The Skeleton Box (16 page)

I needed a fresh notebook for the drain commission meeting. We’d run out of the latest ration corporate had shipped, but Whistler
hoarded them, so I walked over to his desk. I didn’t see any unused notebooks. But there on his calendar blotter sat the fat gold pinkie ring he was constantly taking on and off. His Toronado was parked out back, so I figured he was in the john.

“I hope they find whoever caused all this trouble,” Philo said. “And I hope everything works out for your mother, and for you.”

I cradled the phone on my shoulder and picked up Whistler’s ring. Its heft surprised me. Either Whistler had a thick pinkie or the ring had a lot of real gold in it. I rotated it in front of my eyes. Up close, it was far from perfect, closer to oval than round, with hairline streaks of scarlet and silver flecking the gold. Carved on the inside were four letters in uppercase italic:
EJPW.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Interesting story on Channel Eight last night, eh? The Catholic Church?”

This was Philo’s way of asking me why the
Pilot
hadn’t had the story first.

“Tawny Jane may be out on a limb on that,” I said. “But we’re on it.”

Philo cleared his throat. It was time for the business part of the call. I heard the toilet flush in the john and set Whistler’s ring down on his blotter.

“This probably isn’t the best time, but there is something I—we—need to discuss.”

“Shoot.”

“The Media North board of directors, as you know, meets this afternoon.”

I didn’t know or care, but I said, “Yeah.”
EJPW.
Initials, I assumed. But for what? Whistler’s high school? An old girlfriend? An ex-wife? His ex, I recalled, was Barbara or Beverly something, so it wasn’t that ex.

“One item on the agenda,” Philo continued, “is a discussion of how to rationalize our print and Internet platforms.”

That got my attention. “Rationalize platforms? You mean shut the paper down?”

“Calm down, Gus. You’re jumping to conclusions again.”

“Our readers aren’t ready for point and click. They’re old, like three times your age. I know you find that hard to imagine, but technology’s not their thing. They still get freaked out by antilock brakes.”

“Nobody wants to close the paper.”

“It’s March, ads are in the shitter, so the bean counters get panicky, and the fastest way to fix things is to kill the dinosaur, whack the printing and delivery, all that bothersome expensive stuff, and just put the whole thing on the Internet. Then we’ll all get rich.”

“No, we won’t.”

Whistler came out of the john. “Morning,” he said.

I nodded at him. He went to his desk, put his ring on, fished his car keys out of his vest. He waved and started to leave, but I held up a finger for him to wait. He shrugged and sat on his desk.

“Damn right,” I told Philo. “Because Audrey’s Diner and Kepsel’s Ace Hardware and Sally’s Floral aren’t going to pay squat for Internet ads, are they?”

Philo sighed.

“So what’s the discussion about?”

I heard a chair squeak—Philo sitting—and then clacking on a computer. I sat at my desk. Whistler had left a page torn from a notebook on my keyboard. A bunch of names and numbers were scratched across the page in black pen. I set it aside and flicked on my computer. At the top of my e-mail queue were two from a former
Pilot
reporter now working at my old paper in Detroit, the
Times.
The tapping on Philo’s end stopped.

“Look,” he said. “We’re just trying to envision the best way to go forward. Ignoring the Web would be—”

“We’re not ignoring the Web. For Christ’s sake, it’s what got you your promotion. We posted twice yesterday and we’ll be posting more today.”

Whistler smiled and winked and gave me a thumbs-up. I gave it back.

“Please listen,” Philo said. “There’ll be a broad discussion of where we go with our online platform, how gradually or not we migrate content—”

“Can you speak in English?”

“Can you shut up?” He waited. So did I. He continued. “The board is going to talk about what we’re doing and how, what we ought to do about costs, whether we should start charging for the paper on the Internet.”

“Who the hell’s going to start paying for something they already get for free?”

I toggled to e-mail and opened the first of the two topping the queue. It had come in the night before:

hey, stranger. got two tix for wings this sun v avs. leave the rat(s) race behind and come down. Will buy you a beer. Or three. We’ll have fun.

—j

Philo ignored my rhetorical question. “Well, Gus, I have to tell you that part of what got this whole discussion going was our CFO noticed some rather large and, frankly, rather disturbing cost spikes at your operation.”

Nothing good ever followed the word “frankly.”

“Here?” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

I scoured my brain for what I’d recently put on my Media North credit card. All I could come up with was two beers and a basket of fried dill pickles at Enright’s for me and some real estate guy trying to unload the empty strip mall outside of town.

“There was that monitor your reporter destroyed,” Philo said.

“That was last year’s budget. Wait—I did buy a month’s worth of toilet paper the other day. But at least it was Costco.”

“This is no joke. Your costs are out of control. Long-distance calls. Copying and printing. And a consultant? In Grosse Pointe, for Pete’s sake? Who authorized that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We have three credit-card charges totaling four hundred fifty dollars.”

“For what?”

“Hard to tell. All it said was ‘Information services.’ Some consulting firm.”

I looked at Whistler. He, too, had a Media North credit card. It wasn’t supposed to be used for anything but gas on long-distance trips and the occasional coffee or lunch with a source. Certainly nothing over fifty bucks.

“That’s got to be a mistake,” I said, lowering my voice so Whistler wouldn’t hear. “Hell, Luke used his own cell phone until the end of the year when he could’ve been using ours. It’s not like he’s trying to screw us. Someone probably got our credit card mixed up with somebody else’s.”

“Do you personally approve
Pilot
expense reports?” Philo said.

“Of course.”

That was technically true. My two employees—Whistler and, previously, Mrs. B—filed their infrequent reports online and zapped them to me. The supremely efficient paperless process required so many clicks and strokes to scrutinize each entry that I gave up and just approved the reports without looking. Which was even more efficient, as I saw it.

Philo waited. He knew I was full of shit. He knew all I cared about was writing stories.

“I’m worried about you,” he finally said.

“Why?”

“I know you’ve had a rough—a very rough—couple of days.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

“I fibbed before,” he said. “There is very serious consideration being given to putting the
Pilot
on the Internet only.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. They want to try it with one of our papers to see how it goes. Fuqua’s running the numbers now.”

Fuqua was Media North’s CFO. Fuckward, I called him. He had been hired away from a chain of fudge shops. He had never worked at a newspaper. Based on the memos he e-mailed about how to be more “smart” and “productive” about covering news, I had come to doubt that he had even read a newspaper.

“So the
Pilot
would be a pilot project, huh?”

“I hope not,” Philo said. “I actually don’t think it makes business sense, at least not yet. But you’re not helping me with four hundred fifty dollar bills.”

There was no use arguing.

“Understood,” I told Philo. “I will check into it.”

“I’m going to try to head this thing off for now,” he said. “But this train’s going to arrive sooner or later.”

“What was that all about?” Whistler said after I’d hung up.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Listen, I hate to ask, but did you put a bunch of charges on your credit card for some consultant or something?”

Whistler gave me a look. Great reporters never liked being questioned on such unimportant details as how much money they spent chasing stories. Nor did I. But things were different now. If the
Pilot
went online only, the bean counter Fuqua would shut the newsroom, sell the desks and chairs and copier, and make us work from home. Or, worse, Traverse City.

“I did,” Whistler said. “A guy downstate who helps me with Freedom of Information requests. I was going to put it on my Visa, but it was on some sort of frigging hold.”

Reporters, I thought. They could write story after story eviscerating a county board for running a budget deficit but couldn’t get their own bills paid on time.

“Goddamn, Luke,” I said. “You’ve got to be more careful. The budget hawks are circling.”

“Gotcha.”

“The scanner, too.” Media North had been on me about our utility bills. Whistler was always leaving the police scanner on overnight. “Just turn it off. Humor me.”

I felt like a mope saying it. How much electricity could a scanner use anyway?

“Sorry, boss,” he said.

I picked up the page of notes he’d left me. “Midland County? Around the thumb?”

“Somewhere over there. My archdiocese guy said to check that and the other.”

“Marquette County, in the U.P. According to his obit, Nilus was living up there when he died. What are these other numbers? Case files?”

“Yeah,” Whistler said. “Listen, I’m supposed to be at some little college in Roscommon talking about journalism careers. I’ll knock that out and be back on the case in a couple of hours, and we’ll lap those bastards at Channel Eight.”

He was sleeping with one of those “bastards,” I thought, but let it go. “What are you going to tell the kids?” I said.

He grinned. “Try blacksmithing.”

I heard his Toronado growl to life as I swiveled back to my computer and opened the second e-mail from the reporter at my old paper:

hey, sorry for being so chipper in my earlier e. just heard about what’s going on up there. holy crap—bingo nights? is your mom ok? was that your neighbor? i’m trying to get my editor to send me up there. call me!

—joanie
Mobile 313 555 6758

I sat back in my chair. Did I really want Joanie McCarthy coming back to Starvation Lake? I couldn’t stop her. In my experience, nobody could stop Joanie from doing what she wanted to do. But I didn’t have to encourage her either.

I scribbled her number on my blotter, picked up the phone, and dialed the clerk’s office in Midland County. I had no idea what I was looking for, but hoped I might learn something about Father Nilus Moreau.

Frank D’Alessio was standing in front of the Echo Township Hall where the drain commission met when I parked on the snowy shoulder across the road. He wore a white shirt and red tie beneath a dark topcoat. He was shaking hands and handing out big sheets of paper that flapped in the morning breeze.

Campaigning again, Frankie? I thought. I rolled my window down to watch, thinking of the “anonymous” tip he must have given the cops about Tatch missing hockey the night of the break-in at Mom’s house.

“It’s right there, people, right there in black and white,” I heard him shout. He’d printed out copies of the online version of Channel Eight’s scoop on Nilus. Just what I needed. “Morning, Carol, Edgar . . . hey, Channel Eight’s on the case, but what’s our sheriff doing? Probably sitting in his office stuffing crullers in his face.”

I rolled up my window, opened the door, and walked up to the hall, a converted firehouse that sat in a clearing of pines. The glassed-in bulletin board on the front of the hall read “Pine County Drain Commission,” and just beneath it “Phyllis Bontrager, We Loved You,” and beneath that, “Go River Rats! Beat Pipefitters!”

“Frankie,” I said. “Don’t you have a shift coming up?”

“Took a leave of absence as of today . . . Morning, Mrs. Jargon, here you go . . . Unpaid leave, incidentally, in case you see fit to mention. By the way, good game last night. Damn glad you weren’t in the net.”

“Smart move, Frank. Insult the local paper.”

“Like you matter . . . Hey there, Mr. Bradley, how’s by you? Take two, they’re free.”

“Come on, Frank, you work there. Why don’t you bring the burglar in?”

“Man, they’ve shut me out completely. I can’t get Dingus to tell me what he wants in his coffee . . . Morning, Mrs. Baranowski.”

“They appear to have a lead.”

“Yeah, sure, maybe this priest came back from the dead and did it. That’s what they’re doing, chasing ghosts. Look, Carpie, you’re just sucking up to Dingus because you’re afraid if he gets booted, the love of your life will be out of here, too.”

“Mr. D’Alessio?”

Breck had come up from behind without a sound. He carried a brown satchel under his right arm.

D’Alessio stuck out his hand and Breck took it. “Yes sir, Frank D’Alessio, running for Pine County sheriff, nice to meet you.”

“Mr. Breck. May I?”

D’Alessio gave him a printout. Breck held it in front of his face. I watched his tiny eyes dart back and forth behind his wire-rims. He turned and offered me the sheet.

“Good morning, Mr. Carpenter. Have you seen this? Do you believe it to be true?”

I looked at Breck for some sign of what he thought about the Nilus story, whether it was familiar to him, but saw nothing. “I’m still reporting,” I said.

“I didn’t see it in your paper.”

“Nope.” I reached into the back pocket of my jeans for the notebook I had dug out from under my truck passenger seat. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to prepare for the meeting.”

He walked to the hall, stopped, opened one of the double doors, stepped to one side, and, with a wave of his satchel, ushered two women inside.

“Who’s he?” D’Alessio said.

“The new guy at Tatch’s camp.”

“One of those Jesus people, huh? Why do you want to interview him?”

“You going inside?” I started walking. “Or you got another rally at the IGA?”