caught on the strike plate. The shirt ripped and I heard something bounce into the dark stairwell.
Outside now, I held my breath again, listening.
I shut the door, threw my coat on, picked up the box. Now what? Dad had refused to build an outer stairway. He had said he didn’t want neighbor kids or drunken teenagers or other strangers using his tree house when he wasn’t around. Really he didn’t want anyone using it, except him and the buddies he chose and, once in a while, me. I had to jump the eight or nine feet to the ground.
I slogged through the snow to the railing. The police lights now rippled color across the snow alongside the garage, but the landing remained in darkness. I took out the flashlight and, shielding it with one hand, snapped it on and aimed it at the ground, hoping to see a giant snowdrift I could jump into. There wasn’t one.
I turned the flashlight off and tossed the box down. As long as I roll, I thought, it can’t hurt much worse than a slap shot to the balls. I jumped. I landed next to the box, rolling, chunks of snow scratching into my neck and down my shirt. I grabbed the box and scuttled up the hill, trying to stay low, dodging trees, praying the cop lights wouldn’t find me.
I should have kept running when I crested the ridge. Instead I stopped and squatted with one arm around a birch and peered back down on Mom’s latest crime scene. Darlene and Dingus were standing with their arms folded in the shadows at the edge of one cruiser’s headlights and Skip Catledge was helping Mom into the back of another car, the lights churning all their faces blue and red. It didn’t appear that they had cuffed her, for which I was grateful. She stopped before ducking into the car and nodded at Catledge as if to say thank you. Skipper, polite as ever, nodded back.
The door slamming on Mom made me think of the Bonneville’s trunk lid. You had to bang it down hard. Mom wouldn’t have known that, because she didn’t drive the Bonnie. Dad had driven it, and I had, though not for a couple of years. At some point, she had gone to the garage and put the lockbox I now carried under my arm in the Bonnie’s trunk. Hidden it there, actually, where she thought nobody would find it.
But when? And why? And what did she mean, she had lost a boot? And “Nonny”? Where had I heard that before?
I followed a different path out of the woods than the one we had come up earlier, avoiding my pickup, which I figured the police would find and tow. Still in the trees, about fifty feet up from Horvath Road, I pulled out my cell phone and called Soupy.
SIXTEEN
What the fuck, Trap?”
Soupy had pulled his pickup over to the roadside near the public access boat ramp on the southwestern end of the lake. I came out of the trees where I’d been waiting in a snowdrift up to my thighs.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking the snow off my legs. Soupy hadn’t been happy about my call for help, but I rarely asked anything more of him than a Blue Ribbon, so he came. I hoped he hadn’t said anything to his customers at Enright’s about why he was leaving.
“I had to stick Angie behind the bar,” he said, and I caught a whiff of mint laced with liquor. “By the time I get back, I could be wiped out. So where’s your truck? What do you got there, a box of cash or something? Treasure in the woods?”
The lockbox was a little too big to hide in my coat, so I had set it on my lap, as if I carried a box like that around with me all the time. “The truck got towed,” I said. “The box is Mom’s. I don’t know what’s in it.”
Soupy chuckled. “Old Mom Carpenter could probably could keep all her skeletons in a box that small, eh?”
We happened to be passing Mom’s house. I glanced across the road into the trees sheltering Dad’s garage. I didn’t see any cop lights. “Mom’s going to jail,” I said.
“Get out.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going with her?”
“No. I assume they’d arrest me, too.”
“Holy fuck. First Tatch, now Mom C? Who’s next, Mother Teresa? What did they arrest her for? They don’t think-”
“No idea. They just took her in, up at Dad’s garage.”
“What was she doing up there? That where you got that?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Soup,” I said, “you can’t go back to the bar and start running your mouth.”
“Trap, come on, I love your mother. She’s the last person I’d want to hurt.”
Soupy really did love my mother, really did care about what she thought about him, even if his actions suggested he never heard a word of what she said about his drinking and slut chasing. It reminded me of Mom telling me she was worried about Soupy selling his parents’ place. He had to be “careful,” she had said.
“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Is that the law firm you’re dealing with on your parents’ house?”
“Hold on,” Soupy said. “You’re hiding in the trees like a prison escapee and I’m the one getting questioned? What’s in the box?”
“It’s them, isn’t it, Soup?”
He slowed the truck where the shore road curved into Main at the western end of town. A streetlight illuminated a gnarl of scar on Soupy’s cheekbone where a puck had struck him when we were kids. I remembered the blood spurting between his fingers as he clutched at his cheek and how he made himself laugh while our old coach tried to butterfly the gash closed with hockey tape before he took Soupy to the clinic.
“Eagan whatever sounds right,” he said. “What do you care? Or that Whistler guy?”
“What about Whistler?”
“He’s been asking me about the house, too.”
Damn, he’s good, I thought.
“Who’s the law firm representing?” I said. “They’re sure as hell not buying it for themselves.”
“They didn’t tell old Soupy. Probably some rich guy who’s going to tear the place down and throw up a mansion. Who cares? I need the cash. You going to open that?”
Knowing nothing of the lockbox’s contents, I had no desire to open it in front of Soupy.
“I don’t have a key,” I lied.
“I got a crowbar in the flatbed.”
“Mom told me to take it and go. You have to give me your truck.”
Soupy jammed the accelerator down to blast through the yellow light at Estelle. “Give you my-oh, shit, a cop.”
The sheriff’s cruiser was parked on Main two blocks down. It waited across from my rental house, where, to my surprise, my truck sat in the side drive.
“Soup,” I said. “Turn. Now.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“I thought-”
“Now.”
Soupy swung his truck right onto Garfield, drove a block, and turned right again onto South, rolling toward the parking lot behind the Pilot. I didn’t see a sheriff’s cruiser there, but I couldn’t risk going to the newsroom either.
“Here?” Soupy said.
“Keep going.”
He continued past the Pilot and turned left on Elm, then went another block to Ambling and turned right
