down and they can knock this one down, too.”

Stone columns embellished with gold-leaf carvings rose four stories to a vaulted ceiling painted sky blue with stars of gold. An enormous crucifix, Christ’s head lolling to his right, hovered over the marble altar. A statue of St. Joseph was missing three fingers. The patterned rugs running the length of the church were worn to a pinkish gray.

“There was quite a row over the stained-glass windows way back when,” Mom said. “The archdiocese said they were too expensive. Nilus ordered them anyway. There were special collections every Sunday for years to pay for them.”

“So the parish paid for Nilus’s guilt.”

She walked to one of the windows, unlocked a transom, and pushed it open. Cold air blew into the church.

“Look,” Mom said.

I walked over and leaned my head down so I could see out the transom. All I saw was a stand of snow-covered scrub pines at the bottom of a slope. “What about it?”

“That’s where the old church was. See the foundation?”

In the middle of the trees, two jagged outcroppings of concrete jutted up from the snow.

“Right.”

“That’s where Nonny was. For six years, until . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

“So what else is there, Mom?”

“This is not about me, Gus. It’s about Phyllis.”

“No. You know it’s about you. You’ve always known it.”

“I wish I wasn’t afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of being somebody else.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Some days I can’t remember what I did ten minutes ago. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone out to get the mail only to realize I’d already gotten it earlier. But I can remember everything from ages ago as if it was yesterday.”

“Why don’t you just tell me then? What else?”

“Son. I was seventeen years old and an accessory to murder.”

“No. You didn’t know you were burying a nun.”

“Not then. But later.”

“What do you mean?”

“That priest. That despicable man.”

She met him in a conference room at a law firm on Shelby Street in downtown Detroit. It was the summer of 1971.

Father Timothy Reilly sat at one end of a long table. Beatrice sat to his left. The room was warm and smelled of cigar smoke. The priest wore a dark jacket and shirt with a Roman collar. He thanked her for coming. He told her that Father Nilus Moreau had recently died in a hospital on the Keweenau Peninsula.

“He was a friend when you were a girl?” the priest said.

“Yes,” Bea said. “We lost touch.”

“I see. He remembered you, even at the very end.”

“That’s nice. Is that why you asked to see me?”

She’d heard from a lawyer named Eagan that a priest who’d once met her when she was a child wanted to see her the next time she was in Detroit. She wondered why, but she wasn’t eager to make the trip merely to satisfy her curiosity. When the lawyer called again to say the matter was “of a pressing nature” and mentioned Father Nilus Moreau, she decided she’d better get in the car.

Reilly didn’t answer her question. Instead he said, “Your own husband died recently?”

“Last year.”

The priest made a sign of the cross. “May his soul rest in peace.”

“Thank you.”

“Beatrice,” Reilly said, “I need to take you into my confidence. What I’m about to say is of a rather delicate nature.”

“A pressing matter.”

“Indeed. I believe you also knew Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero, did you not?”

The question startled her. She sat back in her chair. “Yes, Father. Why?”

Reilly folded his hands on the table and leaned over them toward Bea. “Forgive me for being direct,” he said. Then he told her that, based on a confession Father Nilus had given as part of his last rites, she apparently had been party to the death of Sister Cordelia.

“No. That’s ridiculous,” Bea said. “Nonny—Sister Cordelia disappeared when I was a girl. I missed her terribly.”

“Nonny. Yes, of course. I don’t mean, child, to imply that you participated in the actual murder of Sister Cordelia.”

“Murder?”

“We now believe she was murdered.”

Bea felt nauseated. “By who?”

“It’s not clear, unfortunately. What is clear, at least as Father Nilus confessed it to his God, is that you were involved in the disposal of the good nun’s remains.”

It all came rushing back: the humid evening forest, the smell of the earthworms, Nilus’s shiny black shoes at the rim of the hole.

“No,” was all she could think to say.

This was a crime, the priest explained, almost certainly a felony, and if she were to be convicted, she could land in prison. That would be especially tragic now that her husband had died, he said, because there would be no family left to care for her young son.

Bea felt the queasiness well in her stomach. “Father, what are you saying? I didn’t know what Father Nilus was burying there. I didn’t know what—”

“So you were there?”

She felt faint. She told herself to catch her breath. “Where?” she said.

“You don’t know where? Beatrice, God is listening.”

“Father, no, this . . . this can’t be—he said they were vestments and other old things. It was just a penance for me to dig a hole, to remind me I came from dirt.”

“Father Nilus took you into his confidence.”

“He did not.”

“Are you certain?”

She heard impatience in Reilly’s voice.

“I am certain. I did not know that”—now her voice caught—“that Nonny was . . . was there.”

“I see. His recollection differed.”

“Then he lied.”

Reilly offered his handkerchief. She waved it away.

“Beatrice, think. Why would a priest lie on his deathbed, standing at the gates of Heaven?”

Reilly rose and walked to a credenza that held a tray with glasses and a pitcher of water. He poured Bea a glass, set it down in front of her, and sat down again.

“Please, Beatrice, don’t worry,” he said. “You were only a child.”

“I was.”

“And you had sinned.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were doing penance because you had confessed to a sin. A mortal sin.”

Bea swallowed hard.

“But look,” Reilly said, “the fact is, the church has no desire to unearth this regretful episode. There is nothing to be gained. You are a good, practicing Catholic who I assume has earned God’s forgiveness. Let me ask you this: Could you by chance recollect where Father Nilus buried the poor Sister’s remains?”

She thought about this, decided she could answer yes.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Well, we’ve thought that, perhaps if we could discreetly locate them, we could give Sister Cordelia the proper religious burial she deserves.”

“But you don’t plan to tell the police?”

“So many years on, Beatrice.” He shook his head. “This is no longer a matter for men, but for God.”

Bea picked up the glass of water and drank. She set it down empty. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was dark. We were way up on a hill somewhere in the woods where I’d never been before. It was a little scary, actually. I just wanted to get home.”

“Nilus told us the northeastern corner of the lake.”

“Maybe he remembers then. I don’t.”

The priest stood. Bea did, too. “Would you like my blessing, child?” he said.

“That won’t be necessary.”

He made a sign of the cross before her anyway. “I trust you’ll keep all of this to yourself,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“We may be in touch, from time to time.”

She walked up Shelby and turned right on Lafayette, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed. At Woodward she turned left and walked to Sanders, the ice-cream parlor. She took a stool at the counter and ordered a Coca-Cola with ice. She took a pen out of her purse. She flipped over the placemat and, on the blank back, drew a map.

“You remembered?” I said.

We’d sat down in the pew at the very back of St. Valentine’s. A painting on the wall next to us showed a woman wiping Christ’s face as he carried his cross.

“It was impossible to forget,” Mom said. “The big stump. The double-trunk birch.”

“And you gave pieces of the map to Mrs. B and Soupy’s mom.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Louise. She was so sorry.”