The Skeleton Box (8 page)

I heard rapping at the passenger-side window and turned to look. Luke Whistler was standing there, notebook in hand. I rolled the window down.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Isn’t this where the story is?”

I rolled up the window and got out, walked around to Whistler. Under his down vest today he wore a black Detroit Police Athletic League sweatshirt striped with bleach stains.

“Did you talk to my mother?” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “This is as close as I got. Channel Eight came by, too. T.J. tried to sweet-talk her way in, but the cops wouldn’t budge.”

“T.J.? You know her?”

Whistler grinned. “A little.”

“What’s that mean, ‘a little’?”

“She likes white wine,” he said.

He was sleeping with Tawny Jane Reese? Every loser in Starvation Lake had jerked off at least once to Channel Eight’s slinky, fortyish reporter.

“No way,” I said.

“She has a police scanner on her nightstand. So do I.”

“When my mother’s house was—wait. I don’t want to hear this.”

I put my hands in my coat pockets and walked toward Mom’s, stopping where the driveway met the road. A sheriff’s cruiser and an unmarked police car sat there, flashers on. I saw Mom sitting at the dining room table in her fuzzy blue bathrobe.

“How’s she doing?” Whistler said.

“Who? Tawny Jane?”

“Come on, man.”

“You got anything more for tomorrow’s paper?”

“Matter of fact, might have a little scoop.” He pulled a watch out of his sweatshirt belly pocket. “See you back at the shop?”

“What’s the story?”

He grinned again. For someone like Whistler, getting a scoop was just as good as getting laid. I’d known a lot of guys like that in Detroit. A few women, too.

“Has to do with the sheriff.”

“If you’re getting it from D’Alessio, he better not hear you’re bopping Tawny Jane. He’s been trying to get up her skirt for years.”

“So I gather.”

“Let me handle Mom myself, OK?”

“Sure. Sorry.”

“That’s all right. Hey—hold on.” I moved closer to Whistler, looked over his shoulder to see whether any cops were around. “I got a little tip.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not much. Just a word. Apparently, Mrs. B—Phyllis—said something about it before she died.”

“Really? She saw the guy?”

“Maybe, maybe not. All we got is this, and I don’t know if it’s a name or what: nye-less.”

Whistler’s eyebrows crinkled. “Say again?”

I said it again.

“Huh,” he said. “Spelling?”

“No idea.”

“Weird. But I’m headed back. You want me to check into it? Not sure what to do exactly. Maybe run a few different spellings through a search engine or something.”

“Try it out. Maybe we get to it before the cops do.”

“Always first,” he said. “I’m on it.”

“Why was that man here?”

Mom sat across from me, a cup of tea at her elbow, speaking in her normal rapid-fire staccato, which meant she was probably thinking clearly, though that was prone to change in an unpredictable instant.

“Whistler?”

“Can’t you keep your own reporters away?”

“He won’t be back. I can’t help with the TV crews.”

“I thought they worked for your company, too.”

“They don’t work for me.”

The inside of the house was a snarl of yellow tape. The police had strung a narrow pathway from the kitchen to the dining room to Mom’s bedroom. Deputy Skip Catledge sat in the kitchen, waiting for something in the microwave. Outside the picture window facing the lake, a detective paced the deck while talking into a cell phone.

“My God,” Mom said. “Mavis Schmieder just called to extend her condolences. She said she was at the IGA this morning and Frank D’Alessio was standing out front, handing out copies of some story from the Internet.”

D’Alessio must have stopped there after Audrey’s Diner. He’d probably been handing out printouts of our story on the break-in, turning up the heat on Dingus.

“Good old Frankie,” I said.

The microwave dinged. I turned and saw Catledge remove a ham-and-cheese sandwich on an onion roll.

“Is that it, Skip?” Mom said to him. “He’s using Phyllis’s death to get elected?”

Catledge looked surprised that someone had bothered to ask him. “I don’t have the slightest idea what goes on in that man’s head, Mrs. Carpenter.”

“He hasn’t even announced he’s running yet,” I said. “Maybe it’ll backfire.”

Mom sipped her tea, set the cup down. “That man is familiar,” she said.

“D’Alessio?”

“No.” She nodded toward the window. “Your reporter.”

“He was here for dinner last week. He loved the meatballs, remember? I think he went home wearing one on his vest.”

“Yes, Gussy. And you might also recall that I asked him if he had family ties here.”

“He said he didn’t think so.”

“I heard him. But we had a Whistler family here a long time ago. I remember a woman at the church. She had a funny name.”

“Hmm,” I said. I took one of my mother’s hands in mine and smiled. “Do you think she could have been Whistler’s mother?”

Mom slipped her hand away from mine and sipped her tea. I wanted to ask her about nye-less, but Catledge was standing six feet away. Instead I said, “How are you feeling?”

Her eyes focused on the cup as it plinked in the saucer.

“Phyllis was my rock,” she said.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know.”

She picked up her empty cup and saucer and stood. “I would love to take a shower, but my bathroom is police territory,” she said, glaring at Catledge. “At least they let me use the toilet.” Skipper stayed focused on his sandwich. “So I’ll just freshen up in the kitchen sink, and then I’m going to Murray and Murray.” The funeral home. “I told Darlene I’d look into arrangements.”

I doubted she would be able to arrange anything until the coroner was done with Mrs. B, but it wasn’t worth saying. I was glad she’d be occupied. “Darlene will be checking in on you,” I said. “I’ll be back tonight after the game.”

“Nobody needs to be checking on me. I’ve already told the police I want them out of here by sundown.”

“I’ll sleep in my old room.”

“You will not. You will get out there and get to the bottom of this. How are you going to do that sitting here with an old woman?”

I looked at Catledge after Mom had gone into her bedroom. “How’s Darlene doing?” I said.

He thought about it for a moment, then said, “She’s tougher than I’d be. One hell of a police officer, if you ask me.”

T
he rusted metal step creaked as I lifted my boot onto it. I stopped and looked around, hoping I’d chosen the right trailer. Four were arranged in a ragged circle in the clearing that was home to Tatch’s camp.

The trailers sat amid oaks and beeches and birches on a flat interruption of an incline that rose from the lake’s northeastern shore. Soupy’s parents’ house, vacant since their deaths, sat just beyond the crest of the ridge, a few hundred yards up.

I heard something from the other side of the trailer where I was standing. There was a chugging sound, like machinery, and the clank and scrape of metal. Someone was clapping and shouting something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Hey, Gus,” Tatch called out. “Over here.”

I spun around to see Tatch waving from the trailer at my back. Through the stripped trees behind him I could see all the way down to the white lake.

“Hey, Tatch,” I said.

Like some born-agains, Tatch had become one after hitting bottom—specifically, the bottom of Dead Sledder Mile. Dead Sledder was a two-lane corkscrew of asphalt that spiraled between narrow gravel shoulders dropping off forty and fifty feet into thickets of merciless pines. The road got its nickname after a toboggan full of downstate tourists rode it into the grille of an oncoming semitrailer after a long night at Enright’s in the 1970s.

Tatch himself awoke one morning in August of 1999 lying between two roadside crosses garlanded in flowers, having been flung from his pickup as it careened off Dead Sledder’s last vicious curve. His truck was a steel pancake; Tatch was unhurt except for the hangover throbbing in his head. He swore as he lay there, regarding the markers of two
less fortunate souls, that he would never take another drink and that he would seek the Lord as his savior. He would keep one promise more faithfully than the other.

None of it really surprised people in town. Tatch came from a family of devout Christians who read the Bible aloud before and after every meal and led the choir at the Church of the Messiah in Mio. His mother would bellow scripture at Tatch as he played goalie for the River Rats when we were kids, even when he was sitting on the bench and I was in the net. The team favorite was “Save with thy right hand, and hear me.” It was only natural, then, that adolescent Tatch would rebel in every way, seeking salvation in Southern Comfort, Stroh’s, red bud, and speeders. And it seemed just as natural, at least to the people of Starvation Lake, that Tatch years later would fall back on the only thing he’d ever thought he understood except partying and hockey.

Now Tatch had gathered people he had met at church services and at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, along with his jailed sister’s son, Tex, into a makeshift commune on twenty acres his dead parents had left him. I made my way to him across muddy snow pocked with hundreds of boot prints. Strewn along the ground were a playpen turned on its side, a hockey stick cut short for a little kid, a smattering of dolls in various stages of undress. Two pickup trucks and a Jeep were parked along the two-track road beneath the circle of trailers. Tatch offered his hand.

“Welcome to our little heaven on a hill,” he said.

I took his hand and he said, “Come on, buddy,” and pulled me in for a hug.

“I’m real sorry about Phyllis,” he said.

“Me, too.”

He stepped back. “She was all right. I liked them cookies she used to make us. May the good Lord be with her.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s Darl?”

“You know.”

Tatch and I had long been friends, but more than that, we’d been goalies who played alongside each other. Even though I had started
many more games than he had, there was an unspoken agreement between us that we were equals. That’s how it was with goaltenders. It didn’t matter who supposedly was number one, because we were the only ones on the team who understood how alone we were between the goalposts.

I was the better skater, Tatch better at handling the puck. I had a quicker catching glove; he was more agile sliding post to post. You wanted me in the crease when the puck was lost in a scramble of players, but nobody was better than Tatch at stopping a one-on-one breakaway. Only one of us could play the games, though. That Coach chose me undoubtedly frustrated Tatch as much, at times, as it frightened me.

Yet if I had blocked the overtime goal that lost the Rats the 1981 state title, Tatch would have been the first one off the bench to tackle me in celebration. Instead, he was the first to find me on the ice and wrap an arm around me and tell me that I had played the best game I had ever played and I should never forget that.

When we were kids, Soupy had dubbed him Tatch, short for attachment, as in vacuum cleaner attachment sucking pucks into the net. It was hardly flattering as goalie nicknames go, but Tatch painted it in blood red on his goalie mask and had a shoemaker stitch it into his leg pads. Once he was Tatch and not just Roy Edwards or Roy-Roy or Roy Toy, he let his hair grow out and his sideburns go bushy, and the next thing you knew, he was getting hand jobs.

I held up the pair of hockey skates I’d brought. Freshly sharpened Bauers, size 9.

“Tex around?” I said.

Tatch held his hands up. “I ain’t touching those. Bad luck.”

“Where were you last night? The Picks aren’t much good with you, but they really suck without a goalie.”

A semicircle scar creased the skin above his left eyebrow, the mark of a goalie-mask screw pounded in by a slap shot. Tatch treasured the scar as much as his nickname.

“Aw, jeez,” he said, scratching the salt-and-pepper scraggle on his chin. “Had some family stuff.”

“You sure?”

“Sure about what?”

“Family stuff.”

Tatch screwed his face into a question mark. “Why?”

“Dingus was asking.”

“The sheriff?”

“You know any other Dinguses around here?”

“He ain’t got better things to do?”

I really didn’t think Tatch was capable of breaking into someone’s house, especially my mother’s. But he also wasn’t telling me everything.

“Just letting you know,” I said. I looked up the ridge. “What’s going on up there? You building a church?”

Tatch looked relieved that I’d changed the subject. “Got a project going.”

I counted three men and five women scattered across the wooded ridge. They were digging, throwing aside the two feet of snow and jabbing the blades of their long-handled spades and pickaxes into the stubborn winter soil, their faces ruddy with exertion. All around them the ground was torn into shallow gullies that wound between potholes blackening the snowy surface. A backhoe scooped dirt onto snow-flecked mounds. In the middle of the action stood a thin man clapping and shouting orders over the chuffing machine. I didn’t recognize him.

“Busy bees,” I said. “Digging for gold?”

Tatch chuckled again. “Not quite. The good Lord blessed us with an early snowfall, insulated the ground so it ain’t impossible to get in there.”

“But what are you doing?”

“Can’t really talk about it.”

“It’s a secret?”

“You ought to hit the drain commission meeting tomorrow.”

“Why?” I watched the man giving the orders. He was facing away from me now, still clapping his hands in rhythm with the clank of the shovels. “This got something to do with your tax issue?”

After Tatch had planted the trailers on his land, removing the wheels and setting them on cinder blocks as if they were permanent,
Echo Township had doubled his assessment, thereby doubling his property taxes. Tatch went before the county tax appeals board in a paisley tie dangling down a yellowed dress shirt he’d probably worn to high school graduation. “Ain’t fair to crank up my taxes just ’cause of crummy old trailers,” he told the board. “I ain’t got that kind of money.” Getting wound up, he went on to insist that he shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all, as his Christian camp was a religious organization protected by the Fourth Amendment. I think he meant the First. The appeals board members, seeing a scarecrow of a man whom they thought of as better than average at blowing smoke rings, assured Tatch they would consider his request. A few weeks later, Tatch’s tax bill showed up, doubled.