The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  “This would be the first suicide in the shoe tree, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “Nice try. Now move along.”

  I scribbled something illegible in my notebook, just to let Dingus know I wasn’t giving up. Not that it mattered much. Early on a Monday morning, Channel Eight would have an entire day to cover the story before Tuesday’s Pilot came out. And I doubted we’d run much anyway. A woman who’d been racing toward the gates of hell for most of her life had arrived a bit quicker than we’d all expected. Not much news there, actually.

  “Dingus, could you at least confirm-”

  “Gus!” he said, turning the beam on his face. “Look at me.”

  I stopped writing. The light gleamed on the badge pinned to the front of his earflap cap. He jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder.

  “You don’t really want her to see you here, do you?”

  I looked past him and saw Darlene and another deputy moving toward the ambulance. Dingus was right, I really didn’t want Darlene to see me, but I didn’t know how that could be avoided.

  “I’m just doing my job,” I said. “She’ll have to understand.”

  “She’ll have to, huh? I think you know her better than that.”

  “I guess.”

  “Look-off the record?”

  “Sure. It’s Gracie, right?”

  He shrugged. “It’s getting dangerous to drive a Zamboni around here.”

  Gracie had driven the ice-resurfacing machine at the hockey rink where my buddies and I played late at night. Starvation’s last suicide, about a year before, had also driven the Zam at the rink.

  “You going to do an autopsy?”

  “Up to the coroner. But it’s pretty standard procedure.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded toward the tree. “What happened to her other shoe?”

  A vehicle approached. Both of us turned our heads. Twin yellow beams shined between the headlights. Dingus squinted in disapproval as the Channel Eight van rolled closer.

  “Damn it all,” he said. He shouted at his deputies. “Let’s move it, people. Get her down and into that ambulance chop-chop. I don’t want her mother seeing this on TV.”

  I stepped back to the opposite bank and watched as the deputies and paramedics lowered Gracie from the shoe tree. I expected Darlene to stand aside but she shouldered her way in and took hold of Gracie around the waist.

  “Careful,” she shouted. “Be gentle with her.”

  The ambulance doors slammed shut as the Channel Eight van’s passenger door swung open. Out jumped a slim woman in a quilted black parka. She shot me a frown before bounding up the snowbank, waving a microphone over her head. “Sheriff! Sheriff Aho!”

  I looked past her and saw Darlene at the back of the ambulance. She held one gloved hand flat against the door. She dropped it only after the ambulance pulled away, churning snow in its wake.

  I wished I could wrap my arms around her. Later, I thought.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and started back to my truck. As the ambulance siren faded in the distance, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone in my pocket. It could only be one person.

  “Darlene,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t see you?”

  She was upset. I decided I’d let her be.

  “Sorry. Gotta do my job.”

  “You always say that.”

  Cold stung my knuckles. I switched the phone to my other hand.

  “We don’t do much with suicides anyway,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Yeah, no need to embarrass her mom.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  She said it with such force that I stopped and spun around toward the shoe tree. “What do you mean?”

  “Gracie did not-oh, goddammit, Dingus. Hold on.”

  I waited, watching the police lights flicker in the branches of the shoe tree. Darlene came back on.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “We’ll talk later. I love you.”

  two

  Clouds the color of bone hid the morning sun when I stepped onto Main Street just before seven o’clock.

  Exhaust snaked up from three pickup trucks and an SUV idling in the angled parking spaces that ran down both sides of Main to where the street veered southwest at the eastern shore of the lake. The trucks had been left running to stay warm while their owners ate breakfast at Audrey’s Diner. I imagined four grizzled old men in plaid flannel shirts buttoned over thermals sopping up egg yolk with white toast and talking about the chance for more snow, about the Detroit Red Wings’ goaltending problems, about that new hockey rink going up in town, and maybe, if they had heard by now, about Gracie McBride.

  A brittle gust of wind off the lake raked my face as I crossed Main at Estelle Street. Up and down Main stood two-story clapboard-and-brick buildings erected decades before, when the town of Starvation Lake-known back then, at the turn of the century, as Sleepy Corner-was civilization to the lumbermen who’d come north to demolish forests of pine from Lake Huron across to Lake Michigan. They had drunk and fought and sometimes killed and then, when the forests had all been leveled to stumps and pine needles, they had gone, leaving the settlement and other places like it to figure out how to survive.

  Starvation had lasted by luring just enough tourists from Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland to come north to party and swim and boat and snowmobile. For a time, Starvation was Michigan’s secret resort darling, one of the few inland towns that could tempt tourists away from Traverse City and Charlevoix and Petoskey on the big lake. But Sandy Cove and other little lakeside villages caught on and started grabbing for the same vacationers. There had been a time, too, when hockey teams from all over Michigan and even from outstate came to Starvation to play against our kid hockey team, the River Rats. I had been the goaltender on the greatest of those teams and, to some of the townsfolk-actually, a lot of them-the most disappointing.

  If you counted, as I had, you would see that about one of every three buildings on Main had a sign in the window that said FOR LEASE OR SALE BY OWNER. Vandals had destroyed one side of the marquee on the shuttered Avalon Cinema. The Dairy Queen had closed its doors the day after Labor Day and the owner couldn’t say whether he’d reopen come summer.

  Still, there was the diner, the florist, Fortune Drug, Kepsel’s Ace Hardware, the old marina, a bait shop, Parmelee Gilbert’s law office, a dentist, Repicky Realty now where Boynton Realty had once been, Enright’s Pub, and Big Larry’s Party Store, closed Mondays and Tuesdays during winter.

  And there was the lake, named for a drought that had almost dried it up until one of FDR’s make-work projects built a dam to divert the Hungry River. As I saw it walking up Main toward the Pilot, the lake was a vast field of white, crisscrossed with snowmobile tracks and dotted with the dark trapezoids of ice-fishing shanties. Wisps of low clouds shrouded the tops of trees crowding the bluffs on the far shore. The lake stretched north and west from the town in a seven-mile crescent, spring fed, clear as tap water, as deep as 250 feet in some places. In summer it would come alive with the roar of boat motors and the squeals of children.

  I stopped at the locked front door of the Pine County State Bank. The doorknobs of every shop along Main had been rubber-banded with glossy green-and-yellow brochures. I undid the one on the bank door.

  “Media North Invites You to the 21st Century!” the cover said. Media North was the company that in the past year had bought up the Pilot, Channel Eight, and just about every other media outlet from Grayling north to the Mackinac Bridge, including billboard firms and video rental stores. The brochure described the all-in-one packages the company was bringing up north even before the city dwellers in Detroit and Lansing and Ann Arbor would have them: cell phones, beepers, satellite TV, the Internet. I had a Media North cell phone, but this was the first I’d heard that we were in the Internet business. I wondered if it meant we might get new computers for the newsroom.

  Probably not, I
decided.

  I glanced across the street at Audrey’s Diner, thought of going in for a bite, decided against it. I loved Audrey’s coffee and her gooey cinnamon buns-loved Audrey, too, had known her since I was a boy-but I’d been avoiding her place of late. I’d written some stories for the Pilot that had angered more than a few of the locals, and Audrey’s was their favorite soapbox. Letters to the editor wouldn’t suffice; better to tear the local editor a new one while he tried to eat his pancakes and bacon. Nor did I care to hear their gossip about how and why Gracie met her end.

  I stopped on the sidewalk beneath the shake shingles hung over the front window of the Pilot offices. A new logo in slanted, foot-high letters- MEDIA FORCE NORTH — had just in recent days been painted across the latticed glass in spaghetti sauce red. I had taken the sign that had previously hung there for years- PEERLESS PILOT PERSONALS WILL PUT YOU ON THE PATH TO PLEASURE AND PROFIT — and given it to my mother as a souvenir. She hung it on the wall over the beer fridge in her garage.

  Behind the darkened front counter a sliver of light bled from the door to the newsroom. Either I’d left it on or, more likely, Philo Beech was already at his desk. I hoped the former and stepped inside.

  “Good morning,” Philo said. He looked up from his computer and gave me a prim smile before returning his eyes to whatever he was doing.

  “Morning,” I said, throwing my coat on the back of my chair. I might’ve said, “You’re in early,” but after two months of working with Philo Beech, I knew that seven o’clock was not early, not for him.

  “Wow,” he said, swiveling in his chair to face me. My new boss, seven years younger than me at twenty-eight, was wearing a sleeveless argyle sweater-the blue-and-black one he alternated daily with a red and gray-over a starched blue dress shirt with a button-down collar. “Philo” rhymed with “silo”, which was how he was built, a slender cylinder one head and a half taller than me, topped with horn-rimmed glasses beneath short dark hair moussed to stand at attention. He had to stack three telephone books beneath his computer screen so he wouldn’t have to crook his neck down to see. “I don’t know how you guys do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “The gray,” he said. “The constant gray. I mean, I can take the cold and the snow. You know what they say: ‘There’s no bad weather, just bad clothing.’ But the gray, the clouds, the constant overcast. Jeez-oh-pete, we haven’t seen the sun in what? A month?”

  “Actually, Thursday morning,” I said. “I was up early.”

  “Ha!” he said, raising his arms over his head. “I missed that-I wonder why?” He looked around our windowless little newsroom. “Boy oh boy, how do you guys keep from offing yourselves?”

  Any other morning I might have chuckled lamely and said something like, “That’s what Enright’s is for,” because that would be true. But on this particular morning, with my still-fresh memory of Gracie hanging in the shoe tree, I could think of nothing to say to Philo’s stupid little joke. I just ran a hand through my thinning brown widow’s peak and, as politely as I could, gave him a look that said his foot was in his mouth.

  “What?” he said.

  “Well,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at the police scanner. “Did you turn that off?”

  Philo looked at the scanner and shrugged. “It seemed like a waste of electricity to have it on this early in the morning. I mean, we publish twice a week, it’s not like…” He threw his hands up in the air. “OK, I give. Why?”

  I told him about Gracie McBride. It took longer to make him understand what the shoe tree was-apparently he hadn’t noticed it yet in his brief time in Starvation-than what had happened there. When I finished, he crossed his long legs, folded his arms across his chest, and sighed.

  “That is extremely sad,” he said. “Did you know her?”

  “Not very well.”

  I didn’t say more because I wanted to see how interested he really was. I didn’t tell him that Gracie had been my girlfriend’s best friend, that she’d been dating my own best friend, that she was my dead father’s dead cousin’s daughter, my second cousin, and an adopted daughter of sorts to my mother.

  “My condolences,” he said. “Will you be writing it up?”

  “Sure,” I said. I smelled Windex on the air; he’d been cleaning again. He had a screwy theory that a clean newsroom was a more efficient newsroom. “We don’t usually do much with suicides.”

  “People don’t like to read about them, do they? I certainly don’t. It’s always, you know… I suppose this woman had problems with drinking and drugs and whatnot, the usual?”

  “Usual” wasn’t a word anyone who knew Gracie would have used to describe her. But Philo’s question reminded me of what Darlene was saying when she’d cut herself off a few hours before, her husky voice insistent in my ear: That’s not what I meant. It had kept me from sleep when I’d gone back to her apartment, alone. Was Darlene going to tell me that Gracie had not taken her own life? That someone else had hung her in that tree?

  Gracie had left Starvation for Detroit as a very young woman. She was gone for nearly eighteen years. Nobody heard much from or about her while she was downstate. Then Gracie quietly returned to town, and moved into her mother’s trailer in the woods near Walleye Lake. That ended one morning with Gracie’s mother firing a 12-gauge into the air and yelling, “You owe me, you little bitch, you owe me more than that,” as Gracie escaped into the summer trees, laughing in threadbare pajamas. Darlene later told me Gracie and her mom had argued over a game of euchre they’d lost at the Hide-A-Way Bar the night before.

  Gracie took a room with a kitchenette at the Hill-Top Motel. She talked her way into a job at the hockey rink concession stand, making cocoa and popcorn for $3.50 an hour. I hadn’t known her to be a hockey fan-she’d certainly never attended any of my games-but she learned to sharpen skates and drive and maintain the Zamboni. She ditched the motel room for the cot in the Zam shed at the back of the rink.

  I saw her when I went to play in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. She’d be on the Zamboni, circling the ice perched on the stool she needed to see over the steering wheel. Gracie put down a good sheet of ice, smooth and hard enough that it didn’t get too chipped up for at least half a game. Some nights after hockey I’d see her late at Enright’s, where the proprietor, my old friend Soupy Campbell, served her double gin and Squirts and slowly sweet-talked her into his bed. Or maybe Gracie sweet-talked him.

  There was an appearance of normalcy. Gracie and Darlene got together once a week for greasy ham-and-pineapple pizza at Riccardo’s across the river from downtown. If they talked about Gracie’s downstate years, Darlene did not let on, or at least not very much. I chose to believe that Darlene wasn’t deliberately keeping things from me but protecting her friend’s privacy, knowing that Gracie and I, though we were second cousins, though we had spent a good deal of time around each other as kids, had never really gotten along.

  I assumed that Darlene knew many things about Gracie that I did not know, that I really didn’t think I cared to know. But now that she had been found dead, I was curious, of course, mostly because of what Darlene had left unsaid on the phone.

  “I don’t know much,” I told Philo, “but Gracie could drink most guys under the table. Drugs? Not sure. Maybe. She did a bunch of stuff when she was a kid, but that was a long time ago.”

  “Obviously some issues there,” he said. “A few grafs then. ‘Apparent’ suicide, unless the police confirm the real thing.”

  “Right. They won’t. Not here.”

  Philo clapped his palms on his knees and stood.

  “Now,” he said. “We have a bit of decent news on the financial end of things. An opportunity to consider.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Philo had been named managing editor of the Pilot on the fifteenth of December. I was already executive editor. It was explained that he outranked me. I tried not to care. I told myself that I already had so many bosses at Media North headquarters in Traverse City that
one more couldn’t make much of a difference. Especially not Philo, who had written exactly two bylined stories since arriving, one on a routine school board meeting, the other on the arraignment of a man for stealing a dog, both of which required corrections (he misspelled the names of both the school board president and the dog, Zuzu). Before that, he had worked at a couple of nothing papers near his home back east.

  His blunders did nothing to change the impression he gave that he felt he owned the place. It took me an afternoon of phone calls to Traverse City to determine that Philo was actually the nephew of Jim Kerasopoulos, the chief executive of Media North.

  He began to pace between the leaky watercooler and the copier-and-fax machine that had been low on toner for two weeks. His penny loafers clacked on the linoleum, almost but not quite drowning out the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “Hutch’s Hockey Heaven wants to lock in a quarter-page ad twice a week for a month, ramping up to a half page when the new rink opens,” Philo said. “That alone”-he stopped and closed his eyes as he counted on his fingers-“is close to twenty percent of current budget and would help push us up, quarter to quarter, a couple of percentage points.”

  “Nothing to sneeze at,” I said, although, in truth, I knew almost nothing about ads or circulation or anything but putting stories in the paper, such as they were in a town like Starvation. I knew ads brought in money, and money gave me space in the paper. The rest I left to the business guys.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Better up than down, which is where it’s been going for the last two years.”

  “Maybe we could get some toner,” I said. “I had to call the Kiwanis the other day because I couldn’t read the flyer they faxed about their mostacciolli dinner.”

  Philo hesitated for a second before resuming his pacing.

  “Even better,” he said, “the rink itself has proposed a month’s buy of full pages in the weeks before it opens followed by a special section-they’re talking eight pages, full color-about the rink, the local hockey team, et cetera. That’s a little gold mine in and of itself. Then they’ll renew the weekly ads on a month-to-month basis depending on local interest, which I’m sure will be no problem to sustain. The town is dying for this.”