The Skeleton Box (11 page)

“Nope.”

“Seems like he’s running things out there. They’ve got a backhoe tearing up that hill.”

“Really? Building themselves a church?”

“Nah. Something about a septic field leaking into their land. They’re going to try to use it to squeeze the county for some cash.”

“You can’t get blood from a stone.”

“Right.” I ate another chip. “But they might be making some hay about it at the drain commission tomorrow. You want to go? This Breck guy’s supposed to be there.”

“The drain commission? Hmm.” Whistler pedaled his chair back to his desk. “I’m going to be a good guy and let you do it, how’s that?”

“Thanks a million.”

“But tell you what. I’ve got a source in the archdiocese from covering the pope’s visit to Detroit way back when. If he’s not dead, I’ll call him, see what I can find out about this Nilus character.”

“Did you check the old papers downstairs?”

“In the morgue?”

“Nobody calls it a morgue anymore.”

“What you got downstairs ought to be one, as cold and damp as it is. I got allergies. The last time I went down there, I sneezed for a week.”

“I’ll look. There’s probably something.”

Whistler stood up. “I’ve got to see a man about a horse,” he said. “But
one thing. If you’re poking around back in whenever Nilus was here, you might stumble over my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. She lived nearby for a little while in the forties. Matter of fact, I lived here, but we moved away when I was a little shaver.”

So Mom’s recollection of a Whistler in Starvation Lake was not mistaken. I said, “But didn’t you tell my mother—”

“I know, I fibbed to your mom. I’m sorry. See, unlike your mom, mine was nothing to be proud of. Spent most of her life in a bottle. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t know how well your mom knew her, and I didn’t want to get into it.”

“Gotcha.”

“How is your mom anyway?”

“Getting through it. I’ve got to check on her.”

Whistler yanked keys from his vest pocket. “Will let you know what I find out. Let’s get there before the cops, eh, boss?”

I finished up the next day’s paper. Wrote a few headlines, some photo captions, a brief on the high school girls’ basketball team going to Big Rapids for a game. Then I went to the back of the newsroom and descended a set of creaky stairs to the basement.

At the bottom I reached up and pulled on a string that lit a single overhead bulb. The air tasted of chalk. Black binders filled with old newspapers lay in racks along two walls. The binders went back only about forty years, so I doubted they’d help me much. In the darkest corner of the room stood a pair of wooden file cabinets, painted green. Index cards taped on the drawers were marked with letters in alphabetical order. I pulled open the drawer marked Na–No and flipped through the file folders inside.

I found the file I wanted about two-thirds deep in the drawer: “Moreau, Rev. Nilus.” I pulled it out and opened it, praying it would hold a yellowed, cut-out clip or two. The file was empty except for an index card. I pulled the card out and walked across the floor to read beneath the lightbulb. The typewriting on the card said:

St. Valentine’s Welcomes New Pastor, November 2, 1933.

Nilus Expands Orphanage with Children from Midland, January 20, 1934.

Town Searches for Missing Nun; “No Stone Unturned,” Priest Vows, p. A–1, August 17, 1944.

Hope Ebbing in Search for Nun, p. A–1, August 28, 1944.

“Holy shit,” I said. I flipped the card over. The list continued on the back:

Gardener Arrested in Disappearance of Nun, p. A–1, August 5, 1950.

cf. Accused Killer Murdered in Pine County Jail, p. A–3, August 7, 1950.

This had to be the nun Dingus had told me about, and the guy who’d gotten his throat cut in the jail. I did the math in my head. Mrs. B and Mom were the same age, sixty-six. They had known each other since they went to the school at St. Val’s together. The school had closed sometime in the 1970s. Mom and Mrs. B would’ve been eleven years old when the nun vanished. I wondered if the nun had taught at St. Val’s, if Nilus had. Did he know Mrs. B as a little girl?

I flipped the index card back to the front. A faded blue stamp in the upper right hand corner said MICROFILM.

“Shit,” I said.

I slipped the card into my shirt pocket. I ran up the stairs and sat down at my desk and picked up my phone. I felt a little burst of that energy I’d felt at the
Detroit Times
whenever I thought I was on to a good story. I wanted to tell someone. For a second, I thought about calling Whistler and telling him too bad about your allergies.

Instead, I dialed the clerk’s office.

“Pine County Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I hung up and looked at the clock. Three forty-five. The pregame skate had already begun. I had to get going. I dialed again.

“Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I couldn’t afford to wait again. “Vicky, please.”

“Vicky?” her mother said. “Is this a personal call?”

I screwed up by hesitating. “No. Not really.”

“Not really? Well then, perhaps I can help you if whatever you need is doable within the next hour and fourteen minutes. After that, I’m afraid you’ll have to call tomorrow.”

“It’s Gus Carpenter, Verna.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Can I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“May I?”

“May I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“She’s busy at the moment. How can I help you?”

If I told Verna Clark what I really wanted, which was to look at the microfilm of those newspaper clips in the county archive, she would have informed me that I would need to come to the office the next morning and fill out a request form and then wait a week or ten days or whatever she decided would be long enough to frustrate the hell out of me. Silently I cursed the Media North bean counter who had decided the
Pilot
’s oldest stories could be most efficiently stored where Verna could lord it over them. The
Pilot
actually
paid
the county for this privilege.

I had to throw her off somehow. So I said, “I need to ask Vicky about a recipe.”

“A recipe? This is not Audrey’s Diner.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m sorry. Is there any official county business I could help you with, sir?”

“Could you tell your daughter I called?”

“Excuse me?”

Verna Clark hated to be reminded that her deputy also happened to be her daughter. Her opponent in her last election had run an attack
campaign based largely on nepotism, and Verna had been forced to nearly drain her election fund defending herself. She even had to stoop to buying ads in the
Pilot,
which must have infuriated her.

“Could you please—”

“I heard you the first time, Mr. Carpenter. The Pine County Clerk’s Office will welcome your request in person. We close in one hour and thirteen minutes and reopen tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

She hung up. But I had gotten her to speak my name aloud. My phone rang again a few minutes later. Vicky Clark whispered it: “Are you ready for chicken and dumplings?”

P
ucks boomed off of the rink boards as I pushed through the double-door entrance to the Starvation Lake Arena. It felt reassuring. There would be no talk of burglaries or murder there.

Through the lobby windows I saw Tex on the ice, bearing down on the goalie, Dougie Baker. Tex faked to his right, then dragged the puck the other way with the toe of his stick. Dougie slid with him. The puck hit a rut in the ice and rolled up on an edge. Tex tried to snap it between Dougie’s legs but got only half of the tumbling puck. It flip-flopped up and Dougie snatched it with his catching glove.

“Fucking bullshit,” Tex yelled. He turned hard, spun behind the net, wound up with his stick, and, as he came around the other side of the net, swung the shaft across the goalpost with an echoing crack. The broken-off blade went flying. Tex skated to the bench.

We really did have to talk with him.

Refrigerant stung my nostrils as I hustled across the black rubber-mat floors past the benches beneath the big gold-and-blue Home and Visitors signs. I had relished that whiff of chill since I was a boy and the town rink, about the same age as me, hadn’t yet been closed in on the ends.

My dad took me to my first River Rats game when I was five. By the second period, I had taken my hot chocolate and climbed down from the bleachers to stand along the glass behind the Rats’ goalie, a short kid with quick hands named Ronayne. I was fascinated by all the straps and buckles and laces that attached his leather and plastic armor to his arms and chest and legs and how it made him seem so much bigger than when I had seen him walking along Main Street.

I liked how he tossed his head around between face-offs, twisting his neck this way and that, his face inscrutable behind his molded white mask, the sweaty ends of his stringy hair flopping on the back of his
jersey. It wasn’t long before I was strapping on the goalie pads and squatting, alone, between the goalposts.

Now I laced my goalie skates on in dressing room 3. I heard Coach Poppy blow two blasts on his whistle. The skate was nearly over. I shoved on hockey gloves, grabbed a stick, and clomped out to the ice.

The seventeen young River Rats were kneeling around Poppy at center ice in their blue-and-gold helmets, gloves, and sweats. High above their heads hung a faded banner declaring the Rats the runners-up in the 1981 Michigan state championship. My team. A team I wished had been forgotten, but was not.

“On your feet, buckets off,” Poppy said. I skated up and stood facing him from the other side of the players’ circle. The Rats doffed their helmets, hair stuck by sweat to their necks and foreheads. “Let’s have a moment of silence for Coach Carpenter. He lost a good friend who was a good friend to the River Rats.”

Tex and the other boys lowered their eyes. I saw stickers on the sides of their helmets bearing the initials PMB. I wondered if any had known Mrs. B. I wondered what they would have thought if they knew that, the morning after our loss in that state final so long ago, she’d come to our house with a plate of peanut butter cookies she must have gotten out of bed at dawn to make. I petulantly refused to eat. Later I felt sad that she had been so kind and I had turned her away. I walked next door and, while Darlene watched, I apologized to Mrs. B. She laughed and told me she was glad I hadn’t eaten those cookies because it wasn’t her best batch and she’d given one to the dog and thrown the rest away.

The team assembled around me now was poised to wipe out the memories of the team that had come so close but fallen short. These Rats were as quick and hungry as their namesakes and, to the delight of the fans, as nasty, too, certainly tougher and scrappier than any of the teams that had preceded them. For years, the mighty squads from Detroit—Little Caesars and Slasor Heating, Byrd Electric and Paddock Pools—had intimidated the Rats with their jutting elbows and chopping sticks. But these Rats weren’t afraid to meet a slash with a slash, a cross-check with a cross-check.

Best of all, it was Tex, their leading scorer, their most skilled player, who inspired their toughness, though not only with his heavy slap shot or his fast feet or his knack for finding the back of the opponents’ net with the puck. Unlike many a star player, Tex refused to let his teammates fight his battles.

Early that season, he’d scored two goals and an assist and the Rats were finishing a 5–2 win over Detroit’s Byrd Electric when a double-wide defenseman named Cranch, nicknamed “Crunch,” gave Tex a whack to the back of a knee. Tex collapsed and slid into the side of his own net. The crowd howled for a penalty, but no ref had seen. Cranch skated away with a smirk between his chapped-red cheeks. Tex struggled to a knee, then to both feet, and started wobbling down the ice after Cranch. “No, Tex,” Poppy screamed from the bench, and I joined him, yelling, “Come to the bench—now!”

Cranch was curling out of a corner with the puck, his head down, when Tex hit him. Tex’s hard plastic right shoulder pad drove into Cranch’s chin and snapped his head back so hard that his helmet flew off and cracked against the boards. Then Tex grabbed him by the collar of his jersey and flung him to the ice and pummeled his face with punch after punch, opening cuts that would require twenty-four stitches. Cranch was unconscious by the time the two refs and Poppy tore Tex off. Poppy appealed the three-game suspension ordered by the league, to no avail.

After that, the Rats were never the same, never again the talented but tame youngsters from up north who went into games against the downstate teams hoping merely to stay close and get a bounce or a ref’s call that would help them win late. The Rats began to play in the spirit of the logo they wore on their jerseys: a snarling, snaggle-toothed rodent wielding a hockey stick like a pitchfork.

The fans loved it, our players reveled in it, Poppy and I worried about it. Both of us knew there’s a thin line in hockey between playing tough and playing stupid. If the Rats got a reputation, deserved or not, as dirty players, opposing coaches would whisper to the refs, who would then look for the first chance to whistle us for a hook or an elbow. We
didn’t have the depth on our bench or the kind of stand-on-his-head goalie to survive too many penalties.

Because Tex was our best player, we were in even deeper trouble when he went to the penalty box. Yet three times that season, he had taken major penalties of five minutes each because he’d let his temper get the best of him. With Tex sitting uselessly in the box and the Rats forced to play short-handed for long stretches, we had lost all three games.

Mic-Mac, the team we’d face in the state quarterfinal that night, was well aware of Tex’s weakness. They would keep a shadow on him, try to deny him the puck, shove a butt end in his ribs, or give him a face wash with a glove whenever the refs were looking elsewhere, hoping to get him riled, get him to take a penalty, at least get him thinking about something other than taking the puck to the Mic-Mac net.